* * *
THE LATE ’80s lessons of Burke: to the degree the café has or is creating and promoting a larger sense of design and culture, in other words if the place has a sensibility, American men are either embarrassed and hostile in relation to it or they don’t notice it. In any case they aren’t affected by it. For attracting the women, cheap does not help. It doesn’t confirm that they are who they wish to be. As for the men, there are exceptions of course. The unemployed poets with the notebooks. A couple of gay men. That’s it. Writers and painters. A few composers. These are the icons. Like Hitchcock, him you don’t put on the wall. Or Francis Ford Coppola.
And how did we go from coffee to communications? It’s a natural connection. Back to forever. Coffee and friends. Coffee and talk. Being together. We have to make it comfortable. Everyone is nervous and confused about what they’re supposed to like. So we’re well situated not only to exploit the unease of the consumer but to exploit it in order to alleviate it. People who spend all their money and who are not sure they’re spending it on the right stuff. That’s our market. We push up the prices to make the coffee thing a necessary luxury belonging to a certain class, not just thirty-five cents in a Parthenon cup on the way to work. It’s class unease that we’re alleviating. Here you can sit. Here you know the bathrooms are usable.
Eventually the stores were decorated by printed wallpaper: images of James Joyce, James Baldwin, Etta James—all the Jameses. But George continued to buy for himself. Here and there. Eclectic. No dealers, no advice, he just went to shows.
21
Three years into another new decade, which looked not much more promising than the last. Anna didn’t like her job, she didn’t like the weather, which that summer was unrelentingly hot, and she’d moved uptown to Harlem. She loved her apartment—but getting to and from it was soul-compressing. Which meant some days, the worst days, she didn’t even want to leave the house. Or the apartment: she would likely always call where she lived the house but no. The apartment. It was enormous, on Eighth Avenue and 121st Street, with two bedrooms and a room that was circular, or octagonal, really, with built-in bookshelves on each wall and even over the doorway. If she lived to be a hundred she’d never have enough books to fill it. It was costing her nine hundred and fifty dollars a month, which was a bit above her budget but not too far: she was making sixty thousand—low for a lawyer but okay for a nonprofit and quite good for a human—doing governance and nonprofit finance. She brought home around three thousand a month, and the apartment, utilities, and law school loans took up more than half of that. She was single, her other expenses were low. She saved a little, she always saved a little, and in recent months she had been spending her money furnishing this enormous space. Two bedrooms and a library, with light from north and west, which made her feel she should become a painter just to take advantage of it—the high ceilings and suffused, charitable light. There was an IKEA, a miracle store from Sweden, that had just opened by Newark Airport, and she rented U-Hauls three times to go out there. She paid the super twenty dollars each time to help her carry the stuff up. Then followed multi-week projects of putting the pieces together. Frequently she got two-thirds of the way and had to undo it all and start again—something would be off. When your furniture puts you in a fury… she hurt her wrists and bruised and cut her fingers, screwing and rescrewing with those little fucking hex keys.
* * *
THERE HAD BEEN, that past winter and spring, a man; she had thought for a time, only a short time but long enough to leave scars, that this was the man. His name was Colin. He was, if such was possible, both kind and neglectful. Physically rugged—dark, bearded, very into nature, not meant for New York at all, though his work for a national conservancy had brought him here. He was not beautiful but he had enthusiasm and energy and, physically, a magnetism that she responded to on an electrical level—she felt him in her nerves, even right into her crotch, a small ache and swelling whenever she used to see him and even now when she thought of him. He had nothing but good intentions but the good intentions were spread over wide territories and did not include steadfastness or reliability. Of course, when had she ever liked anyone reliable? (Ah, her brother—there he was again.) It soon became apparent he could not concentrate for any length of time on anything except the world of his environmental work, animals and habitat, that his excitements were constantly stirred by new conflicts, new places, new outrages against people and rivers and mountains and species. He would never settle down, as, sure enough, he didn’t. He’d departed for the Pacific Northwest. Some work he was going to do there with native peoples. Indigenous cultures. Her brain said Indians but she always corrected it. Because of him.
What could emphasize loneliness like a large and lovely apartment that one lived in by oneself? She would dedicate herself to it for weeks at a time and for days after that she would love the place, luxuriate in it—then a crash would come.
And bad days. Days such as this one, when it was bad because of the day before. Yesterday after dealing all day with John, one of the foundation directors, who poked his head into her office at every opportunity and who managed to keep running into her in the halls and who kept insisting she go out to lunch again, even after last time, when he’d tried to kiss her outside the restaurant and she’d told him that this was not acceptable and was in fact insulting and that they were professional colleagues and that’s all—yet here he was, still at it, until she wanted to say to him, John, you have a wife. Get a life. Or throw yourself into your work. Don’t you have actual work to do? Ever?—and, Do the words lawsuit and public humiliation mean anything to you at all?—after that kind of day, which at this point with him every day was shaping up to be, then came today and more of the same, until finally a little after six she left to go home and make ramen noodles and broccoli, one of her standard suppers. She was on the subway—always its own little adventure—and a guy passed behind her, not rubbing against her or anything but a little too close, given the space available, and she swore to God he smelled her. She heard it, behind her head, sniff, sniff, with the second sniff elongated, really taking in the aromatic scenery. Of course she immediately and self-consciously (because she was nothing if not that) started cataloguing in her head what such scenery included: the shampoo of morning and the “organic climate-control” hair product that smelled of geranium and coriander; and the morning’s dab of perfume and other things; and of course her skin itself, the smell emanating from clothes being dropped into the hamper, a kind of parboiled, slightly peppery smell, like a mild meat with a dusting of coriander and a hint of cumin, all those smells plus—if he had a developed nose and probably he did, or why else would this be his thing—the other smells that must have been hinting their way upward by end of day from all the landmark bodily locations, various sectors along the front lines in the battle against actual mammal life… And at this point she was really tired, and she was thinking about Colin again, which she’d been trying not to do, and she just wanted to sink to the floor of the train and weep. Then she got really pissed… really pissed. And first thing, because god forbid this guy actually be forced to pay for his crime, she took it out on the woman in the seat in front of where she was standing, who had kept her legs stuck out for three stops so far and no relief in sight. Finally this was what she couldn’t take anymore, so when the woman kind of bumped into Anna’s legs for the ninth time, Anna bumped firmly back and forced the woman to pull hers in. The woman looked at her, looked at her straight and not really hostile, just sharply, with a look that said, I know what’s going on here, I saw it, I heard it, and what are you taking it out on me for? So Anna felt bad.
Sorry, she said. The woman nodded.
And of course she’d been fundamentally invaded, a boundary broken, and she felt bad. This made her, when she took it in, furious. She wanted to turn on the guy who by then was down the car but still checking her out and just start screaming, YOU’RE A FUCKING FREAK and WHAT THE FUCK IS THE MATTER WI
TH YOU and DON’T YOU THINK I COULD HEAR THAT FUCKING SNIFFING, FOR GOD’S SAKE?
And, ultimately, here was the question, as far as he was concerned, or the director John was concerned, or any of these assholes was concerned, like that vicious overbuilt guy with spaces between his teeth at the really bad salad-bar takeout place on Eighth below 125th Street (“You and me go on a date? You got a hot date tonight?” until this woman who was his wife or his mother or some other relation, it was impossible to tell, but who in her own way was also kind of awful, said something harsh to him, at which point he made a gesture at Anna, as if she had rebuked him); or like these two cops that she saw outside the church meeting hall on her block a couple of times a week, she could never figure out what they were there protecting—one of them, a smallish blond one, said all these things when she was walking home—the other night it was, Hey, miss, you got lovely tits, you know that? Miss, you live around here or what? And the other cop, this tall guy, laughed and said, Cool it, but without any teeth in it, which only made it a little worse, so the shorter well-built one called out, Oh, I’m so sorry, miss, I hope I didn’t offend you, miss, while she speed-walked down the block, her face going red and wanting to cry. So to all of them, to this one and this one and this one, she wished to pose the question: Just look at me, gentlemen, go ahead, here I am, I’m thirty-three years old, look at me—no, not there, you dumb shits, up here, up at my eyes, boys, take a look and tell me this, you goddamned motherfuckers: DO I EVEN FUCKING EXIST?
This last being the question that kind of stuck with her through the next morning, and into the afternoon. This was how yesterday extended into tomorrow.
* * *
SHE WORKED AT a nonprofit. A profitable nonprofit, they liked to call it. It managed the endowments of other nonprofits, a kind of investment bank for the all-cotton, blue-button-down-and-corduroy set. Wire-rimmed glasses, frayed cuffs and collars, knit ties. As for Anna, she was making her sixty a year, no bonus, seven years out of law school—abominable for someone in finance with a law degree. Every time she thought about it she decided to think about it later. For now, she was satisfied.
Except for John of course, whom she would have to mace and kick in the balls and probably get an order of protection against and leave her job to free herself from, to get him to leave her alone, if that even worked. And except for Colin, who, sure enough—as she cleansed him from her system, or tried to, except there were electronic instant communications now—had emailed her from Seattle today. He was on his way up to Vancouver to take pictures of the Indians slash Indigenous persons slash First Nations people, doing their salmon fishing. Something about their religion, they have the right to use these ancient nets woven like wicker from fine long sticks of river trees to catch the salmon when no one else is allowed to use nets, and all the local white fishing industry people and their cohort plus the local white people in general hated them for it and were going nuts. All super enthusiastic and cheerful on Colin’s part. He’d gotten some kind of grant, as if he needed it. God, what an absolute asshole and motherfucker. He had this area along his side, just a spot really, one on each side, where his ribs ended and his side dipped down to his hip bone, that she couldn’t get out of her mind. It was soft on the surface and hard-muscled beneath and very pale, just beyond where the dark hair on his stomach ended, back of that line, the skin so smooth and white, and it sloped down (when he was lying on his back), drawing the hand toward the unreachable long muscled valley of his spine. A couple of little brown moles. Jesus Christ.
Next day she was scheduled to have a meeting with a new agency that had been established with a four and a half million-dollar endowment and too much overhead. They had great dreams of the income they could draw from this. It was kind of sad. She guessed they hadn’t been reading the papers for the last what? Three years?
* * *
AND YES, SHE was writing back to Colin, just some blather about her job and she hoped he was well and gee that’s great about the fucking salmon and the fucking nets made out of fucking hemlock sticks and deer tendons and whatever, and let’s not forget the herring and the cormorants, and do the bears up there have attorneys? She had to admit she used to be an environmentalist… then she fell in love with one. Then he left. So she was sitting there at her desk writing away, pretending to be his cheerful old pal. She felt like typing, Well, things in New York are just great, I still have a job, nothing’s collapsed for a long time, no fires on the trains, I’m hearing less gunfire up in the neighborhood and no one puts the police beatings in the papers anymore, which makes it easier all around, except suddenly she thought she was going to throw up. She stared at what she’d already written. Then she reached out fast and clicked on the delete button—and confirmed it, yes, yes, she wanted it gone—before she could change her mind and send it and then have to feel like a fucking pathetic idiot for the next week and a half waiting to hear back from him. Then she speed-walked to the ladies’ room and did throw up. Still, she was proud of herself. Kind of.
There was a man upstairs from her apartment whom she was convinced was beating his girlfriend. Maybe all that thumping and outcry was sex and maybe she was sobbing all the time because of their deep and unbridgeable philosophical differences, but Anna doubted it. Funny thing was, he seemed like a nice guy, seeing him on the stairs. She thought he worked for the MTA. He looked a little like Wesley Snipes but not as scary-looking. Except now she thought he was as scary-looking.
So somebody else always had it worse, right? That was comforting.
* * *
LUCY, ANNA’S MOST lasting friend from law school, called her.
Anna said, Oh, hi.
Lucy said, What’s the matter?
Anna said, Nothing’s the matter. Just busy.
Don’t lie, I can hear it in your voice.
Oh, Anna said. Well.
Yes?
Where to begin, Anna said.
You need a new job, Lucy said.
Yeah, there’s that. If John the Hard-dicked Director keeps bothering me I can retire for a while on the settlement they’re going to owe me.
Ha, Lucy said. Better just to get a new job.
Yeah, okay, Anna said.
And as long as I’m offering advice—
You always offer advice—
As long as I’m offering advice, Lucy said, you should live in Brooklyn.
Fuck Brooklyn, Anna said. I love my apartment.
Nobody lives in Harlem, Lucy said.
Excuse me?
White girls don’t live in Harlem, I meant.
That’s not true. There are a few of us. We eye each other knowingly on the C train. You know, that little nod thing, like undercover cops or rival photographers.
Right, Lucy said. I assume you’re mooning about Colin.
A little, Anna said.
Don’t, Lucy said. Nothing would make him happier. Meanwhile, I want to talk about Mick.
She frequently wanted to talk about Mick, her ethereal and drug-addicted boyfriend, whom Anna sort of liked, except for the drug addict thing, which always tended to be a problem. He was interesting and smart and fairly kind, a rare combination. Anyway, problems galore. Lucy endlessly troubled. They were currently having no sex and no talk, the worst of both worlds.
Heroin has that effect, Anna said.
Have you ever tried it? Lucy said.
No, Anna said. I have not tried it. I haven’t been able to fit that into my busy schedule yet. But I’ve heard.
After that a silence.
Lucy? Anna said. Lucy? Tell me you’re not doing heroin with Mick, okay? Even if it’s a lie.
I’m not doing heroin with Mick, Lucy said, rotely. He doesn’t shoot up, you know. He just snorts.
Great, Anna said. She didn’t say she was having a second date tonight with Eric—from Brooklyn! It seemed in poor taste to bring up a hopeful note on the love-life front just then. Plus Lucy would have buried her in inquiries and assertions.
* * *
<
br /> THE DATE WITH Eric ended badly. They went out for drinks and then saw Fellini’s 8 ½ at the Film Forum, which was funny and interesting and partially insane, and she ended up going back with him to Brooklyn for a drink where they talked about the movie for a while, he had this whole thing about Fellini’s view of women, men’s view of women, and she didn’t tell him that she had gotten to the point where her ears glazed over, if you could say such a thing, when men talked about men’s view of women. But she ended up of course in his place and they were kissing and making out on his couch. He had a nice Siamese cat. After they were at it for a while, he told her that if a man has an erection for a long period of time his heart can explode or something, which made her laugh.
Crazy Sorrow Page 23