by Betsy Berne
But there wasn’t time to concern myself with adult behavior now because it was crucial to act before the cutoff point for even a late person’s lunch. So I dialed, and when I heard the slow, easy hello, I dispensed with a greeting and rushed headlong into a babble allowing no room for interruption. I stumbled over my name and, like quicksilver, recovered. “You know, from last night. I found your credit card.”
“I wondered what happened to that” was the laconic reply.
I wondered what happened to that? Where was his ethnic sense of urgency?
“Well, how are you?” he continued.
“Tired.”
“I know,” he answered. “I had an appointment here at nine, and meetings all day. I haven’t had a chance to hire a secretary since I’ve been back, so I couldn’t get out today.”
I silently cursed my neighbor and his genetic miscalculation—perhaps there were some pale genes in the mix. My own voice—uncommonly high-pitched—was echoing louder in my head than the perpetrator’s, whose delivery proved as disarming now as it had been during the early-morning hours. I considered mentioning that I’d been up since dawn cleaning. Instead I simpered, “Well, can you go home early?”
“Not a chance. I’m supposed to drop by an opening, and then I’ve got a dinner tonight—business. Record people—one of the lowest forms of humanity—from Munich. It’s the last thing I want to do.” There was an awkward pause while I calculated which opening he was referring to and whether I should nonchalantly attend. I was about to resume simpering when he continued. “I was going to call you, but I lost your number.”
I didn’t bother to honor that with a reply. One of the fundamentals of jazz is improvisation, working directly from the unconscious. Improvisational lying isn’t that much of a stretch.
“That was nice last night,” he purred.
“Yeah, it was nice.” Those damn lines, they tripped me up. The simper became higher and squeakier, which was even more disturbing. “Well, anyway,” I started and became paralyzed. There was a longer, more dangerous pause.
“Are you still there?”
“Uh-huh,” I replied flatly.
He chided me. “You were going to say something. What were you going to say?”
“No, I really wasn’t going to say anything. I mean, I don’t know what else to say.”
“All right then.” His voice tightened. “Listen, can I send a messenger down for the card this afternoon?” He said it hard and polite.
“Uh-huh.”
“Can you put it in an envelope?” Real hard and polite.
“Uh-huh.”
Can you put it in an envelope? Where did that come from? I was fully equipped to handle the complexities of the working world. I had no intention of flinging the card into the arms of a messenger. Perhaps I’d played the role of bohemian artist too well. After that sorry debacle of, I guess you’d call it a conversation, there wasn’t going to be a chance to rectify the situation.
When the messenger rang the buzzer I obediently handed him the card in a manila envelope. Then I took stock of the situation. There was no earthly reason to seek involvement with a married perpetrator. I wasn’t the type. Besides, I would make an unconvincing partner in crime because I was an unconvincing liar. And this attached perpetrator came with progeny. A far more serious level of crime implicating the innocent. So what if I’d come across a wavelength? There had to be more than one wavelength out there. I averaged roughly one a decade, which wasn’t exactly encouraging, but look at this decade—I’d come across two. One dead and one legally attached.
C H A P T E R
3
I DIDN’T HEAR from him. But every time the phone sang out in the still loft, I’d leap to my feet, break into a sprint, and get all twisted in the headphone wires. There’d been a few minor meltdowns since Jack, but this was a major defrost and I was taking some time to ice up again. I’d been rattled—no doubt disproportionately. I was especially stumped by the perpetrator’s “I’ll keep trying till I get you” finale. It had seemed to indicate that feelings were somewhat mutual. Why would anyone, even a seasoned liar, albeit a flawed one, go to the trouble if this weren’t the case? With a no-nonsense farewell, he could have made a clean escape—that is, relatively clean.
But I had to get a grip. I had a show coming up and a magazine article to write, and gene-driven guilt was rolling in waves all over the loft and drifting into the sanctuary, where I’d been doing more than a little time. Spring wasn’t helping. My neighborhood wasn’t laid out in a geometric grid of gray New York blocks. It was a magical enclave with quiet, quirky charms. It was a strolling kind of neighborhood, and on spring weekends it began to fill with strolling groups of all kinds: middle-aged parents in sweats toting the standard toddler and infant, packs of tourists with their guidebooks open and faces up, intrepid elderly couples from uptown. Everyone was outside my windows saluting the new season. Those spring days, as nightfall approached—and it never came soon enough with the irksome time change—cabin fever would descend and I’d prowl around the loft like my late cat used to.
While I refrained from stalking in the world outside, I did do a little discreet research—and a fair amount of deluded stalking in my head. My recovery was long overdue. So what if my base instincts were in obdurate rebellion? There was no excuse. Except, of course, for the wavelength excuse. Except for the speed of his wicked wisdom. Except for his body’s impatience, the fury seeping out from under the smooth. I had the impatience and the speed, perhaps without the wisdom, and the fury, the fury maybe not so well hidden. But the fury hadn’t fazed him, and besides, his made mine look tame. His made mine feel mild, normal, well-mannered. His soothed and relieved mine. But some forms of relief are not meant to be and are destined to be fleeting.
Eventually, after three weeks, a regime of solitary confinement—broken only by one-block outings to forage for food at the local deli—served its chastening purpose. Time and will sent the episode and its star scuttling into a dank corner of my mind. There were vestiges. I was still doing a little sanctuary time, some neck craning at hip restaurants when I did get out, but nothing I couldn’t brush aside. It was just a stage, a melancholy what-was-I-thinking stage.
Then there was something else. One afternoon I was trying to write the magazine article. I was writing about lipstick—about whether brown or pink lipstick was going to be the best bet in the summer to come. Brown was the spring’s hot ticket, but my editor had let me know it would be in my best interest to make a case for pink. This was my latest solution—not fail-safe by any means—to the financial standstill I had reached alongside the art market’s crash. I knew enough people in the writing world to forgo paying another long, loathsome set of dues, even at this late date, and breezy writing for women’s magazines was miraculously contributing to my coffers. It was also contributing to an old-fashioned identity crisis—I was not exactly proud of my role as beauty expert—but dwelling on that problem would only induce more gloom.
I was particularly gloomy that afternoon, and every time my loyal companion, the phone, sounded, which was not very often—it was as blue and green a spring afternoon as you were likely to see in the city, and not many were shuttered indoors in solitary confinement—I frightened the caller off. Hoping to blame the bad mood on a culprit more physiological, I consulted the calendar and was suddenly and irrevocably jolted out of my haze. For an hour I remained seated, counting and recounting the days—and then the heartbeats. My bum heart was skipping an undue number. Sure I’d joked with my neighbor about a love child, but then, nothing was sacred between the two of us.
This was sacred, so sacred, that I buried the jolt instinctively in a corner of my mind that was even more dank and festering. I resented the jolt. The perpetrator had finally taken a ghostly seat in the dank corner, only to be suddenly whisked back to the front of the room through a presence that was ephemeral, but a presence nevertheless. It was still early. I was agitated with the show coming up. There wer
e more than enough excuses where those two came from. My emotions were running rampant because of the defrost—or had they been running rampant because of the potential presence? This was, after all, a symptom that could swing toward either verdict. Face it, any symptom could really swing either way. My friend Perry, who was a member of my race’s royal class—the southern version, a different breed altogether—once told me that at our age all hell breaks loose in the body. Because the womb is crying out for a child, she said. We laughed. She hailed from the dark side, too. Perry’s womb, however, was no longer crying out for a child—she was married, due in a few weeks—and I was no longer laughing.
My mind and heart had betrayed me; now my body appeared to be following suit. It was a vile betrayal. What I really would have liked was to go into reverse, back to a time of comfortable, predictable semimalaise, not a jarring, up-and-down jagged despondency. I calculated that I still had some time before I could reach a conclusive verdict, and anyway, I wasn’t sure I could handle it. Verdict or no verdict, the dank corners of my mind were overflowing and pressing in on the ostensible subject at hand—whether to wear brown or pink lipstick and where to find the best one once you’d decided. All I could focus on was pink babies—or, come to think of it, brown babies. And as for decisions, I had a potentially more crucial maybe-brown-or-maybe-pink decision on my mind.
•
When I heard the sound of my loyal companion in the distance I lunged for it on the first ring, determined not to drive away whoever it might be.
“You haven’t called. Do you hate me?”
“Mom? No, no, I’ve just been . . . busy,” I answered.
“Oh, honey, you’re busy, I’m glad, thank God. I just hadn’t heard from you in so long.” So long was one week for daughters, two months for sons. It was part of a genetic double standard that didn’t always add up to two. “I just felt like talking. Listen, we don’t have to talk. If you don’t feel like talking, God forbid, don’t talk. You’re busy.”
“No, no, it’s fine. What’s new?” We were straying from our regular routine. Normally I’d initiate the five P.M. call and we’d talk while she broiled my father’s steak. I’d recite my latest professional accomplishments, if I could summon any up—I was never one to confide in my mother with dirt, unless, of course, it had been thoroughly scrubbed and disinfected; she’d attempt to weasel out information about the other siblings; we’d analyze the grandchildren and the quality of their upbringing—thank God two of them existed—and then we’d ramble.
On a good day, there was no one I’d rather talk to. She was, after all, the original crackpot who’d taught me—unwittingly—to befriend the countless other crackpots I’d since befriended. However, if things were not going so well, she was the last person I’d choose as confidante because she was, first and foremost, a professional mother. Her voice would become low and tense with stifled hysteria, and any commonplace temporary setback would take on overwhelming proportions for us both. She simply cared too much. It was more expedient—and kinder—to spare her.
I repeated, “Mom, what’s new?”
“Oh, nothing, really. I was just making his goddamn dinner and I thought I’d check in. How are you?”
“Oh, okay.”
“Okay? Okay. What exactly does okay mean?” She enunciated each syllable through clenched teeth like a criminal prosecutor.
“It means fine, good,” I begged.
“No, you’re depressed. Believe me, I can tell. You’re depressed. I knew you were depressed. Goddamn it to hell. I knew it. I told him you were depressed. He said, ‘Stay out of it.’ He said I was imagining things. Don’t be depressed, honey.”
“I said I’m fine. Fine means fine.” My teeth were clenched, too. “I told you I’ve just been busy. I’ve got the show coming up and this stupid article to write.”
“Aw, honey, don’t call it stupid. Don’t put the writing down. I think you’re damn good. All kidding aside. Maybe it’s because I’m your mother. I honestly don’t think that’s it.” She paused dramatically. “Don’t knock it—you’re successful and you’re making money. I can’t remember, is it about liposuction or lipstick?”
“Lipstick.” My mother was generally oblivious to beauty products and rituals, but her only spark of vanity, and I hesitate to call it that, involved lipstick: an initial seven A.M. smeary application of thick Revlon True Red from 1952, which rapidly feathered into pink and was never reapplied. “So have you decided whether to come up for the show?”
“Honey, I think so. We won’t be in your way. We’re not going to stay over. The hospital won’t give Daddy the day off.” She wouldn’t let him retire—“Over my dead body; his brain will rot”—and she still called him Daddy, which I never noticed unless we were in public.
“You’re going to drive all that way and then drive back the same night? Are you out of your mind? It’s not worth it.”
“You don’t want us to come.”
“No, no, I want you to come.”
“You don’t want us to come.”
“Mom, I do, I do, but it’s just a group show. But come, great, great. In fact, there’s probably going to be a party afterward—you can come to that, too.”
“Oh, no, honey, no party—who needs that shit? We’d only be in the way. We’ll just come up for the opening. He wouldn’t miss it. You know we love to drive. It’s nothing—five and a half hours. Worse comes to worse that lazy son of a bitch can drive. Hey, where is Daddy? He should be home by now. Do you think he fell asleep . . . Oh, there’s his car. Let me go, I have to put the asparagus on.”
This call threw me off-kilter, not that I wasn’t already off-kilter. Although all I had done was withhold information, it didn’t sit well. I would hardly have been capable of conducting a clandestine affair. (I mustn’t forget that was no longer the problem at hand. I was already regarding the original problem with fuzzy nostalgia.) Honesty was not merely a virtue, it was one of the ironclad platitudes in my platitude-ridden, faux-Ozzie-and-Harriet upbringing. The stress is on faux here, because there was something going on far more treacherous beneath the surface layer of platitudes. In truth, my family had a law-of-the-jungle kind of thing going on. To outsiders we presented a united front, but at home it was another story: We watched our backs, acted cool, learned to be perpetually and candidly sly, and only the strong survived. My neighbor was always perplexed after a session with my family. He said he had never witnessed a family that shared a meal as though it were a highly competitive athletic contest.
We were also gigantic. My three brothers hulked around at six feet four, and my mother was close to six feet tall, even when she was hunched over, which was most of the time. Our benefactor, my poor father, however, who had been barely six respectable feet in his prime, had shrunk down to five feet seven after half a dozen hip replacements and two back operations—“the cripple,” we called him fondly. Now he had to look up to me, the baby of the family and the runt of the litter. At five feet nine, I had believed myself to be diminutive until I left home for a progressive boarding school, where I towered over the true diminutives, rich blond girls from the city.
Although all of us had long since left home, most of us—the oldest, the jazz musician, and I—were still on top of one another, all in the same city. Only my middle brother had made himself scarce, having hightailed it away from home at the first opportunity. He had escaped, in theory, across the country, but it was not a pleasant or an easy escape. It was a sixties-style escape with all the sixties accoutrements—drugs, radical politics, mental institutions. I believe he even lived off the land at one point. He still moved around a lot, never staying at one job or in one city too long. Even though he’d been destined to lose from the starting gate, it was still painful to watch—and no doubt contributed to my soft spot for others who’d been destined to lose but did whatever it took not to.
My oldest brother—whom we addressed as Your Majesty, the King, and who gleefully beat down any attempt at insurrectio
n among his siblings—was convinced that my father had chosen my mother for her big tits, but my father denied it. They’d met young and shared a desire to get the hell away from their own families, so they built their own baroque dynasty. My mother ruled while my father loomed ominously behind the scenes. My mother referred to his menacing presence as “he,” as in “Honey, you know he’s always right,” or “You’ll be screwed when he finds out.” But by the time his ominous presence materialized, most of the physical and psychological repairs had been hastily attended to by her. Needless to say, on a journey when the family had to spill over into two cars, he sat stony and alone in his until I went and sat beside him.
Having two parents who still craved each other’s company after half a century, whose version of a less savory world entailed making crude jokes to each other like “Who would want you and your flat ass anyway?” or maintaining harsh judgments on the few friends who had stepped out of line decades ago, was really more of a curse than a blessing. It fostered unrealistic expectations. My expectations had lowered over the years, but they weren’t nearly low enough. My father always had a good platitude on deck if questions of love or marriage came up—not that he and I ever really mentioned either topic anymore, since discussion of personal life was inherently protected by the familial policy of silent communication—and it was generally something about just being reasonably comfortable. It had sounded plausible when I was younger, but it had grown stale and it certainly didn’t apply to his own situation, which was much more than comfortable, much more than reason dictates. Nor did it apply to mine now.
