by Betsy Berne
C O N T E N T S
TITLE PAGE
DEDICATION
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
EPILOGUE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
COPYRIGHT PAGE
To my parents, my sister and brothers,
and to Hilton Als
Bad
_____
Timing
_____
C H A P T E R
1
I REALIZED I was cracking one Saturday morning in July when I found a mouse in the half-full—well, half-empty—water glass by my bed.
The room was close and sweaty, suffocatingly so. It had been a hot and surly summer in Manhattan, and summer in the city is more than anything a psychological season, a season dictated by income bracket. (The lower your bracket, the longer and hotter and smellier summer is.) Summer in New York can make a loser feel more like a loser and a winner more like a winner. The winners usually beat the summer by leaving, and by now most of them had long since gone. My neighborhood was inhabited mostly by winners, so the streets were pretty deserted. I could see all the way to the Hudson River from the windows lining my loft, and the view was sullied only by a stray loser or two. My own summer strategies varied with my fluctuating income bracket. This year’s income said long summer.
I’d gone to bed very late the night before, though I knew that I’d have to be up early. I’d been invited to Long Island, and it’s easier to be a guest when you’re a little foggy. I hit the alarm without looking at it and made my way slowly toward the kitchen. When I went back into the bedroom I saw the mouse in the glass on my crowded night table, less than six inches from where my head had rested moments before. It wasn’t even dead. It was very much alive and struggling to get out.
I ran to the living room and called my brother, who was in no mood to help. He told me to go back in there and throw it out the window. I informed him that I was unable to go back in there. “Just go back in one more time, cover the damn glass, leave, and when you come home it’ll be dead,” he said. I told him that I couldn’t get that close to it, nor could I face a mouse corpse later. He said, “Jesus, I don’t know—call Mom,” and hung up. My mother had been a renowned rodent killer in our youth. I called her.
She said, “Go back in there, honey, bring the phone, I’ll go, too. What is wrong with you? Damn it to hell, just throw it out the window, honey, and don’t call yourself a feminist if you can’t even throw a mouse out the goddamn window.” I wasn’t sure that last comment made sense, but I let it go. Finally I called the feminist who lived upstairs, and she marched down and disposed of the mouse without incident.
It was time to take a look at the big picture.
•
My slow but steady demise had begun with an unlikely encounter one night a couple of months before.
We had met on an early spring night that was damp and raw, after a particularly grueling winter from which no one had quite recovered. My neighbor, who generally made appearances at every party in town, had told me about a party—a trashy magazine party at a trashy new bar—a hot trashy new bar, which made it even trashier and even less appealing. This wasn’t exactly an invitation; my magnanimous neighbor said he would see to it that I’d get in, but not in his company. My neighbor is a slippery sort who prefers to move about town unencumbered so that he can adopt the appropriate persona for each occasion, and I am the kind of person who might inadvertently blow his cover. He also happens to be black, which means that his persona is a far more urgent matter, in some cases a matter of survival. Luckily, he is a master of disguise, and people of all colors are generally smitten with him. I am white, a white Jew to be precise, and smitten; he is an original, and he has no choice, really, but to be slippery. (My neighbor lives only a few blocks away, and he and I often pass the time by making enormous crass ethnic generalizations and congratulating ourselves on our brilliance.)
I felt it was my duty to go to the party in order to continue an ongoing, albeit desultory, mate search. I can simulate a suitably sociable façade as well as the next person, but an escort would make things easier. So I called Victor, who serves as my human oasis. He is something of a dandy who dresses in Victoriana and S&M jackets with exotic jewelry. On a summer day he is often decked out in a billowing skirt, or linen bloomers paired with a light cotton vest. His head is hairless except for several tiny, well-placed patches and some strategic twirly strands, and he sometimes sports Hasidic earlocks. But by now I no longer notice his appearance, nor do I question the purpose of his cane, even though he has no limp. Victor is not even remotely concerned with the mate search. He has his own ideas about the human condition. But he does love a party. And like me, he is an artist who is slowly losing the ability to do the fawning necessary to revive a faltering career. But neither of us had thrown in the towel yet, and there is really no place more conducive to fawning or searching than a party.
Outside the trashy new bar there was a groveling and expectant crowd. My neighbor had kept his word, and I breezed right through, and Victor—well, no conscientious doorman could refuse entrance to Victor. Inside it was cavelike. You couldn’t see out and you couldn’t see in. The walls were tinted the pale hazy ochre that is designed to flatter those who are getting on in years. It was almost embarrassing to be there when most people in our age group were home guarding their sleeping progeny, yawning and struggling through the last hour before they could respectably turn in, too.
I’ve never spotted an interesting stranger from across the room at occasions such as these—everyone tends to dissolve into a blur—and by now anyone who looked interesting turned out, on closer inspection, to be not a stranger but someone from my past whom I’d either forgotten or hoped had forgotten me. But tonight—perhaps thanks to the full trays of vodka being spirited past by insectlike waitresses, or the pot a wobbly art dealer had coaxed me into trying at the door—I wasn’t bored. Victor and I stood in a corner and watched my neighbor hold various people in thrall. My neighbor looked a little weary. Holding crowds of people in thrall can be exhausting. He motioned us over, so we settled into the unsightly stuffed furniture that crowds new bars for those getting on in years. My neighbor and Victor are allies. When they enter a social gathering together, people look up. They communicate with each other by a flash of the eyes or a discreet nod, and they make an impenetrable and arresting pair. They launched into their own convoluted discourse, and I took the opportunity to gaze around.
Then this guy came along. I didn’t know he was still around; I’d heard he’d slipped out of town—a New York “timely” disappearance. He was one of those big-wheel-behind-the-scenes guys you always heard vague rumors about. I still remembered hearing about him when he’d just moved to town from Paris years ago and was causing some commotion. He was a kind of a renaissance man, a jazz whiz kid—a bass player—one day, then an impresario who owned a jazz club the next. He’d been something of an enfant terrible in jazz circles, and no one knew why he’d stopped playing. But mystery was always welcome in these circles, and he was mysterious with class.
I used to tag along with my brother to his club, before it became infested with tourists and businessmen, before it became what my brother, a jazz musician himself, referred to as a “soft-dick jazz club.” This guy could play and he had a real presence—he looked l
ike he’d been zipped too tight into his human suit. I was surprised to see him at a very stuffy exclusive art event a few years later. He looked trapped and I liked that. The friend I was with introduced us, and this guy looked right past me to the door. Later I asked my brother what his story was. He said this guy had been the real thing, a musician’s musician, and then he passed on a few of the rumors—one or possibly two ex-wives, an uncertain number of kids, a very fashionable society-type current wife—and some “extracurricular activity” on the side. So I had some background.
He sat down with us and began riffing with my neighbor about an uptown multicultural arts festival they’d suffered through together. The guy referred to the festival as a “coon fest” and commented on some of the standard notables. “Oh, yeah, they rounded up every creative Negro in town,” my neighbor said, and they both smirked. I smirked, too, but I couldn’t really participate. They continued riffing on this one and that one, my neighbor graciously playing the straight man.
Eventually I couldn’t resist; I whispered to my neighbor, “Come on, there must have been at least a Jew or two.”
The guy heard me and said, “Oh yeah, more than a few—this was a first-class coon fest—and you know a black man’s really made it when he owns a Jew.” I laughed outright and he tried not to. Soon he was ordering rounds of drinks for everyone—except himself. He nursed a glass of red wine forever, using it primarily as a prop.
Others joined us, among them an artist I’d known when he first landed in New York, Minnesota-sweet and earnest. Now he was semifamous with a fake English accent—and insufferable. We made room for the artist and somehow the guy ended up sitting across from me. I was wedged in next to Victor. He turned to me casually and asked, “What do you do?”
I told him I was a painter and that I’d started writing recently to make money. He didn’t blink at the ludicrous nature of that statement—most people did—and he moved in closer. He insisted I have another drink, but I demurred and sipped water cautiously.
“You don’t drink?”
I told him that Jews were more likely to be drug addicts than drinkers.
“Not the ones I know—they’re both,” he said. Then I confessed I never drank too much because I was sure I’d end up in a heap in some forsaken corner. I’d never said that out loud before.
He asked about my work. “My ex-wife’s a dealer,” he explained. “I do some collecting.” We discovered he knew a dealer I’d shown with recently, and he said curtly, “She’s a crook. But she’s a crook with an eye. You must be talented to show there.”
I told him that my father used to ask me if my musician brother was “talented.” Would he be “successful”? It had driven me nuts to have to explain over and over that, yes, he was talented, but talent had little to do with success.
“You’re right,” he said. “Forget I said that.”
“Okay. Anyway, he never asked me again after the Times decided that my brother was talented.”
“Who’s your brother?” I told him and he said, “He’s your brother? I know him. Yeah, I saw him play in Paris. He’s good.” My brother did not play soft-dick jazz, so I was surprised. “I used to play the bass. Well, sometimes I still do—”
I interrupted. “I know that. I’ve heard you play. I used to go to your club—oh, a long time ago, before it was, before it was . . .”
“Before it was jive? Is that what you’re trying not to say?”
“Well, kind of.”
His insidious charm was making me loose-lipped, and I was almost relieved when the creepy artist leaned in. He’d been watching us closely; he must have known this guy was a collector. “So you’ve gotten hitched,” he said, addressing me but giving the guy a just-between-us-guys look. “How brilliant. I suppose you’ve moved to elegant uptown quarters.”
“Oh, no, no, we just . . .” I began, but the guy took over.
“I live in the East Village—I wouldn’t call that terribly elegant.”
The artist had stopped listening; someone really famous appeared, and I said to the guy, “You liar, you don’t live in the East Village.”
“Was it that obvious?”
“To me it was. But you’re not as bad as him; that guy was asking for it. I mean, his whole life is a lie.”
“You’re sure I’m not as bad as him?” He was trying not to laugh again. Then the artist turned back to us and went on and on until the guy got up abruptly and walked away. When he returned, he apologized to me.
“I’m not much of a group person. I have no tolerance, and I’ve got the kind of face where it shows—unfortunately.” I assured him that I shared a similar affliction, but he refused to believe me. “Oh, no, you’ve got a pleasant face.” He moved in even closer and gestured with the glass of wine. “Are you sure you don’t want a drink?”
My neighbor, who’d been watching us with his third eye, reached behind Victor, nudged me, and hissed, “Be careful.”
I laughed him off. “Don’t worry. I’m not stupid.” I rarely lived in the present, much less enjoyed living in the present, and I was determined not to let anything spoil it.
The guy and I started talking bad TV, one of my favorite topics and a safe one. “Oh, yeah,” he said, “bad TV is great.”
“So do you let your kids watch?”
“I only have one . . . here . . . I mean, yeah, most of the time.” He pressed his lips together. I snickered. I wasn’t stupid.
His eyes were deep and dark and steady. They were eyes that listened hard—and judged hard. But I had grown up surrounded by eyes that judged hard; it was familiar. I approved of his eyes’ judgments—and he understood my shorthand. The eyes and the gentle voice made me confide recklessly things I sheltered closely in my battle to seem normal. My neighbor hissed and nudged more frequently, and I just laughed. This guy, he brought out the laughter in me. I was doing entirely too much of it. I laughed when I told him about my heart problem, a valve that was misbehaving, and the inevitable surgery—a topic there was no need to broach and one I always assiduously avoided broaching with anyone, even myself. I laughed when I mentioned the numerous dead friends I’d accumulated in the past five years. I laughed when I told him that maybe the art career for which I’d forsaken all chance of normalcy wasn’t going according to plan. He watched me and listened closely. When I laughed, he didn’t flinch. He hailed from the dark side, too, so he got the joke.
A resurgence of small talk seemed unlikely after the maudlin detour, but we managed. I regaled him with stories of my crazy family and my crazy brothers.
“So I gather you’re not a big fan of men,” he said.
“I don’t think they’re any worse than women, do you?”
He nearly smiled, and then he said he didn’t have any experience with brothers or sisters; he was an only child—well, actually, an only child with an anonymous father, possibly still at large. “It wasn’t what you think,” he added. “I wasn’t just another statistic. My parents got married too young. He left when I was barely conceived, and then, well, by the looks of things, my father may have been a white boy. Wouldn’t you agree?” He laughed without smiling—a forced cackle.
“I don’t know. I guess it could go either way.” I caught his eye deliberately. “What kind of statistic were you referring to?”
He studied me and continued. “My mother was a professor. We did okay.” With another cackle his eyes became deeper and darker but less steady.
I changed the subject to the anxiety of getting old. I could tell he had it bad. “But you’re not old!” he insisted. (The pale hazy ochre was doing its job.) I told him that I was—that girl years were like dog years, so I was much much older than he was—and he nodded. “You just might have something there.”
I added that I didn’t care, since I didn’t particularly cotton to the young people; I cared because I wanted a kid, not because everyone had them these days but because I’d always wanted one, and besides, I was sick of just taking care of me; I wanted to ta
ke care of someone else. And then I clammed up. He’d been close to me, but he sat back in his chair then with his hands on his knees; his eyes became muddy. “It’ll happen, don’t worry.” And he smiled a tender smile. He wasn’t the kind who wasted smiles, so when he did smile, it was momentous. He continued to insist that I wasn’t old. I think he had decided I was young and that was the way it was going to be. It made a far more suitable scenario.
He was unbridled and bold in the brains department, and well-versed in obscurities. The list we had in common was long. For a while we shared opinions—more often harsh opinions—on the sticky webs of music and art people we both knew. Then he stopped suddenly and asked, “Hey, is there dancing upstairs?”
“Aren’t you too old to dance?”
Not quite yet, he said, but he hadn’t been dancing in so long, certainly not since he’d been back in New York.
“I dance,” I told him, giggling, “but mostly in private, when I paint.”
He asked what I listened to, and I said I had an extremely narrow musical range—mostly funk and old soul—and I told him I’d seen one particular group led by my hero at least twenty-five times, with loyal Victor by my side. That made him smile the momentous smile. He tried to one-up me by reciting some funk mythology, but I knew more than he did and I won. He liked that I won, and I appreciated that. He did it again, the smile, and I confided my secret fear that I would still be screaming along to the Walkman and dancing wildly while painting when I was wizened and sixty-five. He laughed. I knew I sounded like a nut, but I could tell he got it.
He was handsome enough in a hollow, bony, sharp-edged way, but handsome had never done much for me. It didn’t explain why a terrible and inexplicable urge came over me to grab one of his limbs—any limb, I wasn’t particular. I couldn’t recall ever having had an urge to grab a stranger’s limb in a public place before. I had to grip the arms of the stuffed chair to circumvent an unseemly grab. Just about when I got the limb-grabbing urge, my neighbor and Victor stood up to leave. My neighbor eyed me suspiciously, but he didn’t know the half of it.