He’d taken up the idea of Joe as the inventor of Caitlin’s adult life, and had written a couple of long, new revelatory chapters in a kind of creative frenzy. It was wonderful work but somewhat sloppy, in the way of first, rapturous drafts. I was torn between slowing him down so that he would write more carefully, and urging him to simply go on and edit later.
Michael solved the dilemma himself by saying that he was bushed— he’d been working overtime at the factory—and needed to pause for a while and just polish his sentences. He also wanted to look at the new stuff in the context of the rest of the manuscript.
His decision pleased me, and so did the ease between us, the lack of sexual tension. I told him about the Gina Berriault story and said that he might want to read it, as much for its keen understanding as for its literary example.
I was getting ready to leave when a woman approached our booth and said hello to me. She was a tall, Nordic-looking blonde. For a discomfiting moment or two I had no idea who she was. Then I realized it was Imogene Donnell’s girlfriend—who’d aroused such domestic yearning in me that day in Brooklyn—and her first name, Patty, fell into place, too.
After I introduced her to Michael, she began to talk about the upcoming art show, and how excited she and Imogene were about it. “Maybe you can make the opening, too,” she said to Michael. “We’ll need all the warm bodies we can get.”
Michael wrote the information down on a paper napkin he’d pulled from the table dispenser. I felt only the smallest pang when I saw how he perked up at her invitation to be a warm body, and the way he looked her over. Well, he was in for a surprise.
There was a surprise for me, too, when I got home. The official invitation to the art show was in my mailbox. But it’s too early, was my first thought. The return address on the envelope was the gallery’s, but my name and address were in Ev’s handwriting; this was a special, preview mailing. I didn’t open the envelope until I was upstairs, in the kitchen, where I used the fish-boning knife to slit the top with surgical precision.
The invitation was stark and striking—bold black letters on a single page of heavy white stock. The heading was the word ANYWAY, which I’d finally come up with as a title for the show, with the artists’ names listed alphabetically underneath, followed by the date, the time, and the place. I shook the envelope, hoping for a personal note, but nothing fell out. Then I propped the invitation against the coffeemaker, so I could see it from every angle in the room.
The title had occurred to me after I’d interviewed all of the artists, examined their slides, and considered and rejected several other possibilities. Then I remembered Imogene shrugging and saying that creating art didn’t make much sense, given the way the world was, but that she did it anyway. I thought of Greta Gordon’s valiant little “night lights,” and about India, whose studio was once in the shadow of the World Trade Center and whose grandparents had been in Bergen-Belsen. The persistence of these artists, like Violet’s, in the face of such dispiriting times and so few rewards, seemed to be at the core of their work.
The members of the collective met and voted unanimously to approve the title. They hadn’t read the essay yet, because I was still refining it, incorporating my motivation for naming the show “Anyway” into the text. It felt good to write it, but less thrilling than when I used to write fiction. Maybe you’re not supposed to be thrilled with your own writing; maybe that precludes the reader’s delight. It was one more thing I might have discussed with my mother, if she had lived, or with Ev, if we hadn’t been so locked in competition.
I’d made a reservation at the Palm Court at the Plaza for my tea with Thomas Roman, because it was a place my mother had liked so much. If Rumpelmayer’s still existed, we might have gone there instead. I was the first to arrive and was shown to a table in that elegant, open room, facing the entrance, where I could watch out for him. “I’ll be the oldest guy there,” he’d written. “You’ll know me by my decrepitude.”
That didn’t turn out to be hyperbole. He came toward me in slow motion, leaning on a wheeled walker, with a tiny, equally aged, but more nimble woman at his side. She seemed to be deliberately decelerating to keep in step with him. Tom Roman was stooped, but still tall; he reminded me of those white-crested wading birds we used to see at sunset at the beach in Chilmark. The woman was his wife, Emily, a “behind-the-scenes person,” as she put it, at Leaves.
“My first reader,” he amended. “She used to read everything that came in, even when there was postage due. She was always afraid she’d miss something.” He looked amused and adoring. Why shouldn’t he be? Emily obviously adored him, too, and she was abidingly radiant. It was hard to imagine her ever lampooning some awful submission to Leaves, just for kicks, the way the other summer interns and I often did at G&F.
“So you’re little Alice,” she said, beaming at me over her menu. “We were so fond of your mother.”
“All those letters, back and forth,” Tom said. “We felt like childhood friends. But we met only once, on the Vineyard,” he added. “You were there, too, but I doubt you’ll remember.”
I didn’t remember, although I scrambled through a mental montage of those distant summers, trying to dredge up a youthful version of this ancient pair. But I knew then, if you can ever know that sort of thing for certain, that my mother’s friendship with Thomas Roman had never been more than that.
“How is the memoir coming along?” he asked.
I’d forgotten about that. All of my “harmless” lies were coming back to haunt me, one by one. My face flared, and I had to take a long sip of iced tea before I could answer. “I’m not actually writing a memoir,” I said. “I’m just trying to find out some things for myself; you know, to sort out the past.” I felt like one of those scam artists who prey on the elderly, as if I’d attempted to wangle their life’s savings from them rather than simple information about my own family.
But neither of them seemed that surprised or perturbed by my confession. Then I took my mother’s Central Park poem from my purse and handed it to Tom, asking if he’d ever seen it before. He read it carefully, at least a couple of times, before shaking his head and passing it on to Emily. She’d never seen it before, either. “This seems like a rough draft,” she said. “Your mother did so many revisions before she sent anything out. Maybe she just didn’t have time to work on this one.”
“That last line is interesting, though,” Tom said, “with its nod to Dickinson.”
“And kind of mysterious,” I said. “I was hoping you’d seen the poem before, or that my mother had spoken to you about it. I keep thinking that it’s a clue to her history, and even my own.”
Tom shook his head again, as if to clear his thoughts, and said, “I’m sorry, Alice.” Then he reached into one of the flap pockets of his jacket and withdrew a small envelope that he handed to me. “But maybe this will help in recapturing the past.”
There was a snapshot inside the envelope, one of those faded, scalloped-edged prints from my childhood. It was taken at the beach—a seagull swooped down above striped umbrellas toward some quarry in the water. I was in the center of the picture’s foreground, squinting as I always did in the sun, and about waist-high to the four adults leaning together to fit in the frame of someone’s Brownie lens. We were all wearing swimsuits.
I would never have recognized Tom and Emily; did they recognize themselves in those dark-haired, nervy-looking strangers? My father had one arm around my mother’s waist and the other clamped to the top of my head, as if he were saying, through the clench of his smile, “Hold still, Alice.” And he would have been right to restrain me. My left arm and leg were only a blur; I was already headed elsewhere, maybe into the future that was now. “God,” I said.
“Yes,” Tom Roman agreed.
“Your father was so much fun,” Emily said. “We laughed and laughed that day.”
Fun! It wasn’t a word I would have associated with my father, but as if the snapshot were only the freeze-fr
ame of a movie, I envisioned our pose broken by the click of the shutter, and then all of them in motion behind me along the shoreline, their eruptions of laughter generated by something witty my father had just said.
“That’s for you,” Tom said, when I tried to hand the snapshot back to him, and I thanked him and tucked it into my purse, alongside my mother’s poem.
We argued briefly over who would pay the check, but my relative youth and alacrity helped me to prevail. They were staying at a hotel downtown, someplace cheaper and more modest than the Plaza, and I put them into a taxi before I started walking home. Floating, almost.
23
I’m standing at the door to my father’s consultation room. There’s a tremendous sense of urgency; someone is ill or injured, maybe me. I’m clutching a book to my chest to stem the rising pain there. Yes, I’m the one who’s ill and my father’s door is locked. I make a fist with my free hand to bang on the door, and then I jiggle the knob and call out to him. I can hear muffled voices and music coming from inside—it sounds like a cocktail lounge—but he doesn’t answer. I run around a street corner and try another door and it swings open much too easily, as if it’s fallen off its hinges. The room it leads to is completely white. I can’t see anything except that whiteness, like the brilliant glare in an operating room. The book is gone; I must have dropped it in the street. “Daddy!” I cry, and then I wake up.
The next day, at Andrea Stern’s, I tried to make meaningful associations with the images in the dream. Even before I got there, it came to me that the book I’d held to my breast represented my mother—her poetry, the pain in her own breast, her wish to calm the feeling in mine. Didn’t I still carry her everywhere, and wasn’t she lost?
I wondered if the whiteness of the room stood for purity, virginity, for something bridal, or maybe it was a kind of void, like the blank pages of another book, the one I hadn’t written. I told myself that my father didn’t come to the door because he couldn’t, because he was senile and confined to a wheelchair. Except he was in his office in the dream, completely restored to his old vigor from the sound of things, and I was a child again.
Dr. Stern stayed on the sidelines, offering encouragement and affirmation as I stumbled toward interpretation, but not pressing me into making connections. I felt so restive, the way I did when I was in labor, with a desire to pace or to just push the damned thing out. At the hospital, they’d made me wait until the baby began to descend, getting ready to present itself to the world. Suzy, especially, took her sweet time. Now I was the one stalling, unwilling or unready to let go. “This is like having a baby,” I groaned, and Dr. Stern said, “Yes, it’s hard work.”
“But maybe it’s only false labor,” I told her, just as I kept telling the doctor in the delivery room, when I wasn’t screaming. There was no backing out then, but before my hour in Dr. Stern’s office was up, I had veered away from the subject, and the most vivid details of the dream began to recede and fade.
I went to Violet’s studio later that day for coffee and a second opinion, and, as I had anticipated, she was far more directive and confrontational. “You women with kids are always looking for analogies to childbirth in everything,” she said. “In your writing and your painting, even in reading your own dreams—it’s such a cliché.”
I glanced at the canvas on her easel; there was certainly nothing life-giving there. “Well, they’re all hard work,” I said, a dull echoing of Andrea Stern.
“Yes, but you have to be more creative in your thinking,” Violet said, “and more radical.”
“So what do you think it means?”
“No, what do you think? And get your mind out of the stirrups for a minute.”
“I think I’m going nuts,” I said. “My marriage, my life, is wrecked, and all I can dream about are my parents. It’s as if I’m arrested at about the age of ten.”
“Ten,” Violet said thoughtfully. “What happened then?”
“You were there, too. You tell me.”
“It’s your dream, Alice. It’s your life.” She wasn’t that directive, after all. And hadn’t Jeannette Joie said something similar about the nagging feeling in my chest?
“That was the year I went to Dr. Pinch,” I told Violet. “His name inspired me, you know. I used to pinch myself, hard, while I was in his office, so I wouldn’t blink.”
Violet laughed. “Did it work?” she asked.
“Of course not.”
“What else?”
“Wait a minute,” I said. “Wait.”
“What?”
“My birthday.”
“What about it?”
“I don’t know. I can see the whole date printed out somewhere, on a calendar or something.” Violet’s birthday was only two weeks later, and we always had back-to-back celebrations. “Did we do anything special at our parties that year?”
“I can’t separate them from one another anymore. Was it the year of that manic clown, or was it when you had the magician with the balloons? Poor Allie, you were so afraid of those balloons.”
“I still am, a little. That awful rubbery squeak when he knotted our party favors. Cute little dachshunds for the girls, airplanes for the boys.”
“Sexist bastard,” Violet said mildly. “We should have reported him to NOW.”
“Actually,” I said, “I preferred the dachshunds. They were pretty cute. Yet I was never prepared for when they popped—the bang and that sudden deflation.”
“Yeah, don’t you just hate that deflation.”
“Women like you,” I said, “are always looking for sexual metaphors.”
“Well, when you can’t get the real thing . . .” Her voice trailed off, and the smile she tried on was feeble. Then she told me that she’d broken up with her married doctor a few weeks before, after she’d seen him walking past Framework one afternoon with his wife and child.
“But you knew that they were part of the deal,” I said.
“Yes, of course.” Violet said. “And I could handle them in theory, just not in the flesh.”
Flesh, I thought, the word evoking nakedness, in a sexual sense, and in the sense of being exposed and undefended. And I knew that my own fleshy presence in the world would keep Violet and Ev from ever getting together, easing a fear I hadn’t even let myself acknowledge before this.
Then I thought of Michael, and of the startling possibility of Violet and Michael—that’s what comes from free association—but she was too old for him, really, just as I had been, and she probably wasn’t even his type or the right temperament. Part of my resistance to the idea, I knew, came from an old, subliminal rivalry between Violet and me, the darker side of our devotion. For an only child, I seemed to have an endless supply of would-be siblings.
“I’m sorry,” I told Violet.
She shrugged. “I’ll live,” she said. “Now back to you. Where were we? You were ten, right?”
But the fused odors of turpentine and linseed oil in the studio, which I’d always thought of with pleasure as Violet’s particular fragrance, had begun to seem suffocating. “Let’s not do this right now,” I said. “We’re not getting anywhere, and it’s creepily like Donna and Ricky trying to solve one of their little mysteries. Besides, I really have to go.” I realized that I’d just given one reason too many, that fatal move of bad liars. I looked at my watch, as if to back up my sudden restlessness with a hint at having actual plans.
The only place I needed to go, though, was home. And once I got there, I wasn’t sure of what to do with myself. It was that transitional time of day you might mark with cocktails and music when you lived with someone else, putting up a cheerful unified front against the onset of darkness. I didn’t feel like drinking alone, but I put a CD on the stereo, the soundtrack from Sleepless in Seattle, with all those gorgeous, sentimental old ballads.
When Jimmy Durante’s raspy, vital voice crackled through the speakers, singing “As Time Goes By,” I closed my eyes and began to slow-dance with an invisible par
tner around the living room. After a couple of turns, I bumped into the sofa, and I opened my eyes and sat down, overwhelmed by feelings I couldn’t exactly name. I remembered dancing with Ev, of course—swaying in place, really—and, long ago, watching my bathrobed parents glide across the floor together to the music of Les Brown or Char-lie Spivak. Like the embracing dancers suspended inside my mother’s perfume bottle. Was any of that, or maybe all of it, the source of the music in my dream? The whole thing was becoming curiouser and curiouser. And then I saw myself, barefoot, perched on my father’s black leather slippers, being whirled around the room, too, with my head flung back, until I was dizzy with delight and vertigo.
I shut off the stereo and went into the bedroom, where I took out my mother’s folder. I lay across the bed and opened it, reaching for the letter from the New Yorker editor in its separate pocket. There was the date— November 18, 1963—my tenth birthday, on the envelope’s postmark, not on an old calendar, as I’d suggested earlier to Violet. This was surely just a coincidence, but it seemed weighted with some significance I didn’t understand.
Later, when I was in bed again, absently watching the news on television, it occurred to me that the whiteness in my dream was a presence more than a void or an absence. But I couldn’t elaborate on that impression, and I fell asleep soon after that, still thinking about the dream, and hoping for and dreading a rerun, or even a sequel.
The next morning I realized that I hadn’t dreamed at all, at least not that I could remember. It was as if my head had been erased, leaving only chalky traces of what had been written there. I had a date to meet Suzy near Bloomingdale’s for lunch, and to go shopping with her afterward for bedding. Unlike Suzy, I’ve never liked shopping very much. It’s always seemed to be as much of a time-killing social ritual as a simple convention of free enterprise. But now I had plenty of time to kill; it made me contemplate how many hours of most couples’ lives are expended on ordinary domestic matters, like cooking meals and eating them, making love or plans or conversation.
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