Stillriver

by Andrew Rosenheim

  And he realized then that his chief burden was no longer his sense of shame and humiliation, or a fear of physical violence. It was something far darker and deeper than that, a soul-withering loneliness, an overpowering sadness he still felt about losing Cassie, and the seeming impossibility of building a life without her.

  2

  IT WAS STREATLEY who came to his rescue. Streatley was his boss, a tall and rangy man, given to wearing loose-fitting suits and white shirts, usually without a tie. A native of Salem, Oregon, he had a flop of straw-coloured hair that made him look far younger than the ten years he had over Michael. He had studied after college for a year at Imperial College in London, and to Michael he was a glamorous figure at first, for he also had an impressive array of working experience on construction projects all over the American West – Nevada, Utah, Idaho – and was vividly articulate and funny about it. He had only returned to central office, here high up in the General Motors building, when his wife became pregnant. Six months after their daughter was born, his wife had left him for a director of television commercials, and Streatley found himself trapped in a middle manager’s corporate position (and in Manhattan) by the legal demands of child support and the natural wish to see his daughter.

  Streatley liked to drink, and had no compunction about drinking with colleagues, even if, as in Michael’s case, they worked for him. With corporate niceties he had little patience: ‘We are on the cusp of a new age, an era of corporate rationalization, mass redundancies, and careers cut short at fifty by the insatiable requirement for younger, cheaper blood. I can play the game, knowing however dutiful I am, however “professional” my conduct, I will still one day face the very same axe that I have wielded so fiercely on the company’s behalf. Or I can say fuck that, drink with the people I like, chase the woman I want, and figure that even if I get the chop a couple of years earlier than might have been the case, I sure as hell enjoyed myself while I could.’

  Streatley was in a characteristically buoyant mood when he stopped before lunch one Tuesday by the desk Michael had for the day, and asked him if he was busy that evening.

  Michael did not need long to consider this, since he faced a typical evening: some reading in his room, before watching Hill Street Blues with Mrs Gennaro. ‘Not really,’ he said.

  ‘Then could you do me a big favour?’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Join me at Costello’s.’ A bar and restaurant near Grand Central where newspapermen, especially from the nearby Daily News, hung out. Streatley loved it because the food was good and Hemingway had been a customer. ‘I’ve got a date with a girl named Maura Hobbs. She’s got a friend and says the friend has got to be there too.’

  ‘What’s the friend like?’ asked Michael, able to see where this was headed.

  Streatley shrugged. ‘I’d like to tell you she’s gorgeous, but the fact is, I’ve never met her before. Maura says she’s rich. Do you like rich girls?’

  ‘I don’t really know any,’ he said truthfully, since he’d learned the week before that Sophie Jansen had moved to Los Angeles to work for a television production company.

  ‘Well, I would if I were you. My grandfather used to say, “It’s just as easy to marry a rich girl as a poor one.” But believe me, it’s not. Anyway, come see for yourself.’

  ‘What’s her name?’

  ‘Sarah. Sarah Forbes. Something like that.’

  In fact her name was Sarah Perkins and when Michael arrived she was sober (which was more than could be said of Streatley and Maura Hobbs), and looking impatient. She also seemed to Michael more than pretty, almost beautiful, with high, wide cheekbones flanking a soft, small nose, and small round blue eyes. Her hair was straight, long, and light brown with blonde streaks, and her arms and face were tanned the colour of a ripe peach, the tan mottled with hints of sunburned red. She was short, no more than five feet four, with an athletically trim figure except for her breasts, which, he could not help noticing as she stood and leant forward to shake his hand, bordered on the oversized.

  As Streatley got drunker and Maura followed him, Michael could not really have said what he and Sarah talked about over the next three hours. It was small talk to be sure, mainly about their jobs (Sarah worked in an advertising agency on the accounts rather than creative side, not far from the General Motors building), but he felt that with any topic she answered so truthfully, so directly, that it gave an interest to the otherwise commonplace. There was also a formality about her, which seemed novel, quite unlike the easygoing, casual manners of the Midwest. But it didn’t put him off, for it didn’t seem affected, or pretentious. It was just formal.

  When they said goodbye to the other couple, who piled unsteadily into a cab headed north to Streatley’s apartment in Yorkville and/or Maura’s studio on Fifth and 104th, Michael turned and asked hopefully, ‘Can I see you home?’

  ‘Not unless you want to meet my parents,’ she said with a laugh, then explained that she still lived with them in New Canaan, almost an hour’s train ride away. So he offered to walk her to the station.

  When they came to her track he stopped and said, ‘It was very nice to meet you,’ wondering how he could ask her out again.

  ‘Really?’ she said dryly.

  ‘Really,’ he said with some surprise. ‘I mean it.’

  ‘Then why aren’t you asking me out again?’

  He was surprised Sarah Perkins didn’t have a boyfriend until she explained that she had recently broken up with her childhood sweetheart, one Oakley Hale, whom she’d known since birth. Her parents were unhappy about this, she confided (she had dumped him), for Oakley’s parents were friends of the family.

  She knew Manhattan better than Michael did (which wasn’t saying much) and their early dates covered the obvious locations – the Metropolitan Museum, MOMA, feeding the ducks in Central Park. They even went to a jazz club once, in the West Village, but it was very expensive, and when Sarah herself admitted afterwards she didn’t really like jazz, they tacitly agreed to confine most of their dates to the movies. She was mad about them, and here Michael was happy enough to go along, especially since her taste was for the major releases he liked and might have seen in Burlington or Ann Arbor. There, movies were the gateway to fantasies of the big time world; since Sarah was actually living in that big time world, he found it surprising that she insisted on going to the movies so often.

  But in fact he soon found Sarah was far less adventurous than he. She was a creature of confirmed habits and strong if conventional tastes: she was tidy, and wore expensive skirts and crisply ironed blouses for work, with middle height heels and charcoal stockings; the effect, perhaps because of its very corporate demureness, was amazingly sexy. Her casual dress was equally unrelaxed. True, she wore blue jeans, but they were Calvin Klein, and the sweaters she wore were from Bloomingdale’s, her boat shoes from L.L. Bean. There was something so conventional about this – as if someone had opened the back pages of The New Yorker and, pointing to the ads, said, Dress like this – that he found it oddly alluring, and it made him want to sleep with her very much.

  It was because of Sarah and sex that he got out of Queens. For once they started going out, they quickly discovered they had no place to sleep together. A hotel would for him be unaffordable; for her, he sensed, too tacky. Mrs Gennaro’s was out of the question, and so, Sarah made clear to him, was the Connecticut house of her parents. Then just as he felt near breaking point – tired of the midnight clinch under the Grand Central clock, finding his interest in one of the friendlier secretaries at work growing – Sarah announced that her friend Valerie, Bryn Mawr classmate, was out of town that weekend and they could borrow her place. Sarah would tell her parents she was staying with Valerie.

  In the cab to Valerie’s she was quiet, and he resisted the impulse to put his arm around her. When they arrived she got out while he paid the driver. When he joined her under the building’s awning she was staring abstractedly down the street, which was full of t
he weekend traffic of jostling taxis and partygoers, horns blaring and headlights flashing as they bounced along the pot-hole pitted surface of Columbus Avenue. He stood with her for a minute, sensing she was making a decision. At last she took his arm and led him into the building.

  For all her usual assertiveness, she proved very shy in bed, undressing before Michael and quickly hopping in, where she pulled the sheet up over her breasts and tucked it under her arms. When he joined her, she was tentative at first, as if unsure how to proceed. Although she kissed him back, she seemed oddly inert. Gradually, by caressing her gently while kissing her hard, he found her becoming aroused, then increasingly excited, until she climaxed abruptly and noisily from his stroking hand before he had even entered her. When he slowly moved into her, she seemed to steel herself, and closed her eyes, as if the better to lie back and think of New England.

  He made a point of coming quickly, then got up and poured them glasses of the wine he’d brought along, then slowly teased out from her the brief details of her sexual history. She had lost her virginity as a freshman at Bryn Mawr to a cadet from the Naval Academy, but had otherwise only ever slept with one man: the worthy Oakley Hale. Doubtless Oakley had his points – the photograph Sarah showed Michael revealed a handsome, athletic figure with tousled hair and Pepsodent teeth who had played lacrosse for Yale – but he could not have been a ball of fire in the sack, since Sarah seemed unaware that what she called with only mild irony ‘the act of love’ was something women were allowed to enjoy as well.

  This surprised him. With Cassie sex had been an exploration for them both, unrestrained yet never more important than their simple urge to be with each other, to share everything – sex, yes, but also food, and ideas, and feelings. But with Sarah, her sexual awkwardness was curiously pleasing, since it allowed him to lead in a relationship where otherwise he felt he always followed – it was Sarah who knew that Sixth Avenue was really the Avenue of the Americas, that there was only one 57th Street gallery open on Sundays, that Tompkins Square was not the place for a late evening stroll, and that New York taxi drivers really did expect twenty per cent as a tip. It was nice to know that at least in the bedroom he was the one in the know.

  It turned out that Valerie’s roommate was moving, and for an extra hundred dollars a month above the rent he paid to Mrs Gennaro, Michael could move in. So he transferred his few belongings from his grim room in Queens, where Mrs Gennaro insisted on keeping two weeks of his two months’ deposit, and installed himself in his new bedroom in Valerie’s apartment on a dicey block off Columbus in the high west nineties. Valerie had a boyfriend in Brooklyn and often stayed there, leaving Michael the whole apartment to himself – or rather to him and Sarah, who now stayed over one or two nights a week, still telling her parents she was staying with Valerie.

  He was Sarah’s boyfriend now, he supposed, though there was no immediately greater intimacy between them. Nor did he discuss much about his past with her, as if their initial exchanges of information were, for her purposes, more than adequate. She knew there had been a girl named Cassie in his life, and it was Cassie in fact who provoked the first display of Sarah’s irritable side. They had been in a fern bar near Lincoln Centre, having lunch one Saturday, when he had compared the way Sarah ate her hamburger – politely, bird-like – with the almost ravenous gusto Cassie had brought as she used to chomp her way through hers. ‘Don’t compare me to her,’ Sarah had said crossly, ‘I don’t like being compared.’

  But he couldn’t help it, noting to himself the contrast between Sarah’s indifference and Cassie’s almost pedantic interest in everything he did. ‘Why can’t you use an electric razor?’ Cassie had asked when he’d nearly cut half his lip off one absent-minded morning; ‘You have to tell Alvin,’ after he’d mentioned suspecting one of the summer help of stealing money from the liquor till; and later, with concern, ‘Are you still skipping breakfast in Ann Arbor?’ Oh, Sarah knew – thought it ‘cute’ in fact – that as a teenager he’d worked in a drugstore, and yes, she could probably remember if asked that his father taught high school. But after receiving this kind of basic information she asked no further questions; so after a while he stopped talking about his past. If she’s not interested in me, he thought, then why is she seeing me?

  Unwittingly, her roommate Valerie supplied the answer. He was asleep in his room and alone in the apartment, having come home early with what he feared was the flu. Valerie came in at 5.30, far earlier than his usual arrival, just as the phone rang, and she picked it up before he had time to shout hello and let her know she was not alone in the apartment. He only half-listened as she chatted cheerfully with some friend. Then she declared, ‘I think he’s kind of cute.’ Oh, so who was Valerie keen on?

  ‘Of course he’s not right for her,’ she continued. Who was this unsuitable guy?

  ‘He’s from the smallest town in America, apparently. That’s half the reason she’s fallen for him.’ She paused to listen, then giggled. ‘No, it’s not just the sex. He’s smart and she says he can be very funny too. You’d never think he was an engineer. But her mother would die a thousand deaths. And pray to God that Sarah was just slumming it for a while.’

  The phone conversation helped clarify his position in Sarah’s life. She was not very interested in his past because it was of no use to her in her liberation struggle with her mother. What mattered was what he stood for now. He was a symbol, a vehicle for rebellion. Slumming it indeed.

  Yet the emotional distance this revealed was not in his view necessarily a bad thing, even if he concluded that his ‘love life’ was a far cry from the complete romance he’d had with Cassie. He was not in love with Sarah Perkins, and wasn’t even sure how much of the affection he had for her was simply the desire for company. She was smart, she was direct, she was attractive, she was fun (now) in bed – and besides, the woman he loved had gone with someone else. I’ve got to get on with my life, he told himself. And when he sometimes questioned why he was seeing Sarah Perkins when he knew he didn’t love her, he would conclude that she was his hope for getting over Cassie. I can’t do it on my own. And if this were a very cynical way of proceeding, Valerie’s précis of Sarah’s motives didn’t indicate any fairytale romance going on in Sarah’s mental neck of the woods, either. If Sarah were serving his purposes nicely, he had little to feel guilty about, since apparently he was suiting hers.

  One evening Valerie put in a rare appearance at the apartment, to announce that she had become engaged and was going to live with her fiancé in Brooklyn. Michael was depressed by the news. ‘I don’t want some roommate I don’t know,’ he said to Sarah. ‘I’m not in college any more.’

  ‘Take the whole place yourself then,’ said Sarah.

  ‘I can’t afford it.’ He had never seen any point pretending he had more money than he did. Why bother? he told himself, especially if Sarah thought she was slumming it anyway.

  ‘I know you can’t. But if we split it . . .?’ She was staring at the Vermeer print in the corner as she said this, which distracted him until he suddenly realized what she was suggesting.

  She moved in six weeks later; in the interim Streatley cautioned him against just such a step. ‘What are you, twenty-four? You’re way too young to be shacking up with somebody. Sow some oats kid, then settle down.’ He laid off the topic only when it became clear Michael wasn’t going to change his mind. The week before he had seen Cassie again, for the first time since he had met Sarah; she was waiting at a bus stop on 57th Street. He had almost got on the bus with her until she turned round and he was face-to-face with a woman probably thirty years older than Cassie. Fed up with the false hope these phantoms kept stirring, he decided that if anything were going to get Cassie Gilbert out of his head for good, it would be a firm commitment to life with someone else.

  Sarah was too terrified to tell her parents that she was living with someone. ‘What’s the problem?’ Streatley demanded. ‘She’s a grown-up. What do her parents care?’

&
nbsp; Michael shrugged. ‘Her parents are still upset that she dropped her last boyfriend. Who rejoices in the name of Oakley Hale.’

  ‘They’ll get over it,’ said Streatley. ‘But it’s you I’m worried about. This WASP business is harder than you think.’

  It never got easier. The wedding was held in the Episcopal Church of New Canaan. His father and Gary flew in two days before the wedding, staying in a Ramada Inn on the Greenwich side of town. He saw little of them since they spent the next day sightseeing in the city. At the wedding reception Gary had too much to drink and was sick in some bushes at a corner of the country club grounds; Michael’s father was polite, but talked more to a distant Perkins in-law from Cincinnati than to any of the other, closer Yankee family.

  Streatley was best man, and gave a long and only mildly drunken speech, contrasting the high WASP setting of the wedding with Michael’s humbler origins in what Streatley repeatedly called The Great Plains. Michael laughed throughout most of it, though Sarah told him later she thought it was ungracious and, in parts, bordering on the vulgar.