On the way back to the hotel, I picked up a deli sandwich and a couple of bottles of wine, one for myself and one a little more impressive.
Dinner in hand, I stood on the street outside the liquor store, turning one way and then the other. Finally I put down my purchases to consult the map again.
“Are you lost?” A man stood near, his head tipped to peer at my face.
“I need the 6 train.”
Attractive in a lived-in, well-fed sort of way, he looked at my map and never quite in my eyes and it hit me how much I longed for eye contact. From anyone. I couldn’t help but look for his ring finger. Who do you think is more faithful by nature?
“You walked right in the wrong direction. Here, I’ll show you.”
I followed, glancing at the silver hairs woven into his temples as he walked me back in the direction from which I’d come. He asked where I was from.
“A Canadian! My sister-in-law is from Toronto,” he said.
“Canadians are the new Golden retriever.”
“Ha ha,” he said, “that’s funny.”
His laughter sent a soft flutter through my lungs. Then he stopped and pointed out the direction of the station. I stared at his back as he walked away.
“Before I came here, I was writing an article about a vineyard, a nice place in the Italian countryside. I invited Andrew and he said he does not like the countryside. He cannot stand it and he prefers to see me when I come to New York City after. Now where does he go? The country. Rural Connecticut. For two days.”
I thought of Petra’s words, back at the Waldorf, up to my nose in bathwater.
I could drown in that bath.
Petra spoke of a text message Andrew had received from the former nanny of his children. The babysitter, as Petra had called her, now lived in Massachusetts. He messaged her for longer than usual and, according to Petra, he was nervous. He announced that he would get together with the girl for lunch one day. Petra suggested she might join them, but Andrew changed the subject.
“Perhaps he sees the babysitter in Connecticut,” Petra mused.
I had envisioned the babysitter as a seventeen-year-old. But this one was thirty.
“And why must he always talk about his wife? Why do I need to know about these things, what he buys his children at FAO Schwartz. I don’t care.”
As I listened to Petra, a large dollop of wasabi charged my sinuses, piercing my brain with euphoric pain. I wondered briefly if there was a masochistic element to all great food and sex. I asked her if she had ever seen the film The Ice Storm, the scene with Sigourney Weaver and Kevin Kline in bed after some extramarital rummaging. Klein launches into a monologue about work and golf. “You’re boring me,” Weaver interrupts. “I have a husband.”
“Tell him,” I suggested to Petra, “you’re boring me. I’m not interested in your little Weiner rats.”
Her face lit up and she hooted. “Weiner rats! Ya!”
Cringing later at how like the smell of blood Petra’s laughter had been, how it had sharpened my teeth, I slipped under the water of the Waldorf tub. I emptied my lungs, shook the water through my hair, and sank until my head tapped the bottom of an old memory.
My mother had just hollered again for me to get out of the bathtub. She had gone back to work part time and, I guess, as low man on the totem at her job she must have felt there was no reprieve. Lately every time she wiped a counter or picked clothing up off the floor, she sounded more exasperated. “Here she comes again, Queen of the Shit Jobs,” she’d say.
The phone rang. I could hear it through the bottom of the tub, imagining it to be whale song. Like Jacques Cousteau I swam, inspecting the floor of the ocean, wagging my head and watching my hair wave like seaweed in the water, listening to my mother’s garbled voice. Seconds later she stood over the bathtub, calling down through the fathoms. I shot up, gasping.
“Lila. Out. Now. Your father’s idiot battery is dead again. I have to go pick him up and I want you ready for bed.”
“Is Clay my babysitter?” I was six years old. Clay was in grade four.
“I’ll be back as fast as I can.” She scrubbed a towel over my head and body, then wrapped it around, secured it with a tucked corner under my armpit, and scooted me into the hall. “Clayton, turn that down.”
Clay was in my parents’ room watching TV.
“Clayton! How many times do I have to say it?” she yelled over the din. “I have to get your father. Make sure she goes to bed.”
The TV held his gaze.
“Put your pyjamas on!” she called over her shoulder as she rushed away.
I stood, looking in at Clay who sprawled like a prince on the big bed.
“Clayton!”
The volume lowered.
“I’ll be back as soon as I can.” She stalked downstairs.
I trotted into the bedroom and climbed up on the bed with Clay, rested my head on his chest while he watched men squeal their cars around the corners of grey city streets, punch and shoot one another.
The dishwasher’s hiss began downstairs. We heard the sound of my mother’s shoes rushing in the hall, followed by the groan of the clothes dryer, metal bits clacking inside its steel belly, and then, finally, the back door slammed.
Clay turned the TV up to where appliance noise was drowned to nothing. I recall closing my eyes a while, the shooting and screech of tires against asphalt blaring through the room, and then suddenly nothing but the mild plink of piano keys. I opened my eyes to a screen full of lips. One of the shooters from earlier was now with a pretty woman and they were sucking on each other’s mouths with altogether too much spit. It seemed to go on forever.
“Dad’s got a magazine on his side. In the cupboard thingy,” Clay said suddenly.
I was silent a moment trying to ascertain his point. Sometimes there was little left for me to do but use world-weary sarcasm. “So? Big whoop.”
“So, you should see where they kiss each other in there.”
I gawped up at him.
“There’s girls kissing each other’s kitties.”
“Shut up. They are not.”
“I’m not showing you, you’ll just blab and we’ll both get it. Me worse.”
“I’m not a blabber, stupid. Show me.”
Soon a glossy magazine with the words Urban Swinger across the cover came out of my father’s bedside cabinet. Clay turned the pages between thumb and finger with an anxious delicacy that made it seem all the more exotic and mysterious. These were pictorials, pictures with a sentence under each that told a larger story: Jack and Amy meet Nadia.
I gasped. “Ew! That’s where they pee out of!”
Amy and Jack taste Nadia. Nadia pleasures Amy, my brother read. The word pleasure used as a verb was almost as strange as what they were doing: Amy’s tongue between Nadia’s legs; Jack’s tongue between Amy’s legs.
The skin of Amy was cake-white, the tongue poking toward her licorice red.
I sat cross-legged in my drooping towel, astonished. “It’s like ice cream,” I said. I meant the way the tongues reached, trying to get a lick of someone else’s treat. “Why are they doing that?”
Clay shrugged.
In the last picture, Amy appeared to be in some sort of polite anguish, her back arched.
“Ow—no! Does it hurt?”
Clay said that if he were to do to me what Nadia did to Amy it wouldn’t hurt, which brought on a spasm of giggles.
This is how I remember it: my concern about pain, Clay’s insistence that it could not possibly hurt. The pictures in the magazine, the two of us debating, and the nervous laughter—they were, after all, showing the bits we were supposed to cover up. Downstairs on our refrigerator door was an old picture of us in the bath together, me a toddler, Clay in first grade, bunches of thick bubbles bearding our faces. It had been made quite clear to us that we were too old to have baths together now. Too old.
I don’t know how much time had passed, but on television the men were shooting e
ach other again. Clay put his head between my legs and kissed me square on the kitty. He stuck out his tongue and I laughed and wriggled, hands over my eyes—until we heard our mother scream.
All in a rush, there were hands and arms and smacking, Clay’s hair in my father’s veined hand, my brother dragged off the bed crying, my own squeals, and my mother’s screeching: “What is wrong with you?” The volume was of the sort that generally only happened if one of us had done something so life-threateningly stupid that neither parent could think what to do but introduce a bigger, louder, more immediate threat. The cacophonic pitch of this, though, was beyond the most desperate we’d ever heard.
My mother yanked me to my feet, screaming over the TV as it railed and fired and honked and roared. “I told you to put your pyjamas on.”
“Clay did it,” I sobbed, though I didn’t know what he had done exactly, if we could get sick from it, end up in the hospital.
She slapped the towel back around me and then rushed to Clay’s rising cries. I followed her into the hall and watched as my father batted Clay with both hands. I said nothing in his defence. I caught a last look at my brother’s tear-streaked face, his red eyes and the hatred in them, before both our bedroom doors were closed behind us.
When it was finally quiet that night—the television squelched, voices silent—the air ached with its own bruising. We two were never left alone in the house again. They sent Clay to a psychiatrist.
I hugged a towel and stared in the bathroom mirror. Pulling on the hotel robe, I wandered into the bedroom and sat down on the bed to flip through the Waldorf catalogue. I was wearing the “Plush White Terry Robe” pictured. I straightened my spine, raised my chin, attempting the genteel bearing the copy mentioned. This hotel was one big commercial for itself. How could we feel the occasion was rare or exceptional when everything was so haveable?
I unwrapped my sandwich and flipped to a description of the bedding on which I reclined: 100% Egyptian cotton. These heirloom-quality linens … A chunk of turkey and mustard hit the duvet. I rushed for a wet face cloth.
After the last bite, I called Vancouver. His voice mail answered.
Once the beep had sounded, I was suddenly tongue-tied. Mashing the receiver to my head, I said, “Hey, Clay. You’ll never guess where I am: The Waldorf! In New York!” A nervous titter escaped and I wondered what had possessed me to call my brother. Clay took a special pleasure in his disgust for each member of his family. In his first year of graphic design school he began referring to us all as hidebound plebs.
“So … I haven’t talked to you in a while. Thought maybe it’d be good to, uh, catch up.” My eyes began to sting. “I miss you.” Out the lips before it could be caught.
I put the phone down and turned to the muted TV. On screen was a contortionist, her back bent, legs crooked up and over her head, through her arms. Though she was twisted into a position that appeared more like affliction than skill, her face was serene.
The next morning a man who looked as though he’d been working here since the hotel opened its doors in 1931 wheeled in my breakfast. His hands all vein and bone, he set the cart at the foot of the bed and handed me the bill.
He offered it, you should take it, Petra had said over lunch when I asked if she thought Andrew had meant his breakfast invitation. I tugged my bathrobe tighter and looked into the faded blue eyes of the waiter. His mouth twitched and he stared at the floor. Tucking hair behind my ear, I stared at the figures, the cost of the eggs, the juice; I wondered what to tip a man who had probably seen so much he’d rather pluck out his eyes than see any more.
I scribbled down what a guilty man might tip and signed my name.
All the dishes were covered in silver domes, the grapefruit juice set in a silver decanter filled with crushed ice. Before opening the serviette, I rooted for my camera, put it on the windowsill and set the timer. A couple of flashes later I had proof that I once had breakfast in bed at the Waldorf. I examined the digital display, myself in the Plush White Terry Robe, holding up a slice of bacon, perched behind a table that glistened silver. I looked happy.
I decided my day should be spent in the presence of beauty. Setting off in my new gold slippers, I headed over to the Metropolitan Museum and slipped into the middle of a small tour as it snaked its way into the Tiffany section. I hung back as the docent lectured her group on the intent of Tiffany, the way he had weaseled his way around the secular use of stained glass and the potential outrage of the Church. As we trailed her to the Temple of Dendur in the Egyptian section, the docent spoke of the generous patronage of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. I recalled a story of Jackie finding a woman’s pink panties in her pillowcase when married to John Kennedy. She is purported to have turned to her husband and said, “Would you find out who these belong to, because they are not my size.” Infidels and infidelity.
My mother stepped up her hours and went to work full time the day I started junior high. Hospital Administration was what she did but I never knew exactly what that entailed. People answered to her though. I imagined that would be a relief: someone else could do the shit jobs around our place. But there was the unspoken issue of Clay and me being left alone that had to be addressed.
My mother found our new sitter at the hospital doing volunteer work. Clarita showed up at the house one Saturday morning toward the end of summer vacation. My mother toured her around, explaining what her duties would be.
I sat at the table eating cereal as my brother staggered into the kitchen on cue, barefoot in his pyjama bottoms and a T-shirt, bleary-eyed.
“Say hello to Clarita,” my mother directed him. “Clarita, you’re unlikely to see Clayton, he has so many extracurriculars on the go.”
He grunted into the fridge and then tipped the open carton of orange juice toward his mouth. As he lowered it, he turned and stared blank-faced at Clarita.
Coming from a long line of tall thin WASPs, my mother may not have considered that a short, plump Mexican girl might be an object of desire. I could almost hear my brother’s erection as he gazed into the new maid/babysitter’s vulpine eyes. Her dark hair hung like heavy curtains opening to the main attraction: a caramel-skinned, full-lipped, Latina matinee. He left the room immediately.
Clay started coming home after school. He loitered around the kitchen, putting things in the dishwater, wiping counters. Meanwhile Clarita and I talked over grilled cheese sandwiches and I became smitten with the fact that someone in the house met my gaze as we spoke. She’d gone to a private American school in Mexico City. I loved the way she said “film,” never “movie,” “literature,” instead of “books.” Clarita was ferociously sophisticated.
Eventually Clay sat down and joined in the kitchen talk, staring like a snake at a flute when she spoke.
“English, Spanish, French and German,” he repeated, astounded, one afternoon. “Man, I can barely speak English.”
“Knowing it’s half the battle.” I didn’t so much as glance his way.
“You’re a smart guy.” Clarita’s fingertips tapped Clay’s. “We learn best when we’re young. Look at Lila, she’s only twelve, her mind is gymnastic.” She fanned her thick eyelashes toward me. “You are a watcher too,” she told me. “You find the clues in body language. You would be a good detective.”
A far cry from what I’d heard in the past. “You were born with your eyes closed and they stayed that way,” my mother said once. She claimed that I would not open my eyes or hands for days after my birth.
Clay snickered. Clarita did not. He suddenly stared at me in a way that shut my mouth. It seemed as if he hadn’t seen me in years, and I felt a strange panic that he would look away. The front door slammed and we all turned to see my father come into the kitchen.
He was home early for the first time in months. It was the first he set eyes on Clarita. He insisted she stay for dinner; we would order in.
That night Dad lobbed questions at Clarita and we discovered that her father had been a politician in Mexico.
A scandal of the sort she didn’t want to discuss over pizza had driven them north to Vancouver two years earlier. Her parents would go back when things calmed down. She wasn’t sure she would go with them.
The room was tense with my father in it. Clay was tense.
My father’s eyes followed Clay’s glance to Clarita’s fidgeting hands. I could see it plainly, as though the future were driving in fast down a long flat road, but I did not want to be a witness. I did not want my brother’s gaze to slip away, to take on that old battered look again, the look of a boy who knew he was alone in this world.
The air had become lighter this past year. We could abide each other again. Every movie is the same though: eventually, the kissing stops and the men start shooting. I laugh and wriggle until somebody screams.
I came back to the hotel suite agitated by crowds, the constant sense of a different stranger dogging my heels. The message light on the phone flashed. I hesitated, then picked up the receiver. One new message: Felicia. She was sick, she said. I was welcome to come over, but she’d be lousy company.
“Lousy, lousy, we’re all lousy,” I muttered, and erased the message. The next one was in a woman’s German tongue and I listened a few seconds as though I understood and then set the receiver down. Fidgety sparks scattered through my lungs and belly. I poured from last night’s wine, got up and wandered around the suite.
Greedy Little Eyes Page 5
