West 47th

by Gerald A. Browne

  She adjusted her dark glasses. With a second finger reset them on the bridge of her nose. Gold wire-rimmed glasses with round magenta-tinted lenses. Chosen from her many pairs, an entire dresser-drawerful.

  “Why are we stopped?” she asked.

  “Garbage truck.”

  She pictured it and thought it wouldn’t be difficult for her mind to go from a garbage truck to blank. But her mind wouldn’t mind. It went from the garbage truck to the Manalo Blahnik navy satin pumps she had on, which still felt somewhat tight and made her wonder if her feet were getting fat, and from that to whether or not she’d remembered to close the door of her aviary, to wondering what Elise and Marian might be doing that moment in Spain where it was now midnight or later. The last she’d heard from Elise they’d wanted to move from Marbella back to Barcelona. Oddly that desire had arrived by letter rather than the usual phone call. To make sure Mitch was in on it, Maddie thought. “New stationery,” Mitch had remarked before reading it aloud. Very fine, lined stationery from Armorial the Graveur on Fauborg St. Honoré. The letter said (its only purpose, really) that Marian had located a darling apartment in Barcelona’s better district, expensive but darling, not all that large but sumptuous, more for intimacy than for entertaining. Why was it Elise couldn’t communicate without using words or phrases that were certain to conjure up sexual images? Was it her intention to boast? It seemed so to Maddie.

  “Phone him,” she told Billy.

  “I did, just now. No answer.”

  He’s down on the street waiting, she told herself and then mentally told Mitch, I didn’t want you to have to wait tonight. Fucking garbage truck.

  As though her cursing was what had been needed to dispel the impediment the way was suddenly clear and Billy went ahead and left and left and left around the block and pulled over for Mitch.

  Maddie felt the air disturbed by his climbing in. She inhaled the distinctive scent of him and leaned toward its source with her face up to receive his lips briefly on her cheek.

  “You weren’t early,” she accused.

  “Would have been but I needed to freshen up.”

  “You didn’t reshave.”

  “Maybe later.”

  “Maybe,” she arched.

  “Look at you! Thought you said no makeup.”

  “Changed my mind.” She removed her dark glasses to expose her eyes.

  Mitch knew how long it had taken her to get them so right. Both eyes equally and perfectly outlined and shadowed, lashes thickened.

  Care had also been taken in what she’d decided to wear. Mitch imagined her standing before their bedroom mirror imagining how she looked. Her dress was an Isaac Mizrahi she’d recently bought at Bergdorf and shown to him on a hanger, telling him what it was. Large white polka dots on navy blue ground. The bodice of silk crepe de chine, the short, ample skirt of filmy silk chiffon. At the time he’d said he liked it with just adequate heart. Now he set that straight, told her enthusiastically, “You look smashing!”

  “Think so?” She soaked that up and hoped for another helping and he didn’t disappoint, told her: “Being with you tonight is going to be dangerous.”

  Instead of thank you she paused and extended her lips for him to bring his to. She was feeling extremely feminine. Her arms like wings, her thighs full of blossoms. She re-crossed her legs and the chiffon obediently floated and lightly settled upon and around her. “Navy is a helpful color for me, don’t you think, for my hair and all?”

  Mitch thought so, said so. Her heavy healthy hair was naturally blonde, naturally variegated. Plenty of shine but no brass. She had it styled fairly short and in such a simple way it practically disciplined itself, required only a vigorous swish or two and a combing with her fingers here and there to look right.

  Billy brought the Lexus to the curb.

  Mitch got out, extended his hand back in to Maddie.

  She expected it, got it, used it as she aimed her left foot and found the sidewalk, placed her weight on that foot, kept her head down and then she too was out and up.

  Stumble, as always, was her enemy. At such times as this her audacity challenged it. So far so good. She paused momentarily to gather her poise, glanced off as though to survey East 55th, then returned her attention to the direction that her highly honed senses told her was the entrance to the restaurant.

  Mitch grasped her elbow firmly, started her.

  She didn’t shuffle or feel ahead with her feet. Took assured paces of a natural length, five to the held-open entrance door and twenty from it to where there were six steps up that she managed without so much as a toe bumping a riser. Mitch halted her while he dealt with the maître d’.

  Mitch and Maddie had settled on this system years ago, his using her forearm like a tiller. By now they’d pretty much perfected it. She knew what each pressure of his hand meant, which signified to go left, which to right and to what degree each of those directions. Those for stop and start were easiest. Simply a restraining or slight forward shove. A little downward tug told her she’d reached the point where she could confidently sit. There were refinements, little squeezes of a certain number conveyed certain impending things. Stairs, for example.

  Of course, their system wasn’t infallible. Old enemy stumble often had its way and there’d been numerous collisions. One day, when attempting lunch at La Goulue, Maddie had misinterpreted a signal as the sit signal and taken an inelegant flop.

  This night, however, no mishaps. She managed the zigzag course of tables and chairs and waiters without even a brush, and soon she was conspicuously seated on a banquette with the stem of a crystal wine goblet between her fingers, acclimating, actually sort of parsing, as she usually did, the sounds in the large, high-ceilinged room. The polyphony of conversations punctuated by trills of laughter and the effects of the waiters serving. She enjoyed Lespinasse, had been there numerous times for either lunch or dinner, and was acquainted well enough with the layout of the place to make a solo trip to the ladies’ room.

  “The stunning brunette two tables over,” she said out of nowhere.

  “Who?”

  “The one who’s hitting on you. Sneakily but nonetheless hitting.”

  “Two tables over?”

  “Yeah.”

  “No brunette, just three paunchy businessmen at that table.”

  A waiter brought rolls and butter. Maddie told him: “That attractive lady, at the second table from here, the dark-haired one …”

  “Yes, ma’am?”

  “See the one I mean?”

  “With a diamond clip in her hair, yes ma’am.”

  “Never mind,” she said as though having a second thought. The waiter went about his business.

  “You’re tricky,” Mitch said, wolfing a hunk of roll.

  “You’re a fibber,” Maddie contended.

  “Anyway, the brunette in question hasn’t looked this way even once.”

  “Now how would you know that?”

  Mitch retreated to the safety of silence.

  Maddie went along with that for a short while, then let him off the hook by finding his hand and giving it three consoling pats. “Don’t despair, precious,” she said, “I was just guessing and happened to be right.”

  Again, Mitch came close to saying aloud.

  Over the years there’d been numerous such instances, some so accurate it seemed she was able to recover her sight at will. She always claimed they were guesses; however they were too right and too frequent for Mitch to accept that. He thought a more likely explanation for these coincidental observations, as he called them, was she had developed an extraordinary ability that sometimes compensated for her blindness.

  But wasn’t that just as far-fetched as off-and-on seeing? Mitch’s pragmatic side told him it was.

  He’d gotten the first indication of this faculty of hers shortly after they’d met. He and Uncle Straw were out on the terrace of the Sherry Netherland apartment playing gin rummy for a penny a point. Maddie was sort of ne
utrally kibitzing, not commenting, just hovering around. Mitch drew the nine of diamonds. Discarded it. Maddie moaned, she moaned before Uncle Straw picked up the nine. How could Maddie have known the nine was Uncle Straw’s gin card, Mitch wondered. Uncle Straw evidently thought nothing of it, just gave himself points and gathered up the deck to shuffle for the next hand.

  Mitch didn’t puzzle over the incident. But neither could he dismiss it. He tried to mentally re-create it, the sequence of it, and became less certain it had happened as he recalled.

  Still, he found himself on the lookout for such occurrences.

  For example, the three sapphires. Mitch had purchased them as part of an estate. Three oval cuts, each about six carats. Maddie’s birthday was a couple of weeks off, her first birthday since they’d been married, and he wanted to have one of the sapphires repolished and mounted into a ring for her. He brought the three sapphires home, told her what he intended to do and explained the differences between the three.

  One had a distinctive lavender cast, threw pink and cornflower blue scintillations.

  Another was a typical Burma tone, dark blue, inky.

  The other was a bright Ceylon that just missed because it was ever so slightly zoned, that is, it was a lighter blue in one area.

  “Which do you think is most me?” Maddie asked, pleased by his thoughtfulness.

  “The Burma is the more precious,” he told her, “worth more and will always be, but the lavender is far prettier.”

  At that point the stones, enclosed by cotton in individual glassine bags, were on the sofa table where Mitch had placed them. Maddie considered for a moment, then her fingers went straight to the lavender and took it up, as though she knew surely which was which.

  “Is that one the lavender?” Mitch asked.

  “Well, isn’t it?”

  “How could you tell?”

  “Just guessed.”

  He watched Maddie raise her wine glass precisely to her lips. She’d ordered the house red. She took a sip preclusive to a gulp.

  “Elise was always such a wine snob,” she said. “It never failed to irk me, the way she went on about a wine’s staying power or well-structured flavor or roundness of character and all that. What shit.”

  “Maybe since she’s been in Europe she’s been shamed out of that.”

  “Let’s hope. That and all things like that.”

  Elise was Maddie’s mother. Biological mother was how Maddie qualified her, not bitterly, just to be truer about it.

  “What do you think about Elise and Marian wanting to move to Barcelona?” Maddie asked.

  An indifferent shrug from Mitch. He sometimes forgot Maddie couldn’t see such body language.

  She went on. “For some ridiculous reason they seem to feel your approval is required, or rather that I need it.”

  “Has there been any mention of how much it would set you back?”

  “Not yet, but if it’s anywhere near what it cost for their move from Paris to Marbella or their one before that, from Capri to Paris, it’ll be a small fortune. Why do you suppose they all of a sudden believe you have the power to cinch my purse strings?”

  “I’ve no idea.”

  “Maybe I should nurture the fear. If I wanted to be mean I would.”

  Mitch couldn’t imagine her mean. She could be tough at times but never mean.

  “Would that appeal to you?” she asked.

  “What?”

  “The power to cinch.”

  “You’ve asked that before.”

  “Numerous times but you might have changed your mind.”

  “We should order,” Mitch said. A waiter was standing at the ready. Maddie went right through the suggestion. “Sunday afternoon,” she said, “afterward, when you were snoozing, I was remembering when the only kisses Elise and Marian exchanged were hello-goodbye, left and right pecks on the cheeks. Uncle Straw contends that one night in parting they happened to put a lingering one smack in the middle and that was that.”

  Marian had been Uncle Straw’s wife. Thus, Maddie’s aunt by marriage. She and Elise bore such a resemblance they were often taken as sisters. They frequently fibbed about that, told people they were fraternal twins.

  Mitch had met Elise and Marian only once. Not at the wedding. They didn’t show for that. At the last minute Elise phoned to prove by sounding hoarse and sniffily that she had a terrible flu. Said she’d caught the bug while shopping in a chilly Paris rain for a wedding present, said it didn’t matter, that nothing, not even her near death could keep her from attending, said they were merciful dears for not insisting she fly considering what a mess her sinuses were, said her heart would be with them.

  The present, a pair of Christofle crystal candle holders, arrived miraculously intact two weeks later. Carelessly packed in a regular cardboard box rather than securely so in a Christofle carton. Reason enough for Mitch to suspect Elise had owned them for a while.

  Two years after then Elise and Marian came over on the Concorde for a visit that actually was a combined inspection and refinancing, so to speak. They came dressed in Ungaro suits and matching matinee-length strands of ten-millimeter pearls.

  From first sight, first cheek kisses, Mitch and Elise endured one another. She talked through her teeth at him and only barely tried to conceal her disdain. He, on the other hand, was tactfully polite and amiable while finding her little more dimensional than the photos he’d seen of her.

  She was visually attractive, though. Mitch had to give her that. Slender and conscientiously kept up. No doubt she’d had tucks and redraping here and there. The sort of time-fighting, well-off woman whom Mitch had known practically all his young life as the typical client of the Laughton jewelry store up on Madison. Known without knowing them. Those who came in to sell away what they’d once cherished came in escorted by avarice and gossamer excuses for indulgence such as ennui, in need of a lift, deserving of reward. The kind who never twitched a lash when told the price of a piece, a diamond and platinum bracelet, say, that had struck their fancy, was a hundred thousand.

  In Mitch’s eyes Elise had that sort of cachet and whatever assets she presented were spoiled by both her smile and her laugh, which in his opinion couldn’t have been more artificial. It was as though she had only a certain supply of sincerity and was afraid of running out.

  Running out.

  Elise and Marian were supposed to stay two weeks. After the third day it was apparent they wouldn’t make it. On the sixth, having fulfilled the capital aspect of their mission (a six-figure wire transfer to their joint account at the main Champs-Elysées branch of the Credit Lyonnais), Elise and Aunt Marian each left three-minute messages of contrition on Maddie’s answering machine, checked out of the Plaza and put to use what remained of their Concorde round-trip.

  “Think they’re happy?” Maddie asked.

  “Sure, why not?” Mitch replied generously.

  “The other day, to let them know for what must be the thousandth time that I don’t give a rat’s ass what they’re up to, I had them sent a needlepoint pillow. You know those little pillows with sayings on them.”

  “What did it say, the one you sent?”

  “Butch on the streets, femme in the sheets.”

  “That should do it,” Mitch remarked wryly.

  “I thought so.”

  “Let’s order.”

  “Anyway,” Maddie went on, “I’ll bet anything that what Elise and Marian had, their sizzling, inconsiderate hots, have by now dampened down to a much less limiting arrangement, a mere sharing of preference. I picture them hitting on desperate young girls for one another.” Maddie realized her spite, countered it by abruptly taking a bright side road. “Josie Jefferson was wonderful today!”

  “I was wondering how it went.”

  “She arrived a quarter hour early, her lessons all practiced, a serious little artist eager to get tuned up and into Vivaldi.”

  “What piece?”

  “Concerto in D Major, the Lar
go section. She virtually attacked it. For now she has more spirit than artistry but I heaped on the praise and asked her to solo next Sunday.”

  Maddie had been strumming and plucking at guitars since she could manage to hold one. She didn’t become serious about it, however, until she lost her eyesight at age ten. Until the black, as she put it.

  She’d taken instruction from an elderly Spanish man, a once highly recognized artist whose fingers had gone arthritic. Elise went along to his sixth-floor studio in the Carnegie Hall Building for the first few lessons, sat by the window in an ordinary folding chair counting minutes and turning pages of Town and Country and thinking why the hell didn’t Maddie play something instead of doing those incessant exercises?

  At fourteen she’d been accepted at Juilliard.

  At eighteen she realized what a saving distraction the guitar had been.

  She still played.

  Various guitars and mandolins were propped around the apartment for her to take up whenever she was in that state of mind, and it pleased her whenever Mitch asked her to play for him. Some mornings, while he was shaving, she would sit on the edge of the tub and play pieces that she believed were sure to ignite him for his day. “How’s this for a starter?” she’d say and go into a Stevie Ray Vaughan or a fandango by Rodrigo and he’d have difficulty keeping his attention on the strokes of his razor.

  At other times, on Saturday afternoons or late after a night out, he’d sit close and watch, entranced by her fingers so deftly changing positions along the frets. How sure she was of the music she made no matter how complicated. If she made mistakes, which he doubted, his love prevented him from detecting them. What could he say to convey his appreciation for her performances? He, an audience of one, with thunderous applause and countless bravos in his heart.

  His favorite pieces were from the “Castles of Spain” by Torróba, just about anything flamenco and the anonymously composed old piece called “Spanish Romance” or “Forbidden Games.” He could only take infrequent doses of the latter as the melody line of it would get into his head and intrude there for a day or two.