“I’m going down to see him at the end of the month. Why don’t you come with me? We’ll make it a long weekend.”
When I didn’t answer, Rita pulled her head back and crossed her arms over her chest, turned her head away from me, then back, the smoothest, most elegant double take I’d ever witnessed, and said, “Oh shit.”
I told her what had been going on during these “incredibly busy” times and about my conversations with Marian and Alex.
Rita said, “It was only a matter of time before one of us wanted something else.”
“Three years is more than ‘a matter of time.’ ”
She shrugged her shoulders. “It’s just like you not to try to fake it.”
“It’s just like you not to hold that against me.”
“The other night. I should have known then.”
“Even I didn’t know it then.”
“Regardless.” She pushed a few strands of hair away from my forehead. “Which took longer, deciding to tell me, or figuring it all out?”
“Don’t ask me that.”
“Then help me figure it out now. You’re not breaking up with me because of another woman, but because she helped you understand how unhappy you are?”
“Made me think about how I’ve been living my life.”
“And how unhappy you are?”
“This doesn’t have to do with happiness.”
“Unsatisfied, then. And how does she feel about this?”
“Are you sure you want to know?”
“And you think you’re in love with her. Is she in love with you?”
“I have no idea.”
“That’s no small matter. And I can’t say I don’t feel any less insulted.”
I said, “I feel like I’m about to go over a cliff.”
Rita said, “Thanks for not holding my hand while you do it.” She rested the tip of her chin on my shoulder. “I wish you still wanted what I want.”
I pressed the side of my face against her cheek.
She said, “I think I lack some gene or something, because I’ve never wanted that great marriage, that total partnership.”
I said, “You never make me feel tied down.”
“It may be that I lack the imagination to want anything more than what I have at the time.”
“Or you don’t want to feel beholden to anyone.”
“I like it just as it is.”
“I didn’t come to this easily.”
“Who wants easy?” She sighed. I felt the warmth of her breath on my eyes. She said, “I’ve always believed that everything in life is transitory. And yet, I never like endings.” Her voice was soft, but not sad.
“Thanks for letting me off the hook.”
“You were never on the hook.” She put her hand inside mine. “It’s very strange, the thought of not seeing you again.”
The sun was strong and hot against my face. The light illuminated the dark red strands in Rita’s hair. At that moment I was only aware of how beautiful she looked.
She said, “I think we shared a taxi.”
“A taxi?”
“The night we met. I think we shared a taxi.”
“Was it snowing? I seem to remember snow.”
“I’m very fond of you,” she said.
We sat for a while longer, Rita’s hand in mine.
She said, “I’m not quite ready for our afternoon together to end. Let’s walk a little while. Walk me back to my office.”
Rita held onto my hand as she stood up, then put her arm through mine while we walked up the stone steps and out of the park. She stroked the cuff on my coat with the tip of her fingernail. “I wonder what it will feel like the next time I hear your voice on a commercial?”
We crossed Fifth Avenue to Madison, then headed downtown, as though we were just any couple on the street, in no particular hurry. Looking in store windows, our reflections looking back at us. How compatible we appeared—a metrosexual couple—through the displays of clothes, shoes, and cosmetics, arm in arm.
I said, “I’m being cruel, aren’t I?”
“Not the way you mean. Not intentionally.”
When we reached the doors of her building, Rita took hold of my lapels, pulled me close to her, and kissed me on the lips, as though it were just a kiss, as though we were sure to kiss each other again tonight.
She said, “I wonder how long this will last. Whatever’s going on with you. With the two of us now, I suppose.”
“You’ll go to Charleston as planned.”
“You’re going to be hard to replace.” Rita lifted my hand and held it against the front of her coat. “Oh well, what’s the point of having a heart, if you’re not going to use it?”
Nine
It seemed like the time to find the nearest bar, get drunk, and confide in the bartender, as if pouring me a whiskey made us old friends and I could talk to him about feeling untethered and reckless, and how appealing that seemed until a few minutes ago. Except, I rarely drank in the afternoon, and never made a practice of telling my sorrows to strangers, bartenders included. Instead, after I watched Rita get onto an elevator, and tried to remember exactly what I had thought I would accomplish by breaking up with her, I started walking.
I must have been walking for quite a while. I was way over on First Avenue past the U.N., over by the little plaza on Forty-seventh Street, under the bare trees. The street was filled with traffic, the sidewalks were deep with the postlunch brigade, I stepped into the current, the man on the street—I liked the idea of that—melding into the crowd and heading uptown.
Sometime after that, I took out my cell phone, called Alex, and told him what I’d done.
He asked, “When did this happen?”
“Today. An hour ago. Longer than that. I suppose I should tell our friends. Maybe Rita will. I don’t know . . .”
He said, “This is too important for the phone. I’ll come over to your apartment.”
“What time is it anyway?”
“Almost two-thirty. I’ll try to make it as soon as I can.”
I was aware of the chill in the air, but not much of anything else. I was just trying to move along, keeping pace.
I walked west to Park Avenue, uptown to Seventieth Street, and west again to my apartment on Fifth. When I entered the lobby, there was Simon, sitting in one of the chairs, reading a magazine. I started laughing.
“How do you manage,” I said, “to appear at the absolutely worst times?”
“A talent and a curse?”
He’d shaved since I last saw him, and his clothes were pressed and might have even been new, but there was still that tired look about him when he stood and walked over to me, speaking as he approached: “I really have to talk to you.”
“Some other time. I’m having a bad day.”
“Why are you such a hard-ass? All I want is your help, Geoffrey.”
I started to walk away from him. He followed me all the way to the end of the lobby and over to the elevators, talking to my back as we walked.
“It’s been twenty years for you,” he said, “for me, it’s been every day of my life.”
“I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”
“My sister—”
“Not today.”
“Can you possibly think that I like embarrassing myself this way?” He looked over at the doorman. When I got onto the elevator, Simon got on with me.
When the doors opened and I stepped off, Simon stayed with me all the way to my apartment. He was still talking.
“Five minutes,” he was saying. “Ten at the most.”
“For what?”
“Not out here,” he said. “Give me a break. Okay?”
I unlocked the door and let him in.
After Simon settled himse
lf into one of the living room chairs, folded his jacket on top of his legs, he said, “I once told you you don’t know what you’re dealing with.”
“Did you come here to see if I remember things you’ve told me?”
“You have to tell Remsen that I can stay in my sister’s house. At least let me go inside for a little while. I’ve got to get some closure on this.”
“I told you before, I have nothing to do with that.”
“You’ve got more to do with it than you know.”
“You’re giving me too much credit,” I said. “And too much responsibility.”
He slumped deep into the chair, reached into his jacket for a cigarette, put it back and rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands, at the same time telling me, “I’m sitting here thinking: What can I say to get you to help me?”
The intercom buzzed. The doorman told me that Alex was on his way up. I opened the front door and went back into the living room.
“We’ll have to continue this some other time.”
“What other time? This is the time.”
Alex walked in, said, “So, tell me all about—” saw Simon sitting there, and that was all he said.
“This is my brother. Alex, this is Simon Welles.”
“Laura’s brother?”
“Simon was just about to lecture me on the importance of closure.”
“Are you familiar with the term?” Simon asked Alex.
Alex took off his coat and sat down.
Simon was watching me while he told Alex, “What I have to say is for Geoffrey alone.”
“This is your only chance,” I said.
“Your brother?” Simon lifted his chin toward Alex.
“Say what you want to say,” I told him.
“Don’t believe everything they told you about me.” Simon was speaking to Alex.
“They?” Alex asked.
“They don’t know the whole story.”
Alex said he didn’t know there was a whole story.
Simon now looked over at me. “Twenty-some years ago, you meet Laura Welles, and she’s smart and beautiful, and oh so talented. You’re great friends. And that’s all you know.”
“What’s your point?” I asked.
“The Welles family history. By the time you met my sister she was already fully formed, or nearly, but you never knew the two precocious Welles children. The performing monkeys growing up in the shadow of Tanglewood.”
I saw Alex lean back in his chair and press the flat part of two fingers against his lips, and all that I was thinking about was getting Simon out of there so I could speak with my brother.
“You see,” Simon was telling me, while he looked everywhere but at me, “Laura and I, each in our own way, broke our parents’ hearts. Laura by running off with Steve, and—well, after summer workshops and leaping across the appropriate stages, the plan was for me to plié my way behind my sister all the way to Juilliard, fast-tracked to wasting my youth making auditions and ending up in the chorus of Coppélia.” He shook his head. “Laura had the real talent, and she was smart enough to know what was right for her.”
“She fell in love,” I said.
“Well, there’s that. I suppose. So there we were, Laura and I—there everyone was, really, family, teachers poised to send us off to New York. Only there were two minor technicalities where I was concerned: I wasn’t good enough, and I didn’t want it badly enough. My parents wouldn’t listen to me. Just because I had some talent I was supposed to— Sometime I’ll tell you all about the pater familias and the Arts.” Simon leaned forward. “I didn’t know how to talk to Laura about it. Or maybe I was afraid to. I mean when I started freaking out about it. All I could do was get drunk and high and alienate her. I was young, scared, desperate. So desperate that I thought if I did something really egregious, I’d be able to wriggle my way out of it. And everyone would realize they were mistaken about me.”
“You forged some checks.”
“A gesture that seems to have defined my life. You look bored.” Simon was speaking to Alex. “Am I boring you?”
“When did you run away from home?” Alex answered.
Simon looked over at me. “What makes him think I ran away from home?”
Alex said, “You ran away, didn’t you?”
Simon was still looking at me. “My parents’ advice to me was—they thought I couldn’t make the commitment or the sacrifices, but what’s the sense of doing either if the love isn’t there. Or the talent. They didn’t believe that. I don’t mean they thought I was lying, I mean, they didn’t understand. They thought that I lacked the drive, the ambition, that they had for me.” He looked back at Alex. “Is there something else you’re just dying to ask me?”
Alex grinned. “Are you through telling us why your parents never understood you?”
Simon turned and grinned back at Alex.
“When the smoke cleared, I tried to get back in the good graces of my family, first at Bennington, and when that didn’t work out, the nearest community college, which also didn’t go according to plan. I don’t know why.”
“Why it didn’t work out, or why you expected it would?” Alex asked.
“I’d like you to stop annoying me,” Simon answered, “and let me finish talking with Geoffrey.” He got up and walked across the room, pulled back the curtain and looked out the window. With his back to Alex and me, he said, “I’m going to be forty years old and still don’t know why I do most of the things I do.” He turned and looked only at Alex while he said, “Maybe I’ll get it figured out the next time Self-Awareness Week rolls around.”
I’d been watching Alex through most of Simon’s monologue. I didn’t know what my brother’s face looked like when he was with his patients, but I guessed that it looked much the way it did while he listened to Simon. Not just curious but concerned. I supposed a psychoanalyst analyzed regardless of the venue. That was what I thought at first.
“Eventually I ran away from Shady Grove,” Simon was telling us, “hustling around—not that kind of hustling, faking my way into one job or another. I was only eighteen, nineteen years old, so you can imagine the shit I had to do.” He came back to his chair, sat down, and folded his coat over his lap again. “Sometimes I crashed with friends, sleeping on dorm floors, finessing meals in dining halls, doing whatever . . . Finally, I came to New York. Which is where you come in, Geoffrey.”
“My couch and twenty-five dollars.”
“And the next thing I know, Geoffrey’s telling me that my sister’s married and out of the country.” He shook his head and frowned at me. “I knew you were lying to me, that day. I didn’t know she was getting married, I found that out later, but I knew she didn’t want me anywhere near her, not then. I know what you did for her.”
I spoke to the expression I saw on Alex’s face. “I told Simon that Laura had left the country, when in fact she was downtown getting married.”
Simon told Alex, “He also used to cover for her when she was off somewhere with Steve and my parents got curious.”
Alex was sitting forward, his elbow on his knee and his chin resting in the palm of his hand, as though he were studying, scrutinizing, not only what Simon was telling us, but Simon himself. He looked unhappy.
“I think that’s what I envied the most.” Simon was talking to me. “When we were kids, Laura and I always confided in each other. We talked about everything. And then she went away, and not only had I lost my closest friend, but she met you and confided in you and she didn’t need me anymore. And I still wanted to be the person she could tell things to, instead of you.” He felt around the inside of his coat pocket again. “I’ve often wondered if you were the brother substitute. The good brother. You know, leaving the theater at a young age, the way I left dance? Only without the angst.” He took out the cigarette and this time placed it between his
fingers.
“So, what do you think?” Simon was speaking to Alex.
“Was I supposed to think something?” Alex sat back now.
“About what I’ve been saying.”
“What have you been saying?”
“I mean,” Simon told him, “shouldn’t your brother at least try to help me out here?”
“This is between you and Geoffrey. What makes you think I want to be involved?”
“Isn’t that why you’re sitting here?”
“I came to see my brother.”
“And you have no opinion?”
Alex folded his arms behind his head.
“I have lots of opinions.”
“About what I’ve been saying.”
“How could I not have an opinion?”
“Don’t you think Geoffrey should help me out?”
“I think you’re full of shit.”
“I don’t think you’re qualified to have that opinion,” Simon told him.
“I don’t think you’re qualified to question my qualifications.”
Simon put a cigarette in his mouth. “You’re a funny kind of brother,” he told Alex.
“You should see me at parties.” There was a sly smile on Alex’s face. If it had been anyone else, I’d have thought he was flirting.
“You think I’m lying?”
“Is that what I said?”
“Why would I make all of that up?”
“Did you make it all up?” Alex asked.
“I liked you better,” Simon answered, “when you were bored with me.”
Alex said, “Something tells me you’ll be boring again before long.”
Simon gave Alex a flashy little smile and said to me, “Mind if I have a cigarette out on your terrace?” and walked away.
“And that,” I told Alex, when Simon closed the terrace door, “is Simon Welles.”
“He’s kind of sweet. In a damaged sort of way.”
“Didn’t you just call him a liar?”
“He’s being less than forthright. I didn’t say he was lying, I said he was full of shit, which he is. He’s not that desperate to stay in his sister’s house. But he’s trying to find out what you’ll do for him. And I’d like to find out, too.”
The First Warm Evening of the Year: A Novel Page 9
