Vigil for a Stranger

by Kitty Burns Florey

  She put down her cup, suddenly, and folded her hands together, elbows on the table. She was still smiling, but incredulously, with a touch of coolness, eyes wide: the Comtesse d’Haussonville. “Christine,” she said. “What on earth is going through your mind?”

  This time, the tears spilled over—a familiar feeling, not entirely unpleasant. “I keep trying to stay rational,” I told her. “I know I have a tendency to go off the deep end. But I do know this isn’t some cheap melodramatic movie, Alison,” I said. “I do know you aren’t collaborating with Orin in some plot to drive me crazy. When I’m myself, I know that. This is life, it’s not a movie or an Agatha Christie novel, and life doesn’t work that way, life isn’t so—interesting, as you say. So wacky. Whatever. This is National Enquirer stuff and everyone knows that’s invented by a staff of maniacs in Jersey City.” I laughed a little, shakily. I didn’t look at Alison. I had no idea how she was reacting to this. I wiped my eyes on my napkin. The napkin was a deep rose madder, the color of Alison’s blusher, and my tears left blotches like red wine stains. I went on, I couldn’t stop talking. “And yet this is driving me crazy,” I told her. “I want so much for life to be simple again. I just want to be a woman who’s sneaking around on the guy she lives with.”

  I meant that as a sort of joke, an attempt to close the conversation by lightening the atmosphere, but it didn’t work. Alison frowned and looked off into space, distressed. She sighed deeply and said, “Oh God, Chris. Please. Really. I don’t know what Orin is up to, but I certainly don’t have any hidden agenda. I thought I was being helpful, I really did.”

  Faintly, from the kitchen, I could hear talk, laughter, dishes rattling. I wished the attentive Frank would fill our water glasses: my head was pounding, my throat was tight and painful. I wondered if I had aspirin in my bag and, if I did, could I get it down. “And sometimes, what I really really want is for him to be Pierce. To be my old friend, back from the dead.”

  “Frankly, I think you’re going to have to find out one way or another,” she said. “That’s the only way to end this madness. You’re going to have to make some phone calls, do some checking.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t badger me.” I snapped this out; the kitchen noises suddenly ceased. Then, in the silence, we both laughed, surprising ourselves. She apologized again, and I felt suddenly warmer toward her—maybe only because she made me laugh. But I had a feeling we weren’t going to be such friends after all.

  My head ached. I wanted to leave—walk over to the Whitney, get some fresh air, look at the folk art, and then meet Orin and talk about something neutral, like whether the idea of putting a trolley line on 42nd Street was really feasible.

  I tried to think of a way to leave gracefully, but Alison did it for me. She looked at her watch and said, with regret, “Oh hell, I should get going. I have this boring appointment in about ten minutes.” She was the yuppie big-shot again, the woman with the bulging Filo-Fax.

  She paid the check, insisted it could go on her expense account. Frank brought us our coats and helped us into them, out of the proper deferential politeness or a desire to get rid of us faster, I couldn’t tell. On the sidewalk, Alison and I embraced. She kept hold of my arm and looked me in the eye. She said, “Chris. Forgive me. I know I’ve been nosy and intrusive and awful.”

  “No you haven’t,” I told her. “This talk has been good for me. It’s helped me clarify things. I’m glad we got together, really I am.” What I said was mostly true.

  She shook her head. “No. I’ve upset you, I can see that. I’m a pain in the ass. And this whole thing is undoubtedly a dead end. I still think you should check it out, but Orin is probably just weird, and I’m trying to explain him with Pierce. I don’t know what it is, maybe the business I’m in, working with these supremely rational machines all day, but I love the irrational, I love coincidence and mystery and fog and murk.” She laughed and began to search in her purse for something, talking without looking at me. “The truth is, I had a real crush on Orin for a while, before I got hung up on Roger.” She smiled to herself, down into the depths of her wine-colored bag. “He’s such an odd duck—Orin. The mystery man. But he’s really a very dear soul. I’m still extremely fond of him.”

  I couldn’t help wondering if this was what she had wanted to tell me all along: this last, off-hand remark. I had a real crush on Orin, I’m still extremely fond of him. Was it Alison I should be wary of, after all? Alison’s bright lipstick, painted fingernails, golden hair, way with waiters? I thought of Alison and Orin in his office at Parker Properties, putting their heads together over file servers and LAN networks. I believe in pleasure. The question was, what gave her pleasure?

  She came up with what she was seeking: her business card—I remembered it from the train. She scribbled a phone number on the back and gave it to me, closing my hand around it. “Call me one of these days,” she said. “Soon. We should talk some more—maybe when we’ve had less wine?” Her smile, I realized, was a little wobbly; she had drunk much more wine than I. “I mean it. I can be your sounding board. Lay any theory on me, no matter how absurd. And maybe we can go to an auction or something together. Okay? Will you call me?”

  I set off toward Madison Avenue. The air felt wonderful—even in the middle of New York City, it was a lovely, fresh, May afternoon. I breathed deeply and felt myself waking up; my headache was immediately better. Alison and I were going in opposite directions, but I was tempted to look around, to see if she had really left or if she was still standing in front of Chez Duroc watching me with her glassy green eyes.

  Chapter Ten

  James showed me a postcard from my old friend Beth, in Taos. It arrived while I was in New York. In red ink, in her spiky handwriting it said: “So what’s happening with you? Would it kill you to get in touch once in a while? Are you working? Are you painting? Are you still there? Hello? Love, Beth.”

  I read it and gave it back to him. James stood there holding it in his hand, looking at the color photograph of a black pottery bowl from San Ildefonso. “Nice bowl,” he said.

  “James.” I didn’t know how to go on.

  “Before you think up another lie,” he said, “let me also tell you that some guy called a couple of nights ago. It had that long-distance sound to it. He asked for Mary. I told him he had the wrong number.”

  “It could have been anybody,” I said. I couldn’t believe Orin would call me, get James, and not tell me about it.

  “He’s done it at least three times, maybe four. Same voice, same Mary.” James held out the postcard with finger and thumb and let it drop to the polished floor at our feet. The black bowl gleamed up at us. “I know you’re seeing someone in New York,” James said. “Even without the postcard, even without the phone calls, I know what’s been going on. You don’t exactly have to be a genius to figure it out.”

  I broke down and told him about Orin. I told him everything, beginning with Alison on the train and ending with Beth’s postcard. He knew about Pierce, of course—not everything, just that Pierce was my friend, I loved him, he died young, and I had trouble accepting it. James had always been properly sympathetic. We always discussed Pierce’s death along with our other losses, the various sorrows from the difficult lives we lived before we met each other and became happy together.

  Now he didn’t want to hear it. He said, “I don’t give a damn about the circumstances—all that this crap about Pierce means to me is that you’ve been having an affair with some guy in New York and lying to me about it.”

  He said he thought we should split up. He had been considering selling the business. Raymond was trying to find a way to buy it, although this was a long shot no matter how good a deal James could give him. But they were looking into it. James was ready for something else, he didn’t know what. He’d been thinking of getting out of New Haven. If we split up, he said, I could have the house and the furniture and the cats.

  Our talks went on all day and into the night. James didn’t go t
o work and we forgot to feed Rosy and Ruby. We didn’t even answer the phone. I imagined Orin, puzzled, on the other end; this didn’t bother me, it barely came through to me. What James told me was devastating: all those months that I’d been deceiving him, he’d been responding. I had thought he was merely sulky, and he had been outraged: he had been planning to leave me, to sell his business, to take off for God knows where and leave our little house behind—leave me behind because I had done him wrong. He had stopped being my savior, and who could blame him?

  All this time, I had had no idea. I had joked about the situation with Alison. I hadn’t protested nearly enough when Orin made fun of James.

  Everything he said to me was brutal, and he made no attempt to soften it. I was being punished. I was the fish hitting the cold water, leaping in pain. His face was cold, closed, a stranger’s face. The cats wanted to get on his lap and he pushed them down. He didn’t even see them.

  “You don’t think I’m real,” James said to me. “You don’t think I’m a real person, Chris.”

  “I do, James. That’s not true.”

  He wouldn’t listen to me. His fury was astonishing. He banged his fist down on table tops, he slammed doors, he couldn’t eat, when the phone rang he turned on me and said, “Don’t answer that!” He drank a can of beer and then squashed the can in his fist and tossed it at the wall. Beside this vehemence, I felt half-alive. I had no energy to shout back or to defend myself. I felt myself dwindling to nothing.

  He asked me, “What in hell did you think was going through my mind all this time? Did you think I didn’t notice? Did you think I didn’t care? Did you think I’d just wait it out?”

  “I haven’t been thinking about anything.” I didn’t say that everything he said was true, though it was true: from the day Alison sat next to me on the train, James ceased to exist. What I said was, “I’ve been under an enchantment. I’ve been living in a dream.”

  He was not impressed, his anger intensified. He said, “This makes me wonder if that asshole Emile maybe didn’t have a point when he sent you to the funny farm.”

  After that, we stopped discussing it. James slept in the guest room. I remained in our big brass bed, but I didn’t sleep at all. As if to make up for all the months of neglect, I thought compulsively about James: how unhappy he was when we met, how it hurt him that he would never have a child of his own, how funny and sweet he was the day he delivered the cats to my apartment. I couldn’t match his anger with any of my own. His accusations, the cruel things he said to me, even that final crack about the funny farm—none of them sparked anger, only a listless, defeated feeling, a sense that I’d been stupid, I’d been stupid again.

  Lying there, with the cats draped over my legs—I tried to get one of them to go to James in the guest room, but they slept on our bed out of habit—I also thought about Denis, who would be in New Haven in less than three months. He was planning to spend a week with me and James before he had to report to Yale. I didn’t want James to be gone when Denis came: the idea filled me with terror, and I realized what I had never understood before, that I was scared to death of my own son. I had been depending on James to make things pleasant between us, to help me smooth over the fact that, say what you might, I had let Emile take Denis away from me. I didn’t fight, didn’t get a lawyer, didn’t even protest: I only sat quietly in my chair by the window in the funny farm, I waited until after visiting hours to cry. The two of them left for Paris, and I threw myself into the weaving of baskets. After a while I didn’t cry anymore. Denis and I began writing our cordial little letters. My life went on.

  I didn’t know if Denis saw it that way or if he saw me as Emile’s victim. I had no idea what Emile had told him. Denis and I had never discussed it. His letters were never anything but affectionate. But he was eighteen, and in person he might want a confrontation: this might, indeed, be the real reason he was coming to Yale. He terrified me, and now James expected me to face him alone.

  I lay on the bed we had shared, thinking about Denis—the sweetness of his childhood. I was filled with terror. I knew that James was lying awake across the hall, and I was unable to go to him. I was unable to beg him to stay. I didn’t know if I wanted him to, and if I had known that I wanted him to, I still couldn’t have asked him.

  Orin was not on my mind at all, but all that week I knew I’d go to New York on Saturday as usual. James asked me nothing, and I didn’t tell him that I was going: it was assumed. I called a taxi while he was at work. When the taxi pulled up in front and honked, and I picked up my overnight bag and went out the front door and locked it behind me, it felt final, as if it were the last time. I imagined coming home to find James gone, and I almost told the taxi driver to forget it, I almost went back inside and called James at Jimmy Luigi’s, broke down weeping and asked him to forgive me. I was pretty sure that he would, and so I didn’t do it.

  I asked Orin why he didn’t tell me about James answering the phone when he called. “I thought it would just confuse the issue,” he said. It was the same answer he gave me when I asked him why he never told me he’d been an actor.

  What issue? This is what I wanted to ask him, but I didn’t see the point.

  He wanted to know about the lunch with Alison. “What did you talk about?”

  “Antique furniture.”

  He laughed. “You didn’t talk about men?”

  “William Morris,” I told him. “Gustav Stickley.”

  After my lunch with Alison Orin seemed different to me. I trusted him less—or I admitted to myself that I had never really trusted him, I wasn’t sure which. Many of the things he said seemed insincere, or deliberately superficial. He looked more like Pierce. He was in a good mood, full of beans but I didn’t want to talk to him, I just wanted to be in bed with him, making love and sleeping and making love again. I kept wondering if Proust ever considered the possibility that a random memory found in a cup of tea could be the kind of memory that did no one any good, or that temps perdu ought to stay lost.

  I didn’t tell Orin about James’s discovery. I said only that I was thinking of breaking up with James, that living with him had become painful. Orin smiled slightly when I said this, as he did whenever I mentioned James. We had just come back from dinner, and we were sitting side by side on the sofa in the living room. Orin said, “So what would you do? Move into the city? Get a job? Or can you support yourself painting?”

  “I’m not sure. James said he’d let me have the house.”

  Orin laughed. “Thanks a lot, buddy. Your payments are pretty enormous, right?”

  “Pretty enormous, yeah.”

  “I’ll tell you what,” he said. “Sell the place and move into New York. I’ll find you something you can afford, and I’ll figure out a way for you to finance it.” At first I thought he was kidding—his sleazy realtor routine—but he sat up straight and faced me, and I could see the enthusiasm in his face. “This is the time to buy,” he said. “With interest rates going down, things are really going to start to move. You’ve got to do it now, Chris.”

  I sat there half-listening, watching him. He had been leafing through the newspaper, and he had his spectacles on. He was wearing a denim shirt and a black knitted tie. He looked very sharp, very handsome. The shirt made his eyes look intensely blue. Was I imagining it that Pierce once wore a black tie and a denim shirt like this when he worked in a bank?

  “I’ll help you find a job, too,” Orin said. “In fact, a friend of mine in the business happens to need a receptionist. Steve Kramer—a really nice guy, and he pays well, and basically all you’re doing is answering the phone and making appointments. Then we could forget this weekend stuff, we’d get a lot more time together, Chris.” He held my hand, squeezing my fingers together, full of his fantasies. “I just want to be with you,” he said. “You’ve changed my life. You wouldn’t believe how lonely I used to be, how lonely this city can be.” He pulled me roughly over to him, my head against his blue shirt. He said into my hair, �
��Ah, you know I love you, Chrissie. I’m sick of putting you on that damned 2:00 train and sending you back to the pizza capital of New England.” He laughed. “Come on, admit it—wouldn’t it be great if you lived here?”

  Yes, it would be great. I said it to him, I said it to myself: I can sell the Bishop Street house and move into a condominium in Manhattan and work in a real estate office and see Orin all the time. I felt an unfocused disappointment. What did I expect him to say? I had the same feeling I used to have when I put on my white mini-dress and stockings and took the bus to Dr. Mankoff’s office after a weekend of painting. The idea went through my head: he’s not who I thought he was. This seemed absurd to me: of course he wasn’t, that was the whole point.

  The next morning, when he was in the shower, I searched his apartment again. I didn’t know what I was looking for now, it just seemed important to me to know who he was, to find out something I didn’t know—anything. I had uncovered all his dirty socks, his underwear, his collection of shirt cardboard. I had looked at all this books and shaken them to see what fell out, I had gone through his pockets, I had stood on a chair to inspect the back of the closet shelf, opened his suitcase, looked at the labels in his sweaters, gone through the kitchen cupboards. I looked now in more deliberate hiding places: under the pile of sheets in the linen closet, in the toes of the shoes on his closet floor, under the sofa cushions. I looked for hidden drawers and fake bottoms. I considered opening the packages of frozen spinach to see if they contained spinach or a collection of letters from me to Pierce tied up in ribbon. I stopped short of that; nor did I take down the posters on the wall to look for a hidden safe, or pour out the All-Bran to see what was in the bottom of the box.