People started arriving, too. It was unnatural for someone who had once lugged copper pots and pans from Paris and cherished her few lessons with Julia Child’s partners, Mmes. Bertholle and Beck, not to be feeding crowds, so I started inviting people for dinner and never gave a thought as to whether there was a man seated at the foot of the table, even though friends said an extra man made a useful bartender. I was proud of being able to handle anything short of a Manhattan—which nobody drank anyway, the only mixed drink I have ever known a New Yorker to like being a martini—and ran from ice cube tray to glass closet to the old wine carriers that held liquor bottles, feeling a power I had never known in marriage. Ceres I was, the great goddess, dispensing stuffed bass and a modest Sancerre as if I were reaping and sharing the fruits of the earth.
I was proud of everything I did on those evenings, rejecting the guests’ offers to clear the table, bring out the dessert, make the coffee. Pride forbade my asking for help, pride and the fact, slowly dawning upon me, that I didn’t need any. Perhaps I looked silly sometimes, hostessing, bartending, cooking, serving, and clearing simultaneously, but I never felt silly. Rather, I felt—as the guests murmured, “You did it again, Mary,” and “Loved that chocolate mousse!”—the fabulous exhaustion of the long-distance runner. I had crossed the line. I had made it home.
I am a good cook and was turning into a pretty good talker, but I doubt that is why people came to the house. I think it was the house itself. Everyone wants to crawl into a cave once in a while, and although I have never had a place I thought big enough (wherever I have lived I have had the same dream, that of finding a previously unnoticed door and beyond it another room), I am a digger of caves. At night I would loose the living room curtains of their ties and pull them shut, turn on a few low lights and a little Lee Wylie, and then I, and everyone with me, was safe. Only in the rear, where there were no curtains at the big dining room window, did the house seem dangerous. If we were alone, the children and I ate our suppers as quickly as we could, fearful less of the intruder than of the impenetrable black out of which he might arrive.
Most of the neighbors had lived on the block for years. On summer nights they sat on their stoops, weaving tales out of the inconsequential, which are perhaps my favorite kind, because I can summon a profound interest in the possible reasons behind a favorite delivery boy’s defection from one supermarket to another, or why the lights were on so late in So-and-So’s apartment. It is the gift of growing up in a small town, I believe, this tendency to magnify the ordinary into the extraordinary. “Now tell me everything that happened,” I still say to friends returned from holidays, “starting with when you got on the plane.”
Once the weather became too cool for stoop-sitting, the neighbors disappeared indoors and issued last-minute invitations to come over for drinks. The women invariably wore long skirts, and one of the men invariably put on his sequin-striped party sweater, and all would greet one another with glad cries, even though they may have met at the supermarket a few hours earlier. I liked that; I like it when people put a sheen on their days. But I seldom sat on the stoops in summer, and I seldom went to the cocktail parties, because, a newcomer and diffident, I did not belong to the inner circle. “Mom,” my younger daughter said sadly, as she watched people exchanging gossip from their respective front steps, “I don’t think you’re really a member of Jane Street society.” She was right, but it didn’t matter. What did matter was that on this odd, isolated block, I had an identity: the rather pretty woman at Number 83 who had two young daughters and a dog who was forever pulling frantically at his leash.
I also had an occupation distinct from my daily stint, one that imposed order on weekends which, sans church attendance, sans a husband carving the roast at Sunday dinner, sans afternoon treats with Daddy while Mommy takes her nap, might otherwise have been made up of listless perusals of section after section of the endless Sunday Times. A few years earlier the then managing editor of Mademoiselle, friend of the famous and giver of cocktail parties featuring skinny women and paunchy men who were always just back from or en route to Mount Desert or Hobe Sound, and who elbowed their way to the bartender with the ruthlessness of basketball players elbowing their way to the hoop, was looking for a food writer. When she listed the potential candidates, an editor whom I had fed often said, “I don’t know why you’re going outside for someone. You won’t find anyone better than Mary.”
For years I had wanted a chance to write something besides “a mere slip of a dress” or “damask carved like ivory,” but I was too timid to ask, too much in awe of what I thought of as “real writers” and “real writing.” Handed a modest food column, I was ecstatic, so much so that I never asked about money, which was just as well, because the managing editor wasn’t planning to pay me any. So one Sunday every month, after having spent the previous weekends getting recipes from friends or little-known French magazines and testing them on the children, I would sit at my desk and lose myself in happy amateurism. The columns are, but for my adolescent occasional effusions, the closest thing I have to a diary, and among my favorite reading.
I do not like the view from my window today. It is a chilly Sunday and the air is gray, and for a week Con Ed has been tearing up the cobblestones so that the road in front of our house is one long trench railed with orange ropes. The few who walk by seem concussed, but no more so than our dog, Fred, who is asleep on the rug—flat on his back, paws dangling, and looking like a dead beetle. The three cats and my younger daughter are staring mournfully at this dismal landscape and I am staring mournfully at a picture of myself taken when I was six. I have changed for the worse . . .
As I read that, the past sweeps over me, and my recall of the pain that twisted my ribs whenever I thought of B dissolves into images of the cats capering on my bed, of Rose Red, wearing what she called her pancake hat, making Sunday breakfast, of Snow White, in love with Elizabeth I, confiding stories of the Tudor court as if only she were privy to them. If it weren’t for those columns, pasted in a schoolchild’s three-subject notebook, I would have forgotten—so powerful, maybe even preferable, is the memory of misery—that there were many days at Number 83 when I was joyous. When the balding man called to say he was coming to town, I was excited, because now I was going to have the kind of evening that society, by which I mean friends, psychiatrists, and assorted magazines, said a woman of my age and hormonal perfection should be having. Still, my feet dragged when, babysitter installed, I left that paradise of children, pets, and dinner on the stove to go uptown and pray that the other people on the hotel elevator hadn’t guessed that the woman accompanying the man to his room on the twelfth floor was not his wife.
Age—he was about ten years older than I—and alcohol had taken its toll of the balding man, and although he was never impotent, he was demanding. Neither the athlete his publicity claimed nor the sexual Goliath his reputation promised, he was more myth than male. That may not have been true when he was young. “The first time I ever had a girl, mah Mary, I couldn’t wait and neither could she. So I took her on the kitchen table, only a room away from where her parents were sitting. Oh, mah Mary, I wish you’d known me then.” But by the time we met he needed fantasy. I was Scheherazade.
Unless having read The Story of O counts, I had only a nodding acquaintance with pornography. Once, a friend who was an incurable scavenger had picked up a pile of paperbacks from the floor of the office elevator (“The guys in the mailroom,” she said darkly) and carted them to her apartment on a night we were dining together. While she was in the kitchen, cooking, I was in the living room, reading about a woman who preferred stallions, so hypnotized that I forgot my cigarette and it burned a small hole in her couch.
For the balding man, though, I became a teller of tales of Great Danes and girls’ reform schools and female warders and whippings and frightened virgins on all fours, urged onward by his murmured “That’s good, mah Mary, that’s real good.” Once I would have felt myself degraded by
my nasty, nimble tongue, but not now. Telling stories to him so that he could make love didn’t seem all that different from telling stories to my children so that they could sleep. “You don’t need fantasy, do you?” he asked. “No,” I said, “you’re the fantasy,” and snuggled along his magic back and slept.
Years later, marooned in someone’s summer house, I picked up a copy of The Pearl and laughed to see that I had the mind, and the limitations, of a Victorian pornographer.
Married, dishonest, drunk as often as he was sober, the balding man nonetheless added cubits to my stature when he came to the office. A certain contrived madness ran through its corridors; we hugged our craziness—“Women! We are a silly race,” the editor-in-chief was fond of saying—to our Rudi Gernreiched bosoms. That I had to send my secretary out for a bottle of bourbon when he came in for a photo session, and that he once wrestled with a sturdy, knee-socked woman in the personnel department when she asked for identification from this unexpected caller, only added to my glory. True, I had not lost an entire skiffload of clothes while photographing on the Charles River, as had a fashion editor, nor did I keep a quart of Scotch in my bottom drawer, as was the custom with production editors. But I had a famous admirer, and so what if he sometimes seemed a sot? Wasn’t that the price of genius? Wasn’t I lucky to be partaking of it? My compliance—collusion, really—was predictable. I was, after all, the daughter of a man who believed that to be involved with books was to live at the heart of light, and the former wife of a man who shared his faith. Papa, however, had never met an honest-to-God writer, and B, who knew acres of them, was shrewd enough to separate the dancer from the dance. I was not.
When I semi-chaperoned Mademoiselle’s guest editors on their trips abroad, it was usually because they were going to a country the editor-in-chief didn’t want to see. Who could blame her? Sad, raggedy Ireland suited me right down to the ground, but en route to Israel I nearly wept when we flew over the presumed glories that were Greece. I balked at Russia, too, despite knowing that I would never have such a chance again. But reluctant as I was to leave for Moscow, I was more reluctant to leave a house that was acting on me as an oyster does on grit. I knew what would happen, though, because it had happened before. I would be miserable for the first few days and ask myself, “Why did I do this?” Then, because travel was the only true cure I had for loneliness, I would sever all connections with my world and rock myself into the swing of a new one. I seldom sent postcards, and in Russia I didn’t have the choice.
I remember little of Moscow, because I saw little of Moscow. Instead, I stood for hours at the Intourist desk in the hotel lobby watching while women thumbed through ledgers reminiscent of Bob Cratchit’s, trying to confirm my travel plans. When I did go out, I was forever on the edge of the law, sitting down where I wasn’t supposed to, suffering the warning whistles of policemen whose eyes were as opaque as pennies. The evening I finally left the city, I saw a box of matches on the airport floor, bent to pick it up (I was running out), then stiffened quickly, afraid of yet another shrill nyet! No matter. The g.e.’s were well behind me, on their way back to New York, and I, armed only with a little Russian-English dictionary, was going to Uzbekistan and Siberia alone.
If you travel great distances in Russia, you are always flying at night and sliding in and out of time zones. All airport and official clocks were on Moscow time, maybe still are, so neither my watch, which I was doing my damnedest to set correctly, nor my body was ever in sync with the official hour. It would be an exaggeration to say that I hallucinated, but after a while time and space started shifting. I was there but I was not there. The sun was at this point but it was not. Conversations were sudden and absurd. Flying to Tashkent, I was so swathed in heat, I took off all the clothes possible as well as my shoes, and was sitting directly opposite an elderly, well-dressed American and his wife, both of whom were also barefoot. They were courteous people, and we exchanged a few courteous words about the godawfulness of Russian food before they fell asleep. A few hours later the man woke, smiled, looked down at my feet, which were planted a modest inch or two from his, and said, “I’ve always thought I could win any beautiful feet contest I entered, but I think you’d beat me.” He dozed, and neither of us ever spoke to each other again.
Tashkent was where I shook to another whistle, because, exhausted from waiting eight hours in a torrid airport, I put my rope-soled espadrilles on a battered old coffee table, thus scarifying Soviet property. But it was also the place where, sick of the seedy lunchroom to which all foreigners were herded, I stubbornly stood in line at a rooftop Uzbek restaurant until a worn-down waitress finally sat me at a table full of Russian soldiers.
They gave me vodka, I gave them my American cigarettes, and together we talked and laughed about what, I cannot imagine, because we were communicating by semaphore and my little dictionary. But what a good time we had, and how well-companioned I was. My shishkebab was skewered horsemeat, and the champagne that came later, along with indecipherable toasts, was sickly sweet, but no matter. I was in the group, part of the party, not one of whose boisterous participants would have dreamed of daring me to down a glass of Scotch.
I hadn’t danced for a long time, but now I was queen of the hotel’s dollar bar, where I usually went after dinner for a coffee. Young Russians hung around there, in lieu of anywhere else to go, and all asked me to dance, thinking that I, an American, would know the new steps. I didn’t, so I made them up, my shimmies and wiggles and windmill arms followed silently and intently by boys half my age. Then I would go up to my bed and pray for deliverance from a city where the temperature never dropped to bearable and the only cultural institution was a museum filled with photostats and replicas of Lenin’s boyhood furniture. “Oh, God,” I whimpered, “once I am out of here I promise I will never leave my children again.”
Samarkand was different. It was just as hot, but here I could drag my mattress to the tiny balcony outside my room and listen all night to drums and clapping and the whine of Uzbek music. In the morning I rode the trolley out to the market, where all the fish were interred in one big block of dirty ice, climbed the hill on which the sextant of Ulugh Beg, a fifteen-century astronomer, had been excavated, and wandered through a park that was full of—is this possible? is my memory accurate?—Ping-Pong tables. In the afternoon I invariably visited the Shakh-y-Zinda, a complex of mosques, and the tomb of Tamerlane because they were close to the cherry-juice dispenser and the ice cream stand.
I never spoke unless it was to name my destination, except in the evening, when I shared my dinner table with a Canadian woman, a big-boned blonde with a raucous laugh, and an old Anglican minister from Bristol, England. When I told him I had grown up in Bristol, Rhode Island, he exclaimed, “Did you know Canon Parshley? Saint Michael’s Church was so good to us during the war.”
“He was one of my father’s closest friends,” I said excitedly, suddenly out of Samarkand, out of New York, too, and returned to what I persisted in calling “home.” “My sister was a bridesmaid at his daughter Marjorie’s wedding and . . .” There was no stopping my speech, not simply because once again I could use English, but because I could talk about a time before B, before children, before loss.
I had assumed the Canadian woman was much younger than I, since she giggled a lot about Russian officers met in the parks, and had glorious hangovers. Something of a snob, I had her figured for a secretary out on what my parents would have called “a toot,” until the afternoon we were strolling along a street of mud houses and she started talking about herself.
She had never worked, never had to, only taken a course in flower-arranging at a famous London florist’s. Like me, she had been married and divorced, but had given custody of her children, who were the same age as mine, to her husband. How could she be smiling and laughing and having such a good time when the end of her trip meant an empty house? I couldn’t imagine living without my children, and panicked every time I thought they might be taken away. That
fear was why I was so secretive about the balding man; why I lived a life so steeled with propriety.
After the Canadian woman left, the hotel dining room seemed very quiet, and the minister and I spoke often of her gaiety. “But I don’t see,” I said, “how she could have given up her children.”
“I admire her courage,” he said. “She believed her husband could give them a better home.”
Disapproval had edged my voice when I spoke of the woman, and his charity shamed me. I had never thought about whether B or I could have given Snow White and Rose Red a better home. I thought only that I would die without them. Friends said I gave too much of my life to my daughters. The truth is that I would have had no life to give anyone were it not for them. What courage I had was for their sake: I had turned into a tiger the day Snow White was born. But without her and her sister to give me a reason for being, I might have been as flaccid, and as shapeless, as a jellyfish.
The minister’s name is gone from my mind and he is probably gone from this earth, but I can still hear him telling me about his church’s jumble sales and about the years he had saved money for this journey, so wild was he about Islamic architecture, and how sad he was that he couldn’t have saved enough for his wife to see it as well. I remember the nights he didn’t come to the table, because, low on funds, he was eating alone in his room out of cans he’d brought from home. And I remember the morning when, soggy with tiredness, I met him at breakfast and he told me a ghost story.
“One night,” he said, “I was home alone—my wife was visiting our daughter—and had gone to bed when I heard a knock at the kitchen door. I went downstairs, and there was a friend I hadn’t seen in years.
Speaking with Strangers Page 7
