Dive From Clausen's Pier

by Ann Packer

  Miss Wolf was her employer, an elderly writer of some previous fame who lived near the Metropolitan Museum in an apartment with views of Central Park. Lane was her paid companion.

  “No work today?” I said.

  She shook her head. “She’s got her niece visiting.”

  “How’d you get that job, anyway?”

  “The old-girl network, lesbian track,” she said with a smile. “My favorite professor at Yale was this same niece’s best friend’s cousin. Miss Wolf is an unequal opportunity employer and I fit the bill perfectly: ‘a young, frail sapphist poetess,’ to quote her. Her last companion is now the director of a retreat for lesbian artists in upstate New York, so you can see the wide career path ahead of me.”

  I smiled. “Are you a poetess? A poet?”

  Lane’s pale face filled with color, and she nodded.

  “I didn’t know that,” I said. I thought of the others, Simon with his illustrating, Greg with acting. I’d been in nearly as many conversations with Lane as I had with Greg, and she’d never mentioned anything but her job.

  “It’s not something I really talk about,” she said.

  “I’d love to read something you wrote. If that’s not too forward.”

  She looked down for a moment, her face even redder. “I’m sorry,” she said. “This is ridiculous. I’m stupid about this.” She wiped her palms on her gray duvet cover, then went over to one of the bookcases and withdrew a slim paperback book, the cover a soft periwinkle blue. “Here,” she said, holding it out to me.

  Parapraxis and Eurydice, it said on the cover. Poems by Lane Driscoll.

  “You already have a book?” I said.

  “It’s just a chapbook.”

  I took it and turned to the table of contents, which was like a poem itself: “The Blue Door in the Garden,” “Where You Stood,” “Knowing the Vocabularies of the Body.” I flipped a few pages and read at random, conscious that she was watching me. Part of it went:

  Of the you in me:

  l’uomo vero,

  the true man.

  The father of memory,

  of all my time.

  “Wow,” I said. “Did this come out while you were still at Yale?”

  “It was printed then,” she said, blushing again. “It didn’t really come out, it’s just a chapbook.”

  I handed it back to her. “Well, I’m impressed.”

  She slid it back onto the shelf, where there were eight or ten other copies, their narrow spines carefully aligned. She turned back and smiled at me. “Simon, in typical Simon fashion, ordered a case and sat outside our dining hall trying to sell them—my publicist, he said he was. He had a sign made up. I’ve never been so mortified.”

  I smiled. “What was he like then?”

  “Like now, but with a little more Wisconsin around the edges.” She shrugged. “How about in high school?”

  He was quiet in the French class we had together—not unfriendly, but very self-contained. Around school he smiled when he saw me, but to himself, as if he thought me vaguely comical. Which I probably was, joined at the hip to Mike. Out of nowhere I recalled sitting on Mike’s lap in the cafeteria one day and seeing Simon in line by himself, nothing on his tray but a container of red Jell-O. He paid and then carried it to an empty table at the far edge of the room. “I didn’t know him that well,” I said at last. “He was shy, I guess.”

  “Closeted?”

  “Definitely.” I looked at her. “Was it hard to be gay at Yale?”

  “More hard not to be. We lucked out, timing-wise. It was more like certain people were closet heterosexuals.”

  I thought of how open Simon was now. How he’d told me he no longer went anywhere where he had to pretend to be straight. If he’d stayed in Madison would he have reached that point? I doubted it.

  “I didn’t come here expecting anything like this to happen,” I said.

  “With Kilroy?”

  I nodded.

  “Because of …”

  “Mike. I mean, Simon told you, right?”

  “I adore him, but he’s not discreet.”

  “It’s OK,” I said. “It’s fine.” I looked at her for a moment, then turned to a nearby shelf and stroked my finger over the rough surface of a tiny starfish lying there.

  She took something off her bedside table and carried it to me in her outstretched palm. “Look at this,” she said. “Feel it. It’s really soft.”

  It was a sand dollar. I took it from her and held it in my hand, a pure white disk etched with delicate spears. I touched the surface, so soft I imagined a fine dust would come away on my fingertips.

  “I found it on the beach when I was a little girl,” she said. “I’m always amazed I haven’t lost it.”

  I handed it back and watched her set it carefully on her table again. I imagined her alone on the beach, alone but not minding it. A little girl in a flowered bathing suit and a big straw hat. Digging in the sand. Knowing she was safe.

  Lane had errands to do, so we headed out together, then said goodbye on a street corner. The cloud cover was lifting and separating, revealing ribbons of watery blue. I checked on my car, then headed for a hardware store in the neighborhood. The sidewalks were alive with people, passing me with their gesticulating hands and their focused expressions. Where but in New York could you see a woman in a pink sari walking alongside a man with green hair and a pierced eyebrow, their faces turned toward each other in obvious delight? I liked the juxtapositions of stores: Cool Comix next to Manny’s Shoe Repair; Laundromatic next to Faïence de Provence. For a while I just looked at people’s feet, wondering at the number of foot-miles each block of sidewalk supported each day.

  The hardware store had six different kinds of curtain rods. The spring-loaded one I needed was only $3.99, and I carried it around the store with me while I wandered through Tupperware and extension cords and garbage cans. It was its own kind of pleasure to browse among things that were entirely practical, things people needed. Down one aisle I found packages of cardboard you could assemble into furniture: bedside tables, file cabinets, sweater chests to slide under your bed. The biggest package contained an entire dresser, a shrink-wrapped stack of cardboard printed with cabbage roses. For twenty bucks I could unpack.

  Back at the brownstone, I ripped into the plastic and found the instructions. They were three pages long, all Slot A and Flap B, and within minutes my knuckles were rubbed red, but I wasn’t daunted. I pushed and pulled at the cardboard, and an hour later I had a dresser. It fit snugly between the futon and the wall, five drawers that didn’t exactly glide open but that worked. I dumped the contents of my suitcase onto the futon, a chaos of clothing twisted together. No more. I began folding and arranging, sweaters, shirts, and pants, even dresses and skirts, because I didn’t want anything left in the suitcase, not a single sock. Last on the futon were the silk nightgown and robe, still wrapped in tissue but all twisted and crumpled now. The bottom drawer couldn’t really open—the dresser was that tightly wedged between the wall and the futon—but I cracked it a few inches, unwrapped the two silk pieces, smoothed them out as well as I could, and arranged them inside by feel. I took the empty suitcase down to the first floor and wrestled it onto the top shelf of the closet with the ironing board and the vacuum cleaner, then I went back upstairs and gave my cardboard dresser a pat. Much better.

  Kilroy called at five. He was about to leave the advertising agency where he’d been working all week, and he wondered if I wanted to meet him at McClanahan’s, or maybe meet him at his house beforehand so he could get out of his work clothes …

  I met him at his house. I got there first and waited in the vestibule, wondering what to say about last night, what to think. At last he pulled open the outside door and came in. His hair was tucked behind his ears, his face smoothly shaved. He always came home to change before he did anything else, but I liked how he looked in his work clothes, uncomfortably handsome. Today he wore khaki pants and a blue dress shirt that bro
ught out the pale flecks in his eyes. “Sorry you had to wait,” he said. He seemed a bit breathless. He let us into the lobby and went into the mailroom for a moment, then came back out and pressed the button for the elevator. “Phew,” he said.

  “Tiring day?”

  “I’ve just been hurrying.” He tucked his mail under his arm and reached for my hand. He interlocked his fingers with mine, but then the elevator arrived and he let go and we stepped on.

  “What’d you do today?” he said.

  “Bought a dresser.”

  He raised his eyebrows.

  “Cardboard,” I added.

  A smile curled his lips. “That’s very cutting edge, actually. Frank Gehry has these cardboard chairs that people in the know are very into.”

  “Do they have cabbage roses on them?”

  “That I doubt,” he said. “Though I may not be up on the latest developments.”

  We reached his floor and he held the elevator door as I stepped off. In his apartment he dropped his mail in the kitchen and then went into the bedroom. “Want to go get a beer?” he called.

  I made my way down the hall. He was standing there in his blue shirt, his khakis already tossed over a chair back. The last twenty-four hours spun through my mind, the ravioli dinner we’d had in the noisy Italian restaurant, Kilroy talking to Simon and Greg in the kitchen, then the thing with Lane and her school. Mike’s voice on the phone, my night alone, talking to Lane this morning. I didn’t, actually, want to go get a beer. I approached him, and as I walked I pulled my sweater over my head and tossed it onto the bed. When I reached him I slipped my fingers into the leg of his jockeys and touched his supple balls, rolling them for a moment between my fingers until I was ready to wrap my fingers around his hardening erection.

  “You surprise me,” he said in a soft, choked voice.

  “Still?”

  “Yes.”

  I put my palm over his mouth and then unbuttoned his shirt and pushed it off his shoulders and onto the floor. I flung my bra away and moved us both to the bed. I tugged his jockeys off and then moved down until he was right there between my breasts, engorged, and I squeezed my breasts together and slid up and down on him, his smooth warmth. I lowered my mouth and licked and sucked for a while, then stopped abruptly. I sat up and yanked my jeans and underwear off as he lay beside me breathing hard. I moved back and got his knee between my legs and my breasts sandwiching him again, and we moved and moved, and then he groaned and flipped me onto my back and pushed into me, and then he pumped and pumped harder and harder, his face hovering over me, his hair brushing my forehead, and then I came, and then he did, and then we lay there damp and panting, a heap of entangled arms and legs, and we didn’t talk.

  CHAPTER 21

  That Sunday Kilroy decided we should cook. Too much takeout, he told me, was bad for the soul. It was a cold October day, a day he said was crying out for beef stew. We left his apartment and headed downtown, my mind for some reason racing ahead to put us in a store in the Village that I’d wandered into one day. It had been crammed full of the most appealing foods I’d ever seen: beautifully stacked fruits and vegetables, sausages hanging from the ceiling, bins of breads, shelves of exquisite cakes, trays of olives, jars of imported mustards, fresh, clean fish laid out on beds of ice. And the most incredible array of meats. Everything perfect, everything way out of my reach. How much would my share come to? Could I plead no appetite to reduce the amount of meat we bought?

  “Balducci’s?” Kilroy said when he figured out what I was thinking. “You don’t buy stew meat at Balducci’s.”

  “You mean you don’t.”

  He shook his head. “I don’t buy anything at Balducci’s. Well, maybe a piece of imported cheese that would stink to high heaven, on a day I was in a weird mood. But no one would buy stew meat there—the whole point of stew is to take a so-so piece of meat and cook the toughness out of it until it can’t be anything but delicious.”

  We went to the A&P instead. Filled our cart with prepackaged stew meat, carrots, onions, mushrooms, bacon, tomato paste, beef broth, bay leaves, and a loaf of French bread. At the cash register Kilroy waved off the money I took from my wallet. “My idea, my treat.”

  “But,” I said. “But …”

  He picked up one bag and pushed the other toward me. “You’ll emasculate me if you fight me on this.”

  “But not if I carry one of the grocery bags?”

  He shook his head. “That’s actually a notch down on my scale.”

  Back at his apartment we settled into his immaculate kitchen. I chopped carrots and onions on a big wooden cutting board while he browned the meat three or four pieces at a time. It was all very familiar, and after a while I realized why: in high school, Jamie and I had once checked Julia Child out of the library and made a complete French dinner for Mike and Rooster, from soupe à l’oignon to tarte aux pommes. (It was pathetic, now that I thought about it: Mike had proudly brought a filched bottle of horribly sweet white wine, and at the end Rooster’d asked if there was ice cream for the “pie.”) The centerpiece had been a dish nearly identical to the one Kilroy and I were working on, a beef stew with sauteed mushrooms and braised pearl onions. “Hey,” I said, “isn’t this basically boeuf Bourguignon?”

  Kilroy looked up from the stew pot. “It would be if we were in France. Here it’s just beef stew.”

  I blushed. “Oh, I see.”

  He cocked his head. “Come on, don’t be like that. I just have a theory that you have to be careful about importing foreign names and pronunciations. Sometimes it’s necessary, but other times it smacks of affectation. I used to know this woman who’d say, ‘Well, I’m off to Roma next week.’ ‘Would you like some veecheesoizzz?’ It was tempting to throttle her.”

  “Who was she?” I asked.

  “She was a woman.”

  “You said that.”

  He turned back to the stove and tossed some more beef into the pot. “She sounds like a snooty rich girl,” I said. “Was she a friend of yours?”

  “What a horrible thought.” The meat sizzled and spat, and he concentrated on it, turning it with a long wooden spatula.

  “So?”

  He turned around. “She was a friend of my mother’s, OK? I don’t know what I could tell you about her that would make her interesting.”

  My face burned, and I stared at the pile of chopped vegetables on the cutting board. Here we went.

  “Say boeuf Bourguignon again,” he said, something apologetic in his voice as he changed the subject.

  I looked up at him. “Boeuf Bourguignon.”

  He smiled. “I was right, you do have a good accent.”

  “French for six years. Did you take it, too?”

  “I lived there for a while, a long time ago.”

  I set my knife down and stared. “In France?”

  His smile broadened and he nodded.

  “I’ve always wanted to go to France,” I exclaimed. “I read a book about the House of Dior that made me want to be French for a while. How long were you there?”

  “About two years.”

  My mouth fell open. I picked up a piece of carrot and set it down again, my fingers damp.

  “No need to be so impressed,” he said.

  “I’m not impressed, I’m flabbergasted. Did you live in Paris?”

  “Paris part of the time, Provence for a while.” He shrugged. “I spent a summer in the Dordogne.”

  “I can’t believe this. How old were you?”

  “Twenty-seven, twenty-eight.”

  Suddenly I was confused. “And this was when?”

  “Ten years ago. More, actually.”

  I felt my mouth fall open.

  “I’m forty,” he said. “If that’s what you want to know.”

  Forty. I’d been assuming late twenties, thirty max—at Viktor and Ania’s I’d thought he was my age. The idea that he was forty and a temp worker, forty and living in an apartment with no more pieces of furniture
than you could count on your fingers, no art on the walls, no junk—it bothered me somehow.

  “What are you thinking?” he said.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Don’t you mean you don’t want to say?”

  I pushed some scraps of carrot peel together, making a little pile. “OK,” I said. “I’m wondering why you never told me before.”

  He raised his eyebrows. “That I lived in France for a while?”

  “That you’re forty.”

  “It never came up,” he said with a shrug. “What was I supposed to do, fill out an application? ‘Age.’ ‘Places lived.’ ” He gave me a pointed look: “ ‘People known.’ ” He moved closer and put his hand behind my neck, pulling me forward until our foreheads touched. “ ‘Ability to appreciate a fetching small-town girl who’s full of surprises.’ ” He kissed me and his lips were warm, his stubble scratchy on the skin around my mouth.

  “What does it matter, anyway?” he said, moving back toward the stew pot again. “Forty doesn’t say what I am, I say what forty is.”

  “Maybe,” I said, but I was reminded of what my mother’d said on the phone, weeks ago, about defining versus being defined by what you did, and thinking of her made me realize: Kilroy was closer to my mother’s age than to mine.

  I entered a phase of intense listening, in the hope that I could learn more about him. I wanted facts. I saw myself as the perennial graduate student he’d said I should be, but a student of him, a researcher in a carrel, typing notes into a laptop. I’d left one library only to build myself another.

  Yet the shelves were bare. Or all they held were real books: what I learned was how much he liked to read. He went through a book every four or five days—huge, heavy books on the geology of the American Southwest, or Russian art and iconography, or the history of fundamentalism in the Middle East. Evenings, he read while I sewed: I went back to the fabric store and bought two different kinds of black microfiber for a couple of pairs of side-zip pants, then took my Bernina to his place so I could work there. Some nights we’d go hours without talking, the only sounds my sewing machine stuttering a quick seam, then his book answering with a flip of a page. Other nights he’d look up after half an hour and say he was thirsty, how about a beer and a game of pool at McClanahan’s?