A Certain Age

by Beatriz Williams

  He sets down the wineglass, but he doesn’t look at me. His attention is still fixed on the opposite wall, where a fire burns in a small grate, and the modest mantel contains a clock and a framed photograph of his mother.

  “Well, how strange,” I say.

  “Not everybody wants to live on Fifth Avenue, Theresa.”

  “Then why did he bother to make so much money?”

  “Because he likes to invent things, I guess. That’s what I thought, anyway, after meeting them.”

  His voice is absent, his gaze distant. You know the look. His seven-mile stare, I call it, when the Boy’s soul levitates right out of my presence to inhabit another world: one to which he rarely invites me along.

  “Was she pretty?” I ask.

  “Who?”

  “The girl. Ox’s girl. What’s-her-name.”

  “Sophie. I guess so.”

  “Lucky Ox. But then everybody’s pretty at nineteen, I suppose. It’s only later that the underlying architecture starts to matter.”

  He drinks again and rises from the table. “Her architecture seemed all right to me.”

  I watch him make his way around the furniture to the hot little fireplace, and for some reason I think of the portrait that hangs in the apartment uptown, which the Boy, of course, has never once entered. (My principles, not his.) I fiddle with the stem of my wineglass. “You should have seen me at nineteen.”

  “I wasn’t even born, Theresa.”

  “Oh, that’s right. I’d forgotten I was so very old.”

  “You’re not old. For heaven’s sake.” He flicks his cigarette into the fireplace. “She’s just young. She’s very young.”

  I hardly need ask whom he means, do I? I finish the last drop of wine and say, as dry as can be, “She’s your age.”

  “She’s younger than me. She’s a baby. She’s never left New York, except last year when her father took them to Europe, and even then they only stayed in fancy hotels in the nice parts of town.”

  I sit back in my chair and tuck my feet onto the seat before me. The Boy has lit another cigarette and smokes it continuously as he stares at the fire, which he laid while I was arranging the food, our accustomed habit, a nice neat companionable division of labor. The flames lick greedily upward at his abdomen.

  I reach for the cigarette case. “It sounds as if you had a nice chat together.”

  “They invited me to lunch afterward.”

  “I suppose the infant Miss Sophie regaled you with tales of her doll collection and her latest hat?”

  “No.” At last, the Boy turns to face me. “We talked about art, mostly. She’d just been to the latest Ravenel exhibition, that new gallery above Grand Central.”

  “Really? Ravenel? I wouldn’t have thought that was in her line. A pretty young thing like her.”

  “It was his post-Cuba work, mostly.” He finishes the wine and strolls back to the table to pour himself another glass. The bottle runs out before he’s done.

  “There’s another in the basket,” I say. “I didn’t know you liked Ravenel.”

  “I didn’t know you wanted to talk about art.”

  The air’s gone flat, the room’s stuffy and full of smoke. The merry postcoital buzz along my limbs has turned cold and turgid. I want to say something kind about this child, this Sophie: something generous. I really do. But it’s as if I’ve boarded a ship of some kind, have taken command of an ocean liner of immense gross tonnage, and though I can clearly see that our course is leading to a disastrous collision, I can’t quite seem to put the engines in reverse. There’s no possible way to change direction.

  “Of course I don’t want to talk about art,” I say. “I employ a curator for that.”

  The Boy flinches. He’s turned away from me, rummaging through the basket for the second bottle of wine, and he straightens now and turns, bottle dangling from one hand and cigarette from the other. His face is terrible. “What are you saying, Theresa?” he says quietly.

  “Oh, let’s not fight.”

  “Because I did what you asked. I went and took time off from work to deliver your crazy ring—”

  “It wasn’t my ring.”

  “But you asked me to do it, and I did. I delivered the ring, I had lunch. It was a nice lunch. They’re a good family, a sweet good-looking pair of girls. I left after an hour and went back to work and sold a few ten-year government bonds to a lawyer in Scarsdale. What else do you want to know, Theresa?”

  “Nothing,” I whisper.

  “Nothing.” He sets the bottle on the table, but he doesn’t open it. “It’s always nothing with you, isn’t it? Just sex and nothing else. You have a curator to talk art with, a dressmaker for your dresses, a husband to pay for the whole racket. And what am I?”

  You’re everything.

  I snatch my cigarette from the ashtray. “Oh, Boyo, you’ve gone and turned all serious on me. I was just teasing. You can flirt with all the pretty girls you like. I don’t give a damn. What we have is something else, and it suits us perfectly, doesn’t it? So don’t go ruining things with all your maudlin talk about dressmakers and husbands.”

  The Boy stands there watching the fluttering of my hand as it maneuvers the cigarette, and he might be a granite statue, he might be the Old Man of the Mountain, if the Old Man had a full head of hair and a firm young face stained with agitation on the extreme outer edges of his cheekbones. He returned from France bearing a number of injuries—if you peer between the unbuttoned edges of his shirt, for example, you can see a shiny patch of skin across his chest where the flames from an engine fire caused his jacket to ignite, and a pinkish-white triangle where a broken rib punctured his skin—but not one bullet or strut or strafe touched his face. I suppose you could call that a miracle. Or luck. The Boy has luck, for all his multitude of scars. He’s still alive, after all.

  “Sit down, won’t you?” I say. “Open the wine like a good boy.”

  He eases downward and grasps the bottle. A juicy red Burgundy, a 1912 Gevrey-Chambertin from the limitless Marshall cellars. (Now don’t cluck your tongue at me; it’s not illegal to drink the stuff, you know, just to sell it.) The Boy sets the bottle on the edge of the chair, between his legs, and reaches for the corkscrew.

  “I don’t know what you’ve got against her,” he says, driving slowly into the cork.

  “I haven’t got anything against her.”

  “You have.” The cork slides out. He sets down the corkscrew and lights another cigarette, which he sticks between his lips while he pours my glass and then his. “You know, I see pretty girls all the time. I saw them when I was a kid in Connecticut, I saw them in France. I see them every day on the streets of New York. Dime a dozen.” He hands me the wine. “You’re the one who’s married. You’re the one with a husband.”

  “Oh, you’re not jealous of him . . .”

  “I am. I sure am. I think to myself, Why does she stay married to him? And then I think, Well, what have I got to offer her? Just me. No money, no name, no apartment on Fifth Avenue.”

  “No, Boyo. You’re much more than that.”

  “Really? Because you just told me I wasn’t. So which is it?”

  “The second,” I whisper.

  He shakes his head. “Do you know what I thought, that first time I saw you at the van der Wahls’ place? Fourth of July? I thought you were the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen. Everybody talked about you as if you were some kind of goddess. And then you came up to me.”

  “And you sent me away.”

  “Because I knew what would happen if I didn’t.”

  “This?”

  “This.” He puts down the wine and reaches forward to lift me onto his lap so I’m straddling him at the waist. He buries his face between my breasts. “You know, the honest truth, I might have killed myself that summer, just back from France, if it weren’t for you.”

  The Boy’s hair is soft in my hands, and his breath is hot. His fingers wander along my hips. He smells of soap and s
weat and New York winter air, of youth and vigor. I cradle the indestructible roundness of his skull in my palms and imagine him in the dining room of a modest New York brownstone, sitting next to a fair-haired young lady, talking about art. Her bosom is firm and buoyant, and her cheeks are as pink as his. On the backs of her smooth, white hands, the veins are still invisible. And yet the Boy doesn’t care. He doesn’t notice.

  “I saved you, darling Boyo,” I said. “Don’t forget that.”

  “As if I could.”

  WHEN I FIRST CAME OUT, I couldn’t stand all the boys my own age. I thought they were silly and scrawny and impossibly callow, that they only wanted to talk about football and baseball, that they couldn’t dance and couldn’t dress and couldn’t pay you a proper compliment. Sylvo was thirty-six years old when we met, almost twenty years older than I was, and when he walked into my parents’ opera box that evening, I thought he was a god. He looked immaculate and fully grown, like a stag of mighty antlers, and he sat down next to me and discussed the first act of Lucia as if he actually cared about what I thought, as if he actually knew about music. He smelled of richly made shaving soap and cigars. By the end of the evening, I was in love with him.

  Does that surprise you? Yes, I was in love with Sylvo, and I expect he was in love with me, in the way that a thirty-six-year-old man loves a beautiful seventeen-year-old girl: covetously, self-indulgently. On the night of our wedding, he set about his matrimonial duty in the manner of a tutor instructing a favored pupil, and when he was finished he put on a dressing gown and smoked a cigar. We were quite happy, I think. We suited each other perfectly; we were each exactly what the other one required. When Tommy was born, ten months later, no man could possibly have been more delighted than Sylvo. Another cigar. (And I suppose he smoked yet another, soon afterward, when his mistress gave birth to their daughter.)

  The point is, in my early days, I looked at younger men with nothing but scorn, valuing neither their smooth skin nor their coltish vigor nor their single-minded simplicity. I preferred sophistication in those days, because I didn’t understand what sophistication really was, and how it was earned. I preferred wisdom and experience and polish, because I didn’t appreciate the sentiment behind a young man’s awkward eagerness to please. When I first went to bed with the Boy, he wanted not to instruct, but to be instructed. His flesh was firm under my hands. His skin sprang back from my fingertips. His strength was neverending. Afterward, we shared a cigarette, and then we repeated the exercise, again and again, until we were both half dead, until the sheets were an awful mess. At sunrise, he got up and made me breakfast.

  And I decided, right then, that there was something to be said for a young lover, after all.

  BUT WE DON’T HAVE ALL night this January evening, and anyway the Boy isn’t in the mood for limitless exercise. At eleven o’clock we dress each other sleepily and head downstairs and out onto the street, to the frosty corner of Seventh Avenue. The Boy searches the pavement for an empty taxi, to no avail.

  “I forgot to ask,” I say, as we stand silently on the curb, awaiting the fruits of the next wave of traffic. “Did she say yes?”

  “Sophie? Yes, she did. Right away.”

  “Well, well. So my brother’s engaged. Imagine that.”

  “You don’t sound all that happy.”

  “Darling, she’s an unknown. I’ve never even met her. It’s all just—well, it’s a bit strange, that’s all. How did he meet her? Are they really so rich?”

  “Why should that matter, if they’re in love?” He peers down at me. “You’re shivering.”

  “It’s cold.”

  He takes me by the hand and pulls me back down Christopher Street.

  “Where are we going?”

  “Back to my car. I’ll drive you home.”

  “Don’t be silly. It’ll be past midnight by the time you get back. When are you going to sleep?”

  “Theresa,” he says, and this time he’s grinning, and his grins are so rare that I want to bottle them in vinegar and keep them forever. “When have you ever cared about letting me get some sleep?”

  So we climb into the Boy’s awful jalopy and he persuades it to start—it’s an old Model T, cantankerous in the cold, and I have to sit there in the driver’s seat, operating the choke and the ignition, while my hands freeze in their leather gloves and the Boy’s arm rotates vigorously before the grille—and then we’re off, coughing and sputtering up Seventh Avenue, and the first thing we see is an empty taxi.

  “It figures,” the Boy says, and he puts the car into high gear and slings his arm around my shoulders.

  You’d think that midnight Manhattan would prove easier to navigate than evening Manhattan, but in fact it’s just the same, minus the delivery vans. We lurch our way uptown while my hand rests on the Boy’s sturdy thigh, and I think how simple it would be to keep going straight up Manhattan, across the Harlem River to the Bronx, and then upstate. Keep going until we found a farm somewhere, nestled in the snow, and no one would ever hear from us again. We would age slowly together, not giving a damn about anything except the crops and the horses and each other, ordering our clothes from the Sears Roebuck catalog and growing our own apples and potatoes. I would toss out all the mirrors, except the one the Boy needs for shaving. Maybe even that.

  The Boy pulls the car to the curb, and I look up and realize we’ve reached the corner of Fifth Avenue and Sixty-Fourth Street, two blocks from the apartment I share with Mr. Marshall.

  The Boy stares through the windshield at the restless shadows of Central Park. “You know what? Let’s keep going.”

  “Keep going?”

  “You don’t need all this, do you? We could head out west and start a new life, and no one would know or care who we are.”

  The engine coughs again and dies, and the Boy says something under his breath.

  “Let me buy you a new car,” I say. “Please. A Christmas present.”

  “You already gave me a Christmas present.”

  “A New Year present, then.”

  “I don’t want presents.” He gets out of the car to crank the engine again. I watch him carefully for the signal. Turn the switch for the spark. My pulse thumps against my ears. Keep going, keep going, keep going, I think, in rhythm with the turn of the pistons, and my imagination, for some reason, returns to Sophie Fortescue in her house on Thirty-Second Street, about to sacrifice her eternal future to the dear and witless Edmund Jay Ochsner.

  Better the poor thing had run away with the grocer’s boy instead.

  A sputter and a roar, and then the steady reassuring rattle of a Ford minding its duty. The Boy comes around to the passenger door and opens it. He places his foot on the running board and his hand on the top of the window.

  “Well? How about it?”

  “How about what?”

  “Run away with me.”

  I love his sharp and frosty nose, his keen eyes beneath the brim of his woolen cap. We’ve parked in the deep shadow between two lampposts, so I have to imagine the rest. I lean forward and kiss him on his cold mouth.

  “I need you to do me a favor, Boyo.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I need you to look into this family. The—what was the name?”

  He sighs. “Fortescue.”

  “Fortescue. Something’s fishy. Why would a man that rich live in a rinky-dink brownstone so far south and east? It doesn’t make sense.”

  “You know, it’s just possible he doesn’t care about money the way you do.”

  “I don’t believe it.”

  He doesn’t answer.

  I put my gloved hand on his cheek. “Darling, it’s my brother we’re talking about. I just want to be sure. What if this man’s a bootlegger, or something equally awful?”

  “Theresa . . .”

  “Just ask a few questions. I’m sure he keeps all those piles of money in one of those banks down there. You can ask a question or two for me, can’t you?”

  Another thin
g about the Boy: he maintains a terribly slow respiration. Sometimes, when I’m lying next to him, and my hand rests upon the scars of his chest, I feel as if I’m waiting forever for the next heartbeat, the next intake of air, and panic intrudes. What if he’s dying? What if, like an automobile engine—or an airplane, for that matter—his heart and lungs slip into a rhythm so torpid, they begin to stall? And then my Boy will fall from the sky, and be gone from me forever.

  At present, I can actually see that alarming breath of his, each puff making its tardy way into the convergent glow of the equidistant lamps, and I count them—one, two, three, four—while he stands there blocking the passenger door with his wide shoulders, one foot raised on the running board, his gloved hand gripping the edge of the window, not a muscle flickering in his ropy young body.

  “Just a couple of meager questions,” I say. “Please? For me. You must admit, it’s all rather unusual. No one gets rich in Manhattan without trumpeting that important fact to the entire city.”

  The Boy moves at last, taking my right hand in his left hand and drawing me out of the car. “All right. But only to prove you wrong.”

  “I’m never wrong, Boyo. Remember that.”

  He leans forward to kiss me good night, but we’re right smack in the middle of an Upper East Side sidewalk, in the guilty half-lit space between two streetlamps, and even though I’m wearing my hat low upon my forehead and my scarf all the way up to my chin, I know at least three families whose windows overlook this particular patch of Manhattan. I move aside just in time.

  “Until Saturday,” I say. “I’ll come down after the Schuylers’ party.”

  “What if I’m out?”

  “You won’t be out, darling. You’ll be waiting for me like a good boy.”

  He leans back against the car and folds his arms across his chest.

  “Well?” I say.

  The Boy reaches inside his pocket and pulls out his cigarette case, the beautiful gold one I gave him for Christmas, engraved on the inside panel: With dearest love to my Boyo, M.T.M.