The Wonder Spot

by Melissa Bank

  . . . . .

  Rebecca told us that if we wanted to go out on the terrace, we should get our coats. I helped my mother on with hers, an old fur of my grandmother’s that was worn down in patches. I said, “I think you might be molting.”

  In a low voice, Pete said, “Play nice.” Over his corduroy suit, he wore a red down jacket patched with silver duct tape.

  We went out to the terrace, and when I saw the Hudson spread before us I said an involuntary, “Jesus.”

  Rebecca said, “I know,” and she said it as though the dazzling view belonged to me, too.

  “Well,” I said, “I guess you kids won’t be having that New York real-estate dream anymore.”

  Rebecca said, “What?” a muted version of how she’d spoken to me when we were younger.

  “You know,” Eugene said, “you find a door that you never noticed and it leads to a terrace or a huge room or even to a whole other apartment that turns out to be yours, too.”

  “I never had it,” she said.

  I said, “It’s actually a nice dream.”

  My mother said she was cold and going in, and then Rebecca and her mother and Eugene said they were, too.

  I told them, “I’m right behind you,” but I wasn’t.

  Pete stayed on the terrace with me. After a few minutes, he said, “You don’t really love advertising, do you?”

  “Nope,” I said. I told him that I was applying for a job as a researcher in public television, but I was also thinking of becoming a cartoonist, a songwriter, an underwater photographer, a peace activist, and a zookeeper for a really good zoo, the kind animals would have to apply to get into.

  I was going to go from career to career and I wouldn’t stop until I found one I loved. I was going to be the career version of a serial monogamist.

  We stood at the railing, and I was glad he was there. No one was easier not to talk to than Pete, with whom I’d spent many happily quiet hours clamming and fishing and swimming; he spoke only when he had a really good joke to make or a truly interesting thing to say, or when he saw that I was about to get creamed by a wave. I thought that no one would appreciate this view more than Pete, until he turned around and faced the party instead. Then I remembered that Pete wasn’t himself anywhere but Martha’s Vineyard. Everywhere else, he was just waiting to go back.

  “What’s the matter?” I said. “Our stars aren’t bright enough for you?”

  Un-Petely, he said, “How much do you think this place cost?”

  I thought of the current slogan for the New York lottery: “All it takes is a dollar and a dream,” I said. “And another, I don’t know, one-point-five million dollars?”

  For a second I got a pang of envy—the unPHairness!—but then I reminded myself that this loft doubled as Nora Goldberg’s pied-à-terre.

  Pete was shivering—Pete, a man who took an annual swim with his Newfoundland in the Atlantic on Christmas Day. I thought maybe talking about Martha’s Vineyard would warm him up; I said, “Remember all those little silver fish we saw that time?”

  “No,” he said.

  “On Lucy Vincent Beach?” I said. “They were jumping out of the water.”

  He didn’t remember because he’d seen thousands of little fish hundreds of times, and because it didn’t mean to him what it had to me. “Soph,” he said, “little fish only jump out of the water when a big fish is chasing them.” Then he said, “You’re not cold?”

  I was, but I shook my head.

  He said, “I’ll see you inside,” and in he went.

  With so much sky and so much river, you couldn’t help seeing the big picture. It was what you already knew, but crowding into the subway or rushing to a movie, you only saw it for a second, and close up. Now I took a good long look. I’d always heard you couldn’t see stars in Manhattan because of all the lights. But here they all were. Here was my night in shining armor.

  THE WONDER SPOT

  SETHTALKSMEINTO going to a party in Brooklyn. He says that we can just drop by. I tell him that a party in Brooklyn is a commitment. It takes effort. It’s like a wedding: You can’t just drop by.

  “We can just drop by,” he says again, and he gives me a look that means, We can do anything we want.

  This will be our first party as a couple.

  He says, “It’ll be fun.”

  My boyfriend is a decade younger than I am; he is full of hope.

  We drive to Brooklyn in his old Mustang convertible, with the top down. Because of the wind and because I’m on the side of Seth’s bad ear, we can’t really talk—or I can’t. But he tells me that we’re going to Williamsburg, the section of Brooklyn that’s been called the New Downtown. After the party we can walk around and have dinner at a restaurant his friend Bob is about to open there. Bob has offered to let us try everything on the menu-to-be if we’ll help him name the restaurant; the finalists are the Shiny Diner, Bob’s, and the Wonder Spot. “Start thinking,” Seth says, and I do.

  Across the bridge and into the land of Brooklyn, we go under overpasses and down streets so dark and deserted you know they’re used only to get lost on, and I get a pang for Manhattan, where I am never farther than a block from a bodega, never more than a raised arm from a cab. But then we turn a corner and—Lights! People! Action!—we park.

  Walking to the party, I tell Seth about the Williamsburg I’ve already been to, the one in Virginia. I expect him to have heard of it—he’s from Canada and knows more about the United States than I do—but he hasn’t. I tell him that I was five or six at the time, and I didn’t understand the concept of historical reenactment; I thought that we’d just found a place where women in bonnets churned butter and men in breeches shoed horses. I tell him the real drama of the trip: I lost the dollar my father had given me for the gift shop.

  I’m having such a good time that I forget about the party until we’re on the elevator up. I say, “Maybe we should have a code for ‘I want to go.’ ”

  He starts to make a joke but sees that I’m serious and squeezes my hand three times. I okay the code.

  The elevator door opens right into the loft. I was counting on those extra few seconds of hallway before facing the party, the party we are now part of and in, a party with people talking and laughing and having a party time. I think, I am a solid, trying to do a liquid’s job.

  I am only a third joking when I squeeze Seth’s hand three times. He squeezes back four, and before I can ask what four means, our hostess is upon us. She is tall and slinky, with ultra-short hair and a gold dot in one of her perfect nostrils; I feel every pound of my weight, every year of my age, until Seth tells her, “This is my girlfriend, Sophie.”

  I smile up at this ghosty-pale sweetie-pie man o’ mine.

  As soon as our hostess slinks off to greet her next arrivals, I say, “What does four mean?”

  “It means, ‘I love you, too,’ ” he says.

  I want to be happy to hear these words—it’s the first time we’ve squeezed them—but I feel so close to him at this moment, I say the truth, which is, “I feel old.”

  He puts his coat around my shoulders and says, “Is that better?” and I realize that I’ve spoken into his bad ear.

  I nod, and we move deeper into the party. He introduces me as his girlfriend to each of the friends we pass, all of whom seem happy to meet me, and I think, I am his girlfriend, Sophie; I am girlfriend; I am Sophie, girlfriend of Seth. I’m fine, even super-fine, until he goes to get a glass of wine for me. Now I look around, trying to pretend, as I always do at parties, that I could be talking to a fellow partygoer if I wanted to, but at the moment I’m just too captivated by my own fascinating observations of the crowd.

  The women are young, young, young, liquidy and sweet-looking; they are batter, and I am the sponge cake they don’t know they’ll become. I stand here, a lone loaf, stuck to the pan.

  It is at this moment that I see Vincent—only from behind, and it’s been years, but I know it’s him.

  I’ve tol
d Seth almost nothing about my ex-boyfriends. Now he’ll meet the one who told me my head was too big for my body.

  When Seth returns with my wine, he says, “Still cold?” and he rubs my shoulders.

  A small crowd gathers around us—the drummer in Seth’s band, and his entourage—girlfriend, brother, and girlfriend of brother. They try to talk to me, and I try to talk back. One of the girlfriends, I’m not sure whose, works in public radio. Since I’m a public-radio lover, I can keep this conversation going, program to program, until she asks what I do.

  I say that I do research for a PBS talk show but add that what I love doing better than anything at the moment, and what I am getting damn good at, is practicing the lost art of the silhouette. I mime cutting, which leads to an almost post-nuclear silence.

  But the girlfriend who works in public radio says, “People?”

  “And animals,” I say.

  “That sounds fun.”

  I say, “It’s stressful,” and she laughs, and we are insta-friends.

  Then we girlfriends go back to them boyfriends. I plant myself beside Seth like a fire hydrant, my back to where I imagine Vincent to be.

  But he’s not; he’s right across the room, his arm slung like a belt around the hips of a girl who I can tell right away is a model. She has the long, straight hair I used to wish for, and sky-high thighs I can see through her mesh stockings.

  Just like the bad old days, Vincent doesn’t seem to recognize me. Then he does.

  I inadvertently squeeze Seth’s hand, and he smiles without looking at me, like we have a secret language, and I wish we did.

  I watch Vincent steer his girlfriend toward us.

  He’s grown his hair long and now sports a Lucifer-style beard and mustache. Plus, he’s wearing a shirt with huge pointy collars jutting out like fangs over his jacket.

  When he reaches us, I say, “Happy Halloween.”

  “Hello, Sophie,” he says, Dr. Droll.

  I say, “Seth, this is—”

  Vincent interrupts and introduces himself: “Enzo.”

  “Enzo?” I say.

  He doesn’t answer, and I remember his New Jersey friends calling him Vinnie and his firm correction: “Vincent.”

  Vinnie-Vincent-Enzo pulls his model front and center and says, “This is Amanda.”

  “I’m Sophie.” Then I get to say, “This is my boyfriend, Seth.”

  “Hi.” She is both cool and chirpy, an ice chick. “We know each other,” she says about the man I’ve just introduced as my boyfriend, and she kisses him—just his cheek, but so far back that her pouty mouth appears to be traveling neck- or ear-ward.

  I stare at her, even while I am telling myself not to. I fall under the spell not of her eyes but her eyebrows, which are perfectly arched and skinny and make me aware of my own thick and feral pair; mine are a forest and hers are a trail.

  When I blink myself out of my trance, Vincent is saying, “Whenever anyone would say, ‘Small world,’ Sophie used to say, ‘Actually, it’s medium-sized.’ ”

  I say, “I was about eleven when I knew Vincent.”

  Then, like the hostess my mother taught me to be, I say, “Vincent”—I correct myself—“Enzo is a musician, too.”

  “I used to be,” he says, and names the best known of the bands he played in, though I happen to know it was only for about fifteen minutes. Then he asks Seth, “Who do you play with?”

  Seth says the name of the band, and I can tell Vincent’s impressed and doesn’t want to be; he fast-talks about starting up a start-up—an online recording studio, a real-time distribution outlet, a virtual music label. He goes on and on, Vincent style, grandiose and impossible to understand.

  I say, “Basically, you do everything but teach kindergarten?”

  Vincent says, “There is an educational component.”

  Seth squeezes my hand three times.

  “Oh, shoot,” I say, looking at my wrist for a watch I’m not wearing, “we have to go,” and I love the sound of we, and I love that it’s Seth who wants to go, and I love that we are going.

  Vincent says they’re headed to another party themselves. He kisses both my cheeks—what now must be the signature Enzo kiss—and he looks at me as though he cares deeply for me, a look I never got when we were together, a look that Seth notices, and I think, Phew! Seth will think another man loved me; he will think I am the lovable kind of woman, the kind a man better love right or somebody else will.

  Vincent says, “You look great, Sophie,” and I think of saying, Whereas you look a little strange, but I just say, “See you, Vinnie.”

  A few more pleasantries, and Seth and I are on the elevator, just the two of us, pressing 1.

  I say, “Good thing she was just a model.” I am giddy, talking fast, and happy. “I think that would’ve been really hard if she were a super-model.”

  Seth looks at me, not sure what I mean.

  Out on the street, I say, “How do you know her, by the way?” and instantly regret how deliberately offhanded I sound.

  “I don’t really know her,” he says. “She came up to me after a show a few weeks ago.”

  I think, Came up to you or on to you? but I give myself the open, amused look of a bystander eager to hear more about one of life’s funny little coincidences.

  “She asked me if I would help her celebrate her half-birthday,” he says, and his tone tells me I would be crazy to think he’d ever be interested in her.

  Unfortunately, now I am crazy, and I have to stop myself from saying a tone-deaf and tone-dumb, So you’re saying you didn’t eat her half-birthday cake?

  Suddenly I feel like I’m Mary Poppins, floating with an umbrella and a spoonful of sugar into the city of sexual menace, population a million models with ultra-short and long straight hair and pouty mouths and thighs you can see through mesh stockings.

  From there I go straight to, This will never work. He has models coming on to him after his shows. He’ll be forty-nine when you’re turning sixty. He is young and hip, and you don’t even know the hip word for hip anymore. You belong at home in bed with a book.

  I remind myself that this is what I always say and what I always do. As soon as I’m in a relationship, I promote fear from clerk to president, even though all it can do is sweep up, turn off the lights, and lock the door.

  I am so deep in my own argument that I almost don’t hear Seth say, “Sophie.”

  He stops me on the pavement and turns me toward him. His face practically glows white; he is a ghost of the ghost he usually looks like.

  He says, “When did you go out with him?”

  “So long ago he had a different name.”

  “Beelzebub?”

  I tell him that Vincent was still in purgatory when I knew him.

  “But it was hard for you to see him with somebody else, tonight?”

  “No,” I say, a little surprised.

  He nods, not quite believing. “But the thing you said about her being a model?”

  “Models are always hard,” I say. “And it was hard to see her necking with your cheek.”

  After I’ve said this, I want to say that I don’t usually use the word neck as a verb; it’s a fifties word, my mother’s word, but he is shaking his head and I can see he is not thinking about how old I sound or look or am.

  “Obviously he still has a thing for you,” Seth says, and shakes his head and swallows a couple of times, like he’s trying to get rid of a bad taste. “The way he looked at you.”

  My phew gives me an Indian burn of shame. “That look was for Amanda’s sake,” I say, and I know it’s true. For a second, I am an older sister to my younger self. “If she brings it up later, he’ll tell her she’s crazy.”

  “Very nice,” Seth says, and his voice tells me that he doesn’t want to hear any more about Vincent and Amanda, he doesn’t care about them, and that he’s wishing he didn’t care so much about me.

  It scares me. But then I get this big feeling, simple but exalted: He
’s like me, just with different details.

  His eyes are closed, and I think maybe he’s picturing me with Vincent or other men he assumes I’ve slept with or loved. Maybe he’s telling himself that he’s too tall or doesn’t hear well enough.

  Usually he pulls me in for the hug, but now I do it. I pull him in and we stay like this, his chin on my head, my face on his chest.

  I find myself picturing Amanda at another party with Vincent and feeling sorry for her. It occurs to me that if I were as beautiful as she is, every passing half-birthday would be harder to celebrate. But mostly I am just glad I am not her and glad we are not them and glad just to be out here on the curb, breathing the sweet air of Williamsburg and postcolonial freedom.

  We are quiet for a while, walking. I begin to see where we are now. We pass the Miss Williamsburg Diner. Little bookstores I could spend my life in. We pass a gallery with mobiles hung above a reflecting pool.

  Then we’re standing in a parking lot, outside of what Seth tells me is Bob’s restaurant. I’m saying that living in Manhattan gives you a heightened appreciation of parking lots when Seth takes something out of his pocket and puts it in my hand. It’s a dollar. “For the gift shop,” he says. “Don’t lose it now.”

  With my dollar hand, I squeeze Seth’s about thirty-seven times, telling him everything I feel.

  He says, “What does that mean?”

  I say, “ ‘I’m hungry.’ ”

  What I feel is, Right now I am having the life I want, here outside the Shiny Diner, Bob’s, or the Wonder Spot, with my dollar to spend and dinner to come. We will try everything on the menu. Then we will drive through Brooklyn and cross the bridge with the Manhattan skyline in front of us, which looks new to me every time I see it, and we will drive right into it. We’ll find a parking space a few blocks from my apartment on Tenth Street, and we’ll pick up milk and tomorrow’s paper. We will undress and get into bed.