Thirty-three Swoons
Page 21
“Nobody’s answering?” I said, amazed. “What do you call my just telling you I helped Jordan die?”
She didn’t answer right away. “I call it an admission,” she said finally. “You gave me the facts. But you didn’t talk about how you felt afterward. You said nothing about how his death must’ve affected your relationship with Mom—because she was involved, too. How did she react? What did she feel for Jordan? Those are the things I want to hear about, and you’ve made it clear you don’t want to discuss them.” She paused, then ended: “It’s like you finally tell me a secret, only you tell it in a way that keeps it secret. I’d rather not keep up the charade.”
I couldn’t have willed myself to speak even if I’d been sure more words were the appropriate offering, and I wasn’t. We were still traveling south on the West Side Highway, the river glinting on our right, Manhattan massed on our left. At Fourteenth Street we plunged into the traffic heading east; in a few more minutes, we pulled up in front of my building.
Danny opened the wagon’s rear door for me, and I took out my bag. We stood on the curb near a streetlight, whose silvery glow softened and flattened her features.
“You realize you’ve left me no choice here,” I said.
“I haven’t any, either,” she said. Then she was back in the car, and the car was gone.
INSIDE THE front hallway of my apartment, I put down my bag and went for the dimmer switch on the wall, sliding it upward as far as it would go. No light came on. After trying the switches for several different lamps, I realized my electricity must have gone out, a not-uncommon occurrence in my building, whose wiring was shoddy.
Making my way to the kitchen, I opened the door of the refrigerator. Its interior stayed dark, but everything still felt cold. The power couldn’t have been out for long, and would probably be back on within a half hour.
I poured a shot of vodka over some ice—still frozen—and carried my drink to the living room, one hand in front of me as I piloted cautiously. Sitting on the sofa, I felt my entire body trembling lightly. The first sip of the vodka took me down; I lay on my side, pulled my knees to my chest, and curled into a ball as an unfamiliar scent rushed my nostrils. Oakwood, bergamot, the barest touch of sandalwood: these notes were detectable, I could separate and identify them. Yet something else, known yet not—unnameable—aerated the verdant fugue.
I breathed it all in. Before traveling, Jordan used to uncap the glass vials of essential oils he kept in his kit and let me sniff each slender cylinder, one after another, just for a moment. Collectively, those potent hits of scent were an olfactory flash, intense and kaleidoscopic. Like my feelings for my father: impossible either to locate or to dispel.
I lay on my side as loss permeated the air around me, a fine vapor. For several moments I was unable to exhale, afraid that if I did I’d forfeit Jordan forever. But at last I could breathe again and knew what I’d just encountered: a secret perfume of my father’s, the one I’d smelled in my dream.
ON THE phone with Stuart the next morning, I began describing my weekend. He cut me off. It would be better, he said, if we talked in person. He’d hop in a cab and meet me at a little café near The Fourth Wall.
I protested that he needed to stay put, but he stood his ground. Carl could handle things, he said, and certain discussions should not take place telephonically.
I arrived at the café just as Stuart was getting out of his taxi. We settled into a corner booth and a couple of half-pints. It was eleven-thirty; we had the place mostly to ourselves. Picking out three large Brazil nuts from a small dish on our table, Stuart began juggling them without averting his gaze from my face.
“Und so?” he asked. The nuts whirred around his head. “How’s my traveler doing?”
“Not so good,” I answered. “It was a complicated weekend.” Within me, anxiety bucked; for several moments I couldn’t continue. Stuart stopped juggling.
“Come on, spit it out. Cough it up,” he said.
“Those are such crude expressions, Stu.” I was stalling and he knew it.
“You’re right, they are. Hardly invitational. Okay, how about ‘vent it’?”
“That usually pertains to anger, no?”
“Hmm. Yes. And ‘air it’ isn’t right, either—too talk-showish.” He made a tent of his fingers, tilting them forward and backward as he pondered. “I know!” he exclaimed, flattening the tent by pressing the palms of both hands together. “Spill it.”
“There you go.” Calmer now, I told him what had happened in Ithaca, from beginning to end. Stuart listened attentively without interrupting me. When I’d finished, he collected his three nuts and sent them spinning again.
“You think Danny really means it?” he asked. “About not wanting to see you for a while?”
“Absolutely. She’s not fooling around. She thinks I have no interest in helping her find out more about her father. Or Eve.”
“Well, do you?”
“What does she think I am, omniscient?”
He gave me one of his skeptical smiles. “Thou doth protest too much,” he said. Then he resumed his juggling. After a final cycle, he gathered the nuts in one hand, which he then opened and extended toward me. “Brazil?” he asked.
“No thanks, I prefer Belgium.” I raised my glass of Belgian beer as Stuart dumped the trio of nuts back in the dish. “That’s disgusting,” I said, gesturing. “Now somebody will eat those without realizing they’ve been handled.”
“Palmed,” he corrected me. “They’ll be bitter—the nuts, I mean. I wouldn’t worry. Ever met anyone who actually likes Brazil nuts? Anyone who passes up a cashew, say, for a Brazil nut?” He held his glass of beer to the light, peering at it. “Lovely amber, this one. Must remember it.” Staring at the label, he mouthed its name silently, entering it into his beer memory bank.
“Are you going to comment on anything I’ve said, or only on the beverage?”
He scowled. “I have plenty to say about you, but I’ll save that for the time being. About Danny—well, she’s clearly a mess. All that anger and frustration she didn’t get around to airing before Eve died . . . it’s all out of the bag now. Can’t cram it back in, either.”
His right hand, lying on the table, assumed a hunched shape; propelled by its index and middle fingers, it scuttled across the table toward me. “I see why you’d make a tempting target. You’re supposed to be solid, reliable Cam, but it turns out you have no light to shed on the daddy question! And then she finds out that you and Eve were both, how shall I say, intimately involved in your father’s death.”
“Plus I compounded the sin by not saying how I felt about the whole thing.”
“Well, yeah! Danny’s looking for role models, Cam. She wants other people to tell her who her father might be, how to feel about Eve, what’s acceptable, what’s not. . . . Like, is rage acceptable? Is ‘why should I be upset you’re dead, Mom, when you never gave a shit about me’ acceptable? Look, as far as Danny’s concerned, you and she both lost parents—you lost two, if you’ll remember, as has she—and you each had a difficult relationship with the parent who raised you. So why the hell aren’t you willing to talk, now that the principals are dead?”
He paused. “I suggest—don’t you wanna know what I suggest?—that you write Danny a letter. And soon.” Stuart was in advice-giving mode now, tapping the table with a bossy forefinger. “Not an e-mail, a real letter—handwritten, on nice paper. Make it clear you’re open to talking at any time. About anything. Sound like a game plan?”
“I’ll think about it,” I said. “And thanks for listening. So how’s your day been?”
He shrugged. “My day, thus far?” He popped a cashew into his mouth. “Right after we opened, several people came in looking for a copy of Calderón’s Life Is a Dream. It’ll be playing at BAM next season. Well, we happen to be out of every single Calderón title, so I spent a solid hour placing orders—or trying to. Computers! I wish the little fuckers had never come into existence. My C
PU is about to collapse. It’s supposed to be Y2K-compliant, but I sense impending doom.”
“Life Is a Dream? Never read or saw it,” I said.
“It’s cool, actually. Your man Meyerhold liked Calderón, did you know that?” He fished his three nuts out of their dish and resumed juggling them. “He staged Adoration of the Cross—that’s another Calderón play—in St. Petersburg, in the dining room of a friend. Apparently the room was huge and kind of spooky, and they used a candelabra and lots of gold brocade curtains. Must’ve been vampy as hell! The play’s a religious comedy, but Meyerhold’s version was more comedy than religious.”
I whistled softly. “How come you know so many trivial details about so many obscure theatrical productions?”
“Dunno,” he replied. “But thanks for the compliment, if that’s what it was. I happen to be very fond of candelabra. As is Carl. As you know.”
I did: a few years back, I’d given them a wrought-iron candelabra as an anniversary present. “Is Carl okay, by the way?” I asked.
He threw me an appreciative glance as he rummaged for more cashews. “I think so. Recently he’s had a little fever he can’t shake.”
“He’s checked himself out with his doc?”
“Yeah. He’ll be fine,” Stuart answered. Tension edged his voice; he was clearly worried about his partner. “Our check, please,” he called to our waitress. “Might as well ride back to our respective ranches, eh? Maybe you can take some time this afternoon to pen that letter to Danny.”
“Don’t pressure me, okay?”
“Pressure you? I’m merely suggesting you might save a certain girl from her own private quicksand.” He handed the waitress a twenty, waving away my contribution.
“Thanks,” I said. “But Danny doesn’t need to be saved.”
“Oh, I wasn’t talking about that girl.” He smiled at me languidly. “You’re right, though. What you need, Cam, isn’t to be saved—you need to be lost. It’d do you a world of good to be stripped of your bearings. Get lost!”
“I already am,” I said. As soon as the words emerged from my mouth, I knew I’d heard them recently, spoken by someone else. It took me a moment to remember who: my father, in one of my dreams. The one with the whale-shaped bottle. Jordan had whispered to it—snatches of poetry? And I’d told him to get lost, and he’d said Lost? But I already am . . . I closed my eyes and Sam’s face appeared, his expression sorrowful; and there was Meyerhold, saying something about longing—
“Cam,” said Stuart, jostling my shoulder. “Wow, girlfriend, when you leave, you really vacate.”
“Sorry.” I took the glass of water he handed me and finished it off. “Just flashing back to one of my dreams.”
“Again? Hmm.” He switched to a German accent, accompanying it with a stern look. “Vat you are saying is most interesting, Fräulein, but ve don’t know precisely vat you mean, und ve don’t like guessing games.” He shook his head. “What’s chewin’ you, sugar?”
I reached for his hands across the table. “I don’t know, Stuart. If I had a clue, I’d tell you,” I said.
His fingers curled around mine, their grip solid. He’s good at waiting. He waits for movies to go to video, for hardbacks to turn into paperbacks, and for me to say what I mean.
“You know what?” I responded finally. “Right now my mind feels like it’s stuck in a tight little space, and I just can’t scale the walls.”
“Ah.” Releasing my hands and leaning back in his chair, Stuart extended his legs and scissored my ankles with his. “Well, when you’re ready, you’ll climb. First you’ve got to see this thing through with Danny.” He gave my ankles a squeeze. “About these dreams of yours—these aren’t ordinary nighttime visitations, Cam. They’re a serious bunch of Daddy dreams. Am I right?”
“Maybe.”
“Sounds like your unconscious is doing you some favors. You ought to listen up! How’re things with the lover-man, by the way?”
“Oh, all right,” I answered, inwardly flinching. “Recently I’ve been vexed with him.”
“Good.” Stuart released my legs and stood up. “Because vexed indicates tension, which in turn suggests movement. And movement, as we know”—he did a little shimmy accompanied by syncopated finger snapping—“is always good!” His strong hug lifted me off the ground. “Take care, baby. I’ll be thinking of you.”
“ANYONE HOME?” Sam stood in my back-office doorway, his eyebrows raised questioningly.
It was one o’clock. I’d been staring into space and hadn’t heard his entrance. He extended a dozen roses toward me, their stems wrapped in a wad of damp paper towel. “Here you go,” he said.
“What’s the occasion?” I asked, inhaling the sweet buds. They were white, shapely Cherokees, small ornamentals like swamp roses only more graceful, with feathery hips at the centers of their blossoms. Drops of water clung to their petals.
“Just picked,” Sam answered, leaning in to kiss me on the cheek. “This morning Zeke announced he was tired of seeing so many roses in our garden, so I decided to accommodate him. Zeke’s loss, your gain.”
“Thanks,” I said. I put the roses in a mason jar and filled it with water, and we both stepped back to admire the bouquet. “How’s Zeke doing these days? And Abby?”
“Both good.” His face softened as it unfailingly did when I asked him about the children. In obedience to an unspoken rule, our conversations about them didn’t occur regularly, though they always felt earnest. Touchingly so. Perhaps because we both knew that but for the operations of chance, we might be talking about our own pair of kids. Or maybe because we knew chance wasn’t the only thing that had separated us from that scenario.
“They’re both happy in school?”
“Happy in most everything. That’s the best and the hardest thing, for me—seeing how easy it is for them to be happy.”
“Why’s it hard?”
“Oh . . .” He looked suddenly shy, but I knew he’d tell me. We were still, despite everything, each other’s confidant. “Well, because I envy them. Though I don’t think I resent them. Not usually, anyway. But also because I know how easily their happiness could be interrupted. Punctured.”
“It will be, one way or another.”
“Thanks, Dr. Fatalist.” He smiled wanly, then added, “No—Dr. Realist. You’re right . . . but still, it’s challenging. The whole ball of wax. Every day.”
“I can imagine.”
“I know you can.” We’d gone as far as we could go; his quick smile—a kind of punctuation mark—signaled this. “You free for a bite?”
The offer took me aback. “Actually I’m not too hungry.”
“A light lunch, then,” he said. “And quick.” Looking at me closely, he said, “Everything all right?”
“Not entirely,” I said.
A pause. “Danny?”
“Yes.”
“Want to sit in Washington Square Park for a little while, watch the pigeons?”
I nodded.
“Let’s go, then.”
For the second time that day, I locked my shop’s front door. As Sam and I headed eastward, I slipped my arm through his, automatically.
LISTENING ATTENTIVELY, Sam shielded his eyes from the sun while I told him about my weekend with Danny. When I’d finished narrating, he sat in silence, pondering.
While he stared into space, I found myself envisioning Danny’s body. It was less full-figured than her mother’s; alluring, but in a taut, rangy way. Invitational—that’s how her sexiness would’ve felt to Sam during that trip they’d taken to London. As sleekly real as it was unconsciously communicated.
He’d thought about sleeping with her, wanted to but hadn’t. This I was sure of, though he’d never said as much to me.
Yet once we’d parted, what then?
“Sam, I need to ask you something,” I said.
He raised his brows inquiringly, his expression distracted: he was still thinking about my account of the Ithaca weekend.
“My cousin,” I said, “had this idea that you’d slept with her daughter at some point.”
Sam’s gaze flickered. “Camilla,” he said quietly, “what is this?”
“This conversation with Eve took place several years back—at your wedding, in fact. I figured it was just something she was lobbing at me, to see if I’d jump. You know how she could be.” I paused. “But I didn’t forget what she’d said, either. And the thing is, you’ve showed up today for one reason: you’re worried about Danny. And now I’m thinking, is Sam wondering whether Danny and I will get to talking, and she’ll tell me something . . . ?”
He crossed his arms at his chest. “I think the best thing for you to do, if you really give Eve credit for what she said, is to ask Danny herself,” he said. His voice sounded surprisingly unperturbed; I wondered what such control was costing him.
“You’re not going to answer me, are you?”
He shook his head. “No, I’m not, Cam. There’s no point. Because I think you wouldn’t believe me.” Taking my hands in his, he drew them to his lips and kissed them where the palms joined—an old habit neither of us had indulged for many years. “I ought to get going,” he said quietly as he let my hands drop. “I suggest you take a little time off. You need a break. You’re not making things easier for anybody with this kind of approach.”
My anger dissolved. Instinctively I closed my eyes as if to shield them from a too-sharp light, the glare of shame. Sam left without a further word.
THE PARAMOUR showed up at my place after work, grimy and sweat-slicked.
Suppressing my fatigue, I pulled Nick into the shower with me. There I soaped him into a lather and had him do the same for me, slowly, making him kneel before me for a while and then lie flat, water pounding his face, as I crouched over him and took what I needed. It was a clumsily satisfying encounter.