by Betsy Berne
As I left for the airport late the next evening, my mother asked anxiously, “Honey, we did have a good time, didn’t we? We did have some laughs, didn’t we? Didn’t it feel like a vacation?”
“Yes, yes, it was great,” I assured her. “Yes, yes, it was like a vacation.” It had resembled a vacation, I thought, but the kind of vacation I needed most—a vacation from myself—was eluding me. Not even my mother, the travel agent, was capable of arranging that kind of vacation.
C H A P T E R
16
WHAT A DIFFERENCE a day does not make—even an extra-long thirty-six-hour day in a beige-and-blue state.
“Try to remember you’re having a bad day, not a bad life,” Aaron advised when she called from the rehab hospital Kojak was paying for. She’d been sequestered for little more than a week, and already she was equipped with a stockpile of platitudes. She didn’t miss the drinking yet, she said. “They keep you so damn busy.”
“Doing what?”
“Groups, lots of groups. In fact I can’t talk long. I’m due at abuse group in a few minutes because this asshole reported me for being rude, or maybe she said I was a snob, I can’t remember. They keep you so busy I can hardly remember a thing. I don’t know, something’s working—it must be because they scare the fucking daylights out of you.”
My neighbor was suspicious when I told him how well Aaron was doing. “There has to be some kind of a religion thing going on—God’s behind all those places.”
“There was a New Age tone to her voice, but she didn’t mention anything specific,” I said.
“Believe me,” he said. “There are some prayers going down somewhere.” Or maybe that was my line. I can’t remember, which is surprising because I remember most lines spoken to or by me that August. I remember distinctly that the month was taking forever to end, and I remember the silence that greeted me when I returned home from Florida.
You couldn’t really call it summer anymore. We were in a holding pattern between seasons, so the balance was off in the city. The poor neighborhoods were too loud and the rich neighborhoods were too quiet. Joseph Pendleton hadn’t responded to the message I’d left before I’d gone away and I was pretty sure he was back in town. I was positive she was back in town because the script had been approved. I left another message, not with the secretary this time but on his brand-new “voicemail,” a surprising bow to technology, since he prided himself on keeping his office not up-to-date. On the message I stumbled through an abbreviated version of my side of the story for whatever had gone wrong that night, and then I waited for an appropriate amount of time—appropriate for what, I don’t know. When I tried again, he answered.
“Oh, hello. Can I call you right back?” He did call me right back, but his tone made my spine go rigid. “I’ve been out at my Long Island place,” he said.
“Oh, that’s nice.”
“No, it’s not nice. Would you call the L.I.E. a nice highway? The commute is a nightmare. I’ve got so much to do in the city right now that I’m always coming or going at the wrong time, so there’s nothing I can do to avoid the traffic.”
“Well, maybe it would be easier to take the train? I kind of like the—”
“I wouldn’t be caught dead on that filthy train. So what have you been doing?”
“Not much. I was away.”
“Where?”
“It was only for a day or two.”
“Can you hold on for a minute . . . you were saying?”
“I don’t remember. Oh, what I’ve been doing. Not painting because I got an assignment. I have to write about a day in the life of a cosmetics clerk. No, sorry, they call them aestheticians. What have you been doing?”
“Whatever happened to the dead-shoe-designer article?”
“It came out.”
“I’ll have to look for it.” I didn’t tell him that the magazine was a weekly, that the issue was already off the stands.
“Well, can we see each other?” I said instead.
“Not in the near future.”
“Near future?”
“I no longer have my evenings free. I’m at the club most evenings, and what with commuting . . . I’m gearing up for September at the club. Fall seems to start earlier every year, doesn’t it?”
“No, I hadn’t noticed. Well, it’s good that you’re busy.” No evenings free. That had never presented a problem before. No, there had always been afternoons free.
“Not really. It’s just a lot of bullshit to deal with. Tedious, really. It’s pretty miserable.”
“Okay, busy and miserable. Anything else to tell me?”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Well, let’s be honest—oh, pardon the expression. You haven’t called since . . . in a while. Are you mad about something?”
“No, I’m not mad. Why would I be mad?”
“You haven’t called me back.”
“I never got a message that you called.”
“I left two messages.”
“Oh, I haven’t had a chance to listen to all my messages since I’ve been . . . since I’ve been, ah, around.”
“I left one message with your secretary.”
“Oh, I never got it. I apologize for any—”
“Inconvenience? Were you going to say inconvenience?”
“Oh, hold on, another call . . .” He eased up when he returned. “Your voice . . . you don’t sound like yourself.”
“I don’t? Oh, I guess . . . well, are you trying to get rid of me?”
“What a terrible thing to say! Oh, damn, just a minute, I’ve got another call. I have to take this. Listen, we’ll talk soon.” His conscience made his voice brittle. “Ah . . . take care.”
“We’ll talk soon” was bad enough, and “I’ll call you next week,” an old standard, was a sure sign that he would not, but “take care” was downright deadly. It was irreversible, final, like something you’d say to your grandmother whom you weren’t going to be seeing anytime soon. I didn’t call again for a week, a week crammed with bad days, but at least Aaron called frequently to remind me that it wasn’t necessarily a bad life.
Rachel wasn’t around. She was with the groom-to-be in the place to be, the hub of the universe: glorious Paris. We talked regularly. Rather, she talked and when the overseas pauses grew too costly I prodded her in a dead voice. She told me that he had bowed out of the project.
“What was his excuse?” I asked. “Just out of curiosity.”
“Apparently his collection is tied up. Some show just came up. He was very apologetic, you know, a real gentleman. He suggested some people to call and said I could use his name, and if that didn’t work he said he would make some calls for me. I can’t complain. He was perfectly lovely.”
“I’m sure.”
My neighbor avoided me. He hadn’t been involved one-on-one for a long time, and maybe he’d just had it with being involved one-on-two with me. He’d probably forgotten how the rational part of the brain shrinks to infinitesimal size in these instances and how everything else goes into overdrive to compensate. Or maybe he deemed my behavior self-indulgent or delusional, a concept I had long since embraced. His fall was starting early, too, and he also may just have been too busy becoming famous as a hot deejay. Now he had the two-career problem, which I knew all too well was no small problem. Whatever the reason, he couldn’t take my saga anymore. When we did speak, he was polite and I retaliated with reserve. Eventually I was so taut and high-pitched that he blew up, and he didn’t blow easily.
“What the hell is going on?”
“Nothing.”
I wasn’t lying. It was that the whole experience had come full circle, as bleak and hauntingly as I’d anticipated. Medical bills had suddenly started to arrive at a brisk tempo, reminding me of how it had all begun, and it looked like my insurance wasn’t going to cover how it had all begun. I flogged myself daily, if not hourly, over my weak will, my inability to cope with an ostensibly casual, short-lived affair, b
ut my emotions were loose and floppy and no amount of flogging snapped them back into place. Joseph Pendleton and the ghost baby were bound inextricably together, triggering all the big-picture questions just as they had initially. Each day began at dawn, strong and proud. But by the time I lay prostrate on the couch for the apex of my day, my six o’clock show, I was spent, just spent.
In these circumstances you were supposed to be angry, but I wasn’t. I would have welcomed anger. In fact I was counting on Aaron to give me explicit instructions on how to get in touch with my anger. When she finally called, she said that anger was the key to closure, and when I managed it, she assured me, I would “let go.”
Closure? They were still pushing closure? To me the term, not to mention the concept, had always been suspect. Besides, didn’t you need cooperation in order to reach the alleged closure? But I was willing to try. I called again, with a new tactic: upbeat and businesslike. After all, handling business and romance in the city weren’t all that different. I was also determined to take him up on his long-ago offer “to pay half.” I would bring it up once, only once; that was all the degradation I was willing to withstand. Then I’d swoop in like a stealth bomber to confront the real business at hand, and if all went according to plan, I’d trap some truth.
“There were just a few things I wanted to ask you,” I said. There was still some sleeping potion in my bloodstream, so I sounded relatively calm and casual. “Do you have a few minutes?” Not giving him a chance to protest, I continued in my calm and casual voice. “Um, that cosmetics-clerk assignment, well, it’s evolved into an article about what makeup women should wear at what age, I know it’s ridiculous, but anyhow . . . should they or shouldn’t they, you know . . . wear makeup, lipstick, mascara, all that kind of thing . . . how much, how little. Anyway, I have to ask men their opinions.”
“You’re barking up the wrong tree. I wouldn’t know anything about that, I hardly have the time to look at women.”
“Of course you don’t, but I need one more man, so let me just ask you the questions. There are only a few. And also, um, it looks like my insurance isn’t going to cover. I got some bills, and it looks like it’s not going to cover the whole thing, the . . . you know—”
“How much do you need?”
“Um, I guess around two hundred.”
Rachel had said right from the start that I should insist he pay the entire amount and not even mention insurance. I was entitled, she’d said. So what if I made money on the deal?
“Fine, I’ll give it to you next week.”
“No hurry. Anyway, do you think women should wear makeup?”
“It depends. Unattractive women should probably wear some. Really unattractive women shouldn’t wear any—it just accentuates their flaws. Attractive women shouldn’t wear any, either.”
“I have a feeling that quote is not going to go over well. Let’s try again. How about lipstick?”
“Maybe a little. Never bright colors, especially not that awful orangy red.”
“You may not be aware of this, but bright orangy red is in.”
“No, I have noticed. It’s really awful, especially when they gob it on. Even on younger women—”
“But I thought you didn’t look at women. And I’m sure you don’t look at younger women.” We were teenagers again, playing hooky in a paneled basement, and I egged him on. “What about women as they get older?”
“The less makeup the better. No lipstick or nail polish in funny shades.”
“Even older women who look young shouldn’t wear a little makeup. You know, the kind with no wrinkles, perfect bodies?”
“No such thing exists. They’re kidding themselves if they think—”
I swooped in then. “So anyway, what’s going on? And don’t act like nothing’s wrong.”
“All right. I was mad. And guilty.”
“Mad about what? Guilty about who? Me or your . . . your family?” The term wife still would not leave my mouth. You cannot play hooky forever, especially on your genes.
“My family. My son, he was up one night when I got home . . . from you. Adolescents, they’re perceptive, they know. I mean, this is only going to get worse for both of us. There’s just going to be another calamity. It’s going to be disastrous.” He left out “when it ends,” like he always did. Like I always did, too. Why would we start putting it in at this stage? It was what always made our separate but equally pointed silences all the more ominous. It was the unuttered phrase at the end of every sentence either of us had ever uttered, the filler for every pause, the answer to every question we’d ever asked, or never asked.
“Why didn’t you just say you were mad when I asked you before?”
“Because I didn’t feel as strongly then, and you’ve been so persistent.”
“You call this persistent?”
“I’m telling you, it’s going to be a disaster. I don’t know how you’re going to react. Human nature is such that you never know . . . it’s such a . . .”
“You still don’t trust me?”
“I do trust you, I do. It’s just . . . I don’t know how you really feel, what you want.” I would have liked to help him out, but I couldn’t. “And then a friend of mine said he’d heard some talk about me . . . and some Soho artist. That pissed me off. Perhaps your friends aren’t as reliable as you might imagine.”
“Who said that?”
“I’m not going to play that game. It’s not important who said what. That kind of information just keeps the game going.”
“Okay, fine, but no one I know would refer to me as a Soho artist.”
“Well, maybe I am being a little paranoid.”
“Maybe? Maybe? You are the most paranoid person I’ve ever met.”
“Well, maybe I’ve lived a lot longer than you have, just maybe long enough to understand what—”
“Forget it. But Joseph, the other night, that night, after that night, I mean, we do have to talk about . . . Oh, damn it, now I have a call. Hold on . . . the goddamn phone company. What was I saying?”
“You were saying I was the most paranoid person you’d ever come across.”
“No, that wasn’t it, let’s see . . . Where was I? Well, I don’t know, I don’t know.”
This time he said “Take care” so tenderly, so wistfully, that it was clear he hadn’t quite made up his mind yet and I’d made a calm and casual dent. I was willing to wait for a decision, but I wasn’t a good waiter. He’d said the near future was out. But he had also said he would give me the money next week. How would one define “near future”?
•
The near future, which I had decided to define as next week, was a long time in coming. It was not next week. Nor was it the week after next. I continued to pass the time. I spent a morning with Victor, who was heading toward the poorhouse via the waiting-for-a-corporate-check process. Now he had in his possession a bona fide corporate check. Unfortunately, he no longer had a checking account. He also no longer had a picture ID, and apparently without a picture ID, you can’t cash a check or open a checking account. Victor was matter-of-fact about the situation, but I saw the defeat and humiliation in his eyes, and besides, my feeling about Victor was that any one of us could be Victor if we were so bold as to be what we were, if we just plain lost the skills to be what we weren’t in order to play the game.
We celebrated our check-cashing victory in the concrete park. Victor liked the concrete park, too. I’d often see him sitting upright on his bench among the assorted bums with his cane standing guard, like a distinguished English gentleman, reading one of his enormous books. We sat close together on the bench, and I felt better than I had in a long time.
“We really pulled it off,” I said smugly. “It was so easy. I wonder why it didn’t work before. It had to be a racist thing, don’t you think?”
“I wasn’t going to bring it up,” he said. “I think one of the bank tellers before was even black, right, but it didn’t make a difference. It proba
bly made things worse. Yeah, it’s insane. We’re sitting here congratulating ourselves like we pulled off some scam, a fucking criminal act, and all we were doing was cashing a check. A corporate check, for God’s sake. Right? I was nervous with that last teller, the Indian guy. When he started giving us that officious Indian attitude—”
“Oh, are Indians officious?”
“Is the sky blue?”
The next day I had to undergo a makeover for the makeup article. It was a disheartening experience. When it was over, I conducted a hasty interview and took off. I was distracted when I sat down to write the article because, while I still hadn’t gotten in touch with my anger, I was wildly in touch with my despair. I reminded myself that closure was imminent, that I’d see him soon. After all, he owed me money and he wouldn’t renege on that, not Joseph Pendleton with his precious sense of propriety.
I spent a horrible evening with Hank, so horrible it may very well have been our last, a swan song to forced romance. I took him to an art opening where orangy-red lipstick predominated and the women wore summer clothes so tight that even flat New York bellies protruded and the men wore heavy black boots—in the summer. I had worn the pink shoes in an act of irrational rebellion, and it was a mistake. After the opening we had to undergo the food-and-dating challenge—the hunt for the perfect restaurant—which involved covering many cement miles. The blisters returned full force, and I was sweaty and cranky in the quaint French bistro. When Hank began pronouncing ludicrous romanticisms about what it meant to be an artist, my frustration almost caused a public to bubble up. When I sequed obliquely into my current predicament, Hank was brusque and the public bubbled over, and though I apologized, he was even colder.
I told Rachel about the evening when she checked in from Paris, and she gave me hell.