Thirty-three Swoons

by Martha Cooley

  AS I was fixing breakfast, the dream temporarily forgotten, my phone rang. I was surprised to hear Danny’s voice.

  “You up?” she asked.

  “Sure,” I replied. It wasn’t Danny’s habit to phone me first thing on a Sunday morning, though that didn’t mean she had something important to tell me. She might simply feel like chatting. Or hearing me chat. Talk as blotting paper, something to soak up spills of feeling.

  Her mother—my cousin, Eve Pell—had died two months earlier, without warning, after contracting bacterial meningitis. Since then Danny’s moods had become difficult to gauge. Some days she’d call me repeatedly, gabbling about trivia, as if she were the most empty-headed twenty-five-year-old alive and her mother’s death hadn’t affected her in the least. Other days I’d hear nothing from her, leave messages at her office, and get no callback. I’d start worrying, wondering if she was holed up in her apartment in Brooklyn, not eating, refusing all contact. One day she’d shown up at my shop and begun to heave things around. She didn’t break anything, and I managed to calm her down, but the episode revealed how shaky her hold was. I wondered how she was able to get through a day on the job without coming unstuck.

  “You by any chance going to your shop today?” she asked.

  “I am, actually,” I said. Normally I don’t work on Sundays. But I had things to catch up on, and the weather forecast was dour.

  “Leaving soon?”

  “I’m having my coffee now. What’s up?”

  “Just wondering if I might stop by later for a little visit.”

  “Like when?” Something in Danny’s tone was putting me on alert.

  “After I leave here. Say, five-thirty.” Now I realized she was calling from her workplace, a graphic-design firm on Seventh Avenue. I could hear background chatter, several early-bird colleagues conversing in the hallway.

  “Sure,” I said. “But you’re at work now? Why on a Sunday?”

  “Oh, everyone’s here. We all had to come in for this big project that’s way behind schedule. Total mismanagement. Welcome to the world of design.”

  “You get paid extra for this?”

  “Hah.”

  “Everything else all right?”

  “All right,” she echoed neutrally. Not for the first time, I was conscious of how much her voice resembled her mother’s. The same pitch, the same rough timbre, just this side of gravelly. Since my cousin’s death I’d had a few uncanny experiences of answering my phone and thinking Eve before registering the reality of her daughter on the other end.

  “Don’t be staring at any walls, okay?” I said, aiming for a spot between jokiness and concern.

  “I’ve got tons to do here,” Danny responded evenly. “Actually it’s been good to be busy with something other than Mom’s closets.” She paused, then added: “I’ve packed up the last of her stuff, by the way. All I have to do now is ask Sam if he’ll cart some boxes to the Salvation Army. Then the whole thing’s behind me.”

  “Good,” I said. “So I’ll catch you at the end of the day.”

  I HUNG up the phone and finished my coffee, contemplating Danny’s call.

  The whole thing. She’d been referring, of course, to the process of emptying first her mother’s gardening store and then Eve’s rent-stabilized apartment. The latter task had turned into more of an ordeal than it should have, thanks to Eve’s landlord. Though I’d paid him for an extra half month to give Danny more time, he’d been hounding her relentlessly since her mother’s death. One evening he’d threatened to toss any remaining possessions out the back window and into the alley.

  That focused my own pent-up anger. After staging a fight with him in the building’s dingy lobby, I’d used one of Eve’s keys to score a series of long gashes across the front door of her apartment. “Art for art’s sake,” I’d said to Danny, happy to make her laugh.

  So the clearing-out job was done, yet the whole thing, as Danny called it, wasn’t behind her—couldn’t possibly be. It was still unspooling, a chain of improbabilities whose initiating event had been that most ordinary of complaints, a headache. With astonishing swiftness, Eve’s symptoms—a pounding head and stiff neck—had been followed by delirium, coma, a spreading purplish rash, and blood poisoning, which was what had ultimately killed her. Wham, one doctor at the hospital had said (not realizing I was eavesdropping) to another, a young intern. Seventy-two hours, man! Never saw anything like it.

  To me Eve’s meningitis had arrived as a natural disaster might have—some unannounced tornado stem-winding down an unsuspecting street, everyone looking the other way. And something more was en route, too. I could feel it. Not another death but a shake-up of some sort, necessary and unavoidable, for which no preparation would be possible.

  GATHERING MY things for work, I glanced at the Arts section of the paper before shoving it into my bag. Cirque du Soleil, the Canadian circus, would be coming to Madison Square Garden, and tickets were going on sale that week.

  Unlike lots of plays, circus acts are always both funny and sad, sweet and grotesque at once. They’re an old art form, after all—old, wise, and playful. I ought to go, I thought. It’d do me good. And I should take Danny. She’d love it.

  A switch flipped in my memory: clowns. A dream (had it been only last night?), involving my father in a circuslike performance, outdoors, in a strange city. Not American, perhaps Central European . . . Jordan had been doing something with perfume. And there’d been another man, wearing a cape, who’d cartwheeled across the stage. A theater director, I was sure of that. I thought I recognized him, yet couldn’t think who he might be.

  And the scent in the dream—jasmine, yes, definitely jasmine. But not quite right. A bit off, somehow?

  LATER THAT morning, shortly before noon, Stuart and Sam entered my shop at the same moment. Having nearly collided at the door, they were as taken aback as I; I wasn’t expecting either of them. They greeted each other cordially.

  Stuart I’ve known thirty-two years. He’s short and thin, with large gray eyes and a minimal gray beard. His body’s supple and agile, a perfect mime’s body. In college in New England, which is where I met him, Stuart was something of a celebrity. He used to hire himself out as a mime for community events and frat parties, and during those four years he made enough money to cover his massive book bills. His dorm room looked like a very cramped library. Books were stacked everywhere but in one corner where Stuart stored his props: top hats, canes, feathers, face paint, and black patent-leather spats.

  He still performs occasionally, for friends—never formally. Sometimes I wonder if he’s missed his real calling, but Stuart claims he’s happier watching a mime than being one. A mime’s work is terribly gloom-inducing, he says. That’s how Stuart talks. He strings together words that might seem affected coming out of someone else’s mouth, but sound entirely natural emerging from his. When he speaks, his hands talk, too. He’s got remarkably flexible wrists and broad palms, each with five long snakes attached: his fingers. I’ve never met a man with nicer nails.

  Stuart and I first encountered each other in our college’s theater on a cold Saturday in December. That autumn, having worked hard and happily on two productions, I’d decided I wanted to be the theater’s props manager for the rest of the year. Normally this job was rotated between two students, but on that afternoon I cornered the director and began lobbying for a change in policy. She was not easily convinced, and we began sparring.

  Stuart happened to be waiting around for an audition to begin. Hearing me press my case, he sidled up to the director and began tipping his head from side to side like a slightly manic cuckoo bird. Both the director and I fell silent, at which point Stuart launched into a spot-on pantomime of our debate. We began chuckling at him, no longer contestants but an audience. Winding up his improvisation with a bow, Stuart said: “Give this girl whatever she wants.” His voice, which I was hearing for the first time, was as attractively reedy as his body.

  “Who is she, anyway?�
�� he added, pointing a sharp forefinger at me while aiming his words at the director. “Camilla Archer?—never heard of her! But I can tell she’s good with props. Only a totally obsessive person would hunt you down and harass you right before an audition! Has this girl not heard of an opportune moment?”

  Won over, the director relented. That’s Stuart: he performs a bit of magic and things change, often for the better. But he’s a jouster, and I’m an easy mark for him. “If we were in a spook house at an amusement park,” he asked me once, “and you were really scared, and we were holding hands, would you let go of my hand if I ordered you to?” When I shook my head, he jeered, “Of course you would—to prove how brave you are!” I asked him why, in that case, he’d even bother to order me. “Do you have any idea,” he retorted, “how appealing you are when you’re unnerved?”

  SAM SAID something similar to me—I like it when you’re flustered—soon after we met. I took this as a good sign, proof of his ability to see behind surfaces.

  That was a long time ago. Sam and I met in Eve’s gardening store. We lived together for two years, were married for seven, and have been divorced for nine—which means we’ve been co-orbital, as he puts it, for eighteen years. We both still live in the West Village, and we still co-own my shop, The Fourth Wall, which we opened at the start of our marriage. When that union ended, we saw no reason to shut down our business, which was clearing a small but reliable profit.

  The Fourth Wall is an odd little place. It sells performing-arts memorabilia and curiosa of all kinds, including scripts, scores, libretti, posters, photos, small props, and costumes. Opening a specialized store was never a goal of Sam’s, but he went along with the idea, and we came up with a division of labor that’s still in place. Sam seldom accompanies me on my buying missions and never mans the shop, preferring instead to handle its bookkeeping and taxes.

  He’s also a successful publishing consultant with a great eye for well-conceived quirkiness. Mostly he packages and publicizes books featuring the work of contemporary photographers, several of which have done quite well. In addition, Sam also owns a lively art gallery in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, a neighborhood he spotted long before it became trendy. The gallery was launched by Lila, his current wife, whose name, Stuart likes to point out, is a shortened version of my own. (And she’s a lot shorter than you, too, he adds, which she is. Younger and prettier, too.) A couple of artists actually run the space, which operates on a shoestring but shows interesting work. Sam’s quietly proud of it.

  Then there are the kids. Three-year-old Zeke is Sam’s and Lila’s son; Abby is a seven-year-old redhead, Lila’s from a former marriage, now Sam’s adopted daughter. He adores them both. The children are what Sam’s always wanted, what he and I didn’t manage to—what’s the right verb, conjure, concoct?—while we were together.

  “SO WHAT brings you two here?” I asked. “On a Sunday, no less?”

  Stuart gave Sam a deferential, you-go-first nod.

  “Just wanted to say hi,” Sam said. “Plus I have a favor to ask you.”

  The favor, I figured, would be a short-term loan from The Fourth Wall’s account. Sam’s gallery sometimes has minor cash-flow problems.

  “Ask away,” I said. “Unless . . .” I gestured at Stuart, thinking Sam might want to speak with me in private, but Sam shook his head.

  “No, it’s okay,” he said. “This has to do with Danny, actually. Maybe you’ll have some ideas, too, Stuart. I mean, you know her pretty well, don’t you?”

  “Not very,” Stuart replied. “But go ahead.”

  Sam gave a preliminary shrug. I knew that shoulder roll, as I knew most of Sam’s repertoire of gesture. It communicated confusion.

  “She called me last night,” he said. “Wanted to know if I had room in my cellar to store a few boxes of stuff she’d taken from Eve’s apartment, and if I could drive the rest to the Salvation Army. Then she said she’d gone through her mother’s papers and found something she wanted to discuss with me. When I asked her what it was, she said she’d rather tell me in person.”

  He glanced first at me, then at Stuart. “Wonder what’s up.”

  “Taxes, maybe,” said Stuart. “Your cousin wasn’t too good at that kind of thing, was she?” he asked, turning to me.

  “That can’t be it,” I said. “Danny and I have already been over all the paperwork. I’ve dealt with the insurance companies, Social Security, the IRS, everybody—there aren’t any outstanding bills to pay.”

  “I figured as much,” said Sam.

  “She called me, too,” I said. “This morning. Wanted to know if she could stop by later and talk with me about something.” Within me, a little balloon of unease began slowly expanding. “When are the two of you supposed to get together?”

  “Thursday—I’m taking her out for a drink. I guess you and I should check in afterward?”

  Stuart gave one of his polite but perceptible frowns. “Maybe Danny doesn’t want to talk with both of you about the same thing. Maybe she wants separate responses to separate matters.”

  Sam shrugged more aggressively this time, then turned to me. “Let’s just confer later,” he said. Though bland, his words twanged my nerves. Stuart noticed my discomfort.

  “Cam, what sort of shape is Danny in, these days?”

  I shook my head. “I really can’t tell. She’s back at work, and she seems to be eating and sleeping all right . . .”

  “But has she been talking about Eve with you or anyone else?” Stuart prodded.

  “Depends what you mean by talking.” I decided to attempt straightforwardness; with Stuart there, Sam might do the same. “The truth is, I think she’s suffering. Acutely. But more because she’s angry than because she’s grieving.”

  Sam’s face was a perfect blank.

  “Hmm,” said Stuart. “What’s it boil down to?”

  Stuart is intolerant of lengthy psychological explanations. I produced as short an answer as I could: “Let’s just say she never had her mother’s undivided attention.”

  “Love, yes. Attention, no,” said Sam. His phrasing surprised me; I hadn’t expected him to take Eve’s side.

  “A distinction without a difference?” asked Stuart.

  “No, I don’t think so. I mean, a kid knows whether he or she is loved, which is all that matters—”

  “Oh please.” Stuart’s breeziness barely concealed his scorn. “Let’s get back to where Danny’s at. Of course she’s angry—but that’s not news, is it? She’s been angry at her mother for years! What’s new is having to figure out how to be angry at a dead mother.” He paused. “It’ll be a while before she can say anything about what she’s actually feeling, I’d bet. So she’ll express her inner troubles in some other way. She’s not drinking, is she? Pills? That’s the kind of thing to watch out for.”

  “We’re aware of that. And a little blunting of pain isn’t necessarily a bad idea either.” Sam had iced up; he was registering Stuart’s dismissiveness. “If Danny needs short-term help from booze or drugs, I say fine. I’m sure she’s not abusing anything. That’s not her style.”

  He was right; I nodded in agreement.

  It was Stuart’s turn to shrug. “For what it’s worth,” he said, “I think the biggest issue for Danny has got to be fear. She’s alone now, in a whole new way.”

  Sam clenched and unclenched his right fist several times, a signal that either the conversation or the mild muscular ache he occasionally suffers in that hand was disturbing him. I was fairly certain which it was, since we were discussing Danny. He glanced at his watch.

  “Gotta go—I’ll check in with you after Thursday, all right, Cam?” He leaned over and kissed my cheek. “Take care of yourself. Bye, Stuart,” he called over his shoulder as he left.

  THE DOOR closed. Stuart raised his arms straight up over his head, then released them downward, slowly, his elbows bent and palms turned upward. Dipping his knees, he bobbed both forearms simultaneously, as if handling something spherical and
heavy.

  “Oof.” He exhaled, his hands flopping to his sides as he dropped his imaginary burden. “Beats me how folks do it.”

  “Do what?”

  “Carry so much at once. A wife, two kids, and an ex-kid, plus there’s an ex-wife . . .”

  “Danny’s not an ex-kid,” I said. “And for the record, you were kind of rough on Sam. He’s as worried about Danny as I am.”

  Stuart cocked one skeptical eyebrow at me. “Well, you know what? The man didn’t say so, but he’s actually concerned about you.”

  “Oh please,” I said, mimicking his earlier rebuke of Sam.

  Stuart wagged a forefinger in disagreement. “This is a three-way, my dear. Sam knows you’re bearing the brunt of this situation. He could offer to spend more time with Danny. He’s the father figure in this setup, right? The one steady male presence in the girl’s life, the only guy who was around from the time she was a kid—am I right? Well, the man feels guilty, which is why he showed up here. To mollify you.”

  It was fruitless to argue with Stuart about Sam. Although not consistently displayed, Stuart’s animus was old enough to elude my attempts at uprooting it. “What exactly is a brunt?” I asked, to divert him.

  “Brunt?” Stuart rose to the bait. “It’s Middle English, for fire or heat. It means a direct impact or hit. Or, metaphorically, the hardest part.”

  “Thank you, Webster, I know that part. I was hoping you’d tell me the word comes from some medieval cookery book. What brings you here, anyhow? You didn’t say.”

  “Didn’t exactly get a chance to stick a word in edgewise, did I? What with all the yakkety ex-husbands around here.” He stuck out his tongue and twisted it into a corkscrew.