The second phone call was from Sharon Danzer, to welcome Howard home. Gil got on, too, and told me he was feeling terrific, ready to take on Leon Spinks. After he hung up, Sharon whispered that he’d actually been having a lot of anginal pain. “Don’t say anything to Howard,” she said. “Gil would kill me.” I promised, finding myself whispering back, hushed by our collusion and the abundance of deceits. We made a dinner date for the four of us for a month from then.
When the tandoori was almost ready, I went inside to wake Howard. He needed to take his medicine, anyway. I watched his eyes open and focus, a wary Lilliputian watching Gulliver come to, and I asked how he felt and if he was hungry. I was all business, but I quickly saw what was on his mind, as if a cartoon balloon of lascivious thoughts hovered over the bed. Come in, sit down, said the spider to the fly. The fly buzzed in protest—Oh, no, I can’t! Our dinner! Your heart! Then his hands and mouth were on me, moving in blind certainty, but not in any married, follow-the-dots routine. This was desperate intention, life and death. I never lost sight of my outrage, but that didn’t matter—it only served my own reviving passion. Howard aroused all those old places that long for touch, here and here and here, and I opened to him, clenching and unclenching like an angry fist. I did worry fleetingly about his heart, as I’d worried once in his car—too late and too little—about contraception. At least I didn’t say anything this time, or yell out. I managed to keep some dignity, and the mystery of my emotions to myself. I’d often cried afterward—Howard could make anything he liked of that.
I saw Bernie Rusten leave the library. He’d put the Civil War book back on the shelf. I picked it up and opened it to the section on Antietam, and there it was, the bloodiest battle of the war.
8
PAULIE DROPPED ME AT the studio after lunch, and zoomed away. We had taken our time getting there, thank God, going through local streets and stopping for gas and a newspaper. As I walked in the door, Mike collared me and hissed, “She was just here!”
I was confused for a minute and thought he’d meant Paulie. “I know,” I said. “So what?”
“Oh, man, are you ever cool,” Mike said. “What if Paulie saw her?” And then I understood that he was talking about Janine, and that he knew about us.
I didn’t have the energy to lie or play dumb. “When?” I asked, as the day, my first one back at work, began to fall apart. I had been looking forward all week to putting in a few hours, to start easing back into the routine of things.
Mike was sympathetic, but he was also enjoying himself. “Maybe ten, no, five minutes ago. Man, I almost shit-freaked!” At that moment I regretted not hooking up with somebody older, somebody married and more reserved. Mike was in his early thirties, an electronics whiz kid who didn’t play an instrument himself but who worshipped jazz. I’d met him on one of my last club dates, in Chelsea, when he was about twenty. He’d handled the sound and lights that week, and he impressed me so much with his enthusiasm and skill that I hired him on a part-time basis right after I opened the studio. Five years later, he borrowed from every musician he’d ever amplified, and I took him in. He was a lot more reliable than he looked, with that pasty, night-owl complexion, and the shades he affected in homage to all his blind heroes. He showed up when he was supposed to, driving in from the East Village in his battered Chevy, and he carried his own weight. Since I’d gotten sick, he’d been carrying most of mine, too. I’d always trusted him completely, but how dependable could he be if the business with Janine turned him on like this? I couldn’t see his eyes behind the glasses, but the rest of his face was alive with animation.
“Look, Mike,” I said, “whatever it was, it’s over.”
“That’s what you think,” he said. What the hell had Janine told him?
“What do you mean?”
“She said to give you a message.”
I waited, but he paused, dragging out the suspense, glancing around as if spies were lurking in the corners of the studio. “Well, what did she say, damn it?” I said.
“She said, ‘Tell Howard I’m still in his life.’”
Jesus. “What else did she say?”
He hesitated again, uneasily this time. “She said she’d be back later this afternoon.”
“Mike, I don’t believe it. You told her I was coming in?”
Mike put up his hands. “I didn’t know who she was then, Flax,” he said. “I thought she was … maybe just a friend. The last time she didn’t say, and she didn’t really say anything this time, either, at first.”
The place had smelled like a giant ashtray from the minute I’d walked in, and now, as we were talking, Mike started lighting up. He was a Marlboro man, like me. He flashed the familiar red-and-white box, and then there was the sulfurous flare of the match, the sweet stream of smoke in my face. “Christ, put that thing out!” I yelled, and he jammed the cigarette against the wall so hard that sparks flew, almost igniting his shirt.
“Hey,” he said. “Take it easy, will you?”
Easy! He’d put me right back in the CCU. My heart was banging in my head the way it had after Paulie and I made love. I had to sit down, take some deep breaths. I didn’t have any pain, but I put a nitroglycerin tablet under my tongue, just in case.
Mike started doing a worried little dance around me. “I’m sorry, man, okay?” he said. “Just take it easy and everything will be cool.”
Maybe for him it would be. I thought of his carefree, uncomplicated life, the various “foxes” I’d seen waiting for him on the sheepskin-covered front seat of the Chevy. Paulie used to say he’d installed the sheepskin so his girlfriends wouldn’t get bedsores. “You have to drive me home,” I said.
“I can’t. I have an appointment in a couple of minutes—the gospel singers from Huntington Station.”
“Leave them a note. I have to get out of here.”
“She won’t be back right away.”
“How do you know?”
“She said something … wait a minute. Yeah, she said she had to go back to work. I think she was on her lunch hour.”
Bloomingdale’s. It was Saturday, and I was safe until five. My first feeling was one of relief—Paulie was going to pick me up around four. Then I saw the thing for what it was, a game of hide-and-seek I had to lose. Janine had shown up at the hospital, and now she’d revealed herself, us, to Mike. She was getting closer and closer to home. I had to face up to it, to make her understand that it was over between us, that I loved Paulie above everything, and my life depended on being with her. As for the demo, Mike could finish that for me; he’d probably make her sound better than I ever could, anyway. I would continue to cover the expenses, of course. It all seemed simple at that moment, a clear and reasonable scenario. If it was cowardly to pick a crowded public place for playing it out, so be it. The whole point was to end it, and nobody could mistake the main floor of Bloomingdale’s for a motel room. And I wouldn’t run into Paulie there—she was spending the afternoon at La Rae’s. Besides, she’d once said that she hated Bloomingdale’s. It was soon after Janine and I had begun, and I remember the way my flesh crawled when she said it. But she’d only meant that the glitter of so many worldly goods in one place was too much for her. “I get intensely greedy,” she said. “And at the same time I want to take a vow of poverty.”
I waited for the cab to come and take me to Bloomingdale’s. Mike thought I was going home, which was almost true, since I intended to go there next. I would call Paulie then and say I’d gotten tired faster than I’d expected to. The gospel singers had arrived in the meantime, and were rehearsing. They were five middle-aged black women who sang a cappella with a thrilling vocal range. They sang “How I Got Over,” building in volume and passion with every chorus. Listening to them made the term “inspirational music” seem just right. You had to be inspired to get a sound as rich as theirs. Mike was in harmony heaven in the control room, moving the levers on the console, jerking his shoulders and arms around as if he was possessed. Gospel music
was much older than his beloved jazz, and was probably its ancestor, it was so jazzy in its beat and phrasing. And it was inspiring as well as inspired. As the women belted out “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” I started feeling uplifted and hopeful myself, if not exactly religious. When the cab’s horn tooted, breaking into the final hallelujah, it jarred me from a peaceful trance.
I heard Janine’s voice even before I saw her standing next to the up escalator. She was doing her act a cappella, too, but her voice was shallow and piping in the humming crowd. She sounded like an impatient child trying to get attention at a grownup party. “Ladies! Princess Marcella Borghese has a lovely gift for you today! Ladies! Won’t you try Princess Marcella Borghese’s lovely new fragrance! Ladies …”
She was aiming a perfume atomizer at the upturned wrist of a gray-haired woman, and she froze when she saw me. Then she smiled, that same surprising break of sunshine through the clouds. “Howard!” she cried, as if she was still addressing the entire floor. People turned to look at us, and the gray-haired woman withdrew her wrist, smiling, too, at what she obviously assumed was a romantic reunion.
Janine had a tray of cosmetics slung from her neck, like a cigarette girl’s in a nightclub. It got between us when she tried to hug me.
“Ouch!” I said, a lousy opening, and then, “Hey, hello.”
“Hello, yourself,” Janine answered, and she beamed at me with blinding intensity.
“I have to talk to you, Janine,” I said.
She looked at her watch. “Just give me fifteen minutes, honey, until my break,” she said. “But don’t you dare go away.”
I wanted to go away, as far away as I could get. I remembered shutting my eyes in the hospital and keeping them shut until she’d disappeared. This time I kept them open. Janine was wearing a ruffled white dress and a load of makeup. She looked vulnerable and dangerous at once.
It was the longest fifteen minutes. Janine held me with her gaze, like a short leash that let me go in circles around the handbag counter, the gloves. I watched women try gloves on, turning their hands this way and that in admiration and doubt. I picked up a handbag or two, opened zippers, sniffed the animal smell of leather linings. Husbands and wives went by arm-in-arm, carrying crackling shopping bags, having ordinary domestic conversations. They appeared contented, pleasantly bored. Jesus, how I envied them. “Ladies! Ladies!” Janine called. I pictured Paulie and La Rae and Katherine drinking coffee in La Rae’s kitchen, plotting a pro-choice counter-demonstration at an abortion clinic. I remembered their voices drifting down the hall when they met at our house, flutey and urgent, full of important female secrets. I could have written anonymously to La Rae, asking for advice. Bewildered at Bloomie’s. Or asked her straight out. I saw her standing with her arms folded, a rubbery little blonde, chewing on her lip before saying, “You know what you have to do, Howie.” Katherine, who gave guidance to teenagers all week, would peer at me through her glasses and say, “I think you should see somebody.” But I was already seeing somebody, that was the problem. Katherine would sternly reject the joke.
A man came to relieve Janine, and she hung the tray from his neck. “Go get ’em, tiger,” she said.
He seemed to be wearing makeup, too, and he carried his own atomizer. Janine pretended to spritz me with hers as we walked away. “Hey, cut it out,” I said, and when I put up my hand, she grabbed it with her free one and held on. I quickly turned down her suggestion that we go to her house to talk. “Why not?” she said. “Tommy’s at a game. And Rod will cover for me as long as we need.”
“We won’t need that long,” I said.
“What is that supposed to mean?” she asked, dropping my hand. We had wandered into the men’s department, and she stopped dead near a display of jogging suits. Two athletic-looking mannequins were also poised in arrested motion.
“Janine, we have to break it off,” I said. “I don’t want to hurt you, but I don’t know how else to do this.”
“I don’t understand you, Howard. Everything was fine until you got sick. You’d think that almost dying like that would make you want to grab what you can out of life.”
“It does. I mean, it makes me want to hold on to what I had, what I have. My family. We had a wonderful time together, you and I. I won’t ever forget it, and I really want to thank you.”
“Oh, I get it. Wham, bam, thank you, ma’am.” I could see her color mottling under the makeup, the tears gathering.
“It wasn’t like that. It’s not like that.”
“Then what is it like, Howard?”
“It’s over,” I said.
Just then, a woman approached us with an inquiring smile. “Excuse me,” she said. “Would you wear this tie with a pinstriped blue suit?” She held the tie in question up to her own tweed-covered chest for my inspection.
“Yes,” I said. “It’s very nice. Perfect.”
“He has your coloring,” she said, thoughtfully.
“Ah,” I said. “Well, good.”
Janine had strutted off and I followed her, moving quickly, snaking through the busy aisles toward the exit to the parking lot. “Thank you!” the woman with the tie called after me.
“Janine, wait a minute,” I said, grabbing her arm just before she could go through the door. We were caught in a two-way stream of shoppers—everyone had to walk around us. One of Janine’s colleagues was a few feet away, intoning, “Estée Lauder! Estée Lauder has a lovely free gift for you today!”
“I want to wish you luck, and happiness,” I said. “And I know how much the demo means to you, so Mike, my partner, will finish the job. It’s a gift.” It sounded terrible to my own ears, like an echo of Estée Lauder’s promotional offer. I began to feel dizzy while I was saying it. I was reaching into my shirt pocket for the nitro when Janine’s hand came up. “You bastard!” she said, snarled really. I thought she was going to hit me, so I flinched, which probably saved my eyes from real damage. The perfume burst from the atomizer. I think I tasted it first, sickeningly sweet and acid-bitter, before I felt its icy sting. “Wait, no!” I said, gagging, and took another blast, and then another and another, mostly on my upraised arms. Somebody yelled, “Hey! Watch it!” as I backed blindly out the door to the parking lot. My eyes were killing me and I was retching. People bumped into me. “You all right?” a voice asked, and I reeled away without answering. I made my way to the street and walked about a block, in the direction of Old Country Road, everything around me in a brilliant, burning blur. I stopped and shoved a pill under my tongue. Shit, my heart was going a mile a minute. Slow down, slow down. When I could see a little better, I crossed the street and went into Lord & Taylor’s. I stank like a thousand harems. In the men’s room, I rinsed my eyes over and over again with cold water. I washed my face and arms, but the smell was still powerful. How could I take a cab? I went to the phones and called Mike at the studio. The gospel singers were gone and he had some time until his next appointment. He picked me up, and I have to give him credit, he didn’t ask a single question, not even about the perfume. He opened all the windows, though, and we rode home with our hair flying and our shirtsleeves flapping like flags.
I had an hour before Paulie was due to pick me up at the studio. I showered and then I called her at La Rae’s. “What’s wrong?” she asked immediately, just like my mother.
“Nothing,” I said. “I got a little pooped, that’s all. Mike gave me a ride home, so you can take your time.” After I hung up, I took the plastic leaf bag with my clothes in it and carried it to the next block, where I stashed it in somebody’s trash pail that was sitting out near the curb. I was like a murderer getting rid of the bloodstained evidence.
Back home again, I showered once more and gargled with full-strength Listerine. I used eye drops and invented reasons for the residual redness: cinders, shampoo, allergies. I tried to remember some of the hints from Paulie’s column about clearing cooking odors out of the house. There was something with lemon, something with vinegar. I went to t
he cabinet under the sink and sprayed a couple of things around. It was no use. The first thing Paulie said when she came in was, “My God, what stinks like that?”
“Me,” I said. Mea culpa. “I spilled a bottle of after-shave all over myself, the fancy stuff Annie brought me at the hospital.”
“Phew!” Paulie said, turning on the exhaust fan.
It was that easy. Hallelujah!
9
WE WERE DRINKING COFFEE and finishing our committee work, the strategy for a counterprotest the following week at an abortion clinic in Northport. This time La Rae would do the telephoning, Katherine would prepare the signs and sandwich boards, and I would draw up the formal request to the police for permission to march. The Right-to-Lifers had chosen a Saturday, thank goodness—I guess they had jobs, too.
“I hope they don’t wave those butcher’s aprons at us, like the last time,” Katherine said.
“What I can’t stand are the blown-up pictures,” I said.
“Get pictures made for us, too,” La Rae instructed Katherine.
“Of what?” Katherine asked. “I’m not exploiting abused kids.”
“She’s right, La Rae,” I said. “Our argument isn’t made with shock tactics.”
“I still feel funny about abortions,” Katherine said, closing her notebook. “I can’t help thinking of little Ethan.”
“Oh, please, Katherine,” La Rae said, “spare us the violins, okay? This has nothing to do with your grandchild.”
“Well, it has to do with somebody’s grandchild.”
“No, it doesn’t,” La Rae insisted, “and you know it. It has to do with choice, remember? With women’s bodies.”
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