“It didn’t work out,” I answered, smiling back at her.
She did that thing that I hated, studied my face while saying nothing, roving her eyes over me for too long a time. But I thought I could read in her a new factor being contemplated: some intimation of a previously hidden, not-so-Catholic recalcitrance.
“Well, please help Dolores and Marta,” she said, and turned on her heel.
I passed Sidney’s sister, Anne, briefly greeted her and her husband, Mitchell, and was introduced to their daughter, Shoshanna, a skinny, all-elbows girl eating herself alive with self-consciousness. I could only imagine the condescension her cousin Cornelia probably showered on her. Anne was never happy to be in Clarice’s house, and I felt her trailing me with a sad face as I made my way toward the stairs to the kitchen. Cornelia saw me and immediately cut her eyes away.
Everything seemed to be passing in underwater-like slow motion. I saw the preening young writer from Clarice’s Friday luncheons, Broyer Weatherhill, not yet thirty and too formally dressed, with comb marks cut through his gelled hair. He was talking to the Calvin Klein blondes while scanning the crowd, ever the player looking for an angle. He raised his eyebrows to greet me and I nodded. The blondes swung out like bookends, took me in with a competitive girl sniff, and then tossed their collective head and turned from me.
And somehow I knew then that my place had disappeared from the table. I was not going to be eating up here with these folks at all.
I looked, but found Jerry nowhere.
Anyway: I was there to serve.
*
After the last dessert plate had been cleared from the table, I sat at the kitchen counter downstairs with Dolores and Marta, staring at the plate they had fixed for me. Turkey, stuffing, homemade cranberry sauce, haricots verts, some colorful squash thing, all lovingly arranged. They had even accented it with a garnish, a needless, pretty flourish: a parsley sprig and a tiny fan of spiced apple slices. I pictured myself picking up the plate, calmly carrying it to the door, and Frisbeeing it across the backyard canyon.
“Come, come, tienes que comer,” they said to me, pointing to the food.
Instead I sat tracing the last few hours over in my head. Everything came back to me in miserable little flashes. I saw myself carrying an enormous gravy boat around the table, a foolish thing the size of a soup tureen, and Anne giving me a confused, disbelieving look as she picked up the ladle to serve herself, mouthing the words, Why don’t you sit? Cornelia squirming in her seat, waving me away. And then, as if seeing it through the pinhole of a silent movie camera, I replayed in my head the sight of one of the Calvin Klein girls dropping the ladle back in too forcefully, calling herself butterfingers as gravy exploded across my chest.
That’s why you should wear the uniform, the disembodied voice of Clarice said from across the table.
But the worst and the strangest was Jerry. He presented himself after everyone was seated and noisily took a chair at the far end of the table. In a kind of fog I saw that he was in his pajamas, with his ugly woolen scarf twined around his neck. When I came to him, he wordlessly took the ladle, helped himself, and returned it to the dish. And then he turned to me with a face like stone.
He said nothing, spoke up for me not at all, but simply sat there like a princeling and let himself be served.
I stared into the plate in front of me, and my head was so thick with misery that I saw nothing. In a moment there was an odd sensation and I realized that Marta had picked up my hand from my lap and was trying to shape it around my fork.
Dolores climbed down from her seat at the counter and went to get some pie. Marta tipped her head in the opposite direction, toward the swinging doors, and with this she was indicating the upstairs world, the kingdom of white people, and Clarice in her ass-whipping surety. Marta had a determined look on her face and, quietly lest Dolores hear her, whispered to me, “Don’ let the beech win.”
“But how?” I said.
“I see everything. That boy is in love with you.”
I shook my head and slid from the stool. I went outside to smoke a cigarette.
By now I had discovered that there was a spot where I could sit, on what was left of an old brick border swollen out over time by the roots of a mimosa tree, and be invisible to all the windows of the house. I had to be up against the stockade fence, right where an old yellow gravel path abruptly dead-ended, and if I moved even inches to the right I would be seen. But if I was still and steady, I would be invisible. I sat there and lit my cigarette.
I was thinking.
I was thinking that I didn’t understand these people, the game-playing, the quiet cruelty. No one was screaming in anyone’s face, which to my mind would have been a lot more honest. I wondered about my own course of learning their ways, and about the fact that I could smile back in matched falseness to false Clarice.
This was nothing I could have done in the past. And this was no way I wanted to be.
Jerry I couldn’t even think of, it all felt so false now and so painful.
I needed to get out of there. I needed a plan.
I mashed out my cigarette on the ledge beside me, pinched and rolled out the last bit of tobacco, and scraped the filter along the brick ledge. I thought of a thousand cigarettes I had smoked and mashed in my hometown while I played the waiting game that was like drip, drip, drip, water torture until I could finally escape and find someplace real, someplace where I could be.
I’d tried to clean off my dress, my Bergdorf’s-via-Domsey’s-in-Brooklyn good black dress, and looked down to see brown food that I’d somehow missed caked along the length of my serving arm. Disgusting. I pulled at the sleeve, folding it together to scrape it against itself and “clean” it. I thought of my mother and her thousand depressing economies, darning ancient socks and hanging paper towels up to dry and taking a Magic Marker to the shiny elbows of her good black blazer…and she did this all so regularly, as if this were the stuff of actual living and not a meaningless biding of time, with minutes adding up to hours and hours adding up to days and days to weeks and weeks to years and those to decades until you are, at last, dead in the ground.
Night had come early and I found myself looking up at the sky. I heard the back door open and close again. I froze. The footfalls were not slow or hesitant but somehow encumbered, and then the person was in front of me.
Of course it was Jerry. He stood on the dead-end path, in line with the trees that hid us from the windows.
“Ha, funny, this is just where I used to sneak cigarettes in high school,” he said.
Do I care? I thought. I said nothing.
He held out his hand, as if to ask for a cigarette.
“You’re too ill for that,” I said.
“Just one?”
“None at all,” I said.
“Just a little one,” he said, smiling.
“I’m glad you can smile,” I said.
He had an instant lingering familiarity, a lack of formalness about him now, which was humiliating. This would be where he revealed his game and laughed at me for my believing ways.
I felt myself welling up but would not, would not.
“You have something to say to me,” he said, smirking.
“I have nothing at all to say to you.”
“You do and you’re dying to say it.”
I turned away, then turned back to him.
“Why did you do that? Why did you act like that? Like you barely know me, let alone—uh!”
“Let alone?”
“Nothing.”
“Let alone what?” he said with his canine smile.
I went to get away but he blocked my path.
“Let alone what?”
“Please let me go,” I said.
He held his place in front of me, bearing down on me.
“Cornelia told me the whole tragic tale. The uniform—she was tied in a thousand knots. Oh, it offended her sense of order. How terrible, terrible! But the only shame that
I see is on Clarice. My fucking mother with her delusions of grandeur and her pathetic need for payback. She embarrasses only herself. But she’s complicated, my mother, and you don’t know the half of it. So—maybe I wanted to see what you’d do. Maybe I needed to see how you would conduct yourself.”
“How I would conduct myself?”
“Yes, exactly. And the thing is, you were perfect. You were so somber and quiet, and the way you lowered your eyes—”
“Jerry, do you know how horrible you sound? What are you, directing a movie? You act like this isn’t real! Don’t you understand? People don’t act like this. People with compassion don’t.”
He held his eyes on my face, searching.
“I don’t know—that was never a word we used. Compassion. So I don’t know, I don’t know. Look, it’s like this. You’re so filled with life. You love things. I wonder about it, I do. It makes you seem far away from me. And I realized I wanted to see you sad.”
“You wanted to see me sad?”
“Because then you would be closer to me.”
“No, Jerry—this is my life. What’s this game? How can I trust you? You’re more like your mother than you know. Get out of my way.”
“Please,” he said, “I don’t understand.”
“You’re all aliens and none of you see this at all except Kendra. She’s the only honest one out of you and that’s why she’s gone.”
Still he didn’t move. I watched as he drew his hands to his face and rubbed at it as if he would rub it away.
“You must forgive me,” he said. “I never know how to be. You could show me, I guess I think you could show me. I think we could be happy together. It’s never happened in my life and I don’t know how to name it. But you see, I’ve been so happy with you, so happy…” And he stuck his hands out before him and stood like this, out in the cold in his scarf and pajamas.
I felt a warmth in my chest, a painful, inevitable warmth. He was fettered, pierced by a hundred arrows, comprehending nothing. And yet he was beautiful to me. Beautiful. I sometimes wonder if I’m cursed by my love of beauty, if for me that is how the infection comes in, my life course of distraction and infection: it comes in through my eyes.
I put my hands out to him, unable to speak. And he took my hands, gathered them to his lips, and kissed them.
*
We walked this thing through the November streets that night, wrapped in old canvas coats from the garden shed, shaking with cold, smoking. Talking, or trying to. He had decided on me, chosen me, he told me. But please, what does that mean, I asked him, for my half of the equation, my half of this story of his? So the man chooses, and the woman must be flattered and give in to him? But more than flattered I was, because it was that night that I admitted to myself that I’d loved this boy from the moment I first saw him.
But I wasn’t about to tell him this.
We went to the Hudson, to the West Side piers and the crumbling docks. That landscape is gone now, cleaned up entirely, obliterated. But there was mystery back then, when things still could be hidden—there was the frisson of danger, the feeling of peril that I realize now thrilled me so much in my youth.
“Are you cold?” he asked me, both of us shivering. I shook my head. He pulled off his scarf and gently twined it around my neck while I stood, still and somber.
What do I do with this strange kindness?
We stood there unspeaking at the water’s edge, the wind coming in hard off the Hudson. I wouldn’t let myself give in. I needed to think, but I couldn’t think at all with him beside me.
We leaned against the rotted railing and looked silently out across the water.
It was late when we finally came in from the piers, stiff with cold and sadness.
All of Greenwich Village seemed a ghost town with its dark storefronts, and the unusualness of this gave the city a kind of science-fiction desolation. Something in it seemed to stir us both, tell us we were two people together in a long night. We’d been walking silently and not looking at each other for some time, and all at once Jerry reached out, grabbed my hand, and plunged it into his coat pocket. I felt an almost gleeful tingling rise up inside of me.
Maybe this could be possible…?
We passed a diner lit up like Nighthawks, almost garish amid all the dark, and both of us turned to look in.
And this is how I remember it. The order of events. The mink, draped from the shoulder, hanging straight to the floor. The blond head, the lifted hair. The profile: pitiless, yet somehow bored. Her jeweled arm on the counter in front of her. Before it, a cup of coffee, and me thinking to myself, That coffee must be very cold by now. And beside her, the young writer Broyer Weatherhill. Broyer—wait, what? Start again, I don’t understand. And at that moment of confusion, watching Broyer lean forward to kiss Clarice on her lying mouth.
16
The next morning Jerry would be gone.
It must have been that Jerry pulled me away from the window, from that public kiss beneath its theatrical spotlights. And then we were walking, the wrong way, headed downtown.
Neither of us said a word. It was as if we still had to process it. I kept seeing it over and over again in my mind: the mink, the hair, the cup of coffee, the Broyer…the kiss. Devastating in its implications. Everything would be gone, it seemed to say, and I saw the Marr-Löwenstein dynasty come crashing down: the five stories of the house on Eleventh Street pancaking one atop another, bringing down plaster ceiling medallions, pendant lamps, Napoleonic bedsteads, brocaded fauteuils, recamiers, poufs, and coiffeuses and Her Majesty’s bergère à la reine, smashing stacks of Spode and Clarice’s writing talismans, hurling twenty thousand books from their cases, crushing to a fine flat plate the silver loving cup that stood on Clarice’s mantel. All that would remain, miraculously, would be the tiny, desolate Blakelock nightscape that hung over the fireplace, and maybe this had been Clarice’s way of telling her husband that despite all the riches he had showered upon her, she really had felt desperately alone all along.
“I don’t understand,” Jerry said at last. “I don’t understand at all. Broyer Weatherhill is such an asshole.”
It seemed strange to me that he was fixating on Broyer and not the fact of the affair.
“Has she ever—?” But the way Jerry looked at me stilled my tongue.
“If you want to know, actually, she has. She has, she has. Last time five years ago, maybe six. It was with another younger man. In France. A man who made cheese and wore a leather string around his neck. Why are you smiling?”
“I’m sorry, it just sounds so ludicrous, ‘made cheese.’ ”
“Well, it was awful. Sidney threatened to kill himself.”
“That’s awful.”
“It was. It was awful. Bertrand hates him and said, Go ahead. I think Bertrand hates him because he’s not pretty. Or maybe Bertrand hates him because Sidney’s not his father. So Kendra used to say. She had all sorts of theories…she used to conjecture for hours, and she decided Sidney had been Clarice’s way out of some affair, maybe with a married man? Kendra always had a head for imagining. But it’s just impossible for me to picture Clarice young and vulnerable. Because, you know, my mother is a ghost. She has no past.”
“I don’t understand,” I said.
“She never talks about her childhood. I can’t even tell you where she grew up. There are no relatives on that side, nothing. She would tell us the same three or four stories that were supposed to satisfy us when we asked. One was that her mother’s name was Mabel and that she was a silent film actress. Or perhaps she was named for a silent film actress? Another was that when my father asked for Clarice’s hand in marriage, Mabel called him a ‘filthy Jew.’ ”
I swallowed and looked away.
We had stopped by now, and in his uncanny way Jerry stepped to the side and immediately opened a random apartment building door and pulled me inside. The hall was dimly lit by a Depression-era fixture, the frosted kind shaped like a hanging bowl, and lo
oking up, I could see a collection of old dead bugs in it, silhouettes and shadows.
“I can’t tell you when I realized Clarice never loved my father,” he said to me.
“Maybe he should leave her,” I said.
He leaned back against the wall.
“He would never leave her. Life without her would kill him. It would kill Sidney dead. He loves her so much it’s mystifying. None of us can understand it. And it’s like this love of his is a recessive gene, because the rest of us…well, you see us,” he said.
“I see you how?” I said.
“We’re cold,” he said.
I said nothing.
“Do you want to be?” I said at last. “I don’t think you want to be.”
“Tell me,” he said, looking at me.
“If you’re saying you can’t love—that’s wrong, you do. All of you love.”
A shade passed across his face in the dimly lit hall.
“How do you know?” he said.
I shook my head.
“Come with me now,” he said.
“What?” I said.
“Please, tonight, come with me. We won’t go back.”
“Where would we go?”
“I’ll find a way,” he said.
“What do you mean? Everything is there. Everything I own is there.”
“We’ll get you other things,” he said.
I put my hands over my eyes.
“You forget we barely know each other. I barely know you.”
“I think you know me better than anyone else in my life.”
I shook my head violently, denying this, even though I somehow imagined it was true.
“Please,” I said. “You have no idea about my life. I have nothing to fall back on. I have a mother who’s a widow who lives in a row house on my father’s schoolteacher pension. I have a student loan I’ll have to repay. A student loan, do you know what that is? You don’t understand—”
But worse than any of this was my fear that his caring for me was based on the slim moments we’d had together and that it could be revoked in a second. I thought of Kendra, notes left on doors, promises made, the way she would grab my hand and squeeze it like I meant more to her than anyone else in the world, and then…the inevitable disappearance.
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