She had been obsessing about whether to keep or get rid of the candelabra. The night table had already bitten the dust in the private inventory she was making. She had been obsessing about whether to keep or get rid of nearly everything she owned ever since she decided, once and for all, to move from New York to San Francisco, where she could start a new life, more or less, and rid herself of the oppressive layers of her own history amidst which she had been living for the last ten years. She had decided this, once and for all, that morning. It was her thirty-fifth birthday.
The one slight hitch to her plan was her boyfriend, Alex. He played drums in a rock band and was ten years younger than she was. For a whole year they had been having a relationship, and she loved him, and yet their relationship had become static, frozen with warmth. It would have ended soon anyway. It was just a matter of telling him. Leaving town, she thought, will make it easier.
The buzz—an incredibly loud, grating, and unpleasant sound—made her whole body twitch, as though she were falling backwards in a dream, and had jerked awake a split second before impact. The tea spilled. It burned her hand on the soft fleshy part just below the thumb. She switched the mug, which had little bunnies on it, from right hand to left, brought the injured part instinctively up to her mouth, and gave it a long restorative suck. Then she moved towards the intercom.
“Hello?” she said into the intercom.
“Delivery!” came the voice over the intercom. It was female and, for a delivery person, unnaturally cheerful.
ON THE OCCASION of Christine’s birthday, Alex had reserved a table for two at her favorite restaurant, Nadine’s. It was a dark, romantic place on Greenwich Street, not far from her home, lit by a series of crystal chandeliers over which the owners had draped a light gauzy material which made the chandeliers, and the place in general, feel dreamy, like a faraway memory even while you sat in its midst.
They had eaten there a number of times together, and Alex had stared at Christine’s large, delicate hands as they fluttered about in the dim light with a strange animal gracefulness, coming to rest now and then on the table’s darkness, against which they seemed all the more radiant and beautiful.
Alex’s next step in planning the birthday, after he made the dinner reservation, was to pay a visit to the Ritz Thrift Shop on Fifty-seventh Street just off Sixth Avenue. The Ritz Thrift Shop sold new and used furs. It had been around for years, and Alex had seen its commercials on television when he was a kid. Even then the commercials had seemed ancient, conceived and produced in some prehistoric, pre-ironic, pre–animal rights era, and long before Alex developed an ironic, retro-appreciating bone in his body he sensed a thrilling bit of artifice in the black-and-white commercial. A well-dressed, elegant woman walked down the sloping incline of Fifty-seventh Street wearing a knee-length white skirt and white gloves, and a nice fur coat that came down just below her waist. Her brown hair was in an elaborate bun. Though there were no pearls visible, it seemed likely that she owned a very nice double-strand necklace. Her pretty face was set in the blank but slightly expectant expression of someone who knows quality when she sees it, who likes to see it, and who knows she will shortly be seeing a whole lot of it. As she walked down the street a demure male narrator extolled the virtues of fur, and of the Ritz Thrift Shop as a place to buy it, new or used, and in the end there was a shot of her entering the store, a refuge of good taste and style at reasonable prices, while the announcer said: “The Ritz Thrift Shop—where you don’t have to spend a million to look like a million.”
Alex had already closed the door to his apartment, ready to head out to the Ritz, when something came over him and he dashed back in, flipped through the yellow pages, barked some instructions to the voice on the other end of the line, recited his credit card number and Christine’s address, and then headed uptown feeling vaguely pleased with himself for his inspiration.
Beneath his smile was a terrible panic that the woman he loved would leave him. He had no guile or cleverness or subtlety or strategy with which to confront this mortal threat. He only had one big idea; it was blunt, bludgeoning, and simple: he would love her more.
“I’M NOT EXPECTING anything,” said Christine into the intercom. Then she added: “What are you delivering?”
“It’s a surprise,” came the voice.
“I’m on the fifth floor. I’m sorry, but I’m not expecting anything and I can’t come down right now.”
“I’m supposed to come up,” said the voice. “It’s a surprise what I’m delivering.”
“Can you just tell me what it is? Are you from FedEx or something?”
“I’m supposed to just show up at your front door and surprise you, ideally, but if you have to know in advance, the thing that I’m delivering is, like, basically, me. I’m a singing telegram. If you buzz me in I’ll come upstairs.”
She hit the buzzer and stared with a sort of numb horror at her night table. The Gum Incident was exactly the sort of minor travesty that she wanted to delete from, if not her memory, then at least her immediate surroundings. The man who had been chewing the gum was just a footnote to the story. She had met him at a bar years ago, and they had ended up at her house, where they copulated drunkenly. He left the next morning, acting cordial and friendly. They never spoke again (because of the gum incident) even though he called several times and left messages.
After the Gum Incident man left that morning she had padded around her tiny apartment in socks feeling besieged by conflicting feelings of pride and revulsion. She had been working, at the time, as a legal proofreader on the lucrative graveyard shift, so she had her days to herself. But the nocturnal schedule got to her sometimes. She had been in a miserable lonely funk in the preceding weeks, and was proud that she had galvanized herself to go out into the world and find company. She had gone to a bar with a friend and let herself be found by this reasonably attractive man.
But she also felt disgust at having slept with him right away. It was a moral issue, though not in the normal good-girl-versus-slut terms. She thought of it more in food terms: daintiness versus gluttony. Sleeping with this anonymous man was like binge eating. She could have had a small portion of making out passionately at the bar where they met, or a more substantial heavy grope session on the street, against a building, in the shadows, which might have been sufficiently filling. But she wanted to finish everything on her plate, and so she brought him home and let things take their course.
She had been in a good mood after he left, though. But then a mystery of sorts had come into her mind. While he was making love to her the man had been chewing gum. He had chewed gum throughout the whole evening, and she had commented on it, saying he looked really good with his jaw muscle clenched, which to her amazement he took seriously, forcing her to add that when he was at the other end of the chew cycle, with his jaw slack, he looked a bit slow. She was hoping he’d lose the gum, but he didn’t.
The mystery was that after they had done it, when he was lying beside her, breathing heavily and with an amazingly lewd look of satiation on his face, he was no longer chewing gum.
She began to wonder what had happened to the gum. Had he put it behind his ear? Had he executed a deft jump shot into the trash bag over by the sink without her noticing? Was it in storage in some corner of his mouth?
She had pondered it all morning, and then reflexively and without any rational thought she walked over to the night table and ran her hand along the underside. She almost felt ashamed for even entertaining such a thought; he had been nice and well-mannered, after all. The night table was a nice piece of furniture, not some temporary plastic thing a college student had dragged into a dorm room. She felt disgusting to even suspect that he might…
There it was. Soft and moist. She removed it and held it up for inspection. It looked like a tiny brain. He must have reached over at some point, while he was inside her, and stuck his gum underneath her nice wooden night table. He might as well have stuck it on her forehead.
&
nbsp; Now she glared at the little white intercom box on the wall with the irrational feeling that anyone who laid eyes on the night table would understand the whole sordid history right away.
ALEX WALKED FROM the subway down the sloping incline of Fifty-seventh Street. He wore black jeans and a white T-shirt, over which he wore a black V-neck cashmere sweater, his favorite item of clothing, something so dear to him that in spite of the gaping holes at the elbow he wore it with pride and felt utterly confident that it made him look as cool as it was possible for him to look. On his face was a five-o’clock shadow which had taken three days to accumulate, and the blank but expectant expression of someone who wanted to buy a really nice, and original, and memorable, and daring, and also useful gift for the woman he loved, but who didn’t want to spend too much money to get it, and who was also racking his brains for the memory of any remark his beloved might have once uttered in passing that would suggest a deep emotional connection with beavers, minks, lynxes, or foxes, which would incline her to exclaim with horror when presented with, at her birthday dinner, a muff.
The very word made him happy: “Muff.”
He had become obsessed with muffs. The idea of Christine’s long fingers, so quick to get cold, swaddled inside a big warm ball of fur pleased him enormously. He took long loping strides down the hill, staring at the sidewalk, as appealingly preoccupied and lost in thought as the woman in the Ritz Thrift Shop commercial had been appealingly empty of all thought save one—to visit the Ritz Thrift Shop.
He instinctively looked up across the street to take in the Russian Tea Room’s red awning. He used to go there on his birthday. He would sit there amidst the red banquettes and bustle. On every visit he carefully read the menu before making his usual order of blinis and caviar to the attentive waiter in his high-necked authentic Russian jacket, and later he would marvel at the deft wrist movement with which the waiter would personally roll his first blini, a demonstration whose effortless perfection he could never match with the remaining blinis. How earnest and touching those dinners had been!
But Christine’s birthday dinner would not be about those emotions. Hers was a completely different way of experiencing things. Even the most straightforward moments with Christine always had a twist. In the middle of fooling around, for example, she sometimes looked at him with a pained, almost tragically wistful expression, as though this were the last time they would ever be together. It was with such an expression that she had told him, just weeks earlier, in bed, “I love you.”
He found her expression when she said this incredibly sexy but also complicated, because he sensed she was being theatrical, that she was creating a little bit of false drama for the sake of play. It was as though there were, in her mind, an urgent scene unfolding, something out of a Russian novel, in which one of them would shortly be boarding a train to a far-off place, and this was the last tryst fate was affording them.
There was also the suspicion, always in the shadows when he was with Christine, that she really was thinking their relationship was coming to an end, and that these were their last moments together. He had felt lucky to be with her in the first place, and like many people who feel that their lover is somehow a gift of fate, he had the uneasy feeling that his luck would run out.
He thought of her saying those words: I love you. She rarely said them. Walking down Fifty-seventh Street, he marveled at that moment of pure unbridled feeling to which she could provoke him, the incredible pleasure of it.
“I love you, too,” he had said, and he saw her face change ever so slightly. A tiny shadow came across it.
A YOUNG WOMAN, extremely tall, stood before Christine in an absurdly garish outfit consisting of short pants, a red satin shirt, and a puffy down jacket (blue). She was on roller skates (white), which partially explained her enormous height. Her hair was blond and pulled back in a ponytail. She exuded vigor and good health.
“Hi,” she said. “This is from…” She consulted a piece of paper. “Alex. Ready?”
Christine stared up at her with stunned fascination. “Okay,” she said rather softly.
The woman in the satin shirt took out a harmonica and blew on it once, producing a single note. Then, armed with that clarifying middle C, she launched into “Happy Birthday to You.”
Christine held on to the doorknob. The occasion of her birthday, combined with her decision to move, and the strange earnestness of this woman’s cheer, and the fact that it was Alex who had conjured this up, unleashed all sorts of strange emotional energy in her. She began to cry. Her eyes got puffy. A tear rolled down her cheek. By the time the song was over it was near her mouth. The singer’s bright smile evaporated when she saw it.
“God, I’m sorry,” she said. In the absence of her clear bright voice the only sound was her roller skates rolling back and forth on the hallway’s linoleum floor, making it creak a little.
“Excuse me,” said Christine, sniffling.
“Oh shit,” said the woman. She stamped her roller skate on the floor. “I’m not cut out for this job. You’re the second person who’s cried on me this week.”
“It’s not your fault,” said Christine. “You were really good.”
“No, you don’t understand, I have that effect on people. I’ve talked about it with one of the other girls. She’s been doing this for nine months and no one has ever cried on her. I’ve been at it for three weeks and I’ve had four of them. It must be something about my personality. People take one look at me and they burst into tears.” She looked stricken.
“It had nothing to do with your personality at all,” said Christine. “It’s just I’m not used to surprises, I don’t take them very well….”
AT THE RITZ Thrift Shop, the phrase “Miracle on 57th Street” was embossed in gold script on the two glass front doors, though the gold had chipped and faded, and the script in which it was written seemed quaint and out of date, an old-fashioned notion of elegance. Beyond the glass door was a vast stretch of wall-to-wall carpet, which once upon a time might have been white, or perhaps ivory, but was now decidedly gray. The store was filled with ancient-looking sofas and chairs whose pillows were tired and deflated. Two men stood in the middle of the store with their hands behind their backs, like guards at a museum which no one ever visited. One was bald, in a blue blazer and sharply creased gray slacks, with a handlebar mustache. The other was shorter, in a tan two-piece suit, and had an outburst of frizzy gray hair that leapt off his head.
“May I help you?” said the bald man with the handlebar mustache.
“I’m looking for something in fur,” said Alex. “Preferably used.”
“Well, you’ve come to right place!” said the man with the frizzy hair. He laughed nervously.
The shop was mostly empty, though Alex noticed an older woman sitting on one of the sofas with an impatient look on her face. The one thing that seemed conspicuously absent from the store, besides customers, was fur.
“Are you hiding the fur?” he asked.
“It’s in a vault,” said the bald man curtly. “Was there anything in particular you were looking for?”
Alex looked around the store. There was a black security guard standing behind him by the door, slowly rotating a toothpick between his teeth. “These past years must have been tough,” he said. “With the anti-fur people, the protests and so forth. Women getting attacked for wearing fur. I want you to know I’m not one of those people. I’m not a fur terrorist, in case you were worried.”
“We weren’t worried,” said the bald man.
“Spray paint!” shouted the woman on the sofa.
All three men turned to her. She stared back at Alex with wide incredulous eyes to which a great deal of mascara had been applied.
“Mrs. Gluck had an incident,” said the frizzy-haired man.
“It’s madness, insanity! Right on Sixty-fourth and Park. A lunatic with orange spray paint. A woman! Can you imagine?”
“We’re cleaning it up, no problem,” said th
e frizzy-haired man to Alex in a confiding tone.
“What exactly did you have in mind?” said the bald man.
“It’s not for me,” said Alex. “In case you were wondering. It’s for my girlfriend. And I’m not interested in a coat. I wanted to look…” He hesitated. “I was thinking about muffs.”
To actually pronounce the word in the hallowed decrepit confines of the Ritz Thrift Shop, whose sexy television advertisement had made such a deep impression on him at the age of eight, thrilled him. It was perhaps the first time he had said it out loud since the idea came to him, and probably one of the few times in his entire life he had had the occasion to use the word—“muff”—in a literal, practical, unironic sense. Everyone seemed cheered by the word.
“A muff!” said the frizzy-haired man.
“That’s nice,” said Mrs. Gluck from the couch. “You don’t see muffs as much as you used to.”
“Al,” said the bald man, for the first time dropping the guarded, formal, and even stand-offish air that he had possessed since the moment Alex walked into the shop, “show him our muff selection.”
“I hope you’ve got some in orange,” said Mrs. Gluck. “That’s the color of the spray paint that’s on my mink. Orange!”
“It’s going to be all right, Mrs. Gluck,” said the bald man, a little sternly.
“A stripe, like a skunk!” she continued. “I walked into the Regency looking like an orange skunk.”
The bald man turned at the waist towards Mrs. Gluck without actually moving his feet, which, Alex noticed, had been planted to the exact same two spots on the faded white carpet since the moment he walked in the door, as though years ago the carpet had acquired a terrible pair of stains, and store policy dictated that every day an employee had to stand for the whole day with a foot on each one so as to cover them up.
The Sleep-Over Artist Page 13