by Anne Bernays
I called Raymie and told her to turn on the news. “I’ve seen it,” she said. “Maybe he runs a training camp for Jew-hating ecoterrorists who need to demonstrate their distaste for the way other people live. Why don’t they get a life?”
I told Raymie I wouldn’t be surprised if the trasher turned out to be Halliday. “He seems to like big houses.”
I was mildly joking about something that wasn’t the least bit funny. How could you lead a normal life when maniacs lurked behind every dune and hedge, waiting to get you? The answer was, you couldn’t. How did the people living in Israel get used to it? Go to the beauty parlor to have your hair done and when you return, you find your apartment building has turned into a pile of rubble.
Raymie said Mitch thought it was Halliday. He’d been on the phone again with his private investigator. “Really,” she said, “I wish he’d stop spending so much money on this manhunt.”
Could I ask her just how much was so much? Did I care?
I continued to hear from David Lipsett, mainly via e-mail, one of the most useful inventions, right up there after the paper napkin. His messages were carefully crafted and seemed to be bristling with subtext. “I’m sitting at my desk thinking about how best to use your work; you have many talents.” “When you come to New York again, I think it’s important that we talk about your future.”
Meanwhile, Tom and I had drifted into what surely was the last phase before a couple split: no yelling, recriminations, sly tricks, competitive games. I suppose it was something like what often comes over a person about to commit suicide—the rough places go absolutely flat. If you’re just about to ingest a handful of pills, does it matter that you owe the MasterCard people fifteen thousand bucks, or that your brother has just been convicted of aggravated assault, or that your spouse called you a rotten pig? We had retreated into a freezer, surrounded not by haunches of uncooked prime beef and legs of lamb but by memories—and both of us too cold to talk. How had we ended up here? From desire and affection to indifference and irritation—I grew to hating the way he chewed on his eyeglasses, a habit I had once found sweet and boyish. I couldn’t stand the way he picked at his fingernails, sometimes until they bled.
David occupied more and more of the space inside my head. I sent him an e-mail telling him I was thinking of coming to New York in the next few weeks—would he have time to look at some more of my photographs? He answered back within an hour. “A terrific idea! When?” I looked through my portfolios and decided that only one of them would do. So I took my camera and prowled my Watertown neighborhood, caught some pleasing moments—a fat old man eating an ice-cream cone with the melted stuff dripping across his fist, two people leaning against a car, talking fervently. I found a homeless woman huddled under a filthy blanket in the unused doorway of a hardware store. I took her picture without her knowing it—this is something I don’t like to do, but I did it anyway because she had, under the grime, a beautiful face.
I had the pictures developed and printed, chose a few and stuck them between the jaws of my portfolio, and picked out the clothes I would wear while in New York. I knew the photographs were just an excuse to bring David and me together, a nice, businesslike convenience, the subtext of our meeting. The pictures carried the weight of what did not have to be said.
I told Tom I was going to New York. I expected him to say “Again? What for?” But he didn’t. He said, “That’s nice.”
“Tom,” I said. “When I get back, don’t you think you and I should talk about things?”
“What things?”
“Us.”
“What about us?”
“Something’s happened to what we used to be.”
“We got old,” he said.
I told him to speak for himself. “And anyway, what does how old we are have to do with anything?” I was being as disingenuous as anyone trying to score emotional points. Of course age had something to do with it. I wish I could have accused him of beastly behavior, but I couldn’t. He was good old Tom who had lapsed into a routine that no longer included me. His work absorbed him like a bride. And maybe he was, as they say, “seeing” someone else as well. But that wasn’t it either.
“For chrissake, Tom, can’t you even look at me?”
“Why are you yelling, Dannie?”
“Because it’s so much louder than gnashing my teeth.”
I guess we had stepped out of the freezer for a moment and although we warmed up a little, it was not a success.
This trip to New York, I stayed at a hotel that I found on the Internet by telling hotels.com that I didn’t want to spend more than a hundred and twenty-five dollars. It was a perfectly nice place in Midtown, although the lobby looked as if nothing had been seriously done to it for twenty-five years or so. I brought my portfolio over to David’s office, as I had the last time. He looked at the photos and pronounced them “interesting.” Then he reminded me that he was a children’s book editor. I asked him why not find someone to write a children’s book about a beautiful homeless woman. “Who is really a breathtaking princess transformed by an evil witch jealous of her beauty?” asked David.
“I’m crazy about it,” I said.
“God, you look good,” he said.
I thanked him, eyes lowered.
“I have a meeting uptown this afternoon,” he said. “How about dinner?”
“I don’t see why not,” I said. Actually, I saw one big reason why not and I was fooling myself if I believed he didn’t too. It was how we all seem to know the rules even if we haven’t played this particular game before. Except in movies, and HBO, the true, lusty message hides under layers of rectitude, politesse, innuendo.
“Good,” David said. “I was hoping you’d say that. Look, I know what you’re probably thinking. You’re a married woman, I’m single. I assume we both saw the movie Fatal Attraction.” (I nodded). “That movie either did a great deal of harm or an awful lot of good—I can’t decide which—but what happens is everyone is scared to indulge in a friendship. You and I have been working together for years, for chrissake, what’s the big deal?”
“Did I say anything?”
“I guess not,” he said. “I sound defensive?”
I nodded again.
“Well,” he said, standing and looking at his watch. “I’ll pick you up at your hotel, say seven-thirty?”
I spent the afternoon in Soho, going to half a dozen galleries where I saw work that my art teacher in college would have dismissed as “junk,” not willing to give it half a chance. Aesthetics had given way to emotion—“How romantic,” I thought, “just like the nineteenth century.” In one gallery I saw four pairs of soccer balls hanging from the ceiling in soft net bags, suggesting, if anything, testicularity. Was it art? It made you wonder what, in fact, art was. And all the time I was in and out of these places, along with other visitors, most of them in the most amazing outfits and colored hair and rings in their noses, ears, eyelids, lips, tongue (only one of those) and I could only imagine where else, having heard that some men had pierced their penises—a practice that apparently met with the approval of the women they penetrated. Ouch!
Art had turned a corner while I was doing my little thing with my children’s books. Beautiful had been relegated to the hinged box in the attic and you didn’t want to go up there because the dust was so thick. And there were mice. I suppose that was okay, mainly because it meant that people who did art moved on from one thing to the next. If they hadn’t, we would still paint pictures like Giotto. Still, it felt odd to gasp rather than sigh when looking at some object—let’s say a toilet with a cracked seat—set up in a gallery, starkly spotlit, when, if you saw the same thing in a bathroom your only reaction would be to be careful sitting down. Are there little old ladies still painting watercolors of the fruit trees beyond the porch? It’s nice to think so, except their work won’t hang in Soho, New York. I don’t suppose they give a hoot. And if they do give a hoot, a small one, they do so while consigning the ne
west “art” to the degenerate pile. Was it ever any different?
While I was educating myself in the new edgy aesthetic, I was thinking of David Lipsett with guilt and a longing of the sort usually embraced by girls just into puberty. Did I consider myself to have stepped over some line not endorsed by conventional society? Not at all. As a matter of fact, I was sure I was joining those women—and, according to Newsweek, there were an awful lot of them—who felt that if they had to have sex with the same man for the rest of their lives they’d kill themselves.
Briefly, I had considered going to see Ground Zero, getting a ticket and standing in line, maybe for several hours, along with hundreds of others whose motives for looking down into the enormous gash in the ground were murky at best. It wasn’t clear to me at all what makes people visit places, once perfectly ordinary, but now covered with the patina of the sacred. I’ve done it myself. The year I graduated from college, I went to Aix, where Cézanne lived for a while, looking at his house and trying to take in something from it, as if he were still hanging about the place, giving lessons to gifted students. But I hesitated about Ground Zero. There was something ghoulish about; it would be like viewing an operation on your own abdomen after being shot. My imagination—along with the television and the New York Times—had provided me with enough visual stuff to fill my mind for the rest of my life. So I didn’t go.
Besides, I was nervous and impatient. I went back to my hotel, slipped the card into the slot—who would have thought, fifty years earlier, that a plastic rectangle would replace a brass key?—undressed and took a shower. The cake of soap smelled like generic flower, the shampoo came in a bottle the size of a container of baby aspirin. But the towel was nice and big and soft. I wrapped it around me, pulled back the cover on the double bed and lay there for a while, watching the news. I like to watch the New York City news when I’m there, things you’re not apt to see elsewhere: a delicatessen in Queens robbed by two little girls with fake handguns; the kid who dropped his girlfriend’s baby out of a fourth-story window; the mayor cutting a ribbon with a theatrical pair of shears at the opening of a Wal-Mart in the South Bronx; Bill Clinton, caressed by a crowd in Harlem. Everything very specific, and the cameras right there, just minutes after the crime or on the spot with Clinton and the mayor. There’s a sort of small-town intimacy to these TV images, the guys in the studio doing a minimum of chitchat. There was no minibar in the room—what did I expect for under a hundred and thirty-five bucks?—or I would have treated myself to a ten-dollar, eight-ounce bottle of wine, to take the edge off. David said he would pick me up. When the phone rang, I was dressed and putting on my makeup with shaking fingers. I told him I’d be down in five minutes. I was ready in three but held back for another two.
When the elevator door opened, he was waiting right there; I nearly bumped into him. “You look great,” he said. He seemed to say that a lot. Did he really mean it, or was he nervous like I was?
“We’re going to Benno’s, a sort of bistro. Is that all right with you?”
“Sounds fine,” I said. He could have said Burger King and that would have been all right too. At that moment, putting a hand on my right ear, I realized I had forgotten to put on my earrings.
“Is something the matter?” he said.
“I forgot my earrings.”
“You don’t need them.”
“I do.”
“Do you want to go back for them?” he said.
“I guess not.”
“You have lovely ears.” He wasn’t looking at me when he said this. The force of his feeling for me was like the flash of heat when you open the oven door to see how the roast is doing.
He was wearing a gray shirt with a banded collar, buttoned up to the last button, khaki chinos and a black jacket that could have been cashmere, something very soft-looking anyway. To me he looked New York cool.
“Would you mind walking?” David asked. “It’s about eight blocks.”
I told him I loved walking in the City.
Throughout most of the meal—and it was very good, portions just the right size, exotic marinated fish—we talked about work, mine and his. He enjoyed his job, that was obvious. I asked him if he had ever tried to write a book himself and he said, “When I retire. I’ve got a couple of ideas I’d like to try out.”
I could hardly swallow the incredible food in front of me. All I could focus on was, when were we going to jump into bed together? His tongue darted around when he took a bite off his fork, like a lizard. I wanted him to kiss me. I wanted him to kiss me every little where.
He hadn’t told me what he did for sex. Did I really want to know? Did he do it with Ashley? When I was very young, my mother assured me that all men slept with their secretaries and I believed it for the longest time. No secretaries today. Today they were “assistants”; everyone wanted an upgrade. Ashley had no meat on her bones, skinny little thing. Her bones stuck out like a pre-corpse’s. But even that wouldn’t keep her boss from doing it with her, though he might have liked something more to grab onto. I wondered if David was browsing in the same general area that I was. Then I realized I must have been nuts. Why me when there were so many delicious younger, juicier morsels within arm’s reach. Why me? What did he want with a woman deep into middle age with tired lines around her mouth, a vertical crease on her brow and about fifteen more pounds than she needed. I didn’t get it; it was a near-impossible leap for me to believe that if, in fact, sex was his plan, I was the target.
“Would you like some dessert? The biscotti’s great. Or espresso?” David asked me.
“I couldn’t eat another thing,” I said. “And coffee keeps me awake. No. I’m all set, thanks.”
David got the bill and paid with an American Express card. I wanted to ask him if he was putting this dinner on his expense account, but didn’t have the nerve.
“Well,” he said as we left Benno’s and stood outside on the sidewalk, “where would you like to go now?”
“We probably ought to go to my place. It’s closer,” I said.
Chapter
7
AS DAVID CLOSED THE door of room number 1208, I began to imagine us as two characters in a movie, and this put me at an awkward distance from the scene, as if I were sitting in the audience, making judgments: Were the characters “realistic”? Did the plot follow some basic understanding of cause and effect? How about “motivation”—did we have a clue as to why they were doing what they were doing? Then I leapt back into the action, where the clichés made me extremely self-conscious. The camera had focused on me, and beyond that sat an unseen director watching my every move and telling me what to do. Was this going to be a teen flick, where you rip off your clothes willy-nilly, tearing buttons from their anchors, leaving your things in a heap on the carpet, flinging yourselves onto the bed and going at it like two beasts? Or would it be an “autumn of life” story, with nostalgic background music, up, while you do a languorous mating dance, with whiskey sipped to help you bury the shyness and trepidation?
“Nice room,” David said.
“It’s okay.”
“I don’t suppose you have anything to drink?”
“As a matter of fact, I don’t.”
“No minibar?”
I shook my head. We were standing motionless, waiting to be cued, the hesitancy factor about equal in each of us. “Well.” Hesitancy was now joined by reluctance. “Do you get high?” he said, reaching into his coat pocket.
“Once in a while,” I said. “But right now it seems too much like Annie Hall. I think I’ll give it a pass.”
What was I doing here? The wild and windy attraction had lost some of its power, downsizing from an outright hurricane to a tropical depression.
“Why don’t I order something from room service?” David said.
“There’s a package store just down the street,” I said.
“What’s a package store?”
“A liquor store,” I said.
“Hmmm.” Wa
s he reminded, as I was, that two hundred and fifty miles lay between us, as authentic an obstacle as a tree, fallen across the road?
“Do we really need it?”
“I guess not,” David said. He looked as if he felt exactly as I did. The oddest element of my hesitation had, I think, to do with the way I looked undressed. While David had the slimness of a person who never had to worry about calories, I was a “before” picture, familiar to readers of diet pill ads, lumpy around the thighs, heavy-breasted, my abdomen, once flat, now rounded like the second trimester of pregnancy.
“I feel silly,” I said.
“Don’t,” David said. “You’re anything but.”
“Do we really want to do this?”
“I do. I was hoping—given plenty of evidence, as a matter of fact—that you did too…” He trailed off. Next, he would be accusing me of being a tease, the ultimate male put-down. I suppose you can’t blame them—their dicks are all dressed for the party and they have nowhere to go.
We sparred for a few minutes more, and then, like some old married couple, we offered to let the other use the bathroom, then quietly took off our clothes and, me first, got into bed. The sheets were smooth and cold, like water when you first lower yourself into the pond. David talked to me softly, close to my ear. He told me I was a lovely person inside a lovely body.
