by Rita Ciresi
Ordinarily I would have felt delirious with joy at leaving behind the humdrum suburbs and making my way into the bustle of the city, where no one knew me as Eben Strauss’s wife. But it had been a while since I’d ventured into Manhattan, and the blare of cab horns and roar of idling delivery trucks overwhelmed me. Everyone else on the sidewalk seemed to know exactly where they were going—and there I stood on the street corner, trying to remember was it Lexington? or Madison? that came between Park and Fifth? And was it worth trying to take the train—but which train?—from 42nd to the lower 50s? I used to know this city, I told myself. But now I’m lost. At any moment, one of those gorgeous men or women brushing past me on the sidewalk—who seemed to have stepped out of the pages of Esquire or Vogue—would glance at my scuffed boots and dowdy down coat, then disdainfully tell me, “Radio City Music Hall lies that-a-way, so get thee hence.”
Ichikawa—which fortunately had been listed in our outdated copy of Zagat’s—was on the ground floor of one of those medium-size skyscrapers that might have functioned as a landmark in a smaller city like Hartford or Albany. As I pushed through the revolving door and walked into the central lobby, I turned and looked at myself in the glass window of the restaurant. Ricardo had cut three inches off my hair. But he hadn’t lopped the fat off my chin or cheeks or even my falling derriere. He hadn’t gotten rid of five years of fretting about Danny that had settled in the lines of my forehead, nor had he washed out the bags beneath my eyes that came from waking at all hours of the night as Danny’s adenoids rattled like hard-boiled eggs in a pan. I did not want to bring such a self to meet the great I. I. Iforson. But that self was all I had, and so I took a deep breath and walked in.
The salty odor emanating from the kitchen—a combination of cod and rice vinegar and soy sauce—made my stomach curl in distress.
“I’m here to join someone,” I told the hostess as I peered around the soshi screen into the restaurant. It wasn’t large—at most, thirty tables—and in one of the tiny black leather booths at the back sat Aye-Aye, his blond mane unmistakable against the rugged cables of his Shetland fisherman’s sweater.
I waved and noted I was not the only woman in the restaurant whose eyes were upon Aye-Aye as he rose—all six-feet-whatever of him—from the booth and made his way toward the soshi screen.
Aye-Aye held out his arms. “You must be Elizabeth D.,” he said, taking my cold hands in his warm hands. “Looking exactly like I imagined.”
My mouth, I swear, opened wide enough to catch an incoming 747. I was convinced that Aye-Aye had derived his picture of me from my description of Robin Stern in I’m Sorry: Sometimes Robin felt so plug-ugly that she listed all the surgical procedures she would need if she ever wanted to rekindle Simon’s flagging passion: nose job, chin job, cheek job, boob job, butt job, thigh job . . .
I licked the spittle off my bottom lip. As I clasped Aye-Aye’s warm hand in my cold right hand, I told him, “You look exactly like your photograph.”
This was a lie. Aye-Aye looked even better. Sturdier. Healthier, as if he subsisted on a diet of fresh brown bread and goat’s milk cheese and spent the day either slinging large slabs of blubber around the deck of a whaling ship or wrestling elk.
Aye-Aye may have looked handsome enough to bronze upon a krone—but I immediately noted that Ebb had much better manners. Aye-Aye did not gesture for me to go first when we walked back to the table. He did not help me take off my coat. Plus he just flopped himself down in the booth before I even lowered myself onto the leather cushion—unlike Ebb, who had been trained by his parents never to sit down until a woman had been seated.
Either I was turning into an old fuddy-duddy—or I was discovering rather late in life that I preferred the idea of Sir Walter Raleigh the courtier (who spread his cloak over a puddle so a woman might cross it dry-shod) to Sir Walter Raleigh the pirate and the plunderer.
I sat down opposite Aye-Aye and pointed to his pilsner glass. “What are you drinking?” I asked.
“Kirin.”
I never drank before dinner. In fact, I never drank beer—at any time of the day—because it made me piss like there was no tomorrow. But when the waiter came by, I said, “I’ll have the same.”
Aye-Aye and I made idle small talk—mostly about the snow—until the waiter returned with my beer and two hand-lettered menus printed on ecru rice paper. My dislike of Japanese food stemmed from the one time Ebb and I had eaten too much tempura at a tiny restaurant in a strip-mall close to our home—and then spent the rest of the evening letting loose more fiery belches than Mount Fuji (when the volcano was active, that is). The menu in our hometown Japanese restaurant had shown photographs of all the entrees. But at Ichikawa—judging from the dishes listed—I would have preferred not even knowing, much less seeing, what I was about to shovel down my gullet. Only in New York, I thought, would people lay down good money to eat seared ostrich on a bed of portobello mushrooms. Or eel tempura. Or tuna tartare. And that was just the stuff I recognized. What, I wondered, were fire oysters? Yellowtail? Hamachi? I was terrified to order and find out later that I had eaten something like the testicles of a harp seal.
“What are you having?” I asked Aye-Aye.
“I wanted to try this—but I forgot to have my assistant call in the order.” He pointed to an entree marked: We are pleased to have authorization of health dept. to bring to you this exciting, sociable dish. Please, 24 our notice.
The entree—which looked like it was pronounced fug-you—cost one hundred ninety dollars. “What’s that?” I asked.
“Puffer fish,” Aye-Aye said. “If the chef doesn’t fix it just right, you drop dead.”
“You’d eat that?”
Aye-Aye leaned across the table and looked me too keenly in the eye. “Live dangerously.”
He obviously didn’t have any children, I thought, as I abandoned my plan to order the staid California roll. When the waiter came back, I pointed under the sushi listings to a trio of mysteries—maguro, bineyo, and hirame—and said, “I guess I’ll have this.”
“One ménage à trois,” the waiter said as he scribbled down my order.
“And a side of . . . um, silverware,” I said.
“Knife and folk for lady,” the waiter said scribbling away. “And you, sir?”
“I’ll start with the spider roll,” Aye-Aye said.
I took a very big sip of my beer.
“With an extra helping of the wasabi. Then the ritsu. Sauce on the side. And could you ask the chef if he’ll do half an order of the fried ebi?”
The waiter shook his head. “No half ebi. Whole only.”
“Well, then I’ll have the fuko maki. Lightly seared. But I’d also like it—”
I must have been really thirsty. Or maybe I just wanted to keep my glass up to my lips so I wouldn’t be tempted to tell Aye-Aye, If you’re going to be so fussy about how your food is fixed, then why don’t you just hustle back into the kitchen and cook it yourself?
After the waiter retreated, Aye-Aye folded his hands on the table—he had huge hands—and said, “Now. Lisa. I’m sorry.”
“About what?”
“I mean I’m Sorry, your novel—”
My face flushed. “Oh, I’m so happy,” I said, “that you liked all of the manuscript.”
“Liked it?” Aye-Aye said. “I loved it. I felt pained by it. I mean, that marriage.”
My fingers inched toward my pilsner glass. “What about it?”
“Beyond hopeless.”
I took another very healthy sip of beer.
“All that bickering,” Aye-Aye said. “The sleepless nights. The disappointments. The longing. Honey, the grief.”
I wiped the beer foam from my lips—and probably three quarters of whatever lipstick was left on my lips came off on the napkin. “I didn’t think it was that bad.”
“Bad! It’s hellish!”
“Simon and Robin have their good moments,” I said. “Even their good days.”
“Yes, bu
t their marriage felt like forever.” Aye-Aye swallowed the last of his beer and shoved his glass to the side. “I just wanted to pluck those poor souls off the page and give them a drastic makeover. Maybe in the sequel—”
“I wasn’t planning a sequel.”
“—Simon and Robin can stop dreaming about becoming something other than what they really are. They should run off to the city—solo, mind you—and get a real life. Or at least update their utterly retro belief that they should stay together for the sake of the kids.”
“Kid,” I said. “Singular.”
“Whatever.”
From the way the pattern on the tatami mat nailed to the wall seemed to shift, I realized why Ebb made it a rule not to drink at company functions. Nevertheless, I ordered another beer when Aye-Aye ordered another. And when the waiter brought us a lacquer tray holding something pale rolled in seaweed and Aye-Aye said, “Try one,” I felt obliged to dip one slimy roll into a tiny bowl of green sauce.
I took a bite. The nostrils practically blew off my nose. “Whoa,” I gasped as I reached for my beer. “Now I know what to give my son—who snores like a pig—before he goes to bed at night.”
“I thought you had a daughter,” Aye-Aye said.
“Simon and Robin have a daughter.” I hesitated, then said, “You know, very few of the key details in my novel are true.”
“I should hope so. For your sake.” Aye-Aye took a hearty bite of his seaweed roll. “Although I have to say, right now New York is falling all over its face for the memoir.”
“I can’t imagine why,” I said. “Personally—when I read—I prefer to escape.”
“I’m with you, Ms. Diodetto. Take me to the outer reaches of the imagination. Speaking of which. In I’m Sorry.” Aye-Aye leaned back. “You strike me as someone who can take it straight from the hip.”
“Right,” I said. “In my next life, I plan on joining the Marines.”
“Well, I need to tell you: I don’t have an easy sell here. This is a very quiet story you’ve written.”
“That’s odd,” I said. “It seemed so loud in my head.”
Aye-Aye refolded his huge hands on the table. “Furthermore, we don’t have anything truly original here. No talking dogs, no pedophilia, no midgets with sixth sense. How many times can we read about a marriage on the rocks—”
“I guess I was hoping at least one more time.”
“—without saying to ourselves, every postwar author from John Cheever to John Updike has more than beaten this subject to death?”
I crinkled up my nose in disdain. Neither of those Johns, I thought, had written about their husband’s hemorrhoids (which really were the piles I’d gotten after I gave birth to Danny) with such consummate wit.
“What I’m trying to tell you,” Aye-Aye said, “is that you need to change your ending.”
“I do?” Good thing I had to press my lips together to hold back a beery burp—otherwise I would have blurted out, I do not! I gave Aye-Aye a tight smile. “Tell me why.”
“This final chapter doesn’t ring true. You failed to capture what a man feels when he really wants another woman. And you need to get rid of all the remorse that Simon feels. It’s completely overdone.”
“But Simon betrayed his wife with Take-A-Letter-Maria,” I said. “In his imagination.”
“But not in reality.”
“But he realized he was a heartbeat away from flushing his whole life down the toilet. So when he stopped himself, just in time, from grabbing Take-A-Letter-Maria’s butt—”
“Most guys wouldn’t have those scruples,” Aye-Aye said.
“My guy does,” I said. “My guy acknowledges he’s done wrong and tries to make it right.”
“It would be more realistic,” Aye-Aye said, “if he did wrong and then did wrong again.” Aye-Aye leaned forward and grasped my hand. “Simon needs to fuck Maria.”
I smiled. And nodded. And thought, You need to fuck yourself.
“Yes, Simon needs to leave Robin for Take-A-Letter-Maria and do just what the song says: Tell her I won’t be coming home, I’ve got to start a new life.”
I looked down at Aye-Aye’s hand on my hand. “Real men don’t do that,” I said.
“Of course they do,” Aye-Aye said. “Just look at the divorce rate. One out of two.”
“But what about the other fifty percent? What’s their story?” I suddenly became aware that I was raising my voice, so I took a deep breath and said, “My novel is about why a couple chooses to stay together in the age of divorce.”
“But, honey, don’t you understand: We want to know why people divorce in the age of the divorce. Besides—in your book—we feel this push toward adultery through the entire narrative and then we don’t even get a good fuck in the end. It’s so disappointing. So staid. So overly moral.”
“What’s wrong with moral?” I asked.
Aye-Aye removed his hand from mine. “This isn’t Aesop, sweetie. You don’t get a fat advance for telling the reader at the end of your story, ‘Look before you leap’ or ‘Familiarity breeds contempt.’ ”
I sat there, speechless. I could not—no, I would not!—change my exquisitely written (not to mention touching and poignant and heart-wrenching) ending in which Simon Stern flung open the front door of his home, determined to rush into the kitchen, take Robin in his manly arms, and vow that he would love her forever—only to get hit with a stream of WD-40 that Robin (who was sick of nagging him about the sticky front-door lock) accidentally sprayed all over his turdish tie.
What did Aye-Aye think I was—a fishmonger? a mattress salesman? a hustler of used cars? I was a Writer with a capital double-U. I shall not compromise my artistic ideals for money, I felt like telling him. Nor will I sully my vision for the sake of one lousy buck.
However. For one hundred thousand bucks . . .
Several uncomfortable seconds of silence passed, in which I seriously considered rushing back into the kitchen to bribe the chef to fix—incorrectly—a big steaming plate of fugu, which I would deliver to Aye-Aye with these words: Eat this—and die. But I knew that now was the moment for me to speak in Ebbish, to say “Let us agree to disagree” or some other reasonable line.
I opened my big mouth and told Aye-Aye: “I’m sure we can reach some misunderstanding.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
EBEN
At the bagel shop, Cynthia showed me that she believed in the cardinal rule of real estate: Sell to the woman, close to the man. She came on strong to me. She kept saying we, as if I were buying the house with her instead of Lisa: “We need to order a termite inspection.” “We need to confirm your lock-in rate.” “We need to guesstimate how much the house is worth to the buyers and how much it’s worth to us.”
I pushed aside the plate that had held my pesto bagel and took a sip of my coffee. “You mentioned you met the wife,” I said.
Cynthia finished the last bite of her cinnamon bagel. “Last week, when my car was in the shop, I rode along with Rob while he did a job there.”
“Mice?” I asked.
“Oh no. Rob deals with much larger animals than that. This was just an owl. Roosting in the attic eaves.” Cynthia raised her coffee; her styrofoam cup was tinged with pale pink lipstick. “I was going to wait for Rob in the truck, but the wife insisted I come in for a cup of coffee.”
“Oh, so you had coffee together?” I nodded at her cup. “When you and Lisa go out for coffee, I know sometimes you . . . um, open up . . . to each other.”
Cynthia blushed. “I’m embarrassed to admit it, but I do unload a lot on Lisa.”
“I’m sure Lisa pays you back in kind.”
Cynthia shook her head. “I can’t say that she does.”
If I hadn’t been so concerned about derailing the conversation, I might have asked, Are we talking about the same Lisa?
“So when you had coffee with this wife at the house,” I said, “did she say anything to you? That might be useful to us?”
“Well.�
�� Cynthia’s eyes sparkled. “She did call her ex-husband a pig.”
“I see.”
“The sort of man who had a wandering eye, if you know what I mean.”
“I’m sure I don’t. But go on, please.”
“Actually, I need to backtrack. Before she even got around to complaining about her ex-husband, I complimented her on her home—you know, ‘This is a beautiful home you have here’—and she said to me, ‘More like a beautiful burden.’ She said she had gotten the house in the divorce settlement, but she didn’t have the money to keep it up. Then she told me—not knowing I was in real estate, of course—’I’d ditch this house faster than my husband ditched me, which is to say, in half a second.’ ”
“Oh.” I leaned back in my chair. “I like the sound of that.”
“I thought you would. And so—if you’re wondering how low we can lowball?”
I nodded.
Cynthia reached into her tote bag for a pen, plucked a napkin from my tray, and scratched down 650 instead of 750. “Should we start there and see what happens?”
“That sounds doable to me.”
“Then let’s do it,” she said.
We pushed back our chairs and put on our coats. “What a gorgeous day,” Cynthia said when we stepped out of the bagel shop into the blinding sunlight.
“By the end of the week it’ll all be slush,” I said, “and you’ll have nothing but the Bahamas on your mind. Watch that car.”
Cynthia had stepped off the curb into the path of a car turning into the mini-mall parking lot. The silver grille of this big blue Buick seemed to grin as I took Cynthia’s forearm and pulled her back onto the sidewalk. The man behind the steering wheel tooted his horn. I dropped Cynthia’s arm. The driver was Josh Silber.
Josh’s open-mouthed look of surprise confirmed what Lisa once said of him: “There are times when Josh looks like a friendly, but not very bright, hippopotamus.” The Buick rolled forward and slowly stopped. Josh lowered the window. Coughing from the exhaust, he called out, “Hey, Ebbie. Hey, Cynthia. Where’s”—he coughed again—“Lisa?”
