IN THE END, each of us has only one story to tell. Yet despite having lived that story, most people have neither the courage nor any idea of how to tell it.
I did not live this long so that now, when I am finally able to talk about my life, I will lie about it. What’s the point? There is no one left to impress. Those who once loved or hated me are gone or have barely enough energy left to breathe. Except for one.
There is little else to do now but remember. I am an old old woman with a head full of memories, fragile as eggs. Yet the memories remain loud and demanding. “Remember me!” they shout. Or “Remember the dog that spoke.” I say, “Tell the truth! Are you sure? Or are you making up more convenient history just to make me feel better?”
It is too easy to turn your best profile to history’s mirror. But history doesn’t care. I have learned that.
Mirrors and treasure maps. X marks the spot not where a life begins, but where it begins to matter. Forget who your parents were, what you learned, what you did, gained, or lost. Where did the trip begin? When did you know you were walking through the departure gate?
My story, the X on my map, began in a Santa Monica hotel with the dog that made the bed.
WE’D MET RIGHT after college. For a while, for a year and a half, both of us truly believed this would be the great love of both our lives. We lived together, visited Europe for the first time together, talked shyly about marriage and what we would name our children. We bought things we knew would live in a great old house we’d have someday by an ocean. He was the best lover I ever had.
What ruined us was simple: at twenty-one you’re too damned optimistic. Too sure life has so many wonderful things in store that you can afford to be careless. We treated our relationship like a dependable car that would always start and run, no matter how cold or bad the weather. We were wrong.
Things got bad very quickly. We were unprepared for failure and each other’s dumb cruelty. When you’re that young, it is easy to go from lovers to enemies in a couple of breaths. I began calling him Dog. He called me Bitch. We deserved the names.
So why, twelve years later, was that very same Dog sitting in an expensive hotel room when I came out of the shower, wet hair wrapped in a towel and pleased to see he’d made the bed? A bed we’d shared for the last ten hours with as great a relish as always between us? Because you take what you can get. Women love to talk. If you find a man who loves to listen andwho happens to be a great lover, damn the rest. You’re the one who has to live inside your skin and conscience. If you can visit an old lover and still revel in whatever things you once had between you, then they are still yours if you want them. Is it right to do? I only know that life is a series of diminishing returns, ending with too many days in a chair, staring. I always sensed it would be that way. I wanted to be an old woman remembering, not complaining or fretting until death rang the dinner bell.
Over the years Dog and I had met when it was convenient. Almost always it was a joyous, selfish few days together. Both of us left those meetings replenished. His word, and it fit.
He’d made the bed and straightened the room. But that was Doug Auerbach: an organized man and a successful one too, up to a point. I admired him but was glad we had never married.
The place looked exactly as it had the day before when we’d walked in. He was sitting with his hands in his lap, watching a game show on television. The oohs and aahs of the audience sounded sad in that cavernous lilac room. I stood looking at him, toweling my hair, wondering when we’d meet again.
Without taking his eyes from the set, he said he’d been thinking about me. I asked in what way. He said he’d been married and divorced, had only sort of succeeded at what he’d wanted to do with his life, and generally regretted more than he was proud of. He saw me as just the opposite. When I protested, he looked up and said, “Please don’t!” As if I was about to do something terrible to him.
Then he turned off the television and asked if I would do him a big favor. Across the street from our hotel was a large drugstore. He wanted me to go there with him while he bought a razor and some shampoo. He knew I had lots to do before my plane left for New York that evening, but there was no leeway in his tone of voice.
I hurriedly dressed while he sat and watched me hustle around the room. What could be so important about a trip to the drugstore? I was annoyed, but also felt there was something both pathetic and urgent about his request.
The store was one of those large discount places that sold thirty kinds of toothpaste, and all the customers seemed to be moving down the aisles in a stupor.
Like the others, we grazed the razor and shampoo shelves. It was clear he was in no hurry to find what he wanted.
“What’s going on, Doug?”
He turned to me and slowly smiled. “Hmm?”
“Why do you need me around to buy soap?”
He didn’t say anything for a moment, only looked at me and seemed to consider the question. “I’ve been wanting to do this ever since I heard we were going to meet. More than the talk, the sex, more than anything. I just wanted to go into a store with you and walk around, making believe we were husband and wife. Just out for a few minutes to buy some aspirin and a TV Guide, maybe a couple of ice-cream cones. It would’ve been better really late, but I didn’t want to say anything last night.
“I’ve always been jealous when I go into an all-night drugstore or market and see couples shopping together. I look in their baskets to see what they’re buying.”
“Didn’t you ever do that with your wife?” I wanted to touch his arm but held back.
“Sure, but I didn’t knowI was doing it then. Now I do. Know what I mean? Then it was just a drag, something necessary. With you, I knew it would be a little adventure and we’d know we were having fun while we did it. Even if we didn’t buy anything, it’d be…”
He looked at me but didn’t say anything more. The worst part was, I knew exactly what he was saying, and was sorry. Yet there were other things to do and they were more important to me than this. I wanted to comfort him but wanted to leave just as much. It meant so much more to him than to me.
We bought his stuff, went back to the hotel, and checked out. Waiting for my cab out on the street, we hugged. I told him we’d see each other in New York at the end of the summer.
When the cab arrived he said, “You know there’s a famous rap singer now named Dog. Snoop Doggy Dogg.”
“Doesn’t matter. You’re the only Dog Man I’ll ever love.”
He nodded. “Thanks for the drugstore.”
THAT SHOULD HAVE been reason enough to tell me that there was more in the air then than oxygen. Why does it take a lifetime to realize that premonitions are as numerous as birds in a cherry tree? During the cab ride to the airport I saw something else that, in retrospect, certainlyshould have told me to think hard about what was going on rather than just look at my watch and hope I didn’t miss the plane.
The driver was a big old man who wore a San Diego Padres baseball cap and didn’t utter a sound other than a resentful grunt when he banged my suitcase into the trunk of his car. That was fine because I sat in the back with a cell phone and returned calls to people I’d avoided while in L.A. I had the practice down to an art—call someone and tell her you’re on your way to the airport but just had to touch base with her before you left. Then she told you everything in a five-minute chat she would have taken two hours to tell over an expensive dinner. Who said patience came as you grew older? I had less and less and was proud of it. Whatever success I had was due to keeping things short and sweet, and expecting the same of others.
In the middle of my last call I had my eyes closed and didn’t register what the driver said until a moment later. When I opened them we were passing an astonishing sight: there by the side of the freeway was a woman in a wheelchair.
It must have been eight at night and there were no streetlamps, only the stab and drift of headlights across the Los Angeles darkness. Only a moment to glimpse her and then we were gone. But for that moment there she was, illuminated by the car in front and then us: a woman sitting in a wheelchair on the shoulder of a superhighway out in the middle of nowhere.
“Nuts. L.A. is full of nuts!”
I looked in the rearview mirror. The driver was staring at me, waiting for me to agree.
“Maybe she’s not nuts. Maybe she’s stuck there, or something has happened to her.”
He shook his head slowly. “No way. Driving a cab, you see things like that four times a day. You want to see how crazy the world is, drive a cab.”
But that didn’t satisfy me and I called 911 to report it. I had to ask the driver exactly where we’d been on the road. He answered in a curt voice. The operator asked if there were any more details. I could only say no, there’s a woman in a wheelchair on the side of the road and something’s wrong with that, you know?
The whole flight to New York I kept thinking about that half hour in the drugstore and then the woman in the wheelchair. Both made me uneasy. But then we landed and there were so many things to do that week before I met up with Zoe.
Even the idea of seeing my old best friend and doing what we’d planned made some part of my heart nervous. We were going to our high school class’s fifteen-year reunion.
Events like that always sounded great months before they happened. Then as the time closed in, my enthusiasm began to curdle like bad milk. With this reunion, part of me wanted to know what had happened to certain classmates after all those years. The other part was both petrified and appalled to be seen by people who’d owned my life when I was eighteen years old.
NowI am unconcerned by my past, but at thirty-three I wasn’t. Back then, embarrassment still arrived in capital letters. I cared very much what most people thought of me. Even fifteen years after high school, I wanted to walk into the reunion sure that most of my old classmates would be pleased, impressed, or jealous—and not necessarily in that order.
Zoe was different. Compared to my life since high school, Zoe Holland’s had been a shooting gallery, with her as the target. She dropped out of college freshman year and married when she found out she was pregnant. The culprit was a vain little scorpion named Andy Holland who, three months after they were married, started sleeping around with whomever he could find. Why he wanted to be married neither Zoe nor I could ever figure out. They had two children in quick succession.
Then, out of the blue, Andy announced one day that he was leaving. Zoe was suddenly on her own with two babies and no prospects. The fact that she prevailed was inspiring because nothing she had done before prepared her for it.
She had been one of the queens of our high school class—high grades, lots of friends, and the captain of the high school football team, Kevin Hamilton, was her love. Everyone looked at Zoe and sighed. But she was such a nice person that almost no one resented her good fortune.
She was an optimist and, even in the midst of her later torment, believed if she worked hard and remained kind, things would improve.
She took a couple of part-time jobs and struggled through. When her kids were old enough to go to school, she enrolled in community college. There she met the next disaster in her life, a handsome guy who began beating her up a few months after he moved in.
Suffice it to say, Zoe’s philosophy wasn’t correct and throughout the ensuing years more bad happened to her than good. By the time the class reunion rolled around, she was living in a sad little house in our old hometown; one of her children did serious drugs and the other didn’t have much to say for himself.
I TOOK THE train up from Manhattan. Since my parents moved to California, I hadn’t been back to Connecticut in a decade. The ride that hot Friday afternoon was the beginning of a trip to the past I was ambivalent about making.
I hadn’t seen Zoe for years, although we spoke on the phone now and then. She was waiting for me at the station looking happy and exhausted in equal measure. She had put on weight, but what really struck me was how large her breasts were. In high school one of our constant running jokes was how neither of us had much in that department. Now there she was in a black polo shirt that stretched in ways that said it all. I must have been pretty unsubtle in my staring because after we hugged, she stood back, put her hands on her hips and asked in a proud voice “Well, what do you think?”
There were people walking by so I didn’t want to say anything too obvious. I shook my head and said, “Impressive!”
She hugged herself a moment and grinned. “Aren’t they great?”
We got into her old Subaru station wagon and drove through town. All the way to her house she rhapsodized about new boyfriend Hector, who was the greatest thing to happen to her since she didn’t know when. The only problem was, Hector was married and had four children. But his wife didn’t understand him and… You can take it from there.
She had the look of a saint in a religious painting. I kept looking from her face to those movie-star breasts and didn’t know what to say or think. Married Hector held her life in his hands but she seemed thrilled. From the sound of it, she was just happy someone was interested enough to wantto hold her life, take the weight from her while she rested up.
Her house was so small that it didn’t have a driveway, so we parked on the street in front. At first glimpse, it was the kind of house you see in biographies of famous people as the home where they were raised, or the first one they owned when they were starting out, poor but enthusiastic.
She had arranged for her kids to be away for the weekend so we could have the place to ourselves and not worry about them.
As she fumbled through her keys searching for the one to the front door, I felt a momentary squirt of fear go up me. Suddenly I didn’t wantto go into this house. Didn’t want to see what was there. Didn’t want to see the concrete results of my friend’s life on the mantelpiece, the walls, the coffee table. Things like photographs of kids gone bad, souvenirs from places where she’d been happy for a few days, a cheap couch that had known a million hours of unmoving asses watching TV with no real interest.
But I was completely wrong and that broke my heart even more. Zoe had a wonderful home. Somehow she had distilled all of her love and care into those few small rooms. Walking through them, admiring her taste, sense of humor, and talent for putting the right things in exactly the right places, I kept wondering, Why hasn’tit worked for her? Why has everything gone so wrong for such a good person?
There was a small backyard that she’d saved for last to show me because there sat the surprise. Pitched in the middle of it was a familiar brown tent that made me laugh loudly as soon as I saw it.
“Is that it?”
Zoe was beaming. “The exact same one! I’ve saved it all these years. Tonight we’re going to camp out again!”
When we were teens, our weekend ritual in the summer was always the same: set up this tent, stock it with junk food and fashion magazines, then spend the night inside gabbing and dreaming out loud. Our houses belonged to our parents, but this old Boy Scout tent in Zoe’s backyard was ours alone. Her brothers were banned from it and we took swift action when they tried to invade. What we talked about in there all those nights was as secret and important as the blood moving through our veins.
I walked over and touched the tent flap. As I held it between my fingers, the rough familiar cloth was an instant tactile reminder of a time when life still made sense, limits were for old people, and James Stillman was the most important person on earth for me.
“Look inside.”
I bent down and peeked into the tent. Two sleeping bags lay on the floor with a Coleman lamp between them. There was a box of Zagnut candy bars.
“Zagnuts! My God, Zoe, you’ve thought of everything!”
“I know! Do you believe they still make them? Oh, Miranda, I have so many things to tell you!”
We went back into the house. She showed me to her daughter’s room, where I changed into cooler clothes. Afterwards she suggested we take a drive around town before dinner and have a look at our old stomping grounds.
Far more disturbing than any spook house at an amusement park is a ride through the old hometown if you’ve been away for years. What do you expect to see? What do you want to see? Having been away so long, you know it’ll be different. Still, seeing the inevitable changes makes quick deep slashes across your soul. Loss, loss. Where are all those places I once was?
Iansiti’s Pizza Parlor was gone, replaced by a store with a postmodern facade that sold CDs. There were only records when I lived here. LPs, notCDs. I thought about all the slices of pizza with extra cheese and pepperoni we’d eaten in lansiti’s, all the dreams and teenage hormones that once filled that dumpy place with its stained menus and bunch of fat-bellied Italian cousins in T-shirts eyeing us from behind the counter.
“Sometimes when I’m driving down these streets, looking at our old hangouts, I think I see myself inside them.” Zoe chuckled and slowed for a yellow light in front of the bank where James’s mother had worked.
I turned to her. “But whichyou? The one you were, or the you now?”
“Oh, the one I was! I always think of myself as seventeen here. I’ve never gotten over the fact I’m twice that age but still living in this town.”
“Don’t you feel strange going by the old places? Like your parents’ house?”
“Very. But when they died, so did it. A house is the people who live there, not the building. I just wish I hadn’t sold it when the market was so bad. The story of my life.”
We drove by the high school, which despite some new buildings still looked as glum as ever. Past the town park, where, one fifteen-year-old summer night, I almost lost my virginity. Then down the Post Road to the Carvel ice cream stand where James and I sat on the hood of his old green Saab and ate vanilla cones dipped in heated chocolate.
Until that moment, I hadn’t been able to get up the nerve to ask Zoe thequestion, but seeing that cherished Carvel stand was a sign it was time. As casually as possible I asked, “Is James coming to the reunion?”
Zoe looked at her watch and dramatically blew out a breath like she’d been holding it for minutes. “Phew! You went a full hour without asking. I don’t know, Miranda. I asked around, but no one knew. I’m sure he knows about it.”
“I didn’t realize till we started driving around that this whole townis haunted by him.” I turned to her. “I didn’t know how I’d react coming back, but more than anything it’s James everywhere! I keep seeing places where we were together. Where we were happy.”
“Miranda, he was the love of your life.”
“When I was eighteen! I havedone other things since then.” The tone of my voice was stiff, prissy. I sounded too much on the defensive.
“Not as much as you think.” She grinned and threw me a quick look. “High school is a terminal disease. It either kills you while you’re there, or waits inside your soul for years and then comes back to get you.”
“Come on, Zoe, you don’t believe that! You had a wonderful time in high school.”
“Exactly! And that’s what killed me. Nothing was ever better than high school.”
“You sound so cheerful about it.”
She chuckled. “Right now I’m looking forward to the reunion because in those people’s eyes, no matter what’s happened to me in the last fifteen years, I’ll always be Zoe the golden girl. The cheerleader with the great grades and the boyfriend who was captain of the football team. And you’ll always be Miranda Romanac, the good girl who shocked everyone senior year by going out with the baddest boy in school.” She slapped my knee.
In a bad Irish accent I said, “Aye, and God bless the boy!”
She raised a hand as if it held a glass and she was offering a toast. “And God bless Kevin. I’m also looking forward to this because I hope he’ll be there. And he’ll be absolutely wonderful, sweep me off my feet and save me from the rest of my life.”
My heart filled so quickly that I couldn’t catch my breath. It was exactly the way I had been thinking for weeks.
I MET JAMES Stillman in geometry class. God knows, I knew abouthim before; he had a reputation fifteen miles long. He mesmerized innocent girls into his bed. He’d once stolen a pair of skis from the town sport shop, then had the chutzpah to return there the next day to have the edges sharpened. He and his friends were reputed to have burned down the abandoned Brody house during one of their infamous parties there. All told, James was not interested in being a solid citizen.
A group of typical thugs had usually slouched around our school halls wearing gaudy leather jackets and intricately piled hairdos that looked like hood ornaments, but James Stillman’s brand of bad was planets away from those human clichйs. What fascinated me was his great, singular style when I didn’t even really know what that word meant yet. Despite his reputation, he dressed like a preppy, in tweed jackets, khakis, and loafers. He listened to European rock groups—Spliff and Guesch Patti—and was even rumored to love cooking. When he was going out with Claudia Beechman, he had a bouquet of yellow roses delivered to her in gym class on her birthday. Like most of the girls in the high school, I watched him from afar, wondering if all the things said about him were true. What wouldit be like to know him, date, kiss him? But that was academic because I knew the thought of someone as colorless and well behaved as me would never even cross his mind.
“What’d he say?”
Only after a thudinside my brain did I realize that James Stillman had asked mea question. He sat behind me in geometry class but only because seating was alphabetical. Before I had a chance to digest what had happened, he repeated the question, this time adding my name to it.
“Miranda? What’d he say?”
He knew me. He knew who I was.
The teacher had said the earth was an oblate spheroid, as I dutifully noted in my book. I turned and said, “He said the earth’s an oblate spheroid.”
James watched me intently, as if whatever I said he’d been waiting all morning to hear.
“A what?”
“Uh, an oblate spheroid.”
“What’s that?”
I was about to say, “Like an egg that’s been leaned on,” but something inside said shut up. I shrugged instead.
A small slow grin moved his mouth up. “You know, but you’re not admitting it.”
I panicked. Did he know I was playing dumb just for him?
“It’s okay to know things. I just know different stuff.” He smiled mysteriously, looked away.
After class I kept my eyes down and gathered my books as slowly as possible. That way there would be no chance of walking out of the room at the same time he did.
“I’m sorry.”
I stood still and closed my eyes. He was behind me. I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t need to because he came around and stood in front of me.
“Sorry about what?” I couldn’t look at him.
“About what I said. Do you think you’d ever want to go out with me?”
All I remember about that moment was I could actually feelfate’s wheels turning inside me. In the split second before I answered, I knew everything would now change, no matter what.
“You want to go out with me?” I tried to make it light and sarcastic so I would be in on his joke if there were one.
His face was expressionless. “Yes. You don’t know how much I’ve been wanting to talk to you.”
WE WERE INSEPARABLE for the rest of the year. He was everything I wasn’t. For the first time in my life, I learned with increasing joy that differentcould be complementary. We had worlds we wanted the other to see. Somehow those very different worlds fit together.
Remarkably, we never slept together, which was one of the great mistakes of my life. James was the first man I ever loved with an adult heart. To this day I still wish he’d been my first lover instead of a handsome forgettable goof I said yes to a month after I got to college.
I never asked about other girls before me, but contrary to his reputation, James never did anything I didn’t want. He was gentle, loving, and respectful. A sheep in wolf’s clothes. On top of that, he was a wickedly good kisser. Don’t get me wrong—just because we never did itdoesn’t preclude a few thousand delicious hours horizontal, hot, and hungry.
Because we were such different souls, he seemed delighted by my prim, skirt-down-over-the-knee worldview. He knew I wanted to be a virgin when I married and never tried to force the issue or change my mind. Maybe because he was so used to girls saying yes to everything he wanted, I was like an alien to him—something peculiar, worth studying.
As is so often the case, our relationship ended when we went off to different colleges in different states. Those first months apart, I wrote him furious, impassioned letters. He responded with only stupid two-line postcards now and then, which was perfectly in keeping with his bad-James part. Gradually college and its different faces, as well as the rest of my new life’s diversions, slowed my letters to a trickle. When we saw each other again that first Christmas vacation home, it was warm and tender, but both of us had new lives elsewhere. Our reunion was more nostalgia than building toward any kind of future.
Over the next years I’d heard things about James from different sources, but never knew which were true and which third-hand information. Someone said he worked in a boatyard, another that he’d finished college and gone to law school. If the last was true, he became a very different J. Stillman from the one I had known. They said he lived in Colorado, then Philadelphia; he was married, he wasn’t. Sometimes when I was restless in bed at night, or low, or just dreaming about what might have been, I thought about my old love and wondered what had happened to him. The first thing that came to mind on reading the invitation to our class reunion was James Stillman.
FOR OLD TIMES’ sake, Zoe and I had dinner at Chuck’s Steak House. We’d worked there together as waitresses one summer and walked home late all those warm nights with nice tips in our pockets, feeling very adult. Chuck had died years before, but his son took over and kept the place looking exactly the same.
Earlier, Zoe had said she had many things to tell me, but since that afternoon a kind of delicious time warp had set in. Both of us were content inside it talking mostly about thenand little about now. A half hour sufficed for catching up on where we were in our lives. This was to be a weekend for memories, photo albums, “Whatever happened to…?” and the sighs that come with remembering who you were. At dinner neither of us expressed much interest in talking about what we’d become or where we hoped to go with our lives. Perhaps that would have come after the reunion—a natural summing up after seeing old classmates and putting the weekend and the experiences into context. But as things turned out, that summing up was done for us.
After Chuck’s, we returned to Zoe’s house. Both of us were dying to get into the tent, our old mood, those times. We hurriedly washed, changed into our pajamas, and by the hissing light of the Coleman lamp, talked until two.
The next morning she got up before I did. The first thing I remember about that momentous day was a violent tugging on my arm. Not knowing what was happening, I tried to clear my head and sit up at the same time. I forgot I wasn’t in a bed but wrapped in the cocoon of a sleeping bag. Held on all sides, I started thrashing around, which only tightened the bag around me. By the time I extricated myself, my hair was standing out from my head, my face was heated to two hundred degrees, my pajama top was wide open.
“Miranda!”
“ What? What’s the matter?”
“Are you all right?”
Early as it was, I went instantly on the defensive. “What do you mean?”
“You know exactly what I mean. The way you were thrashing around. And everything you talked about last night, the way you see things now… You have such a good life. You’re successful and you said it yourself; things’ve worked out. But you’re not happy. The way you talk—”
“How doI talk, Zoe?”
“Like you’re old. Like you don’t expect anything better to happen because you’ve lived too long and seen too much to have any more hope. I’m luckier than you. I don’t think life’s very friendly either, but I know we cancontrol hope. You can turn it on and off like a spigot. I try to keep mine on full blast.”
“That soundsgood, but what happens when things go wrong? What happens when you’re disappointed time after time?”
“It kills you! But you go on and when you’ve got the strength, you start hoping again. It’s our choice.” She reached over and took my hand. It made me very uncomfortable.
“Maybe I’ve just learned to be careful.”
“Would carefulyou have the guts to fall in love with a James Stillman today?”
The question was so accurate, so right into my bull’s-eye, that I started crying. Zoe squeezed my hand tighter but didn’t move.
“I saw a woman last week in a wheelchair by the side of a road. Right there on the side of the L. A. freeway with all these cars zooming by. I was so frightened for her. Out in the middle of nowhere. What was she doing? How did it happen? I haven’t been able to stop thinking about her and I didn’t know why until right now.
“It was me, Zoe.”
“You? How?”
“I don’t know. Her helplessness, the danger, the wrongnessof her being there. The longer I live, the more careful I get. It’s like you stop using certain limbs because you don’t need them, or because you only used them as a kid to swing on trees. Then one day you realize you can’t even movethat leg anymore—”
“And you end up in a wheelchair.”
“Right, but even that’s okay because everyone else around you is in one too. Nobody we know climbs trees anymore. But sooner or later we come to the freeway and we’re alone; no one to help and we’ve gotto get to the other side. We’re stuck, and it’s dangerous.”
“So you’re stuck?”
“Worse; I’m carefuland I don’t know how to stop it. I wouldn’t fall in love with James now. I’d get one sniff of what he’s like and run away. Or push my wheelchair as fast as I could to get out of there. He’s too dangerous.”
“’Cause he haslegs?”
“And arms and… a tail! He could swing from trees with it. That’s what was so wonderful about him, what was so wonderful about those days—I was using all my arms and legs and loved it. Today I’d be too scared of the risk. I wish I knew the flavor of my happiness.”
She looked at me while I continued to cry. Life had come to a stop on a nice summer’s day in my oldest friend’s backyard. I had no desire to go to the reunion now, even if James was there. Seeing him would only make things worse.
“DO YOU EVER wonder what the dead talk about?”
We stood elbow to elbow in front of the mirror in her tiny bathroom, putting the final touches on our makeup.
“What do you mean?”
She turned to me. One of her eyes was perfectly done, the other bare and young-looking. Made up or not, her eyes were too small to contain the amount of life behind them. In a corner of the room a small radio played Billy Idol’s “White Wedding.”
“I was just thinking about my parents—”
“No, go back to what you said: what the dead talk about.”
She pointed her mascara stick at me. “Well, I believe in an afterlife. I don’t know what kind, but I’m sure something’s waiting. So if there is, is it one big place? Do you get to be with people you knew? Assume for a minute that you do. I was thinking about my parents. What if they could see us now, getting ready to go out tonight? What would they say?”
“They’d say it was cute.”
“Maybe. But now they know so much more than we do. Whenever I see a hearse go by or hear someone’s died, that’s the first thing that comes to mind: Now they know. Always, the first thing. Now they know.”
“Hmm.”
“Even the smallest, most forgettable little… termite of a person. Some guy who sat on the street in Calcutta all his life, begging, dies and suddenly knows the biggest answer of all.”
“A lot of good it does him when he’s dead. Why are we having this conversation, Zoe? Are you trying to get us in the mood for the reunion?”
“I’m thinking out loud to my oldest friend.”
It was my turn to stop. “Do you have a lot of friends? The kind you can really talk to, cover a lot of ground with?”
“No. It gets harder the older you get. You’re less patient. You need so much patience for a good friendship.”
“All right, you’re the optimist: What doesget better as we get older? You get wrinkles, you’re less patient, you’re supposed to know more, but that’s not true. At least not as far as important things are concerned.”
She didn’t hesitate a second. “Appreciation. I appreciate things much more. My kids when they’re around. Or sitting with Hector in a bar that smells musty and old… things like that. I was never aware of what things smelledlike when we were kids, you know? Too busy wondering if I looked right or what was going to happen next. Now I’m just happy if the minute is right. When there’s peace in the air and I don’t want to be anywhere else in the world. I always wanted to be somewhere else—even when I was having a good time. I was always sure there had to be better.”
We looked at each other and, as if on cue, slowly shook our heads.
“Don’t you wish you could go back and tell yourself what you know now? Say, ‘Zoe, it doesn’t get any better than this so enjoyit, for God’s sake.’ ”
“It wouldn’t make any difference. I tell that to my kids all the time but they look at me like I’m nuts.”
Finished with the makeup, we carefully looked each other up and down.
“Why are we so worried about how we look?” she asked. “All the men will be wearing plaid pants and white loafers.”
In as deep a Lauren Bacall voice as I could find, I said, “James Stillman would never wear white shoes.” Then I added, “ I’mnot worried about tonight: twelfth-grade me is.”
“Bullshit!” We both laughed. “Let’s go.”
Even though it was evening, her car had been sitting in the sun all day and it felt as if we were riding inside a deep fryer. Neither of us said much because we were trying to steel ourselves for whatever was coming.
THE PARKING LOT at the country club was full of cars, but not so full that it didn’t send a chill up my spine.
“What if we’re the only ones who came?”
“No way. Look at all the cars.”
“But Zoe, there aren’t many! What if only Bob Zartell and Stephanie Olinka come?”
Just saying the names of the two most awful people in our class made me laugh. It was terrible, but I couldn’t help it.
“Bob Zartell is worth a zillion dollars.”
“Get out!”
“Really! He owns a huge condom company.”
“Condoms? That adds new meaning to the word dickhead.”
We parked and got out. I was already so sweaty that I had to peel the dress off my back. A bunch of dark sweat patches would make my grand entrance complete. Why hadn’t I gotten tan before tonight? Or worn more of a power outfit, one that radiated money and cool?
Before I had a chance to think more such happy thoughts, Zoe put her arm through mine. “Let’s go.”
The only other time I had been to Spence Hill Country Club was in tenth grade when a girl invited me to spend a summer afternoon there. She had a face the color of wet cement and a personality to match. After a few hours, I got so tired hearing about how she hated everything that I excused myself early and went home. What I remember most about that day was arriving home so happy to be there that I sat in the kitchen and talked with my mother till dinner.
“Here we go, Miranda.”
“I have to go to the bathroom.”
“Zoe? Zoe Holland?”
We turned and there was Henry Ballard, the nicest person in our class, looking exactly as he had fifteen years before.
“And Miranda! Both of you. How great!”
It was the best way to begin the evening. Henry, like Zoe, had been everyone’s favorite. In a moment, we were all gabbing away while people walked around us into the building. Some said hello, others smiled, some we even recognized. For the first time all day I felt relaxed. Maybe everything was going to be all right.
“I guess we’d better go in?”
He nodded, but turned and looked behind. “I’m just waiting—ah, there he is!”
A nondescript guy in a beautiful blue suit waved and hurried toward us. Zoe and I exchanged glances but neither could place him.
“Sorry I’m late. I dropped the car keys; they hit my knee and slid underthe car.” The man smiled and their look said everything.
Why did it jolt me? Because Henry had played football and dated sexy Erma Bridges? Because I’d once made out with him at a movie and could still remember how gently he kissed? Or because some obnoxious part of me couldn’t accept he’d lived a life where he’d learned he liked men and ended up kissing them the same tender way we’d once kissed?
“Zoe, Miranda, this is Russell Lowry.”
We shook his hand and talked as we moved slowly toward the door. Henry kept touching Russell in the way one does when a relationship is new and still sending off sparks. I’ve never been able to figure out if those touches are to reassure yourself the person is still there, or just the delight of knowing they’re close enough totouch whenever you like.
“Henry told me about you. He made sure I was well prepped on who’s who tonight so I don’t make any serious faux pas.”
I stopped and asked, “What’d he say about me?”
Russell narrowed his eyes and pretended to be scrolling through a mental file. “Miranda Romanac. Smart, attractive rather than pretty. Big crush on her in tenth and eleventh grades. Several serious make-out sessions. Most of all, Henry said you were the first girl he ever wanted to hang around with.”
“Wow! That’s a compliment.”
“That’s what he said.”
Suddenly I was overwhelmed by familiar faces that shot a cannonful of fifteen-year-old memories at me. I was looking for James among them.
Some looked good, some terrible; some were impossible to recognize unless they introduced themselves or were pointed out as so-and-so. We entered the ballroom and the four of us beelined for the bar. We stood with big drinks, wearing the kind of tight, phony smiles North Korean diplomats use.
There was no way I was going to circulate, at least not until I got the lay of the land. Surveying the room, I was amazed to remember how much of an affect some of these people had once had on me. There was beautiful Melinda Szep, who’d saved my life in Algebra 2 by letting me cheat off her tests. Linda Olson, who one night in tenth grade had the kindness to explain and answer a hundred questions about what really happened in bed with a man. It was a turning point because hearing what she said allowed me to relax. Then there was Steve Solomon, who’d been the first person on earth to put his hand on me down there.
Even seeing classmates I’d never had much contact with filled me with a delightful warmth and nostalgia. At a table in one corner were Terry West and Eric Maxwell, class party boys, dumb and sweet as cows. Both were fat and red-cheeked now. They looked so happy to be together again. Had they kept up over the years? Had their lives been good?
Only a few couples were dancing. It was still too early in this dangerous evening. Like us, most people were smiling uneasily or trying to remain invisible until they got their balance.
“Is that Mike Sesich and Kathy Aroli?”
“Yup.”
“He looks so old. Do we look that bad?”
“I hope not. But she looks good. Too good.”
I finished my drink and ordered another. Were we going to spend the whole evening like this, figuring out who people were and then either envying them or feeling aghast?
Henry and Russell excused themselves and went off to mingle.
“Just because they’re happy doesn’t mean they can abandon us!”
“What do you think? Henry and Russell?”
“Adorable, but I keep remembering the time we made out at the movies. It’s strange.”
“I’m just having trouble adjusting my gyroscope. I’m okay, but I have to go to the bathroom. Don’t move. Stay right here.”
I nodded and watched her walk away. Brandon Brind came to the bar and ordered a drink. Here was a guy I’d always liked. After a hesitant greeting, we fell into easy conversation. He’d done all right. From the way he spoke about his life, he sounded happy and sane and looking forward to what tomorrow had to offer.
We talked a long time. I didn’t realize how long until Zoe came back from the bathroom, looking very shaken. She was pleasant to Brandon and asked several questions, but it was plain she needed to tell me something. I excused myself and we took off.
“Look at us, running off to the bathroom to talk. What? What happened?”
“Oh, Miranda, you can’t believe—”
“What, what’s the matter?”
As we were about to enter the bathroom, from out of nowhere came one of the eeriest human voices I have ever heard. Hearing a voice like that, you instinctively know something is terribly wrong with whoever owns it. A midget’s voice? No, it was higher. I wondered if it was a joke, a gag recording. It came from behind me, so I didn’t have a chance to turn before seeing Zoe’s expression freeze, then melt to pure dread.
“What, going to the bathroom again? What’s wrong with your bladder? What’s the matter with you, Zoe?” It started out playful but ended aggressive.
Then I heard, “Hello, Miranda.”
I turned, and the first thing that registered was his haircut. It was the worst haircut in the world. Not even in Ulan Bator could a man get worse. Thick and unkempt in some places, it was much too short in others. It looked like someone had randomly hacked away at his hair with a pair of scissors, then grown tired and simply stopped.
Then I recognized his face, the eyes particularly because they still contained some of the same jollity they’d once had. But now there were other things in them too—lunacy, anger, and confusion like no other. You could not look for long.
And you didn’t want to look because everything there was wrong, off: his expression, the way his eyes wouldn’t stay on you for more than a second before sliding away then back, then away.…
“ Kevin?”
He smiled and twisted his head to the side, like a dog when it’s confused. Kevin Hamilton, Zoe’s beloved Kevin. Captain of the football team, Dartmouth College, the halest fellow you ever met. Now he was so bizarre that my mind flooded and all its circuits shorted out.
“Aha! I knewyou’d be here! I told Zoe when I saw her, I bet Miranda Romanac’s here. And I was right. I was right.”
I was speechless. I looked at Zoe. She stared at him horrified, fascinated.
“I came back to town just for the reunion. We live in Orange now. Know where that is? In New Jersey. We have ever since my dad died. But I forgot your telephone number, Zoe, so I couldn’t call to tell you I’d arrived. My sister said I shouldn’t call, but I said, ‘Look, we were going outfor years.
He went on and on like that in a high-pitched, weirdly sonorous, disconnected ramble about himself, the reunion, Zoe, his “research.” I was glad because it allowed me to absorb the shock and watch him closely without seeming rude.
Within seconds you knew he was mad, but what species of madness was hard to say. Although he spoke strangely, much of what he said was coherent, even intelligent. Seeing him this way, I had to keep reminding myself that Kevin Hamilton had been one of our class scholars. We were sure he would do great things. I had heard almost nothing about him except that he had graduated from Dartmouth and gone to Wharton School of Business, but that was expected. Even at eighteen, you knew you’d see him interviewed a decade later on TV or read about him in Timemagazine.
Apparently others at the reunion knew about Kevin, because no one got near us while we stood with him. A couple of times I saw others I recognized and smiled. They smiled back and started over, but on seeing him they quickly veered away. He kept talking.
Gradually what had happened came out. He was the oldest of four children. His father, with whom he was very close, died suddenly when Kevin was in graduate school. Kevin had had to quit and come home to take care of the others. Somewhere along the line, the pressure sent cracks up and down his psyche and he simply fell apart. He was institutionalized and since then had been on heavy medication. He spent his days in the library researching things, but when I asked what, he looked at me suspiciously and changed the subject.
I could not imagine how Zoe was feeling. Whatever she had brought with her to this night—dreams, expectations—had been met at the door by this human nightmare of everything gone wrong, all hope abandoned. Once again my poor friend had lost.
“Excuse me, Kevin, but we have to go.” I didn’t care if I hurt his feelings. I took her by the arm and we fled into the ladies’ room. He was still talking when the door whooshed shut behind us.
Luckily no one else was in there. Speechless, we stared at each other. It was as if a beautiful piece of crystal had dropped and shattered on the floor. Of course you sweep it up, but first you must accept the fact that it is gone forever.
Zoe went to the sink and turned on both spigots. She lowered her head and cupping handful after handful, threw water on her face. Then she squirted out a handful of bright green hand soap from the dispenser and thoroughly washed her face clean of all the makeup she’d so carefully applied an hour before.
I wanted to be so much smarter than I was, able to come up with something right to say that, even for a moment, might fill the black space I knew was in her heart and would be for a long time.
“Where did I learn my cliches?” She was looking in the mirror. Her face was blank and shone from water.
“What do you mean?”
“Love never dies. Hope springs eternal. The one thing we should have learned by now is to put a seat belt around our heart. The road is dangerous but we never put the damned seat belt on.”
“Zoe—”
“He said something to me once I’ll never forget. He said, ‘We’ll start to reminisce when we’re a hundred and four because till then we’ll be too busy.’ I was going to bring Hector tonight. He could have come. But I thought about Kevin, you know, and maybe there was a chance that something might happen… so I didn’t.”
Where was my wisdom? I kept licking my lips and scouring my brain but nothing came. She continued to look blankly in the mirror, as if seeing her face for the first time.
The door opened and Kathy Herlth sauntered in. She was as gorgeous as ever but still carried the icy wind of disdain for everything on earth that froze the rest of us humanity to death.
“God, did you see Kevin Hamilton? He’s got to change his lobotomist! He’s standing out there talking like a Klingon. Sort of looks like one too.”
It was so cruel and true that Zoe coughed out a huge laugh. I did too.
Kathy shrugged. “I knew I shouldn’t have come to this. It’s so depressing. Youtwo have sure come full circle tonight. Kevin’s mad and James is dead. That ends that chapter, huh?”
“What?” The word came out much slower than I wanted. My hand froze as I was about to wipe tears of laughter off my cheek. I looked at my hand when she spoke again. It had already made a fist. I didn’t feel it. I didn’t feel anything.
She looked surprised. “What do you mean? About what?”
“About James.”
“James? What about him? Oh God, Miranda, didn’t you know? He’s dead. He died three years ago. In a car crash.”
Everything was so clear, incredibly sharp and accentuated: Zoe’s gasp, the sound of water hissing in the sink, Kathy’s high-heel scrape across the tile floor. Their faces—Kathy’s cool but interested, Zoe shocked beyond her own new trauma. These things were clear, but some essential part of me had already left. Something left my body and floating high above the room looked down, taking one last glimpse before leaving forever.
The part that had loved James Stillman with the energy and abandon only beginners have. The part that had smoked twenty delicious cigarettes a day, laughed too loud, didn’t worry about dangerous things. The part that wondered what sex would be like and who would be the first. The part that looked too long in mirrors at the only flawless face I would ever see there.
Fearless teenage me, so sure one day I’d find a partner with whom my heart would rest happily ever after. A man I would put on like lotion. James taught me that, showed me great happiness was possible right from the beginning. He was dead.
“Jesus, Miranda, I thought you knew. It happened so long ago.”
“How—” I stopped to swallow. My throat was dry as cork. “Um, how did it happen?”
“I don’t know. Diana Wise told me. But she’s here tonight! You can ask. I saw her before.”
Without another word, I walked out of the room. Zoe said something but I kept going. I needed to find Diana Wise immediately. Without the facts, a precise description, James Stillman’s death would stay liquid in my brain and it had to be solid, real.
Hadn’t the ballroom been billiard-chalk blue before I’d gone into the bathroom? Blue with white borders? I could have sworn it was; yet now it was a weak ocher, the color of young carrots. Even the colors had changed with the terrible news.
People mulled around talking, laughing, and dancing. Tonight they could be eighteen andthirty-three at the same time. It was wonderful. Mouths were full of teeth and shiny tongues. Words surrounded me as I moved. I felt like a visitor from another planet.
“They moved to Dobbs Ferry—”
“I haven’t seen himsince, Jesus, I don’t know—”
“The whole house was carpeted with the most ugly brown shag—”
When we were eighteen, people still listened to records. There were three speeds on a record player: 33 1/3, 45, and 78. The only time you ever used 78 was when you wanted to laugh. You turned it up there and played 45s on it. Hearing familiar voices transformed to a high silly chirp was always good for a laugh. As I walked more and more quickly through the room searching for Diana, thinking about James, thinking about him dead, the world around me switched to 78. Voices became a speeded-up muddle. This whizzing chaos became so strong that I had to stop and close my eyes. I breathed deeply a few times, telling myself not to panic. When I opened my eyes, Zoe was standing in front of me.
“Are you okay?”
“No. Have you seen Diana? I can’t find her.”
“We will. Come on, she’s got to be here.” She took my hand and we walked together. Later, when my mind cleared, I thought, How kind of her. Zoe had had her own nightmare only minutes before. Yet here she was, holding my hand and helping when she could just as well have been shut off in her own pain from meeting Kevin Hamilton.
“There! Over there.”
Unlike so many others at the reunion, Diana Wise looked almost exactly as she had when we were in school. Interesting face, long black hair, the sexy smile of an Italian movie star. We had been almost-friends in high school, but she was so much maturer than we that we had always held her in awe.
“Diana?” She was talking to a man I didn’t recognize. Hearing her name, she turned and saw me. Touching the guy on the hand as a good-bye, she took me by the arm.
“Miranda. I’ve been looking for you.” Her voice was strong and assured. The expression on her face said she knew what I needed. I was grateful not to have to ask the question. Not to have to say the words out loud, into the world: Is it true? Is he really dead?
The three of us walked through the lobby back out into the summer evening. It was warm and beautiful, the air still heavy from the day and full of the voluptuous smell of honeysuckle. I was empty and scared. I knew what was coming. Even though answers were what I wanted, I knew that when I heard them there would be no way back to a part of my life that, until a few hours before, was still intact.
“Diana, what happened to James? How did it…” I couldn’t say any more.
She put a hand into her long black hair and drew it slowly away from her face. “I bumped into him a few years ago in Philadelphia. He was working for a company that had something to do with art—selling it, dealing it? I don’t really remember. Maybe it was an auction house, like Sotheby’s. Anyway, we ran into each other on the street. He loved what he was doing. He was so revved up. Remember how excited he could get about things?”
I wanted to tell her how I’d seen that excitement, seen his whole being glow about something that had grabbed his attention.
“We were both in a rush and only able to have a quick cup of coffee together. He sounded wonderful, Miranda. Said for the first time in his life he felt like he was on the right track. Things were where he wanted them. He had a girlfriend. He was absolutely up, you know?”
“How did he look?” I wanted a picture, an image of him grown up I could hold on to.
“Older of course, thinner than he was in school, but still those great eyes and smile.” She paused. “He looked like James.”
I began to weep. Those words held everything I did and did not want to hear. Zoe put her arms around me. The three of us stood on the lawn, a few feet—and light-years away from all the happiness and goodwill inside the building.
When my storm had mostly passed, I asked Diana to go on.
“We exchanged numbers and promised to stay in touch. We called a couple of times but I didn’t go back to Philadelphia, and who ever comes to Kalamazoo?
“One night three years ago, very late, I got a call. A woman asked for me two times. She was so upset that I had to convinceher who I was. She said she knew I was a good friend of James’s and wanted me to know he’d been killed in a car accident.
“He’d been in New York and gotten a call from his girlfriend in Philadelphia. She wanted to break up with him because she’d met someone else. Apparently she was that cold—wanted out and there was nothing more to talk about.
“As soon as he got off the phone, James jumped in his car and drove straight down there. It was very icy and the roads were bad. He made it to Philadelphia but was driving too fast. When he tried to get off the turnpike, the car skidded and went off the road. She said he died instantly.”
“Instantly?”
“That’s what the woman said.”
“Who was she?”
“I don’t know. She wouldn’t give a name, even when I asked. I bet it was the girlfriend.
“He asked about you, Miranda. When we had coffee, he asked if I had heard anything about you.”
My heart lurched. “Really?”
“Yes. He was disappointed when I didn’t know.”
We were silent while music from the reunion filled the air around us.
“Is there anything else?”
“No. I told you I asked the woman for her name but she wouldn’t say. She hung up right after that.”
Zoe sighed and looked at the ground. It was such a final, nothing-left sigh.
“Thank you, Diana. It makes it clearer.”
We hugged. She stepped back, hands on my elbows, and looked at me a moment more. Then she turned and started for the building.
“Diana?”
“Yes?”
“Really, he was happy?”
She only nodded. Which was better than any words. It allowed me my own vocabulary for his happiness.
“Thank you.”
She reached into her handbag, took out a card, and handed it to me. “Call if you want to talk, or if you’re ever in Kalamazoo, Michigan.”
Zoe and I stood in silence in the middle of the lawn. After time had passed I said, “I don’t want to go back in there. I’ll call a cab. Could you give me a key to your house?”
“Let’s go someplace and drink a lot.”
Instead we ended up driving around again. Past the same places we’d seen that afternoon, which now felt like a million years ago. I turned on the radio and, as if they knew our mood, all the stations seemed to be playing only songs we’d loved when we were young. Which was all right because we finished being young that night and it was right to be immersed in it one last time.
I hadn’t been paying attention to where she was going, and realized where we were only when she slowed and turned into the parking lot of the Carvel ice cream stand.
“Good idea!”
“If we’re not going to get drunk, we’ll get fat.”
We ordered the old usual—vanilla cones dipped in heated chocolate—and went back to her car. In our party dresses we sat on the hood and ate.
“They’re still delicious.”
“I haven’t had one in years. I used to bring the kids when they were young, but they wouldn’t be caught dead with me in public these days.”
We watched people come and go. Back at the country club, our classmates were dancing and reliving happy times. But Kevin was back there too and so was James.
“Zoe, what do we do now?”
“Hope, honey. Same thing as I said before.”
“Not much hope in Mudville tonight.”
“Did I ever tell you about the time I found Andy’s gun?”
That stopped me. “You’re kidding! Andy, your slimy ex-husband?”
“Yup. It was the first year we were married. I was putting away clean underwear in his drawer. Sitting on top of his Fruit Of The Looms was a gun.”
“Why’d he have it?”
“The most interesting thing was, the moment I found it, the only thing that went through my mind wasn’t‘He’s got a gun!’ What hit me was, ‘The world is an amazing place.’ You know how it is when you’re first with someone and love him: you think you know everything about him. Then you open a drawer one day and there’s something—an old love letter, a diary, a gun. It’s impossible to connect with the person you thought you knew.
“It was kind of wonderful, Miranda. I knew no matter what happened, life was always going to be interesting.”
“Because you found a gun?”
“No! Because it was part of Andy too. I really didn’t know him and that excited me. There were all these new things to discover. In the end we divorced, but back then, life was still opening up. It excited me. It still excites me. You should let it do that. You should let that happen.”
“YOU’RE A THIEF, Miranda.”
I rolled my eyes. “Yes, Jaco.”
Sniffing the air as if something stunk in the room, he went on as if I hadn’t spoken. “Perhaps the most unscrupulous I have ever done business with.”
I tapped my front tooth with a fingernail. “Jaco, we’ve had this conversation before. You always say the same thing: I’m a crook, a bitch… always the same spring rolls. But I find the books you want. You wanted a signed first edition of The Gallery; I got it for you. You wanted a letter from Eliot, I found it for you—”
“True, but then you charge so much that I have no money left!”
“You’d have to live another four hundred years before you ran out of money. Don’t buy it! You know Dagmar will if you don’t.” It was a rotten thing to say, but I was so disgusted with him at the moment I couldn’t resist.
As usual, her detested name straightened his back and narrowed his greedy eyes.
Dagmar Breece. Jaco Breece’s nemesis. All I had to do was wave her name in front of him and the mean old man started snorting like Ferdinand the Bull.
Dagmar and Jaco Breece had two passions: cashmere and twentieth-century authors. That was great when they were married and ran a sweater company together for four decades. The business was successful, they had a couple of nice children who grew up and away, they shared a passion for collecting. Then when she was sixty years old, Dagmar fell in love with another man and promptly moved out on her husband. Good riddance.
What galled Jaco more than losing her, however, was her saying he could keep the rare book and manuscript collection they’d spent years amassing. She would start another with the help of her rich new boyfriend.
That’s how I came to know them. Several years before, when they were still together, Dagmar came into the store and bought an Edward Dahlberg manuscript I had listed in a catalog. After that, I found a number of things for them, both when they were married and after she left. I liked Dagmar but not Jaco. Not one bit.
Standing there watching him fume, I wondered how he would have reacted if he’d known I was going to a dinner party at her apartment that night.
“What else do you have that’s new?”
“Some Rilke letters—”
“Everyone has Rilke letters. He wrote too many.”
“Jaco, you asked what’s new. I have some letters—Noooo, wait! I have something else that’ll interest you!”
My store is small, so it was only three steps to the sideboard. I disliked the whole pompous leather-and-dark-oak look of most rare book dealers’ stores, so mine was furnished with 1950s Heywood Wakefield blond wood furniture and a very warm red-and-white Chinese rug. Together they made the room light, slightly odd, and, I hoped, welcoming. I loved books and everything about them. I wanted customers to know that when they walked in.
The difference between my business and the business of other book and manuscript dealers was that I sold anything else I fancied too.
Opening a drawer, I took out the long thin case made of crocodile skin. It looked like the kind Victorian gentlemen used for carrying cigars. What I had inside was much better than that. Opening it, I put it down on the counter in front of Jaco, knowing he would go into cardiac arrest when he realized what it was.
“I don’t collect fountain pens, Miranda.”
“It’s not a pen. It’s a Mabie Todd.”
“Then maybe Todd would like it.”
“Very funny. Look at the barrel.”
He looked at me like I was trying to pull a fast one but in the end he picked up the largest fountain pen I’d ever seen.
“So? It’s a pen.”
“Jaco, turn it around. Look closely.”
He turned till he saw the name engraved in gold lettering on the black barrel. When he spoke again, his voice was almost a whisper, as if his tongue had grown too big for his throat. “No! Is it?”
I nodded. “I have authentication.”
“How did you—”
“At a Sotheby’s auction last week. I saw it in their catalog. I think it came from Lord Esher’s estate.”
“Rolfe.” He read the name reverently. “I remember from the Symons biography, he was supposed to have always written with a huge fountain pen.”
“That’s right.”
Exasperated and smiling for the first time, he shook his head. “Miranda, how do you find these things? How did you find Frederick Rolfe’s fountain pen?”
“Because I love what I’m doing. Hunting for things, having them in my hand for a while. I love selling them to people like you who care.”
“But you never keep anything for yourself?”
“Never. You have to decide whether you’re going to collect or sell. Collecting would exhaust me. I’d never be happy with what I owned. I would always want more. This way, I can enjoy things for a while and then sell them to the right people.”
“Like Dagmar?”
“Like Dagmar, andyou. Do you want this?”
“Of course I want it!”
I WAITED A good half hour after he left before I made the call. Jaco had the disconcerting habit of returning in a rage to demand a better price for something he had just bought. In the beginning I’d been cowed by his fury, but not anymore.
“Hello?” Her voice was soft and elegant, as sexy a woman’s voice as I knew.
“Dagmar? It’s Miranda. Jaco was just here. He bought the pen.”
“Of course he did, darling. It’s exactly what he would want. That’s why I bought it. It’s a fabulous piece.”
“But why sell it to him? Didn’t you want it for your collection?”
“Yes, but he would love it more. Baron Corvo is one of his few heroes.”
“I don’t understand. You finally left him after all those years of unhappiness, but you’re still giving him things?”
“Not giving, selling. Loving Jaco was like sitting on a cold stone: you give it all your heat but it gives none back. You end up with a chill in your behind. I couldn’t take it anymore. But leaving doesn’t erase most of my adult life. I still love him for a few things and always will. Not that I necessarily want to. Sometimes you can’t control who you love.”
“But you’re happy you left?”
“Blissfully. The only time I look back is to check to make sure I locked the door. Tell me how Jaco reacted when he saw the pen.” I could almost hear her smile through the telephone.
“He nipped. He was in heaven.”
“No doubt. Hadrian the Seventhis his favorite book. No wonder—the story of a miserable, undeserving person who’s chosen to be pope. Jaco identifies totally.”
“I’ll bring you a check tonight.”
“No hurry. Today I’m beyond madness anyway. The caterer called and said he won’t be able to make the yogurt trilogy for dessert, which essentially ruins the dinner. But we have to be strong.”
“Yogurt trilogy?”
“Don’t be cynical, Miranda. One taste and you’d be a believer. Plus our apartment smells like a wet washcloth, andI have to go have my hair done. Sometimes it would be nice being a man. For them, a haircut is nine dollars. For a woman it’s a religious experience. So I have to go, sweetie. If I live through today, I’ll be immortal. Be here at seven. I’ve invited three Scud missiles for dinner and told each you’re the catch of the century.”
“That’s tough to live up to.”
“But you are!”
FEW PEOPLE CAME into my store to browse. For the most part, the clientele knew exactly what they wanted. I lived a good deal of the time on the road, tracking down their specific and often expensive desires. You could page me on my wristwatch or call me on the smallest portable telephone I could find. I was happy when I could spend even a few weeks at a time in the store straightening things up paying bills, reading catalogs and faxes. Yet I was also happy in airports, hotel rooms, restaurants that served regional dishes I had never heard of. There was no man in my life. I was free to come and go as I pleased.
In college I had majored in sociology, but realized junior year how unsatisfying demographic charts and terms like gemeinschaftand gesellschaftwere. For extra money I found a job at a used book store and was lucky enough to be there the day a man came in with two cardboard boxes of books to sell. Among them was a signed limited edition of Faulkner’s The Hamlet, which happened to be on the reading list of a course I was taking. Knowing it was valuable, I showed it to the owner of the store. He said I could keep it because I’d been honest and was a good worker. I took the book to class to show the professor. His eyes widened and he asked if I would sell it to him for a hundred dollars. There was something in his tone that made me suspicious. I looked up the telephone numbers of several rare book dealers and called to ask what the book was worth.
Nothing is permanent, but books are one of the few things that come close. Hearing how valuable the Faulkner was, I realized I had been made privy to one of life’s small secrets, which was that there are objects that mean nothing to most people, but everything to some. What’s more, if you knew anything about the subject, you quickly discovered collecting books was one of the last real treasure hunts possible in this age. There are old books everywhere and most people don’t care about them. The few who do will go to remarkable lengths to possess them.
As I continued, I realized I was good at the job—this in itself is a great reward. I loved my customers’ excitement and delight with what I found. I loved the serendipity of the hunt. My heart still pounded on seeing something unique or important in a junk store, second-hand shop, a Salvation Army bin in the bad section of some downtown. Slowly reaching out, I would take it in my hand, knowing one of the greatest pleasures of all was here. Opening the book, I would check the first pages to make sure it was what I thought. Yes, there was the proof if you knew what to look for—the letter A, or the even more obvious first edition. Other indications, emblems, marks… the secret alphabet and language of book collectors. On the inside front cover someone would have carelessly written in pencil, $1or 50ў. I paid ten cents in Louisville for the most beautiful first edition of The Great GatsbyI’ve ever seen. Five dollars for The Enormous Room. I couldn’t understand why more people weren’t doing this. Even if you knew only a little about the subject, it was like looking for gold everywhere you went.
After reading the journals of Edward Weston and Paul Strand, I became interested in photography. That opened up an altogether new world, not to mention business opportunity. On a trip to Los Angeles, I discovered a large box of photographs at a yard sale. Most were of strangers, but some subjects were famous movie stars of the 1930s and ‘40s. What struck me was how beautifully the pictures were lit and how naturally the people had been posed. On the back of each was a stamp with the photographer’s name, Hurrell, and address. I bought them and never forgot the look on the woman’s face as I handed her money: it said I was a sucker and she was the winner. But even then, without ever having heard of the great photographer George Hurrell, I knew she was wrong.
“Miranda?”
I came out of a daze to see one of my favorite people in the world standing at the door.
“Clayton! I’m sorry, I was daydreaming.”
“The sign of all great minds. Give your old boss a hug.”
We embraced and, as usual, he had on another mysteriously beautiful cologne that made me swoon.
“What are you wearing today?”
“Something French. Called Diptyque, which I think is appropriate for a bookseller, wouldn’t you say?”
“Absolutely. Where have you been, Clayton? I haven’t heard a word from you in months.” I took his hand and led him to a chair. He sat down and looked slowly around before speaking. He must have been sixty, but looked years younger. A full head of hair—and the wrinkles on his face came mostly from smiling. I had gone to work for him in New York after college. He had shown me everything he knew about the rare book business. Enthusiasm and generosity were at the heart of his personality. When I left to open my own store, he lent me ten thousand dollars to get started.
“Do you still have that nice Stevens? I have a buyer. A Scientologist from Utah.”
“A Scientologist who reads Wallace Stevens?”
“Exactly. I’ve been out west, drumming up business. Bumped into some very interesting people. One man lived on a strict carrot diet and collected nothing but Wyndham Lewis. That’s why I haven’t been around. I don’t know about you, but books haven’t been flying off my shelves recently. That’s why I’ve been traveling. How are things for you?”
“So-so. They go in waves. I sold a bunch of Robert Duncan in L.A. a couple of months ago. That put me back on track. Do you know who I saw when I was out there? Doug Auerbach.”
“Ah, the Dog. What’s he been doing?”
“Making commercials. He makes a load of money.”
“But you said he wanted to be Ingmar Bergman. I can’t imagine making dog food ads satisfies that desire. Does he still miss you?”
“I guess. I think he misses the time when his life had more possibilities.”
“Don’t we all? Well, Miranda, I’ve come to see you, but I’ve also come on a mission. Have you heard of Frances Hatch?”
“Am I going to be embarrassed saying no?”
“Not really. She’s a well-kept secret to all but a few. Frances Hatch was a kind of Jill of all trades, mistress of none, in the twenties and thirties. Although she wasmistress to an amazing number of famous people. She was a sort of lunatic combination of Alma Mahler, Caresse Crosby, and Lee Miller.
“She came from big money in St. Louis but rebelled and ran away to Prague. She went at the right time to the wrong city. Things weregoing on there, as in the rest of Europe in the twenties, but it was nowhere near as interesting as Berlin or Paris. She stayed a year studying photography, then moved to Bucharest with a Romanian ventriloquist. His stage name was ‘The Enormous Shumda.’”
“To Bucharest with The Enormous Shumda? I love her already.”
“I know—a strange choice of geography. But she was always being towed somewhere by one man or another and willingly went along for the ride. Anyway, she left after a short time and ended up in Paris, alone.”
“Not for long, right?”
“Right. Women like Frances never stay alone long.” He opened his briefcase and took out a photograph. “Here’s a self-portrait she took around that time.”
I looked at the picture. It was a beautiful black-and-white shot, reminiscent of the work of Walter Peterhans or Lyonel Feininger: angular, stark, very Germanic. I laughed. “This is a joke. You’re joking, right, Clayton?” I looked again. I didn’t know what to say. “It’s a self-portrait? It’s wonderful. From the way you described her, I thought she’d just be a ditz. I’d never have imagined she was so talented.”
“And?” He pointed to the picture and, eyes twinkling, started to smile.
“And, she looks like a schnauzer.”
“My first thought was an emu.”
“What’s that?”
“They look like ostriches.”
“You’re telling me this emu was the lover to famous people? She is ugly, Clayton. Look at that nose!”
“Have you heard the French phrase belle laide?”
“No.”
“It means ugly enough to be desirable. The ugliness adds to the sexiness.”
“This woman is not belleanything.”
“Maybe she was great in bed.”
“She’d have to be. I can’t believe it, Clayton. Part of me thinks you’re bullshitting. Who was she with?”
“Kazantzakis, Giacometti. Her best friend was Charlotte Perriand. Others. She lived a fascinating life.” He took the photo from me. After glancing at it once more, he put it back in his briefcase. “And she’s still alive! Lives on 112 thStreet.”
“How old is she?”
“Got to be way up in the nineties.”
“How do you know her?”
“Frances Hatch is rumored to have letters, drawings, and books from these people and others, the likes of which would make any dealer weep. Very important stuff, Miranda, just sitting there growing yellow. For years she made noise about wanting to sell, but never did till now. Her companion died a few months ago and she’s afraid of being alone. Wants to move into an expensive nursing home in Briarcliff but doesn’t have the money.”
“It sounds great if you can get her to sell you the stuff. But why tell me?”
“Because at age ninety-whatever, Frances no longer likes men. She had some kind of late-life revelation and became a lesbian. With the exception of her lawyer, she deals only with women. I’ve known her for years and she says she’s really willing to sell now, but only if it’s done through a woman dealer. If she’ll sell, I’ll go fifty-fifty with you.” He made no attempt to hide the desperation in his voice.
“That’s not necessary, Clayton. I’m glad to help if I can. Besides, I’ve always wanted to meet an emu. When would we go?”
He looked at his watch. “Now, this morning, if you’d like.”
“Let’s go.”
BEFORE CATCHING A cab, Clayton said he needed to find a market, but not why. I waited outside. In a few minutes he reemerged with a bag full of serious junk food. Things like pink Hostess Snowballs, fluorescent orange Cheetos, Twinkies, Ding Dongs, Devil Dogs, Yankee Doodles.…
“Those aren’t for you?”
“It’s the only food Frances eats. Anyone who visits her is expected to bring a bag full of this merde.”
“No wonder she’s ninety! If she ate those all her life she’s probably eighty percent chemically preserved. When she dies, her body will have the half-life of plutonium.”
He took out a package and looked at it. “When was the last time you ate a Ding Dong? They all sound obscene—Devil Dogs, Ding Dongs.…” He tore open the wrapper and we contentedly ate them as we rode uptown.
Ms. Hatch lived in one of those beautiful turn-of-the-century buildings that looked like fortresses. It had outlived its neighborhood but was falling to ruin. There were gargoyles on the front facade and a long courtyard with a fountain in the center that no longer worked. It was the kind of building that deserved quiet and reserve, but as we walked across the courtyard, salsa and rap music swept down from open windows and crashed on top of us. Somewhere a man and woman yelled at each other. The things they said were embarrassing. As often happened in situations like that, it struck me how people feel no shame anymore talking publicly about anything. While riding the subway recently, I’d sat next to two women talking loudly about their periods. Not once did either of them look around to see if people were listening, which they were.
When I mentioned this to Clayton, he said, “No one’s concerned with dignity today. People want either to win or to be comfortable.” He gestured toward the windows above us. “They don’t care if you hear. It’s like the TV talk shows: those idiots don’t mind your knowing they slept with their mother, or the dog. They think it makes them interesting. Here we are. This is it.”
The hallway smelled of old food and wet paper. Illegible graffiti had been spray-painted big and black across the mailboxes. A yellow baby carriage without wheels was pushed against a wall. The elevator didn’t work.
“What floor does she live on?”
“Third, but she never goes out. Sometimes I wonder how many old people are prisoners in their apartments in this city. Too scared, or they can’t climb the stairs. There’s got to be a lot of them.”
We climbed in silence. I noticed here and there signs of the onetime beauty of the building. The banister was bird’s-eye maple, the ironwork beneath it intricate and pretty. The stairs were made of dark green stone with swirls of black inside, like a frozen cyclone.
There was lots of noise everywhere. Music, people talking, the general white noise from many television sets going full blast. It made me appreciate my own building, where the neighbors were unfriendly but quiet.
On reaching the third floor, we walked down a long hall to the end. Unlike the others, which looked like the police had periodically beaten them in, Frances Hatch’s oak door was immaculately preserved. There was a small brass plaque with her name engraved on it. It had recently been polished. Clayton rang the bell. We waited quite a while.
The door opened and I think both of us took a step back in surprise. A short bald man with a moon-round face and no chin, dressed in a dark suit, black tie, and white shirt stood there. His face said seventy or eighty, but he stood so straight that he could have been younger.
“Yes?”
“I’m Clayton Blanchard. Ms. Hatch is expecting me?”
“Come along.”
The man turned and walked stiffly back into the apartment, as if rehearsing for the march of the tin soldiers. I looked at Clayton. “I thought you said she only spoke to women?”
Before he had a chance to reply, the soldier called out, “Are you coming?” We scurried in.
I didn’t have a chance to look at anything, but my nose noticed how good it smelled in there. “What’s that smell?”
“Apples?”
“In here, please.”
The man’s voice was so commanding that I felt I was back in high school, being summoned to the principal’s office.
I saw the light before entering the living room. It was blinding and came through the door in a white flood. We walked in and I was in love before I knew it. Frances Hatch’s living room was full of Persian rugs, rare Bauhaus furniture, and the largest cat I had ever seen. The rugs were all varying shades of red—russet, cerise, ruby. Which mixed brilliantly with the stark chrome furniture. It softened the starkness but also made individual pieces stand out in their pure simplicity, almost as if they hovered over the varied redness below. High windows went all the way down the room, taking in as much light as the day had. On the walls were a large number of photographs and paintings. I didn’t have a chance to look at them before another imperious voice called out, “Over here, I’m here.”
As if it knew what she had said, the cat stood up, stretched languorously, and walked over to where Frances Hatch was sitting.
It stood looking up at her, tail swishing.
“How are you, Clayton? Come over here so I can see you.” He walked to her chair and took the large bony hand she held out.
“Cold. Your hands are always cold, Clayton.”
“It runs in my family.”
“Well, cold hands, warm heart. Who have you brought with you?”
He gestured for me to come over. “Frances, this is my friend Miranda Romanac.”
“Hello Miranda. You’ll have to come close because I can barely see. Are you pretty?”
“Hello. I’m passable.”
“I was always ugly, so there was never any question about that. Ugly people have to work harder to get the world’s attention. You have to prove you’re worth listening to. Did you meet Irvin?”
I looked at the man with the big voice.
“Irvin Edelstein, these are my friends Clayton and Miranda. Sit down. I can see you better now. Yes. You dohave red hair! I thought so. Very nice. I love red. Have you noticed my rugs?”
“I did. I love the way you’ve done this room.”
“Thank you. It’s my magic carpet. When I’m in here I feel just a little bit above the earth. So you’re a friend of Clayton. That’s a good sign. What else do you do?”
“I’m a bookseller too.”
“Perfect! Because that’s what I want to talk about today. Irvin is here to advise me on what I should do. I have very valuable things, Miranda. Do you know why I’ve decided to sell them? Because all my life I’ve wanted to be rich. In one month I’ll be a hundred. I think it would be very nice to be rich at a hundred.”
“What will you do with the money?” It was a rude question to ask, especially after having just been introduced, but I liked Frances already and sensed she had a good sense of humor.
“What will I do? Buy a red Cadillac convertible and drive around, picking up men. God, how long has it been since I was with a man? You know, when you’re my age, you think about who you were all those years. If you’re lucky, you grow very fond of that person. The men I knew were silly most of the time, but they had nerve. Sometimes they even had the kind of guts you usually only dream of. Guts are what matters, Miranda. That’s what Kazantzakis told me. God gave us courage but it is dangerous music to listen to. That man had no fear. Do you know who his hero was? Blondin. The greatest tightrope walker who ever lived. He walked across a rope over Niagara Falls and halfway there stopped to cook and eat an omelette.”
“Clayton said you lived enough for three normal lives.”
“I did, but that was because I was ugly and had something to prove. I was a great lover and sometimes I had courage. I tried to tell the truth when it was important. Those are the things I’m proud of. Someone wanted me to write my autobiography, but it’s my life. I don’t want to share it with people who care less about it than I do. Anyway, by then I was too old to remember if I was telling the truth about everything, and that’s very important. But Irvin gave me this little gizmo and it’s a great comfort.” She reached into her lap and held up a small tape recorder. “I sit here and feel the magic carpets under my feet and the light through the window is warm and when an especially nice memory comes, all I have to do is press this button. I tell the machine something I haven’t remembered for a long time.
“Just this morning, right before you arrived, I was thinking about a picnic I had with the Hemingways at Auteuil. Lewis Gallantiere, Hemingway, and mad Harry Crosby. Why those two men ever got along was beyond me, but it was a lovely day. We ate Westphalian ham and Harry lost three thousand francs on the horses.”
Amazed, I looked at Clayton and silently mouthed, “Hemingway?”
“I think of Hemingway a lot. You know, people never stop talking about him and Giacometti, but they always describe them in such distorted, frenzied ways. People want to believe they were wild and dissolute because it fits a romantic image. But Gallantiere said something before he died that must be remembered: All the great artists put in a good day’s work every day of their lives when we were all living in Paris. People want to think those books and paintings arrived out of the ether, whole cloth. But what I remember most is how hard they worked. Giacometti? He would have murdered you if you came to his studio while he was working.”
CLAYTON GAVE ME many wonderful things over the years, but the introduction to Frances Hatch was the most important. I will remember that first morning with her as long as I live. Afterwards we met frequently, both to settle the business of her collection and because I loved being in that room with her and her crowded memories. In college I’d read a poem by Whitman about an old man in a boat, fishing. He has lived a full life, but is tired now and waiting peacefully to die. Until then, he’s content to sit and fish and remember.
Even as a kid, full of pepper and brass, I was enchanted with the idea of living so fully that at the end you had nothing left you wanted to do and were willing to die.
When we left her apartment that day, I felt like I had been in a room with pure clarity and understanding, if such things are possible. As if they were concrete substances I’d been allowed to hold in my hand awhile and I’d gotten their weight and feel. It proved such things were feasible and it lifted me.
I went back to my store feeling supercharged. I buzzed through the rest of the day wishing only that I had someone important with whom to share the experience. I was glad for the party that night, glad I could mingle and talk and hope for some of the common magic Frances had found all of her life.
I’d been to Dagmar Breece’s home for several dinner parties. Frequently they were loaded with both interesting people and strange people. In contrast to Jaco, who didn’t like anyone stealing his thunder, Dagmar and her boyfriend Stanley had the modesty and good sense to invite an intriguing crowd and let them steer the evening. What was also nice was that you weren’t expected either to dress up or to perform. Showoffs were discouraged, and only if they were engaging were egos permitted to flourish.
I went home at five and changed. The phone rang while I was dressing. It was Zoe, calling to chat. We spoke too long and I barely had time to finish up. Luckily Dagmar and Stan’s building was only a few blocks from mine—although in a decidedly nicer neighborhood.
One of the reasons why I liked living in Manhattan was that the city would share your mood the moment you walked out the door. If you were in a hurry, everything else was too, even the pigeons. You shared the same speed and sense of urgency to get wherever you were going.
When you had time to kill, it was happy to give you things to look at and do that easily took up whole days. I didn’t agree with people who said Manhattan was a cold, indifferent town. Sure it was gruff, but it was also playful and sometimes very funny.
All the way to Dagmar’s the traffic lights were green for me. When I got to her block, I said a little thank-you. Seconds later, a madman pushing a baby carriage heaped with junk wobbled by. Without saying a word, the man smiled and tipped an imaginary hat at me, as if he were the city’s spokesman acknowledging my thanks.
On the back wall of the elevator was a large mirror. Riding up, I had a look. My hair was shorter than a month before. Why do women cut their hair shorter the older they get? Because they don’t want to be bothered? Because few faces can bear to be framed so luxuriously after a certain age? Looking more closely, I saw a lot more gray in my hair than I had been expecting by age thirty-three. The lines around my mouth were okay, but the beauty creams I used were getting more expensive because they were supposed to work that much harder. I held up both hands and turned them back and forth to see how theywere doing. The elevator stopped. Dropping my hands, I turned around quickly.
The doors opened and I stepped out into the corridor. To my surprise, Dagmar was standing outside their apartment with a champagne glass in each hand.
“Miranda! There you are.”
“What are you doing out here?”
“Hiding from the men. They’re in there talking about boxing.”
“Aren’t there any women?”
“Not yet. Men always come early to parties when they know there are going to be gorgeous women.”
“You didinvite other women, I hope.”
“Of course. And couples too. I wouldn’t throw you completely to the lions.”
“Now I’m nervous.”
“Don’t be. Just take off your clothes and walk right in. Come on.” She handed me a glass and we went in.
Unlike the Hatch apartment, Dagmar and Stan’s was very sparsely furnished. Jaco had been there once and spitefully said you could clean the whole place with a fire hose and three Brillo pads. That wasn’t true, but it was not cozy and I never understood how two such warm people could be comfortable living in a hi-tech igloo. Walking down the hall to the living room, I heard a bunch of men burst into laughter.
The living room was full of people, but the balance was about half-and-half. Doing a quick scan, I recognized a bunch of them and waved to a few. The unfamiliar men I saw on first glance looked good but not interesting. To a one, they had hair that was either slicked back with gel, gangster style, or falling over their shoulders in the chic of the moment. I knew it was an unfair assessment, but that’s how I went about things: Guilty until proven interesting.
Dagmar squeezed my shoulder and went off to talk to the caterer. A man I’d met there some months before came right up and introduced himself. He was a broker who specialized in railroad stocks. For the next few minutes, we chatted about train rides we had known and loved. That was fine because he did most of the talking, which allowed me to continue looking.
A waiter came around with a tray of hors d’oeuvres. Their nice smell reminded me that the only thing I had eaten that day was a Ding Dong and a cup of coffee in the taxi with Clayton. Railroad Man and I took what looked like caviar-and-egg biscuits and popped them into our mouths.
The hors d’oeuvre was so lethally hot and spicy that it exploded on contact. I barely had enough presence of mind to slap a hand across my mouth before squealing like a stabbed rabbit. He did almost exactly the same thing. We stared at each other. It was so unexpected and shocking. Thank God he fumbled in his pocket, brought out a package of tissues, and handed me one. Without a second thought, we spat the bombs into the tissues and wiped our mouths. I think we might have gotten away with it, but some people had seen us and were watching. He looked at me and made the sound of a train whistle: “Woo-OO-Woo!”
I laughed and gave him a push. My eyes were tearing, my mouth was on fire, and I was embarrassed as hell but couldn’t stop laughing. “Everyone’s staring!”
“So what? My life just passed before my eyes.”
Everyone wasstaring, but that made us laugh harder. Stan came over and asked what was wrong. We explained and, sweet man that he is, he ran to stop the waiter from offering the hors d’oeuvres to other people.
Who would have guessed that moment on fire would change everything?
Half an hour later dinner was announced. As we moved into the dining room, a man I didn’t know came up and asked if I was all right. In his forties, he had a big thatch of unruly brown hair a la John Kennedy, and the kind of warm broad smile that made you like him right away, whoever he was.
“I’m fine. I just ate an hors d’oeuvre from hell and it paralyzed me.”
“You looked like you’d seen a goat.”
I stopped. “You mean a ghost?”
There was the smile. “No, like you’d just seen a goat walk into the room! Like this.” In an instant, he wore an imbecilic expression that made me giggle.
“ Thatbad?”
“No, impressive! I’m Hugh Oakley.”
“Miranda Romanac.”
“This is my wife, Charlotte.”
A knockout, she had the kind of unique beauty that only deepened and became more interesting with age. Her eyes were Prussian blue, the hair as white-blond and swept as a meringue. My first impression was that everything about Charlotte Oakley seemed Nordic and… white. Until her mouth, which was thick and sexual. How many men had fantasized about that mouth?
“Hello. We were worried about you.”
“I thought I’d eaten a flare.”
“Make sure to say a little prayer to Saint Bonaventure of Potenza before going to bed tonight,” Hugh Oakley said.
“Excuse me?”
“That’s the saint invoked against diseases of the bowels.”
“Hugh!” Charlotte pulled his earlobe. But she was smiling, and oh, what a smile! If I’d been a king, I would have traded my kingdom for it. “One of my husband’s hobbies is studying the saints.”
“My new favorites are Godeleva, who protects against sore throats. Or Homobonus, patron of tailors.”
“Come on, Saint Hugh, let’s eat.”
“Don’t forget—Saint Bonaventure of Potenza.”
“I’m praying already.”
He touched my sleeve and moved away with his wife. We continued to our places at the tables. By coincidence, Hugh and I were seated at the same one, although there were people between us.
Unfortunately, my neighbor took a shine to me and all through the first two courses asked personal questions I didn’t want to answer. Sometimes I looked over and saw Hugh Oakley talking with a well-known SoHo gallery owner. They seemed to be having a great time. I wished I were in their conversation and not mine.
Because I wasn’t paying attention to what the guy on my right was saying, it didn’t register when he began to touch me as he spoke. Nothing bad, just a hand on the arm, then a few sentences later fingers on my elbow to emphasize a point, but I didn’t want it. Once when his hand stayed too long on mine, I stared at the hands until he slowly pulled his away.
“ Oops. Sorry ‘bout that.”
“That’s okay. I’m hungry. Can we eat?”
The silence that followed was welcome. The food was good and my hunger had returned. I dug into the chicken-whatever and was content to eat and let the talk flow in and out of my mind. If it hadn’t been for that, I wouldn’t have heard what Hugh said.
“James Stillman would have been one of the best! It was a tragedy he died.”
“Come on, Hugh, the guy was uncontrollable. Don’t forget the Adcock disaster.”
Hugh’s voice was angry and loud. “That wasn’t his fault, Dennis. Adcock’s husband had us all fooled.”
“Yeah, your friend Stillman most of all.”
I leaned so far forward I felt my chest touching the table. “Did you know James Stillman?”
They looked at me. Hugh nodded. The other man snorted dismissively. “Sure, who didn’t? Half New York knew him after the Adcock thing.”
“What was that?”
“Tell her, Hugh. You’re his big defender.”
“Damned right I am!” He glared, but when he spoke to me his voice dropped back to normal range. “Do you know of the painter Lolly Adcock?”
“Sure.”
“Right. Well, a few years ago her husband said he had ten of her paintings no one had ever seen. He wanted to sell them and contacted Bartholomew’s—”
“The auction house?”
“Yes. Adcock wanted them to handle the auction. James worked for Bartholomew’s. They thought veryhighly of him, so they sent him to Kansas City to verify if the paintings were real.”
The other man shook his head. “And in his great enthusiasm, Mr. Stillman cut a deal with the wily Mr. Adcock, only it turned out the paintings were fakes.”
“It was an honest mistake!”
“It was a stupid mistake and you know it, Hugh. You never would have done it that way. Stillman was famous for going off half-cocked. Half-cocked Ad-cocked. I never thought of that. Very fitting.”
“Then explain how he found the Messerschmidt head that had been lost for a hundred years.”
“Beginner’s luck. I need another drink.” The man signaled a waiter. While he was giving his order I grabbed my chance.
“Did you know him well?”
“James? Yes, very well.”
“Can we—Um, excuse me, would you mind if we switched seats? I’d really like to ask Hugh some questions.”
The gallery owner picked up his plate. As we were changing, he asked, “Were you also a Stillman fan?”
“He was my boyfriend in high school.”
“Really? I didn’t know he hada past.”
I felt the hair on the back of my neck go up. “He was a good man.”
“I wouldn’t know. I never cared to spend time with him.”
When I sat down I was so angry I couldn’t speak. Hugh patted me on the knee. “Don’t mind Dennis. He needs Saint Ubald.”
“Who’s that?”
“Patron saint against rabies. Tell me about you and James.”
We talked through the rest of dinner and dessert. I didn’t eat a thing.
Hugh Oakley was an art expert. He traveled the world telling people what they owned, or should buy. Listening to him talk, I quickly understood why he looked so young. His enthusiasm for what he did was infectious. His stories about unearthing rare or marvelous things were the tales of a boy with a treasure map and a heart full of hope. He loved his work. I loved hearing him talk about it.
Years before, he had given several lectures at the Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia, and that’s where he met James. Hugh described James as a young man who was lost but convinced there was something significant waiting for him. Something that would arrive one day out of the blue and lead him home.
“After my last lecture he came up, looking so bewildered that I was concerned. I asked if he was all right. The only thing he could say was, ‘I want to know about this. I haveto know more about this.’ I’d felt that same excitement at Columbia when I heard Federico Zeri speak. Do you know his book Behind the Image? You must read it. Let me write the title down.” He slipped a hand into his pocket and brought out a Connolly leather notebook and a silver mechanical pencil. He wrote down the title and author’s name in distinctive block lettering. It was not till later that I learned it was the typeface known as Bremen. Another of Hugh Oakley’s many hobbies was meticulously copying in various faces poems and stories he liked and then, like a monk from the Middle Ages, illuminating them in paints he made from scratch.
I was so absorbed in what he was saying that it took a while to realize I was hogging him from the rest of the party. I worried what his wife would think. Looking around, I was relieved to see her deep in conversation with Dagmar Breece.
Somehow we’d gotten off the subject of James. I needed to know as much as Hugh was willing to tell.
“What exactly didhappen to James?”
“The idiot heart.”
“What do you mean?”
“ ‘Hope gleams in the idiot heart.’ It’s a line from a Mayakovski poem. His girlfriend had those words—the idiot heart—tattooed on the inside of her wrist like a bracelet. Can you imagine? But it’s the ageof tattoos, isn’t it?
“Her name was Kiera Stewart. She was a graduate student at Temple. Beautiful Scottish girl from Aberdeen. James was nuts over her, but you only had to meet her once to see she was an ocean of bad news. Women like that give you wonderful for the first few months, but then start taking it back bit by bit as the relationship goes on. After a while you’re wondering if that great stuff ever really existed at all. But you’re so hooked on them by then and the tidbits of delicious they parse out, it’s like being addicted to drugs.
“The tragedy was, James was just coming into his own around the time they met. He’d found what he wanted to do with his life. And he was so good at it that the right people were already watching to see what he’d do next.
“The good is always the enemy of the great. From the beginning, he had the rare ability to discern between them. The trouble was, in our business insight often comes slowly and through meticulous detective work. James constantly wanted to achieve right now, this second.” Hugh shook his head. “He once said he had a lot to prove but didn’t know to whom.
“So everything happened at once. Not many people can handle that. His star was rising, he’d met a wild woman who sent him spinning, and then his bosses sent him to look at the Adcock paintings. James thought he was invincible. For a while it looked like he was.
“Then it all crashed. He made a big mistake. Adcock’s husband turned out to be a clever crook, but not clever enough. The deal blew up in James’s face. That was bad enough, but then Kiera got wind of what happened. Over the phone she told him their relationship was finished. Over the phone. Classy, huh? A platinum bitch. He got in his car in the middle of the night, drove down to Philadelphia to see her but never made it. That’s the story, Miranda. I’m sorry I can’t tell you more. He was a great favorite of mine.”
“You haven’t touchedyour desserts!”
Startled, I felt a firm hand on my shoulder and looked up to see Dagmar glaring at us.
“I’m sorry. We were talking—”
“No excuses! That is a yogurt trilogy, which I had to torture a man into making. So eat!”
She stood there until we picked up our spoons and started shoveling it in. Tasted like yogurt to me. Everyone else was finished and leaving the table. Charlotte Oakley came by.
“What are you two talking about? You look like you’re sharing atomic secrets.” She was smiling and her voice was only friendly. A beautiful nice woman. Anyway, why should she be worried? She won any contest in the room. Whenever I’d looked at her, I’d noticed at least two men staring at her each time. Who wouldn’t?
“Charlotte, the most amazing thing! James Stillman was Miranda’s boyfriend when they were in high school.”
“Really? I loved James. He reminded me of Hugh when he was young.”
Thatwas it! I’d not been able to put a finger on why I liked Hugh Oakley so much. The instant she said it, I realized a great part of my attraction to her husband was that he seemed to have the same kind of roaring spirit and curiosity as James.
“I hadn’t seen him since high school. Then I went to our class reunion and heard he was dead.”
She frowned. “A bad place to hear something like that. James was the Prodigal Son always sneaking back in through the dog door. The original Bad Boy, and always a pleasure! Any time we spent time together he absolutely melted my underwear. I would have eloped with him any time. But that girlfriend, Kiera! She went from zero to bitch in two seconds.”
“What happened to her?”
“Wait a minute, I have a picture of them.”
“You do?” Hugh sounded as surprised as I did.
“Sure. The time we all went to Block Island?” Charlotte carried a small purse but had a large wallet wedged into it. She took it out and rummaged through. “Here you go.”
She passed me a photo and although I took it, I couldn’t look immediately.
“What’s the matter?”
“It’s hard—the life I never lived is right here. On this piece of paper.”
“Nah. Do it, Miranda. Then you won’t be haunted.”
I took a deep breath and looked. James, Charlotte, and Kiera were smiling at the camera. He had short hair, which was a shock, because when we were together he wore it down to his shoulders. He looked older. There were wrinkles, and the gaunt face he’d had in high school had filled out some, but there was that same smile with the white, white teeth. Long artistic hands.
My eyes filled. “I can’t stand it.”
“He was great. You would have loved him.”
“I did.” I looked at Charlotte and tried to smile.
IN THE MONTH that followed I didn’t think much about the Oakleys. Business picked up, and I met a man who went from Promising! to Forget It! in just four dates. Do(u)g Auerbach came to town and we devoured each other for the weekend he was there. Twice I had tea with Frances Hatch, After the second time, she said there was a brain behind my face and she liked me. That made me feel very good. I said I liked her too. She responded playfully “But do you want to love, or beloved?” For a long time the question fluttered around my mind like birds that fly into a building but can’t get out again.
Doug said that while in Germany he had watched a TV documentary about people who had sexual fetishes for amputees. The show was very calm and informative and without any attitude. They showed snippets from amputee porno films, magazines, social clubs, and even comic books.
“I’m a hip guy. You know, try not to judge others, be as open as possible. But I saw this show and my mouth dropped open. I kept wondering, do I live on the same planetas these people?”
Frances liked to talk about sex, so I told her about it.
“What’s the matter with you, Miranda?”
“What do you mean?”
“You sound so prissy. Wouldn’t you go to bed with a man without a leg or an arm if you loved him?”
“Yes, of course.”
“What about a woman?”
“I can’t imagine loving a woman that way.”
“A child?”
“Frances, you’re just trying to provoke me.”
“How old is a child to you? How old would they have to be before you would sleep with them?”
“I don’t know, seventeen?”
“Ha! A lot of men made love to me before I was seventeen and that was eighty years ago.”
“Yes, but you’ve led a pretty unique life compared to most people.”
“So what? Know when Ithink a person is old enough to make love? When they become interesting.” She held a cane in her hand and knocked it on the floor.
“I don’t think you should run for president on that platform, Frances. They might burn you at the stake.”
“I know. I’m too old. My heart doesn’t live here anymore. That’s why memories are good: you wake up every morning and put them on like hand cream. That way, the days can’t dry you out.
“Listen, Miranda, I have a favor to ask. Do you know the painter Lolly Adcock?”
Hugh Oakley’s face came instantly to mind. “Funny you ask. Someone was talking about her just the other day.”
“A miserablewoman, but quite a good painter. I have a small watercolor by her I want to sell. Would you be willing to look into the best way for me to do it?”
I told her about James Stillman and me, about his dealings with the Adcock estate, and what happened to him afterwards.
“Too bad you two didn’t meet when you were older; you’d probably be happily married with a house full of kids. But that happens: we keep meeting people or having experiences at the wrong time. The greatest love of my life was a man named Shumda, but I didn’t know that till I was ten years smarter. When we were together, I was just a kid auditioning different men for mad love affairs. I was looking for heat, not light.
“You know how we look back and say, ‘Gee, I was dumb when I was seventeen.’ What if you look at it the other way—seventeen-year-old Miranda looks forward at you now. What would shehave to say about what you’ve become?”
“What would seventeen-year-old me think of me now?” I laughed.
“Exactly. She’d probably be furious you didn’tmarry this James and save him.”
Hugh had given me his business card at the party. I called and we made an appointment to meet. Frances gave me the Adcock painting to show him. I was surprised she was willing to trust me with something so valuable.
“You can only steal it. But if you do, then you won’t be able to come back and visit. I’d rather know me than rob me.”
The day before our meeting, Hugh called to say he had to go to Dublin immediately. We could cancel the meeting, or he could arrange for one of his assistants to see me. I said the assistant would be fine. If necessary, we could meet after he returned. When I put the phone down I was disappointed, but nothing more.
An hour before the appointment, I had a confrontation with the man I had been dating. He came into the shop all excited about a new video camera he’d just bought.
Within fifteen minutes he was insulting me. He said I was cold and calculating. I’d squeezed him empty like a tube of toothpaste, then dropped him in the trash. I let him go on until all he had left was splutter.
“I have an appointment now. I have to go.”
“That’s it? That’s all you’re going to say?”
“Haven’t you said it all?” I stood up.
I don’t know what my face said at that moment. My heart and stomach were calm. More than anything, I was glad it had come to this. Now I wouldn’t have to diplomatically sashay around him anymore. I’d have guessed my expression was nothing but empty. Who knows? Whatever was there, his eyes widened and he slapped me across the face.
Staggering backward, I banged into a metal filing cabinet. The edge of it stabbed me in the small of the back. Crying out, I fell to my knees. I saw his feet coming toward me. I curled my body inward, sure he was going to beat me.
He started laughing. “Look at you! That’s where you belong, on your fucking knees. Let me get a picture of this. I want to remember it.”
I heard a whirring sound and, fearfully looking up, saw the camera up to his eye, pointing at me.
“This I gotta have. What a memory!”
It went on forever but I wasn’t about to do anything to anger him further.
“Miranda, get off your knees, honey. You don’t have to beg me for anything. You’re the liberated woman.” He dropped the camera to his side and walked out.
MY MOTHER USED to hit me. Long after I’d grown up and could talk to her about such things, I asked why. She refused to admit she ever had. I said, “Don’t you remember the time I broke your purse and you slapped me?”
“Oh, well of course, then. Dad gave me that bag.”
“I know, Mom, but you hitme!”
“You deserved it, dear. That’s not hitting.”
All grown up, on my knees, petrified he would come back and do worse to me, I wondered if I deserved this too.
I could call the police, but what might he do then? I felt helpless. So tough and clear in business, I easily held my own in most situations, but most situations didn’t scare you to your marrow where a child still lives and cowers at the real monsters walking the earth.
Hugh Oakley’s office was in a building on Sixty-first Street. I went in spite of what had happened. I knew if I didn’t, I would have gone home and been afraid. I needed something to do. This meeting wasn’t so important that if I started crying again in the middle of it, I couldn’t leave fast.
When I got out of the elevator, I took a couple of deep breaths and tried to pull myself together. For the next few minutes I could be cool, crisp, and professional. Try to avoid my fear that way. But when it was over I would have to return to the world where helived. What could I do about that?
The door was marked simply OAKLEY ASSOCIATES in the same letters Hugh had used to write down the book title for me at the party. As I put my hand on the brass doorknob, I heard, faintly, a violin inside the office playing something sprightly. I felt a jolt of joy. The unexpected music said there were still lovely things on earth. I went in.
The outer office was furnished with antiques and paintings, but there was no sign of a receptionist. The phone on the desk was lit with blinking lights.
The music grew much louder. I made out a flute and bass along with the violin. I know nothing about Irish music, but from the jump and flow, I had a hunch.
A few steps farther into the office, I called out a tentative hello. Nothing. More steps, another hello. The music kept going, light and gay as a dance. I thought, What the hell, and went toward it. There were several rooms. One was open and I peeked in. The place looked like a laboratory. Test tubes and Bunsen burners… It reminded me too much of high school chemistry class and I moved on.
At the end of the hall was another open door and that’s where the music was. It abruptly stopped and a woman said loudly, “Damn!”
“That was good! Why’d you stop?”
“Because I blew the damned passage again!”
“Who cares?” Hugh said.
“I care.”
Walking over, I knocked on the door. “Hello?” Slowly poking my head in, I saw Hugh, a man, and a woman sitting in straight-backed chairs with music stands in front of them. Hugh had a violin on his lap, the woman had some kind of flute, the man an acoustic bass guitar.
“Miranda, hi! Come in!”
“Am I interrupting?”
“No, we’re just practicing. Miranda Romanac, this is Courtney Hill and Ronan Mariner. We work together.”
“Your music is wonderful.”
“Our lunch hour. Come on, sit down. We’re going to run through this again and then we’ll talk. We’re playing ‘Ferny Hill.’ Do you know it?”
“I’m sorry, I don’t.”
“You’ll love it. Let’s go.”
They started playing. I started crying. I didn’t realize it until Courtney looked at me and her eyes widened. Then I felt tears on my cheeks and gave a gesture that said it was the music. And it was, more than anything else. Nothing could have been a more perfect antidote to what happened earlier. Irish folk music is the most schizophrenic I have ever heard. How can it be so sad and happy at the same time, even within the same note? Simple and direct, it tells you yes, the world is full of pain, but this is the way through. As long as you’re in the music, the bad things stay away. They performed the tune perfectly. For those few minutes, I cried and was more content than I had been in days.
Finishing with a flourish, they looked at each other like kids who had sailed through a great adventure without a scratch.
“That was beautiful.”
“It wasgood, huh? But let’s get down to business. What have you brought us?” Hugh looked at me and obviously saw the tears but said nothing. I liked that.
I undid the strings and paper around the painting and held it up so all three of them could see it at once. They looked at it, then at each other.
“Is that what I think it is? A Lolly Adcock?”
“Yes.”
Hugh took it from me. They huddled over it, making quiet comments, pointing here and there.
“Hugh didn’t say anything about you bringing in an Adcock.”
“I would have, if I’d gone to Dublin,” Hugh said.
Ronan rubbed his mouth. “You know what my gut reaction is? Stay the hell away from it, Hugh. Even if it’s real, after the Stillman fiasco, people are going to be gunning for anyone who authenticates an Adcock.”
Hugh brought it close to his face and sniffed. “Doesn’t smell fake.”
“It’s not funny, Hugh. You know exactly what he’s saying.”
“I do, Courtney, but that’s our business, isn’t it? We call them as we see them. If we’re wrong, then we’re wrong. Who knows, we may find out it’s a fake when we check it out.”
“I still agree with Ronan. Whatever we might get out of it, it’s not worth the trouble.” She looked at the painting and shook her head.
“Fair enough, but would you begin to check it for me?” He spoke quietly. The others got quickly out of their chairs and headed for the door.
We sat and listened to them walk down the hall. Far away, a door closed.
“Why were you crying?”
“I thought you were going to ask where I got the picture.”
“Later. Why were you crying?”
“Does it matter?”
“Yes. When you came in, your face was somewhere else. Someplace bad.”
“Excuse me?”
“You weren’t expecting this.” He held up his violin. “You had a different face on and you had to change it very fast. For one second I could see you brought something awful in from outside. The tears proved it.”
“You’re a good detective, Hugh.”
“It’s only because I care.”
What could I say to that? We sat long moments in silence.
“Someone hit me.”
“Do you need help with them?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Why would someone want to hit you?”
“He thinks I’m a bitch.”
Hugh took two yellow hard candies from a shirt pocket and handed me one. As I unwrapped it, he opened the other and popped it in his mouth; then he picked up the violin and began to play quietly.
“I don’t think I’m a bitch.”
He smiled. “Who is he?”
“A man I’ve been dating.”
He nodded, silently saying, Go on. He played the Beatles’ “For No One.”
I started out slowly but was full speed ahead in a few moments. I described how we’d met, the dates we’d had, things talked about, what I’d thought of him right up until the fateful slap.
“A painting licker.”
“What do you mean?”
“There’s a man in England who goes around lickingthe paintings he loves. Locking’s not enough for him. He wants a more intimate experience with his favorite pictures, so when he’s at a museum and guards aren’t watching, he licks ‘em. He has a postcard collection of each one he’s done.”
“Crazy.”
“It is, but I understand it. I think that’s what happened with your man: he couldn’t have you and it drove him crazy. So he did the only thing he coulddo to own you for a few minutes: scared you. It always works. For today, or however long you’re going to be afraid of him, he doesown you.”
“Damn it! Damn that power men have. Whenever they don’t like something, they can always hitus. You’ll never know that feeling. Always that little bit of fear in our heart.”
“Not all men hit women, Miranda.”
“But you can, and that’s the difference.”
A small white bullterrier ran into the room and over to Hugh.
“Easy! Miranda, this is Easy. Whenever we play, she runs and hides. The only dog I’ve ever known that actively dislikes music.”
“That breed always scares me.”
“Bullterriers? She’s a cream puff. She only lookslike a thief.”
She looked more like a bleached pig, but her face was sweet and her tail was wagging so furiously that I couldn’t resist reaching out to pat her. She moved over to me and leaned like a stone against my leg.
“Why do you call her Easy?”
“My daughter named her. No reason. I brought her home from the kennel; Brigit took one look and said her name was Easy. Simple as that.”
“How many children do you have?”
“A daughter and a son. Brigit and Oisin. Oy-sheen.”
“Oisin? Is that Irish?”
“Yes. Both kids were born in Dublin.”
“By the way, why didn’t you goto Dublin?”
“Because you were coming. When you said you’d be happy to see my assistant, I thought, Uh oh, when would I see her again? I knew I had to be here.”
Once again I tried to figure out how to respond.
“You say things that throw me off, Hugh.”
“People say I’m too direct. I didn’t go to Dublin because I had to see you again. It’s that simple.”
Courtney called out from down the hall, asking him to come. He stood up, put the violin on the chair, and started out of the room. “I was going to call you the other day but you called me. I didn’t want to wait any longer. Ever since we met, most of my days seem to be about you.”
He left me sitting with Easy leaning against my leg. It took a while before my body started shaking, but when it did, it came on strong. So strong that it roused the dog from her doze. She looked up at me. I closed my eyes. My heart pounded inside its cage of bones. I couldn’t wait for him to return.
HERE I AM, an old woman with a shaky hand and a cheap pen, writing about sex. Is there any greater irony? Most of the time I cannot even recall what I ate yesterday. How do I presume to remember and write honestly about that most evanescent act, fifty years after it happened?
I will stand up and walk to the kitchen. On the way I’ll think about how to do it. There are some chocolate cookies left. I want to eat two and drink a glass of cold water. Eating is sex for old people.
This is my home, what’s left of a life in its final few rooms. There are some photographs. My parents. Hugh and me. Zoe on the porch of this house. The only piece of furniture I have kept over the years is Hugh’s easy chair. Despite having been re-covered two times it is shabby-looking now, but I would never give it away. On the table nearby is a photograph of Frances in her New York apartment. All of her possessions surround her, the paintings and rugs, that lush abundance of color so much a part of her being. The difference is, Frances wantedto remember everything. I don’t. Better to keep my last surroundings simple. Avoid any fatal memory or malevolent connection from things best left to their uneasy sleep in my heart.
Certain things must be here. Most importantly the pile of sticks in the fireplace. Every one of those pieces of wood is important. Written on each is a date and a reason. I have never counted, but would guess there are twenty now. Hugh’s collection was much larger, but he started his years before I did.
It was his idea: When anything truly important happens in your life, wherever you happen to be, find a stick in the immediate vicinity and write the occasion and date on it. Keep them together, protect them. There shouldn’t be too many; sort through them every few years and separate the events that remain genuinely important from those that were but no longer are. You know the difference. Throw the rest out.
When you are very old, very sick, or sure there’s not much time left to live, put them together and burn them. The marriage of sticks.
AN HOUR AFTER I visited his office to have the painting appraised, Hugh Oakley and I were walking through Central Park. He told me about the marriage of sticks and suggested I start my collection right then. I was so nervous about what was about to happen that without thinking, I did. It was from a copper beech tree. I knew nothing about trees then. Foliage, plants, things that grew. I was a city girl who was hurrying to a hotel to have sex with a man I knew was happily married with two children.
“What’s the matter?” He stopped and turned me so we were face to face. We were holding hands. A moment ago we’d been racing to get to a hotel. I assumed he’d been there before. How many other women had he sped along like this, rushing to get them into bed?
“You look miserable.”
“I’m not miserable, Hugh, I’m unstrung! Somebody hit me this morning, and now I’m here with you.” I stared at our clasped hands and kept staring while I spoke. “I don’t do things like this. It’s everything together, full volume. Dangerous, right, wrong… Everything. I thought you’d be in Ireland. I thought your assistant was going to appraise the painting and I’d go home. Not this. This is all new territory for me.”
He looked around and, seeing a park bench, pulled me to it. “Sit down. Listen to me. What you’re doing is right. It’s your heart and the adventurous part all saying go. Our checks and balances hold us back too much from risking anything.
“Don’t let them, Miranda. Do it. If nothing else, you’ll remember this later and say it was crazy but you’re glad you did it.”
My eyes were closed. “Can I ask a question? Will you answer honestly?”
“Anything.”
I straightened my back. “Are you worth it?”
I heard him take a sharp breath to answer but he stayed silent a long moment. “I think so. I hope so.”
“Do you go to hotels a lot with women?”
“No. Sometimes.”
“That doesn’t makes me feel special.”
“I’m not going to apologize for the person you didn’t know till today.”
“That’s facile, Hugh. This is a big thing for me.”
“I’ll do whatever you want, Miranda. We can stay here and talk. Go to a movie, or go somewhere and make love. It’s all the same to me. I just want to be with you.”
Two Rollerbladers pounded by, followed by a bunch of kids in crooked caps, carrying a big boom box.
We watched the parade pass before I spoke. “Know what I want to do? Before anything else?”
“What?”
“Go to the Gap and buy a pair of khakis.” It was a test, plain and simple. I said it only to see how he would react.
His face lit up and he smiled. It was genuine. “Sure! Let’s go.”
“What about the hotel?”
He paused. When he spoke his voice was slow and careful. “You don’t getit, do you? I’m not twenty, Miranda. I don’t ride my cock around like a witch on a broomstick. I want to beyou. If that’s in bed, great. If not, then together is all the matters.”
“Then why were we going to a hotel?”
“Because I dowant to touch you. I thought you felt the same. But I was wrong. Big deal. Let’s go buy your trousers.”
“Really?” The word came out scared.
He put his hand on my cheek. “Really.”
WE WALKED OUT of the park as fast as we’d walked in. I would have given a month of my life to know what he was really thinking. He took my hand again and we kept squeezing back and forth as if to say, I’m here, I’m still with you. No matter how this day ended up, I knew I’d be running the replay in my brain for a long time.
I didn’t need new pants. The only reason I’d even said it was because a few minutes before I’d seen an ad for the Gap on the side of a crosstown bus.
“Here we are.”
I’d been thinking so hard about what was happening that I didn’t realize we had arrived at the door of a Gap store.
“You get your khakis and I’ll buy a cap. It’ll remind me of today. You’ll have your first stick and I’ll have a baseball cap.”
“Are you angry, Hugh? Tell the truth.”
“I’m excited.” Without another word, he pushed the door open and gestured for me to go in.
“In what way?”
“I’ll tell you later.” We walked in. He moved away from me and picked up a green sweatshirt.
Nothing else to do but find the damned pants. When a saleswoman came up and sweetly asked if she could help, I snarled out, “Khakis! I’m looking for khakis, okay?” As she backed off, her face was one big “Uh-oh.”
I didn’t care. I was in a damned Gap store, shopping, instead of having devil-may-care sex with a fascinating man. Why was I a coward with him? I’d done it before in a blink. That time outside the China Moon Restaurant in San Francisco? Or with the model in Hamburg on the bed with the broken spring? I hopped into bed with other men and things had worked out fine. The memories were happy and guilt-free.
I looked around the store and saw Hugh trying on baseball caps in front of a mirror. A nice-looking man in his forties in a dark suit, pushing boys’ hats around on his big head. Why notwith him?
Because I could love him.
It began in his office when he said, “It’s only because I care.” As honest and simple as a piece of white paper with those words printed large and black on it. His candor disturbed me because I loved it. It seemed everything he said was either honest or interesting, usually both. He knew so much, and even if a subject had never mattered to me before once he began speaking I was hooked. Like the words he’d learned in Khalkha when he was in Mongolia researching Genghis Khan, or James Agee versus Graham Greene as a film reviewer, or the plumbing system Thomas Jefferson invented for Monticello…
His face was all animation, all angles and eyes. His chin was square, his teeth were smoker’s yellow. There were deep wrinkles down either side of his mouth. When he smiled they almost disappeared. His eyelashes were long and thick. I didn’t want to kiss him yet, but wouldn’t say no if he tried to kiss me. When he asked me to lunch I said yes. When we walked out of his office and his colleagues stared I didn’t care. When we stood on the street and Hugh said he wanted me, I said okay without hesitating.
In the store I walked up behind him and talked to his reflection in the mirror. He was wearing a green baseball cap tipped slightly to the right. “Will you come with me and see how these look?” I held up the pants. I had no idea what size they were. I had picked up the first pair I’d seen on the shelf.
“Sure. Did you know Babe Ruth had a small head for a man his size? Seven and three-eighths.” His expression didn’t change. I asked a passing saleswoman where the changing rooms were. When she pointed them out, I took his hand and pulled him behind me.
Another saleswoman stood outside the dressing rooms, but she didn’t seem surprised when we entered together. It was very narrow inside. I whipped the curtain across, dropped the pants on the floor, and turned to him. A foot apart, I could smell him for the first time. We had never been this close. Orange-and-cinnamon cologne, tobacco, a slight sourness that was already delicious.
Reaching up, I slid his cap off and kissed him. His lips were softer than I had imagined. They gave nothing yet because it was up to me now and we both knew that was necessary. I slid my arms up his back but didn’t pull him close.
He reached up and stroked the back of my head. We stared.
“Will we be friends too?” I slid a finger down one of the wrinkles alongside his mouth. It was so deep.
“It can only work that way.” He took my finger and kissed it.
“I want to lick your spine.”
Nothing else happened. We made out for a steaming minute or two, then left the dressing room smiling like lottery winners. Hugh insisted on buying the cap as a souvenir. He wore it the rest of the day as we walked around the city and deeper into each other’s lives.
Whatever bad thoughts came to my mind—his nice wife, his children—had almost no gravity. The good thoughts, the hopes, the thrilling possibilities had the weight of mountains. I knew this was the beginning of something bad for all concerned, no matter how cleverly it could be justified. I had never been with a married man although there had been ample opportunities. I believed what goes around comes around. If I did the snug dance with someone’s husband, surely the gods would find an appalling form of payback.
We stood outside a subway entrance. Our day was over. He was going back to his other life where his family waited for him and suspected nothing. We looked at each other with the increased hunger separation always brings.
“Are you going to get your dog?”
“Yup. Then I’ll walk her home and think about you.”
“I’m thinking about your family.”
He shook his head. “That does no good.”
“But I’m new to this. Sooner or later it’s going to come out.”
“Miranda, sooner or later we’re going to die. I used to think a lot about sooner or later, but you know what? Sooner suddenly became later and I realized I’d wasted too much time worrying about it, rather than living it.”
“A friend of mine asked if I would rather love or be loved. I’d rather love.”
He nodded. “Then that’s your answer. I have to go.”
We kissed; he touched my throat, then moved toward the subway steps. Halfway down them, he turned and his face lit up in the greatest smile. “Where have you been? Where have you been all this time?”
I DIDN’T HEAR from him for two days. Imagine how loud that silence was. On the third, worried and resentful, I stopped at the mailbox on my way to the store. Inside were the usual bills and advertisements, but the last envelope in the bunch was the jackpot. My name and address were written in Hugh’s handwriting. My heart started galloping.
There was a postcard inside.
A Walker Evans photograph of a tired room with only a bed and a side table with a water pitcher on top of it. The wallpaper had long since died and been consumed by the water stains everywhere. Over the bed, the slanting ceiling indicated the room probably sat right under a roof. Without the bed, it was a whore’s room in Tropic of Cancer, or one from an early Hemingway short story about living poor in Paris.
But like alchemy, the improbable whiteness of the sheets and pillow transformed it into a space of sex and infinity. A room you would go to with someone you wanted to fuck again and again. Then the two of you would fall asleep wrapped round each other. There was nothing special about the room except how carefully the bed had been made with ironed, brilliantly white sheets and cases. In those dismal surroundings, the two plumped pillows stood out like crisp clouds. The bedspread was a patchwork quilt. I could smell the staleness of the room, feel its temperature on my skin, and then the touch of whoever would take me there. Nothing was written on the postcard itself, but on a separate sheet of paper, this:
This is all I want with you now: a simple room, one light in the middle of the ceiling hanging on a long line, the kind you see in cheap apartments or hotel rooms no one ever remembers staying in. At night the sad weak light never reaches the far corners. It droops over a room full of shadows. It doesn’t care.
But for us, light doesn’t matter here. The room is clean and bright in the day. Maybe there’s a good view out the window. It is the room I want, a bed wide enough for us to lie in comfortably. Faces close enough to feel each other’s breath.
Your skin is flushed. With my finger, I trace a line from the ledge of your chin down the neck, your shoulder, arm. It makes you smile and shiver. How can you shiver when it’s so warm in here?
I want this room. I want this room with you in it, naked beside me. I don’t know where we are. Maybe by the sea. Or in the middle of a city where the noise through the window is as busy as we are.
The afternoon is ours. The evening and the night too. We’ll be tired by then but we’ll still go out and eat a huge meal. Your body will be wonderfully sore and raw. It will make you smile when we walk to the restaurant. I’ll look at you and ask if anything is wrong. You’ll say no and squeeze my arm. We’ll need this time out in the world to remind ourselves there is something else besides us today, that room, our bodies.
In a noisy restaurant we’ll talk quietly. Voices and faces smoothed by all those hours in bed. Anyone watching us will know we have been fucking. It is so obvious.
Later again in the room when nothing is needed, I want to sleep a few hours, and then wake with you pressed against my side. Maybe I’ll reach for you. Maybe I will only touch your wrist and feel your sleeping, secret pulse. The rest can wait. There’s time now.
Keep this picture with you. Put it on a table, a desk, wherever you are. If someone asks why you have it, say it’s a place where you’d be happy. Look at it and know I am waiting. Look at it again.
I walked out of my building on legs made of wet spaghetti. Out on the street, the world was the same as yesterday but it took two or three blocks to regain my bearings and recognize I was still on planet earth. When I came to, I realized I had been walking with the letter clutched tightly in both hands behind my back. To hold the joy as long as I could, I stopped where I was, closed my eyes and said aloud, “I must remember this. I must remember it as long as I live.”
Opening my eyes again, the first thing I saw was James Stillman.
My heart recognized him before any other part did. And it was calm. It said, “There he is. James is across the street.” He looked the way he had when I’d known him fifteen years before. He was unmistakable, even in the rush of people surrounding him.
He wore a suit and tie. I stood frozen in place. We stared at each other until he lifted an arm and waved to me, slowly, from side to side. The kind of exaggerated wave you give someone who is driving off in a car and you want to be sure they see you until the very last second.
Without thinking, I started out into traffic and was met by screeching brakes and angry horns. When I was halfway across, he began to walk away. By the time I reached the other side he was already far ahead. I began running, but somehow he stayed way in front of me. He went around a corner. When I got there and made the turn, he was twice as far as before. There was no way I could catch up. When I stopped he did too. He turned and did something that was pure James Stillman: He put his open hand against his forehead, then moved it down to his mouth and blew me a big kiss. Whenever we parted he would do that. He’d seen it in an old Arabian Nights film and thought it the coolest gesture—hand to the forehead, to the lips, big kiss. My Arabian Knight, back from the dead.
“I SAW A ghost and I’m in love with a married man.”
“Welcome to the club.”
“Zoe, I’m serious.”
“Married men are alwaysmore delicious than single, Miranda. That’s where the challenge is. And I’ve believed in ghosts all my life. But tell me about Mr. Married first because I’m the expert on that subject.”
We were having lunch. She had come into town for the day. Married boyfriend Hector had ended their relationship and she was at the end of her period of mourning. For weeks I’d suggested a day in the city doing girl things together to take her mind off him and finally she said yes. Now I was doubly glad to meet so I could get her input on my new twilight zones.
“The ghost was James Stillman.”
“Great! Where?”
“On the street near my apartment. He waved to me in that old way, remember?” I did the gesture and she smiled.
“A very romantic fellow, no doubt about it.”
“But Zoe, I sawhim. He looked exactly like he did in high school.”
She folded her napkin a few times and put it on the table. “Remember when we used to do the Ouija board and contacted all those old spirits, or whatever they were? My mother believed when some people die, their souls get tossed into a limbo between life and death. That’s why you can talk to them on a Ouija board or in a seance—they’re half here and half there.”
“Do you believe that?”
“Why else would you want to hang around life if it’s over for you?”
“He was so real. Solid. No ectoplasm or Caspar the Friendly Ghost, hovering a foot above the ground in a white sheet. It was James. Completely real.”
“Maybe it was. You’d have to ask an expert. Why would he come back now? Why not before?”
We didn’t talk about it much beyond that. Neither of us knew what it meant, so further discussion was pointless.
“Tell me about your new man. The alive one.”
I told her in great detail, and along the way we kept having more drinks to help us analyze my new situation.
“You know what just hit me? What if James came back as a sign to tell me not to do this?”
Zoe threw up her hands in exasperation. “Oh, for God’s sake! If you’re going to feel guilty, don’t blame ghosts. I’m sure they’ve got better things to do than keep tabs on your sexual behaviour.”
“But I haven’t slept with him yet!”
“Miranda?”
Hearing my name spoken in a familiar voice, I turned and saw Doug Auerbach. He was staring at Zoe.
“Dog! What are you doing here? Why didn’t you call?”
“I didn’t know I was coming till yesterday. I was going to call later. I’m supposed to have lunch here with a client.”
I introduced him to Zoe and he sat down. Soon it was clear he was interested only in my oldest friend. At first she smiled and laughed politely at his jokes. When his interest hit her, she transformed into a sexy fox. I had never seen her like that. It was fascinating how deftly she handled both Doug and her new role.
Naturally I was disconcerted. Part of me was jealous, possessive. How dare they! The rest remembered Doug’s small place in my life, and Zoe’s goodness. At the appropriate moment, I “suddenly remembered” I had another appointment—and would they mind if I left?
Out on the street again looking for a cab, I felt like Charlotte Oakley, the unwanted third. I shuddered and started walking as fast as I could.
ONE AFTERNOON WHEN his family was away for the weekend, Hugh invited me to their apartment. Easy the bullterrier followed me from room to room. I had on tennis shoes, so the only noise was the tick-tick of Easy’s long toenails on the wooden floors.
This is where he lives. Where shelives. Each object had its own importance and memories. I kept looking at things and asking myself why the Oakleys had them or what they meant. It was a strange archaeology of the living. The man who could decipher it all for me sat in another room, reading the newspaper, but I wasn’t about to ask any questions. Pictures of his children, Charlotte, the family together. On a yellow sailboat, skiing, sitting beneath a large Christmas tree. This was his home, his family, his life. Why was I here? Why put faces to his stories, or see gifts brought back from trips for these people he loved? On the piano was a crystal box full of cigarettes. I picked it up and read the name Waterfordon the underside. A large red-and-white stone ball stood beside it. Crystal and stone. I stroked the cold ball and kept moving.
When I’d asked to see his home, Hugh had not hesitated a moment. They owned a house in East Hampton. The family usually went there on weekends in summer. The first time they went without Hugh, he called and told me the coast was clear. And it wasa coast of sorts; they lived on the east, I lived on the west. If I had been his wife, I would have been enraged to know another woman was in my home, looking at my life, touching it.
So why wasI here? If I was going to be with Hugh, why didn’t I work to keep his two worlds separate and be satisfied with what I had? Because I was greedy. I wanted to know as much about him as I could. That included how he lived when I wasn’t around. By seeing his apartment, I figured, I would be less afraid of what went on there.
I was right: walking through the rooms, I felt calmer seeing that only people lived here, no master race or gods, all impossibly better, stronger, and more heroic than I could ever hope to be.
As a girl, I read every fairy tale and folktale I could find. A story that began, “In an ancient time, when animals spoke the speech of men and even the trees talked together…” was my chocolate pudding. More than anything, I wished my own small world contained such magic. But growing up means learning the world has little magic, animals talk only to each other, and our years go over the tops of the mountains without many marvels ever happening.
What carried over from my childhood was the secret hope that wonders lived somewhere nearby. Dragons and pixies, Difs, Cu Chulainn, Iron Henry, and Mamadreqja, grandmother of witches… I wanted them to beand was still mesmerized by TV shows about angels, yetis, and miracles. I snatched up any copy of the National Enquirerthat headlined sheep born with Elvis’s face, or sightings of the Virgin at a souvlaki stand in Oregon. On the surface I was a briefcase and a business suit, but my heart was always looking for wings.
They were in his study waiting for me, but I wouldn’t know that until many years later. The room was large and bare except for a pine table Hugh used as a desk. It was piled with papers, books, and a computer. On the wall facing the desk were four small paintings of the same woman.
“What do you think?”
I was so involved in looking at them that I hadn’t heard him come in. “I don’t know. I don’t know if they’re fascinating or they scare me.”
“Scare you? Why?” There was no amusement in his voice.
“Who is she?”
He put his hands on my shoulders. “I don’t know. Around the time we met, a man came into the office and asked if I wanted to buy them. He didn’t know anything about them. He’d just bought a house in Mississippi and they were in the attic with a bunch of other stuff. I didn’t even haggle about the price.”
“Why do I feel like I know her?”
“Me too! There’s something very familiarabout her. None of them are signed or dated. I have no idea who the artist was. I spent a good deal of time researching. It makes them even more mysterious.”
She was young—in her twenties—and wore her hair down, but not in any special fashion that gave you an idea of the time period. She was attractive but not so much so that it would stop you for a second look.
In one picture she sat on a couch staring straight ahead. In another she was sitting in a garden looking slightly off to the right. The painter was excellent and had genuinely caught her spirit. So often I looked at paintings, even famous ones, and felt a kind of lifelessness in the work, as if beyond a certain invisible point the subject died and became a painting. Not so here.
“Hugh, do you realize that since we met, I got beat up, saw a ghost, made out in a Gap store, and now am looking at pictures of someone I’ve never seen but knowI know.”
“It’s the story of Zitterbart. Do you know it?”
“No.”
“ Zitterbartmeans “trembling beard.” It’s a German fairy tale, but not from the Brothers Grimm. There was a king named Zitterbart who got his name from the fact that whenever he grew angry, his beard shook so much his subjects could feel its breeze in the farthest corners of his kingdom. He was ferocious and whacked off people’s heads if they so much as sneezed the wrong way. But his weak spot was his daughter Senga.
“The princess was madly in love with a knight named Blasius. Zitterbart approved of a marriage between them, but one day Blasius went to battle and died while fighting another knight named Cornelts Brom.”
“Blasius and Brom? Sounds like stomach medicine.”
“Senga was shattered and swore she would kill herself at the next new moon. The king was so frightened that he had the kingdom scoured for every good-looking man and swore if any of them caught her fancy, he would permit the marriage. But no luck. All the most interesting men were brought before her, but she’d take one look and turn to the window to see if the new moon had arrived yet. Zitterbart grew more and more desperate. He sent out a decree that anyman who pleased his daughter would have her hand.
“Cornelts Brom heard about it. He’d also heard how beautiful Senga was, and he decided to have a look. The thing about Brom was, he was the plainest-looking man in the universe. His face was so forgettable people would break off conversations with him in the middle because they forgot he was there. They thought they were talking to themselves. That was why he was such a great warrior: he was essentially invisible.
“As a child he realized if he wanted to make his mark in the world he would have to excel at something, so he became the best fighter around. Plus when he was actually ina sword fight—”
“His opponents forgot he was there.”
Hugh smiled. “Exactly. But Senga wasn’t interested in great fighters, and besides, this man had killed her boyfriend! Brom was clever though and, with his forgettable face, had no problem sneaking into the city for a look at her.
“Every Tuesday the princess went with her lady-in-waiting to the marketplace to shop for food. Brom stood right next to her and watched her squeeze tomatoes, haggle over the price of cucumbers, and fill her basket.
“He instantly pitied her, and pity is a bad place for love to begin. He knew she really would kill herself because he had seen that same doomed expression of absolute hopelessness on men’s faces in battle when all they wanted was the peace of death. A special despair that comes only when people have lost the way back to their own hearts. It was Brom’s fault this had happened to Senga and he was genuinely sorry. Because he was a decent man, he swore that if it were the last thing he ever did, he would help her.
“Living outside the city were three minor devils named Nepomuk, Knud, and Gangolf. They did a good business trading wishes for parts of people’s souls. If you wanted something, you went to these little shits and said, ‘I want to be rich.’ They’d look in their ledgers and say, ‘We want your joy. Give us your ability to feel joy and we’ll make you rich.’ Most people were willing to do it too, not knowing that as soon as they did, they’d give up something much more valuable than riches.”
When he said “little shits” I laughed out loud and rubbed my hands together in expectation. He sat down next to me.
“Brom went to the devils and said he wanted to make the princess happy again. This confused them because they were sure that, with his face, he would wish to be handsome. Then they got into a fight among themselves. Nepomuk wanted Brom’s plain face because he knew that would make him vulnerable on the battlefield. Gangolf wanted his sense of humor because no fighter is ever great without the ability to laugh. Knud insisted on his fear because anyone living without fear is either a fool or dead.
“In the end, they settled for his courage. Brom didn’t hesitate: ‘Take my courage in exchange for the princess’s happiness.’ There was a large clock in the corner of their house. All three devils went over and blew on it. The clock stopped in mid tick and the deal was fixed.
“Back at the castle, the princess stopped looking for the new moon, put a hand over her heart, and started singing. She didn’t know why, but she couldn’t help herself.
“At the same time, Brom stood in the doorway of the devils’ house, unable to move because he was afraid of everything. What he didn’t realize was that the devils had given him Senga’s fear, which was what had made her want to die. Life is full of surprises, but if you’re convinced all of them will be bad, what’s the point of going on?” Hugh jumped down from the table and, taking me in his arms, started waltzing us around the room.
“ And?”
“And what?”
“And what happened to Brom?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t figured it out yet.”
“ You made all that up?”
“I did.” He dipped me backward.
“What does it have to do with me?”
“When you find your way back to your own heart, amazing things happen. You see ghosts, you fall in love; anything’s possible. I was trying to think up a great end to the story that would tell you all that. But I couldn’t figure out what happened and…
“I wanted to tell a story that would convince you it’s time, Miranda. Time to let go and start trusting me. Let it happen.”
“I dotrust you. I’m just scared.” I pulled away and swept an arm in a wide arc to include his room, his home, his family. “But I’m also ready. Let’s go to my place.”
THERE USED TO be a neighborhood dog I liked. Since I didn’t know his name, the second time he visited I started calling him Easy, after Hugh’s bullterrier. The dog didn’t seem to mind. A mixed breed, he had the color and markings of a cow—brown spot here, white there. Midsized, short haired, calm brown eyes, a real dogdog. He came by once or twice a week on his rounds. A gentleman, he invariably stood at the bottom of the porch steps and waited for me to invite him up. I was always happy to see him. When you are my age you have few visitors.
Usually I would be sitting in the rocking chair with a magazine or book or just my old woman’s thoughts. That’s one of the things I like about this house—it has a good sitting porch where whole chunks of a day can be spent daydreaming and contentedly watching this small district of the universe come and go. My house is just off Beechwood Canyon in Los Angeles. During the day most of my neighbors are away at work and their children are in school, so it is surprisingly quiet and peaceful for a street ten minutes from Hollywood Boulevard. Generally the only sounds are occasional snatches of conversation, the hiss of sprinklers or roar of a leaf blower, and the muted but constant hum and thump of traffic on the Hollywood freeway a mile away. It is a good house in which to be old. One floor, a few rooms, not much work to keep it clean. The porch has a view of a peaceful street and good-natured neighbors who wave or smile when they pass.
Whenever Easy came to visit I would give him two Oreo cookies. He knew that was the limit and even if I had the package with me, he would make no attempt to ask for more. The dog had his dignity and never begged or stared with “gimme more” eyes. I liked that. I also liked the way he sat beside me on the porch for a while after he had slowly eaten his cookies. He was my companion for a small part of his day, and we watched life’s passing parade while I’d tell him what I had been thinking. Who wants to listen to you when you are old? A sympathetic dog is better than an empty chair.
Sometimes odd things happened. Once a bird flew so low that it almost hit him. Once a child fell off its bike directly in front of us. Easy looked at me to see if these things were all right—if the world was still in order. I said, “It’s okay, nothing major,” and he went back to watching or sleeping with his head between his paws. Dogs are here to remind us life really is a simple thing. You eat, sleep, take walks, and pee when you must. That’s about all there is. They are quick to forgive trespasses and assume strangers will be kind.
After I heard that someone had poured gasoline over this dog and set it on fire, I realized I could no longer wait for you. These many years, your coming was the only thing I had left to hope for. I genuinely believed it would happen one day. Although I had no idea what would occur when we met, I’ve thought about it constantly. But after Easy was murdered I realized I had to finish this account as soon as possible because we might notmeet before I die. Whether we do or not, this diary will be here to help you. To explain where you really came from. Perhaps that knowledge will save you from some of the awful experiences I have had because not knowing my own history ruined my life.
What is important about the death of a dog when so much else has happened over the years? I can only say it brought the realization it was no longer important whether I continued living or not. I’d thought that moment had come years ago, but I was wrong. Old age arrives like the first days of fall. One afternoon you look up, or smell something in the air, and know instinctively things have changed. I suppose the same thing is true about our own death. Suddenly it’s near enough that we can smell it.
Despite that, I must continue to tell this story. Whether I am still alive or not when you read it, you must know what really happened and why.
IS IT POSSIBLE to properly describe the months right after Hugh and I first became lovers? That means describing happiness, and no words bear the weight of real joy. I can tell you about meals and weekend trips, conversations walking down a street on Block Island in August when the summer air was thick as breath because it was about to rain and the afternoon was suddenly purple everywhere.
Our hearts were always too full. But what does that mean? That each of us had our separate, impossible hopes, which we had brought along like secret extra suitcases.
His small touches on my arm, hair, hand always reminded me of a school of silvery fish that swam up, intensely curious, made contact, then fled at my slightest movement. But I was always moving towardHugh, not away, and after a while when he touched me his hand would stay.
I have never felt so loved in my life. It made me suspicious at first. Like a turtle, I kept pulling my head back into my shell because I was certain a blow was imminent. But as our bond grew stronger, I left my head out and realized how much I had been missing my whole life.
The great surprise was how quickly we understood each other. Even in the best relationships I’d had, certain things were never communicated or understood. No matter how fluent you are in a language, situations arise that stump you for ways to express exactly what needs to be said. Being with Hugh gave me the words, which in turn helped me to know myself better. Trusting him, I opened up in an entirely new way.
Sexually he was marvelous because he had had so much experience. He admitted that for years women had drifted in and out of his life like incense. His wife knew about many of these affairs but they had come to a truce about them: so long as he was discreet and never brought home any part of these other relationships, Charlotte turned a blind eye. Was theirs then only a marriage of convenience? Did she have lovers too? No. She didn’t believe in affairs and no, the marriage was strong and important.
If thatwas true, why had he allowed me to come into his apartment?
“Because I was already gone for you by then. Gone like never before. I would have done anything. I broke every one of my rules.”
“Why, Hugh? Why meafter all those other women? The way you describe some of them, they were incredible.”
“There’s never a satisfying answer to that. No matter what I say, it won’t assure you or lessen your doubts. Love is like an autistic child when it comes to giving good explanations. Sometimes we love things in others they’re not even aware of. Or they think are ridiculous. I love your purse.”
“My purse? Why?”
“I’ve never seen a woman with such a Zen purse. You keep only the most necessary or beautiful things in there. It says so much about you, all of which I cherish and admire. I love the way you put your forehead against my neck when we sleep. And how you put your arm over my shoulder when we’re walking down the street. Like two pals.”
“You aremy pal. My dearest pal. Whenever I write you a letter that’s how I’ll start it—Dearest Pal.”
What did I feel about his wife? What one would expect, made all the more difficult by a quality I liked very much in Hugh: he said only good things about Charlotte, no matter the context. From his description, she was a loving, generous woman who made life better for everyone.
Married people often feel compelled to deride their spouse to a new lover. I knew it from my friends, and particularly from Zoe’s accounts of ex-boyfriend Hector. It makes sense, but it’s neither honest nor brave. We have affairs because we’re greedy. Don’t blame that greed on someone else. People are brilliant at justifying their motives. It’s one of our ugliest talents. Hugh and I wanted each other and were willing to hurt others if it meant the survival of our relationship. There were other explanations and rationalizations, none of them true. We were simply greedy.
When did Charlotte find out about it? I think a couple of months on. Hugh never said, directly, “She knows,” but things came up in conversation that indicated she did. Strangely, the more involved we became, the more like her Ibecame in not wanting to know about his other life. In the beginning I was fascinated to know what they did together. Or what kind of woman he was married to. But one day that stopped. As best I could, I tried to shut her out of my thoughts and ignore the fact she was there.
It worked for a time, but six months on I answered the ringing phone and almost threw up when the tranquil voice on the other end said, “This is Charlotte Oakley.”
“Hello.”
“I think you know why I’m calling.”
“Yes.” I wanted a composed voice too. One that said, I’m ready for this, ready for you; nothing you say will change how I feel.
“My husband told me he was in love with you. I said I was going to call you. He made me promise not to, but some things need to be said before this goes further. I think you should know them.
“He was very frank about your relationship. I don’t know you so I can only go on what he said. Hugh loves women and has had many lovers over the years.”
“He told me.” Was thisthe tack she was going to take? Try to humiliate me by making me feel like just another of his sweeties? Something inside lightened immediately. I pushed hair off my face that had fallen there a moment before, when I sat with it hanging down, like the guilty party.
“I’m sure he has. That’s Hugh’s way. Women love my husband because he is so honest. And funny and pays so much attention that you feel like he’s your alter ego.
“What you don’tknow is his habit of choosing the same kind of woman again and again, Miranda. They’re always pretty and very intelligent. They have something to say. They do interesting things with their lives. But when you get down to the fine print in his job description, they must also be needy. Hugh wants to save you from your dragons. He’s a chivalrous man. I’m sure you need help and he’s here to give it.”
“I’m going to put the phone down.”
For the first time, her voice became cross. “I’m telling you something that will save allof us time and pain! If you are anything like his other girlfriends, you love him because you need him and not the other way around. You’ll fall into this relationship until you’re helpless without him. Maybe you already are. But I warn you, once it happens and he grows bored with your weakness, he’ll leave. He always has. That’s just his way. He’ll do it sweetly and it’ll seem he’s in so much pain that you’ll think it’s your fault, but it isn’t—”
“How can you say these things about your husband?”
She laughed and the tone scared me; it was relaxed, knowing. Here was a subject she knew a great deal about. Talking to me, the beginner, was amusing.
“Has he given you the Kazantzakis autobiography to read yet? Report to Greco. He will. There’s a line in there he loves: They were sparrows and I wanted to make them eagles.’”
I hung up. I had never done that before in my life. I wanted to dismiss her but couldn’t because what she said was right: I wasweak. I didneed him.
For minutes afterward, I hated Hugh and myself equally. Why couldn’t it just be an affair? I would have been content with that. Why couldn’t we just have driven our car up to that point on the road and stopped? Whose fault was it that we had gone so far?
An hour later, I was still sitting in the same chair when he called. I told him about the talk with his wife and that I didn’t want to see him again.
“Wait! Wait, Miranda! Please, you have to know something else. Did she describe our whole conversation? Did she tell you how it happened? I told her I wanted to separate.”
“ What?”
“I told her I was so in love with you that I wanted a separation.”
I took the receiver away from my ear and looked at it aghast, as if it were he. “What are you saying, Hugh? You never told me this!”
“Yes I did, but you didn’t believe it was true.”
“No, not like that you didn’t! I don’t know what’s going on. I amlike your other girlfriends. Charlotte’s right: I’m another weak little bird in your fan club. Why do you want to leave
her—”
“Because I love you!”
“You’ll leave a wife of twenty years and your kids and… Bullshit! I don’t want that responsibility. Or that guilt. I have to go.”
“No, please—”
I put the phone down.
I TRIED TO go back to life before Hugh Oakley and almost succeeded. You can create as much work for yourself as necessary. The problem is the time betweenthings, when thoughts and memories burst out of your brain like shrapnel.
I took trips to California, Boston, and London. In a dreary secondhand bookstall near the Hayward Gallery I found one of the most valuable books I’d ever seen, selling for five pounds. Any other time, I would have done somersaults. This time, tears came to my eyes because the only person I wanted to show the treasure to was Hugh Oakley.
He called constantly. If I washome, I’d force myself to let the answering machine kick in. His messages ranged from quiet to tormented. He sent letters, flowers, and tender gifts that stopped my breath. What he didn’tdo was show up at either my apartment or the store. I was grateful. The last thing I needed was to see him. He must have understood and accepted that, thank God.
I told both Zoe and Frances Hatch what had happened. They disagreed on what I should do. Zoe had had her share of married men and was even more skeptical than I about the possibility of Hugh’s leaving his wife.
“Forget it! They all say that till they know they have you back in their power. Then they get wiggly again. A married man wants the excitement and newness of a lover, combined with the comfort and peace of his family. It’s an impossible and unfaircombination. How could you ever give him both when you’ve only been in his life a few months? Someone said the first wife breaks the man in, while the second gets all the goodies, but I don’t think that’s true. Just the opposite. Even if he leaves his wife, you’ll be carrying ten tons of his guilt around on the back of your relationship until the day you die.
“Do you know the joke about the man who goes to get a new suit made? The tailor measures him and says come back in two weeks. The guy does and puts on the suit. It looks terrible. The left cuff comes down five inches too long, the lapels are completely uneven, the crotch hangs like harem pants. It’s the worst suit in the world. The guy complains but the tailor says he’s seeing it all wrong: ‘What you’ve got to do is pull up the left sleeve and hold it there with your chin. Then ooch your right shoulder up five inches so the lapels are even, put your right hand in the pocket of the pants and pull up the crotch…’ You get the idea.
“So the man does all this and ends up looking like the Hunchback of Notre Dame. But when he looks in the mirror again the suitlooks wonderful. The tailor says, That’s the new style these days.’ So the jerk buys the suit and walks out of the store wearing it.
“He’s staggering down the street like Quasimodo and passes two men. They turn around and watch him limp away. The first guy says, ‘I feel so sorry for the handicapped.’ The other says, ‘Yeah, but what a fabulous suit!’
“It’s the best metaphor I’ve ever heard for how we try to make relationships like this work. Or what we do to ourselves to make anythingimportant work. Don’t do it, Miranda. You’ve got so much going for you. You don’t need him, no matter how good you think it is.”
“But what if this is it, Zoe? What if I walk away and it turns out this was the most important relationship in my life? What if the memory’s too big and ends up crushing me?”
“If we’re lucky and find Mr. Right, seventy or eighty percent is there from the beginning. The other twenty you have to create yourself. This is a lot more than twenty percent, Miranda. But if you have to do it, then do. Just make sure to put on a helmet and learn to recognize the sound of incoming shells when they start dropping. Because they will, in clusters!”
A LETTER CAME from Hugh:
I had a dream last night and have no idea what it means. But I wanted to tell you because I think it has to do with us.
I’m in Los Angeles and need a car, so I go to a used car lot and buy an Oldsmobile 88 from the 1960s. It’s canary yellow and in good shape, especially the radio. But what’s really extraordinary is, the engine is a large potato! Someone replaced the original with this giant spud. For some wonderful reason, it works perfectly. I’m driving around L.A. in my old new car with a potato engine and feeling great. I have the only automobile in the world whose engine you could cook and eat if you were hungry.
One day I stop at a light and the engine stalls. That worries me, especially because the thing has well over a hundred thousand miles on it. So I pull into a gas station and tell the mechanic what happened. He opens the hood and isn’t surprised at what he sees. He tells me to drive it into the garage. He and another guy winch the potato out of the car and throw it on the ground. It breaks in half. I’m horrified.
Inside, like any normal tired out engine, it’s glutted with thick black oil and gunk. I ask how much it’ll cost to replace it. They say they can only put in a new, normal motor but it’s not expensive—a few hundred dollars. Right before I wake up, I can’t decide what to do. I keep thinking, Why can’t they put another potato in there. I don’t want a regular engine. What does this mean, Miranda?
“How do I know what it means, Miranda?” Frances Hatch said. “I’m not Carl Jung!
“Your boyfriend had a dream about potatoes and you’re asking meto interpret it? I’m just old. Being old doesn’t mean you know more; it means you ate enough fiber. Most of my life, people didn’t have psychiatry to rely on. If you had a bad dream, it was either something you ate last night or a vivid imagination.
“I don’t believe in interpreting dreams. You should avoid it too. Don’t worry about what Hugh’s dream says; worry about what he says when his eyes are open. If he’s not anxiety-ridden about his wife and kids, don’t you be! Are you his conscience or his lover? I think it’s great he’ll throw everything over for you. That’s the way romance should be!
“It’s arrogant to think you know what’s right. Morality is only cowardice most of the time. We don’t avoid misbehaving because it’s not proper; what we’re really afraid of is how far down it looks to the bottom. It isfar, and you may getkilled when you hit. But sometimes you survive the jump, and down there the world is a million times better than where you’re living now.”
WHEN I CALLED to say I wanted to see him, Hugh asked what had changed my mind. I said the days were dead without him and I couldn’t stand it anymore.
We met on neutral ground—a favorite restaurant—but we were out of there and back in my bed within an hour.
If I’d had any fears he would leave, they disappeared quickly. He moved into my apartment within two weeks. He brought so little with him that I worried he might be thinking of the move as a test drive: since all of his belongings were still at his place, he could always go back to them if we failed.
But one Saturday when he was at his office, the doorbell downstairs rang. A furniture store was there to deliver a big cushy chair I hadn’t ordered. When they said a Hugh Oakley had, I clapped my hands. Hugh loved reading at night but said it could only be done in a perfect chair. Now he had bought one for his new home.
Charlotte refused to let me meet their children. She was convinced I was only a blip on the screen of her husband’s Midlife Crisis. Consequently, when he came to his senses, they would reconcile and I’d be yesterday’s news. Why expose their children to further confusion?
Hugh didn’t care what she felt and was adamant about my spending time with them. I said no. They lived in a parallel universe I was not yet part of. There would be time in the future. Secretly I was petrified of what would happen when we did meet. I imagined two children glaring with fiery eyes that would melt me before I had a chance to say I would do anything to be their friend.
He missed his kids terribly, so I encouraged him to see them whenever he could. I knew in certain ways he missed Charlotte too. I was sure there were conversations and meetings going on between them that he never told me about. His emotions tacked back and forth like a sailboat in a gale.
What could I do to help? Be his friend. Let him know how much I loved and appreciated him. Hold my tongue when necessary; try to be considerate when the first instinct was to snap at anything I didn’t understand or that threatened me. For all of my adult life, Hugh Oakley had lived in marriage, a foreign country I had never known. It was easy to imagine what the place was like, but imagining was like reading a brochure at the travel agency. You could never really know the place itself till you got there.
“HAVE YOU EVER heard of Crane’s View?” Frances was smiling and her eyes were closed. She was sitting by a window in her red-carpeted living room, her face lit by the morning sun. A few minutes before, when I’d come in and kissed her cheek, it was almost hot.
We were drinking gunpowder tea and eating English muffins, her favorite breakfast.
“What’s Crane’s View?”
“A town on the Hudson about an hour away. I discovered it thirty years ago and bought a house there. It’s a small place, but it has a spectacular view of the river. That’s why I bought it.”
“I didn’t know you owned a house, Frances. Do you ever go there?”
“Not anymore. It makes me sad. I had two good love affairs and a nice dog in that house. Spent most of a year there once when I was angry with New York and was boycotting it. Anyway, I was thinking about it last week. Houses shouldn’t be empty. They should either be lived in or sold. Would you like to have it?”
I shook my head and put down the cup. “You can’t just give away a house. Are you crazy?”
She opened her eyes and slowly brought the muffin to her mouth. A blob of marmalade started a slow slide off the edge. Very carefully she caught it with her thumb and shoved it back onto the top. She looked at me coldly but didn’t say anything until she had finished chewing. “Excuse me, I can do whatever I want. Don’t be obnoxious and treat me like an old nitwit. If I want to give you my house, I’ll give you my house. You don’t have to takeit, but that’s your choice.”
“But—”
“Miranda, you’ve said at least four times how you and Hugh would like to move. Your apartment is too small and you need someplace where you can start a new life together from scratch. I agree. I don’t know if you’d like Crane’s View. It’s a small town. There’s not much to do there. But both of you could commute to the city. It’s only an hour on the train and the ride is pretty—right alongside the river the whole way. At least go have a look. What do you have to lose?”
The next Sunday we rented a car, picked up Frances, and drove to Crane’s View. It was the first time she had left her apartment in months. She was both thrilled and scared to be out in the world again. Most of the day she wouldn’t let go of my arm but was so excited she didn’t stop talking for a minute.
From their first meeting, Frances and Hugh liked each other very much. Her life and the people she’d known fascinated him. Her greatest pleasure was talking about her experiences to someone who cared. They also argued all the time, but Frances loved a good fight. Despite her great age, there was still a big fire in her that longed to be fed. Hugh sensed this immediately and to my dismay started an argument with her the first time they met. The look on her face was pure joy. In the middle of the battle, Frances slapped a hand down on her birdie knee and proclaimed, “If you hadn’t said that, someone else would have. That’sthe difference between the clever and the great,” Hugh hooted and said he was going to pray to Saint Gildas, who protected people from dog bites.
As we were leaving, she pulled me aside and said, “He’s so different from your description, Miranda. So much better and so much more annoying!”
We visited her together after that. When Hugh did our shopping he invariably brought back a variety of Ding Dongs, Pinwheels, Twinkies, and other sweets for her. When I told Frances he was the one who bought her the junk food, tears came to her eyes. But the poster won her heart forever.
Seeing it the first time, I asked how the hell he’d found it. Hugh said only that he’d been lucky. His assistant Courtney later admitted Hugh had all of his European contacts on the lookout for months before they tracked one down in Wroclaw, Poland. It was a large color poster from the Ronacher Theater in Vienna advertising a 1922 performance by The Enormous Shumda, “world renowned” ventriloquist and, of course, the great love of Frances Hatch’s life. On the poster he is standing with arms crossed, looking huge, confident, and mysterious in a tuxedo and full-length cape. He’s a handsome man with gleaming black hair combed straight back and a wicked little goatee. When Frances saw the picture, she touched her cheeks and exclaimed, “That goatee! He always put Florida Water on it first thing in the morning before he did anything else. You never smelled anything so good in your life.”
As we drove out of New York City that day, she started talking about him again. “In a funny way, Shumda gave me Crane’s View. Not directly. He was gone years before I ever came up here. But Tyndall lived here, and he was Shumda’s biggest fan.”
I turned around and looked at her in the backseat. She was wearing a tomato red wool cap and a fur coat that had seen better days.
“Tyndall, the oil man?”
Frances nodded. “Yes. We met him in Bucharest in the twenties. Back there he was just another fan of Shumda. We kept in touch over the years. In the early fifties he invited me for a weekend to Crane’s View. I fell in love with the place and kept coming back. It was the perfect escape from New York and Lionel was always glad to have me.
“They had a murder there last year.” She didn’t say anything for a while and when I turned to check her, she was asleep. That was one of the few symptoms of her almost hundred years: she fell asleep faster than any person I’d ever known.
We rode in comfortable silence a long time. I looked out the window and watched the city turn into suburbs and then almost country. Hugh put his hand on my knee and said softly. “I love you. Know that?”
I looked at him and said, “No one in the world could be happier than I am right now. No one.”
We didn’t wake Frances until we saw the first exit sign for Crane’s View. In fact, we didn’t wake her at all: a mile before the turnoff, we both jumped when she called out, “Take the next right!”
I turned the rearview mirror to see her. “How’d you know when to wake up?”
She patted away a yawn. “Lionel Tyndall always had a crush on me. He was as ugly as an egg salad sandwich, but that was okay. I’m no prize in that department myself. No, my mistake was sleeping with him a few times. He didn’t know what he was doing. But Idid and that made him unreasonable. The guy didn’t know the difference between his big head and his little one. Now go right, Hugh. That’s it. We’re almost there.”
She continued talking as we drove toward the town. I didn’t know what to expect, but what was there pretty much fit what I had imagined. Crane’s View itself was cute and small. The stores in the town center were the basics—food, clothes, hardware, and newspapers—with a couple of specialty shops. It was a town built on hills and from those hills you often caught glimpses of the Hudson River below. Driving around that first day, I kept thinking, It’s a nice place, a real 1950s small upstate town. But there was nothing special about it. I wondered why Frances said she loved it. Crane’s View was everything Frances Hatch wasn’t—quiet, slow moving, unsurprising.
“Stop here! This is the place for lunch. They’ve got the best pizza in the county.”
Hugh braked hard and swerved into a parking spot in front of a dumpy-looking pizza joint. We got out of the car and Frances led the way inside. We were welcomed by the delicious smell of hot garlic. A couple of town studs leaned against the counter and gave us the slow once-over. We each ordered a slice of pizza; when they arrived, they were each as big as an LP record. Frances shook crushed hot pepper all over hers. We took soft drinks out of a refrigerator and sat down at a scarred table.
While we were eating, a handsome man in an expensive-looking double-breasted suit came in. He stopped when he saw us and his face lit up with a big wholehearted smile.
“Frances! What are you doing here?”
“Frannie!”
He came over and they embraced. “I am really happy to see you, old woman! Why didn’t you call and say you were coming? We coulda had a dinner or something.”
“I wanted to see the look on your face when you saw I was still alive. Frannie, these are my friends Miranda and Hugh. This is Frannie McCabe, chief of police. I’ve known him for twenty-five years. How are you, Chief?”
“Good! I’m a married man again. Magda and I finally did it, though I had to carry her kickin’ and screamin’ to the altar.”
“Good for you! Magda McCabe, huh? That’s a nice name. Listen, we’re going to my house after lunch. Is everything all right over there?”
He crossed his arms and looked at the ceiling, exasperated. “Frances, have we had this conversation before? You knowI keep an eye on the house for you! How many times do I have to tell you? It could use a paint job, but we’ve talked about that. Otherwise it’s fine. You going to start living there again?”
“No, but they may. That’s why we came up to see it.”
McCabe pulled out a chair and sat down. “It’s a nice house, but if you’re going to live there, it needs work. Definitely a paint job, and the basement gets damp. I could introduce you to some people who’d do the job right and not charge too much.”
Frances finished her pizza and brushed off her hands. “Frannie is the king of Crane’s View. He knows everybody. If they’re not in his family, they used to be in his gang. He was a juvenile delinquent when he was a kid. That’s how we got to know each other: he broke into my house when he was fifteen but I happened to be there at the time.” She turned toward him. “Why don’t you go over there with us?”
“I would, but I have too much stuff to do. There’s a zoning meeting this afternoon and I gotta be there. The company that bought the Tyndall house sold it after the murder there last year. Can’t say as I blame them. Now a consortium’s sniffing around. They want to tear it down and build a hotel or something. What’s a dull little town like ours going to do with a hotel? Who’s going to stay there, Rip Van Winkle?
“Anyway, I gotta go. If you two need anything, she has my phone number. I wish you weremoving back, Frances. I’d rather visit you here than down at that creepy apartment in the city.”
They kissed and we shook hands. Starting for the door, he was called back by the smirking counterman, who held out the pizza he’d ordered. McCabe grinned and went back for it.
“Is there much crime here? You mentioned a murder before.”
His smile evaporated and he stared at me before answering. “That was a one-time thing. There were a lot of extenuating circumstances. Crane’s View is a quiet town. Dull most of the time. Lotta blue-collar people here, some commuters. Everyone works hard. On the weekends they mow their lawn or watch a game. I’ve been a cop here a long time. The worst crime we have is, once in a while someone gets his car boosted. That’s all.
“Listen, I really gotta go. Ms. Hatch, I will talk to you soon. And let me know if you folks are going to move in. I’ll send some people over before you do to straighten the house up so at least it’ll be livable when you first get in.”
The counterman yodeled out, “Byyyyye, Chief!”
McCabe gave him the finger and smiled. “I don’t get no respect.” Then he was gone. I watched him get into a beautiful silver car and drive away.
“Drives a very nice car for a policeman.”
Hugh had watched too, and he nodded. “Did you see the wristwatch he was wearing? That was a Da Vinci! We’re talking about seriousmoney for that timepiece.”
Frances shrugged. “He’s loaded. He doesn’t need to be a cop, but does it because he likes it. Made a lot of money with his first wife. Something to do with television. He told me once but I forget.”
“I like him. He’s a tough guy.” Hugh put up his fists and pretended to box.
“You do? He reminds me of one of the gangsters in Goodfellas, I wouldn’t want to mess with him.”
Frances patted my hand. “No, you wouldn’t. He’s like a Russell’s viper if you cross him. But a great friend and one of the few people you can depend on completely. Shall we go? I’m excited to see my house.”
This time Frances sat in the front seat and directed Hugh to the house. As we drove through Crane’s View, I kept imagining myself there, walking down this street, shopping at that store. Letters to us would arrive at the small gray post office at the end of Main Street. After a while, we would know the names of the men on the orange garbage truck stopped at a corner. Young kids rode bicycles in woozy lines down the sidewalk. Dogs crossed the road at their own pace. Two girls had set up a lemonade stand on one side of a tree-lined street. The sun through the leaves dappled the girls and they frowned at us when we drove by.
“Hugh, look!”
A pretty teenager was walking a bullterrier that looked like Hugh’s. The two were in no hurry. The dog sniffed something on the sidewalk, tail wagging slowly. The girl wore a Walkman and waited for him with arms crossed. She looked up as we passed and waved. Frances waved back.
“That’s Barbara Flood. Good-looking girl, huh? Her grandfather was Tyndall’s gardener. Turn right here.”
“She’s the first black person I’ve seen here.”
Frances gave Hugh a shove. “Don’t start with the liberal agenda. There are plenty of blacks in Crane’s View. The mayor is black.”
He caught my eye in the mirror and winked. “I was just making an observation.”
“Yeah, well it weighed ten pounds. This is it. Stop here.”
“ Thishouse? You’re joking.”
Frances’s voice slashed down like a karate chop. “What’s the matter with it?”
I bent forward for a better look. “Nothing’s the matter. It’s just big. You said it was small. This is not a small house, Frances.”
It was blue, sort of. Blue with white trim. But the years had faded the paint to the color of a pair of old jeans. The white around the windows and door had yellowed and was peeling off everywhere. McCabe was right—the first thing it would need would be lots of paint. The house was square, shaped like a hatbox, with two floors and a large porch in front. The night before we drove there, Hugh and I had spent a whole dinner wondering what it would look like. Neither of our imaginings had come even close to this.
189 BROADWAY // CRANE’S VIEW, NEW YORK
“Here Hugh, you open the door. I want to take a look around.” Frances handed him keys and walked toward the porch steps. Leaning forward, she kissed the wooden newel post. “Haven’t seen you in a long time.” Slowly climbing, she patted the banister as she went. At the top, she reached out and pressed the doorbell. It rang loudly inside.
Hugh put his arm around my shoulder. “Did you hear that? A realbell! Ding dong!”
I quietly asked, “What do you think?”
“I like it! Reminds me of a house in an Edward Hopper painting. It’ll need a lot of work, though. I can see that already.” He put his hands on his hips and looked appraisingly at the house.
“It’s sure a lot bigger than I’d imagined. I thought it would be a kind of large bungalow.”
Frances walked to the end of the porch and stopped. Her back was to us. She didn’t turn around for the longest time.
“What’s she doing?”
“Remembering, probably. Let’s go inside. I can’t wait to see what it’s like.” Hugh slotted the key and turned it in the lock a couple of times. Before pushing the door open, he slid his hand back and forth over the surface. “Nice door, huh? Oak.”
It swung open. The first odors of our new home drifted out to say hello: dust, damp, old cloth, and something in complete contrast to empty-house bouquet. Hugh entered while I stood in the doorway, trying to figure out that one smell. Clean and sweet, it was not at all appropriate in a building that had been closed and unused for years. It was fresh, delicious. I couldn’t put my finger on what it was.
“Miranda, are you coming?”
“In a second. Go ahead.”
I heard Hugh walk across the floor, then a door creak open. He said a quiet “Wow” to something in there, then his feet started across the floor again. What wasthat smell? I took a few steps into the house, looked around, and closed my eyes.
When I opened them a moment later, the hallway was full of people. Full of children, rather, with a few adults standing around watching the show. Kids were running, jumping, making faces at each other, and playing. They ran back and forth from room to room, stomped up and down the staircase, ate yellow and blue cake ( thatwas it—cake smell!), blew plastic horns, hit each other. Most wore pastel party hats. Seeing them, I realized what this was—a kid’s birthday party.
I was not surprised. I must repeat that, because it is very important. From one second to the next, Frances Hatch’s empty house was in a flash full of the happy chaos of a child’s birthday party, but none of it surprised me. I simply watched and accepted it.
One little boy in a crooked party hat stood in the middle of the hall watching the party whirl around him. He wore a white button-down shirt, stiff new blue jeans, and zebra-striped sneakers. He looked like a miniature Hugh Oakley, even to the color and texture of his long hair and the broad grin on his face. A smile I knew so well now and loved. This had to be Hugh’s boy.
He looked directly at me and did the most wonderful thing. Slowly closing his eyes, he shuddered all over. I knew it was from delight at the party around him. For it was his party, his birthday.
His name was Jack Oakley and he was eight years old. He was the son Hugh and I wouldhave when we lived together in this house. We had already talked a lot about having children, joked about what their names would be. Jack and Ciara. Saint Ciara of Tipperary who put out fire with her prayers. And now here was our Jack Oakley standing in front of me, eight years old today, looking like his father. There was some of me in him too. The high forehead and upward curve of the eyebrows.
I didn’t move, scared if I did, this gorgeous vision of our future would go away. The boy looked at me and, still smiling, threw his small hands in the air as if they were full of confetti.
“Miranda?”
Startled, I jerked my head to the left. Hugh walked toward me, smiling just like his son. Our son. I looked back to where the boy had been standing. Everything was gone—Jack, the kids, the party.
“Are you okay?”
“We have to live here, Hugh. We haveto live in this house.”
“But you haven’t even looked around yet! You haven’t moved from this spot. Come on, I’ve got to show you something.” He put his arm around my shoulders and gently pushed me along. I went but looked back once, twice, just in case Jack was there again. The little boy, our little boy, come to show us how wonderful it would be for all of us here.
I STOOD AT the bottom of the stairs and took a long deep breath. Thirty-four steps. After thirty-four steps I could stop and rest awhile. Just in time too because my arms were beginning to feel like pieces of chewed gum. I was holding a heavy cardboard box. Across the top was written “Sky Average.” Don’t ask what it meant because the contents of the box were Hugh’s. Already that morning I’d taken “Pontus Harmon.” “Tarzan Hotel.” “Ugly Voila,” and now “Sky Average” up to the room he would use as a study. The first time I’d seen him writing those strange phrases onto boxes in New York, I’d looked at them, at Hugh, then at the boxes again.
“Am I missing something? How do you know what’s inside?”
He capped the thick marking pen he was using and slid it into his back pocket. “I’m a mood packer. Free form. Things go in a box that connect with each other, but leave enough room for surprise when I open it again and discover what’s there.”
“So what does ‘Tarzan Hotel’ mean?”
“I made it as a kid. I took a Buster Brown shoe box, cut it up, and painted it. I was seven. I made it into a hotel for some of my favorite toys.”
“And you kept it all these years?”
“No.” He looked at me and shrugged.
“Sooo, the Tarzan Hotel isn’tin your Tarzan Hotel box?”
“No.”
“Hugh, I think we’ve left the highway here. Should I put it into four-wheel drive?”
“No. Hand me that tape, willya? The Tarzan Hotel was where I kept favorite things. So inside thisbox are some of my favorite things. My pocketknife collection, fountain pens, some great books. That novel you gave me – The Story of Harold. Other stuff too, but I didn’t write it down so I’ll be surprised later.”
“You’re a strange fellow, but I like you.”
HUGH HAD MADE packing up my apartment bearable. I had never liked moving. Who does? But his company and unbroken enthusiasm made the work tolerable and sometimes even fun. Frequently I would get manic and feel we had to have everything done/packed/finished in this or that period of time. He was much more relaxed about it and that mood calmed me down. Often he came to me holding some object—a lamp, a figure, a pair of German binoculars—and wanted to know the story behind the thing. He wasn’t snooping or asking me to disclose any secrets; he wanted to know me through the things I owned. Frequently I found myself telling him in long detail the story behind them and, in doing so, relaxing and pleasantly reliving past times. When both of us were exhausted and dirty, we would take a bath together and then go out for a meal. Invariably we lingered at the table talking about what life would be like in Crane’s View. And not only that. We talked endlessly about what life would be like together. One night after dinner he took a slip of paper out of his pocket and read a poem to me. I kept the paper and had it framed. I must have said the poem to myself hundreds of times over the years:
If I get to love you, please enter without knocking,
but think it over well:
my straw mattress will be yours, the dusty straw,
the rustling sighs.
Into the pitcher fresh water I’ll pour,
your shoes, before you leave, I’ll wipe clean,
no one will disturb us here,
hunched over, you could mend our clothes in peace.
If the silence is great, I will talk to you,
If you are tired, take my only chair,
If it’s warm here, loosen your collar,
take off your tie, if you are hungry,
there’s a clean sheet of paper as your plate if there’s food,
but leave some for me—I, too, am forever hungry.
If I get to love you, enter without knocking,
but think it over well:
it would hurt if you stayed away for long.
Hefting the box marked “Sky Average,” I began climbing. I couldn’t see a thing with it full in my arms, so I had to count steps as I went. I’d found that counting backward somehow made the climb easier. At step sixteen, Hugh called out from above. I kept going and had reached seven when he called again.
“Wait a minute!”
I heard his footsteps, and then the box was lifted out of my arms. Immediately I felt dizzy and almost fell backward. Grabbing the banister, I steadied myself. Hugh was climbing with the box and didn’t see what had happened. Just as well. It was the second dizzy spell I’d had that morning and it was disconcerting. We’d been working too hard.
Three days before, we’d rented a yellow Ryder truck and filled it with our belongings. When we were done, we stood on the sidewalk in front of my apartment building and looked inside. Hugh said it was unsettling to see all the possessions of two lifetimes stacked neatly in the back of a not-so-large truck. I kissed his shoulder for being diplomatic. Uptown in Charlotte’s apartment he had a whole other lifetime of belongings, which undoubtedly would have filled several trucks, but he’d made no mention of that. He was taking a lot to Crane’s View, but not so much when I knew what he couldhave taken.
When Charlotte heard we were moving out of the city, she flew into a flaming rage. From that day on, she did everything possible to make Hugh’s life miserable. She was good at it. In their last civil conversation before the lawyers started circling the remains, she hit him with everything she had where it hurt most. What about their marriage, his responsibilities, their children? Did he realize what this would do to them? How could he? Was he so selfish? Did he care about three other people’s lives?
“MIRANDA?” HE STOOD at the top of the staircase with his hands in his pockets, looking at me. “Are you okay?”
“Yes. I was thinking about you and Charlotte.”
His face hardened. “Thinking what?”
“I was thinking there’s no way I’ll ever be able to thank you enough for coming here with me.”
“You don’t have to thank me; just love me.”
“I’m so afraid I’ll do it wrong, Hugh. Sometimes it feels like my heart is breaking loose because I want this to work so much. How do you love someone the right way?”
“Use plenty of butter.” He pulled his T-shirt out of his pants and over his head. He dropped it on the floor, watching me the whole time. “And no margarine. Some people try to cheat by using margarine, but you can always taste the difference.” He undid his belt and slid his jeans down.
“I thought we were supposed to be unpacking.” I crossed my arms, then dropped them to my sides.
“We are, but you asked how to love someone the right way. I’m telling you.”
“Use butter.” I began unbuttoning my shirt.
“Right.” He stood in white Jockey shorts with his hands on his hips. He wiggled a finger at me to climb the rest of the stairs to him. My shirt was open by the time I reached him. He slid his hands over my breasts. “Women will always win because they have breasts. It doesn’t matter how big they are, just the fact you havethem means you’ll always win.” He pulled me slowly down to the floor.
The wood on my back was cold. I arched up into him. “Men have cocks.”
“Cocks are dumb.” He kissed my throat. “Too obvious. Breasts are art.”
I put my hand over his mouth. Slid my fingers back and forth over his tongue, then slid them out and wiped the wet across his cheek. It glistened. I kissed it. The phone rang. I put my hand between his legs and whispered, “’We’re not home right now, but leave a message. We’ll get back to you as soon as we’ve come.’”
It rang and rang. “What would you do if I answered that?” He was smiling and flinched when I squeezed him too hard.
His face was a few inches above mine. Some of the bristles of his beard were gold, others black. I rubbed my hand across his scratchy cheek. Then I stopped my hand and left it there.
He stared at me. Something distracted him and his head snapped up. His eyes widened. His face changed into an expression I had never seen before on him: fury. Outrage. He leaped up. Before I could say anything, he was already sprinting down the hall.
“Son of a bitch!”
“Hugh!” I grabbed my pants and stood too quickly. Again came a whoosh of dizziness. It passed slowly and I went after him.
He was in our bedroom looking frantically around. “There was someone here! He was watching us. I looked up and saw a man standing in the doorway watching us!”
“Where did he go?”
“I thought in here. But he’s not. The windows are closed… I don’t know. Jesus.”
“Should we call the police?”
“It won’t do any good if he’s not here. When he saw that I saw him, he stepped back in here but now… nothing. What the hell…”
“What did he look like?”
“I don’t know. A man. He was in the shadows. I don’t know.” He kept checking around. He opened a closet door. He went to a window and, throwing it open, stuck his head far out and looked in every direction.
We spent a long time searching the house from top to bottom. But Hugh was much more upset about it than I. Perhaps because he had actually seen the man. What disturbed me more was that it was the second time something strange had happened in Frances’s house and we hadn’t even moved into the place yet. While we searched, I kept thinking of the little boy and his birthday party. That little beautiful boy.
“LOOK AT THIS!”
An hour later I was in the kitchen making lunch when Hugh came in holding something large in his hand. Or rather his fingers—he held it far out in front of him, as if it wasn’t at all nice. I smelled it before recognizing it. A bone. The kind of big cow bone you give a dog to chew.
“Where’d you find that?”
“Under the desk in my room! But touch it—that’s what’s weird.”
I pointed to the food on the counter. “Hugh, I’m making lunch. I don’t want to touch a bone.”
He jiggled it as if trying to guess the weight. “It’s still warm. Warm and slimy. Like it was chewed five minutes ago.”
“In your room?”
“Under my desk. I haven’t seen any dog around here. But this thing is warm. Something has been chewing this bone in my room. Recently.”
I put the knife down. “Do you think it had anything to do with the man you saw this morning?”
He looked at the floor and shrugged. “You mean maybe the dog was chewing this while his master was spying on us? I don’t know. I was wondering along those same lines. It’s weirder thinking he might have had a dog with him.”
The phone rang again. I picked it up and was relieved to hear Frances Hatch’s scratchy voice on the other end. She asked how we were doing. I told her about our morning of the intruder and the warm bone.
“That house has been empty a long time, Miranda. Who knows who’s been going in and out of there over the years? McCabe says he’s been watching it, but he can’t be there the whole day long. I’d call and tell him. You two be careful.”
She asked to speak to Hugh. I handed him the phone and went back to preparing our meal. When I was finished, I brought it to the table. Hugh continued talking to Frances while he ate. I was about to sit down when I realized I had to go to the bathroom.
That was one of the few annoying things about the house—there was no toilet on the ground floor. I trudged up the stairs again and walked down the hall. Approaching the bathroom, I stopped when I heard something inside: water running. The door was cracked. A moment’s hesitation before I pushed it open and felt for the switch on the wall. The light came on and I saw a thin thread of water running out of the faucet. I went over and turned it off and looked at myself in the mirror. Something else. Something else was wrong but it didn’t register for some moments. The doorknob. The old porcelain doorknob to the toilet had been warm when I touched it. I went back and put two fingers on it to be sure. Warm. How could that be if no one had touched it for hours? I took a deep breath and said a good throaty “Shit!” before I started out on my own investigation of the upstairs rooms. Although Hugh was downstairs, I still hated the idea of looking on my own but knew I must. I couldn’t be afraid of this house and I would be if I got spooked now and ran for cover. As I opened the door of our bedroom, my hand paused on the doorknob for a moment to gauge the temperature. Cool. No problem. Our bedroom, Hugh’s study, what would one day be the guest room and in time, the baby’s room, were only full of boxes and stacked-up furniture. Nothing more. No shadow men or dogs chewing bones. In Hugh’s room, I even got down on my knees and felt the floor under his desk where he said the bone had been. Nothing.
Then I did something that was strange but seemed right at the moment. I tipped my forehead till it was touching the floor. And I prayed. Or I said to someone powerful and important and in charge, “Please let everything be all right. Please let us be safe.” And then I went back downstairs to finish lunch with my love.
I WATCHED AS a red + sign slowly appeared in the middle of the blotting paper. Though I already knew, sensed, had feltit for days, it was still a storm in my head to actually see the physical proof. I was pregnant. The druggist told me these home tests were usually 98 percent sure.
I bought it at a pharmacy near my store. I’d put it in my purse and carried it around for three days, equally excited and frightened to use it. Every time I took it out and read the instructions again, turned the box over and over in my hands and shook it next to my ear as if it might have something to say, I ended up dropping it back into the bag and saying, “Later.”
After too many strange things happened—continued dizziness, fatigue, sudden nausea at the smell of coffee—I knew I had to find out what was going on inside me. At home Hugh had a book of medical symptoms. When I read those describing pregnancy—dizziness, fatigue, nausea—I closed the book and bit my lip. What would he say on hearing that it had happened so soon after we’d moved in together? Right in the middle of all the turmoil with Charlotte and his children. How would he react?
The day I decided to take the home test, we rode together into Manhattan on the train. Just past Spuyten Duyvil, I carefully curved our normal morning chitchat around to the subject of children. Hugh had been looking at a Sotheby’s catalog of rare musical instruments to be auctioned.
He drummed his fingers on the cover. “I love Fellini films and my favorite parts are when there’s a scene of a big family fest: a marriage or birthday party. Tables have been set up in an empty field and everyone’s eating, having a wonderful time. A bad local band is playing, children are running around. The wind is always blowing and crepe paper or balloons are flying around, and leaves…” Looking out the window, he blew breath against the glass and made a small patch of fog. He rubbed it away with the heel of his hand. “Sometimes you hear a train passing in the distance. A couple of sad toots.
“I want to be at those parties, with myfive kids running around. They’ve eaten too much cake and are tired of sitting still. Or maybe they’re my grandchildren and I’ve got white hair and am beginning to get sleepy because I’ve had too much wine. I love the Italians. All those big families and their kids. I love kids. I’d be so happy if we had some. But of course only if you want them too.”
I stared at the vivid red cross on the test and realized I was humming the Beatles song “I feel fine.” I had a plan. I put the test in a small Ziploc bag and slid it into my desk. Then I went to a liquor store and bought a bottle of their best champagne. My first thought was to go to Hugh’s office and surprise him, but I realized I didn’t want his assistants to know yet. I called instead and asked if we could have lunch. To my great dismay, he said no. He had to meet with clients all afternoon and might not be home till late. I was on the verge of telling him then, but that would have been wrong. Over the telephone? This was our greatest event and it deserved special treatment. The announcement had to wait till later.
I stood in the middle of Eighty-first Street with a bottle of champagne and the best news I’d ever had but no one to share them with. If only my parents were still alive.
To make matters worse, ten feet away across the sidewalk a well-dressed middle-aged woman suddenly started screaming, “Where is everyone going?” again and again in a voice that could have opened the eyes of the dead. In typical New York fashion, people steered a wide path around her, but I was mesmerized. Her fists were against her cheeks, and she looked like a mad Edvard Munch character. Naturally she ended up staring at me, her audience of one. Snapping out of my trance, I didn’t know whether to flee or try to help her.
“Where are they going?” she pleaded, as if I knew who “they” were or where they were headed. She continued staring at me in the most beseeching way.
The only thing I could say was, “I don’t know.”
“But you have to know; you’ve been here longer than any of us!” And with that she moved off down the street in a swift stagger that was as awful to see as the look on her face.
After making sure she wasn’t coming back, I returned to the phone booth and called Zoe. Halfway through tapping out her number I hung up, remembering she had flown out to Los Angeles two days before to visit Doug Auerbach.
Frances! Frances was always home, thank God. She answered after the fifth ring. When I asked if I could visit, she happily said, “Of course!” I went to a specialty market and bought tins of pate and Russian caviar, a beautifully fresh French bread, and a box of Belgian chocolates.
When I hailed a cab the sun was shining brightly, but on the way uptown the sky darkened abruptly and thunder rolled. The rain began just before I saw the madwoman again. She was now walking briskly in a purposeful stride that said, Outta the way I’m in a hurry. So different from minutes before when she’d been standing on the sidewalk looking like aliens had landed inside her skull. Now she looked straight ahead and her arms pumped back and forth, rump rump rump.
But the moment we passed, her head jerked toward me. She raised a hand and shook a scolding finger. Shocked, I turned away. The rain swirled silvery down the window. The street shone glossy black. Cars hissed by. Umbrellas were everywhere. I wanted to look at her again but was afraid. The rest of the ride uptown I tried to keep my eyes closed. I listened to the rain and the bumpity-bump of the tires hitting ruts in the road. I thought of the baby. I thought of Hugh.
Arriving at Frances’s, I paid the driver and ran across the courtyard into her section of the building. The rain soaked the paper bag full of food and I felt it coming apart in my hands. I stopped on a landing and took the things out. Cradling them in my arms, I started up the stairs. They weren’t heavy, but in a moment they were much too heavy. Suddenly I was dizzy and too hot to go on. I was barely able to lower myself to a step without keeling over. I put the food down and put my head in my hands. Was this what pregnancy was going to be like? Nine months of feeling great and then abruptly feeling like you were going to keel over?
Normally the building was as loud as a train station. Kids ran shouting up and down the stairs, dogs barked, radios and TVs blasted. Today it was virtually silent but for the rain pattering outside. I sat trying to will the dizziness away so I could go up and tell Frances my joyous news.
At the same time, it was enjoyable sitting there alone on that cold step, listening to the rain outside plink on metal, splat on stone, gurgle urgently down into the drains. I had never realized before what a variety of rain sounds there were. Rain had always been rain—something to avoid or watch dreamily through a window. It made the familiar world wet and shiny and different awhile and then you forgot about it till the next time. But alone now surrounded only by rain noises, I was able to recognize more and more distinctions: rain on wood, sliding down glass, rain on rain. Yes, there was even a sound to that, but a hidden one, altogether secret,
I lifted my head and said aloud, “That’s not right. No one can hear those things.” But I was already hearing other things too: conversations, channels changing on a television, someone peeing hard into a toilet. What’s more, I knew exactlywhat each of the sounds was. Feet crossing a floor, a cat purring, a person licking their dry lips in sleep, toenails being clipped.
I looked around to check if any doors were open nearby. No. Only the rain outside and now this relentless cascade of sounds falling over me. From behind those closed doors, from apartments twenty or thirty feet away. Noises I shouldn’t have heard. Impossible from where I was sitting.
Back in some bedroom behind closed doors where two kids were supposed to be taking a nap, one little boy was whispering to his brother, both of them under the blanket on his bed. Somewhere else in the building a woman sang quietly along with the radio in her kitchen as she washed dishes. It was the Dixie Cups song “The Chapel of Love.” I heard the rush of aerated water in the sink, the squeak of the sponge on glass, her quiet melancholic voice.
“I fuck you good. You know I fuck you good.”
“Fuck me hard.”
I could hear their grunting breath, the smack of kisses, hands sliding over skin. I could hear everything. But where werethese people? How was this possible?
I stood up. I didn’t want to hear. But none of it would stop. Cars ssh’d and honked outside on the street, a heating pipe clanked in the basement, pigeons chuckled on the windowsill, food fried, people argued, an old woman prayed. “Oh God, you know how scared I am, but you not helping me through this.” All the sounds of a rainy day in Manhattan were too near and I couldn’t stop them. I covered my ears and shook my head from side to side like a wet dog. For a moment the sounds of the world stopped. Silence again. Beautiful, empty silence returned.
But then itcame and it was the biggest sound of all. My heart. The dull, huge boom of my beating heart filled the air and space of the world around me. I could only stand and listen, terrified. What was worse was the irregularity. Boom boom boom, then nothing for seconds. It started again, only to go and stop and go with no evenness, no rhythm or structure. It beat when it felt like it. Then it stopped. It was moody. It did what it liked. But it was my heart and it was supposed to be the steadiest machine of all.
I knew it was me because I had had arrhythmia all my life. A few years before it had grown so serious that I spent a night in the hospital being rigorously tested and monitored by a twenty-four-hour EKG.
The loudest noise I ever heard pulsed and stopped and pulsed again but with no pattern, no safe recognizable rhythm. Maybe it would beat another time. Maybe not.
“Miranda? Are you all right?”
A moment passed before my mind focused on her voice and face. Frances stood several steps above me. She wore a red robe and matching slippers, which made her intensely white skin glow in the dark of the stairwell.
“What’s the matter, dear?”
Her voice brought things back. I tried to speak but couldn’t. She slowly worked her way down. When she got to me she put a hand on my elbow. “I was sitting by the window and saw you come in. I got worried when you didn’t ring.”
She helped me up the rest of the stairs. Without that help, I don’t know how I would have made it.
“IT’S ALL MY fault.”
“Don’t be ridiculous, Frances. Unless you made all these things happen to me.” I tried to sound facetious, but the words came out sounding self-pitying.
“You don’t understand; it’s more complicated than that.” She began walking around the room.
I had just finished telling her everything. From the day I saw the ghost of James Stillman on the street, right up to the impossible sounds I had heard out in the hall. Once I’d started, the whole story leaped out like an animal that had been trapped in a cage too long. Simply recounting all of the strange events made me feel better.
Frances was silent throughout and spoke only after a long pause. “I knew you were pregnant the day we went to Crane’s View. I don’t know if you remember, but when we got to my house I stood on the porch and asked to be alone while you two went in.”
“I remember that. Hugh mentioned it.”
“I didn’t want you to see my face because I might have given it away. That’s when I knew.”
“How, Frances? Are you psychic?”
She shook her head. “No, but when I was a young woman in Romania I met people. Shumda introduced me and they taught me some things. That was the greatest mistake of my life: they were willing to teach me much more but I wasn’t interested. Incredible. Incredibly stupid.
“Shumda was Romanian. He had been raised in the country, and to country people, real magic is no big deal. Things like that shouldn’tbe a big deal. They are to us because we’re so sophisticated and skeptical that we’re above all that primitive hocus-pocus.
“But there isanother world, Miranda. Most of us refuse to accept that because it scares us. It threatens to take away our control. But that won’t make it go away. Let me read you something.” She walked to a table and picked up one of the many notebooks she kept around the apartment. She called them daybooks and filled them with her thoughts and quotes from things she had read and liked. She leafed through this book. “Here, listen to this: ‘Maybe what comes from elsewhere will make me do crazy things; maybe that invisible world is demonic and should be excluded. What I can’t see, I can’t know; what I don’t know, I fear; what I fear, I hate; what I hate, I want destroyed.’”
“But Frances, I do believe in those things. I always have. I’ve just never had any contact with them until now. Did you really know I was pregnant that day? How?”
“Your smell. And the color of your fingertips.”
“What does a pregnant woman smell like?”
“Like hope.”
I smiled and felt my spirit lift. “It’s possible to smell hope?”
She nodded. “When you know how.”
“And what about the fingertips?”
“Look at them.”
I held up my left hand but saw nothing at first. Then I gasped. The tips of my fingers were changing colors—the colors of clouds on the sky. As if a strong wind was pushing fleecy clouds across the sky, clouds that were white, purple, orange-red. They moved over my fingertips in a passing rush. The colors of storms, sunsets, early morning. All of them together flying across my fingertips.
I guess I made some other noise because the moment I did, the colors disappeared and my fingers returned to their proper color. I kept staring at my hand. Eventually I looked at Frances again but with a whole new perspective.
“ That’swhat I saw when we were in Crane’s View. You can’t because you haven’t been trained. I did it to you now so you could see for yourself.”
“All women have that? On their fingers? All of them when they’re pregnant?”
“Yes.”
“And you learned how to do that in Romania?”
“Among other things.”
“What else, Frances? What else do you know?”
She sighed loudly. “Not enough. I was too young to appreciate what they were offering. Knowledge pursued me, but I was faster. When you’re young you’re only interested in parlor tricks, Miranda, things that can impress others or get you in the door.
“But these people, and they were from all walks of life, were willing to teach me incredible things because I was with Shumda. If only I’d had the patience and dedication! I met a Yezidje priest, people in the Sarmoun Brotherhood… You can’t imagine who I knew when I was there. But none of it penetrated. The young are like rubber—everything bounces off them.
“Shumda called me bimba viziata, his spoiled child, and I was.” She sighed again and rubbed her hands up and down her sides. “You talk to shadows too much when you get old. Old memories, old regrets. I could have learned so much when I was a young woman, but I didn’t and that was a great mistake. But I do know some things. I knew you were pregnant. I know that what you’re going through now is a result of that pregnancy.”
“And James’s ghost? Or the noises I heard outside? The little boy in our house?”
“They’re part of it. Believe me, it’s all necessary for you now. Something enormous is about to come into your life and all of these things are part of the overture.” She walked over, put her hands on my tense shoulders, and kissed the top of my head. It was the first time Frances had kissed me.
WHEN I GOT back to Crane’s View, the rain was having an intermission and the sky was full of black fat thunderclouds. After getting out of the train I stood on the platform and stared at that turbulent sky, remembering my fingertips and what had happened in Frances’s apartment earlier. The day had exhausted me, but I decided to walk the mile to our house. I wanted the exercise. The air smelled delicious and ripe as it always does in the country after rain.
As I walked and breathed deeply of the thick air, I kept thinking about what she had told me. More than anything else, “there is another world” kept chiming in my head like a clock striking twelve. Like it or not, that world had become part of mine. I would have to accept it and go wherever it led me. But how would it affect my relationship with Hugh? And our child?
Frances told me about a dull man she knew who suddenly, in middle age, was able to see what people would look like when they were old. For the rest of his life he had to live with that … talent? Curse? What would you call it?
Another man suddenly developed a frighteningly accurate ability to read palms. That lucky fellow went mad because it reached a point where he could see nothing else but people’s palms and the certain fates that awaited them.
“Need a ride? You look tired.”
I looked up and saw Chief McCabe leaning on the roof of his car in front of the bakery. He held a French cruller in one hand and a small carton of milk in the other.
“No, thank you. I just got off the train and this walk is bringing me back to life. But I have a question.”
He grinned and nodded. “You don’t want a ride but you got a question. Okay. Shoot.”
“Have you ever known anyone with special powers? People who could tell the future or read palms, that sort of thing?”
He didn’t hesitate. “My grandmother. Spookiest person I ever knew. Always knew when you were lying. The family legend. No one of us ever lied to her because she always knew. Worst part was, if you did lie, she hit you. Lie—BANG! When I was a kid she must’ve got me a thousand times! Shows how smart I was, huh? Why do you ask?”
I didn’t even know McCabe, but for a moment I wanted to tell him everything. Maybe after what had happened that day, I just needed a friend.
“Oh, yeah,” he went on, “and Frances Hatch too. She gets tuned into weird channels too sometimes.” His car radio squawked and he bent in to listen. I couldn’t make out what it said.
“Gotta go. Someone’s screaming up on Skidmore Street.” He popped the rest of the cruller into his mouth and took the milk with him when he got into the car.
He drove off before I could tell him. It was a Japanese woman. A Mrs. Hayashi. I had never seen her before. She had taken too many pills and the hallucinations were driving her mad. Her children stood on windowsills in a high building waving happily to her down below. Bye-bye Mama. Then one by one they jumped. She watched as they dropped through space and hit the ground directly in front of her. I saw her face, the wide open mouth screaming to her sanity to help.
Outside her small house on Skidmore Street, neighbors stood worriedly at the window watching her on the floor, pulling her hair and screaming in a language none of them understood.
I saw it.
FIVE HOURS LATER Hugh came in looking pale and very drawn. He went into the living room and sat down in his new chair and let out a low groan. I got him a drink and asked if there was anything I could do. Unsmiling, he kissed my hand and said no. Sweet man that he was, he looked up with weary eyes and apologized for not being able to make lunch earlier. He’d had an awful day. An important deal for a rare Guadagnini violin fell through. He had argued with his assistants. Charlotte called and accused him of terrible things.
I sat on the floor next to him and leaned my head against his leg. I had wonderful news to tell him but didn’t. After dinner. I would cook and it would be wonderful, the most delicious meal I’d ever made. After dinner, when we both felt better and the day was ours again and the moment was right for such a surprise. Then.
We sat in silence. It started to rain again. When he spoke, Hugh’s voice was flat and toneless, as if it had been washed of all color.
“Know what I love? In the summer when you leave the windows open in the bedroom and go to sleep. There’s a breeze blowing you can just feel on your face. As you’re drifting off, the wind picks up, but you’re too sleepy to do anything about it.
“Then in the middle of the night, a big bang wakes you up in a second. A storm’s ragingoutside and all your windows are flapping back and forth. Like they’re applauding. Like they’re applauding the storm.
“So you get up, sleepy as hell but wired from the shock, and go around closing them. Everything’s wet, the windowsills, the floor.… While you were sleeping this thing blew in and drenched everything.
“The best part is standing at the open window and getting wet. I put my hands on the sill and stick my head out into it. The wind’s whipping, things are tremendous out there. It’s three in the morning and no one’s around to see it. Only you. The whole show’s just for you.”
I put an arm around his leg and squeezed tightly. His hand was on my head, ruffling my hair. Neither of us moved for minutes. The only things that changed were the sounds of the wind outside. Hugh’s hand stopped moving. The rain gradually slowed and stopped too. Everything stopped. The silence was thick as fur. Despite all the surprises and excitement of that bizarre day, the next minutes were the most peaceful and fulfilling I ever knew.
When I finally moved to get up, because my back was beginning to hurt, because it was time to cook our dinner, because afterward I could tell Hugh about our baby, his hand slipped from my head. I saw that he was asleep.
He was dead.