It is October. I love October. It makes me think I am in school and that I have homework and that my father and I are going to tune in Inner Sanctum and turn out the lights so that he can scare my sister and me with odd whistles and tappings. We still exchange memories of him, very different memories, because I knew one man and she knew another. The father I knew was pleased that I shared his bookishness and the joy he took in language, and he smiled whenever he heard me intoning, as he so often did, “Had I the heaven’s embroider’d cloths . . .” Diana’s father was enchanted by the eagerness with which she embraced swimming and softball and basketball, and he once had high-topped sneakers—she had weak ankles—made just for her. But whenever we speak of Papa, the identical smile lights our faces.
It is October, and I am on my way to a cocktail party with the balding man. He doesn’t want to go, but I have promised—it is the first time the hostess has entertained since her husband died—so he is sitting half-drunk in a corner of the cab and he is sniping at me.
“You’ve got a mean, intelligent face.”
I am silent.
“Mary Cantwell, the clock is running out on you.”
“That depends on what clock you’re watching,” I say calmly. I have the resilience of a roach.
We get to the party and he stalks through it like an angry bear. He isn’t rude, but he’s showing off, and he’s feeding so visibly on the adulation of his fans that he’s swelling like the corpse in the Ionesco story who gradually swallowed up the room.
The hostess and a friend from the office take me aside. “Mary, stay here with us,” she says. “You can’t leave with that man,” he says. “They’ll be picking you up in bits and pieces all over Riverside Drive tomorrow.”
“I have to go,” I say, because I have made up my mind. I cannot bear any more dreams about B, and half-waking with my arms half-open. If this man is the sexual giant he has claimed to be during the year since we met, he is going to blast me right out of those nightmares. The children are away for the weekend, and I have put my best sheets on the bed.
I take his arm and we go to a dinner party, where none of the guests speak to him because he is drunk and because they dislike him.
“Mah Mary,” he says, “please don’t let me drink. I don’t want to make a fool of myself.”
So I don’t, happy to be needed, happy to mother, and he goes off, to sit in a corner like a schoolboy with a dunce cap and sober up. The moderator of the panel on which the males of this distinguished group, all of whom have written for the screen, are to speak later, leans over and says, “Don’t you go in for the Madonna Dolorosa. You’ve got the face for it.”
I laugh. This is the light, skinny chatter I enjoy at dinner parties, and he and I sparkle right through dessert.
While the other panelists are drinking coffee, the balding man and I walk around the block. He is sober now, and he is unhappy.
“Mah Mary,” he says, “last night I was in Chicago, at a forum, and they offered me a woman. And I didn’t want her, I didn’t want her, but I took her because she was offered me. I feel dirty.”
If he had been B, the confession would have made me heartsick. But B was real, whereas the balding man is an actor. An autumn night in New York, an empty street, a pretty, rather innocent listener, and, in a few minutes, an audience of at least a thousand: how resist the chance to speak such compelling lines? But if he is an actor, so too am I. Playing the Madonna Dolorosa suits me very well.
At the theater, where the panelists are to speak after a movie screening, I sit in what I immediately christen Mistresses’ Row. Each and every one of these pretty women who had been guests at the dinner, each of whom clearly has a camel’s hair coat and the Yale Bowl in her past, is sleeping with one of these men, some of whom are married, up there on stage. I do not like this. I have been a wife too long to like being lumped with girlfriends.
Actually, I don’t like anything about the evening, because the panelists, eager to prove why they had earned a place on a stage, are speaking mostly to their peers and hardly ever to the audience. True, one of them announces he has a good Sam Peckinpah story. But he forgets to tell it.
An hour or so later, after the panel breaks up, the balding man and I are leaving the theater when a young man steps out of a shadowed doorway and says, “I’ve been waiting here, sir, to tell you how much I admire your work.”
I look across Lincoln Center, which by this hour is empty, at the fountain, still sending sprays of water into the midnight air, and at the young man hurrying off into the darkness. Awed by fame and, in this great plaza, its perfect setting, I ask, “Doesn’t that make up for everything?”
“No,” he says, and I marvel at the despair that too many years of reading biographies of Hemingway and Fitzgerald have convinced me attends genius. Anyone emerging from a shadowed doorway to say he had admired, say, my piece on Yugoslavia would have had me soaring.
We are in my living room now, and he, used to hotel rooms and probably afraid his wife will call and catch him out, says, “This isn’t right, my bein’ in your house.”
“If it isn’t right in my house, it isn’t right anywhere,” I say, and lead him upstairs. Propped on pillows, wearing my best nightgown, quiet, self-possessed, watching him fold his clothes on an old rocker, extending my arms when he turns and says, “Well, this is me,” no one would ever guess that he is only the second man I have ever slept with.
“You don’t feel any shame at all, do you?” he asks the next morning.
“No,” I answer, “only joy,” and I think he is disappointed. He has written about the magic of guilt, but guilt is magic only to the amateur. I think myself my husband’s killer, and in indulging the balding man and his sad semblance of lust, I am not committing another crime but doing penance for the first.
When we part in front of his hotel and, restless, I walk through Bloomingdale’s, I am too dazed to shop, and go home to slide between the sheets he’s just vacated. I feel as though I’ve given birth to him, and that the umbilical cord still connects us. Dr. Franklin says, reluctantly, “I guess you won’t feel so alone anymore.” And I don’t, not for years.
Four
The last time I saw the Snow White I had known from the day she was born was on a Christmas morning. We had opened the presents, and in a few minutes her father was to ring the bell—he never entered the house and I never entered the hallway to greet him—and take the children to the country for the holidays.
Actually, it is not the sight of her that I remember as well as I do the sharpness of her thin thighs. She was sitting on my lap, crying, because going away meant Christmas afternoon would be no turkey stuffed with chestnuts, no guests applauding when I came out with the plum pudding, no sitting past bedtime under the tree while I marveled at the stool she had made for me in shop and the handkerchief on which Rose Red had, in running stitch, embroidered my name. Perhaps what she was going to would be more fun, more filled with family, because her stepmother had many relatives, and we were only three. But one thing, perhaps the only thing, I know about children is that they are as wedded to ritual as old priests are to the Latin Mass.
The doorbell rang. Rose Red, dry-eyed, lips set, already the mother I was not sure how to be, took Snow White’s hand and walked her to the door. I never saw my elder child again. Her semblance, yes, but never that same little girl. People are fond of saying that babies change from week to week. Go away for a few days and you come back to a whole other person. But it is not only infants that mutate. So do children, and while I was not watching, Snow White turned into someone I had not met before. Her younger self is present now only in old albums, in photographs where she stares at the world with wide wondering eyes, often with a flower—she loved to smell flowers—clutched in her small, short-fingered hand.
After the car drove off, I moved away from the curtains, around which I’d been peering, and allowed myself to cry. But not for long. I had to take down the tree, lug it to the gutter, and put a
way the ornaments for another, better year. Then I had to pack.
A few weeks earlier I had been in my office, working late. In truth, I didn’t really need to work late. But I knew the nice young woman from Dominica who came in every afternoon so as to be there when the children came home from school—I could no longer afford a housekeeper—would stay until I got home, and here, in this office, was peace and order. Here I knew what to do, to move papers from In boxes to Out boxes, to sign my name to requisitions, to scribble in the margins of manuscripts that this paragraph here, that sentence there, needed more work. At Number 83, I did not. Perhaps I might say something to offend my daughters. Even worse, during our rare phone conversations, I might say something to offend B, whose contempt had a razor’s edge.
I thought I was alone, so was surprised when the travel editor poked her head in my door. She had just got a promise of advertising from three different countries, but here it was, the Christmas season, and who on earth could she find to write the articles that would be the quid pro quo? I asked which countries, and when she mentioned Turkey, I said, “I’ll go.”
I would have gone anywhere, really, to escape a house that would be empty by Christmas afternoon and a Christmas tree that by the evening would be lying naked in a gutter. Going to Turkey meant fleeing absences—the smell of a roasting bird, the rustle of tissue paper—to embrace new presences. When I left, in the early evening, to deposit Fred at a friend’s apartment until she could take him to a kennel the next morning, I felt as if I were closing the door on a tomb.
To enter my friend’s apartment was to be surrounded by safety, because she was a woman who never took a risk. She hadn’t risked marriage; she hadn’t risked job-hopping; she hadn’t even risked falling in love unless the man was a homosexual—closeted, of course. It was the era of the bachelor, the man-about-town, the always reliable escort to the Junior League Ball, and never did I, nor she, associate such a cadre with what we knew, for sure, were “fairies” or “the boys.” We thought they were simply bachelors, in the sense that my grandfather’s somewhat eccentric brothers had been bachelors, and assumed that somewhere out there were the someones who could catch them someday.
Oh, but it was so cozy in her apartment, she with her afterdinner framboise and her escort of the moment with his. The living room was strewn, but artfully, with discarded wrap and ribbons; a fire burned in the fireplace; Christmas ornaments—little birds, all of them—glinted on the mantelpiece. I didn’t want to leave this pleasant room, these pleasant people, and Fred, who, scenting departure, tried to get in my lap and who, when at last I walked toward the door, hurled himself against my legs. But once in a cab, free of his howls and slicing through Queens, my calves were as tensed as a sprinter’s before the pistol shot. Takeoff, and I wished I were lashed to the plane’s nose like the figurehead on a ship, and soaring.
The smell of coal smoke: that’s what woke me every morning in Istanbul, that and the sound of boats hooting on the Bosporus. The hotel was old fashioned, an Edwardian relic, and my room so dimly lit that the only place I could read was the bathroom. At night I lined the tub with a blanket, put some pillows at one end, and climbed in quite happily, surrounded by a space as bright and white as an operating theater. This time I wasn’t traveling with Galsworthy. This time it was Edmund Wilson.
Because the hotel was well off the American tourist route, its guests were the few Turks who traveled, families mostly, European businessmen whose expense accounts did not permit first-class accommodations, and a lone middle-aged woman who, one night in the dining room, started talking in I do not know what language and left the table in tears.
It was the kind of dining room that encouraged tears, because its good days, had there ever been any, were long ago and its revelers were long since dead. The room was cavernous, as big as the dining salon of an ocean liner, and a pianist played old show tunes—“I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right out of My Hair,” “People Will Say We’re in Love”—in a skinny forest of potted palms down by the kitchen door. Unless some member of the Tourist Board had been appointed to show me Istanbul by night, I dined there every evening, drinking my white wine and eating my lemon sole and thinking myself a woman of the world, no longer myself but a character out of Graham Greene. When I slept, there were no more nightmares. The silence was like a sable brush that someone had stroked me with from head to foot, and in the morning, when I left my bed, I was as sealed as an egg.
Most of the hotels were in the new city, but most of what I wanted to see was in the old city, so every morning, through the fog, I would cross the Galata Bridge, through a clutter of cars and buses and horse-drawn carts, to a spider’s web of streets. In retrospect, I don’t know how I got there, because I was too shy to hail a dolmus, a kind of cab with assigned stops, and certainly I didn’t dare the city buses, so I suppose I walked. In strange cities I have always walked, everywhere, with more trust in my feet and a map than in any car or driver. Too, my lack of languages (French, my only other, I mispronounce and misuse) makes me feel as if I have a rubber plug in my mouth, the kind that stops up sinks. So, lost more often than not, I have walked and walked, my mouth closed over my useless tongue, and never have I failed to get where I was going.
I walked to Sancta Sophia, where a fragment—only the heads are whole—of a mosaic of Saint John and Mary pleading with Jesus for the world’s sinners induced a kind of melting, like a wound draining. I walked to the Blue Mosque, paved with a faience so blue, it stabbed the eye, and, shoeless on demand, I wondered at the equality that prevails when you and everyone around you are padding around in stocking feet. There was another mosque, the Quarye, whose mosaics evoked Yeats’s “Sailing to Byzantium” as surely as if he were whispering it in my ear. I had loved Yeats in college, even used him as a kind of sex manual. “For love has pitched its mansion in the place of excrement,” I would murmur over and over, trying to turn the awkward college couplings in B’s car—my back pinioned by the steering wheel and my legs splayed—into something resembling passion, ardor, romance.
“My God, we’ve sent a claustrophobe to the Grand Bazaar,” the executive editor called out to Mademoiselle’s editor-in-chief when I phoned to report on the horror of walking through acres of embroidered robes and rugs, stacks of brass trays, and thousands of gold bangles, all of them illumined by fluorescent lights so bright they hurt my eyes. It was good to be able to speak English, even better to think of the gang back at the office fielding hyperboles and getting breathless over Anne Klein. If I was serious about doing my work well, I was wholly unserious about the work itself. It made me laugh too hard.
“Buona sera” and “Quelle belle femme,” the dusty-looking young men would mutter as I walked by. (I suppose they would have muttered something in German had I been fair.) The American young men—one could tell them by their jeans and their godawful sandals—never said anything. They were too busy looking for hashish. “They seem to have an idea about the city,” said a young girl the Tourist Board had made my luncheon companion as we were dining in a restaurant on top of the Galata Tower. It was wonderful talking again—about her university, her rent, and the one thing about the United States she really wanted to know. “What do you think of Jackie Kennedy now that she’s married that Greek?”
Mostly, though, I was alone. I was alone the morning I took a crowded ferry across the Bosporus to Uskudar to see nineteenth-century houses that looked like weathered matchsticks, and an old Moslem cemetery pinned with cypresses and thick with tall tombstones that tottered drunkenly and seemed to leer at passersby. They seemed human, those tombstones, because their finials told me whether those beneath them had been men or women. “I am in Asia,” I said to myself, awed that my own two feet had taken me so far. Perhaps I too could be a Freya Stark, wandering the Middle East, spying the past beneath the present.
But of course I could not be a Freya Stark, and not because I had two children and a tongue that could not twist itself around the unfamiliar. I could not be a
Freya Stark because that night, dining at the best restaurant in Istanbul with people from the Tourist Board, I realized that this world, where tablecloths were spanking white and waiters dipped their trays to one’s left, was truly my world. When we stopped on the long drive back to my hotel to buy huge circles of flat, crackly pastry from an old woman in a little lighted stand, alone in miles of dark, I shuddered at her isolation, imagining myself into her role as easily as I had imagined myself into that of a divorced housewife looking for lust at that roadhouse near the Long Island Expressway. At the same time, though, I reveled in my own solitude, because for once I was free of the baggage I’d been toting since, fresh out of school, I married a young man who once kept a copy of Orlando in his trenchcoat pocket. A stranger to the country, a stranger to the people who carted me about, I was to the Turks only a woman with brown eyes, a big shoulder bag, and an almost unimaginable life thousands of miles away. To me, I was only myself, an integer again.
“No, no,” the Turkish tourist office in New York had said when I offered a rough idea of my itinerary after Istanbul. “You musn’t be in Ankara on New Year’s Eve. Ankara is a city of civil servants. It will be deserted, and you will be lonely.”
B and I had celebrated New Year’s Eve only twice that I can remember, and I’d never done so in childhood. At home, my parents out for the evening, I would think deep thoughts and inscribe them in my diary, one of the several little spiral-bound notebooks I would buy during the year, write in for a month or two, then forget about. So New Year’s Eve in an empty Ankara, me reading in bed and turning out the light before midnight, would be no different from all my New Year’s Eves. But no, the nice tourist people said. “You must go to Izmir for the celebration. You will be happy there.”
My escort, from the Tourist Board, was a plump, curly-haired man in his thirties who called me “Mees Mary” and ended his sentences with “et cetera, et cetera, et cetera,” like the king in The King and I. As oily and ingratiating as a seal, he was also anti-Semitic. “What can you expect? They’re Jews,” he said when the noise from an adjoining table drowned our conversation. I bit my tongue, knowing that I of all people—the ex-wife of a Jew, the mother of two half-Jewish children—should snap back at him. But courtesy, as always, made a coward of me, courtesy and the one habit, apart from liking to polish silver, that I had inherited from my mother. We were too much given to making excuses for others, too willing to overlook the unspeakable. I outgrew the habit. She, however, has been a “lady” all her long life.
Speaking with Strangers Page 5
