Bad Timing

by Betsy Berne

  The seedy loft looked its best at this time of night with the sun going down in school colors, maroon and gold, behind the river. It was peaceful lying there wrapped in the illusions of the present, and I hadn’t had peace in a while so my fears subsided. We didn’t engage in combat. We exchanged small confidences, just talking aimlessly. Until we stumbled into the future.

  “Are book parties as bad as art openings?” he asked. “I have to go to one for a book about the eighties art scene. It was unfortunate enough that we had to live through it, but to prolong it by writing a book about it? Why would anyone do such a thing?”

  “Money, I would wager.” He smiled and I continued. “You mean Rachel’s party, don’t you?”

  “Rachel—you know Rachel Miller?” He was no longer smiling.

  “She’s one of my closest friends.”

  “Really.”

  “She went with me . . . on Thursday.”

  “She knows about this . . . us?”

  “Yes.”

  “And she knows about tonight?”

  “Well, she knew I was seeing you tonight. But she understands. She’s completely discreet.”

  “You don’t know that for certain.”

  “Yes I do.”

  “No. You don’t. You’re being naïve.”

  “No, I’m not. I’ve known Rachel since I was fourteen, and I know that she’s discreet.”

  “Oh, I see. Did you also know I’m lending her photographs, and doing some consulting, for a book she’s doing?”

  “Consulting? No . . . but yeah, I knew about the photographs.”

  “Oh, Christ. And you didn’t tell me?”

  “When was I supposed to tell you, when you didn’t show up—”

  “Tell me again. Who else knows?”

  “I told you. My neighbor.”

  “And who else?”

  “I told you. No one.”

  “How do I know you’re not lying to me?”

  “Look I’ve told you—I can’t lie. I’m a terrible liar. You’d see right through me.”

  He saw right through me but let it go for now. Every deception, self-deception included, requires a deceptor and a willing deceptee, and the roles are interchangeable. We alternated roles seamlessly. Sure I was telling lies. It wasn’t so difficult. I even believed my lies as they rolled off my tongue. So someone else knew who he was. It was only Victor, who didn’t register gossip as anything but theater with anonymous players serving as fodder for his convoluted theories. Oh, and my brother. Well, he didn’t count. I felt sick about it now, but I would feel worse if Joseph Pendleton got upset, too. It was just as well that he didn’t know, especially if he was going to get all riled up. It didn’t feel like I was lying. Not at all. I was just sparing him. It was already becoming a habit—sparing him.

  “What should I do at this party when I see you?” I asked.

  “Don’t worry about it. It’s not for a while.”

  “No. Really.” I closed his eyes with my fingers.

  “Run up and kiss me,” he said flatly as he removed my fingers.

  I started to giggle, but he cut me off in the same flat tone.

  “I’m hungry. Let’s get something to eat.”

  We went to a dive, an adulterer’s safe haven, and we kept it light. When I got home, guilt came home with me. The guilt was not your proper adulterer’s guilt. It was the guilt of an inept criminal who couldn’t play by the rules, who had never expected to need the rules. It was guilt that I had not been discreet, that I was going to ruin his life. Not my life, strangely enough, but his life. There was another guilt, one that ate at me. A pointed, serves-you-right guilt. Guilt that I’d behaved so carelessly, so childishly, again and so soon. Just asking for it, making light of it.

  I carried my guilt straight to the sanctuary, where I put on my chaste nightgown and got into bed. The guilt consumed me, but at the same time I couldn’t help feeling light and really good. I berated myself, and the guilt joined in. I woke at two not feeling light or very good. I called on my medical genes to rescue me. Risk of infection—that must be it. I rifled through my store of pills in the refrigerator, found the antibiotics, and began gobbling down a carefully chosen selection. In bed I resumed rationalizing. So I was embarking on a casual affair. No one would have to get hurt. People did it all the time. It wasn’t a criminal act. Except that nothing about this affair thus far had been casual. My feelings about what had transpired on Thursday were not casual, my feelings about Joseph Pendleton didn’t feel casual. In fact, they could have been considered criminal. Joseph Pendleton and I, we could play at casual, but it never lasted long. The loose emotions from Thursday would be funneled into this not-so-casual affair, this distraction. And postponed. Postponed indefinitely.

  As I embarked, I knew all this. I knew who would pay later. I knew who would pay much more. Later. After Try, Maybe, and Might became Forget It, So Long Sucker. Somebody should take action immediately. Somehow I knew who it wasn’t going to be. That left only one other candidate—one whose former steely will was shot—not a very promising one.

  C H A P T E R

  9

  I HADN’T QUITE recuperated when Joseph Pendleton struck again, two nights later. It was almost impossible to hear him on the phone. He was in the neighborhood; would I like to meet?

  “Yes,” I replied automatically, but I harbored reservations. I’d been on edge for the past forty-eight hours, never knowing if or when he’d strike or how I’d respond. In order to paint, you can’t be on edge—you have to lose yourself. I was having trouble losing myself entirely, in my own home. If you can’t hide from the elements of the city, both man-made and mankind, in your own home, you’re at a distinct disadvantage.

  Hurricane season had begun, so every night the weathermen would get all lathered up, describing the disasters that were in store. And no doubt there was a real hurricane down in North Carolina, but there were no trees going down here in town. It was windy and unusually sultry for early evening, but I had my mother’s sixth sense and I did not detect danger when I leaned out to the fire escape and took a sniff.

  I met Joseph Pendleton in the alley adjacent to the restaurant down the street, and we walked a few blocks to another charmless safe haven. Suburban-Italian with a colonial seafaring theme. The neighborhood still had a few suburban restaurants, but the only people who went to them worked in the token skyscrapers, and even they only stayed for happy hour. There was no one at the bar when we arrived, and only one silent couple staring bleakly at each other in the restaurant. We sat on bar stools with ship steering wheels for backs.

  At first I didn’t notice he was drunk. I’d never seen a drunk Joseph Pendleton.

  “I just came from the most inane party,” he said.

  “Oh.”

  “You seem nervous.”

  I confessed I hadn’t been prepared for his call.

  “Would you have been more prepared if I’d called you yesterday?”

  “I didn’t mean it that way. I’m glad you called. I just meant I panicked after the other night. After what we did.”

  “You mean what we did.”

  “I said what we did. Calm down.” I told him I’d assumed that the risk was infection and that I hadn’t slept much the last couple of nights.

  He interrupted. “We didn’t really talk the other night. It was more of a physical thing. Your behavior the afternoon when you first told me. You have to explain.”

  Again, I said I really felt terrible about it, that I hadn’t realized how angry I was, but remember the situation, and yes, he had got the brunt of it, and yes, I had been enormously defensive and I was aware that that was a problem. He said he could relate to that, but that I’d been worse than defensive.

  “You belittled me. You acted like a spoiled bitch. You said you couldn’t afford to have a baby, but your family had money. You looked at me like I was beneath you.”

  “I wouldn’t have said that, or if I did, I didn’t mean it the way you took
it. Believe me, you have much more money than I do.”

  “Oh, yes. You said all of that. I remember it very clearly. I haven’t told you this, but I was planning to try to get custody. When you said you couldn’t afford a child I thought maybe I had a chance. I was going to tell my wife, tell her, you know, these things happen.” His voice was low and deliberate. I didn’t tell him that my Brother the Lawyer would have ripped him to shreds before it even reached the courts. That might have been belittling.

  “These things happen?”

  “I was wondering how my son would feel about a baby and what I’d tell our child about his mother, about you. I’d tell him you were a brilliant painter.”

  “You haven’t even seen my work.”

  “Yes, I have.”

  “When?”

  “Yesterday. I saw the show. I got it but I had to look. For a long time. Layers, all those layers. Your layers—I know your layers. You don’t think so . . .”

  It almost worked. “Wait a minute. You were going to try to take my baby? Are you out of your mind?”

  “Our baby,” he said, looking at me more vindictively. “Our baby.” Then he looked away and I moved in closer to hear. “Did you ever think about what it would look like? I did. It would have been pretty attractive. Don’t you think?”

  “I didn’t get that far. No, I just worried it would know too much for its own good—you know, between the two of us—and be doomed.”

  “Yeah . . . yeah, I guess . . . I guess we’re cut from the same cloth, you and I.”

  A drunk and unleashed Joseph Pendleton caused too many conflicting sensations and tied up my vocal cords. He tried to coax me out of my silence with words, without touching me. Finally he said fiercely, “You’re doing it to me again. Like that first time.”

  “I’m not doing it to you. You’re doing it to me.” I tried to take his hand, but he clenched his fist. “I told you exactly what was going through my mind that first time. Look, this was a terrible thing for me. Why are you torturing me? I’m sorry. I told you I feel really bad. I thought you understood. You’re better than I am at these kinds of conversations.”

  “You’re wrong there. I can just fake it better—it’s your job not to let me get away with it.” He laughed without smiling and took a long swallow of his drink. “Maybe we are too alike. This thing, the two of us, it’s never going to work. This woman, back in Paris, she’d do the silent routine. I haven’t told you about her.”

  “Oh, yes, you did.”

  “I did?”

  “Liars don’t have good memories.”

  “When?”

  “The first time we met. You told me the whole thing. How you never saw her again and about the kid and how she never told you about him until he was gone. Remember? You said you hadn’t told many people—that’s why I knew you’d react so strongly when I told you, and that’s why I was scared to.”

  “Why didn’t you say that?”

  “Why did you do the ‘I’ll call you tomorrow’ act?”

  “I meant it. But then you were so . . . well, I assumed I was just another one of the men you were sleeping with, and—”

  “You thought I sleep with just anyone?” He didn’t say no and I laughed. “That’s so wrong it’s funny. I just figured you’d forgotten me.”

  “I tried, but I couldn’t forget your voice.” He said it in a low voice. “I tried, I really did try . . . but . . .” Then his tone changed and his clenched fists tightened. “Did I also tell you why I quit playing? Marriage,” he said derisively. “A condition of marriage. I’d just found out about the kid, that he’d died. My wife, she got me through it, big-time. She—well, that’s between us—it’s of no concern to you.” His face was empty when he turned back to me. “When you said I’d made it worse, after I stood you up”—he half-smiled here, as if he were congratulating himself on a victory—“it was the first time I thought, Oh, this might really be something.” I was uncomfortably mesmerized, so I didn’t say anything. “I wanted to go with you on Thursday, but I couldn’t. When I was in Chicago, I wanted to call and tell you I’d take you on Thursday. But I couldn’t. I just couldn’t.”

  He said it so softly, in cadences so lulling, that I was unable to say, Well, why couldn’t you? Instead I said, “It was so awful. Those places.” When I described Rachel’s stricken expression, we couldn’t help laughing, and that provided some relief.

  We kept at it, huddled over the bar, bravely clearing up mysteries without touching. But for every mystery that was cleared up, another, deeper one was created. We were cowards at base. When I mentioned Rachel again, he became certifiably paranoid and constructed a whole scenario about how she was going to blackmail him and how my neighbor was in on the scheme. In reality Rachel and my neighbor could never get past “Hello, how are you?” and I informed him of that. He continued ranting.

  “But you said you trusted me,” I reminded him.

  “I do trust you,” he said, and resumed ranting. That was when it became clear that he’d reached the far side of drunk, and that he hadn’t been there in quite some time.

  I was just trying to change the subject when I mentioned my latest job offer, writing an in-house educational film, whatever that was, for a cosmetics company. “What cosmetics company? How long have you known about this?” He got the message across—the message concerning you-know-who just happening to work there. Neither of us used the term wife, we used she. Luckily we were rescued by an old soul tune on the jukebox and his face cleared. He wasn’t in the restaurant anymore and I wasn’t either, and because we didn’t have to explain our flights to each other, it led to an eruption of public pawing, and he said, “C’mon. Let’s go.”

  On the way out, I said, “I feel so guilty. Now why am I the one who’s feeling so guilty?”

  “It can be summed up in one word: Judaism.”

  “As if I didn’t know. You can do better than that. You never feel guilty?”

  “Guilt never absolves anything. It’s just another way to rationalize, an exercise in futility. We’ll talk about guilt later.”

  The streets were oddly forsaken, probably because of the hurricane alert. We argued on the corner over taking a cab. Cabs were verboten by the genes for less than twenty blocks. We were only seven blocks away from my loft and I said, “It’s silly. Taking cabs everywhere is a black thing. That’s what my neighbor says. Jews walk.”

  “Not the ones I know,” he said, and hailed a cab.

  When we got to the loft, he said, “Show me what you did today,” so we went into the studio. That was a ruse. “We’re depraved,” he murmured with a real smile and half-closed eyes.

  “You are,” I said, just to rile him up.

  “We are.” He took his hands away and was about to start in on me, so I suggested we go to my room.

  “It’s so pretty,” he ventured. “Have I been here before?”

  I didn’t tell him he’d been barred. I just said, “Liars don’t have good memories.”

  “That painting—it’s beautiful. Innocent. It’s from a while ago, I can tell.”

  He stared at pictures of Jack on the dead-people wall and looked at me.

  “A dead friend.”

  “He looks familiar, what did he—” he started, and I diverted him.

  The sanctuary served as a combat-free zone. He fell asleep in the sign-of-the-cross position and I curled up rigidly next to him and didn’t fall asleep. Maybe he regretted saying too much already, but I didn’t: I had more to say, so I held imaginary noncombative conversations in my head. I told him I was well aware that he was no solution to the Big Picture, but it was okay for the time being because he gave me more than he took away, because he didn’t shrink from the black cloud—he could get behind it and even see behind it—which provided sustenance and a relief that I just could not deny myself. And I told him not to worry; I knew he was hanging by a thread—in more ways than one—but I wouldn’t pull too hard. Unless of course he said, “No . . . pull. Pull hard
.”

  Then I began to worry because it was getting late. Then I wondered why he wasn’t worrying. I tried to get him up, but he didn’t want to get up. For several hours I worried and he slept.

  When he woke up, he got back into his suit and went into the kitchen to get a glass of water, and when he came back he perched far away from me at the end of the bed and said in a hard voice, “I have to go.”

  “We never talked about guilt like you said we would.” I made him lie back down, and we whispered a little. “I wish you could stay,” I whispered.

  “Don’t say that.” But his voice wasn’t gruff anymore.

  “It just slipped out,” I whispered, and we lay there for a while longer.

  C H A P T E R

  10

  THOSE WEEKS WERE teeming with calls; no set pattern, but calls, calls, calls: Meet me here, meet me there, what are you doing, what about later. Sometimes we’d meet in the late afternoon near his office in Times Square and go to some out-of-the-way dump, pretending it was just for a quick cup of coffee but always ending up back at the loft with the sun going down, listening to music, looking at paintings. Eventually I’d have to nudge him gently off the couch and out the door. He’d mumble, “Are you okay?” before he got up, looking away, and I’d reply, “uh-huh,” and steer him toward the door. The night before Rachel’s party he took me to see some band no one else would have heard of, or would have wanted to see, except the two of us—well, maybe my brother. That night it was harder than usual to get him out the door.