You Lost Me There

by Rosecrans Baldwin

  “Look, look, I’m drunk,” he said, pushing himself back from the car. “You’re right about Larysa, she probably just wants to cuddle. Vic, call me tomorrow, I’m sorry. Hey, I’ve got something for you.”

  He slipped an envelope through the window. When the cab pulled away, Russell slapped the trunk like he was spanking it, hard enough so the whole car jolted. The cabbie hit the brakes, but Russell was already going back into the club.

  “Asshole,” the driver said under his breath.

  We shot uptown. I opened the envelope. Inside was the sticker Russell had peeled off his windshield: an image of the twin towers smoking, with the words underneath, “We Will Never Forget.”

  Sara once claimed that if movies were eliminated, if cinema were wiped off the planet and then somehow, a hundred years later, film was discovered again, two styles would instantly reemerge: kung fu and pornography. The genre’s cockroaches, but also in possession of its genetic code, the bonds of movies’ base pairs: athleticism and sex, war and love. I said slapstick surely came next, with westerns in tow, but Sara disagreed. She wanted romantic comedy in third place, so that any descendants of ours could have a shot at claiming royalties.

  Slapstick always beats romantic comedy, I thought, staring out the back of the cab. Not that we produced any descendants anyway. Going up Third Avenue, I counted three new multiplexes that hadn’t been there when we were living in the Village. I stared at Russell’s sticker, then peeled off the back and stuck it on the door.

  At three a.m. the night was still muggy. The crying jag never struck. I watched people in the dark walk their dogs, pick up dog shit with plastic bags over their hands like mittens. At five in the morning, the garbage trucks appeared.

  Too tired to sleep, I caught an hour at best. Most of the time I sat in a chair by the window and pictured Russell and the airport security guard crawling around like insects.

  For the second time in a month, I caught a sunrise. I showered and shaved and watched CNN. As I was packing, I found a stray jar of moisturizer inside my bag. One of Sara’s. It must have been from some trip ages before, when we shared a suitcase. The coincidence seemed overpowering—not a coincidence but a significant event with no correlative, the sudden appearance of this little pot.

  I had an image of myself trekking and suddenly needing hand cream, and I’d reach into my backpack, and there would be a tube of Aveda, next to my water bottle.

  We Will Never Forget. As though it was a syndrome, not a pledge.

  Was this the bag Sara had taken to California?

  I couldn’t remember.

  Then I had my big idea.

  My goddaughter was dreadlocked as Russell had described, but her dreadlocks were blond and thin as twine, not the thick ones you’d see on a reggae album. Tied up in a bird’s nest, they made her seem top-heavy, her neck was so long. Cornelia made for a very pretty Rastafarian. She’d always had a gaunt, masculine face, wide eyes with her father’s heavy eyebrows, his turned-up nose. I found her sitting on a bench outside a coffee shop on West Eighth Street. She wore a billowing black skirt and black flip-flops, lots of jewelry, a rose-colored silk camisole, and glitter across her cheeks. The Cornelia I remembered had been an animal-rights activist, an A student, a smoker, and, of all things, a dedicated fan of Singin’ in the Rain. She’d stayed with us for a long weekend the month she graduated from high school, and on Saturday night, we presented her with an early graduation present: Sara had arranged for a late, private showing of Singin’ in the Rain at the Criterion. They even opened the candy counter.

  Now she was a woman of twenty-two, alien to me. But there was something refreshing about her posing as an adult. For thirty minutes, Cornelia drank iced chai tea and filled me in on existence post-Cornell: the bar life with friends, sunbathing alone, some boy she had an eye on, an Internet animator she’d been hooking up with since graduation but now considered more, like, a friend with privileges, she said, perhaps. Cornelia’s voice was permanently caught between registers, hoarse and cracked like an adolescent boy’s. The last time I’d seen her was at Sara’s funeral. Cornelia had been in her first year at college. The day was cloudy. She’d worn a baggy tan cotton dress puffing out like a spinnaker, like a portable tepee. I remembered her nose had been red from a piercing that had become infected.

  The nose ring was gone. “Uncle Victor, you have to help me.” She took one of my hands and started massaging my fingers. Cornelia’s fingers were long and spindly, dry and cracked around the knuckles, covered in rings. She almost never dropped eye contact.

  “Of course I will.”

  “What did my father tell you?”

  “That you want to go to cooking school. That he wants you to work in a restaurant first.”

  “What an asshole,” she said, then she laughed, kicked off her sandals, and slung her legs over my knees. “But please, I know, it’s so sad, he’s still paying for college, so who is Connie to ask for more. But I am so serious about this, Victor. Someone should make me an apprentice. I want to have a craft and pay rent and have a career, you know? This is my calling. If I felt called to be a monk, I’d ask for a ticket to Tibet, but I’m not a monk, I’m a cook. Russell got into business because he wanted to make money, but I don’t care about money.”

  I said, “Maybe because it’s his money we’re talking about.”

  Cornelia yanked her feet down to punish me, and we watched a young man walk by wearing a tuxedo, pushing a big instrument case on wheels. What was he singing? Glancing away, I noticed Cornelia still didn’t shave her legs, one of those things I’d always found admirable about her, if not pretty.

  I’m never upset around her, I thought.

  “Well, if you’re so serious,” I said, “then why not take him up on his offer?”

  “What offer?”

  “Setting you up in a kitchen in New York.”

  Cornelia snorted. “Please, excuse me, then he’s the power broker and I’m indebted. I’ll be the third-world country that can’t export corn. Can you see me in his friend’s restaurant, under, like, surveillance? Plus, how would I know if I was there on my own merits, or because someone owed him a favor?”

  “That’s just networking.”

  “I hate networking.”

  “Young people always hate networking. What if I had a friend who owned a restaurant?”

  “What?”

  Now or never, I thought.

  “Why don’t you come live up in Maine for the summer?”

  She deliberately blinked twice in a row. “You are joking.”

  “You’ll have your own room, your own bathroom. That house is too big for one person anyway.”

  “But why?”

  “Because I’m your godfather, I’m supposed to do these things,” I said gruffly. “People my age like feeling useful. Plus, I actually do know a guy, he owns a terrific restaurant. There’s no guarantees, but I should at least be able to get you an interview.”

  “But, like, Uncle Victor,” she said, “you’re joking.”

  “But, like, I’m not.”

  And I wasn’t. What I was was exhausted. I missed my routines. Somehow, I sensed, by bringing Cornelia up to Maine, I’d get them back.

  Cornelia shrieked and nearly burned me with her cigarette. She kissed me several times on the cheeks. I told her we needed to make sure her parents approved, but that turned out to be a piece of cake: Russell phoned that evening to say he was surprised, but also supportive and grateful, and Cornelia’s mother called the next morning to say how much she appreciated my cordoning off Cornelia from her ex-husband.

  By Cornelia’s age, I’d written encyclopedias inside myself on the ways of the universe and the gears of man. Now I contained about a pamphlet, mostly relating to rodent brains. I flew to Logan, bought a coffee, and waited for my connection to Bar Harbor. I knew I’d never swim a mile faster than thirty minutes. That I wasn’t one for political buttons, country clubs, merchandise with logos, one cuisine over another, the lates
t trends.

  That I wasn’t any good as anyone’s boyfriend, at least not yet.

  I sat with my coffee in a rocking chair, feeling tired in every muscle group, staring at Boston across the water. Time to face facts: I wasn’t ready. Between work and looking after Betsy and now Cornelia, I had more than enough to sustain me through the summer, at least another year.

  I knew I should have replied to Regina and congratulated her about her poetry book, for courtesy’s sake, but that otherwise we were through.

  I boarded my connection.

  The man next to me on the plane was a Texan businessman, employed by IBM, I gathered, based on the logo on his polo and his matching laptop bag. He brought up e-procurement channels. Sensing he wouldn’t shut up, I asked him about his family, and he talked for an hour about his dog. He said when we landed, “You just don’t meet people like you where I’m from anymore, people who will talk to a fellow passenger rather than pretend to be asleep.

  “Must be Maine,” he said.

  A good modest Mainer, I didn’t commit to more than “Perhaps.”

  three

  Change of direction three. It’s been a week since I wrote those last cards, and here I am at my desk, on the daybed, back at the desk again. What to write? Where to start?

  Today, I played solitaire on my computer for forty-five minutes. I went outside and did yard work. Paid the phone bill, made lunch, went to yoga, and did e-mail after that. One message I got from Mark: “Four words: Move to Los Angeles. Maine is for lobsters. We miss you. Everyone does.”

  Yes, Mark, thank you, dear, but I’m still stuck, and surely I’d be stuck in California, too. Stuck: frozen while fulfilling the worst suspicions of myself as: a hack, an amateur, not good for much except: using colons.

  Writer as lobster: she who grows into a shell of her own construction.

  Even my own mother vomited at my work. Cheap shot, but true.

  I just read again the last line from card set number two, what Victor said when Mark suggested I try writing screenplays, “What do you know about writing screenplays?” And now I can write. Now I’m ready to go shove these cards up his nose. Do something about it, as you and I’ve discussed, Doctor, rather than just complain and mull and weather (as my mother drank and starved and napped to survive her own marriage).

  So I’m out the door and on my way to the lab, but actually I don’t leave the chair. The idea of being even an ounce like my mother was enough to sit me still and fall back in love with Victor. I’m thinking: What good from confrontation? What would be gained? Victor is who he is, no matter who I’ve become, and why should he change? Who wants to change at our age anyway? Who says it’s possible? I’ll be sixty soon, almost twice the life expectancy of a century ago. Would those generations of women, suffering far worse, have contrived one-tenth of my complaints?

  Victor would point out, the reason people didn’t have Alzheimer’s back then was that no one lived long enough for it to develop.

  But sixty. Jesus.

  After Woman Hits Forty, I wrote four scripts in two years; none went anywhere and each was tougher than the last to finish. Victor came around. He saw room to maneuver. Since I was back to scratch, he was ready to coach: looming, notating, leaving Post-its on the fridge. We’d spend evenings together in our separate chairs studying movies and rehearsing dialogue and discussing character motivations (which cracks me up now, Victor The Unaware under the reading lamp twirling a pencil, wondering why people do what they do, but of course he was very good at it, better than me with people on paper: nailing cause and effect with no sympathy for mystery if it wasn’t reasoned and strategic). And again, it was helpful, I knew as much, but I was also quite aware of what he was doing and what I wasn’t, and I remembered the joy of writing Woman on my own.

  When Victor bought books on how to write screenplays, he always bought two copies, keeping one for himself to read on the subway. He over-participated right when I wanted back my sense of soloing. Was that so egotistic? Supposedly I was the artist in the house, he the scientist. What if I’d stayed up late reading Nature, giving him tips?

  Do all scientists fancy deep down they’re polymaths?

  What Victor does believe, I’ve long suspected though never said, is that his work is fundamentally more important than mine. His for the dedicated, mine for the dabbler. And who’s to say he’s not right? What difference would it make if I never wrote another thing?

  Or maybe I’ve just been conditioned over thirty years to think that way.

  Or maybe I’m being unfair.

  So bad news struck. Aunt Betsy got breast cancer. And Uncle Bill wasn’t fit to look after her, he wasn’t fit to look after himself by then. They needed help. I don’t know where the idea came from, but one evening I was in the living room, drinking tea, talking to her on the phone, and out popped my revelation. Victor and I had discussed getting them a caretaker, and this was the conversation where I was supposed to suggest that idea, but then I blurted out, “Why don’t I move up?” Betsy loved it, and a flood of rightness washed through me. I needed a break. A retreat from run-ins around the city with friends whose careers leaped from success to success. An escape from Victor’s lingering. In Northeast Harbor, I could write half the day and shuttle Betsy to her X-ray appointments.

  Victor was pleased. On the surface because Betsy needed help, but also because he and Lucy were preparing some big grant, and he could maintain his sixteen-hour days guilt free.

  I flew up in June. In July, Betsy underwent surgery, a complete mastectomy of her left breast, and survived to smoke another day. And by the end of August, I had a rough draft, as easy as that. As though hatching from nature, out she came. And it had gone exactly as conceived, from an idea during the flight to Bangor through to the last typed pages: a hundred thirty pages word-processed in a stuffy yellow room overlooking the ocean: all mine, and my first reader, Betsy herself, calling it a smash.

  And Mark sold it a month later.

  When people asked me where I drew inspiration, I always wanted to say my Aunt Betsy. Her determination, her carnal will was so affecting, not only to get my own ass up and out of bed, but also for the character. Doctor, if you haven’t seen The Hook-Up (I realize how awful that sounds, but it seems as if everyone has seen it by now, if only on a plane, and after it came out I gave up on false modesty anyway. It’s my baby and I’ll be proud of it as long as there are DVDs on this planet), it’s about redemption and revenge and a rather extreme May-December romance: the story of a washed-up movie star who makes a come-back at seventy-two, post-cancer, with the help of a young film director. Who knows why, America loved it. When Sony tested the movie, the most common comments were “sweet” and “light,” and if that led certain critics to call it sappy, it still nearly paid in cash for the house in Somesville. Two months after the release, Mark set up an auction, and in a weekend he’d sold my four other screenplays. Didn’t matter that they were crap. One alone bought me and Victor new cars.

  Oh, the cars, beautiful day! I remember thinking at the dealership, you’re buying this out of guilt over the trappings of success, but also because you can. And you love that you can, that you’re the one bankrolling lavish toys, not him.

  Of course Victor protested. When he saw the car, the Audi he’d picked out from the catalog, there was evident shame I was buying it for him, and then embarrassment as the modern male about feeling ashamed of his wife’s largesse. He left to pee when I was signing the final papers. Still managed to drive home with the top down, though.

  But for the look on the dealer’s face, when he learned it was the wife who’d be negotiating the sports cars.

  But aside from cars, houses, investment accounts? Frankly, The Hook-Up did nothing good for our marriage. Talk about a change of direction unforeseen. The more successful I became, the less Victor liked it. The less he respected me, was how it felt. And I’m sure he felt less loved. It really was something, that year, where here I was the toast of some midnight
dinner in Tribeca, and Victor was home with the television. Some producer would pull me aside at a festival and tell me that this happened only once in a lifetime, that I should enjoy myself, and so I did: me with a suite for a week at the Chateau Marmont, being recognized at the gate, being driven here for a photo shoot, there for a panel discussion, and where was Victor? In the lab with his specimens. As though for a year I was constantly abandoning him for further trappings of (accidental? undeserved?) success, was how he saw it, and yet he never said a word, just went back to the microscope, and meanwhile I was flying to Vancouver, to a festival in Toulouse, lonely and sick with a cold and tired of traveling solo and imploring him to join me.

  First-class tickets! A suite at the Four Seasons! Paid for by studio assholes!

  But Victor wouldn’t budge.

  My relentless seeker had turned reluctant.

  After thirty-odd years, we are our furthest apart. Perhaps marriages shouldn’t last so long. Perhaps by prolonging their span, we expose our relationships to diseases that would have remained dormant. Victor won’t admit my success has driven him away (to his “music room,” to the lab, inward, away from me), but I’m tired of trying to draw it out of him.

  When The Hook-Up hit it big, the tables flipped. Victor wore all sorts of smiling faces, but obviously he was wounded. He was lost. Me? I was too happy to observe much, much less act on what he wouldn’t confide. When I say the movie did nothing good for our marriage, do I mean I did nothing good by creating it? Or was it how Victor responded, how he continues to respond? I loved the limelight. It was one long, fizzy dream. If Victor had a memory—false, in any case—of what we once were like and he wanted to preserve it, fine, was my thinking at the time. Let him stand in place. Me, I was on a flight somewhere, probably to California, business class.

  Two weeks after the conference in New York, my physician’s office called, an automated voice recording saying I was due for a checkup. The night before my appointment, a storm brought down power lines, and I took it as a sign of doom. In the locker room at the pool, I eyed the other men closely, senior faculty in their sixties and early seventies with fluffy eyebrows and white spotted potbellies and fallen arches, losing balance, lacking motor skills, shuffling to avoid a fall. In the waiting room at the doctor’s, one specimen gave me the fish-eye. He was probably eighty, gray-skinned with long brown fingernails, hooked up to an oxygen tank and a walker for ballast. Incontinent, I guessed, and probably vexed about that. During my appointment, I inquired how old he was. “Sixty-one,” said my doctor. “Three years on you, but that’s cancer for you. You don’t smoke, correct?”