I read somewhere that the reason Japanese advertising is often so simple and peaceful, always giving the impression of a light breeze blowing through, is that such an atmosphere is just a dream in that country, almost impossible to achieve when living cheek by jowl. I leaf through my magazines—Architectural Digest, House & Garden, Vanity Fair—and I pull out the pages of my dreams. White curtains blowing out over the back of a white couch. White shelves supporting a few white objects—porcelain, shell, faded wood, rice paper.
Colors keep crowding me, but it’s my fault. I’d have everything white if I were organized.
Even love hasn’t had the power to clear my clutter.
There was an awful day after I moved to the New York bureau when I had to reconstruct the board meeting minutes and I couldn’t find my notes. I was scared and ashamed and Ted said to me, “Do you know why the ropes are always coiled in the same way in the same place on yachts, Lillian?” Of course I didn’t. I was a deer in headlights. I’d been on yachts, but I hadn’t thought about the ropes. “It’s so that when things get dicey and everyone needs to keep the boat safe and sailing, there’s no question as to where things are and what’s been done with them. You can put your hand on anything you need because it’s always where it should be in the way it should be there.” He spread his big hands, palms up, to indicate the mountain of papers and magazines on my desk, and left.
A few months before, Ted and I had worked late and made love on the floor of his office until even later. I don’t know what Ted needed to work on that night, but I was as usual trying to catch up. The sun went down and I finished typing, separated the copies from the carbon paper, left mine on my desk and took Ted’s into his office, thinking simultaneously about how I’d need to wash my hands well in order not to get blue on my dress and about how handsome Ted was with his sleeves rolled up, reading in the light of his desk lamp, chewing his lip. A big man chewing his lip is an attractive, vulnerable thing. A small man chewing his lip is a rodent.
I could have stayed opposite him and handed him the papers across his desk, but something kept me walking around to stand on his left. Maybe I manufactured something to point out to him. His face was a few inches from my arm. He turned his head slowly and rested his lips on my blouse, and I could feel the warmth seeping through the fabric and into my skin, and neither of us moved. Sometimes the grandest moments are the quietest. Then he dropped his left hand and pressed the backs of his fingers against my calf, and the colors crowded in.
When he told me I needed to be shipshape three months later, I wanted to be shipshape. I came in on the weekend in slacks and rolled-up sleeves and cut the mountain down to size. By Sunday afternoon I was standing by the filthy window, chewing on a heel of bread, feeling like a normal person.
Sunday night I washed and styled my hair, cleaned up my cuticles and painted my nails. Monday morning I put on a gray skirt and a long red cashmere sweater. It was early December. Sitting in my office, I tapped my nails on the clean top of my desk and allowed one piece of paper at a time onto my blotter. Of course it didn’t last. Systems don’t stick with me. I forget I even have systems sometimes. But that was a lovely moment in a strange, strange day.
At lunchtime Ted came in and said, “You’re coming with me.” It sounded professional, maybe something had gone wrong in Munich again, but he took me into the elevator, which could only mean we were leaving the building.
“Everything okay?” I ventured.
“Yep,” he said, then he cleared his throat, the doors opened and we walked briskly out of the building, straight to the corner and left on Forty-ninth Street. A block and a half down he turned to look behind us, took my hand and pulled me through a dark door past photos I had no time to take in. We ducked through deep red velvet curtains and were in a small cinema. The movie had already started and the tiny space was full of the lip-smacking noises of a man sucking on a hugely endowed woman’s nipples. Ted exhaled audibly, squeezing my hand. I looked at him and he looked down at me. “Safe,” he whispered, and had me follow him into a pair of seats. I looked at the screen, and I looked at Ted looking at the screen. After a bit he leaned toward me, not taking his eyes off the ecstatic couple. “Okay?” he asked. I wasn’t sure, but he looked so thrilled. So boyish, and also so powerfully male.
Mother was a constant stream of what you couldn’t do, what wasn’t done. I could only imagine Ted’s wife was similar in her way. She kept very busy volunteering and organizing charity galas and performing in amateur theatricals. I think she also wrote some of them. Her hair was still Jackie Kennedy long after Jackie was Onassis. She made picnics for the family to eat in Central Park on weekends. So I put my hand on his crotch.
People say that some things are meant to be. The question that doesn’t get answered, or even asked, is what these things are meant to be. Then there are more questions. I can say I was meant to be with Ted. But then, what does with mean? Or even be? He was completely under my skin. He still is. His breath crawls beneath the first layer. His ghost is the air under that. How much more with can you get? How much more be?
I was never allowed to make visible marks on him. We washed my blue carbon-paper fingerprints off him after that first time. But I once had a dream in which I was alone in a peaceful white room. There wasn’t any furniture, just curved white walls in a perfect circle around me. No windows to complicate the sight, just light streaming down from high above. I turned around and around, studying the room. Then I stopped, reached into my pocket and pulled out a ring. It was a beautiful ring of platinum and precious stones, not something I recognized when I woke up but in the dream it was absolutely mine. I went over to the perfectly white wall, and started using the ring to draw on it, just like a caveman: “I was here. Something happened. I want you to know.”
On One-Night Stands
I always tell Judy when I take someone to bed. I don’t know why. She’s always disapproving, and her eyes go a little wild. She lets me tell her, though. She’s never said she doesn’t want to know. And she keeps sending people to stay with me for the few nights they’re in town for meetings or a reunion.
It’s usually the wine. Red, above all. I love to drink it, and if they love to drink it too, then when we head for the bedroom it’s really like all we’ve done is dive in. The sheets are waves of wine moving over us as we swim in the glass.
Judy even sent me a lord once. And then she was aghast when he proved temptable. Either she’s been married too long, or not long enough. To tell the truth, though, Alfred kept a polite distance for so long that I thought I’d be sleeping alone that night. He spent a lot of time staring bemusedly into his glass. I was at the head of the table and he was sitting to my left, so I had a view of his profile for most of dinner. The candles made the wine look as velvet as usual, and he seemed to enjoy looking at it more than drinking it. Eventually I got tired of studying his lips and looked at his ear. I’ve studied my share of aristocrats, and had expected the long lobes that tend to accompany the narrow nose and tall forehead of the aging gentry. His were small, though; they were the first I’d ever seen that truly reminded me of shells. Even if I hadn’t been drinking, I think they would have touched my heart. They were a child’s ears. We had been talking about Budapest—he’d just been—but his silence had lulled me into imagining that touching him would have no effect. It was peaceful. I reached out to feel the perfect inside of his ear, forgetting it was attached to a man. I was startled when he leaned into my hand—
This is how I told the story to Judy. I think I went on about his ear for a really long time, actually. The truth is, I studied his ear after he fell asleep. I always do this. I study the sleeping profile and imagine that I’m seeing it for the four thousandth time. So the truth is I didn’t touch his ear at the dinner table. I eventually said, “You’d be welcome in my room tonight, Alfred.” He continued staring into his glass. I slipped my left foot out of my shoe and put it on his thigh. If he gave my foot firml
y back to me, I’d say, Never mind, I completely understand, but he wrapped his hand around it and squeezed. He squeezed so hard that it hurt, but it didn’t feel like You whore, it felt like Yes, so I blew out the candle closest to me and he blew out the other and I had him.
“Oh, Lillian, not Alfred,” Judy said. I made up the ear story on the spot, told her how maternal it made me feel, how curious, and how I’d had to change gears entirely when he responded to my touch. I doubt she believed me but she was too polite to press it. We were at their house when I told her all this. George Junior was playing the piano in the living room. I was chopping vegetables for gazpacho. She was slicing crusty bread in her determined way.
“Isn’t it awkward in the morning?” she asked after a time, then sliced more quietly to hear my answer.
“Never has been,” I said, transferring vegetables from cutting board to blender. “Not when we both know it’s not going to happen again. Alfred was up and dressed, reading the paper when I got up. I’ve learned not to talk too much in the mornings, to let them come to me. I go about in my nightie for a bit, drinking my coffee, and they join me if they feel like it and don’t if they don’t. Then I dress. Saying goodbye clothed has a nice finality to it.” I switched on the blender and the beautiful bright tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers and onions leaped and danced and dissolved. I turned it off and the quiet was fragrant. “If Ted leaves me in the morning I like still to be in my nightie. The goodbye embrace is so intimate that way. But with others, les passants, I’m dressed, totally pulled together. New day. Page turned. Unless . . . No.”
Judy brought me three bowls. “Unless what?”
“Nothing.”
Unless they’ve already left when I wake up.
When I went into the office on the day after Ted and I made love for the first time, I wondered if he’d behave coldly, or come out and tell me it had been a mistake that couldn’t be repeated. I prepared myself for business as usual, and business only. If I’d felt more confident, I would have gone in to the office early, to be alone with him before the workday started, to get up close and smell him again. I was awake before the alarm, but I made myself wait. I didn’t want him to feel awkward being alone with me. I changed my nail color and I looked again at the impossible parts of Sunday’s crossword. I thought through a dozen outfits, and decided black would be best. A-line skirt, long-sleeved top, stockings, heavy silver earrings. Serious.
I said good morning to people as I walked through the newsroom to my office outside Ted’s, but not overbrightly. I tried to look like I was thinking about a meeting. He wasn’t at his desk when I got there and I just went to work, pretending there was saliva in my mouth when it was bone dry. I had something to type that required three pieces of typing paper and two pieces of carbon paper. It took forever to get the pages lined up and another eternity to get them behaving themselves on the cylinder. I swore at the thing, and he arrived in the doorway just in time to hear it.
“Does your mother know you use words like that?” he asked as he moved toward the door to his office, smiling. I picked up a pen and my notebook, as usual in the morning, and followed him.
“My mother doesn’t know much about me at all,” I said.
He went behind his desk and sat down facing me. “Oh? You don’t tell her much?”
“Not anymore.”
We were both smiling. Smiling to beat the band. I thought we weren’t going to be able to stop, and then a look I couldn’t interpret traveled across his face. It looked a bit like sadness, but maybe it was shyness. He glanced away from me and inhaled, and when he finally looked back he was smiling again, but warmly this time.
“Would you like some more things not to tell your mother about?” he said, and a nipple-hardening rash of joy scorched my torso.
Whenever I leave after telling Judy about my sex life, I know she tells George Junior my stories. I worry a little about that. But if I’ve learned anything, it’s this: The world has never loved a spinster, and never will. The more people she tells, the merrier.
On Memory’s Mismatched Moments
Judy sent me Michael, actually, nearly three years ago. They’d known each other in college, and he’d looked her up when he was on his way to New York to do research on UN policy in Ethiopia. He’s such a smart man. He stayed for three weeks, and during that time he said one of the loveliest things anyone’s ever said to me, and we were robbed at gunpoint.
All my early memories of him are in jagged pieces. I hate that we live really lovely moments as well as moments of true horror with people. Wouldn’t it feel so much better if we had only charming experiences with some people, and only hideous experiences with others? Then we’d know what to do.
He came in from Philadelphia. I picked him up at Penn Station and drove him back to my apartment via the sights. He’d been before, many times of course, but was very charming from the outset. I got the feeling he was a bit dazzled. I can tell. He said he’d love to see everything through my eyes. “Sometimes this city seems so chaotic, doesn’t it?” he said, “And sometimes it seems so beautifully laid out.” As I was to be, later that night. I could just feel it, immediately. He talked slowly, belying his drive. There is no languor in Michael. We agreed, driving past Rockefeller Center, that Judy’s voice was like a silver bell, and that George Junior’s waters ran deep. At the apartment he was appreciative of the guest room, and unpacked immediately. When I told him I was going to do some shopping, he said he’d like to walk the neighborhood. It was summer, and all the produce looked inviting. Well, it was, in the truest sense; that was the point of all that color and juice and life. I bought strawberries and raspberries and endives and lemons. I bought smoked salmon, and bread, and French cheeses. I bought white wine this time.
He got my whole story out of me at dinner, except for Ted. I talked about Willis. Michael said no one described Paris better than Americans in love. After dinner he asked for the story of every photo on the wall that leads to my room, and spent a long time dissecting a black-and-white portrait of Zoë, age nine, in a high-necked party dress and lip gloss. He went on at length about her sense of self and her sophistication, and I didn’t think at all about whether this corresponded with her nature. I luxuriated instead in the music of a man spending time in the head of a girl. My back was tingling because I could feel my open bedroom door behind us, but I didn’t let myself interrupt him. When he’d finished, he looked up at my coming-out painting. “And this is you?” he said. I nodded apologetically. “No,” he said, putting his hands on my ribs. “This is you.” He guided me deftly backward into my room. When he sat me on the bed he noticed the bowl of flowers on the bedside table. “I knew you were the kind of person who would have peonies in the bedroom,” he said. That was the loveliest thing. Before he knew about the flowers, he’d been inside my head and he’d seen them.
We went to bed together several times during his stay, always on the same wavelength about what it did or didn’t mean. Our schedules dovetailed nicely. It was always after we hadn’t seen much of each other for a few days, and had lots of stories to tell at dinner. His research went fairly well, and he was optimistic about it.
When his stay was almost over, we went to an art opening. I parked in a dead-end alley not too far from the gallery, deep inside it so the parking police wouldn’t notice. The exhibit was irritating. The artist had refused to give any of her paintings a title, so there was no jumping-off point. Even something as simple as “Yellow #7” gives me an idea of where to begin in my thinking. Michael didn’t agree at first, because he said he believed in the complete liberty of the viewer to feel what he felt, without being limited by the perspective of the artist. I told him that no title had ever constrained my ability to have my own personal reaction to a painting, I just wanted to know if my perspective and the artist’s were similar or different, and if he was going to smile so condescendingly he could take himself to the bar and get me a glass of wine.
We had a good time.
Then a man followed us into the alley. I had my hand in my bag, digging for my keys, and he had followed so quietly that when he spoke and I turned I was looking right into the barrel of his gun. I guess they know that this is the most frightening way to do it. They could point it at your chest with equally fatal results, but then you don’t have to look into the barrel. The barrel is like an eye. Just like a camera. If someone pointed a TV camera at my breastbone and asked me to answer questions, I wouldn’t have too much trouble, but point that same camera in my face and I’m mute. I couldn’t talk, even when the robber had thrown Michael’s wallet back at him because there was no money in it and was hissing at me to hurry up. I wanted to say something but all I could do was pull things out of my bag that made other bits and pieces drop out into the alley. When he finally had my wallet I looked at his face, and he looked so frustrated that I was sure he would kill me, so I looked at the gun again. Then he tucked it in his pants and ran away.
Those were the days before hooded sweatshirts, so I could describe him pretty clearly to the police, but they didn’t find him. During a moment waiting at the police station, Michael said, “I wish I could have protected you.” Poor fellow. I think he had felt chivalrous in my bed, but now that image had been challenged. “Maybe you did,” I said.
“By default, you mean?”
I patted his hand.
That night I didn’t sleep until dawn. A couple of times I thought of climbing in with Michael, but each time I imagined doing so it was Ted I saw in the bed with me. I wanted him back. Suddenly Michael was more like a brother. Having been threatened together made us family, and smashed into shards the images of us at dinner or laughing on the street or in bed.
Why don’t I feel the same way about Ted? Why haven’t the bad memories smashed the good ones? Why don’t the good ones struggle to maintain their status? I don’t know. They just don’t. With Ted, even my memories of the most painful events are tinged with the sunrise colors of belonging, and the moments of delight are darkened at the corners by the separation that would always follow. So it all matched. And it’s why I couldn’t leave.
Lillian on Life Page 9
