“What about Jim?”
“They kept Jim.”
“Oh my God. What happened to him?”
“I don’t know.”
Things were a little awkward after that. I kept thinking, Okay, a British guy who was probably some kind of black marketeer got killed by bandits. That was awful. But Ivan had gone to Sudan to help Sudanese people. He assumed the risks, I supposed, and accepted them. The waiter refilled our glasses and offered us more bread. Finally I said, “You must have treated a lot of sick people while you were there. Children, and babies?”
His face went blank.
“I’m sorry—”
“Why would I want to talk about that?”
“Because you were doing good in the world?”
The blank look masked his face for a long moment. The restaurant revolved around us, bustling with quiet, efficient activity, while we freeze-framed at our table. Then he softened and laid a dry hand on mine. “What kind of talk is this for a bright autumn day? We’re in New York City, Sudan is oceans away. Let’s be where we are.”
“I’ve got things I don’t like to talk about, too.”
He flinched, and I wished I could slurp those words back into my mouth like a strand of spaghetti.
“Let’s see… while I was fighting malaria in Sudan you must have been safely in school reading Hemingway.”
“This time last year? Gide.”
“Gide. In French?”
“No.”
He leaned back and pulled a pack of Gitanes from his jacket, offering me one. I took it and leaned across the table to let him light it.
“When I was in college you were probably a very little girl. If you were even born yet.”
“What year are we talking about?”
“Sixty-three? Do you remember nineteen sixty-three?”
“I remember nineteen sixty-four. I was three.”
“You remember being three? That’s remarkable. I can’t remember much before the age of ten.”
“I remember dancing to my babysitter’s Beatles records,” I said. “She had a stack of forty-fives as tall as I was. And I remember our dog, Snookie. And the Bark Button.”
“The Bark Button?”
We had a miniature dachshund named Snookie (named after Dad’s favorite New York jazz club), who barked whenever the doorbell rang. So I called the doorbell the Bark Button. I used to beg my father to lift me up so I could press the Bark Button and make Snookie “talk.”
“That’s your very first memory? The doorbell thing?”
“Uh-huh.”
“I expected something more… elemental. Something about a lost doll or potty training.”
“I remember getting spanked a couple of times. Once for crossing the street alone and once because I bit my mother on the ankle.”
“That’s better.”
I tapped my Gitane in the ashtray and rolled it between my fingers, glad of something distracting to do. “What about you? What’s your first memory?”
“Oh, I don’t remember much about my childhood.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“It’s true. Some people are like that, you know. They grow up to be so different from the child they once were that it’s as if their childhood happened to someone else. And they can’t remember a thing about it. Clearly you’re the other type, the type that remembers everything.”
“Not everything.” But I did remember my child self vividly, my delicate child feelings, my fierce opinions, how frustrating it was to have no power, how interesting to observe without understanding. How could he have forgotten?
We smoked and drank coffee while the restaurant emptied. The elixir of wine and sunshine had made me drowsy. He reached for my hand, placed it on the tablecloth, and traced the veins radiating from my wrist to the tips of my fingers. The waiter brought the check. Ivan put down his AmEx without glancing at the total, and the waiter whisked it away.
“I know a lovely little hotel near here. Let’s go there and have a drink.”
“Oh. I have to work tonight.” I usually worked in the day, but I’d traded shifts with a coworker so I could meet Ivan for lunch.
“Work? I don’t understand.”
“At the bookstore. I have to be there by five.” When he’d asked me to lunch, I hadn’t thought about what would happen afterward.
He stubbed out his cigarette and rubbed his face, smoothing the irritation away. When he dropped his hand, the warm smile was back. The waiter set down a small silver tray with the check, his credit card, and two chocolates. Ivan said he had another appointment in the neighborhood, so he couldn’t see me home. He hoped I didn’t mind.
He ushered me outside and hailed a taxi. The air had cooled since lunch began, the old factory buildings casting long shadows on the empty street. “I’ll call you soon,” he said. He shut me into the Checker, tossed a twenty through the driver’s window, and waved it off. I looked back as the cab pulled me uptown. He was walking away in the other direction, his hands shoved into his pockets, where, I assumed, he kept his key to the golden world.
6 DON GIOVANNI
Ivan didn’t call. A week passed. Then another. It was October. I watched every game of the World Series, O’s versus Phillies, either at home by myself or at the Dublin House with Carmen.
I should have skipped work that night and gone to the hotel, I lamented. My practicality had cost me Ivan’s interest, and Carmen’s. Instead of having my first-ever hotel tryst to dissect with her, I had to milk the mystery of why he wasn’t calling for all it was worth, which was starting to bore her.
“Do you think I should call him?”
“No,” Carmen said.
“Maybe he likes aggressive women.”
“He doesn’t.”
“How do you know?”
“No one likes aggressive women.”
The night the O’s won the series, I was at the Dublin House. When I got home, I found a note on my bed in Robin’s handwriting—someone had called! But the message wasn’t from Ivan; my dad had called to celebrate the Orioles’ victory. By then it was well after midnight, too late to call him back.
Meanwhile, I needed money. Every week I answered classified ads for entry-level jobs in publishing, marketing, advertising, and publicity, to no avail. I went to a temp agency, but they frowned at the dismal results of my typing test and dismissed me as unemployable. I applied at every restaurant with a HELP WANTED sign in the window, but they all required New York waitressing experience, and I only had Baltimore waitressing experience.
“You’re supposed to lie,” Carmen said, and I said, “I am lying,” and she said, “Well, obviously you’re not lying hard enough.”
Robin complained that I owed her rent for September and October. “I have a three-months-and-you’re-out policy.”
I promised to pay her soon, but I had no idea where I’d get the money. I hated to ask my parents for a loan. I was trying to prove to them that I could make it in New York on my own. Something would come through, I knew it would.
* * *
Carmen took me to see Danton, set during the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror. We were on a Gérard Depardieu kick.
“That was depressing,” I said afterward. “And long.”
“Robespierre was such a prick.” Carmen hunched forward into her Gérard Depardieu impression. “Peuple de France!” she rasped, imitating Danton at his trial near the end of the movie, when he was losing his voice. “Only you have zee right to judge me.”
“Peuple de France!” I echoed hoarsely.
“You sound like Marlon Brando in The Godfather.”
Across the street the Metropolitan Opera House glowed like a crystal jewel box. “Let’s go over there and see if we can find anyone as depressed as we are,” I said.
“Yes, what are the bourgeois pigs up to?”
People milled around the fountain in Lincoln Plaza, under a fat October moon. “Nobody looks depressed,” Carmen said.
“I’
m not depressed anymore either.” We walked along the lip of the fountain. I showed Carmen the little hops and leaps I used to do on the balance beam as a child. “I want to go to the opera sometime,” I said. “How much do tickets cost?”
“A lot.” Carmen started singing,
Oh Theodora,
don’t spit on the floor-a,
use a cuspidor-a,
that’s what it’s for-a.
“Where’d you learn that?” I asked.
“It’s from my opera.”
“What do you mean, your opera?”
“Carmen, dummy!”
I reached into the fountain and splashed a little water at her. “Do you know this one?” I faced the opera house and belted out, “Kill the wabbit, kill the wabbit, kill the wabbit!” I played Elmer Fudd, serenading Carmen. “Oh Brunhilde, you’re so wuvwy.”
“Yes I know it, I can’t help it,” Carmen sang.
The doors of the opera house burst open and people streamed out, flooding the plaza with tuxes and diamonds and evening gowns and chatter. The lip of the fountain became our stage, with some of the operagoers cheering us on.
“Oh Brunhilde, be my wuv!”
A man in a long coat caught my eye. He winked, and I realized with a start that it was Ivan, escorting a tall woman whose golden hair was twisted into a poof high on top of her head.
I nudged Carmen. “It’s him!”
“Where?”
He’d grown a goatee. The woman with him tugged a mink stole close around her shoulders while the hem of her dress swept the ground.
“With the blonde. Over there.”
Ivan held my eyes for half a second. Then he pressed a hand to the small of the woman’s back as the crowd carried them to the street.
Carmen took my hand and we bowed to the five people applauding us. The plaza emptied quickly, the crowd’s energy draining away. We hopped off the ledge and started walking home.
“Do you think she’s his girlfriend?”
“Who knows?”
“She can’t be his girlfriend. If he has a girlfriend that gorgeous, what’s he doing playing around with me?”
“Please.” She bumped me with her hip. “You may not have a mink stole, but you have your charms.”
We paused at Broadway and Seventy-Ninth, the neon harp of the Dublin House blinking TAP ROOM, TAP ROOM. “Beer?” Carmen nodded in the direction of the bar.
“Beer.”
We ordered at the bar and settled into a booth.
“No wonder he hasn’t called. She’s tall and elegant and about a thousand times more beautiful than me.”
“Would you stop?” Carmen blew beer foam at me.
“He goes to Don Giovanni at the Met while I stand outside singing Elmer Fudd. It’s so embarrassing.” I daubed the beer foam off my forehead with a cocktail napkin. “She’s got to be his girlfriend, right?”
“Maybe she’s his wife.”
“His wife!” I hadn’t thought of that. “That’s impossible. He wasn’t wearing a ring.”
“So?”
Married: it had never occurred to me.
When I got home, after midnight, my roommates were asleep. The phone rang. I went into the hall to get it.
“I’d forgotten how cute you are,” Ivan said, “until I saw you tonight.” He wanted to see me again, to take me to dinner. I said yes. Then I called Carmen.
“Maybe I should have said no,” I said. “What about the blond woman?”
“You don’t know who she is,” Carmen said. “That’s his problem.”
“If I don’t go, I’ll never find out what would have happened if I went,” I said.
“That’s right. You have to go so you can tell me all about it.”
7 SHADOW
This time, instead of Chanterelle, he took me to Le French Shack, a down-at-the-heels bistro on West Fifty-Fifth Street, tucked among a few unremarkable Italian trattorias and a crêpe place. The restaurant was pseudo-fancy, with gold light fixtures, white linens, and tuxedoed waiters, but the rug was worn and the ceiling tiled with the kind of soundproofing squares you see in suburban basements. I lifted my napkin to reveal a wine stain on the tablecloth. But what did I know? Maybe the food was really good here. Maybe Le French Shack was the best-kept secret in New York.
I ordered steak and he ordered Dover sole. He peered at me over his reading glasses, taking in my Laura Ashley dress, which was too tight on top, flattening my breasts. Carmen said it looked like a reject costume from Little House on the Prairie. It was my best dress.
When he spoke, I noticed that his teeth were slightly yellow and his lips chapped. “Let me take you shopping.”
I flushed. I desperately wanted beautiful new clothes, ones like the blonde at the opera had worn. Clothes that said, My rightful place is at the center of this story.
“I see you in rose-colored silk, high heels….” He rubbed his thumb over my hand. At a nearby table, two middle-aged women stared at us and whispered. Their disapproval sent a jolt of pleasure through me. I was a nymphet at last, my ugly dress turning me into an object of fascination. I imagined people wondering what kind of girl would wear a dress like that, a child’s dress almost, to a restaurant in New York. Maybe a spoiled crazy rich girl who didn’t care what people thought. Maybe a teenage prostitute.
After dinner he said, “Let’s have a drink,” and led me up the street. He didn’t say where we were going, but I assumed it would be a bar of some kind. Instead we turned onto West Fifty-Eighth Street and stopped in front of a sleek glass high-rise that looked like a corporate headquarters. “I’ll go in first. You walk around the block and go in after me.”
I was thrown off by this sudden instruction. Walk around the block? “Why?”
“Just do as I say.” He softened, adding, “I need a few minutes to get the place ready for you.”
“No, you don’t, really, I don’t mind if it’s messy—”
“Walk once around the block and then come up to 27A.” His goatee was an arrow pointing down. “I’ll be there waiting for you.” He strolled into the building, nodding at the doorman, and continued on to the elevator without a backward glance.
The wind cut through my coat as I began my trek around the block, quiet at this hour. I glanced back, and suddenly there was a man behind me. Where had he come from?
I kept walking and turned the corner, tilting my head slightly to catch the man turning the corner too. He wore a trench coat and a black knit cap, exactly what a spy or a detective or a hit man would wear. He was tall, which made him easy to spot. I walked up Sixth Avenue to Fifty-Ninth Street and turned right again. A few paces back, the man in the trench coat turned right too.
Okay, that was weird. If he turned south onto Fifth, he was definitely following me.
Instinct told me to duck into a phone booth and call someone, Robin maybe, because I knew Carmen wasn’t home… or no, grab that passing yellow cab and speed away, go home, go anywhere but get away from this, whatever this was.
I didn’t do it. Because if I went home I’d never find out what would happen if I stayed. If the man in the trench coat was really following me, and why. What Ivan’s apartment looked like. What he was planning to do with me. Leaving now would be like walking out of a movie in the middle, and I never did that.
At Fifth Avenue I turned right. Behind me, the man turned right as well.
I had no way to reach Ivan, no phone number for his apartment, only for his office. Would he want me to shake this guy off before I went into his building? Or would he want me to show up no matter what?
When the man followed me onto Fifty-Eighth Street, I got scared. I had circled the block, and so had he. I wanted to duck into a safe haven, the nearest place I could find.
The nearest place was Ivan’s high-rise building, apartment 27A.
I pushed through the revolving door and glanced back. The man had stopped. He was watching me through the glass.
“May I help you?” the doorman asked.
“Um, I’m going to 27A.”
A nod. “Sign here please.”
I signed my real name without thinking. The doorman dialed Ivan to let him know a Phoebe Hayes was on her way. I wanted to smack myself in the head. My real name. I should have made up something.
I rode the elevator to the twenty-seventh floor, thinking of aliases I could have used. Holly Golightly. Philippa Rizzuto. Iona Frisbee. Nancy Ann Cianci.
Ivan opened the door before I had a chance to knock. The apartment was a glossy studio, a wall of tinted windows looking out at other midtown high-rises. A shaggy white rug and some modern furniture—leather, steel, and glass—but not many personal objects. No souvenirs from Sudan, no framed photos, no plants.
“What is this place?”
“My apartment.” He led me to a black leather daybed and prompted me to sit.
“But… do you live here?” I’d expected him to have a bigger apartment than a studio, and in any case it didn’t look like anyone really lived here.
“Yes, sometimes. When I need a place to stay. Do you like Scotch?”
“Sure.”
He put a heavy crystal tumbler in my hand, Scotch on the rocks. I thanked him. We sat at opposite ends of the leather couch. I stared out the smoke-colored window at the blurry lights. I sipped my drink. “Do you ever think that Scotch tastes like scotch tape?”
“No.”
“I do.” I took another sip. It sounds weird, but that’s what I like about Scotch: the tape taste.
“I’m not in the habit of tasting tape.” His eyes had been fixed on me, but now they roamed the room. “What about here?”
“What do you mean?”
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