“I think you’re crazy, Sherry,” I said. “How do you know who any of them really are?” Some of the photos she’d been sent looked like mug shots to me. I read a few of the other ads on the same page as hers. “Listen to this,” I said. “‘Into good times, Dutch treat only.’ That sounds like a euphemism for something sexual and weird. Maybe he wears wooden shoes to bed.”
“Mmm, I hope so,” Sherry said, and giggled.
“And this one. ‘Tall, dynamic poet laureate.’ Poet laureate of what—the Bronx?”
“Maybe just of his building,” Sherry said. “Oh, Paulie, you haven’t changed a bit. You’re still so cautious, still such a little mouse.”
I was shocked and offended. Was that the way Sherry saw me? Did other people? I’d always thought of myself as adventurous, even somewhat reckless. Hadn’t I taken a tremendous chance on life twenty-five years before? But maybe I hadn’t ventured much out of the safety zone since then. Safely married, safely suburban. Once it had seemed like a death-defying act, Howard and me dangling over the center ring without a net. But who was Sherry to be so condescending? A middle-aged woman sending out love notes in a bottle, like a starry-eyed adolescent. “Literate, luscious, liberal”—all that alliteration had a desperate ring to it. And she’d lied about her age; that struck me as both foolish and pitiful.
I simply had to get out of there—I had to find my own place. It wasn’t that I hadn’t tried. I’d taken Sherry’s advice and looked for a sublet, but none of the ads I answered worked out. Either the rental period was too brief, or the rent was exorbitant, or the tenant wanted sleep-over privileges. One woman expected me to care for ten uncaged parrots, who shrieked their reciprocal alarm as soon as I walked into the room, and shook out a blizzard of feathers.
I began to worry about money, too. Of course I’d resigned from the Port Washington library, and there didn’t appear to be any openings in the city system. The personnel people I managed to see all complained about government cutbacks. “We sure could use you,” the woman in Sherry’s neighborhood branch said, wistfully, “but we can’t afford you.” And she was talking about the minimum wage! An older man shelving books nearby looked at me with fear in his eyes, as if I were about to steal his daily bread. There was a big glass jar chained to the checkout desk, for contributions to the library, and I threw some change in on my way out.
I still had the income from my column, but I definitely needed to augment that with something else. I began to scan the want ads as well as the real-estate pages. By lying about my previous experience, I was able to get some freelance work, proofreading engineering abstracts for a professional journal.
During the day, I continued to look for an apartment and a more suitable, permanent job. At night, Sherry and I sat opposite one another at her table. She graded papers and I tried to make sense of unfamiliar technical terms, while the television competed shrilly for our attention. Whenever the phone rang, I’d listen carefully while Sherry answered it, my blue pencil poised over words like “gravimeters” or “electro-plastic.” I could tell instantly if Howard was on the line, by the belligerent and didactic way she spoke to him. “Yes, she is,” she’d say. “But I believe I’ve already told you that she doesn’t want to talk to you.” Didn’t we learn that yesterday, class? When one of her mail-order men called, her voice changed; it became syrupy and seductive, like a telephone solicitor’s. She would wander into the bathroom with the long-corded telephone, and ripples of affected laughter filtered through the noise of the television.
I’d called my children from a pay phone the day after I moved in with Sherry. Jason hardly seemed to react to my news, as if he’d been expecting it all along. But then Sara took the phone from him and murmured her surprise and sympathy. I asked her how things were going between them, and she whispered that everything was pretty much the same. “Try and be patient. He’ll come around,” I said, although I had no reason to believe that. When I asked her if she’d told her parents yet about her pregnancy, there was a long, troubled pause before she said that she had, and that they’d decided to disown her. I was appalled, and bewildered—how did you disown your own child? The instant I saw my newborns, even before the cord between us was severed, I knew we were joined forever. I changed the subject, asking her what hospital she intended to use, and she said she’d decided to have the baby at home, and be attended by a midwife.
“Are you sure that’s a good idea?” I asked.
“It’s cheaper,” she explained, “and a lot more natural.” I remembered my own months of training in a natural-childbirth class, and then, during labor, yelling like a madwoman for gas, for anything to ease the astonishing pain. My mother had warned me I’d do exactly that, and I was tempted to pass the warning on to Sara, but I didn’t.
“We have to take a course. Jason is supposed to be my labor coach,” she said disconsolately.
“When he was born,” I said, “Howard was right there, too, cheering us on. He said it was the most thrilling experience of his life.” I didn’t mention that he’d grown faint when I crowned, and had to put his head down between his knees.
Ann answered her phone in a grief-stricken voice. “Mommy, you don’t live at home anymore,” she wailed, and I knew that Howard had gotten to her first.
“Well, neither do you,” I said, but she didn’t think that was a fair comparison.
Sara and Ann both invited me to stay with them, offers that touched and pleased me, even if they were totally unsuitable. Young people are resilient, I told myself; they would all weather this. The one I’d really dreaded dealing with, though, was my mother, and my worry was justified. She carried on as if I’d killed Howard, not just left him. “How could you do it?” she demanded. “Such a sick man! Such a wonderful man.”
I couldn’t help reminding her that she’d once passionately disapproved of him, and of us together. “You and Dad didn’t even want me to marry him, Mother, remember? You said he was bad news, you said he had bedroom eyes.”
“Spilled milk!” my mother cried. “Water over the bridge!”
“Well, there it is,” I said, impervious to every mixed-up maxim.
“You’ll be alone,” my mother said.
“No, I won’t. I have my friends, I have my family.”
“You’ll be alone,” she insisted, “and it’s no fun.”
Fun! It was a word outside her usual vocabulary. For the first time in a while, I thought about my mother’s life, the daily rituals of housekeeping and television watching. Lately there’d been a rash of deaths among the elderly widows in her building. For all the fuss she made over less significant events, she remarked on those deaths with gentle and dignified acceptance. “We had a little excitement here today,” she’d say, and that’s how I learned of Mrs. Wasser’s fatal stroke during a game of Rummy-O, and Mrs. Stein’s quieter passing in her sleep. Maybe my mother feared that my separation from Howard was going to leave her more alone, her circle of family members diminished by one.
“Paulie darling,” she said. “Listen to your mother. Have I ever lied to you?”
What an opportunity! But I let it pass. After all, I was using a pay phone on the corner of Second Avenue and Twenty-third Street. Cars and trucks were roaring past and the pedestrian traffic milled around me. My quarter was going to run out soon, anyway.
“If you love each other in your hearts,” my mother said, “you can work the rest out. You have your whole lives to do it in. And life is short,” she added, confounding her own argument.
The quarter dropped, and a bus that had stopped for a light began wheezing loudly. “My time is up!” I shouted. “I’m out of change, Ma, I’ll call you!” And I hung up.
Two weeks later, I found a sublet. The building, a few blocks from the pay phone I’d used, had an elevator, a locked lobby door, and an intercom system. The three-room apartment was on the fifth floor, facing the front. It was noisy, but light, and seemed safer than the apartments in the back. The current tenants were a young
engaged couple named Mary and Jim. Jim, who let me in, said that Mary had left a month before to start teaching in the English department of a small Midwestern college. They were sharing the position, and they had a one-year contract. “Maybe we’ll even be renewed,” Jim said, “but the year is definite.” He was going to join her there as soon as the sublet was settled. I was lucky, he said, because their friend who’d agreed to take the place had changed his mind at the last minute.
The living room was modestly furnished. There was a cheap brown velvet sofa and a matching love seat—the kind that are always advertised on buses—and a couple of shaky tables. But there were hundreds of books on built-in, floor-to-ceiling shelves. Jim was going to take some of them along, but he said I’d be free to read anything he left behind.
I wandered into the bedroom alone and immediately felt that I’d be able to sleep there. There was a peaceful aura that went beyond the modest decor, the slanting sunlight on the worn patchwork quilt. Although I didn’t believe in ghosts, either malevolent or benign, I thought it had something to do with the happiness that had been experienced in that room. The first apartment Howard and I lived in had been vacated by a married couple who were splitting up. I used to sense a leftover sadness there that had to be dispelled by the prosperity of our own marriage.
“I’ll take it,” I said to Jim, back in the living room, imagining him gone and myself falling onto the bed among the pleasant disorder of pillows.
The last week with Sherry was easier; with the end in sight, we became more generous and more tolerant of one another. On my final night at her place, I saw her off on a date with someone who’d answered her ad—a guy with white socks and a Cro-Magnon forehead. He could have been a serial killer, for all I knew, but I blessed their evening like a fairy godmother. “Have fun!” I called gaily after them. As soon as their footsteps stopped echoing in the stairwell, I phoned Howard. It was something I knew I’d have to do eventually. A divorced woman I’d worked with at the library had told me that she and her ex-husband were great friends now, which wasn’t ever possible during their marriage. They met for dinner regularly and talked on the phone all the time. I couldn’t envision any such social ease between Howard and me. While I was dialing our number, my heart bumped and lurched, but I managed, somehow, to sound cool and efficient. Howard’s voice was rusty, as if he hadn’t used it in years. At first he played the game—he let me state my business, and we even exchanged a few superficial, civil remarks. Then, suddenly, he began begging me to talk to him. I knew that if we did really try to talk, I’d wail and scream and cry, and I couldn’t afford to lose control like that. I couldn’t stray the tiniest bit from my plan. I made Howard promise to stay away the next day, so I could pack my belongings in peace and privacy.
La Rae picked me up at the Port Washington station at noon. Katherine was going to meet us at the house later on. As we drove into the development, I had an unexpected and confusing flood of feeling. “Oh, I can’t look,” I said, covering my eyes. “I don’t blame you,” La Rae said. “It’s pretty ugly, isn’t it?”
Howard had kept his promise—his car wasn’t parked on the street or in the garage. I noticed that the pin oak had started turning red while I was away, and the sugar maple near the front door almost seemed to be on fire.
I was surprised at how neat things were inside the house. It wasn’t at all like Howard to be orderly on his own. Could she have been there? Or was this some new tactic of Howard’s, his way of saying, See, I can change if you’ll only give me a chance? Shadow was so delighted to see me he danced around in clumsy circles and squirted my ankles and shoes. I patted him, and then I hurried past the artifacts of my old life and began taking clothing from the closets and the drawers. Katherine showed up after a while, and the three of us worked steadily and with hardly any conversation. We filled three suitcases and then began stuffing things into the cartons La Rae had brought from the supermarket. We didn’t bother with the tissue paper and plastic cleaners’ bags I advised my readers to use when packing their clothes, to prevent creases.
I took my notebooks, my box of rejection slips, and some of the framed photographs from the dresser top. I hesitated and then I threw in a few of our record albums—who was to say who they belonged to? I even took my favorite painting off the living-room wall, an impressionistic seascape we’d bought right from the artist on the beach in Montauk one summer. But it left a conspicuous square of lighter paint, so I put it back. Finally, we were finished, at least for now. I’d have to return sometime in the future, maybe after we’d sold the house, and go through the junk in the garage and the basement. I hugged the dog, crying a little.
We loaded both cars. I rode with Katherine because there was more room in her station wagon, and because she asked me to. When our little caravan started out, I looked behind me, forgetting what happened to Lot’s wife, and I saw the house and the lawn and the trees rush away.
16
I DIDN’T TELL GIL about Paulie and me until we were in his basement den, warming up. He’d called the night before to say that his combo was meeting at his place and did I want to sit in. It was the first time we’d spoken to each other since that fiasco of a celebration dinner, although the women had been in touch. Sharon yelled in the background that she wanted to speak to Paulie when we were through. Neither Gil nor Sharon seemed to know what had happened, and that would have been the right moment to tell him. But it was too important to mention casually over the phone, and I was suddenly afraid I’d lose them both later, when everybody started choosing up sides. So I said that Paulie had gone to bed early (it was about eight o’clock), and that she’d call Sharon back the next day.
In the morning, I left a message about it for Paulie—it was only one more excuse to call her. She’d moved to her own place the week before and she had her own answering machine now. Her outgoing message was briefer than Sherry’s. It simply said, “Please leave your name and number at the sound of the tone. Thanks.” But it was clearly her voice, and I was haunted by the idea that I could hear it whenever I wanted to, merely by dialing her number. Sometimes I didn’t say anything; I just listened and then hung up before the tone sounded. The machine probably registered the call, anyway, and I imagined she knew it was me calling and hanging up all the time. I worried that she’d think I was harassing her and that she’d get an unlisted number, so I began leaving messages, inventing reasons for calling her as I went along. The New Yorker was still coming to the house—was she going to give them an address change? Did she want me to send it on to her, or drop it off, in the meantime? And what about the running shoes she’d left in the hall closet? I seemed to have an adolescent fix on the telephone, but it was my only contact with Paulie, or at least with her voice. After a couple of days, I’d memorized the way she spoke those two sentences on the tape—precisely where the accents fell, and the little pause before she said “Thanks.” I could lip-synch it with ease. I was like Gene Hackman in that movie, The Conversation, where he plays and replays the taped conversation of two lovers in order to uncover a murder plot. The fact that Paulie didn’t identify herself seemed either impersonal or very intimate to me, according to my mood. And that last-minute, breathless “Thanks” could have come from her old need to be good and please everyone, or because she’d realized the lead-in on the tape was too long. I wondered why she was out so much, or if she was actually there and using the machine to avoid speaking to people, particularly me.
Gil had asked me to come over a little earlier than the others, and the moment Sharon left us alone down in the den, I spilled everything.
He said he couldn’t believe it—he’d thought we were the only other happily married couple in America. “I don’t know what to say, Howie,” he said.
“That makes two of us,” I said, opening my fake book on one of the stands.
“Do you think it would help if Sharon spoke to her?”
“No,” I said. “Thanks a lot, Gil, but no thanks.”
“I
suppose she’d side with Paulie, anyway,” Gil said. “Sharon is pretty hard-nosed about screwing around.”
“I know it’s none of my business, Gil, but didn’t you ever …”
“You’re right, it is none of your business,” he said. “But no, I didn’t. Not once in over thirty years, although I sure lusted in mah heart a lot, like President Jimmy. Do you think Ripley would want to write me up?”
“Well, that kills my theory about heart attacks being a kind of divine punishment.”
“Unless they zap you for just thinking about it.”
“Maybe you should have been hung for a lion instead of a lamb, then.”
“Nah, I’m too chicken, I’m too lazy. I guess I’m actually monogamous.”
“In a crazy way, I am, too.”
“Yeah, you sure picked a crazy way to be monogamous,” Gil said.
We could hear the other men arriving upstairs. I blew a couple of scales, and then the melody of “No One Else but You.”
“That’s a cool sound you’ve got there, pal,” Gil said, and he pumped his slide and came in a few bars later.
I was sounding good—maybe misery agreed with me. But I’d also been practicing every day since Paulie left. It was something to do, and it was another voice in the house. When I wasn’t blowing my sax, I played tapes nonstop: mostly Miles and Ella and Billie. And I talked to the dog a lot, like some screwy old hermit. I began letting him into bed with me at night, the habit Paulie had broken him of when he was a puppy. He smelled pretty gamy and the bed was always covered with dog hairs, but his company was worth it. I’d begun to hate television, although it was a kind of drug. I still fell asleep with it on, and I still needed the lights on, too.
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