What She Saw...

by Lucinda Rosenfeld

  However, she’d come to understand that he “affected her adversely.” That was Nancy Patchogue’s phrase. And, so, with her doctor’s encouragement, she called him up and told him she was “still in love with him,” which was why she couldn’t see him anymore.

  He said, “The two sentiments don’t seem to fit together.”

  He said, “I was never able to express deeper feelings for you, but you’ve permanently eroticized the topography of my bedroom.”

  Then he said, “Only time will tell what I’ve lost. To be perfectly honest, you’ve always been seventy-five percent phantasmagoric.”

  But he didn’t sound all that upset to hear that Phoebe was leaving him. If anything, he sounded as if he were reading off a TelePrompTer. Is it any wonder she called him back not two weeks later to say she wanted to see him, needed to see him, and it couldn’t wait? (Without him, she was just Phoebe Fine with the Fat Face—that’s what she kept trying to explain to Nancy Patchogue, but Nancy Patchogue didn’t seem to understand; Nancy Patchogue had a fat face herself.)

  “Are you sure that’s what you want?” he asked her.

  “I’m sure,” she reassured him. Because she thought she was. She didn’t see any other way around it—around her vanity. Bruce Bledstone still made her feel beautiful. He made her feel sophisticated, too. He made her feel as if she were living out some case study from one of those self-help books she’d see women twice her age leafing through in bookstores around town.

  “Well, it’s always nice to see you,” is what he always said.

  The desperation lays continued on a sporadic basis.

  BUT THERE WERE marked improvements in other areas of Phoebe’s life. Thanks to those little yellow pills, she wasn’t throwing up half as many times a day as she had been. And she’d settled on a new major—German studies. She even had a weekend affair with a budding Hegelian from Massapequa— followed by another one with a Brazilian drama major who seduced her with his well-honed directorial techniques. (“Relax,” he kept saying. His hands started on her shoulder blades and moved south.) And she had a new best friend, Audrey Cone, who encouraged her to channel her excess energies into perfecting her body. That’s how Audrey channeled hers. She and Phoebe went to aerobics every day at five. They were religious about eye cream. They ate fat-free muffins for lunch and fruit salad for dinner.

  They turned twenty-one three days apart.

  Phoebe was in no mood to celebrate. She told as much to Roberta and Leonard. But they didn’t listen, they never listened. It was always the same thing. They yelled, “Surprise!” when she walked in the back door. And they made her eat chocolate cake even though she told them she wasn’t eating dessert anymore. And they gave her presents she didn’t want— Wilkie Collins novels she’d never read, Telemann CDs she’d never listen to. And she had to say, “Thank you,” and “I really love it.” Even though she really hated it—would have been happier with a check for twenty bucks. But at least they’d remembered the date. It was more than she could say for Bruce Bledstone. Not that the oversight particularly surprised her. She was past the point of imagining that he cared. She figured he was probably busy anyway—busy pondering the collapse of the Soviet Union, declared officially defunct with the resignation of Mikhail Gorbachev, the very same day.

  IT WAS A mild winter as Hoover winters went.

  The spring was short and rainy and torpid—even as it reminded Phoebe of an earlier spring, when the stillness in the air gave way to a certain restlessness that for one fleeting moment seemed to have found its match. But that time was now over. That time now seemed like a distant memory. Phoebe wasn’t even the same girl. She was wiser now. She was somehow less sure of herself.

  Now she understood the value of fear in love.

  Graduation day came and went.

  Then it was summer, though not in any ordinary sense, what with school being out forever, and Phoebe having not the faintest idea what to do next. She didn’t even have a place to live. It was pretty scary, and she was trying not to cry. (She’d made that mistake the night before.) And she was leaning against a parking meter outside Bruce Bledstone’s Upper West Side sublet. (He and Evelyn had separated. “Trial Deterritorialization” was the phrase he’d used only half in jest. Not that it mattered now. It was too late in the day for Phoebe to imagine she’d been a causative factor.) And she was getting ready to say good-bye after another pointless night, another sporadic lay, when he turned and looked at her from behind a pair of expensive-looking sunglasses that made eye contact all but impossible, and said, “Do me a favor—don’t come around here next time you’re in a bad mood, with the burden of your problems, expecting to be entertained, to the complete disregard of my life and plans.”

  And his anger so shocked her that she forgot about her tears. “How can you tell me I’m a burden?” she sputtered. “I thought you were my friend!”

  “We were never friends,” he demurred. “I mean, we’re different from friends.”

  Then he leaned over and planted a kiss on her cheek as if she were some distant relative to whom he felt obliged to pay his respects—that or some casual acquaintance he might or might not see again, it didn’t really matter either way. Then he walked away and she watched him go. She watched his hulking form loping up the street until he was the size of a dot. Then he started to blend in with the others dots. Then he was gone, and she was alone with her thoughts. And she was thinking: Bruce Bledstone was right about one thing at least: he never was her friend, never would be. And the realization left her strangely relieved. It was easier hating him than loving him.

  If only she could have held on to her anger!

  But she couldn’t. She couldn’t bear to imagine herself a mere detail of a pattern. Which is how she imagined herself when, a month or two later, she learned through a mutual acquaintance that she hadn’t been Bruce Bledstone’s first sleep-over student, and she wasn’t his last, either.

  WHICH WAS MAYBE why, one, two, not quite three years past those first tremulous barrette unsnappings, when she and Bruce Bledstone were living barely twenty blocks from each other, she was still, occasionally, quixotically, calling him from downtown barrooms at half past midnight. She wouldn’t be drunk, but she wouldn’t be sober either. She’d be riding that middle wave of inebriation where the poverty of everyday life seems at the very least irrelevant, in many ways comic, and at rare moments charmed. “I want to see you,” she’d shout-whisper into the receiver in her best sex-toy voice—two parts pure bravura, one part little girl lost in the mall.

  Because, even with her competitive-tennis days long over, she hated the idea that she’d lost. Because in the distant reaches of her convoluted brain, she was still thinking she could make him love her. Because, thanks to Bruce Bledstone, now she knew the difference between the “putting out system,” as in a preindustrial system of production marked by pride in individual achievement and encapsulated by the weavers of Silesia, and the regular old twentieth-century version of “putting out,” as in “for a good time, call . . .” And because, at that particular moment, her life was so distinctly unglamorous—her main connection to New York City being the Class Act Temporary Employment Agency—that even the most degraded of lays had come to seem like compensation. Not to mention the fact that her campaign to rid herself of the final vestiges of her sheltered upbringing was as yet unfulfilled—i.e., in so many ways, alienation was its own reward.

  He’d let a meaningful little wisp of a silence pass between them—at least, it would seem meaningful to Phoebe. Then he’d ask her, “Are you sure that’s what you want?”

  Just as he always had—as if the whole thing had only ever been her idea, and her sex drive that had required servicing. And he had only ever succumbed unwittingly and abjectly to the near-impossible task of trying to service it. “Unfulfillable Phoebe.” That had been his nickname for her. And he wasn’t entirely wrong: rarely had she been anything other than “in the mood.” But only because sex had been the one thing
she’d had to offer that he’d never seemed to tire of.

  But that he still wanted it—that he was still willing!— somehow amazed her. Apparently, Bruce Bledstone couldn’t say no to sex—not even sex from his worst nightmare. “How soon will you be here?” he’d want to know.

  “Ten minutes,” she’d promise. “Fifteen at the very most.” Because, despite everything, she was still loath to make him wait.

  Feigning illness or exhaustion, she’d part company with her friends—step out onto the street, onto Broadway or Second Avenue, Grand Street or Lafayette, the cityscape scintillating before her eyes like some kind of sequined tube top circa 1979, somewhere between tacky and profound. And she’d have an acid burn in her stomach from all the cheap wine and bummed cigarettes. And she’d be wearing a pair of high-heeled mules that gave her cause to imagine her reinvention as the Nelly Bly of the bedroom complete. And she’d be trying not to look at the street people—at their fallen faces and taped sneakers and misspelled, block-lettered signs: I CAN’T NOW LONGER FEED MY FAMMILY IF YOU BELIEF IN GOD PLEASE HELP ME GOD BLESSES YOU. That whole lives could be reduced to one illiterate sentence—it was shocking, it was inconceivable.

  It was too close to Phoebe’s own failure to ingratiate herself with the professional class, and therefore not her problem, at least not right now, maybe someday.

  In the meantime, she’d hail a cab—even though she couldn’t really afford it, what with her temp jobs bringing in barely ten bucks an hour. But this would qualify as a special occasion. This was better than nicotine. That’s how she’d justify the expenditure. That’s what she’d tell herself while she watched the blocks scrolling by, one after another after another, just like the paper filmstrips she and Emily used to pull through the windows of empty noodle boxes back when they were young, not so many years ago.

  MAYBE HIS LATEST tome, The Praxis of Theory, had sold a lot of copies. Maybe he’d come into some family money. Whatever the case, Bruce Bledstone had come up in the world. After the divorce, he moved into a two-thousand-square-foot loft on the western edge of Chinatown. There was a fish market on the first floor. He lived on the third.

  He’d open the door and smile at her, but he wouldn’t say hello. He’d say, “Can I take your coat?” and Phoebe wouldn’t refuse.

  Then he’d offer her a drink, and she wouldn’t refuse that either. Then he’d turn on the television. But it wouldn’t be like it used to be—when the picture on the screen was just a momentary distraction from their own melodrama. Now they’d sit there staring straight ahead, watching and waiting for the right time—there never really was one—to go through the motions. That’s all they were now: physical sensations she was far too self-conscious to experience as pleasurable.

  It was enough to have recorded the event—enough to be offered proof that she and Bruce Bledstone were still capable of producing certain fluids in each other’s company. Or, at least, it was better than being forgotten. That’s what Phoebe would tell herself in the morning. He wouldn’t say good-bye and neither would she. She’d make her exit just as she’d made her entrance the night before—without explication, but for the occasional joke regarding her distaste for swallowing.

  What more was there to say?

  LETTERS. PHOTOGRAPHS. GIFTS. Bruce Bledstone didn’t believe in any of them; Bruce Bledstone didn’t have a sentimental bone in his body. (“In a late-capitalist society,” he once opined, “everything exacts a price.”) So he came and went with few traces: a signed copy of his book (“For Phoebe,” he’d written. “Best wishes, Bruce”); a handful of disintegrating petals left over from a generic get-well bouquet he’d sent her when she was holed up in the hospital during the fall of her senior year (let’s just say she made a rapid recovery); a ninety-minute cassette tape with only one song to its name. He’d left it in her mailbox at school that same winter—the winter she kept pretending to break up with him. He’d written “Phoebe’s Song” on the cardboard insert. It was a clarinet, accordion, drum, and bagpipe number by the Rhodope folk troop of Bulgaria. It was the same one he was playing in the car that night—the night they first got together under all those stupid stars. The visiting professor seemed to have forgotten that it “wasn’t really [her] taste.” Or maybe he hadn’t forgotten at all. Maybe he was rewriting history to suit his own needs. Maybe he was coercing a subordinate class to conform to his interests.

  Maybe he was just trying to be funny.

  She liked a guy with a good sense of humor.

  9. Kevin McFeeley

  OR “The Romantic from Ronkonkoma”

  LEONARD FINE WAS the first to point out that Kevin McFeeley bore an uncanny resemblance to Frédéric Chopin. And he wasn’t wrong: with his long skinny face, dark wavy hair, slightly bulbous nose, and haunted blue eyes, Kevin McFeeley always did look a little like the famous Delacroix portrait of the so-called poet of the piano. Oh, but the similarities didn’t end there! As with Frédéric, Kevin both wrote and performed his own compositions, albeit on a Fender Stratocaster. And while he wasn’t exactly tormented by gloomy visions of his war-torn homeland—as a general rule, things were pretty calm in Ronkonkoma, Long Island—his romantic impulse (let it be said) was formidable.

  Never mind the Valentine’s Day card he rendered out of three-hole-punched scrap paper culled from the Kinko’s copy shop, where he earned his daily keep. Not long after he and Phoebe met—a few months after graduation, at an ironic pin-ball dive on the Lower East Side featuring Elvis lamps and underground porn flicks starring Japanese waifs getting duct-taped to upright chairs—Kevin McFeeley showed up at the door of her East Village studio sublet to declare himself. He had a towel thrown over his rubberized Fonz T-shirt. He was gripping an econo-sized, generic-brand shampoo. He was staring at his Converse sneakers. “I don’t want to impose or anything,” he began. “But do you think I could, like, borrow your shower? For some reason, there’s no, like, hot water in my building. And to be perfectly honest, I’m smelling kind of, like, bad.”

  “Go ahead,” Phoebe told him. “Just don’t, like, leave any hair on the soap.” (She like, had a thing about that.)

  “No problem,” said Kevin. “Oh, and thanks. Thanks a lot.” He disappeared into the shower.

  He emerged twenty minutes later with wet hair.

  “Well, I guess I’ll be going,” he said about twenty separate times.

  “Do you want a beer or something?” she eventually acceded.

  “Maybe just one,” he happily agreed.

  He had a beer.

  He stayed for seven months.

  But then, Phoebe never actually asked him to leave. New York City could get pretty lonely, especially when the weather turned cold and wet, and the wind off the Hudson left the side-walks littered with broken umbrellas that looked like wing-clipped birds.

  And, in all honesty, Phoebe never actually gave all that much thought to being Kevin McFeeley’s girlfriend. She fell into their relationship the way others fall asleep at the wheel.

  And, Kevin McFeeley rubbed her feet, and brought her cupcakes, and illegally wired her apartment for cable, and let her make him up like a girl—with eyeliner, mascara, lipstick, and blush. She hadn’t known guys could be that sweet. She thought all men were more or less like Bruce Bledstone and Humphrey Fung.

  Or maybe it was that it had never occurred to her before that she might be attracted to someone who didn’t treat her like a mild irritant.

  And he told her he loved her, Kevin did. He told her that about sixteen times a day. And the only other guy who’d ever said that to her was Spitty Clark, and she’d always assumed he was too drunk to mean it. Moreover, there were times when she thought she loved Kevin, too. Though what she probably loved even more than Kevin was the idea of someone being in love with her. It seemed like a radical notion. It seemed like the “real thing.”

  But it got pretty tiring reminiscing about TV shows from their youth. (“Remember Rose on Zoom?” “Remember Letter-Man on Electric Company?” “Rememb
er that Twilight Zone where that guy sees that other guy standing on the wing of that airplane?” “Remember that Brady Bunch when Alice becomes a drill sergeant?” “Remember that Gilligan’s Island where Gilligan wants to be the skipper?”) Especially since she’d never seen half the shows Kevin reminisced about—only heard about them secondhand from Brenda Cuddihy.

  And there were only so many Saturday afternoons she could get stoned and go to the Museum of Natural History and find the gem room a “total mind fuck”—only so many Saturday nights she could muster up the energy to go hear the Sun Ra Arkestra play at Tramps.

  And while she was happy to serve as muse to all those potential grunge anthems Kevin was writing about life, love, and suburbia—“Gated Community” was, perhaps, her favorite— neither his singing nor his songwriting ever impressed her. The lyrics she found derivative (“Are you having a ball / Living behind a wall / In the shadow of the mall?”), the chord progressions simplistic (tonic, dominant, tonic, dominant).

  And it made her jealous that he got to be the creative genius—she, merely, the girlfriend of the creative genius.

  And he wasn’t just poor, he was penurious. The one time in six months he took her out to eat—at Dojo, a New York University hangout specializing in inexpensive vegetarian fare— she ended up paying. She ordered brown rice and steamed vegetables. To save money, he ordered the carrot soup. But when the check came, he didn’t even have enough cash to cover his portion of the bill.

  And he had this annoying habit of calling everything he liked “raw.” He’d say, “The new Neil Young album is so unbelievably raw.”