This was the nature of most adult conversation among the professional classes: if not work, which is its own moral justification, then lifestyle affirmation. She tried—but often she had the feeling of a drill being held to her head, that kind of threat and that kind of calm-tearing noise. It was important, in fending this off, to hold that territory on which no one could be induced to admit defeat. Anything beyond the routinely comic in the failure department was inadmissible. Such as the outward acknowledgment that history and culture had forced them into lives their souls could not abide. That she knew not to say… Instead, Yes it’s great. Of course the money but also… Also what? What else? A sense of importance? Of being a grown-up? This is how people talk now. No one made her finish the sentence: Also of course having a career you love! Little word packages like those packets with the cheese, the plastic spreader unit, and the crackers. Or the prepacked lunches from Brown’s with the fork and knife, the sliced kiwi and hard-boiled egg and peanut butter. Airtight. Long shelf life. Nothing could get in to infect, to alter, to ferment.
Foment.
Moment.
Her dread did not involve the tasks, which were engaging enough, in the ways she’d always found the law engaging, a narrative jigsaw puzzle, making the story meet the reality and vice versa; or the people, though they might prove tiresome. But there was the culture. The absolutely unquestioned assumptions. Human rights? How they had quizzed her on this, her professional involvements in it, her personal history. There was always a question mark. Like, had you meant it? Did you still? You’ve given that shit up, right? We don’t believe in that shit around here. Except the gifts office, they paid attention to that shit. You could take a job there at a fifth of your pay…
The attenuation of identity that would inevitably be required because you could fake love but you could not fake action. And actions—nobody liked to admit this—changed you. She did not want to be what she would become. She did not want to dress as she had to dress. It was not much different from how she’d dressed before except now it was a governable issue. She recoiled at the word money. But that’s what it was. There was no other conceivable reason to take this job but for the assured draw of fourteen thousand dollars per month and a low six-figure bonus. Likely three hundred thousand a year, now she was in her first full year. She owed very little on her apartment, liked it and had no need to move. She could bank the bonus and then some and quit in a decade and do anything she wanted. Make next to nothing helping poor people. There would be even more of them by then than there were now—she worked for the people who were going to make sure of it.
It was so great.
Unlike when she was nineteen at the bicentennial getting stoned with George on the sand down by the river—it was a little town now, that sand—one could get into the towers from the subway station and depart likewise and never really see them or deal with the size of them. They were, in the immediate area outside, a challenge to one’s sense of scale. Approached on the plaza, so near the base of the buildings, one understood them as massive office buildings, unique for, if anything, their breadth; you’d have to look far up to sense their true height and from there you couldn’t really see it. Only at some distance, a couple of blocks at least, could they be understood. Thus it became clear to her that the people who worked in them did not understand them: it was a kind of family dynamic, everyone too close to see the true dimensions of the public person any one of the family might be. All the talk of the elevators, of where to go in the concourse, and then back by the elevators, the elevators, the elevators. People were obsessed with the elevators. This was because they were dangerous and inhuman, they were too large, they moved too fast and from time to time they actually banged and shuddered to remind you. Anna had been here only since autumn 1999 but she’d twice heard someone scream in the elevator. Twice. Hard bang. Rattle. Seeming to accelerate. You couldn’t believe you were going to stop. Take a dangerous animal home as a pet and soon enough it becomes the ongoing center of attention. Either way you were secretly afraid of being killed. Secret even from yourself. The elevators—they all talked the elevators, yet no one mentioned the bombing in ’93. That was off limits. That was actual danger, not merely its evocation. A different building then, really. All this fucking money had moved in since. Four investment banking firms and their attendant enablers such as herself, heading up compliance with the firm Morgan Stanley hired to supplement its legal team. Morgan Stanley wanted to comply the way a safe cracker wants safes to go digital.
The man she was seeing after the New Year, after the worst of winter—Henry, an editor, a man who in his online profile had written (yes indeed, though she’d sworn not to accept such, and without a tinge of irony either, she couldn’t fucking believe it) that he loved Sundays in bed with the New York Times, but she’d liked his glasses and a witty quote he’d thrown in—now, predictably, he bored the shit out of her.
They walked in the park—it was early spring. She fully expected walking in the park in spring to appear in his Nerve.com listing now.
After they walked, they ended up, for a late lunch, in a bar called Smoke, a jazz place on Broadway that served brunch on weekends. It was well after brunchtime and lunchtime and she and Henry had the place nearly to themselves. There were a couple of friends of the bartender’s at the bar, and two waitresses, and eating a plate of grilled vegetables and a pasta bianca at the table beside the one they’d been seated at, André, the owner, who introduced himself and soon enough jumped up to get them a particular wine, a peppery Tuscan red to go with the sweet sausage and rabe frittata they shared.
André was the sort of man from whom Anna picked up an immediate vibe, an electrical current of sex. He was probably in his early fifties, wearing what she noted was an excellent gray houndstooth jacket, black shirt, charcoal pants; he was short, but well built, an active face that passed from expression to expression with an almost digital speed and ease. Within ten minutes, or perhaps five, she knew she would come back to the restaurant alone and she would sleep with him. It became obvious to her that he at least suspected this feeling. Henry—a man who was, in a fashion typical to New York men, almost but not quite genial, a relatively nice person who always had his antenna out for a grievance, who thought his grievances were interesting—Henry was not in the least aware of any of this.
And so she claimed work and headache—both!—and dispatched Henry and after nearly an hour went back to the bar. She smiled at André and took a table; he joined her immediately.
He said, You came back.
I did, she said.
He sat. They talked.
I own a restaurant, he said at one point. It’s a lot of work. It’s like having a wife who’s always sick and mean.
Are you married? she said.
Why do you ask me? he said. You already know I’m not.
You have been, she said.
Everyone has been, he said. He said it in that Mediterranean way that you can’t contradict because it comes with a who-cares shrug-off already built-in.
A drink? he said. It’s on me.
Some tea, she said. Earl Grey. No milk.
No wine? Maybe something—
No, she said. Tea.
He nodded toward the bartender, who came around to see them. There was only one other couple in the place. The waitresses were off duty until dinner, she gathered. Or new waitresses were coming. He told the bartender to bring him an espresso and Anna the Earl Grey tea, which, she was pleased to see, came loose and in a pot. The cup was scalded. She said she was impressed. He said, These are basics. But she could tell he was pleased. Pleased to please her.
A little more chat. She went in for a minimum of it.
You know why I’m here, she said.
You like our restaurant, he said. He gestured around at the room.
She laughed.
And? he said.
I thought we had a connection, she said. She looked at him. Tea in hand.
Yes, he said. I t
hought so.
She told him she lived close by. He could have taken her out right then, might have asked for her number, she wasn’t sure what he’d do, whether he could even leave the restaurant. He took her number.
Do you stay up late? he said.
Not unless I have to.
Suppose you have to.
Then, sure.
I’ll call you when I close. Like to walk, it’s close?
Two minutes, she said. Maybe three.
Two, he said. Maybe a minute and a half!
So—he closed the place himself. She wouldn’t stay up—she never stayed up in such circumstances or any other in which she was home and could sleep—she’d wake when he called.
When she got home she fed the petulant cat.
Okay, she said. Be that way.
She left him there in the kitchen nipping at his food. She thought about Henry, whom she was about to betray. Or not betray. Merely crush. She’d made no promises, she never made promises. Henry lived in a straitjacket of received wisdom… Such and such was the next big thing. This or that was interesting. Have you seen the Gauguin show? It’s fabulous. Except it wasn’t fabulous in the least: the walls were dark and the rooms underlit and the paintings in particular, seen together, lost their exoticism. Gauguin’s colors in that light: a mess. The paintings came off on the whole as a little amateurish if anything. They were not formally interesting and they looked dead. His woodwork stuff was gorgeously ornate and crafty, like something one’s secretly talented, perennially strange cousin might produce a few of. The wood itself was deeply alluring: looking at his various tropico-baroque carvings Anna found herself wishing she had not the carving but the wood itself. Perhaps made into something smaller, more human, more primitive. Something she could hold in her hand, feel its density and polish and beauty.
If she challenged Henry with such opinions he would say, Well, I thought it was good, I found it interesting… He had no capacity to argue with her because the thoughts themselves were decals stuck onto his brain, not products of its actual workings.
She said to the cat, Fatty Arbuckle, the Fat One, Fatboy—oh Little Fat One, someone’s coming over tonight and you are not going to like him. I know you won’t like him.
She rubbed the cat’s neck and behind his ears. He tenderly snatched up bits of his food, as if more from necessity than passion. That was how he always did it. He was a figure of classical ambivalence and disdain.
Her cell—she remembered to put it on her nightstand and washed and got into bed to read. She was asleep by 9:30, the cat along her thigh, his tail sneaking between her legs so she could feel it, bone and fur, through the duvet, each time he flicked it until she was asleep.
When André called she woke instantly, knowing who it was. She said hi, he said hi. He sounded a bit tentative, without his earlier certainty. It was always this way with men, the closer they got the more they seemed to feel the ground tremble beneath them. She preferred the certainty.
What time is it? she said.
One thirty, he said.
She raised her head, squinted. Her clock said 1:47. He was one of those guys. Always put a trim on the facts. Had to. Couldn’t not.
I’m closing the restaurant, he said. Locking up.
She gave him the address; he was surprised it was so close. She suggested that he wash up a little, so he wouldn’t have to when he got there.
He said, What are you, a schoolteacher? Or what do you call it, the school nurse? I have to lock up, check the kitchen, I’ll be there in ten minutes. She murmured a vaguely positive sound, indicating her warm presence in bed, awaiting him, like a fresh bun wrapped in a napkin. He hung up. She liked him sounding irritated.
She lay in bed mildly masturbating, rubbing her nipples, twisting a little at the waist, waiting. When the buzzer rang she banished the cat to the small room, closed him in, and intercommed the man into the building. She listened to him climb the stairs—she was on the fourth floor, he preferred not to use the elevator apparently. All she had on was a black silk robe, nothing beneath. Her skin tightened in the coldish breeze through the foot-wide opening of the door. When he came in he smelled only faintly of the restaurant but strongly of the chilled spring air outside. His short leather jacket. She put her hands against his knotty shoulders and let him see her, in the dim light from the kitchen window behind her and one very small lamp around the corner in the living room. They kissed and he opened her robe, explored. His hands were not rough, despite his work. He put them on her face, moved them down her body… She pulled his belt open, managed the button on his pants, pushed her hand in until she had his cock. He kissed her neck. After a minute she slid off his hand, away and down, squatting, and yanked on his pants to free his cock. Everything about him was compact and hard, even his protruding little belly was taut and dense, with a small bit of fat beneath it and then a pelvic bone that jutted out rather cruelly—he even had the bones of an angry peasant. He had a thick cock, sturdy, not quite short but almost. She licked it, drew it between her lips, and felt him transform. It was amazing the way they did that—this thing that happened to them when you took their cocks into your mouth, always a slight surprise, this secret power, all these years it still amused her. It was like having a jet pack.
He was good. He liked women, it was clear. Used his hands very well; when he’d come, and then she, with his hands, they dozed.
Later, the pale lightening of the sky perhaps an hour before dawn. He was hard and pressing against her. She felt something else too.
Jesus motherfucker. He jumped from the bed. There was the cat. Tail high. And there was the welted scratch rising red and diagonal on the back of his hand. She laughed.
I’m sorry, she said but she still laughed. Meet your competition.
She removed the cat, chastised him but didn’t really mean it, he looked at her from the floor of the little room as she closed the door; perhaps she hadn’t latched it before. Then she was back in bed with André, and he had her down and was between her legs doing nice enough things with his tongue and lips, but this usually bored her after a while, she’d been with virtually no males who were able to turn her on that way, so after not too long she gently pulled herself away and brought him up into her arms and kissed him to taste herself on him. He was not hard. She used her hand lightly, felt a stirring.
It was well after five in the morning when he stood up from the bed. I’m late, he said. I have to go to the fish market.
You’re kidding.
No.
When do you sleep?
I sleep maybe four hours at night and a few hours in the afternoon. Or like eleven o’clock some days in the morning, everything will be set up and I’ll sleep then until two. I let the girl handle the lunch, which isn’t so much. Some days though I don’t sleep.
He went to her bathroom. He had a flat ass that formed two near rectangles where they met the tops of his legs. A moderate amount of hair. His back was wide and slightly curved. His body screamed peasant. She had already decided to call in sick, work from home.
I can use the shower? he said.
Sure, she said. After a minute she rose, holding the cat, and stepped into the bathroom. He’d used his hands on her again and made her come, two fingers and a fist, in and out of her, and now every part of her vulva was swollen from the pounding she’d taken, the lips, the mound, the hood around her clit. It felt as if it was affecting her walk, as if she were holding a wallet between her legs, but she doubted the effect was visible. She watched him in the shower, refracted flesh-colored gestures behind the glass. The cat didn’t like the steam and slid from her arms and darted out.
The yellow towel is fresh, you can use that, she said. You want something to eat? Some coffee?
No time, he said. Usually I am out by five o’clock.
This was a lie. It was so funny with them, it was so plain, as if bells clanged every time they lied, bells that not only you heard but they heard too, yet they did it anyway, and no one
ever stopped them. She’d gone to the bathroom at some point after the sex last night and hung her robe there; now she put it on. He wasn’t so bad. When he was at the door, she kissed him and said, That was nice. If you want to fuck me again some night call me by nine or so and I’ll let you know whether it’s okay.
When he smiled, you knew he hadn’t grown up in the U.S.: the teeth. Okay, he said. Okay okay, and went off down the stairs. Men departing: they always looked to her like little boys, leaving for school. A little cocky, sure, energized, but always, too, a little guilty of something and happy to be getting away with it.
* * *
ON THE PHONE with her credit card company. She had transferred money from her bank, it was not being credited. They were holding the money and meanwhile charged her a late fee. She said to the person at the call center, They never had to hold the payment for six days before. Why do they have to do it now? It took more than fifteen minutes including about eleven on hold to get the money liberated, the fee undone, her soul eroded by bureaucracy, no explanation—the banks and credit card companies did this kind of thing because in a percentage of cases they wouldn’t be challenged, probably some algorithm that did this to a random set of accounts each month, when the money arrived a day before the deadline. She quieted her fury. Why be furious? This was capitalism.
When she was a little calmer, the buzzer rang.
Who is it?
Henry.
Henry?
Crazy Sorrow Page 28