by Anna Monardo
“Actually, Denise—”
“—let’s look at the facts. You’re a talented artist with a decent career. You’re showing in galleries. You’re producing. You’ve been married a significantly long time. You say here you love your wife and you’re committed to your marriage. The portrait you drew here of your wife—Christopher, she’s gorgeous. What’s more, you’re very good-looking yourself. The two of you don’t have financial troubles, according to the information you wrote. You own a loft in SoHo, and you have a thousand friends. I’ll just be straightforward. You and your wife are in a completely different league than Don and I ever were. Why would you do this, and why would you do this with me?”
“Denise, there’s a lot—”
“And I must add, too, I don’t need you to boost my confidence. I’m quite happy with who I am and all that. I just need to know who you are, and why you’re doing this.”
Christopher felt dizzy. She kept making him feel this way. He leaned forward, rested his head on his knees, felt the worn khaki against his unshaven face. She was so quiet, mousy, invisible almost, yet she’d just said bold, unspeakable stuff. That pecking order guided everything among people in New York—though it was never talked about, not as honestly as Denise had just spelled it out. Christopher felt himself sinking and, with no other explanation to cling to, he decided once more that he was falling in love.
“Denise, I need to talk to you. I mean in person. I need to see you. I need to see you today and talk about all this. I’m coming up there.”
“Not possible. I don’t see donor applicants up here, only in the city. And, besides, today is a writing day for me. At this point in the process—”
“Denise, with all respect, fuck your process. We’re talking here about a baby, not a lab experiment. I need to talk to you. Not all of us can put words down on paper. I’ve gone along with your rules now for weeks.” Don’t exaggerate, she’s not Nora. “It’s been about two and a half weeks now.” He lowered his voice. “I realize your situation here, and I have a lot of respect for how you’re going about this. I really do have a lot of respect for you, Denise. I’m trying to follow your rules. But your rules don’t account for the other person’s needs of their own. I know I don’t have as much at stake here as you do, no way like you do, but this is very important and crucial to me in a lot of ways. This is highly personal. And I have to talk to a face. My God, Denise, we’re talking about a baby.”
There was a long long-distance pause, which by now Christopher knew went against Denise’s thriftiness. Something new was happening.
Finally, she said, “I need to work at least three more hours today.”
“That would be three o’clock. I’ll come by at four. How do I get to your place?”
“No. I won’t see you at my house. I don’t feel comfortable with that. I’ll meet you in a public place in Nyack. In the coffee shop.”
“I don’t know if I can talk about all this in a coffee shop with people around.”
“It’s the only arrangement I’ll feel comfortable with.”
“Tell me where this coffee shop is. Tell me how I get there.”
NYACK WAS NO EASY MATTER, even though people had started talking it up as the new perfect place to live. Christopher had to take the subway to Grand Central Station. Then the train to Tarrytown. Denise had told him that if he got the train around four o’clock, there would be a bus at the train station to take him across the bridge to Nyack.
“How about a cab? Can’t I just take a cab?”
“Costs too much,” she told him.
After getting off the train in Tarrytown, he waited twenty minutes and still no bus, so he took a cab. Denise didn’t need to know. In the backseat of the cab, Christopher was about to fall asleep (in the depressurizing zone between leaving the city and arriving somewhere outside the city, he always felt exhausted), but as soon as they drove onto the Tappan Zee Bridge to go over the Hudson River, the dark, serious waters caught his attention. The hugeness of the Hudson. What the hell am I doing? As soon as he saw Denise, he’d tell her to forget it. He’d chalk this up to one more lost day when he could have been in his studio. He was going back to his normal life. Enough of this crazy shit.
Christopher’s disenchantment with Denise Wojciekowski and her plan was confirmed when his taxi got near the Nyack side of the river and Christopher saw the houses and yards of the town tucked into the hills at the foot of the bridge, a small settlement as precious and out-of-date, as kitsch and sweet, as the miniatures in his nonna’s Christmas presepio display: a couple dozen cardboard cottages glittered with fake snow, tiny chipped ceramic villagers, a forest of bent-bristle trees in unnatural shades of red and blue. And at the center, a manger with glued-on straw. Nonna had bought the whole tacky caboodle, bit by bit as she saved her money, at the five-and-dime store during the 1930s and ’40s. Christopher loved his nonna very much, but he’d be damned if some stranger, some Denise, was going to drag him back to the aesthetic and cultural wasteland he’d grown up in. “Do you know when’s the next train back to Grand Central?” he asked the cabbie.
“You just missed it. But you can pick up a schedule in town. They run in the evening pretty regular.” The guy was pulling over to the curb on a tree-lined street of shops in old buildings with bright new awnings.
“This the center of town?” Christopher asked.
“This is it. You get your train schedules and all that over there, in that booth.” It was cute and white. “They’ll give you even a map.”
Christopher paid the guy ten bucks. Denise sure was cheap, acting like a ten-dollar cab fare was a big deal. Stingy. Stingy with her time and with her money.
The day had turned on him. When he’d left the city it had been cloudy, nice and cool. Now the sun was hot; the temperature had gone up about ten degrees. Christopher stood under a tree and took off his leather jacket. He was wearing clean black work pants and boots, and a too-hot long-sleeve T-shirt. Itchy. He bunched his jacket under his arm, rolled his sleeves up over his elbows. All those people saying Nyack! Nyack! Arty and crafty, with big houses to rent, much cheaper than the city. They were nuts. They can have it. He pulled out his pocket watch, flipped it open. Two hours and twenty minutes to get here from SoHo. Another two hours and twenty minutes to get back.
There was a pay phone not far from the info booth. She answered on the third ring and told him, “Go to the coffee shop across the street.”
“Where?”
“Right behind where you’re standing. Turn,” she directed him. “Look.”
Great. So she was in a lousy mood, too.
“Get a booth and wait for me. I’ll be there in about ten minutes.”
IT TOOK DENISE twenty-five minutes to get to the coffee shop. When she arrived, she was wearing faded old blue jeans that were a little tighter than what he’d seen her in before. A shrunken Penn State sweatshirt with sleeves rolled up. Much more relaxed than she dressed for the city, but she still wasn’t attractive. There was this thing Christopher had noticed before but never registered completely: Denise had almost no lips. Her mouth was small and folded in, a hillbilly look that suggested she might be missing front teeth. Of course, she had all her teeth, but there was a low-class quality to her features that Christopher recognized from the old neighborhood his parents had grown up in, the people Nonna called “the white trashy.”
Without any hello, she told him, “I don’t like interrupting my work.”
How could he be in love and not feel any sexual pull to the woman? For the first time, Christopher wondered if Denise was a lesbian. Maybe that was it. He knew he’d been sending some vibe out, but she never responded. She’s gay. Interesting twist.
They were sitting in a booth in the back, far from the door and cash register and the few other customers. Christopher was facing the entrance. The exit. Denise looked around over her shoulder, then back at Christopher. “What are we here to talk about?” she asked.
Feeling suddenly bored, slee
py, he picked at a patch of dark-blue paint on the outside of his wrist, couldn’t look up at her. God, she’s rude. “You want to know why I’m your guy for this unusual…well, this arrangement. I’m going to tell you.” Pause. He had no idea what he was going to say.
“Well?” she asked.
“Ever since I was a kid—Did I tell you I was born in Kansas City?”
“Missouri or Kansas?”
“Missouri.”
This was a small encouragement. Denise knew, as many New Yorkers did not, that Kansas City was located in two states. He went on to tell Denise what it meant to him that he’d been born in Kansas City, Missouri. It meant that—even though by his teenage years he was considered by the kids in his suburban neighborhood to be someone apart (some said stuck-up) because of all the time he spent in the garage painting, even though he’d been one of the top students in his grad-school class at the Chicago Art Institute—he’d been terrified when he arrived in New York City.
“Terrified of what?” Denise asked him.
“I was afraid everybody would see I was this rube, this idiot dolt from the Midwest who knew nothing.” Christopher, just out of grad school, had certainly felt exactly like that when he arrived in New York. And probably he still felt it, even now, after so many years.
“I got here from Chicago,” he told Denise, “I didn’t even know you had to have correct change for the bus. My first day, I got the bus from LaGuardia to Grand Central. I walked up the street to get the M30, because that’s the bus my friend told me to take to his apartment, and I’ve got my suitcase and portfolio, and it’s pouring rain like crazy, and it’s noon on Friday, so everybody’s running around. The bus shows up, I get on. I try shoving a dollar bill into the coin box, and the driver yells something so fast to me I can’t understand him. And these three old ladies—I’ll never forget them—they all yell at me, real loud, ‘You need correct change! It won’t take dollar bills.’ And all these people had to pass up coins to me and change my dollar bill.”
“That upset you? Those ladies were probably thrilled to have a chance to talk to a good-looking kid. Probably all three of them wanted to take you home,” Denise said, but the way she said it, in her flat Denise-voice, she offered no compliment, just fact. “Besides,” she continued, “nobody knows you need correct change the first time they get on a bus. You never rode the bus in Chicago?”
“I had a car.” Christopher looked away from her, down to his hands on the table. “Can I ask you something? Personal?”
“What?”
“Are you gay?”
“No,” she answered.
“Oh,” he said.
When he looked up, she was looking at him, waiting for him to go on with his story. He was silent. “Are you gay?” she asked.
“No. No, I’m not.”
“Yeah, I didn’t think so. But, look, I still don’t understand. This Kansas City problem you have. I mean, I came here from Erie. More than twenty years ago. Right out of college. I was a rube then, I’m still a rube. What you sent me in your questionnaire, all those sketches about when you and Nora lived in France—I’ve gone as far west as Chicago, that’s it. I’ve gone as far over the Atlantic as you can go on the Staten Island Ferry.”
“Well, let me explain. Let me tell you. Anyway…”
Anyway, it went on for five hours, the rest of the afternoon and into the evening. He told Denise about the good neighborhood (“one-acre lot for each house, no sidewalks, lots of circular driveways”) he’d grown up in. The fancy brand-new Tudor-imitation house his father had built to please his mother.
“Sounds good to me,” Denise said. “My sister and my two brothers and I shared a bedroom with two sets of bunk beds. Until one of my brothers went away to school, and then we had more room.”
“Where’d he go? Boarding school?”
“Sort of. Detention home for delinquent kids. So—Kansas City, tell me the rest.”
There was Christopher’s family in their good neighborhood. But also, every Wednesday after school and on Sundays, there was the half-hour drive to visit his father’s mother back in the old neighborhood. Westport, where Christopher’s grandfather, who never did learn English after immigrating from Italy, began and built up his parking-lot-and-garage business. Westport, where Christopher’s father, Juno (some neighborhood version of Junior), and his mother, Grace Giordano, had grown up as next-door neighbors. They lived at home and waited until both had finished college before they got married, but the minute Juno finished law school, he moved his wife and his first baby girl out of the old neighborhood. When Juno told the story, you could tell it had been a race to get himself and his family away from Westport. Yet, twice a week, he insisted that Christopher and both his sisters drive back there with him. Their mother never joined them. Christopher’s parents bickered as Juno was getting the kids into the car. Then, when they arrived in Westport, neither Christopher nor his sisters were allowed to play with the kids in Nonna’s “too rough” neighborhood. The same kids who played in his nonna’s empty lot, next to her house. Kids his nonna sliced up watermelons for on hot summer evenings. Kids she relied on daily to run errands for her, since her own kids didn’t live nearby. Kids who, on the rare occasion they caught Christopher alone, called him “snob faggot.”
“Your father set you up,” Denise told him. “He made you look like a creep.”
“No, he just worried.” But actually Christopher’s mother used to tell Juno pretty much the same thing: “Why take them there if you don’t want them leaving the house? Bring your mother here to visit.” Grace had no reason to go to the old neighborhood. She tried to move forward, into the new world. She’d taken art-history classes along with her teaching degree, so, as soon as Christopher and his two sisters were in school, Grace volunteered as a docent at the Nelson-Adkins Museum, and she drove the kids downtown for drawing classes once a week. With Christopher, the classes took. He was her talented child. Her boy. When Christopher, in junior high, was selected for special art classes, Juno told him that artwork wasn’t a way to live or a way to make a living. When Christopher left for New York, his father told him, “I hope it works out for you, son, but I’m afraid they’re going to eat you alive.”
“Your father sounds like a jackass,” Denise told him. “I don’t mean to hurt your feelings, but he does.”
“No! That’s not it, Denise.”
“If you say so, but he sounds scared. For himself. He didn’t need to put that on you and your sisters.”
“He just loves us a lot. Our family’s really close.”
Christopher’s mother and sisters had encouraged him to go away to art school. But they were the reason it had been almost impossible for Christopher to leave Kansas City. Christopher’s mother knew that grad school was right for him, and then that New York was where he needed to be, but he knew that something big would be gone for her when he left. Like Juno, she adored the family, yet in her marriage she was still waiting for Juno to join her, to move on. She was so lonely. And then the sisters. Inexplicably, beautiful as they were, they’d ended up miserable in love. Both were blue-eyed, black-haired beauties, one with extensive piano-training, the other an accomplished ballerina, and they’d dated the worst men in town. “They not only went out with these morons,” Christopher told Denise, “they fell in love with them. Gamblers, a lot of gamblers. Christina married one, and now she has five kids, but she calls me crying so hard sometimes.”
From the time he was a little boy, Christopher had tried to be good company for his mother and sisters. He tried to cheer them up. The women, all three, adored him. “But then my older sister, Cecilia, spelled it out for me. She said, ‘You’re here and we’re unhappy anyway. You may as well go and do your artwork.’
“I was so lucky when I got to New York. I had this teacher from Chicago who gave me all these names and phone numbers. My first summer I got to house-sit in a nice brownstone on Tenth Street. I met all the right people, immediately.”
“See,” Denise told him, slapping her hand flat on the table between them. Her wedding ring. Still. “That’s what I mean. Don and I have never known the right people.”
“Let me finish. Please. What I’m saying is that, yeah, I met all these people, but I felt like a total fraud—like, what am I here for? I just felt—”
“You felt ‘less than.’ ”
“What?”
“That’s what we call that feeling of inferiority, when you feel ‘less than’ everyone else.”
“Who’s this we?”
“In AA. I’m an alcoholic. All this you’re talking about, all this bad feeling you have, I know it very, very well.”
“Denise, how can you have a baby if you’re alcoholic?” A second after it was out of his mouth, he said, “God, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.” But she was smiling at him, a full smile, the first one ever. “Have you been hiding this from me?” he asked her.
“My alcoholism? Ha! Couldn’t hide it if I wanted to. It just never came up.”
She kept smiling and was transformed in front of him. Not into the beautiful woman he’d hoped for, but into the unveiled person he’d been chasing around for several weeks. Nora says I have no inner life, but I knew there was some missing piece to Denise. I knew it. For the first time in months, he didn’t feel stupid. If Denise Wojciekowski was letting him come to Nyack and hear the truth about her, then maybe he wasn’t so bad, maybe he wasn’t.
“You’re telling me your story,” Denise said, “it seemed appropriate to tell mine.”
“Well, man, Denise, I really am sorry I said what I said. And I’m sorry you’re an alcoholic. I mean, that’s a hard one.”
“Don’t be sorry. If I weren’t alcoholic, I never would have found my higher power. It’s the best thing in my life. I’ve been a grateful member of AA for twelve years, and I’ve been sober—mostly—for eleven years. Don and I, we got sober together. The disease is in both our families. I don’t tell most people this, but even before he got sick, we occasionally thought about looking for a sperm donor. To avoid at least some of the drunk genes. Give the kid some odds in her favor. Or his.”