Ghosts of Manhattan

by Douglas Brunt

  I’ve developed a strong inner monologue living with Julia, especially during sex. I just can’t always control the subject of conversation. I increase the pace, pulling back hard on her hips and straining my stomach muscles to throw myself forward in a thud of flesh. Each collision sends a minor tremor up her lean backside and the bounce forward of her body gives an appealing resistance to my next pull back against her hips and we build a rhythm like dribbling a basketball.

  Looking down at her back and ass, I can imagine this same form in its college days, clenched and springing over the high bar. This is a visual that has sustained me, even when alone. With enough foreplay, this position can bring Julia to orgasm and sometimes we don’t adjust. In a few thrusts, I hear her moans that are our verbal cue that she has come and that I can finish. I’ve felt on the verge since the beginning and in a few more thrusts I’m done.

  I lower forward, stacking my shoulders on top of hers, and we press our hips down flat on the bed and in another moment I’m no longer in her. The sweat between us feels slippery and good and I kiss the back of her neck but neither of us says anything. There’s no conversation topic at the ready. I don’t want to talk about my workday and I certainly don’t want to talk about that god-awful dinner plan. She’s already settled her victory there and won’t bring it up again. Why force a conversation? I roll off her and enjoy the silence.

  We used to wake up late on a Saturday with nothing planned and decide to drive four hours to Maryland just for a crab dinner that night. Or out to the Hamptons to rent a boat so we could spend the day sailing naked, swimming, and sunbathing. It was a standing decision to be together that was binding like a country of citizenship. It was our relationship that we loved. We were committed to it, worked for it, took pride in it, would take up arms to defend it. We each brought energy to the other, and each evening or weekend was a mini adventure with my companion and confidant. We were two kids masquerading as adults.

  When we met at twenty-seven, she loved her career working for an interior designer in the city. When we married at twenty-nine, she seemed to care much less about work. She still worked but seemed to want to focus on family and a great marriage. I was already making good money and she knew plenty about the lifestyle of my job, but everyone thinks they can change a person a little. Just enough to suit them. She has tried with me in the years since, less and less over time. The less she tries with me, the more she disappears into her design books or the gym.

  I don’t believe in fate and I don’t believe there’s just one person out there for each of us. I also don’t believe there are very many. Maybe there are a few hundred in the whole world who can really be the person to find their way to our soul. How many opportunities, chances, encounters are we likely to have in our lifetimes to capture a moment with one of them? Maybe there are only five or six events in our lifetime when we have a glimpse of someone who could be that partner. I know Julia is one. Our chance for each other came early and I worry that we can’t sustain our bond as we have grown into adults.

  I put her through more headache than she deserves. Not many thirty-five-year-old wives have husbands that routinely flop into bed drunk in the middle of the weekday night as a part of the job. And worse yet, I doubt many wives have husbands who experience the world so privately, not sharing any observations or conclusions or real feelings. She knows I don’t like my mother, and when she asks why, I say it’s because my mother’s a pain in the ass. I’m sure I can be frustrating to speak with.

  I look over at her sweet face, eyes closed, lips slightly parted like a child sleeping. I still love her very much. I feel it in a swell, so strong that I discover I suddenly want to exclaim it to her, like a sailor first sighting land after long months at sea.

  I reach down and squeeze her hand, hoping I can pass this swell to her in a current, like plugging in Christmas tree lights. She squeezes back. “I love you, Nick.” That felt good. Could this be so simple?

  “I love you too.”

  She rolls toward me, laying an arm and a leg across me, and angles her chin on my shoulder. “Your sister called. She needs to move the party back by an hour. Something to do with a soccer game with the kids.”

  “Okay.” I had forgotten about her party and am now looking forward to it. My sister, Susan, is so much like me, only so much better. Mainly we have the same sense of humor. She’s two years younger but I always included her with my crowd of friends. Even among my closest friends it was she and I who were in on the silent joke. No one else in the room could speak our language of glances and nods and lips curled in a half smile. Speaking with her is like a window into a healthy me. One who hasn’t polluted himself. “It’ll be great to see them. Been too long.” She and her husband and kids live in Pelham. We rarely make the thirty-minute drive north out of the city to their house.

  “She has a home and kids and a normal life.” Julia says this with her eyes still closed and the words come out as effortlessly as breathing. This doesn’t require deduction. She felt she was just stating the obvious reason why we hadn’t seen Susan for so long.

  Julia and I haven’t talked about kids of our own in years. We’ve always brushed it aside, saying there’s time and we’re having too much fun living a city life in Manhattan. Actually I’m terrified I’ll be a complete bust as a father. I think she secretly thinks the same. If her comment is an invitation to talk about kids, I’m declining.

  I give her hand another squeeze, then release and run my fingers through my hair, stopping with my hands behind my head. Fixing Julia’s dissatisfaction with our lifestyle will not be so simple. I realize this, truly realize this, for the first time. Panic is setting in and my eyelids are stretched wide open as though I’m trying to see more of the ceiling. I’ve always been able to count on at least one part of my life going well. If I was unhappy at work, I could come home to Julia to feel her healing. If Julia and I fought, I could go to work to forget and enjoy mindless therapy. Like the air of a balloon when one end is pressed down, I can escape to the other end. I can’t have both work and home turn bad at the same time. I know I’ll go to pieces.

  “Let’s go out.” This suddenly seems like the thing to do together.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Let’s get out, go for a drink somewhere.”

  “Right now?”

  “It’s only nine thirty. Someplace casual, just put some jeans on.”

  Julia and I have never been one of those couples that has to do social things only with other couples. We like when it’s just the two of us. I prefer it. We sometimes go out to dinner and I look at other couples sitting in silence, staring at their soup with an unhappy expression, and then I look back at Julia and realize I have a pretty good thing. We have stories and laughter and then some silence that is in appreciation of everything else.

  Sometimes we go out and get a little drunk together. Not college, puking drunk, but a few drinks. We’ve loved going to the Hog Pit for years, and we decide on that for tonight. It’s a bar that could be in west Texas. It’s got a sort of swinging saloon door, only really it’s just a rickety old door barely hanging on to the hinges. The front room has a long bar running along the left wall, lined with bar stools. The rest of the room is little tables and a jukebox with a good amount of country. A hallway in back passes by the bathrooms, then opens to another room with a pool table, foosball, and a few pinball machines.

  Most places in Manhattan charge at least eight bucks for a beer. Here it’s two for a Pabst Blue Ribbon. We take two bar stools and order two beers. The bar is full of some younger kids out of college who don’t yet make enough money to go to nicer places, and some older folks who don’t make enough money either.

  We take our first sips quietly. I know there is this evolving problem between me and Julia, and like most guys I’m frustrated that fixing it isn’t as simple as turning wrenches in the physical world. It’d be nice if I could make a few tweaks to the motor, maybe change a fan belt, then turn it bac
k on, slap it on the side, and say, Yup, this baby’s running fine again. It won’t be so easy. We’re outgrowing the lifestyle my job has created and this tension is a deterrent to us growing in any other way, including having kids.

  We’re noticing all the off things about the people around us, which is a fun game with Julia in a place like this. All the while I’m searching for my verbal quick fix tools like a klutz.

  I should just engage her on it. She’s a trusted listener and she needs me to talk about it, but I’m waiting in front of it like a cold swimming pool, trying to work up the nerve to jump in. I start the jumping motion a few times, then step back and tell myself just jump in, once you’re in it’s fine.

  “I’m going to go to the bathroom. I’ll be right back.”

  “Okay.”

  The bar is filling up and I weave through some people on the way to the men’s room and stand in front of the urinal staring at a 1980s poster of a blond bombshell in a Budweiser bikini and a hard hat while I come up with my game plan.

  I walk back toward the bar stools and I see Julia raising her voice to a guy sitting on what used to be my stool. I come up behind them and hear her holler, “That is my husband’s seat. We’re still using it. Please move.”

  The guy is ignoring her and trying to get the attention of the bartender to order a drink.

  I put my hand on his shoulder and give enough of a squeeze to let him know that my hand isn’t going to move away. “Hey, buddy. You’re in my seat.”

  I’ve learned in almost all cases you don’t have to fight. You just have to convince the other guy that you really will. Sometimes in a place like New York you run into a crazy person who really will too, and worse yet might have a knife or some other crap. But I’m pretty sure this kid isn’t that way. He’s just a little geek who’s had too many two-dollar beers already.

  He spins around to me, keeping flush on the stool. “I don’t see your name on it.”

  I slowly reach up and squeeze the hell out of his nose and hold on to it. “It’s written right under your ass. Stand up and I’ll show it to you.” I’ve got an excellent grip on his nose. I feel like I could pull it right off his face. I squeeze harder.

  “Okay, okay.” His voice sounds like he just inhaled a helium balloon. Julia half laughs but I’m still trying to act like a tough guy.

  I lead him by the nose to the side and off the stool, then let him go. He reaches for his nose to make sure it isn’t bleeding and walks away to a table.

  I sit back down, half-turned to keep an eye on him. “I hope he doesn’t have a bunch of enormous friends back there playing pool.”

  “My hero.” Julia clinks my bottle, takes a sip, and orders two more beers. I’m still watching after the guy and feeling less tough than I was a minute ago.

  “Don’t worry. If there was going to be a fight, it would already have happened.”

  “I guess.”

  I turn back to the bar and look at Julia in time to see her eyes go over my shoulder and she says, “Uh-oh.”

  I turn back around expecting to see muscles and a tank top and instead it’s an overtanned Italian-looking girl with huge black hair and crazy blue eye shadow. She has on what could be just a bra and leather or plastic pants that look impossible to get in or out of. The guy I removed by the nose is right behind her and looks like he’s trying to slow her down, but she gets right to us.

  Her accent is just what I expect. Nasal and Staten Island. “Oh, big tough guy, tweaking noses. You loser. What kind of a creep even does that?”

  Julia gets off her stool and gets between me and this thing. Her movement is slow and nonthreatening. She just places herself there, which doesn’t surprise me at all. Julia always gets my back. She always fights for me first and only later does she ever wonder whether or not I was in the right. I love that about her.

  “Your boyfriend took my husband’s seat, and he knew it. My husband just taught him some manners.”

  The thing puts a finger right in Julia’s face. “First of all, bitch, he’s not my boyfriend. Second of all,” and she wags the finger, “why don’t you shut your mouth before I smack you?”

  Julia doesn’t flinch from the finger wag. She doesn’t even look at it but keeps eye contact and her expression only gets more calm. It’s clear the girl is waiting for a response from Julia and it’s clear Julia is about to give one. “Why don’t you . . . pluck your eyebrows?”

  The conversation pauses like a needle scratch and we all look at the thing’s eyebrows. They stand out as pencil thin against her thick head of hair. They look perfectly waxed. Impeccable.

  The girl’s eyes seem to roll back to get a look and check in on the eyebrows too. Her face looks terrified.

  The guy with the tweaked nose lets out a moan and looks at the floor. “Oh, God.”

  The wagging finger is long since back to her body and playing defense. She turns on a heel and runs back to the girls’ room. Two other girls from a table nearby run in after her. The nose guy retreats back to a table and Julia and I are left standing alone, shoulder to shoulder, as though everyone else had just been carried off by a tornado.

  “My hero.”

  She looks at me. “I couldn’t have you trading blows with that insane person.”

  “Should we get out of here before round three?”

  We turn back to the bar. It’s pay as you go here so we have a small pile of cash on the bar top that has been changed back. I pick up a few bills to figure out a tip, then decide just to put them all back down. We take a last sip of beer and before we can get away from the stools, the women’s room door opens and the Italian girl comes out with mascara spread around her eyes and goes directly for the exit, followed by one of her girlfriends. The guy at the table gets up and goes after them. The last girl comes over to us.

  “I’m sorry, but I have to know. How did you know to say that? What made you say it? We just looked at her eyebrows in the mirror. They look fine.”

  Julia shrugs. I guess she isn’t going to explain her genius.

  “There’s nothing else you could have said that would level her like that.”

  Julia isn’t gloating but she isn’t saying anything either. I offer, “Is she going to be okay?”

  The girl nods, still amazed at the exchange. “I think so.” She turns for the exit after her friends.

  Julia sits back down. “Another drink?”

  “On me, darlin’.”

  6 | WIVES

  November 20, 2005

  WILLIAM LIVES IN MURRAY HILL WITH HIS FIANCÉE, Jen. It’s a new high-rise, doorman building on Twenty-ninth Street. Everything is new and nice in those buildings but they have no character, just a set of box-shaped rooms stacked next to each other, and it feels sterile.

  He invited us to this dinner party forever ago, so it’s hard to avoid. I’m always rude about asking who else is invited to these sorts of things because I like to prepare for how much of a nightmare the evening might be. These nights are always lousy for Julia but relative to other work dinners this shouldn’t be too bad. William and Jen are hosting me and Julia, Jerry Cavanaugh and his wife, Alison, and Conrad Bradbury and his wife, Janice.

  The night seems like a butt-kissing opportunity for William to advance his career. The title hierarchy at Bear goes associate, senior associate, VP, director, managing director. William’s a senior associate, which is normal for a young guy. Jerry and I are managing directors. Conrad is a trader on the foreign exchange desk and is either a VP or director. William is always networking, which is why he’s a natural sales guy.

  I don’t know Conrad Bradbury very well. He’s a southern guy and seems to come from money. He likes to wear seersucker around to claim his southern roots. His southern accent is softened and refined by years of living in the North. He’s skinny and sort of frail but not in a feminine way and he has blond hair that he’s always touching. He never runs his fingers through it, he just smooths it over with his palms.

  Conrad and Janice get
to the lobby at the same time as we do. He and I are both holding a bottle of wine. Conrad’s a good-looking guy and I would have thought that with the money he’s making he’d have a hot wife, but Janice is just sort of average.

  That’s the funny thing about Wall Street wives. There are almost no tens. They all have plenty of money, so they dress well and have expensive handbags. They go to the gym and are usually pretty toned. They compete on looks as best they can, but you almost never see a ten. When someone on Wall Street has a hot wife, it’s a big deal and talked about. It’s rare enough that people at Bear know which guy at which firm does. Nobody trading at Bear does, though Julia is talked about some. Nobody on the desks at Goldman or Chappy does. There’s a guy at Merrill.

  Janice is just finishing her cigarette. She takes a final drag, which nearly ignites the filter, then snubs it out in a trash can by the elevator.

  “Hey, Conrad. This is my wife, Julia.”

  “Nice to meet you.” He does a quick up and down of her. Poor guy can’t help it. “Nick, this is my wife, Janice. Janice, Julia and Nick.” Conrad has a deep voice that pronounces the southern drawl.

  We all shake hands as the doorman presses the button to call the elevator and tells us William and Jen are in 22C. We ride up in silence and Janice reeks of cigarette smoke. It’s in her clothes and I’m sure by the end of the night it will be in mine the way it was going to a bar in the nineties.

  We get off on the twenty-second floor and ring the doorbell at C. William answers looking very sophisticated.

  “Evening, gents. Ladies.” He’s wearing a blue blazer with a handkerchief neatly tucked in the breast pocket. He and Jen must be feeling very grown-up that they’re hosting a dinner party, like they’re a real couple.

  We walk in, shake hands, and deliver the wine, and each of our wives gets a kiss on the cheek. Jerry’s already in the living room drinking from a bottle of Budweiser. His wife, Alison, is sitting on a two-seat sofa also drinking a beer. I’ve met her once before, so I go over to say hello and introduce Julia.