Bad Timing

by Betsy Berne

  When Rachel called at seven the next morning I was asleep, so she knew something was up. I confessed and she was merciless.

  “What about his wife, his kid? Where do they think he is at three A.M.?”

  “I doubt the kid notices. I don’t know about the wife. She probably thinks he’s at the club. I didn’t ask.”

  “You haven’t talked about his marriage yet? Don’t you want to know?”

  “It’s come up, but, well, no.”

  “Tu est folle!”

  “Rachel, please speak English. She works for a cosmetics company. They have a big office in Paris, so I guess she goes back and forth, I don’t know.”

  “You asked him?”

  “No, no, I just—”

  “Is she in Paris now?”

  “How should I know? He’s not the type who would leave—”

  “Did he tell you that?”

  “No, I just know, and anyway, I don’t want—”

  “What do you want, for God’s sake?”

  “Nothing. It’s casual. I have to go.”

  “Well, you’re coming to my party tonight, right?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe.”

  “You have to come. You have a show up and you should be seen. There’ll be people there you should talk to.”

  “But I think he’s—”

  “He is coming because we have to talk over specifics.”

  “Let’s not discuss tonight now, okay? Let me just get through this morning.”

  “You don’t sound very happy.”

  “No, I’m happy. I’m ecstatic.”

  Rachel had grown up privileged and sheltered enough to believe that happiness, clear and unsullied, was an inalienable right for each and every one of us. I wasn’t going to be the first to inform her otherwise.

  •

  I spilled my tea on the way to the TV for the morning news shows. At the progressive boarding school, intimate clusters of girls sipped tea at four o’clock while they listened to Vivaldi. To me, four o’clock had meant Return to Peyton Place. Never in my life had I sipped tea or listened to Vivaldi, or any other classical music, for that matter. For some reason, we didn’t have a record player until the King turned sixteen and demanded one, and then he reared us exclusively on soul. As for tea, I’d only turned to it as a last resort due to the nervous stomach.

  The morning shows were juicy because a celebrity had dropped dead earlier in the week: a famous shoe designer. Also a celebrity adulterer, a senator, was being publicly flogged, one of several public celebrity-adulterer floggings this summer that weren’t helping my own foray into the field, especially with this particular partner. I was personally acquainted with ethnic paranoia, but mine seemed almost frivolous next to the life-or-death nature of Joseph Pendleton’s. It was only logical, but logic didn’t make it any less daunting. I turned off the TV before the how-to-have-a-healthy-pregnancy segment began and got ready to face a day of meetings.

  The first was with my beauty editor. The shoe designer’s death had thrown the magazine world into a miasma of grief and postponed deadlines. Everything had to be shifted to make way for the accolades, the personal tributes—and for the ads displaying the shoe designer’s posthumous wares. I had been enlisted to write a how-to-deal-with-your-grief piece. I didn’t want an assignment on grief and how to deal with it. Not only did I prefer to grieve in the privacy of my own home, I wasn’t grieving for the shoe designer. I liked his shoes but I didn’t know him. But you’d better believe all the magazine editors were pretending they knew him, and were grieving, grieving hard.

  The weathermen had wised up and changed their tune to multiple hair-raising heat-wave warnings. It was almost as bad as a winter-storm watch. Winter and summer are not unalike in the city. They’re both seasons where you create your own imaginary indoor climate, batten down the hatches, draw the curtains, and wait it out. I slogged along Forty-second Street in my airconditioning-appropriate corporate layers. My well-preened editor led me into her office and confided that the lipstick piece had been transformed into a chart. No doubt the ayatollah editor in chief, who entertained grand Wizard of Oz delusions, had bellowed a proclamation from behind the curtain. The piece read like a Nielsen ratings chart written by a Las Vegas card shark.

  I didn’t raise any objections. Vulnerability had no place at magazines or art galleries, even though painting and writing did induce vulnerability. But both were about commerce, impersonal commerce, and you were just a sitting duck if you let feelings get in the way. It was hard to remember that personal life was about vulnerability and even harder to switch back and forth.

  When my editor started in on the how-to-deal-with-your-grief piece, I interrupted. “Um, I’m not really grieving.”

  “You’ll grieve. You’re in the denial stage—you should be in the anger stage to write this piece. In the meantime, make some calls. Learn how to grieve. I’ve got a list right here of about ten hot women who are grieving. They’ll tell you how to do it right.”

  The meeting was cut off abruptly because my beauty editor had to make an appearance on a dead-shoe-designer special. There was a large cranky crowd milling about on the subway platform when I got to Grand Central. When an announcement came over the loud speaker like a skipping forty-five, I balked and went back up the stairs to hail the verboten to take me to my next meeting—a strategy session with Ditzgirl. When I arrived at the gallery, she was in the back room, feverishly showing a collector some of her wares: life-sized photographs of naked coupling lesbians in beige living rooms, which brought to mind illustrations from a teenage lesbian romance novel.

  “A very complicated process is involved,” she was saying, gesturing wildly. “A very complex, complicated, conceptual-extremely conceptual—process. The artist Draws the Figure, Photographs the Drawing, and Throws the Drawing Away.”

  “Fascinating,” murmured the collector.

  She could smell the money. “I’d also like to show you some paintings,” she added, half shoving the collector into the main gallery, bless her heart. I got up to follow like an insatiable puppy, but she shooed me away—and I applauded her instincts. Unfortunately the collector had a voice that carried, and the news wasn’t good. He left after writing a check for two coupling photographs.

  “He seemed very interested,” she said.

  “Oh, absolutely.”

  It could have been worse. Some dealers hid in the bathroom when they heard the footsteps of an artist approaching in the distance. Ditzgirl meant well, and she had some promising news. A dealer from Paris was interested in meeting with me, and the two reserves were still holding. Our strategy session ended with a discussion of the dead shoe designer and how much his shoes from the seventies would be worth.

  I couldn’t concentrate at my third meeting—with the cosmetics-company honchos—because I was too busy peering up and down hallways looking for her. I was experiencing some of my own frivolous but quite possibly medically certifiable paranoia. I was also struggling to hide my sun-speckled face and chest because cosmetics-company honchos all have flawless freckleless skin and they might not hire someone sun-speckled. It was a feat to hide and crane and appear involved all at the same time. By the time the two filmmakers arrived, I was contorted and twitching in my white leather chair under the fluorescent light. The filmmakers were downtown scruffy and brash in a thirty-years-old kind of way. They were too smart not to know they’d made compromises early on that might backfire later and had developed scornful wits that challenged anyone to hint as much. One was British so he sounded even wittier. We got on pretty well, all the same, sharing snide, world-weary comments. They told me they would let me know soon, and we went our separate ways.

  I took a circuitous route through the endless white hallways, ostensibly gazing at the art on the walls but really searching for someone who looked as I imagined her. I think I half expected her forehead to be branded with his initials. Then I saw her name on a door and flashed quickly on what must have been her: a
delicately sculpted woman with 1940s marceled hair, formidably tailored with tight, trampish undertones. It was like the climactic scene in a horror movie, and I almost covered my face with my hands.

  •

  Rachel’s new home was packed with guests who all appeared to relish the opportunity to celebrate an eighties revival. I didn’t spot the one person I knew would not be relishing such a celebration, but then, I was trying not to. I wasn’t sure that I could master the necessary skills to greet my fellow adulterer at a social gathering. I wasn’t even sure what those skills were. The faint trail of moist air drifting in from the floor-to-ceiling windows, not to be confused with a breeze, wasn’t sufficient to cool down the sweltering guests who were everywhere, standing woodenly or slumped against what little wall space was bare, crammed together on spindly French couches, sitting precariously on thin wicker chairs, or sprawled on large floor pillows.

  Rachel was manning the party alone because Perry was home in the throes of an awkward adjustment to motherhood. When Perry was not adjusting well she shared her maladjustments with the world—too generously—so we were better off without her. Jean was standing, grimy, sullen, and alone, in the farthest corner of the living room. I hid in the next-farthest corner with Victor. Victor had made a grand total of six, or maybe it was seven, subway trips up and down the island that day and had encountered the same technical difficulties at Grand Central. Only he hadn’t jumped bail and had ridden out the storm, so to speak. Either Victor was the exception to the rule or my neighbor’s ethnics-and-cabs theory was a fallacy.

  “So I went to get my portfolio at the magazine,” Victor told me, expressionless. “They’d requested these pictures, right? Then some lackey calls me to pick it up. Three days ago. No mention of the pictures they’d requested, right? I call before I go up there to make sure it’s there. Well, big surprise—it wasn’t there, and of course I was supposed to bring it to a record company today, as in it would be too late if I didn’t bring it in today. I went to midtown three times today in the middle of a heat wave, right? I didn’t get one gig out of it. In fact I even lost a gig.” Victor was in a very bad mood. I couldn’t decide what to change the subject to—perhaps the breasts-and-dresses artist. Victor didn’t respond to direct prying, innocent or otherwise, so you had to be crafty. His answer would most likely have no bearing on the original question, but it would sound like it made sense until you thought about it later.

  When Sam appeared, his top-dog nasty girl was moping beside him. She was dark, petite, and aloof, like all the others, and she had a burgundy-tinted sneer. None of us ever took to Sam’s girls. It was hard to tell whether Sam even took to his girls. This one might stick as top dog though. What did it really matter, he’d told me recently, once you get used to a certain set of problems, whether it’s a brunette or a blond set of problems? Was it really worth the trouble to embark on a new set? Might as well stick with what you know, he’d concluded with a shrug.

  “I just found out I had my third million-dollar idea stolen out from under me,” he said. “At least I know I’m on the right track.” Sam was always coming up with peculiar inventions and not quite following through on them. Victor was eager to discuss someone else’s bad luck, and they immediately became engrossed.

  I affected a listening pose so that I could scan the crowd surreptitiously, but the floating sensation had returned and my scanning technique was rather slipshod. A few semicircle neck maneuvers were all I could swing before I became dizzy. I did notice various notable people in the business whom I should have been talking to, but none looked terribly enticing. Mobility was a problem—I was wearing delicate princess heels, and the combination of the floating sensation, the heels, and the sweltering crowd in the midst of an excessive amount of spindly French furniture might result in an awkward spill.

  Fortunately Rachel swooped in, with an art person on her arm and my neighbor plodding stoically behind. The art person was a collector and behaved like one: blundering, earnest, and goofy, traits filtered through the ineffable air of confidence that emanates from rich people. We had a short conversation, which ended with him assuring me that he would see my show tomorrow. Rachel was delighted. Victor rolled his eyes.

  I was rather enjoying the lewd commentary Sam had begun with Rachel when I saw Joseph Pendleton. I could tell he was looking somewhere beyond me or he wouldn’t have been proceeding at such a furious pace right toward us. Rachel lunged for him, causing him to step back in alarm. I stepped back in alarm, too, or rather I tripped backward in my shoes. She got him in a neck lock and planted effusive kisses on both cheeks. He told Rachel he had some business to take care of but would get back to her, looked right through me, and moved on. A look right through me from someone who’d been wrapped around me less than twenty-four hours prior caused distress that proceeded directly to my internal organs. I would have liked to move as regally as possible right out the door. Instead my bound feet and I rose to the challenge and minced painfully around the party with a renewed gregariousness built on a foundation of nerves and despair.

  I talked to the art people, including a critic my good pal Joseph Pendleton had mentioned, when was it, a day or two ago? Then I teetered over to the farthest corner and, under the circumstances, found Jean’s sloppy pretentiousness endearing. He rewarded me with an introduction to a fellow countryman who turned out to be the dealer Ditzgirl had mentioned, David Mendelsohn. He was slight and wiry with a big brainy forehead and bulging eyes. He said all the right things; he even said he found my paintings serene. The only other person who had described my paintings as serene was Jack. Then my neighbor appeared like clockwork to sweep David Mendelsohn—he was just balding enough—right off his feet. I backed away to leave room for potential sparks to ignite, but my neighbor turned around: “Victor and I are leaving. Do you want to come?”

  The hormones, I hope it was the hormones, or the shoes, maybe, or the word serene—that had to be it—made me exit abruptly.

  I sat on Rachel’s stoop taking deep gulps of summer air so dense it could hardly be called air. Her block was lined with one quaint brownstone after another, each equipped with large enough parlor windows so that you could spy on the seemingly tranquil lives proceeding within their sparse elegance. By the time my neighbor and Victor joined me, they were already involved in a convoluted discourse about Victor’s apartment eviction and subsequent move—to where nobody quite knew. I trailed behind and at the corner I told my neighbor I didn’t care where we went as long as we could go in a cab.

  “Oh, now there’s a switch,” he began, but after one glance at my face he stopped.

  “My feet,” I began.

  “Oh, sure, it’s your feet,” he said sharply.

  We headed down Seventh Avenue through the gridlock traffic and festering swarms of club kids. Clubs were opening and closing so fast that not even the club kids could keep up, judging by the crowds outside even the clubs that were boarded up. We went to the restaurant on my neighbor’s block, a cutesy yuppie restaurant we held in contempt under more solvent circumstances. This block—just an average city block clogged with buses and cabs and jeeps and sports cars wending their way uptown or taking the tunnel to New Jersey—served as our village green, and it wasn’t long before I recognized a voice.

  My brothers were always turning up at the wrong time. This brother’s long body, unwieldy with middle age, was crammed into a table designed for a trim up-and-coming yuppie. Crammed across the table from him was his drummer, Hank. Hank and I had more than a slight acquaintance, and there was something in the air between the two of us—he had a rakish, street-kid element that reminded me of Jack—except the timing was never right. Actually, I had a sneaking suspicion that bad timing was really saving us both some wasted time.

  “You’re all dressed up,” my brother said. “Where were you?”

  “A party at Rachel’s.”

  “Ooooh, lots of celebrities? Doesn’t Rachel always stoke her parties with celebrities?”

/>   “I guess.”

  “A little down tonight? Wouldn’t you agree, Hank?” Hank didn’t look up. “Dr. Doom?”

  “Who’s Dr. Doom?” This time Hank looked up with interest, interest that was simply a manifestation of the human condition.

  “Don’t ask.” My brother smiled a superior smile.

  It had been leaked through the family members that the concubine had deserted the cult, and there were rumors that she might be considering joining ours, legitimately, that is. But privacy was at a limited premium within our ranks, and a precious commodity, so I remained mum.

  “What are you guys doing tonight?” I said instead.

  “We’re doing a hang, going to some clubs. Not the club you’re thinking of.”

  “Why don’t you come with us?” Hank had perked right up.

  “No, I can’t, maybe—”

  “Off to more parties with your rich friends?” Hank’s bluster was becoming tainted by bitterness as he aged, a process that is always most devastating for the vain. He also had a blue-collar chip on his shoulder that required one to buoy his ego far beyond the call of duty. After some desultory buoying, I went back to my neighbor and Victor.

  “Why don’t you go out with him?” my neighbor whispered.

  “I’ve told you. Bad timing. And the blue-collar chip on his shoulder.”

  “Oh, yes, I forgot.” He nodded. “You’re into the black boulder these days.”

  “I’m not into chips or boulders,” I snapped.

  “Speaking of boulders, we won’t mention any names, but that was cold,” my neighbor said. “That was really cold.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You know what I’m talking about.”

  I turned to Victor. “Listen,” I said, “if you need any help moving . . .”