Face Tells the Secret

by Bernstein, Jane

  “You know what I mean.”

  Everyone you like is dead. That’s what she meant.

  I did not say this aloud, could not voice what I knew to be the case, that I brought her no comfort, no security, no companionship, no grandchild. I’d flunked out of college and failed at marriage. And now she was fleeing the country because everyone was dead.

  Everyone she liked.

  I moved too, fifteen months later. When I think about it now, the decision to join a design firm in a city I did not know, with its most unfortunate name—Pitts Burgh—seems petulant. Hasty, certainly. But I felt intrepid saying yes, independent, certain that this was a great move, professionally and personally.

  I’d never been to Pittsburgh before Les Sheldon flew me there. What I remember from that first visit was the tall, thin railroad trestle and low-density sprawl on the way from the airport, the dark tunnel, the way the city shot out of the far end in a stunning, show-offy way, with its bridges and inclines and houses perched high on the hills. My interest was piqued by this landscape, and by Les, who’d been fat, bitter and married when I’d known him at Cal Arts, but who had morphed in an astonishing way into a buff, tattooed single guy.

  Les took me to a restaurant with tin ceilings and a busy bar, tended by middle-aged women in white shirts and black aprons who moved with the grace of dancers. In the morning, he showed me the old school house he’d bought on Smallman Street, in an area of light industry he claimed was poised for change. He’d painted the exterior lime-green, which was dreadful and not, rented out space to a yoga studio and a neighborhood redevelopment organization, and saved the whole second floor for his company, called “Intelligent Design” until the name began to take on unfortunate associations, at which point he added an orange carat and an “s” and redid the logo. I could be a partner, could co-own everything except the lime-green building, and together, we could transform Intelligent Design into the preeminent design firm and idea factory in the country. “Idea factory,” as if the two of us and the comely interns Les hired walked around with hard hats and protective goggles.

  Two months later, I drove across the state with a rattling U-Haul hitched to the back of my car. The truck traffic on the Pennsylvania Turnpike was thick. I found myself inhaling when I was between two semis, as if that might make my car smaller. I listened to music, but the refrain that played nonstop in my head was the warning I’d gotten at the U-Haul place. Don’t back up. When I stopped for gas or pulled into a rest stop, I had to remember not to back up or the trailer could jackknife and I’d be stuck that way forever.

  A light mist fell. Driving west, through tunnels and around s-curves, the caution grew louder. Do not back up. Then I saw a sign for Ohio, and in a moment of pure panic—what was I doing, heading to Ohio?—I pulled onto the shoulder and got out. Trucks barreled past, spraying grit. If there were stars, I couldn’t see them in the night sky. Standing on the shoulder, I felt my mother’s dislike of me. I had lived with this the way a person born without an arm knows only the experience of being one-armed. When I was with my friends or eating fabulous food or making love, when I was absorbed by a movie, designing a beautiful box, all my attention on color, texture, shape, and form, I did not feel this wound, was so detached from it that I forgot it was there. That night when I stood on the side of the road, truck tires kicking grime into my face, the sense of aloneness made me feel as if I had no skin, no cover, no protection.

  I want to go home. That’s what I thought as a shimmying semi thundered past, kicking grime into my face. I don’t want to be here. I want to go home. I did not yet know that “home” was more a feeling than a place, as perhaps it had been for my mother.

  I got back in the car and started the engine. I did not back up. I waited for the right lane to be clear, floored it, and continued west.

  Though I kept yearning for “home,” wherever that was, I stayed in Pittsburgh. I made friends, went on dates, bought a small arts and crafts house with a beamed ceiling and a “tuberculosis room,” a sleeping porch with casement windows that opened onto a majestic ginkgo tree, and beyond, the city itself, twinkling at night.

  I did not leave my mother behind. Her voice remained in my head, her characteristic expressions and acerbic opinions, so while shopping, I might be attracted by a leather belt with silver studs, take it from the rack, smell the leather, work it through my belt loops, see how well it fits, then hear her declare it a shtik drek! and whip it off my waist.

  This was totally different from thinking about my mother, which I also did, every day. I called every Friday. These calls took such effort that I braced myself, the way one does before a dental procedure. Though I did not actually tell myself: This will only take a minute and then you’ll be fine, I got ready as best I could while I waited for her to pick up. Then I said, “Hi, Mom!” or Ma or Mommy in a loud, false, cheerful voice.

  “Who is this?” she always asked, as if there was someone else who called her “mom.”

  “It’s me! Roxanne! I’m at my office,” I added in that awful too-bright voice, because hadn’t I learned that it was pointless to be alive unless one was productive? Wasn’t I raised to believe that work was what distinguished us from the balagulas and balabustas and the vegetables—truck drivers, housewives, and plants—as if these three were the lowest of the low, thorny-headed worms, belonging to the same phylum. Being productive. “I’m at work!”

  Years before, trying to explain what I did, I brought a souvenir for my mother. “A matchbox?” she’d said. “This is your job?” She no longer asked questions about my life and had nothing to say of hers. There were only stories I knew well, if I begged her to stay on the line. She liked to tell me about her husband Morris who’d been so devoted to her and the way he’d gone senile. “I know. I was there,” I said impatiently, no longer able to be egoless, to expect nothing. “He was my father, remember?”

  At the end of our phone calls, I often said, “I’d like to see you. When can I visit?” and she said, “Don’t bother.” I was hurt and relieved and didn’t bother and knew that my reluctance to visit had nothing to do with “bother.” If I saw my mother I would want something. I would not get the words I needed. I would not get reassurance. I would not get her loving gaze because there was no loving gaze, there was nothing beyond the same carefully crafted stories I knew by heart.

  And so I got off the phone, turned back to my desk, and waited for Les to return from lunch and for our office to fill with the chug and hiss of the expensive espresso machine he’d lugged back from Italy and the aroma of rich, dark coffee. I waited for him to swallow his cup in a single gulp, nostrils flaring, then lower himself into his seat so we could hash over projects and hate things together—fonts, styles, trends, foods—a very comforting ritual we’d fallen into early on. If there was time, I might get him to discuss whatever woman he was seeing—my curiosity about the habits and sartorial choices of his dates was insatiable. After that, I sat at my work area and lost myself until the end of the day. Then I rose, or Les did, and one of us said, “Life,” and the other, “totally overrated,” and we headed out into world.

  Four

  One morning a man called at work. “My name is Harley Graeme,” he said. “Edie Phillips suggested I contact you. Is this a bad time?”

  Edie Phillips was the effusive chair of a committee that organized a black-tie event to raise money for kidney disease. She loved the invitations I had designed for the event, loved my style, my dry sense of humor. So I said, “Now is fine,” and waited for the man on the phone to go on.

  “It’s not urgent,” he said. “I can call at a time when it’s more convenient. My day is completely open.”

  “Now is perfect,” I said.

  “And tomorrow, any time after ten could work. Or the day after, as long as it’s before two. I know you have a lot on your plate.”

  “The kidney beans are gone,” I said. “All that’s
left on my plate is a little rice.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Now’s a good time,” I said.

  “Excellent. Thank you. I was wondering if we might get together. Briefly. I could swing by your office at lunch time or we could meet for coffee later in the day. Whatever your schedule permits.”

  I should have asked Edie to tell me something about this humble stranger, but that hadn’t occurred to me until I walked into the dim, fashionable restaurant he’d suggested and a slender man rose from the bar stool—Harley T. Graeme. Oh! I thought. Then after a brief, businesslike handshake, and a lengthy decision about our booth—here, no, this one’s better, what about there?—I found myself sitting across from him, thinking, what a nice-looking man!

  Had so long passed since I’d seen an attractive guy that I’d become like one of those men who can’t get their eyes off a woman’s cleavage no matter the business at hand? It wasn’t that he was gorgeous, which might have turned me off, since I was wary of men who were self-consciously handsome. It was that for a man of his age—our age—he was so clean looking, with no tufts sprouting from his nostrils or ears. Nice head of graying hair, teeth that were strong, if crowded, trim, lanky, erect.

  Out of sheer nervousness I began to describe in lavish detail everything I had done for Edie, the marketing, the brochures, the invitations, the event, the band, their rendition of “My Sharona,” Ooh my little pretty one, pretty one. Ooh you make my motor run, my motor run... I told him about the press releases, the photographer with the hair plugs, the heartbreak of polycystic kidney disease—occasionally pausing and looking up to find his soft eyes on me, his expression unreadable, yielding not a single clue.

  It was only when lunch had ended and he deftly palmed the bill that I realized he hadn’t said a single word about his reason for calling me. Nervousness crept upward, starting from my heels. What was my problem, blathering on the way I did, behaving like an idiot?

  Harley shook my hand when we were together on the street. “Thank you for doing this.” You’d think I just pulled him from a roiling river. “Thank you for taking the time.”

  “What business?” Edie asked when I reached her later that day. “I just couldn’t stop thinking about you and Harley in different corners of the city, both of you single, how maybe you two should meet. Call me an incurable romantic.”

  Alone in different corners was right. Harley lived in the South Hills and worked downtown. We didn’t walk the same streets or eat in the same restaurants or know a single person in common, apart from Edie, whose wealth he managed, and whose gala event I’d helped market. If Edie had asked me ahead of time whether I’d wanted to meet Harley, I would have said no. Not my type; though at that point, the only type I had was not Tom.

  I called Harley to apologize. “That lunch?” I said when I reached him. “I thought I was doing a business presentation. When I think of the way I went on and on it makes me shudder.”

  Harley said he enjoyed listening to me.

  “That’s very kind, but I never asked you a single thing. Not where you live or what you do for a living. I have no idea how you spend your spare time or if you have kids or who’s your favorite Steeler.”

  None of those things were important, Harley said.

  “Don’t you want your lunch date to know something about you?”

  “Not particularly,” Harley said.

  At dinner the next week, while the tea lights flickered at our banquette, Harley said, “I’m not that social a guy.”

  He said: “I worry more than the average person, especially about my kids, and when I do, nothing else matters.”

  He said: “My wife wanted the marriage to be over and when I wouldn’t leave, she rented an apartment and had all my possessions moved there. She’d left a note on the cartons saying, You and your gloomy ass can go straight to hell.”

  I laughed when I heard this. That’s some crazy wife, I thought, all this crucial information extinguished in the heat of my attraction.

  A few nights later, he stopped at my house after work. He had a bowl of soup and gazed at me, as if this was all the sustenance he needed in life. The next night he stopped again, and the night after that, and so on.

  His silence felt deep, more intimate than words. He was sad, I could tell. Though he denied it, I knew that his wife called him nightly to berate him for his failures as a parent and human being. He worried about his sons. I was a tonic for him. Even before he said that being with me was the best thing in his life, I could feel it was true, and it was remarkable.

  Soon after, after the soup and the exquisite silence was the lovemaking, the long nights, nestling together in my bed, the way we fit so well together, my head against his chest, leg over his leg, taking in his scent, tickle of chest hair, the beating of his heart. Hold me: I did not have to say it because he did.

  Harley was gracious and soft-spoken, with old-fashioned manners. I was charmed when he called his childhood “perfect,” with a loving mother and father, from whom he’d never heard a negative word, protective big brother, adorable baby sister, all living in harmony with their housekeeper, a collie named Laddy, and a skating rink in their backyard, where in winter they played hockey. Harley liked to shop, which amused me. I’d never been with a man who liked to shop.

  “We went shopping,” I told Mindy when we returned from a trip to the North Hills or South Hills. “We’re looking for a chair!” You’d think I was telling her, “We went to China!” Or “We’re adopting a baby!” which I also dreamed we might do. I liked Harley’s seriousness of purpose and the way he sometimes detoured to pick out a new socks or a couple of shirts. “We went to Brooks Brothers! He bought some shirts!”

  Mindy and I spoke nearly every night, as if we were again adolescents. My long-married friend, mother of three, licensed family therapist, was as eager to hear my breathless details as I was to relate them. “I went to Mars to meet his sister!” “His sons are really cute!” “He’s so devoted to them he can’t sleep unless they call to say good night!”

  Mars is a suburb of Pittsburgh. Harley’s sons were as handsome as their father, polite, if completely uninterested in me. His love for them was such that nearly every night he drove to his wife’s house or made the three-hour trip to State College, if one or the other did not answer the phone. I had no children and was reluctant to view this as excessive. And his concern extended to me. If I went out of town, he needed to hear from me before I departed and the instant I touched down. No one had ever said, “Call me as soon as you land!” It seemed as if no one had ever loved me enough to worry about me that way.

  I could wait for Harley’s sons to like me. I could wait for him to relax enough to meet my friends. I could wait to go with him to the ballet or plan for a ski trip, both of which he said he loved, or spend a week in Bruges, his favorite city. He was so tender and attentive: more than anything I wanted this relationship to work.

  After we’d been together for a couple of months, Harley said that a perfect chair was all that was missing from my otherwise perfect home, so we went in search of one. The perfect chair, which we found after many excursions, was the kind of chair you see in a men’s club. Dark brown leather, wildly expensive, on back order. A season would pass before it was delivered; we decided Harley would move in as soon as it arrived.

  Well after I met Harley’s sister, we drove to meet his brother Byron, who lived with his family in Charleston, West Virginia, where he owned several fast food franchises. When Harley first took me to meet them, their Scottie would not let me enter the house. He kept skittering side to side, barking frantically, as if I were an intruder. At last, one of their girls dragged him away by the collar, and I stepped into the hall, where Byron, a ruddy-faced, beefy version of Harley, greeted me with a big hug, and said, “We all thought you had to be craz-y to take on little bro, but you look okay; you look fine.”

  It was the
day after Christmas, and their little girl was wearing fuzzy antlers and a matching brown fleece. Their older daughter—leggy, pretty, with a mouthful of metal—sat at her father’s feet. The fire was crackling, and the tree was decorated with delicate heirloom ornaments and ones made with cotton and popsicle sticks, and the house smelled of pine and spices from the mulled wine. I sank into the couch cushions, listened to their easy conversation, and the way they joshed with each other. Harley was of this family; he resembled them, could make small talk the way they did, and yet he was disengaged, phone on his lap. After he slipped off, his sister-in-law said, “Poor Lee-Lee’s had such a hard time, with that wife who wouldn’t let him sleep in the house, and now with the boys.”

  “He’s got a house to sleep in now,” I said. All that I knew about Harley took on a different shape. Maybe Byron was right and I was crazy.

  When we left it was dark, and the heat in the car came up slowly.

  “They’re nice,” I said, when I was warm. The bright lights from an oncoming car broke the darkness. “Welcoming.”

  Harley said he hated Byron, with his perfect fucking wife and his perfect fucking family.

  This surprised me. In every other conversation, Harley had called his family perfect, which was different from “fucking perfect.” Okay, I thought, trying to view this as an opportunity. Maybe now he’d open up.

  I turned down the noisy heater fan.

  “Your wife wouldn’t let you sleep in the house?” I said.

  Tina was as dumb as a stone, he said. The biggest mistake of his life was having married her. His mother had cried when he told her they were getting married, because Tina came from simple people and was swarmy.

  Warmth radiated from the car seat. I felt as if I’d just peed on the leather. I asked what his father had thought.

  Dad had just sold the family business, Harley said. Mother thought he was too young to be retired, so she made him dress in a jacket and tie and every morning go to the small office he kept in town, where he managed the family’s investments, read the Wall Street Journal and books about the Civil War. After he died, they found file cabinets full of empty bottles of gin.