“Peter Ungster, my neighbour, came upstairs one evening to borrow a corkscrew and noticed the wall hanging. He lingered in front of it with a sort of puzzled expression on his face. ‘Where did you get that?’ he said. (He sounded a bit like Truman Capote when he talked, like a sleepy porpoise. How he survived growing up in a mining town in northern Ontario is a mystery. But that’s another story.) ‘Is it for sale?’ he asked, tilting his head. I thought he was playing it up a bit, indulging the new widow in her little hobby, but he wrote me a cheque for twenty-five dollars and took the swordfish back home with him. You never forget a moment like that, the first time you sell something you made. The money makes it different, makes you different.
“His boyfriend, Sean, knew a woman who owned a shop for children’s things: toys, pictures, puppets, stuffed animals. She saw the sailboat and ordered five of them in different colours. A red sailboat, a green sailboat. I put a moon overhead, a flying fish sailing over the bow, a lantern on the mast. Soon I had two teenage girls working for me, doing the cutting, the dyeing, the shipping. I kept one as a souvenir. It’s faded a bit—the sun coming through the window does that—but it’s over there. Yes, that’s it, over the sideboard.”
A blue whale winked mischievously at me from the mouth of a lagoon.
“And the job at the art gallery?”
She leaned forward in a gust of enthusiasm. “It was a period in my life where I couldn’t seem to do anything wrong. Things just fell into place, like musical notes. Most people who work in the art world don’t wish you well, especially if you’re leaving to do something artistic. They want you to fail—it makes their lives less haunting. I understand that, and I expected it. Long faces, sour faces. But I guess life had just given me enough shit for the time being. They threw me a party at the boutique. A little one. Marek Grunbaum came in a cream suit. He looked smashing. A fluffed pink handkerchief stuffed in his breast pocket. It was like showing off your boyfriend at a high school dance. He drove me home that night, and I remember looking out the car window as we passed up through the city, past the parliament buildings, past that park with the man on the horse, and I remember thinking, I’ll never be this happy again.”
“Were you?”
“Was I what?”
“Ever that happy again?”
“Of course I was. You’re never just happy once in your life. Life isn’t like that.” She paused. “Will you have a small Drambuie with me? It’s up there in the cupboard over the fridge. Yes, there, right behind your hand. Could you heat it up? Just put it in those snifters and pop it into the microwave.”
“Did Marek like Drambuie?”
Deadpan. Eyebrows raised. “Marek liked everything. It’s wonderful to be with a man who adores a woman’s body. Every inch of it. But wait.” She pointed to the microwave. “Yes. Thirty seconds should be enough.”
“Is that too hot?”
“No, it’s perfect. Smell that. I’ve been saving this for a rainy day.”
I sat back down. It was eleven o’clock.
“My little sailboats caught on. I did a craft show in Memphis. A rep from a middle-sized American chain saw my stuff and bought me out. I like that about Americans, how they do business. They come in, they look around, and they write a cheque. No pussyfooting. So suddenly there I was, with a bunch of money and two teenage children. What to do?
“Peter Ungster was trying on a new hat in my mirror, and he said in that funny voice, ‘Why don’t you move to Mexico? There’s an artists’ colony in San Miguel de Allende. That sounds like baloney, I know, and there is a lot of baloney down there, but not entirely. You could open a little shop—you could paint—do whatever you want. Leonard Cohen lives there. Or people say he lives there. Nobody ever seems to see him. For a while I had a friend there, an antique collector, soi-disant, but it turned out he was just looking for some Mexican boy to fuck him in the bum and leave him for dead. Which isn’t far from what happened. But don’t get me get started on that one.’
“So I went. San Miguel is a pretty town nine thousand feet up in the air with a sweeping cathedral right in the centre. Somebody in the Cucaracha bar told me it was designed entirely from a single European postcard. But people start drinking early in those towns and they kind of make stuff up. One moment it’s not true, next moment it is. No one seems to care.
“I took Chloe with me. She was twelve years old. I couldn’t leave her with Bruce. That would have been like leaving her in a black-and-white television show. Besides, she wanted to go. She was very adventurous. She could hardly wait.”
“What did Bruce say?”
“He threatened to take me to court. But I called his bluff. I wasn’t rattled by him anymore. I said, ‘Okay, Bruce, I’ll leave her up here with you.’ That scared the shit out of him. He wasn’t a mean spirit, he just didn’t want me to have my cake and eat it too. As if you’d do anything else with your cake except eat it. But the notion of a gangly, phone-hogging, incessantly hungry, expensive, operatic teenage girl running up and down the stairs with a pair of school friends really shook him up.”
“So he folded?”
“Like a deck chair. In fact, he gave me money. He pretended it was for Chloe’s expenses, but I think it was to make sure she actually went.”
“And her brother, Kyle? Can I ask what happened there?”
Her face clouded. “You know that story,” she said softly. “I made a mistake. I was so hungry to be happy that I made a mistake.” She looked toward the window.
I said, “We don’t have—” but she went on.
“Kyle was seventeen. He wanted to stay with his friends. Besides, I didn’t want to strip Bruce of everything. I worried he’d kill himself. But I should have tried harder, I should have insisted.”
I could see her sinking into a fog of distress. I said, “Did he know about Marek?”
Sally had disappeared on me, but then returned. “Who? Kyle?”
“No, Bruce.”
“I made it clear not to wait around. It was a kindness, really. He was mooning around my yellow apartment one evening, waiting for Chloe to collect her clothes for a sleepover. I sat him down in the kitchen, I put a Scotch in his hand, and I said, ‘There’s something I want you to understand. Even if this thing with Marek Grunbaum doesn’t work out, even if it doesn’t work out with the man after him, I will never, under any circumstances, come back to you.’”
“Jesus.”
“He needed to hear it. Bruce was one of those men, you know the kind: A woman leaves them and they take on a look of wounded confusion, as if the whole thing is a kind of problème psychiatrique. A fit of madness that could, conceivably, vanish as quickly as it came on. You know how it goes: My wife went nuts, but I’m being patient. They overlook the fact that you’ve hated them for years. They overlook the fact that you’ve got a new boyfriend, lost twenty pounds, wear different clothes and have an expensive new haircut.”
“Did he believe you?”
“He looked at me with those half-closed eyes and said, ‘I’m not in any hurry.’ At which point I snapped at him. I regret it. Sort of. No, I don’t. I said, ‘For God’s sake, Bruce, you can’t jerk off for the rest of your life!’
“Chloe and I flew to Mexico City and then took a bus for a couple of hundred miles north through the desert and up into the mountains. A friend of Peter’s, Freddie Steigman, met us at the bus station. He was a native New Yorker, a pensioner, thirty-five years with Allstate Insurance. He used to be roommates with Edward Albee. Back when they were in their twenties. Albee was a poet then, apparently a very bad one. You know him?”
“The Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? guy.”
“Yeah, that’s him. When he retired, Freddie came to San Miguel for a holiday. But he fell in love with the Mexican boy who looked after the hotel swimming pool. The boy disappeared after a couple of weeks, but Freddie stayed on.”
&n
bsp; The candle sputtered. Sally watched it for a moment, her eyes sleepy. Getting ready to leave the party.
“What was Albee like?” I asked.
Two
She looked up from the candle flame. “Are we going to do this thing?”
“Yes.”
“And you’ll stay?”
“Of course I’ll stay.”
And I thought, Nothing works out the way you think it will. And this won’t either. So I know which way it won’t work out. But the other way, the way it will, that I don’t know. How was it supposed to go again? The climb up eighteen flights of stairs, the quick walk down the hall, into the apartment. But then what? I can’t seem to recall. What did I think would come after the apartment? The next day, the next week. A year later. Five years later. Surely I must have thought about that: that the end of something isn’t necessarily the end of it. A man parts the curtains one morning and discovers an entire planet revolving just outside the window. Oh, I see.
Sally looked back at the flame, nodding. “What were we talking about?”
“Edward Albee.”
“Somebody asked Freddie about him one night when he was holding court in the Cucaracha bar. ‘If homosexuality had not existed, Albee would have invented it,’ Freddie said.” Sally smiled affectionately. “You could tell he’d said it before. Please, another Drambuie.”
In the kitchen doorway, I turned around. “I have to turn the light on now. Close your eyes.”
***
Settled with a brandy snifter that burned like dark gold in her hand, she continued. “Freddie Steigman dressed like a slightly down-at-the-heels salesman from the fifties. Heavy New York accent. A face part bulldog, part baseball mitt. Loved to drink. He wore a baby blue linen jacket every day of the year. He had two or three of them, identically wrinkled, and a white Mexican shirt that he kept unbuttoned almost to the waist. He reminded me of the retired history teacher in The Catcher in the Rye. Except it was endearing, it was tender, it was adorable, this old blade with a bony chest insisting he was still in the game.
“And he was. Once a month, Freddie took the bus to Mexico City, hired the prettiest boy he could find in the red light district. He paid well, never got beaten up and came back the following Monday with a light step and interested in everything. I adored him.
“Freddie knew everybody in San Miguel, and he liked knowing everyone. He got me a ground floor sublet, with an old piano somebody had left behind, a patio and a view of the mountains. When someone asked me where I lived, I’d say, ‘Callejón de los Muertos.’ The Street of Dead Lanterns. I loved how it rolled off my tongue. Three weeks after my arrival, Freddie threw a party for me.
“The events that day haven’t lost a drop of colour. They’re vivid the way the world looks when you suddenly surface after swimming underwater. I must have been paying a certain kind of attention. Why, I don’t know. Unless you believe that stuff. I’ve been over these details a million times. Because if I had done anything differently, if I had taken this street instead of that street, if I’d lingered over the lines in the fruit stall a few moments longer, then what happened would not have happened. It’s like watching Romeo and Juliet: even though you know the story backwards, you keep hoping that this time the Friar will get the letter to Romeo.
“I took a morning sketch class at the Institute. We were drawing a bare-breasted Mexican girl with a beauty spot on her right shoulder. She had a gap between her front teeth and you could see by the way she smiled that she was shy about it. After the class, some of the students, mostly women, stayed on to talk to the instructor, a Frenchman who smoked Gauloises through an absurdly long cigarette filter. But I had things to do. I bought fruit for the party in the mercado and then I met Jan Trober for a coffee at the Cucaracha. She was a New York actress who had settled in San Miguel after the bottom fell out of her career and her husband left her. We sat at a table on the sidewalk so we could see all the people in the town square. The boys walking in a circle one way, girls walking in a circle the other; everybody eyeing each other. Beautiful in its way, the way life works like that.”
The candle sputtered and went out. We sat in the silence and the darkness. After a while, I said, “Shall I light another candle?”
“No, let’s just sit here like this for a while.”
In the hallway, voices speaking an Indian dialect passed by the door. It’s going to be dark in here tomorrow night, I thought. And for a few nights afterwards; and everything will be different. You assume things are going to be a certain way afterwards, and then you find out, like Macbeth did, that they’re not. Preposterously not. The act, or its after-burn rather, becomes who you are.
How could I have been so naive?
“In Mexico, up in the mountains where I lived, I sometimes felt as if I had just emigrated from a country where it always rained,” Sally said. And it seemed as though I had overheard her thinking, that she hadn’t actually meant to say anything.
A door shut with a bang and the Indian voices disappeared.
And Sally, where will she be? I mean physically. And that too seemed like an extraordinary thing not to have considered. Because you don’t just go into the air when you die; you go other places first, and they’re not so pleasant.
In the darkness, she continued. “Freddie lived on a narrow, windy cobblestone street a few blocks up from the cathedral. He found it comforting, he said, all that redemption so close at hand. He invited all his friends to the party. By sunset, his patio looked like Fire Island. Those tans, those biceps, those white teeth. There were other people too. A Brit with a pirate’s moustache, a sixties rock star from some California band, a handful of alcoholic writers who had spent the morning in the Cucaracha talking about their unfinished Ph.D.s. There was a mysterious, tall Canadian who wouldn’t let anyone take his picture. Some people said he was CIA. I think he’d just been thwarted by life in Toronto and was trying to make himself seem interesting. There was a retired Australian ambassador—some sort of scandal there, I forget what.
“Oh yes, and divorcees! God, so many divorcees. Women with short haircuts and children in Ivy League schools. For them, San Miguel was the last stop before the Pacific Ocean. Their last chance for a slow dance. Even if it meant sleeping with the gardener at night and letting him watch television by the pool all day long. These were transactions, yes, but that doesn’t mean they weren’t friendly, even loving. And let’s face it, a friendly body in the bed is a friendly body in the bed; after a certain age, who cares why it’s there.
“I was cutting limes in the kitchen with Freddie when I recognized a voice in the other room. It was a friend from Toronto who was passing through San Miguel, had stopped for a drink at the Cucaracha and somebody told her about Freddie’s party.
“I heard her say, ‘I hope you don’t mind me crashing in like this.’ I came out of the kitchen, and I was just moving through the living room when I tripped on the carpet, hit my head on the fireplace and broke my neck.
“I didn’t know it was broken at the time. But I knew something bad had happened because I heard a sound I had never heard before. I’ve talked to other people who broke their necks and they say the same thing: in that sound, you know your life is never going to be the same again.
“I lay there for I don’t know how long. There were heads appearing and disappearing above me, but the whole time my body was capable of only one sensation, and that sensation was not pain, it was dread, a sensation that said, like a blunt instrument banging under the floor, This is a very bad thing, this is a very bad thing, this is a very bad thing.
“I heard the voices in the room go silent, like lifting a needle off a record, and that frightened me. And it seemed that I heard Bruce breathing through his nose and saying to someone, She brought this on herself.
“And then I heard other voices, the kind you hear on television. ‘Don’t move her, don’t move her.’ It occurred to me
, even there on the floor, that it sounded like television because it was from television. Like ‘Boil some water.’ People are always telling people to boil water on television.”
She breathed deeply and after a pause said, “We should light another candle now. There’s a box of them near the Drambuie. Over the fridge. They’re made from beeswax.”
I pulled down a red candle, unwrapped it from the delicate tissue paper it was covered with and put it on the table between us.
“There’s no paraffin in beeswax candles,” Sally said. “They’re better for the health. More ions. Or fewer. Whichever.”
I lit the candle with a long kitchen match. We watched the wick gradually change shape as the flame caught and gathered brightness. I was suddenly exhausted.
“It’s incredible, isn’t it?” she said.
“What?”
“How people could be so cruel that they could burn another human being alive.”
“Good heavens.”
“You know who I’m thinking of. Whom, rather.”
“Yes.”
“Poor little thing. What was she—fourteen?”
“Something like that.”
“Will you stay the night here? All this booze, I’m going to have to take a pee.”
“Of course.”
“Don’t leave before me.” She smiled at her own joke.
I opened my lips to respond but didn’t.
“When people ask me about the accident—?” she said, her voice rising into a question at the end of the phrase.
“Yes.”
“How I broke my neck at a cocktail party?”
“Yes.”
“They never say it, but I know that they assume I was drunk.”
“Really?”
“I think they rather hope I was.”
“Why would they hope that?”
Extraordinary Page 3
