Crystal Clear

by Jane Heller

  We both glanced at Steven. Evidently not unfazed by my presence, his eyes were closed, his complexion was green, and his jaws were clamped shut. He appeared to be trying very hard not to be sick to his stomach.

  “I’m Crystal Goldstein,” I said, introducing myself to the blonde. I attempted to shake hands with her, but my hands were hopelessly entangled in the bags of food. I ended up sort of waving at her.

  “Stephanie Roth,” she said, rising from the sofa now, offering herself for my appraisal.

  She looked like a hooker. I know that doesn’t sound very sisterhoodish, but it was true. Between the big hair, the big makeup, and the microscopic dress, we were talking major slut here. And I’m not even going to dwell on the nails, which were the length of Manhattan and painted puce.

  “Stephanie Roth?” I asked, trying to remember if Steven had ever mentioned a sister. A wayward sister.

  “Stephanie is my ex-wife,” Steven explained at last, putting me out of my misery. Or into it, depending. After our first date, he had never discussed his ex-wife with me, not even in passing. So her sudden appearance at his apartment was a stunning development, to say the least. “She dropped by unexpectedly, Crystal. Just the way you did.”

  “I see,” I said, wondering if Stephanie, too, had brought Steven dinner from Grace’s Marketplace and, if so, whether she and I had selected any of the same menu items. Actually, what I wondered most of all was what the hell she was doing back in his life when they were supposed to be history.

  “Maybe I should go,” Stephanie said, making eye contact with Steven. “So you can talk to her.”

  “Talk to me?” I said. Some irony. I had come to Steven’s apartment hoping to talk to him. About a problem I was having at the office. Apparently, Otis Tool was just the tip of the iceberg.

  “I think that would be best,” Steven told the woman he had married and divorced twice. The woman his mother had neglected to tell me about.

  Stephanie undulated past me, gave Steven a little bump with her rump, and made her exit.

  “Here. Let me take those bags,” said Steven in a burst of chivalry. I handed over dinner. “Why don’t you have a seat while I put these things in the kitchen? I’ll be back in a second.”

  I nodded and sat, forcing myself not to rush to judgment. Just because my career was suddenly in precarious shape didn’t mean my relationship with Steven was, too, did it? Okay, so the fact that he had lied about spending the evening alone with Littleton v. The Betty Ford Center wasn’t a particularly good omen. Neither was the fact that I had found him in the company of a scantily clad woman with whom he’d been intimate. But it was possible, just possible, that Stephanie had spontaneously stopped by. Maybe she was one of those ex-wives who was always trying to wheedle money out of her ex-hubby. Maybe she merely had cash flow problems and had dropped over, hoping to pick up a check. Yeah, right.

  “Crystal,” said Steven after returning to the living room and sitting down next to me. “It’s not what you think.”

  I stared at him. Did he think I was a total doofus? When a man says, “It’s not what you think,” it is what you think. And worse.

  “You’ve been seeing Stephanie again,” I said.

  “Yes,” Steven admitted.

  I laughed derisively. “I’ve got to warn you, Steven. I once read somewhere that if you marry the same person a third time, you don’t have a prayer of getting any wedding presents.”

  “Crystal,” he said, wringing his hands. “It’s not what you think.”

  “You already said that,” I pointed out. “I’m ready for a fresh line of bullshit.”

  “She and I aren’t getting re-married,” he said. “We’re just seeing each other occasionally.”

  “How occasionally?”

  “Every now and then.”

  “Was tonight a ‘now’ or a ‘then?’”

  “Look, Crystal, I’m confused. I acknowledge that. You and I have a nice thing going, but I’m not sure where it’s going.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning that I don’t feel that I know you. Really know you. Even after three years.”

  “But you know Stephanie, is that it?” What was not to know about Stephanie? I thought. She exposed her womanhood every time she crossed and uncrossed her legs.

  He shrugged. “She and I have known each other since we were in law school together. We go way back.”

  “Stephanie is a lawyer?” I was dumbfounded. Talk about dressing for success.

  “She was a lawyer,” Steven explained. “Now she’s a cabaret singer.”

  “A cabaret singer,” I said, taking this all in.

  “We’re very different people, with very different interests.”

  “In other words, you have no intention of going from legal eagle to lounge lizard any time soon?”

  “Of course not, Crystal. The point I was trying to make is that Stephanie and I aren’t as compatible as you and I are. She and I can’t go ten days without an argument.”

  “Ten days, huh? It’s been about ten days since you and I last saw each other,” I mused. “That’s quite a coincidence.”

  Steven hung his head. “I don’t know how to explain this to you,” he mumbled. “I feel comfortable with you. I enjoy being with you. I care about you. But Stephanie has been in and out of my life for so long that I can’t seem to get her out of my system completely.”

  “So let me get this straight, Steven. You feel comfortable with me. You enjoy being with me. You care about me. But you don’t want to see me anymore. Is that it?”

  “No, not at all. I want to see you. I just want to see Stephanie, too.”

  That did it. I started to get up from the sofa, but Steven stopped me.

  “What?” I said, my heart thumping in my chest. “What do you expect me to say? To do?” I was not a yeller or a screamer. I did not throw ceramic vases at other human beings. I was, for the most part, someone who put up with the weaknesses in the people close to me, even when those weaknesses hurt me. I had a history of making excuses for them, looking the other way, denying the obvious. It was better to ignore than incite, I’d always reasoned.

  “Tell the truth,” Steven challenged. “In the three years since we’ve been together, haven’t you ever thought about your ex-husband? Wondered how he’s doing? Wanted to see him again?”

  “No.”

  “Come on.”

  “Really.” All right, so I wasn’t being totally truthful. I did think about Terry Hollenbeck every once in a while. Like whenever I’d see some guy in the street who bore a slight resemblance to him. Or whenever anyone mentioned Colorado, the state where he was born and raised. Or whenever the Manhattan summer air took on its first crisp, cool hint of fall, since we’d exchanged our wedding vows on just such an afternoon. Sure, I thought about Terry, even though our marriage had been a lifetime ago, even though it had lasted only a year, even though it had ended badly. I admit I was mildly curious about where he lived, whether he was working, whether he was married, whether he was as attractive in his forties as he’d been in his twenties, whether he was still alive. But did I have the slightest interest in actually seeing him again? Yeah, about as much interest as I had in listening to any more of Steven’s I-can-have-my-cake-and-eat-it-too crap.

  I tried to get up from the sofa a second time. Steven stopped me.

  “Give me a few days to sort this out,” he pleaded. “I don’t want to lose you, Crystal. I meant it when I said we have a good thing going.”

  “Maybe it wasn’t so good after all. You also said you don’t feel as if you really know me, remember? Well, I’m beginning to think I don’t really know me. When I woke up this morning, I thought I knew how I felt about you, for instance. About my job, too. Now I’m not sure about any of it.”

  “Your job? Is there a problem at work?” Steven seemed concerned, which both touched and annoyed me.

  “Yes, but I’ll figure it out,” I said, rising from the sofa, unimpeded. I left Steven in t
he living room, went into the kitchen to collect the bags of food I’d brought over, and returned to say goodbye.

  “You don’t mind if I take these home with me, do you?” I said, hoping none of the items had spoiled while they’d been sitting, unrefrigerated, on Steven’s kitchen counter.

  “Of course I don’t mind,” he said. “It was very considerate of you to—” His voice broke then and he began to sob. Quite loudly, in fact. “I don’t want this to be the end of us,” he blubbered, tears streaming down his face onto his polo shirt, a damp little blob forming on his collar. “Say you’ll let me talk to Stephanie, to tell her that she and I are through once and for all. It’ll be different this time, I swear it.”

  “I’ve heard that one before,” I said wryly, walking toward the door.

  “Not from me, you haven’t.”

  “No, not from you,” I acknowledged, knowing exactly where I’d heard it. Terry had said it. Whenever I had threatened to leave him. “It’ll be different this time, I swear it,” he’d promised over and over. Which was why, when Steven had asked if I had any interest in seeing my ex-husband again, I’d said no.

  Chapter Three

  I spent the rest of the week in a state of high anxiety, going through the motions at work, staying out of Otis’s way, refusing to take Steven’s phone calls. I also made a stab at deflecting Rona’s questions but wasn’t up to the challenge.

  “My God, you look terrible, Crystal. Did something happen?” she asked when she walked into my office on Thursday morning.

  “You always tell me I look terrible,” I said. “That’s what friends are for, right?”

  “I’m serious,” she insisted. “Remember when I said you needed your aura cleansed?”

  “How could I forget?”

  “Well, whatever was going on with you then has obviously gotten much worse. Now you need your chakras balanced, too.”

  Rona hailed from Brooklyn and had the accent to prove it. As a result, “chakra” came out “chawkrah.” Was she trying to tell me that my skin was chalky? I wondered, placing my hands on my face, Macaulay Culkin-style.

  “Your chakras,” Rona said tolerantly, realizing I wasn’t getting it. “They’re the energy centers that run along your spinal column. There are seven of them, according to ancient Eastern healers, and they correspond to the seven emotional aspects of your personality—love, sexuality, creativity, etcetera. When you balance these chakras, you reduce your stress level.”

  Rona began moving her hands over her body in an effort to demonstrate the ancient art of chakra balancing, but what came to mind as I watched her was the ancient art of belly dancing.

  “Crystal,” she sighed when the demonstration was over, “why don’t you just tell me what’s wrong?”

  “I’m taking stock of things, that’s all,” I said.

  She brightened. “You mean you’re re-evaluating your life? Searching for Meaning?”

  “I guess you could say that.”

  She squealed and enveloped me in a bear hug, nearly knocking the wind out of me, not to mention impaling me on the wings of her angel pendant. “This is exactly what I’ve been hoping for,” she said. “You’re finally tapping into how badly you need an emotional clearing. Now, what provoked this sudden self-exploration?”

  “Okay,” I said. “I might as well tell you. Otis Tool intimated yesterday that the company is on the verge of downsizing us.”

  “Us?”

  “You and me, and it’s all about saving money. We’re expensive and, therefore, expendable.”

  Rona frowned. “You’ve practically killed yourself for this company.”

  “So have you,” I reminded her.

  “Yeah, but I have a life to fall back on if they fire me. You don’t.” She had a point. “And I don’t take this sort of thing as seriously as you do. I’ve learned that we can’t control what we can’t control, that we’ve got to let go.”

  “But they’re gonna let us go, Rona. Don’t you see?”

  “What I see is that if they do fire us, then a better opportunity will be right around the corner,” she said, suddenly serene. “Everything is in divine order. When one door closes, another opens.”

  God, I felt as if I’d stepped into a fortune cookie. “You’re sure about this?” I asked. “If Duboff Spector gives us the heave-ho, we’ll find other, better jobs?”

  “Absolutely,” Rona assured me. “As I just said, life is about letting go.”

  “Well then, speaking of letting go, Steven is having trouble letting go of his ex-wife,” I said.

  “You’re kidding,” said Rona. “I didn’t think she was even in the picture anymore.”

  “Neither did I,” I replied, “but I met her last night. She was right there in his apartment, acting as if she owned the place. Steven said she used to be a lawyer.”

  “And now I suppose she writes legal thrillers,” Rona said, rolling her eyes.

  “No,” I said, “and she’s probably the only former lawyer who doesn’t. She sings in nightclubs.”

  “Nightclubs. Interesting.”

  “Steven said they’ve been seeing each other again.” I shook my head disgustedly. “After marrying and divorcing twice, you’d think they would have given up by now.”

  “They sound pretty out of touch to me,” Rona said. “I mean, when a man and a woman spend years breaking up and getting back together and breaking up and getting back together, it’s like: Hello, people! Wake up and smell the codependency!”

  “Steven claims he’s prepared to break up with her once and for all,” I said. “But my trust in him is shattered.”

  “I don’t doubt it.”

  “On the other hand, I can sort of understand why he started seeing Stephanie again.”

  “You can?”

  “Sure. You said it yourself—communicating through secretaries, answering machines, and E-mail. Steven and I are both guilty of putting our work before each other, but over the past few months I’ve been doing most of the neglecting. I haven’t returned his phone calls. I haven’t spent much time with him. And—here’s the biggie—I haven’t made love with him, not in ages. It’s no wonder that he fell victim to Stephanie, who, as well as sharing his knowledge of the law, shows a great deal of cleavage.”

  “Now I see why you look so terrible,” Rona said. “First, the job. Then, the boyfriend. There’s nothing else, is there?”

  “No, but bad things usually come in threes, don’t they?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Yes, they do.”

  On Sunday I drove up to Larchmont for my weekly visit to my “male parental unit,” as I often referred to the man who, through no fault of my own, happened to be my father. His name was Howard, he was eighty-two, and he lived in his BarcaLounger in the same modest house in which I’d grown up—the same house in which my mother had died of heart failure. He spent nearly every moment of every day in that BarcaLounger in front of the TV, pressing the buttons on the remote control. The man watched so much television I often wondered if his was a Nielsen household and he was actually getting paid for all that channel surfing.

  A retired engineer, he was in pretty good health for an eighty-two-year-old. He made his own bed, cooked his own meals, mowed his own lawn, that sort of thing. What he couldn’t seem to do was relate to me. Ever. Granted, he wasn’t much of a talker, even when I was a child; it was my mother who was definitely the chattier of the two. But while he at least made an effort to be cordial to others, he was impossibly unresponsive toward me, as if I were somehow a humiliation to him instead of a reasonably attractive career woman who had never been pregnant out of wedlock, never been forced to declare bankruptcy, never been in trouble with the law. I mean, if I were the Unabomber, I could understand his remoteness, but I had never done anything really wrong in my life. I was the type of child a father could be proud of, flaunt a photograph of, brag to his friends about. And yet, when I showed up at his door every Sunday afternoon, the guy treated me as if I’d come over to ext
erminate his carpenter ants.

  Of course, the fact that I kept visiting him every Sunday was pretty masochistic—just another example of my tendency to stick my head in the sand when it came to my personal relationships. But old Howard was my only living parent, he was my only connection to my dearly departed mother, and he was alone. I felt a certain duty to visit him regularly. Or, to put it another way, I worried that if I didn’t visit him regularly, I would burn in Daughter Hell.

  On this particular Sunday, I was especially vulnerable, given what was going on in my life, and so when my father opened the door, permitted me to kiss him, and then went back to the BarcaLounger without so much as a “How are you, Crystal?” I began to cry.

  At first, he just stared at me, his pale blue eyes full of dread, as if he feared he’d be forced into some hopelessly girlish psychodrama. And then, when it became clear to him that my crying wasn’t going to let up any time soon, he turned away from me, flipped on the TV to the USA Network, and started watching a rerun of “Barnaby Jones.”

  The act so wounded me, so infuriated me, that instead of sitting there and sucking it up, as I usually did, I reached across the big gut my father had acquired in his old age, ripped the remote control out of his hands, and shut the TV off.

  “We’re going to have a talk,” I said, barely able to contain my fury. “I’m not leaving here today until you tell me why you dislike me so much.”

  He looked away defiantly, a recalcitrant child.

  “I want an answer,” I said, trying not to lose my nerve. I had never spoken to my father in such a forthright manner. And I had never, ever dared to turn his television off. “I’ve been dragging myself up here every goddam weekend, just—”

  “I won’t put up with that kind of language in my house,” he interrupted.

  Fine. So he’d scolded me for cursing. At least he’d spoken to me.

  “I’ve been driving up here every weekend, hoping you’ll show me some fatherly affection, and yet you never do,” I went on. “Why is that, Dad? I’d really like to know.”