HER DINNER WITH Nina was a delicious solace. One of the compensations of breaking up is taking stock of that which is yours, having for so long shared that which is ours. Nina was hers. Nina made her laugh, and didn’t mind when she cried. She hadn’t cried, but it was nice to know she was allowed.
Now, as she returned home, she remembered the taste of that cheap candy bracelet the American had offered her. She re-saw the whole scene as though there had been a small camera hidden away somewhere, like the ones in a bank, monitoring the crowd. For weeks her mind had been reeling with thoughts of divorce lawyers and court cases, so it fit right into the prevailing mood. She saw herself in slow motion, bending forward to his outstretched wrist.
ALEX HAD A theory about success in the respective realms of personal and professional life: one is up when the other is down. But the year after he broke up with Christine proved his theory wrong. His love life was awful, and his professional life was awful; he couldn’t even get work with any film crews in spite of the fact that all of Manhattan that summer had become a movie set and he couldn’t walk down the street without tripping over cable wires.
The worst of it had been the day she left; he carried her bags downstairs, then he went back up to her vacant apartment and carried the tiny single bed, now naked and bare and seedy-looking—as stripped beds always look—downstairs. The bed on which they had cuddled and slept and fucked and groaned and stretched now rested—per the landlord’s instruction—against the side of the building.
Breaking up as friends is a miserable thing. It usually means one person agrees not to express the contempt that accompanies disinterest in exchange for the other person’s not breaking down in a hysterical lump of grief and begging.
As is usually the case in the friend style of breaking up, Alex and Christina hadn’t even had a terrible fight; the balloon didn’t burst with a jarring pop, it slowly deflated until it was a shriveled lifeless scrotum of a relationship and then they said goodbye with the understanding that across the expanse of the entire United States, they would be “friends.” He made himself look away before the cab turned the corner; he didn’t want to see the back of her head vanish.
It was, in a suitably cinematic moment, drizzling. He walked through the rain for a while chanting: “It’s over! It’s over! It’s over!” Then he went home and began reading Anna Karenina. At the time he thought it would be like having a whole new relationship, but by the end he decided that he had simply wanted to read about a woman who was in love, having spent all this time with a woman—his own girlfriend—who seemed clearly not to be in love. It was also possible that he wanted to read about a woman throwing herself under a train.
ALEX SPENT MOST of his time that first week in London drunk, and London, in turn, seemed drunk with him. Every day the newspapers carried some ridiculous headline splashed across the front page. A government official spearheading a campaign called “Back to Basics” had been caught in bed with another man. He claimed he was economizing on hotel rates.
Alex’s most intimate encounter had been with a Pakistani mini-cab driver who explained that though he had been born in Birmingham, he considered himself Pakistani. “The English are pissheads,” said the driver. “They get their wages on Friday and by Monday they’ve spunked it up the wall.”
Alex had just been fired from the one well-paying job he had ever held, at a television news magazine. He took some consolation in the idea that he had no wages, therefore, to spunk. He was spunking his savings.
The small flat he had been lent on Fitzroy Square was depressing. The fold-out mattress sat on the floor taking up most of the available space, so he wandered down to the local pub or to Maison Bertaux, a tiny pastry shop in Soho in whose upstairs room he gorged on eclairs and so many pots of tea that he left trembling. Then he went to the French House and eavesdropped, waiting for his friend Harry to show up and tell him where that night’s social event was.
When he wasn’t drinking, he was eating. He was possessed by an insatiable hunger, and ate all the time, mostly at Lazzaro’s, the small desolate sandwich shop down the block. Mr. and Mrs. Lazzaro waited with stoic patience for the customers to come in. But the customers had gone elsewhere. Alex sat in their sandwich shop and immersed himself in his book—The Savage God: A Study of Suicide, by A. Alvarez. He wasn’t suicidal, but someone had told him the book had excellent insight into the English. He sat in Lazzaro’s for hours reading about Sylvia Plath, another American in London, gassing herself.
“The young,” wrote Alvarez, “are great attempters.”
“Yes we are!” Alex said out loud to the close, warm room that smelled of bacon grease and baked beans, in which he sat as the only patron. There was a stirring behind the counter. Harry had informed him that Lazzaro’s had once been a thriving establishment, with lines out the door at lunchtime. The problem lay with the new arrival down the street, Rive Gauche, a fashionable French sandwich shop. Through the large picture window Mr. Lazzaro had a clear view of the line extending out from Rive Gauche’s front door. His wife sat at the back of the shop, waiting to wait on someone.
After several greasy breakfasts at Lazzaro’s, Alex decided to sample Rive Gauche. But when he walked past the corner he made eye contact with Mr. Lazzaro; Alex saw his proud forlorn face glance up from his paper, observe another defection to the enemy, and look back down at his paper without so much as a twitch. Standing in that window Mr. Lazzaro looked like a diorama in the Museum of Natural History: Old-fashioned sandwich shop proprietor; extinct.
Alex felt a chill of guilt, and about-faced into Lazzaro’s. It was a kind of refuge in there, with its smell of frying bacon and the condensation on the windows and the gloomy expectant face of Mr. Lazzaro as he lifted his eyes from the newspaper and took in the line down the block outside of Rive Gauche.
BEFORE ALEX GOT the job at the network he had picked up odd jobs on film crews and worked as a temp. He spent a great deal of time with his friends, drinking, talking, wandering around, and pretending—in that particular way of people who are not old and cynical and worldly and who haven’t really seen anything and don’t know anything—to be old and cynical and worldly and to have seen everything and to know it all.
The truth of the matter, Alex thought, was that he was a philosopher. He didn’t believe that the person who ends up with the most toys won. He wanted to be a pleasurist; he wanted to be a sensualist and a thinker. He did! He was spiritual that way.
He thought being in love was the highest state of existence. And in terms of his cinema (the word of choice for those who think about making films but, for the most part, don’t), he was at once fascinated by and revolted by his own mother’s intense interest in matters of great historical weight. After his dad died, her dancing had slowly receded and, with equal slowness, a whole new career had emerged that was a surprise to everyone who knew her. It was one of the great professional non sequiturs: modern dancer (professionally trained) historian (self-educated). Her eight-year pilgrimage of self-education had resulted in a huge scholarly book about moral choices in pre–World War I Germany, a strange, original book that was almost academic but for the fact that she wasn’t an academic. It was a brilliant book that emerged with the force of an underground river swollen by the melting of glaciers, and Alex, for all his considerable pride in her, just couldn’t stand it. The success delighted him. But the weight of it, the emphasis on moral choices, the valiant expression on his mother’s face when she worked.
Alex liked the trivial. The small. The eccentric. But he was not a trivial thinker. He thought there was something sublime about the trivial and small, which held clues to the larger structures of life. He resisted the big picture. He was a big picture resister!
KATRINA CAME HOME late. She walked past the kitchen, already set up for the next morning’s breakfast, up the stairs to the second floor, where the vast sitting room and the adjoining study sat quietly in the darkness; the third floor was the family floor, and above that was a sui
te of guest rooms. She poked her head into Patrick’s room. His bed was empty. She went to her own room and found him sleeping in her bed. Before Sam left, Patrick would sometimes come to the bed, but would always let himself be led back. Now, seeing his mother alone, he just got in, and she let him stay.
She spent some time in the bathroom and debated whether to wake him and take him back to his room. She decided against it and slid in next to him. He was six. There was a lot of time to draw certain Oedipal lines in the sand.
She lay in the dark, staring at the ceiling high above her, with Patrick breathing softly nearby. Two years earlier they had renovated the house, and her bedroom was now two stories high. It was very dramatic, and unfortunately it was also very lonely. It been intended as a kind of sanctuary for husband and wife, but now it was a kind of cathedral to her singlehood.
ALEX HAD BROUGHT all his investigative skills to bear, and at last he got Katrina’s phone number. She told him politely to go away. He put the phone down and, with nothing to lose, called right back.
“Don’t be exasperated,” he said. “It’s just that you are the most striking, interesting person I’ve met in London and I’m leaving in a couple of days and I would like to take you to a brief dinner.”
There was a long pause.
“Do you promise to be brief?” she said.
IT WAS THAT spectral time when the day is over and the night has not yet begun in earnest. Patrick, barefoot and in pajamas, peered into his mother’s room with the stealthy air of a burglar. He had just emerged from a long fragrant bubble bath and was in no mood for bed. His mother was sitting on a small chair in front of the dressing table, her face reflected in a large oval mirror, putting on earrings. An hour earlier he had sat next to her on the carpeted bathroom floor, naked and shivering, and watched as she knelt beside him in her bathrobe, her dark hair pulled up, the soft back of her neck visible with its wispy hairs, a yellow bottle of bubble bath in her hand. They watched the bath fill up together, the white bubbles getting frothier and higher, and when he got in she scooped up a handful and put it on his head. Then she left him alone in the bubbles.
Now she was dressed up. Her body was full and curvy and warm. He padded up behind her very quietly, feeling the soft carpet between his toes, until he could see her face in the mirror. Both her hands fiddled with the little diamond earring in her right ear, and her head was tilted to the side. Their eyes met in the mirror.
“Hello, Poopsie,” she said. “What are you doing?”
Patrick broke out into a giggly smile revealing a big gap where the front teeth should have been, and his body convulsed as though ten people at once had poked their index fingers into the ticklish parts of his body (almost everywhere), and then his face quieted and became solemn and watchful again.
“Nothing,” he said.
“It’s time for bed,” she said, as he knew she would. She fiddled with her earring some more. Patrick watched, tilting his head to the side and staring with renewed interest at his mother’s face in the mirror, as though his mother were a different person seen sideways.
“Are you going out?” he asked, still sideways.
She said yes.
“Where are you going?” he asked.
“Out with a friend.”
Patrick understood “friend” to mean someone other than his father.
ALEX COMPOSED HIMSELF in the soft London air. The door was black and forbidding, with a huge brass knocker in the shape of a fist.
Each house on her block looked like a fortress; hers was the largest fortress. The very sound of her neighborhood was faintly military: Maida Vale.
He was let in by intercom and stood quietly in the foyer. He bent forward to read some of the invitations propped up on an antique table, but at the last second he suppressed his natural instinct to pry and averted his gaze to the floor—neat, attractive planks of narrow pale pine, unblemished and tastefully fancy. Then he looked up at the mirror above the table. Its frame was ornate, gold, garish. Within the frame stood a man in a blue blazer and white shirt, trying to be himself.
Alex ran his hands through his hair, raised his chin up and then lowered it. Trying to be yourself was difficult, he thought. He made a series of funny faces: a monster, a frightened child, a clown.
In the kitchen was a big round table that was already set for tomorrow’s breakfast. There were three settings. A family-size box of Rice Krispies sat in the middle of the table. High on the wall was a large pair of antelope antlers.
“Just a minute, Alex,” Katrina called out. “I’ll be down in a minute!” He heard the sound of footsteps, like a distant stampede. Her son. The sound of pounding feet made him shudder.
He glanced at the foolish-looking man in the mirror. What was he afraid of? First dates are so ridiculous, he thought. You are either insanely optimistic or insanely pessimistic. He was, at the moment, the latter. Here is a woman with a whole galaxy of life surrounding her, evolving, in motion, and he was a mere asteroid hurtling recklessly in her direction. The proximity to her atmosphere was causing him to heat up. He would probably combust upon entry.
He remembered Ashley, his first First Date. She was a preppy, shy girl with blue cat-eyes who had caused a minor uproar in high school when, as a freshman, she was rumored to have slept with a senior and in the middle of the act whispered, “Hurt me.” Ashley’s father had met Alex in their living room when he came to pick her up. He had a square jaw and a firm handshake. In spite of all this manliness, Alex remembered a look of worry on his face: Please don’t do anything unpleasant to my daughter, it seemed to say.
Later that night he and Ashley had sat on a stoop drinking from a quart of beer and attacking one another with deep clumsy kisses, and he had put his hand under her clean white tennis shirt and pushed her bra up over her brand-new breasts and was a little rough with her; he pinched her a little, not out of some subtle calculation, but just because he didn’t know what he was doing. She groaned with pleasure, a noise that was womanly and real and sexual in a way he hadn’t really experienced yet, which frightened him and excited him and also, for some reason, brought that expression on her father’s face racing back to mind. Alex had, in fact, done something unpleasant to his daughter. And she had liked it.
That was over ten years earlier, at the end of high school on a stoop in Brooklyn Heights. For the ensuing decade his dates had been tinged with the knowledge that he might do something pleasantly unpleasant to someone’s daughter.
And now, as he listened to the tiny footsteps upstairs, he experienced something of a revolution—there would be no father to see him off with his date, but there might be a son. Could he bring himself to do something pleasantly unpleasant to someone’s mother?
Yes, he thought. He probably could.
He heard the voices, faint but growing stronger:
“Mum, can I stay up longer?”
“Mummy, why can’t I stay up?”
“Mummy, I want to stay up! Please don’t go! Stay and read me a story! Where are you going? Mum!”
She came into view for moment at the top of the stairs, and then her son tugged her back out of sight.
“Upstairs and into bed!” she said. It was the voice of motherhood, at once adamant and pleading.
“Mum, can maybe I go to the sweet shop and get more licorice tomorrow? Please!”
“Mummy, don’t go, wait, one more thing, I want to tell you something! Mummy!”
She came down the stairs looking amazingly sleek—black skirt, black stockings, white shirt under a dark gray cashmere cardigan. Her clothes were tasteful and muted and expensive. A young boy in pajamas jumped around at her heels. Her eyes passed over Alex briefly, hardly acknowledging him; she was lovely in this strange moment of two worlds colliding. Her lips were full of life. Her mouth yielded no more than Mona Lisa’s. When he had first met her he had thought there was something fiery and threatening about her, as though her radiant smile could change into something vicious at any moment.
>
But she was different now, with her son in his green pajamas with little frogs on them, his face bright with energy and enthusiasm. He was barefoot, well scrubbed, that special post-bath pre-bed too much energy. Alex knew the mood. He had specialized in it himself.
How obstinate he had been about not going to bed! “But Mom!” he had insisted. “I’m a night person!”
Those occasions when Alex’s mother went out for the evening rushed to the surface of his consciousness, not as an idea, or an image, but as a smell. He remembered the lovely smell of her lipstick, and the perfume she used to wear. He would press his face into the softness of her neck and inhale. Then the faint sense of terror at her departure would give way to a delicious sense of opportunity, to play with the baby-sitter, to roam free in the house.
What he didn’t remember, and what he tried to reach back to now, was whether he had had any sense of what his mother was up to on these nights out. After his father’s death he had administered a stern injunction to his mother: she was not to remarry. He had forbidden other men! How had he come up with that?
At fifteen, five years after the proclamation, he retracted it, almost bashfully, as though he couldn’t believe the audacity of his younger self. She had looked at him with one of her lovely and mysterious expressions that suggested that one could concurrently grow wiser and more incredulous as life progressed.
Watching this unlikely couple descend the stairs, Alex instinctively retreated a little into the kitchen doorway. When Patrick was almost at the bottom of the staircase, still yelling proclamations and making deals, he saw Alex and was suddenly gripped by an intense bout of shyness.
The Sleep-Over Artist Page 18
