Approaching a collection of doors, he heard a familiar male laugh and then some giggling. Robert opened the door just a crack and peered through—illuminated by a corner lamp, his brother stood with his back to Robert while Claudia knelt in front of him. At first Robert imagined the most obvious, and the idea was so shocking that he almost looked away until he realized, relieved, that it was an optical illusion—she was bending over a table as Barry watched her. Robert knocked softly. Barry rushed over and, seeing who it was, told him to come in.
“At least lock the door, for God’s sake,” Robert said, closing it behind him.
Claudia looked up and in one fast and efficient motion sucked up what was in front of her. He noticed the perspiration on her forehead and upper lip, and when she stood up, shakily, and came toward the two brothers, Robert took out a handkerchief and wiped her face.
“Come on Robert,” she said, taking his hand. “Join me.”
“Claudia, I don’t do that stuff, not since Gwen was born.”
“Suit yourself! Little Gwen, so pretty, I don’t care what Crea says about her nose —” She went back to the table, where the LP in its jacket lay, and ran her finger along the cardboard edge, collecting whatever residue was left.
“How much has she done?”
“I don’t know; she’s chasing it. Not a good place to be. Can you get me some whiskey?” Barry asked. “I have a few Valium with me. She needs to come down a little.”
“Who says I want to?” Claudia called out.
“There’s nothing left,” Barry replied. Claudia paced back and forth by the window, running her fingers through her hair. “I’m all tapped out, honey.”
“Can’t you leave her alone?” Robert asked.
“She’d just get it somewhere else,” Barry said. “And I won’t let anything happen to her.”
“How are you so sure?”
Barry’s black-brown eyes darted left and right. “I won’t let anything happen to her,” he said, so softly that Robert could hardly hear him, “because I love her.”
“That’s rich,” Robert mumbled.
“She’s the prettiest, classiest girl I ever met,” he replied, sounding to Robert suddenly fourteen, the age when women had first puzzled and betrayed him. Claudia paced back and forth in front of the window, holding a Kleenex to her nose.
“She was that way once,” Robert whispered.
“You wanted her, didn’t you?” Barry asked. “Years ago? And she didn’t want you.”
“This is all too sick for me. I’m leaving.”
“Get us that whiskey I asked for,” he said. “Please.”
Robert walked down the long hall and out the back door. What was it with Barry and Tracey and all of them, insisting he had feelings for Claudia—the only woman in his life for whom he felt only a brotherly compassion? Was this what happened when you hid your past and kept your secrets from the people around you? They grabbed at pieces of your history and used them to justify whatever conclusion they liked?
The bartender had gone inside and he found a mostly empty bottle, poured a few fingers into a paper cup. Above his head, the last reds and pinks, then blues and greens, exploded in front of him, illuminating the valley in greater and greater bursts, like the last furious lovemaking at the end of an affair. Taking the scotch, he delivered it to the room where Barry and Claudia had been. The door was open and they were gone. He placed the glass on a side table by the bed, then wiped the album cover off with a corner of the bedspread. The Dave Clark Five. The same one Tracey had listened to in their first year of college. He stared for a moment at the smiling, clean-cut young men in their dark ties and narrow lapels, and then quickly left the room.
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
Summer, part II
For the rest of the summer, with Crea and Gwen at the beach, Robert was at liberty on weekday evenings. Sometimes he stayed at work, but more often than not he felt restless—even the most ambitious of lawyers didn’t tend to stay past 8:00 p.m. after July 4. Prudence Brothers had sent Barry to Hong Kong as a reward for being one of their top brokers, and Tracey was either off with one of his young tennis partners or in Tuxedo with Claudia. Instead of enjoying this solitude, as he’d expected, Robert felt distracted and uneasy.
And so, after work on most Tuesdays, and more than a few Wednesdays as well, he found himself sitting on the cheap cloth couch he’d bought for Sally’s use, beer in hand as he sweated in the heat—she had no air-conditioning—and they huddled in front of a rusty portable fan that she’d borrowed from a friend. There was no question of her coming to his place to enjoy the central air; she’d nixed it before he even had a chance to ask. Sometimes they watched television, or played Monopoly, but, though the heat made it hard to eat, he could usually persuade her to get some food in the air-conditioned diner on the ground floor.
She allowed him to pick up the check, that much she would abide, explaining that if he wanted to eat out, he’d have to pay. Her life was not like his, she informed him; she wasn’t out spending money every night. Once, he was able to persuade her to go with him someplace better. She put on a dress and heels and they went to the Union Square Café. He thought she’d like it, though he did not say so—she was temperamental, proud; he had to be careful what he did and didn’t do for her, and how he introduced it. He said only that he wanted a change of neighborhood. The two-story restaurant, which had opened the year before, was popular, and he’d had to reserve a week in advance even for a Wednesday night, but he didn’t fear seeing people he knew. He could look anyone in the eye and say, honestly, that they were just friends.
What he particularly enjoyed was watching her as she looked at the menu and glanced around the room at the well-dressed patrons, the hum of low conversation, the white tablecloths, oak floors, and salmon-colored walls. He remembered his younger self, and what it had felt like the first time he went to a good restaurant and was truly waited on. It was in college, when the parents came to town and he was in a large enough group that he could blend in, awed, observant, anonymous.
He saw her watching him; she mimicked his table manners, put her napkin in her lap, sat up straight. When the food arrived, artfully arranged on large bright yellow plates, she smiled broadly. “They make it so pretty!” she said. But in the middle of the meal, when he asked her how her food was, she replied: “Best fish I’ve had in my life, but it’s dangerous to get used to what you can’t afford.”
“That sounds dire.” Like something his mother would have said. “It’s just a meal. And I can afford it.” But of course he knew, understood. And it did not stop him from pressing his advantage. No matter what she might say, there was no child anywhere who dreamt of coming to Manhattan to cook a hamburger on an ancient gas range in a Pullman kitchen. All dreamt of the same thing: perfectly orchestrated dinners, Broadway shows, art openings, and glamorous clothes. Success. He could offer her those things. It was something he could do.
They shared a crème brûlée, and he watched her lick the cream slowly off her spoon, willing himself to concentrate on her words. She was talking about Atlantic City. She had gone, too, as a child, was jealous, she said, that he’d known it in the days of the real Steel Pier. She’d only known the Boardwalk with gambling, and its strangely commercial glitz and decrepitude, the ladies in polyester pants playing the slot machines, the high rollers from Japan buying saltwater taffy with their platinum cards. Yet she knew of the old AC, too, from her parents and their photo albums: pictures of family members posing in their best clothes in front of Convention Hall; and a series of images of her mother, on the beach in a plaid two-piece and cat’s-eye sunglasses, being lifted into the air by Sally’s father, who wore plaid swim trunks and cradled an unlit cigar in his mouth. “I was fascinated by this other life they had,” she said, “when they were young. It’s so strange to think of parents as ever being young, isn’t it?”
Robert, too, had sometimes glanced at those old albums and wondered where those people had gone. His mo
ther had once been a bride. She had spent money on a wedding dress, a nice long one, and carried a bouquet. Back then she could smile with both sides of her mouth. And had long hair. His father was once slim, or almost slim. Healthy. What had happened? Would that slow erosion of spirit—was it even slow?—happen to him? Had it already?
HE TOLD HIMSELF IT wasn’t his imagination how she was often home when he stopped by at night—did she stay in on the off chance he’d wander by? Was it because she was saving herself, not going out on what she considered “real” dates, on account of the boyfriend? Or did she simply need to be entertained and treated after a day of lugging that heavy box around? He knew that sometimes she changed into a dress after work, and he wondered if it was for him. Then, if he told her she looked nice, she’d hold up her hands to show him the blackness of her fingers, as if for contrast. But she wanted him to think of her, somehow, as a lady and not a girl who knelt in front of men’s crotches all day and serviced their shoes. And once, when he showed up in the lobby on a Thursday, and she hadn’t been expecting him, she made him wait in the living room while she showered and styled her hair, and changed her clothes, just to sit with him in the apartment and then go to a diner. He found this moving; it harkened back to his childhood, when people did work in one set of clothes, then came home and changed into a different self, a different set of clothes, for their leisure time—to leave all that behind.
Slowly, he began to tell her other things about himself, and eventually, in early August, he mentioned Gwendolyn. The mention of a woman sparked her interest—again, he wondered, was she interested in a jealous way or a curious one? He could not tell.
What possessed him to tell her—was it the heat, his loneliness, a sense he’d had lately that no one around him knew who he was? She was a good listener, and something about the calm, relentless focus of her blue eyes encouraged him. When, two weeks after he’d first mentioned the subject, he finally got to the end, the suicide, and all that followed, he wondered if he’d done the right thing; he had never told another human being that story. Now, as he’d once been to Tracey, she was the possessor of his secret. Had Tracey once felt this way with him? He had told someone, and the earth had not opened up and swallowed him.
“That’s a horrible, terrible story,” she said when he was done, and then she got up and moved farther away on the couch. “No wonder you’re so confused.”
“I’m not confused,” he said, wondering why she had suddenly gotten up. Had he repulsed her somehow? “I’m trusting you not to tell anyone. Even Crea doesn’t know all that.”
“Sure,” she said. “I don’t see myself running into her at one of those fund-raising luncheons. But why would she care? Gwendolyn’s gone.”
He did not say a word about his daughter. Did not describe how, holding her in his arms for the first time, he had felt a depth of emotion he didn’t think possible ever again. Crea had been in labor for so long and then endured the emergency C-section. In the first hours, when he came to see her, she’d been only half awake. They had talked for months of naming a girl Alexandra, Alexa for short, but it had been easy to get her to sign the birth certificate with a different name; she’d have signed anything, just then, to get rid of him so she could sleep. After she and the baby were stronger, Jack made things easier by hating the name Gwendolyn, Gwen for short, and claimed that Crea had been manipulated. It was, to Crea, another moment of her father sticking his nose in where it didn’t belong—when, exactly, she welcomed his interference, and when it was too much for her, remained a mystery to Robert—but soon even Crea had to admit that the name suited the child. Now they could not imagine her as anything but Gwen. But writing Gwendolyn Vishniak on the birth certificate that first night—doing what his people had done for centuries with the names of the dead—he had finally felt able to put his grief to rest.
“Maybe there was a time when I might have told her, but now, too many years have passed,” he said to Sally. “She’d know I kept the information back for a reason. She’d know that I wasn’t in a state to marry anyone when I proposed—I was still in love with someone else.”
“Who’d have guessed that you have such romantic notions about love?”
“I was younger than you are when it all happened,” he said, “and not half so tough.”
“I’m not tough at all,” she said. “If I were, you probably wouldn’t have told me all that. But how did someone so romantic turn around and marry for money?”
“Who says I married for money?”
“Hey, I call it like I see it.” She got up again and moved from the end of the couch to the other side of the room.
“Sally, why do you keep moving away from me? You’re practically in the next room.”
“Don’t take it the wrong way.”
“What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”
“Calm down. From my experience, when men tell sad stories from their past, they generally think that they’ve earned being comforted. And for most of you, that means having sex. ‘Look at me, I emoted, now make me feel better.’ But I don’t have therapy sex with anyone. I was just taking precautions.”
He laughed. “I don’t know why I even put up with you.”
“Am I wrong? Isn’t this leading to—‘and that’s why my wife doesn’t understand me’?”
“I’ve just entrusted you with something no one else knows about.”
“I know,” she said, softening for a moment, “and I’m honored by your trust. And I’ll uphold it, I swear. But, am I wrong about the other stuff?”
“No,” he said, “not really.”
“Take that wicked smile off your face,” she said. “I want to help you, you know, to do the right thing.”
“The right thing,” he said, coming toward her, “by whose determination?”
“Don’t come any closer with that legal argument. I’m serious.”
He felt sweaty and frustrated. “I’ve never had to work this hard with any woman.”
“So I’m a refreshing change,” she said, taking his arm and walking him to the door.
THE NEXT DAY, SALLY was at the office to shine shoes. He always brought extra pairs because she had told him that summers were slower, and while she worked they joked and chatted. When she was done she sometimes lingered and, on this day, Wilton Henry walked in and found her sitting in the chair across from his desk, like a client.
“Sally never sits in my office like this,” he said.
“You never bring in three pairs of shoes for me to shine,” she replied.
“And whose office is this, exactly?” he asked, smiling at Robert as he shut the door.
“That was bad,” Robert said, and shook his head, but he’d enjoyed the look on Henry’s face. He’d been living a very safe life, playing by the rules. Even a small, innocent infraction felt oddly invigorating. “You want to meet me for a drink when you’re done?” he asked.
“If you’ll pay,” she said. “I’m not doing so well today.”
“Happily,” he said. “I’ll even buy you a meal, if you like.” Then he held out a twenty. “Take it,” he said. “I’m having a good day.”
“How do you know when you’re having a good day? You don’t count out your tips at six o’clock.”
“I don’t always need to make money to have a good day,” he said. “Sometimes I need other things.”
She stared uncomfortably at the floor, then left, and Robert plunged into his work, hoping to get absorbed enough to make the rest of the day fly.
AT SEVEN, HE FOUND her in the lobby, chatting with the security guys while throngs of tanned men in cotton trousers and polo shirts, and women in sundresses and sneakers, carrying their shoes in tote bags, rushed toward the doors. When Sally saw him she smiled and waved comically, as if from across a large landmass. Coming closer, he saw that she’d scrubbed her hands, replenished her lipstick, and changed from sneakers to sandals. Instead of the polish-stained blue T-shirt he’d seen her in earlier, she wore a fresh p
ink one. The box was gone, too—the shoe shiners kept them in a storage closet at an investment banking firm that had been the company’s first client. She looked so bright and optimistic, so fresh and alive. He’d known her for months and had not so much as kissed her on the lips. He slipped his arm possessively around her waist and for a few precious seconds felt her hip against his own. Then, before she could say a word, he shepherded her out the door and down the steps to a waiting cab.
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
Robert is up for partner
In the fall his wife and daughter returned, and he went back to working long hours. In September he saw Sally after work a few times for a quick drink, then went back to the office, staying most nights until eleven or twelve. But in October he did not see Sally after work at all—there was no “after work” for him; he worked fifteen-hour days, getting home at midnight and dropping into bed. To make things worse, in October she cut her days at the office and shared the route with another girl, saying that she had rehearsals for a showcase. Her arrival on Wednesdays now became the high point in his week, the one moment that he could shut the door and be fully himself. They knew things about each other now, personal things, and that knowledge created an intimacy that when experienced only once a week, in a small, windowless office, by a man who now granted himself so little leisure, was excruciatingly pleasurable, so much so that he always kept her there longer than he should. This, he knew, was what the self-help books called an emotional affair. In this decade of heightened sexual anxiety—and the inescapable fact that sex could be dangerous, even deadly—the phrase was everywhere. Still, he was a lawyer, and he knew the importance of technicalities. An emotional affair was not, by anyone’s definition, the affair that counted, the affair that would end his marriage. Or so he believed. And once she was gone, and he closed the door, he knew how to put his head down and work; he had always known how to do that, and so he worked, blocking out the rest.
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