She was pretty, if quietly so, with short dark-blond hair, gray eyes, and small, finely made features. Years before I had known her in that way—if you were a pimpled, late-blooming boy imprisoned in the dungeon of adolescence—you inevitably knew the elder sisters of your friends: across a hopeless chasm of immaturity. A year older than us and several inches taller, Laura Goodman had belonged to another, better race. Once while visiting Marty in his parents’ palatial Central Park West apartment (a bunch of us, including Toby, had gathered to play a marathon game of Risk), I’d had a glimpse of his sister in her room, sitting on her bed with her back against the wall, reading Jane Eyre. Looking up from her book, she caught me spying on her through the half-open door. And there followed—or so I’d imagined—a shared ephiphany of eros, during which she saw through the humble chrysalis of my present physique to the gallant winged man within. I’d felt readier than ever to fly.
But then she shut her door, and that had been that.
All this I wanted to recount to her now that we were adults. But she hadn’t been at the party more than a few minutes before she put on her coat, clearly intending to leave. On an impulse I asked her where she lived; when she said the Upper West Side, I offered to accompany her. To my surprise, she accepted.
I walked with her back down West End. The snow had stopped, the sky was a frozen pond tipped above us. Our breaths fogged in the night. But the sidewalks were no longer pristine: boot prints and dog piss and soot. A snowplow came grinding up the avenue, thrusting mounds of gray slush against the sides of the frozen, parked cars. Then the tar of the street was visible again, wet and glistening.
I told her about the last time I’d seen her, fifteen years ago. By the time I reached the part about her closing the door in my face, she was laughing.
“You were all such pests!” she said.
“Thank you.”
“You know what I mean.”
“You bet I do.”
“You were more interesting than the others, though,” she added thoughtfully. “I remember you.”
Subtly encouraged, I told her what else I remembered. The Chorus Line poster on the wall above her bed. The shelf of books about horses and the light blue bedspread with dark stripes and the old stuffed horse with the missing eye. How when she read a magazine as opposed to a book, she’d sit hunched over with her legs crossed and the magazine in her lap, turning the pages noisily from the bottom. All of it meaningless except that it should be recalled now, years later, by two different people.
“Yes,” she agreed, looking me in the eye. “Different.”
Outside her building, within view of the uniformed doorman, she let me kiss her. Our breaths blew smoke. The surface of her lips was like polished stone. But past that I tasted in her an abundant warmth.
I had been celibate for too long. Untouched, a tribe of one, muttering my own language, ritualizing myself to no avail. Not caring or wanting or having. The months simply passing.
Now, through the bulky layers of our clothes, in a public street, I felt the first resonant intimations of Laura’s slender body, and pressed myself against her like an animal.
She pressed back.
eight
FROM THAT NIGHT FORWARD we were a couple. I would return home from teaching and find the red light blinking on my answering machine. (Her modesty evident in this too: she always opened her message with, “Hi, it’s Laura,” as if in the intervening twelve hours I might have forgotten the sound of her voice.) Or I’d walk straight to her one-bedroom apartment on Eighty-ninth and Columbus, to which just a few minutes earlier she’d returned from her administrative job at Lincoln Center. Often she greeted me at the door still dressed in her cold-weather work clothes: white or blue blouses and trim gray flannel pants, a navy cashmere blazer and black ankle boots. Plainly elegant, well-made things were what she liked. She had grown up with money, though most of the time she took pains not to show it. This was the locus of her private contradictions: she wasn’t vain in the least but she dutifully took excellent care of herself, as though she instinctively felt obliged to uphold the standards of appearance she’d been raised with. Once a month she went to a chic East Side salon to get her hair cut. Opalescent half-moons floated on her perfect, unpainted fingernails.
She was slender, small-boned, physically and emotionally discreet. From my adolescence ogling her down hallways and through half-closed doors, across vast rooms, I’d imagined her as a cold and willful queen. But I was wrong. Laura turned out to be gentle, kind, on occasion thoughtful to the point of passivity. It was five weeks before she would undress in front of me with a light on in the room (and then she rushed quickly into bed, like someone hurrying naked through the cold). When we made love the first time and she came, in the dark, in her own bed, her arms wrapped as far around me as they could go, her brief, poignant cry held a note of surprise or confusion, as if she’d just discovered that passion was really only another form of vertigo.
In the spring I moved in with her. I was a hermit crab, ditching my one-room apartment like a spent shell, scrabbling sideways with vigor. No crying or weeping, no memories to speak of. And my furniture, the corduroy sleeper sofa, my mother’s old chest of drawers, heavy as a yak—all this went onto Ninety-seventh Street one morning, and by nightfall was gone.
She lived, surprisingly, in one of those recently built yuppie towers, a high-rise sided in toneless brick—though otherwise chock-full of amenities, such as an in-house gym, designed to appeal to the legion of young bankers who had flocked to the neighborhood in the last few years. Still, way up on the fifteenth floor, it wasn’t so bad. Laura’s apartment faced west, and received plenty of afternoon light.
There was a comfortable sofa and a leather reading chair. There was her impressive collection of opera CDs and her books, novels by the Brontë sisters and James and Ford Maddox Ford, the stories of Chekhov and Alice Munro and William Trevor, the poems of Emily Dickinson. There was her equestrian library, still intact as I remembered it, how-tos on English riding and show jumping, an encyclopedia of equine body types, a catalogue of rare handmade saddles. On these titles and others the dust jackets had been worn from countless childhood handlings to a clothlike nap, the very feel of the past.
I added my belongings to hers. She encouraged this. She did more than make room; she opened her life wide to me. It may sound ridiculous to talk about manners in this day and age, but I believe that Laura’s manners were as important and as fine an expression of her true nature, her tender modesty and thoughtfulness of spirit, as any speech or promise she ever made. She did not tell lies, either in gesture or in word. She did not flirt or tease. There was a reason why animals, dogs and horses above all, trusted her implicitly, often would come forward from wherever they were playing or running or feeding to thrust their wet noses against the palm of her hand, or sometimes simply to lean into her.
A good person, in other words. Someone who, despite her own intrinsic reservations and fears, with courage tried to give all of herself, to love with a full heart while holding nothing back.
nine
ONE EVENING IN MAY my father stepped through our front door bearing a bouquet of white chrysanthemums. He was dressed in a tie and tweed sport coat, and seemed as nervous as a schoolboy.
“So,” he said carefully, “how are you?”
“I’m all right.”
“You look all right.”
We nodded at each other, then away. He came forward, still holding the flowers, letting his eyes roam the living room, taking in the books on the shelves (Horses? I could almost hear him thinking; horses are so East Side), the stacks of multidisk opera CDs, the costly leather chair. Signposts, I assumed, ways of reading this new life of mine. He’d never been here before, never met the woman I now lived with. In fact, these past months I’d hardly seen him.
“Laura’s just getting out of the shower,” I said. “Can I get you something to drink? A glass of wine?”
But he was too absorbed in wh
at he was seeing to hear me. He was standing close to the CDs; something there had caught his attention. I followed his fixed gaze to the top of one of the stacks and a cover photograph of a striking, dark-haired woman.
“She came to the Met,” he murmured.
“Who did?”
“Callas,” he said more firmly, without looking at me, still lost in his own world. “December ‘56, Lucia di Lammermoor. She already owned opera then. You can’t imagine the sound of that voice at its best. A voice that could stop time. I waited hours in line just for standing room. Beside me in the stall that night was a woman about my own age. Magnificent. Dark hair, huge dark eyes. I told her she looked like La Divina herself. The performance hadn’t started yet. We were packed into standing room like cattle, right next to each other, but she wouldn’t even give me the time of day. Looked down her nose at me, with that haughty eye of the Jewish princess saving herself for better things. I recognized that look, all right. My God, though, was she something! Still, it wasn’t just anybody singing that night. It was Callas. And when the music started, I forgot all about that woman next to me. Callas sang the first aria. And soon people, grown men and women I’m telling you, people were crying at the beauty of it. Tears were rolling down faces. Underneath the music you could hear the weeping like a dirge. Like being sung to by a voice too beautiful to be human or real. Then she finished, Callas finished, just the first aria, and there was a pause like a single cumulative breath, a pulse, and then the audience—three thousand men and women, the rich sitting, the middle class standing, the poor at home listening on their radios—the audience couldn’t contain itself. Oh, it was bedlam, total goddamn rapture. And the woman next to me, that cool beauty next to me, your mother, she was weeping too, and she took my hand. Just reached out and grabbed it. Because of the music. Because of that voice. It was the greatest moment of my life.”
My father looked up and found me staring at him.
I stood there, wanting to know where that man had gone. The man who was the first to applaud after a performance, who wept at the sound of the human voice, who knew his desires, who wasn’t afraid of being noticed. A man who was visible, in weakness and in strength. A man to pity and yet to admire, who’d risked and lost but who at least had wanted, a wounded veteran of love. Where had he been while I’d been growing up? As though, like a miser, he’d hoarded all the best for himself.
From the back of the apartment Laura’s footsteps sounded against the bare hardwood floor. We turned just as she was entering the room.
I cleared my throat. “Dad, this is Laura Goodman. Laura, my father, Arthur Rose.”
She came forward smiling, her short hair still wet from the shower, slicked back from her face. Her dress the same soft gray as her eyes, falling just below her knees. A single strand of pearls around her neck, their unadorned radiance amplifying her smile and her good intentions, which she presented to him now with innate grace, crossing the room and kissing him on his cheek, welcoming him.
“We wanted to get everything in order first,” she told him, “before we had you over.”
Her warmth worked on both of us, plucked us from the heavy grip of the past with nimble feminine fingers; she raised us up. I felt it happen. And watched him rise to the occasion too, my father, shedding the losses at least for the moment, blushing and smiling and saying that he was happy just to be here at all. Her charm the magic elixir we’d so badly needed—suddenly he was some goofy kid, not the tired man who’d spent his life editing college-level textbooks on behavioral anthropology, the Great War, the rise and fall of ancient Greece.
He remembered the chrysanthemums. “These are for you.”
“Thank you, Arthur. They’re beautiful.”
The flowers she arranged in her grandmother’s Tiffany vase while I poured the wine. Then a tour of the apartment, though it wasn’t big and not much touring was needed. I stayed in the kitchen, putting olives into a bowl, breathing in the smell of Laura’s roast leg of lamb (her mother’s recipe), polenta, cherry tomatoes sautéed in butter. No meal like this had ever been cooked in my studio on West Ninety-seventh. They were in the bedroom now, she and he, the sound of the closet door opening, her ironically concise architectural description (“Closet”), then footsteps again and her sweet voice: “I wish we had two bathrooms but we don’t.”
“You can borrow one of mine,” replied Arthur Rose a bit giddily, “I can’t seem to use them both.”
Laura laughed generously at this odd little joke. And out in the kitchen, relieved and happy and almost unrecognizable to myself, so did I.
After dinner, Laura remained behind to start cleaning up as I walked my father down the long hallway to the elevator. Already my mood was descending from the high of the meal in ways I couldn’t put my finger on. His too, perhaps. We were alone again. The bright green carpet, the uniform lighting that would never be quite right—one of those buildings that are killing the souls of our great cities, block by block. Doors and doors to either side as we walked; and through many of them, and louder than you might imagine, came the boxed vibrations of televised voices, canned laughter, screeching cars and shattering windows. Such hilarity and drama as to make our actual lives seem absurdly small if we weren’t careful.
We reached the elevator, and I pushed the call button.
In a voice of carefully restrained optimism he asked, “Do you think she might be the one, Julian?”
“I don’t know, Dad.”
Like a Greek chorus on acid, the dissonant voices continued to reach us through the neighbors’ closed doors. There was no sign of the elevator, and I jabbed the call button with my finger. He waited a few moments before broaching the subject again.
“You want her to be, though, don’t you?”
“Of course I do. I wouldn’t have moved in with her if I didn’t.”
He nodded. Thoughtfully, he ran his hands over the sleeves of his tweed jacket; I could see him thinking. He seemed suddenly restless, perhaps reliving the dinner and envisioning my future: Laura’s graceful manners, the kiss she’d given him, the delicious food she’d made.
Suddenly his hands went still, he let them drop to his sides. They were a reader’s hands, an editor’s, the nails bitten down, a smudge of blue ink on the left thumb and another on the ring finger. His gold wedding band still there, the last shining emblem of all the hope he’d ever had for himself.
He cleared his throat. “A nice apartment,” he said. He nodded vaguely while staring at his feet. “A home.”
A comforting verdict for us both; but a melancholy expression had taken hold of his face. Without knowing why, I felt certain he was thinking about my mother.
Just then, far down the elevator shaft, I detected the first sounds of the approaching car.
“All her books,” he murmured to his feet. “Her records, hats, her umbrellas….” He shook his head in helpless denial. “How could she have left so much behind? That’s what I can’t understand.”
“Dad, don’t.”
He looked up. His pale eyes still locked and blurred on some distant point, which was the inscrutable heart of another human being. He couldn’t understand how his love had failed to keep her. Spurred by an impulse, I reached out and took his hand. At my touch his eyes appeared to regain focus, and with the effort his stubborn memory released him back to this place and time, and to me.
The elevator arrived. I kissed him on his cheek, held on an extra moment or two, let him go. Then he stepped into the brightly lit box and the doors closed over him.
She was in the bathroom, out of my sight. The door open, the tap running, the sound of falling water broken intermittently by her hands, which scooped and splashed.
In the next room I sat on the edge of the bed, holding a shoe. The other shoe was still on my foot. She was saying something, but because of the water all I could decipher was the vague murmuring of her naturally quiet voice. Then the water shut off, and she emerged wearing a white robe, drying her face with a towel.<
br />
“Did you hear what I said?” she asked lightly.
I told her no.
“Did tonight feel different from the other times you’ve introduced your girlfriends to your father? Or the same?”
“There haven’t been any other times.”
A look of sober incredulity crossed her face. But it was the truth: I’d never introduced Claire to my father; and none of the others had mattered enough. I bent down to untie my shoe.
Passing in front of me, the lemon verbena scent of her French soap wafting behind her, Laura went to her side of the bed and from under her pillow pulled out the white cotton nightgown that she’d folded and placed there that morning. With her back toward me, she let the robe fall on the bed. Her pristine nakedness freshened the room like a flower, and I sat up. Then with a swift practiced motion, she slipped the nightgown over her head and covered herself.
I had the second shoe off. Getting up, I set the pair together on the floor against the wall, for tomorrow.
“Weren’t you ever in love?”
I turned around. Laura was looking at me with an intense vulnerability that I’d never seen in her before and that erased in one glimpse whatever lightness of tone the conversation had begun with.
This was new territory for us. We were both private people, a couple who’d arrived at living together by way of fewer promises than most, and fewer probing questions too.
“Once,” I said.
“When would that have been?”
“When I was at Harvard.”
“What was her name?”
I didn’t answer right away, and Laura’s penetrating eyes never left my face.
“Her name was Claire Marvel,” I said.
A single, slow nod, as if the name itself had some significance for her.
“What did she look like?”
I shook my head.
“Was she beautiful?”
“Yes.”
“How long were you together?”
Claire Marvel Page 15
