Keeping her eyes on me, she took the cigarette out of her mouth and held it out. I put it to my lips, my every fiber aware of the dampness around the filter’s tip. She said that she wished she could stay out here all day but had to get back to work—afterward, I realized it was meant to be a joke, taken in the context of the trash bins and the gaseous stink around us, but at the time I said quite earnestly that I wished the same. She walked me down the narrow alley and gave me a hug. She pressed her ear against my chest, and I let my lips rest on the top of her head, breathing in the intimate smell of her hair. When I spoke, my whispered words tripped over hers, so that together we sounded something like I wish we can’t I know me too.
(Writing this now, years later, I think about Penelope—how young she was, in her late twenties, with an eleven-year-old and married to a man like Arthur, how she must have felt, hearing day after day her coworkers’ after-work exploits, their carefree couplings and uncouplings, the total ease with which they were able to live. How she must have longed to be as free—to call in sick because she felt like catching a movie or to punch out at the end of a shift and walk off into the night with everybody else to a karaoke bar, to an all-night noodlery for yakisoba at three in the morning. Not to worry whether Art forgot to feed himself or let Will go through a box of Frosted Flakes for dinner. Not to worry what these two boys weren’t telling her, what she was so in the dark about.)
I stood out in the bright sun blinking into the mouth of the alley from which I’d emerged, disoriented. Where was I? It took a turn around the block to reconnect with the bakery’s main entrance. I walked on, past it, back to work.
I was loitering in the café with my sweep set toward the end of my shift when Penelope showed up. The nine o’clock crowd had just dispersed. She greeted me with a long look and a slow hug. Her puffy orange coat squished like a stuffed animal in my arms.
I took her on a wordless tour of the theater. Where were we going? I didn’t have a destination; I just let my feet take me places. Penelope followed, coat swish-swishing in my ear. I showed her through the swinging door behind the café counter to see fellow employees hurrying through their closing duties. I brought her down the escalator into the stockroom to see the hissing carbon-dioxide tanks that fed the soda machines. I brought her into the cement break pit, into the locker room, and up the narrow flight of stairs into the projection booth to see the great platters of spooled film feed each of the six flickering projectors. We held hands as we did this. Penelope’s hair was damp and freshly combed, her lips glistening, face flush with a recent application of makeup—something I noticed, I think, because she didn’t normally wear makeup, or this much of it. My heart leaped at the thought that she might have done this for me. We bumped into the general manager coming up the stairs, and we must have looked caught in the act of something, because he teasingly singsonged, “What are you two lovebirds doing?”
As anyone who has found themselves in a similar situation knows—or who has allowed such a situation to get as out of hand as this one had—I was not thinking about whom I might hurt. I was not thinking of Arthur sitting at the dining room table, eating the dinner Penelope had prepared for him out of its Tupperware container. I was not thinking of Will in his room with his earphones on listening to the Jerky Boys while doing his homework. I was thinking only of Penelope’s hand in mine, of her arm brushing against my arm, hip brushing hip.
We took a seat in the back row of Theater 6, showing a new adaptation of a Thomas Hardy novel. It seemed, despite the period costumes and candlelit interiors, that those on-screen were enacting our story: unhappily married woman carrying on with another man. Knowing glances, long knowing silences, long lingering walks alone. Moments before the two on-screen gave in to their desires, our lips were feeling out for each other in the flickering darkness. I kissed the contours of her face, her eyelids, her ears, her nose with its tiny cold stud—and her mouth. Our teeth clicked, our tongues met, the musk of our shared saliva inhabited the air between each kiss. Her puffy coat was a hindrance, rustling loudly in the dark. I tried pulling it off.
Where can we go, she breathed into my ear.
There was a place the ushers used for napping, one of those secret spots that nobody discussed but about which everyone knew, a folding canvas cot set up in the bowels of the stockroom behind a blind of stacked boxes. The spot was ideal, as the only access to it was down a long corridor, which gave you ample time to straighten your clothes, wipe the sleep from your eyes, and grab a sleeve of cups out of one of the boxes, the feigned object of your excursion to this out-of-the-way place. I led Penelope by the hand through the darkened theater, down the center aisle to the front row and out through the emergency side exit behind the screen. My teeth were chattering. We stumbled down two interconnecting passageways, through a back door into the stockroom, then farther, down the long corridor and around the corner wall of boxes.
I took off Penelope’s coat and spread it out on the cot. I unzipped her fleece and peeled it off, pulled her T-shirt up over her head. I unhooked her bra and held the miracle of her bare breasts in my hands. She kicked off her clogs. I unbuckled her belt and stripped off her pants. “My turn,” she murmured. I watched her tattooed arm, that chain mail of snake scales, pull off my bow tie and work its way down the buttons of my white work shirt. Her fingers trembled through this, her arm a stucco of dark blue goose bumps. Her normally green eyes were dilated black. Her cheeks burned, bringing to the surface the tiny all-over scarring of teenage acne. Through our fucking—the warm damp press of naked bodies, the penetration, the rocking and rocking and rocking to climax—she breathed hard into my ear but didn’t say a word.
In the drowsy afterward, she lay curled against my chest. Pulling back, I saw that she was crying.
Writers have the luxury of elision. They can excise what causes too much discomfort to relate. And were I to take such luxury here, I would skip over the moments that followed, pick up the next morning with Suriyaarachchi and Dave and a fresh cup of coffee. Cut away, avoid the pain of waking from our lust. Because, as we sorted through the aftermath of shed clothing, with each article redonned, it was as though we were clothing ourselves in the terrible wrongness of what we had done. We walked a long slow march back down the corridor, not holding hands and not speaking, avoiding a brush against the shoulder or a hip as though a force field had come down between us. We emerged from the stockroom into the salty popcorn air of the empty lobby. I walked her over to the exit doors. She stepped out into the cold and before walking away looked back at me briefly, bleary eyed, and shook her head.
In my dream, Arthur held a shotgun. He pointed it at me and told me that he knew what I had done. I apologized, I broke down weeping, and woke with the sound of the blast ringing in my ears, the cry still stuck in my throat.
Leaving for lunch, I heard Arthur in the hallway with Will and ducked into the stairwell to travel the fourteen flights on foot rather than stand with him and his son in the elevator. A part of me wanted to come clean, to get it off my chest. Another part of me reasoned that it wasn’t my decision alone to make. I needed to speak with Penelope. But Penelope remained unreachable through the swinging door behind the bakery’s counter. I waited on the bench outside for an hour. I went through most of a pack of cigarettes. I pretended to look at the menu and watched for her red bandanna. I went inside and asked to speak with her. The cashier disappeared for a few moments and returned to tell me that she was busy.
Penelope showed up later at the theater. I invited her to sit at one of the café tables, but she didn’t want to sit. She said it would be best if I stopped coming by the bakery. And, while I was at it, the apartment. Just avoid that end of the hall altogether. It was best. I suggested we tell Arthur. Absolutely not, she said. This was not something to hash out. It was something to box up, to toss out as though it never happened.
But I felt terrible, I said.
“Well,” Penelope said, “keep it to yourself.” And then she did s
it down. And put her face in her hands and wept. “What have I done? I am so fucking stupid!”
I sat down and put my hand on her knee, but she jerked it away. “No, don’t touch me.” She dug in her pocket for a tissue and blew her nose. “I thought I could get back at him—balance things between us. But all I did was make it worse.”
I respected Penelope’s wishes. In the days that followed, I avoided the Morels’ end of the hallway. A part of me was relieved. How could I face Will? He would take one look at me and know. I used the same stairwell, across from the garbage chute just past Dave’s apartment, that I’d ducked into earlier to avoid Arthur and Will. The long jog down led me to the side exit by the loading dock, which allowed me to steer clear of the revolving door.
Suriyaarachchi had begun sleeping at Dave’s, I noticed. I would come in to find him on the editing-room couch covered in a blanket or exiting the bathroom with a toothbrush in his mouth. At first I thought it had something to do with the long nights of drinking they were always inviting me to participate in and I was always sheepishly though firmly declining. To be their wingman—or I think it was used as an enticement, that they would be my wing-men. The bars they liked were all of a piece: the former beauty salon, the former pharmacy, the former grocery store. Rather than gut these places, the proprietors thought it better to polish the fixtures, dust off the wares, and restore the signage to simulate a heyday, circa 1957. The girls who got drunk here were pierced and tattooed and wore dresses carefully curated off the racks of the Goodwill. Like Penelope. They did their hair up in the styles of an era to match the décor.
“Don’t you have an apartment?” I asked.
“Can’t afford it anymore. Found a guy to sublet it for plenty, though. I pay half of Dave’s rent now and with enough left over to see this movie into the hands of a distributor. Crawling to the finish line, just barely.”
The twin betrayals in this statement left me winded. I want to say that my face went “dark.” You read writers using this word to describe a character’s expression, but I couldn’t see myself so I can only say it felt this way. The usual tension in my facial muscles that holds my social exterior together, that tries to project a certain friendliness to make me appear, as people have said about me, eager to please—these muscles went slack.
Suriyaarachchi must have sensed this change, too, because he was already backpedaling defensively. “There’s no way you could afford what I was asking for my place. It’s a prewar one bedroom on Park Avenue, dude. I have a doorman! Anyway, aren’t you shacking up with your boyfriend and his wife, down the hall?”
I glared at Dave, who was standing in the kitchen with a bowl of cereal. “You knew I was looking for a place,” I said. “Haven’t you noticed the desperation with which I’ve been using your fax machine?”
Through a crunching mouthful, Dave said, “I don’t know why you hang around that creep Arthur. Did you read what he wrote about his kid? What’s up with that?”
“It’s not what you think,” I said. “He’s trying to save literature.”
I gave my mother the pendant.
“She didn’t want it then?”
“She was married,” I said.
“Her loss, my gain, I suppose.”
I helped her with the clasp at the nape of her neck.
“I don’t know what I’m doing, Mom.”
“It’s okay,” she said. “Nobody does. The ones that say they do are just fooling themselves.”
“I meant about this clasp.”
“No, you didn’t.”
We were standing in the kitchen. My mother was tall, with a dancer’s graceful posture, though she had never been a dancer. She liked to boast of the casting directors who used to mistake her for one. I have a framed studio headshot of my mother in my room—a teenager from the fifties harboring dreams of becoming a starlet. She dismisses these childish ambitions when she talks about her past, of that time before she knew who she was, as though poetry were the inheritance to a kingdom and she were its heiress.
Mom checked herself out in the reflection of the toaster, letting her fingers play over the small jade teardrop against her chest. “It’s lovely, honey. Even if it is a hand-me-down.” She turned and kissed me on the forehead, patted my cheek. “I won’t tell you that it gets easier, because it doesn’t. It just seems to matter less, the older you get. It’s an improvisation. Think of it that way. And there are no wrong notes, because it’s your tune. You make it up. It’s not ideal, but what other choice do you have?”
In my room, sitting at the piano bench, silently sounding off notes on the keyboard, I thought of my An of the Byzantine frescoes and wondered how she was faring. The days when we were together seemed so far away now. Senior year we rented the parlor floor of an old Victorian town house not far from campus. It was rundown, the landlord a reclusive man who lived on the garden level among a maze of bound magazines and stacked newspapers. The rent was cheap. His only stipulation was that we leave our shoes at the door, something I was already used to, as An had this stipulation, too, when I would spend time in her dorm room. I turned that place into a home. An argued against it, as we were only renting—the supplies cost a great deal, more than we could afford—but I couldn’t help myself; as I said, the nesting instinct is strong in me. I ripped up the old threadbare wall-to-wall and waxed and buffed the hardwood planks beneath to a golden luster. There was a set of French pocket doors dividing the living room from the kitchen that were permanently stuck partway open and in total disrepair. I spent weeks restoring those doors, stripping the paint and replacing the plywood squares with matching panes of frosted glass from a local glazier, getting each to run properly along the track. I installed custom shelves in the kitchen, hung a thrift-store chandelier in the bedroom, and planted a garden in the dead patch of dirt out back. I loved my life then, coming home to An, stretched out and reading on the couch, or waking up next to her on a Saturday morning, the weekend wide open before us. It was a much simpler time, compared with the thorny brush I was hacking through now.
I went into the living room for the old rotary and brought it on its long extension back into my room and closed the door. After three foreign sounding rings, An picked up—much to my surprise. And, much to my surprise, within moments I was blubbering about how much I missed her, how terribly I missed our life together. I confessed everything. I told her about Arthur and his book, about what I had done with his wife.
“Get out,” she said. “Get out while you still can. This situation you’re in now is destructive. You can see that. Why don’t you move out of the city? Start over somewhere else. Baby, listen to me. Just get on a bus and go!”
She was kind. She let me reminisce, participated in the reminiscing herself. She did not tell me about the boyfriend she no doubt had. Or how wonderful the alpine air in Baden-Württemberg was this time of year.
Lying in bed, awake, I resolved to quit. An was right. The movie was done. There was no reason I should be spending my days there anymore. The time had come to move on. But what would I do? I had no marketable skills, other than those I had picked up as an usher—sweeping, counting change, making announcements over a loudspeaker. Skills that might have served me well in Communist Poland but that made me at the age of thirty in the entrepreneurial capital of the world an increasingly pathetic figure. My only option at this point was grad school. A doctorate in music composition. I could teach, get the occasional local symphony commission. It seemed almost glamorous now, after being confronted with the realities of moviemaking and the realities of being an iconoclastic novelist with a wife and a child.
9
RUSHDIE
THE FOLLOWING MORNING, AFTER I offered my resignation, Suriyaarachchi said, “But you’d be turning down a full-fledged producer credit, which would be a real shame.”
“On Dead Hank’s Boy?”
“That ship has sailed, my friend, no. I’m talking about our new project.”
“A documentary,” Dave said
.
“About?”
“Your boyfriend down the hall. Dave, show the man.”
Dave held out a copy of yesterday’s New York Post. “Page nine.”
I looked from Dave to Suriyaarachchi to the Post in my hands. The headline: “Brick Suspect Rips Rudy’s Homeless Policy.” I thumbed past the movie listings. Page 9. There were three stories here. One involved a retired television weatherman convinced that a coming storm would wash away the sins of the city and was building an ark on the roof of his Cobble Hill brownstone. The neighbors had filed a court injunction against it. The man’s name was, improbably, Fludd. Another was an update on the kidnapping of a Queens woman’s two-year-old—it turned out the whole thing was a hoax. To what end was not made clear.
The third story was about Arthur: “Local Writer Sued—by His Own Family.” The article began, “Herald Square resident Arthur Morel, who has made waves in literary circles, now finds himself in deep water with his family upon the release of his latest effort, The Morels. Franklyn Wright, Mr. Morel’s father-in-law, has filed a defamation suit on behalf of his daughter and grandson. Mr. Morel’s openly autobiographical book makes explicit mention of an act of incest between himself and his then-eight-year-old son. Mr. Wright claims the portrayal of his daughter and grandson in such a manner constitutes unfair and damaging use of their names for the express purpose of furthering Mr. Morel’s own career. Mr. Morel could not be reached for comment.”
“And?” I said, handing the paper back to Dave.
The Morels Page 16
