• • •
More than a week had passed since I’d spoken to Hallie, and I was feeling incredibly guilty. She had said she wanted time alone, and in truth I’d been too busy to check up on her that frequently. I’d found someone to take over the lease on my Brooklyn apartment, and so I’d been packing my things, destined either for Rhinehart’s or storage. I was also training my replacement for Marty, although we were calling it “a leave of absence,” and I was often rushing from there to the photo lab or the gallery. When I finally got Hallie on the phone, I tried to break the awkward silence by apologizing for the flowers.
“What flowers?” There was a pause. “Oh, yeah. Forget about it.”
“Why don’t I come over there?”
She coughed a couple of times. It sounded rattly, like an old lady’s cough. “Listen, now’s not a good time. My show’s on.”
“You’re watching TV? In the middle of the day?”
She sighed in annoyance, as if giving in to a telemarketer. “All right, fine, come over.”
As I was leaving the house, Rhinehart suggested I bring the red plate. It was something I’d owned since childhood. My father had told me it had magical properties, putting a good mood into the meal and then into me.
“I don’t think it would do anything. Look at the way the flowers went over.”
“I’ll eat off of it, then. I’m feeling a little low myself.”
He did look pale, and there was a fine sheen of sweat on his forehead. I put my hand on it, but it was cool. “What’s wrong?”
“Just sometimes I worry about the future.”
“That’s not like you.”
It was late afternoon, and the melancholy orange light was making squares on the wall. I noticed the shadow of Rhinehart’s small tree, the seated Buddha statue that he had by the window. He said, “For the first time, I really wish I were a younger man. I feel my life is just beginning now.”
• • •
Hallie looked terrible, although I couldn’t pinpoint exactly how, it was that indefinable thing that grief did to the posture and skin and expression. She was leaking sadness. I was alarmed. As I hugged her, she just stood there, letting me feel the bones of her spine beneath her sweatshirt.
In a clogged voice, she said, “It’s a real party here, can you tell?” I followed her into the house—she’d lost weight, her jeans bagged in the rear. We passed my flowers, which were still in their wrapping, lying dead on the hallway floor. I picked them up, looking for the trash. She had already retreated into the living room.
The place smelled like an ashtray. “You’re smoking again?” I called out.
She was balled up on the couch with a lit cigarette, releasing dirty trails of smoke. “You want something?”
I shook my head.
“I don’t think I have anything, anyway. I stopped eating. Remember when we were young, and some guy dumped us, we’d say, hey, at least we’ll get skinny. But it doesn’t look so good on us anymore. Now we just look old.”
I tried to inhale shallowly to avoid taking in the smoke.
“So he’s gone.”
I looked around the room, instinctively, as if to verify it.
“Not before telling me I was a sick person, ‘mal de cabeza.’ Kept shouting it. He shouted nonstop for two days and then accused me of trapping him inside an insane asylum. He claims he was never with Kate, although he may be now, who knows? He went somewhere. I don’t know where.”
“He’s just angry about the party. And embarrassed. He’ll come back when he calms down.”
She shook her head. “No, we discussed that. He says there’s something not right with me. He thought once we married, I’d settle down, but instead I’ve gotten crazier, and he doesn’t want to spend an entire life fighting. Maybe he’s right. Maybe I am sick. I may have imagined the Kate thing—how fucking sad is that? I almost wish he had been with her now.”
She looked as if she was going to cry, and I made a move towards her. She put her hand up. “Don’t hug me.”
Her eyes had grown dark, as if her thoughts had shifted from self-pity to something malicious. “He’s been wanting to go back to Spain this entire time. What would I do there? I don’t speak Spanish. Anywhere outside Madrid I get bored in two days. Now he can just go—he doesn’t have to worry about me.”
She abruptly shifted her gaze in my direction, and I blushed, as if caught doing something wrong. “I wish I had artistic talent,” she said. “Then I could turn this shit into something. A poem or a painting. Isn’t that what you do?”
“Not always. I’m not sure what that word ‘artist’ means most of the time.”
Hallie said impatiently, “But you are one. Walking around with that camera bag.” She gestured to it. “You even brought it here. Were you going to take my picture?”
I shook my head. “I just bring it everywhere. In case.”
“Exactly. What normal person does that? Your strange tastes, the weird shit you notice that no one else does. You don’t wear much makeup.” She smiled, or it was a pinched look around her lips that resembled a smile. “You really don’t think of yourself as an artist? Is this because you haven’t had a real show yet?”
I felt the ebullient rise of my news, which was in the entirely wrong key for this setting. Still, I took her question seriously. Lately, in all my dealings with the gallery, I’d been identifying more with the word “professional” than “artist.” I’d thought myself an artist when I was younger, obsessively sketching the tortured workings of my heart in charcoal or pastels with the music blaring in the background. I’d felt the most genuinely artistic when I hadn’t been producing anything of quality. I started to tell Hallie this, but she was staring vacantly out at the yard, so I stopped. It was a hot, humid day, and you could hear the whirring of insects, see the heat rising like a mist off the grass—it looked uncut. Had she fired the gardener? The entire place seemed to be falling apart, as if Adán had been gone for years.
I wondered if I should suggest a walk. The A/C was turned up so high, it was bone-chillingly cold in here, and awkward, like at a funeral parlor. Hallie was wrapped in a comforter, a little smoke-huffing cocoon.
The cat rubbed against my legs. I picked him up and then remembered pregnant women shouldn’t handle cats—was that just an old wives’ tale? I was full of dubious information lately. I put him back down with a soft plunk near where the end table used to be. Furniture was missing. The antique desk and chair that Adán had had shipped over from Spain. The lamp that was on it, as well as a tapestry by the staircase, supposedly the mate to one in the Met, and a small oil painting of Adán’s grandfather. “He took the furniture?”
Hallie looked confused, as if I had pulled her away from a television show. The TV was off in this room, but I could hear it on in the bedroom and pictured the sickly blue glow on the unmade bed, the room’s stale, sour smell.
Focusing on the vacant corner, she said, “He didn’t take anything.”
“Then where is it?” I wondered, not for the first time, if she was taking pills—she seemed so out of it. “Do you still have that storage locker?”
“I haven’t had that thing in years.” She ground her cigarette out in a white saucer she was using for an ashtray. Then lit another. “I put up an ad on Craig’s List.” Gesturing with the lighter, as if it were a magic wand, she pointed to an empty corner. “That table with the antique tiles went for thirty-five bucks. I wanted fifty, but he talked me down. I think he may have been a student at Fordham. Cute.”
She was laughing in a frighteningly joyless way and then stopped. “Listen—no offense but the hostess thing is really wearing me out.”
I didn’t stand up right away. I needed to take her with me, but I didn’t know where to bring her, or how to convince her to come. “Tell me what—”
“I don’t like blubbering about my problems. I don’t see the point.” And then, “I hate it when you stare at your hands with that mopey look to make me feel guilt
y. I have a lot of rage, Terry. It’s not bittersweet or sad or something you want to hug. It’s ugly and dirty. I’ve been abandoned. The thoughts I have are sickening.”
“Like what?”
“Like finding him, wherever he is, and cutting off his testicles with a pair of scissors.”
I started to laugh. “I don’t think he’d let you get close enough.”
“I’d drug him with the pills I was prescribed after my operation last year and the tranquilizers I’m on now.” She was looking at me with her large icy gaze—it was as if I could see clear through her body into the nothingness on the other side. “But I’ve changed my mind. Lately I’ve been thinking of inviting him over so that he could watch me slit my throat.”
I could hear my own breathing, and she hunched up and said defensively, “You asked.”
I knew that I would have to stay there for a few days, and I got up to call Rhinehart to tell him. I gave clipped instructions, the clothes he needed to bring, a detailed grocery list, but otherwise said little. It was as if Hallie and I were hostages in that house, and I didn’t trust the terrible thing holding us not to make a sudden move.
• • •
I slept with her on the king-size mattress that Adán used to sleep on, with sheets damp from her night sweats and her crying, her blowing her nose in them. I found the Spanish tapestry balled up behind the couch. Frequently, in the middle of the night, she would wrap herself in it and drift out of the room, shoeless, like a ghost. My pregnancy grogginess had burned off in this crazy house, and I got up and followed her. Sometimes she yelled at me over her shoulder, calling me her jailer. Other times she looked through me, the same way she did to the cat, who also padded behind her, hoping for a handout.
When I first arrived, I cased the house for her supply of pills, intending to monitor her intake. I found nothing, but followed the same routine daily. First the bedroom. Then I moved on to the hall bathroom, its vanity crammed with old hairbrushes and makeup samples and the cold medicine that I decided to remove just in case. I flushed the toilet to make it sound like a legitimate bathroom visit, even though she was dead asleep, having wandered the house and part of the yard all night, smoking and crying.
I opened the door, and she was standing there. I gasped.
“How come you were using this bathroom?” she said.
“It was closer to the kitchen, where I was going to have a snack.”
She snorted. “Yeah, right. Don’t you think if I wanted you to have my medication, I would have given it to you?”
“Medication! Who’s even prescribing it? They’re drugs.”
“They came from a physician. I picked them up at CVS.”
“But they’re also lethal, and you said you were thinking about suicide.”
Without taking her eyes off me, she fished her pack of cigarettes out of her robe. “Not suicide—revenge fantasies. You weren’t listening.” She was looking more alert, and I wondered if maybe she’d run out of the pills, or was rationing them herself. Exhaling smoke near my face, she said, “I’m not too keen on you coming over here to play house—I’m thinking about kicking you out.”
“But tranquilizers! Hallie! After what happened to Constance!”
She looked at me, horrified. “Why are you bringing that up?”
“Why? Why?” It seemed tremendously important that she see the connection. As it was, we barely discussed it—all those years together in college, thousands of conversations we’d had lying in our beds in the East Village apartment, and we’d only made passing references to that afternoon. It was like we’d silently agreed to erase it. “Tell me you’re not thinking about it right now!”
Hallie turned, walked back into her bedroom, and shut the door. I heard the click of the lock. Never before had she locked me out of a room she was in.
• • •
It was near the end of our senior year of high school, and we were walking back to her house. Hallie was jealous because the day before we’d all been together in her mother’s bedroom, and I was talking about Todd, who was the closest I’d ever come to having a boyfriend, although we hadn’t really done anything except kiss and stare at each other. I was describing him for Constance in minute detail—she was a great audience—the blond hair that curled around his ears, the way he held my hand, two fingers dangling out to stroke mine, his likes and dislikes: strawberry ice cream, no okra. Hallie was standing nearby, ready to correct me if I strayed even fractionally from the truth. Sexually, she had gone much further than me, had given a blow job, even, which she boasted about to me in lurid detail, but she didn’t have a proper boyfriend and so was limited as to the amount of information she could disclose about any one person to her family.
Constance, having had many lovers, was well versed on the subject of boyfriends. “Playing hard to get is for women who have no confidence. Those not sophisticated in love. There are many ways to seduce a man, a million and one, but they all involve showing and eliciting desire. Once you’re at the stage where you have him in your pocket, do whatever you wish. Everything you do will have his knees turn to water.”
I was thinking she should drill that into her daughter, who lived by the rule of never letting a guy think you were interested, even if you were half-undressed in the backseat of his car.
“You’re going to have to give him up soon anyway,” Hallie said, and then informed her mother, “He’s going to the University of Colorado.” We’d accepted offers from the same college upstate. At that moment, I wished I never had to see her again, and I already regretted the fact that we’d even applied to the same schools.
“I wouldn’t worry about the distance,” Constance said to me. “It can be an aphrodisiac for two people meant to be in love.” And she proceeded to tell us a racy story that didn’t involve Hallie’s father even marginally. It concerned an affair she’d had with a foreign director, back when she was sixteen and acting in plays in New York. I was sitting on the edge of her bed, transfixed, and imagining an older and worldlier version of Todd taking me to dinner at a little Italian restaurant and then undressing me in a boutique hotel in the theater district.
The next day, a Friday, Hallie claimed to have seen Todd in the parking lot of the TCBY, in a car with this girl Mona—an obvious lie meant to cut me. So on the walk home, I was giving her the silent treatment. I would have ditched her entirely and headed back to my house except I wanted to ask Constance’s advice. Todd had invited me to dinner on Saturday night, and I was uncertain how to behave once the check came. Should I offer to pay my portion? Two blocks from her house, Hallie began coaxing me to talk to her, she couldn’t stand being ignored, and was alternately insulting and flattering me, until we arrived at her front door and opened it.
I was the one who saw Constance first, sprawled out facedown on the stair landing. My first thought was that this was a practical joke she was playing on us, although I couldn’t figure out what it was. Her legs were spread open, and her crotch was visible to anyone walking in. It was the first thing you saw, that dark space between her legs where the nightgown had ridden up. Next you saw the carcass of a cooked chicken, which was on the bottom step. Hallie ran over to her and began straightening her clothes. “We have to call 911,” I said, and since I was the only one there to do it, I went into the kitchen and called. When I came back into the room, Hallie was trying to wake her up. “She’s breathing,” she said hopefully to me.
“Okay, good, just leave her. Stop shaking her. She’s going to be okay. They’re coming.” I kept repeating this. An overturned bottle of Perrier had made a small waterfall down the stairs, and I picked it up and clutched it to my chest. I didn’t want to go near Constance. Hallie had arranged her mother over her lap like a giant doll and was stroking her hair, saying, “Don’t worry, it’s just Terry here. She doesn’t care if your mouth’s open.” I nodded foolishly in agreement.
It seemed like we were there forever, just the three of us. It was so quiet, we could hear each other br
eathing. Then there was confusion and noise and blaring lights and the paramedics came in with a stretcher and machines, and moved us away to the periphery, and Hallie called her father. Or maybe he was already there. They all went off in the ambulance together. I stayed behind, and instinctively, maybe inappropriately, went up to Constance’s room to wait. I ran my hand over the bedspread and dresser, over the perfume in antique bottles with pump sprays. The scent of her. Constance believed that perfume should be worn in the hot spots, on the wrists, behind the ears and knees. Every time I visited, she squirted a fine, elegant mist on me, and all the way home I would discreetly sniff at myself, pretending to rub an itch above my lips. For Christmas that past year, she’d bought me my own bottle, and I was rationing it to last me through college. I was thinking these things. I was thinking of how Constance had pulled me aside a few weeks ago and told me how much she was going to miss me when I was away at school.
The phone rang. Constance’s ivory phone, with a dial, where she took all her calls. The receiver smelled like her. I hesitated before saying hello.
It was Hallie. Constance had died twenty minutes after they got to the hospital.
Hallie and her father returned dazed and tearless and strangely intact, as if they’d been out somewhere else, to a movie. I was standing in the foyer waiting for them, a tissue balled up in my hand, bawling, and it was as if everything had been turned inside out, and I was the bearer of this horrifying news. I didn’t want to go home and was afraid they would ask me to leave. But instead Hallie’s father excused himself very politely to me, as if I were his guest, and went up to bed. Hallie was in the mud room, rummaging around for the flashlight. The cat was missing and she was going to look for it. I thought it had been scared off by the paramedics, and would come home eventually, but I was in no state to argue, or to do anything. I went into the living room and curled up in a fetal position on the couch. For hours, I listened to her outside, calling for Pooky. At times, I also heard Hallie’s father crying upstairs, a terrible, frighteningly intimate sound, like hearing him have sex. I covered my ears. Hallie called for that cat. I dozed in and out of sleep, as the beam of her searchlight scrolled past the windows.
The Rest of Us: A Novel Page 26
