That was a long time ago. I can barely recall, now, what drew me to him in the first place. I think it had something to do with the fact that unlike most of our friends, he had a plan for himself and seemed bent on achieving it. He was witty; he was smart. And working for Adam, I knew, would be valuable experience. When it got so that we were barely communicating except to talk business, I repeated those words to myself—valuable experience—like a mantra.
Somewhere along the way, I suppose I must have fallen in love with him. When he reached for me that first time, that early morning in the gallery, it seemed inevitable. The air around us had been charged for weeks. And for a while he was so sensitive to me, so gentle, that I confused the touch of his fingers with love, though a whispering voice in the back of my head warned me not to trust him, even then. So when I found out that he had been seeing other women, I was devastated at first and then philosophical, as if they too were somehow inevitable.
I continued to work with him and even, occasionally, to sleep with him. But as time went on I began to feel a strange silence breeding inside me, a void as tangible as anything I could devise to fill it. I could feel it hollowing against my ribs, inching higher and higher, corroding into itself like a hill of sand.
The blond couple signed the guest book before leaving. I could hear them conversing in some guttural language as they clomped down the stairs to the street. At the bottom of the stairs they paused, letting somebody in, and I cocked my ear to listen. This was what I liked least about being in the gallery alone: you never knew who might be on the way up; you just had to wait, defenseless.
It was Adam. “Oh, hey,” he panted, coming into view. He was lugging a large canvas. “Help me here. Meet Veronica.” He tilted his head toward a tall hazel-eyed woman following behind him. “She’s cataloguing this stuff.”
“Don’t get up. I’ll help him,” she said in a posh English accent.
Adam raised his eyebrows at me. “Did that couple buy anything?”
“No. They looked around for a while, though. They took a card.” I pretended to straighten some papers on the desk. “If you don’t need me, I’ve got some errands to do.”
“Well, actually—”
“Let her go,” Veronica said. “I’m happy to stay.”
I smiled evenly at her. “Great.” I went back into the office and got my bag. When I returned, Adam and Veronica were deep in conversation about the oil painting propped against the wall.
“I think it’s quite marvelous, really,” Veronica was saying, nervously glancing at Adam. She waved her hand in front of the canvas. “All that … movement.”
“You think?” He sounded dubious. He was silent for a moment, his hand on his chin, and then he said, “No. It hesitates. Nok could see it, but he couldn’t do it.”
“Hmm.” She stepped back, squinting.
“Maybe he should’ve settled for being a gallery owner, then,” I said.
Outside, the West Village was crowded with people heading for lunch, meetings, health clubs. Despite the heat, the air was damp. As I walked along the mazelike dead-end streets, I thought about the winding streets of Venice I had wandered the summer before; there were so many of them, and they all seemed to lead nowhere. But in New York, unlike Venice, people walked with a sense of purpose. They had appointments to keep, problems to solve, deals to make. Just thinking about it made me tired.
I drifted up Hudson Street, buying a salad from a Korean grocery along the way, heading toward the concrete playground where Hudson and Bleecker intersect. A homeless woman followed me, and I gave her my change. After that I was approached three or four times, and every time I turned away I felt a part of me harden and steel itself. This happened every day, and every day the process was the same.
I felt that familiar hollowness, the gnawing space inside me that seemed to be growing. I thought about the gallery, the flawed painting, Adam’s hand on Veronica’s back.
All at once I was overcome with anxiety at the narrowness of my routine. My days had become numbingly predictable. Every morning the clock struck seven and the alarm drove me toward it—back to the city, into each day, the minutes ticking one after another, time that loitered but wouldn’t stand still. Up and showering, soap, shampoo, orange juice by the sink, scanning the paper for fatalities in the neighborhood, hesitating over my umbrella—would it rain? Applying lipstick, nude, the color for summer, at the mirror in the hall. Locking the door behind me once, twice, three times. Swinging shut the iron gate out front, walking in the sun or wind or rain and descending into darkness, tokens, the smell of urine. On the subway folding screens—the Daily News, the Times—hid blank faces the shades of New York: boredom, mistrust, ennui.
As the clock struck nine we’d be open for business, for pleasure. Hot Brazilian coffee and bagels delivered by Julio, tip included. Inventory. Phone calls. Mail: exhibition at the Sonnabend Gallery, opening at Elena’s; the Philadelphia Museum requesting a piece for its collection, but the artist and his work were nowhere to be found.
Time would speed up for a deadline, quickly slow down again: the clock would strike one and it’d be time for lunch. Adam seducing a collector on the phone in the office, me eating turkey on rye, reading the Voice. As the day heated into afternoon, Adam might leave for a late lunch with a dealer, and suddenly the gallery would be full: twelve Japanese tourists who speak no English and want to take pictures of the pictures; a couple with three little children; two skinheads who tell me they’re from Milwaukee. A headache pounding against my brain. Three o’clock. Four. Adam would return smelling of bourbon and cigarettes.
Evening overpowered afternoon. Long shadows would fall across the butcher block as we shuffled papers, locked the office, straightened the desk. At seven the street was eerily deserted, trash dancing across the gutter. At eight I’d be in the White Horse Tavern with Drew, nursing a seltzer with lime.
The silence consumed me like a parasite, making me high-strung and nervous. Nothing was happening. Tomorrow would be the same. In the bar I’d eat a bowl of olives and watch the lights come on. Nine o’clock. Ten. Then we’d be out on the street: perhaps now it was raining. I wouldn’t have my umbrella. My hair would be plastered down in strips around my face. The rain would be soft, radioactive, bringing the refuse of the city back to itself. We’d split a taxi to Brooklyn, and Drew would tip the driver. It would already be tomorrow. I was almost twenty-seven. The silence whispered in my head. Other faces in other taxis turned and looked at me, and I looked back; I saw myself. The silence grew.
At the park I slipped off my shoes and sat on a bench with my knees up and my arms wrapped around them. All of SoHo and all of the Village probably didn’t amount to sixty acres.
I was never good at much besides being a teacher, but I was real good at that. When I married Amory I couldn’t cook to save my life or anyone else’s, and I didn’t like to clean. I was not adept at organizing bridge or fixing the house for Christmas. My children were always a kind of mystery to me.
But when I was inside those four walls of a classroom, with a book or a piece of chalk in my hand, I knew exactly what to do. I knew that I could get up there in front of the class and for fifty minutes I could be whoever I wanted; I could tell them almost anything, and they’d believe me. And then they would disappear, melt away until the same time tomorrow, when they’d be sitting there the same as today, waiting for me to start telling stories. I taught English; all of it was stories. I heard that behind my back they took to calling me Miss F’rinstance because I told stories about everything.
I’d only been inside a few classrooms on my own when I had to pack my bags and leave the college, but I had the thrill of it in my blood and truly thought I’d be coming back. Amory seemed to be enough for a while; we’d be eating supper or lying in bed and he’d listen to my stories and laugh at the punch lines. But soon he got busy, and whenever I started to tell one he’d act irritated, get a glaze over his eyes, and that took the fun out of it. Then I tried with
the children, but at first they were too young, and when they were older they acted like I was just rambling. Like they were impatient to get away.
Both of my brothers in Chattanooga finished college, and they sent me books to read, thick hardback books with small type, not those paperbacks with the bosoms and burning houses on the covers. Real books. Oh, I read the other stuff too, when my attention was short and the babies sapped my energy. I took words when I could, any words; I wasn’t picky.
Words never came easy in our house. I’d fight for them, coax, plead. I kept a dictionary in the front room by the Bible, and if I ever heard a word I didn’t know, I’d write it down on a napkin or a scrap of paper and save it to look up. I taught the children to do that too, but Amory didn’t set a good example, and Ellen was the only one who stuck to it. She mined words like gold.
“The sky is iridescent, Ma,” she said once when she was five, and Amory turned on me in a rage: “What the hell are you doing, teaching that girl to talk so we can’t even understand her?” He knew, of course, exactly what I was doing.
I don’t read much anymore, and I keep my stories to myself. But even now the smell of chalk makes me dizzy, and the feel of a new book makes my heart drop.
Afterward, except for our breathing, there was silence in the small room. It was almost dark. I lay without moving on the damp cotton sheet, staring at the outline of a framed museum print. Four flights below, the noises of the city blended like an orchestra. I strained to hear each instrument: the rumbling of heavy trucks and buses, the muffled hum of cars, the blare of horns and the faint wail of a distant siren. I studied a crack in the wall, watching how it splayed into branches across a corner of the ceiling.
“Christ, Cassie,” he said. “You might have feigned a little interest.”
I inhaled thin, cool air from the air conditioner in the window above, its breeze mingling with the smell of our sweat. Flecks of light fell into the room, sprinkling the white sheets and my bare, pale arms. Moving my fingers, I watched the light slide over them like mercury.
“I’ve decided to leave,” I said.
“What are you talking about?”
“I’m going to Tennessee. I wanted to tell you first, before you heard it from anybody else.”
He sat up and looked at me, rubbing his short dark hair with his hands. When I reached over to touch his shoulder, he flinched as if an insect had landed on him.
“Look, I’ll help you find someone for the gallery,” I said. “I won’t leave until you’ve got somebody trained.”
He swung his legs over the side of the bed and reached for his striped boxer shorts on the floor, putting them on in one fluid movement.
“Adam—”
“It’s a big gamble,” he said, standing up stiffly, his eyes flat and expressionless. “Good luck.”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m not saying anything. You’re taking a big risk, that’s all. I admire you for it.”
“What’s so risky?”
“Well, this is it, right? Make it or break it. What if it turns out that all that talent you’ve been keeping on a back burner isn’t there?”
“That’s not the point. That’s not why I’m going.”
“Oh, really?”
“I just need to get away. It’s not a matter of proving anything.”
His mouth turned up at the corners. “Look, Cassie, I’m sure you know what you’re doing. It’s just that usually when people pick up and move they’re either going toward something or running away.”
“It’s not like that.”
“You sure?”
“For God’s sake, Adam, if you’re not going to even try to understand—”
“I am trying. I just think you need to be certain that you’re doing the right thing. For yourself, I mean.”
I drew back. “I wasn’t really asking for your approval. I just wanted you to know. For the gallery.”
Adam picked a T-shirt off the floor and turned to leave the room. I watched him make his way down the narrow hall, switching on the light with his shoulder as he veered into the living room at the end. After a few seconds I could hear a canned voice talking about the Yankees. I sat against the headboard, dragging the sheet up around me.
After a while I began to get dressed, gathering my bra and underwear and large brass earrings, which were scattered around the room. In the smattering of light from the window, I groped for the black dress and slingbacks I wore to work, then shook my hair over my head, combing through the tangles with my fingers. I wiped the mascara from under my eyes. Trembling a little, I went down the hall to the living room.
“Is three weeks’ notice enough?” I asked Adam’s back.
He kept his eyes on the TV, now tuned to Jeopardy.
“Hollywood Romance for six hundred, Alex.”
“This famous couple’s romance ended tragically when she died in a plane crash in 1942.”
“Gable and Lombard,” Adam said.
“Who are Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier?” said the contestant.
After a few moments an ad for dishwashing detergent came on. “I assume you can let yourself out,” Adam said.
I paused for a second, examining the front door. “Actually, I never did figure out how to undo all these locks.”
He stood up, as if with great effort, still watching the television. Without looking at me, he handed me the bottle of beer he was holding. He released the column of locks with a series of clipped, intricate maneuvers. “Sayonara,” he said.
“Please.”
“What?” He held up his hands.
“Come on, Adam. Give me a break. Don’t make this so difficult.”
He shrugged, looking over my head. The game show was on again.
“A hunchback, this nineteenth-century French painter immortalized cancan dancers.”
Adam murmured, “Toulouse-Lautrec.”
“It doesn’t have to be this way,” I said.
“Who is Toulouse-Lautrec?” said the contestant.
He looked at me without focusing, and after a second the brown of his eyes darkened and he looked down. “Just leave, Cassandra,” he said, stepping back. “I’m tired.”
The elevator opened on the ground floor. As I left the gloomy lobby, I felt light-headed, as if I might faint. I stood against the side of the building, my back and arms touching the cool brick, and I couldn’t help it, I started to cry. I put my hands over my face, hot tears squeezing out between my fingers, my shoulders shaking; and then I cried even harder, angry at myself for crying at all.
After a few minutes I straightened up, wiped my face with my hands, and reached into my bag for a tissue. I took one deep breath and then another, adjusted the bag, and started down the street.
Out in the open, the summer air was warm and solid. As I crossed to the other side I glanced back at the red-brick building, up the four flights to Adam’s bedroom window. I could see a light shining inside, probably just the dull glow from the television reflected down the narrow hall.
Her hair was long and black, and her neck was the color of sand on a beach, of wheat bread rising. Her eyes were as dark and bright as a crow’s. She wore the newest styles of dresses in colors the rest of us were too well-bred to try—whorehouse vermilion, firetruck red, sunburst gold—and lipstick to match. Nobody else wore lipstick; we were all married and living in the country. We couldn’t see what for.
Bryce once said, confidentially, that she’d never really been friends with a woman as attractive and strong as she was before, not one-on-one. She said she thought it was a competition problem. Then she smiled her wide, wine-lipped smile and reached over and squeezed my hand.
“We’re alike, you and I,” she said. “We’ve got the same goals.” “How’s that?”
She patted her hair, tucking strands into the loose twist on her head, and then she looked me over slowly. “We’re not going to sit here for the next fifty years and go crazy, ringing the bell for breakfast and lunch a
nd supper, marking time by what’s on the table. We’re not cut out for sitting at home while the world goes marching by without us.”
“What do you mean, Bryce Davies?” I laughed. “Amory and that little baby are the only parade I want to be a part of.”
She was shaking her head even before I got the words out. “For now, maybe, but you’ll see. Pretty soon whatever thrill you find in it is going to wear pretty thin. And stuck out here, too far from civilization to even know what the fashions are! It’s a crime to do it to a woman, especially a city gal like you.”
“But Bryce, I’m the happiest woman in the world,” I said.
Our babies, Horace and Taylor, were asleep upstairs, and Bryce and I were on the front porch with a lemonade as the sun settled into midafternoon over distant western trees. It was the end of September. The air was warm and dry. Amory had come back from Baton Rouge a month earlier, and since then it was like I’d never imagined it could be. The house was our cocoon. I’d get up to feed Horace at two o’clock, three o’clock, and Amory would get up too, to throw a blanket over my feet and warm some milk for me on the stove. Then I’d rock Horace back to sleep, and Amory and I would go to bed, and as many times as not he’d kiss me and stroke me, in and out of my dreams. He would get up for work before the sun rose, and before he left he’d lean over and whisper that he loved me. He’d whisper my new name.
“We were that way too for a while,” said Bryce. “It gets old fast. Just you wait. He’ll get a bee in his bonnet about something, something’ll go wrong at work, and then all you’re good for is getting the food on his plate when he wants it, and maybe some fun late at night. If you’re lucky.”
I smiled, thinking of the night before. “That won’t happen.”
Bryce gave a dry laugh and smoothed the front of her silk dress, lily-pad green. “I said the same thing. Frank was like a honeymooner for a whole year. Then we got the mortgage to pay, and Taylor comes along and he’s working two shifts and dog-tired and yapping at me like I’m to blame.”
Sweet Water Page 3
