She uncrossed her legs. “So?” He was looking at the floor. “Did that not sound right? How about, so what?”
He put a hand through his hair.
“You’re going back to her?” No response. “Even after you came back to me?”
“Nothing’s changed.”
“That’s ridiculous. How can you say that?”
He looked at the ceiling. “It’s the same story it’s always been, do we need to go back over it?”
“Yes. You don’t love this woman.”
“I do.”
“Then why are you telling the fucking light fixture and not me?”
He bent over the back of the desk chair and looked at his hands, fingers laced. “My postdoc ends after next year. After that I go wherever I can get a job. You’ll be working for Harry and going to film school. Anna and I planned what we’d do after postdocs for a long time. We’re the same age, we have the same way of looking at things, we have years together.”
“What do you want, a medal?”
He flinched. “I know you don’t like her.”
“I don’t know her. What I saw was snobbish, cold, and boring, but I don’t know her.”
“She’s moving here. We’re getting married.” She put her arms across her stomach. “I’m sorry. I truly am.”
She rocked forward. “You don’t,” she gasped, “have to use words to lie, you know.”
He was still looking down at his chair. This was a new expression he had, she didn’t know it, but she must have seen something like it some time, after all these years and all those movies. In her mind she projected close-ups, flipping through them like stills in one of Andy’s folders, trying to name it. Not pity. Not anger. Not sadness.
The frame paused. Longing.
She had nothing to say. She stood up and walked out.
Go ahead and long.
When she unlocked the street door on Avenue C, she had no idea what stores or doorways she’d passed, what men had whistled or ignored her, who’d tried to sell her anything or whether she’d jaywalked or waited at the corner. She mounted the stairs, looking at cracks under the doorways and listening for TVs. There was a light underneath Miriam’s door. She kept walking.
Talmadge called to her from the living room. “Ceinwen, is that you? Come and look at this. I moved the couch. I think it looks so much better over here between the windows.” She stood in the entrance; he was facing the couch and holding his hands up as though to frame it. “Check out how …” He turned to her and trailed off. “Oh sweetie.”
She started to talk and couldn’t. He put his arms around her. A first. After a while she raised her head and checked the mascara she’d smudged on his T-shirt.
“Jim was right after all,” she said.
“Ha. Let me tell you, Jim’s not as smart as he thinks he is. Last night he told me maybe he was wrong.” Talmadge brushed at his T-shirt, then dropped his hand. “Let me make you some tea. I have linden. It’s like, a tree or something.”
“I’m okay,” she said. And remembered she needed to take off her jacket.
“No, you’re not.”
“I’ll be okay.” She started walking toward the bedroom. “I’m going to be in the bathroom for a while, do you need it?”
“Not at all.”
She undressed and wrapped her robe around her. She grabbed an old towel out of the stack in the kitchen cabinets and went into the bathroom. The box of hair dye was still in the medicine cabinet. She mixed it up and started applying with the pointy tip of the applicator, like the instructions said. But she got tired of making parts in her hair, so she unscrewed the top and slopped it on. Then she sat on the toilet seat and waited. She didn’t have a watch and she didn’t put on a timer. She let the fumes sting her eyes and watched the light go down in the bathroom until she had to switch on the overhead. When the dye started to itch she stepped into the shower and rinsed it out. She got out, dried off, wrapped the towel around her head, and slipped back into her robe. Talmadge hadn’t had to see her naked since Christmas.
Jim had come home while she was in the bathroom. When she came into the living room he just said, “Let me see.” She took down the towel. “That’s going to be gorgeous, honey.” He pushed his cigarettes at her and she took one.
“I moved the couch back,” said Talmadge. “Jim told me it would be too hard to see the TV.”
“I know exactly what we need,” said Jim. “Sit right there.” She sat on the couch and Talmadge lit her cigarette. Jim came out of her room with a tape in his hand.
“In honor of your new hair,” he said. He put the tape in and pushed play. He sat down and they watched.
“You need a hat like that,” said Talmadge.
Ceinwen concentrated on the glasses on the bar. “How many drinks have you had?” Myrna Loy was asking, and William Powell was saying, “This will make six martinis.” And Myrna was asking the bartender, “Will you bring me five more martinis, Leo? Line them right up here.”
“Do you have any of the sequels?” asked Jim.
“I have them all,” said Ceinwen.
“Good,” said Jim. “Line ’em up, right here.” She put her head on his shoulder and settled in for the night.
AUGUST
1.
“THIS ISN’T MY FAULT.”
“Then precisely whose fault is it, Ceinwen?” Matthew held up a page and jabbed it so hard he left a crease down the middle.
“It’s not my fault you have bad handwriting.”
“There’s nothing wrong with the way I wrote this. Look.” He flicked the page across her desk, picked up his handwritten copy, and slapped it down beside her keyboard. “That is a delta. It is very clearly a lower-case delta.”
“If it looks like an alpha to me then what the heck am I supposed to type?”
His voice was rising. “You could start by looking here, where I wrote out the word on first reference. Delta. D, E, L, T, A.”
“After that, for the rest of the paper you put little tails on them, like an alpha.”
Louder. “You’re from Mississippi. I shouldn’t have to explain a delta to you.”
She picked up her LaTex manual and began flipping to the index with savage concentration. “Okay, okay, don’t have a cow. I’ll look up the command for a universal change—”
A full-on shout now. “Which will do neither of us any fucking good whatsoever because there are in fact alphas in this paper, which you did somehow manage to spot.”
“Listen mister,” she said, pulling the manual to her chest. “Where do you get off swearing at me? I don’t have to type your bloody paper for you if I don’t want to. You’re a postdoc.”
“You have to type it because Harry told you to.”
“He asked me to do it. Harry asks me to do things, he doesn’t tell me.”
“Good for Harry. Now fix it and for fu—” He inhaled. “Just—get it right this time.” He paused at the door. “And for the record, Americans sound ridiculous saying ‘bloody.’”
She got up and closed the door behind him. She sat down and looked at the printout he’d thrown on the desk when he walked in, smudges where the pressure of his hand had smeared the ink, alphas shot through with lines that left dents in the paper, the word “delta” scrawled again and again on each page. There was a soft knock at the door.
“Come in.” It was Harry, breathing a little hard, as he had all week when the weather became unbearably hot.
“What was that I was hearing?”
“Matthew was correcting his paper,” she said.
Harry walked in and sat down heavily in the spare chair. “I gathered something like that.”
“I messed up the Greek letters.”
“Yes. Well. Ordinarily I would be taking a stroll down the hall right now to tell Matthew that here at Courant we don’t yell at the secretaries. Least of all mine.” He cleared his throat. “But I’m giving him a pass. Just this once. He’s got a lot on his plate.”
“I w
ouldn’t know,” she said. “This is the first time I’ve seen him in two months.”
The paper had shown up on her desk last week, with a note from Harry asking her to type it as a favor. She’d left the draft in Matthew’s mailbox downstairs.
“He’s leaving Saturday,” said Harry.
“Yes, that I knew.” She touched the dented lines on the first page, and managed to say steadily, “And there’s the engagement party next week.”
In London. She’d heard Anna burbling in Harry’s office, all the way back in May. When Anna was walking to the elevator Ceinwen had spotted the ring, just before she ducked into her office to cry. “It can’t be two carats. And even if it is, that’s not that big,” was Talmadge’s comfort.
“That, plus there’s the dinner tomorrow night.”
“What dinner?”
“8:30. Il Primo Cerchio,” said Harry. “That fancy-schmancy place down near the financial district.” He was watching her from under his brows.
“Big dinner?”
“No, just me and Donna and Paru and Radha. Intimate. Or as intimate as you can get there. They tell me it’s the size of an airplane hangar.”
“Have fun,” she said. “I hear the food’s good. Talmadge has been seeing one of the waiters sort of off and on.”
Harry’s eyebrows inched lower. “That could come in handy,” he said. “For last-minute reservations. Matthew said Anna booked this about a month ago. She’s very keen on the place.”
“I guess because it’s Italian.”
“You’d think she’d want to branch out. Japanese, Thai, even French. But no, Il Primo Cerchio.” He paused, and continued. “At 8:30. Table for six. On a Friday night.”
“Sounds cozy,” she said.
She picked up the paper. “Don’t bother with that tonight,” said Harry.
“He said he needs it before he leaves.”
“You’ll have plenty of time tomorrow morning, and he can look at it before this dinner tomorrow night. At 8:30. Downtown.” He reached over and tapped her copy of the Voice on the corner of the desk. “If you leave now, you could still make the Mizoguchi at the New Yorker. You were telling me you hadn’t seen much from Japan. Street of Shame, it’s a great one.” He waited. “His swan song.”
She’d never heard of it, but the title alone sounded like a barrel of laughs. “I’m going home. I have to figure out what to register for next semester.”
“All right. See you tomorrow.” She picked up her purse. Harry seemed to be waiting for something, but then he heaved himself to his feet.
Talmadge and Jim were arguing about where to position the fan to catch a breeze. They fell silent when she walked in.
“How was your day?” said Talmadge.
“Don’t ask.” She threw her purse on the floor and the couch shifted as she collapsed on it. “And I don’t want any tea.”
“Excuse me, Missy Thing. Did I offer any?”
“I’m sorry.” She pulled the rhinestone clip out of her hair. She’d been trying to wear it wavy, in a halfhearted attempt at Rita Hayworth, and with all the humidity it was always bedraggled by day’s end. Not that Matthew had noticed. He was looking at his fucking deltas.
“Will you see him tomorrow?” asked Jim.
“I doubt it. He has a big dinner. Him and Anna, Harry and Donna, this professor from Columbia.”
“How do you know, he told you this?”
“No, Harry did. It’s down at that place where Sammy works.”
“Well, whoop-tee-do,” said Talmadge. “Sammy says you can’t get out of there for less than $100 apiece. Even if you order water.”
She made a face. “Yeah, and I guess getting a reservation’s a bit deal, because Harry kept telling me over and over it’s 8:30 on a Friday night.” She grabbed her purse to get a cigarette.
Jim sat down on the floor. “Now why would he do that?”
“How should I know. The heat’s making everyone weird.” She drew a finger across her upper lip to get the sweat off. “It’s supposed to break tomorrow. Rain.” Good. She hoped the restaurant flooded. She hoped Washington Square Village flooded.
“Why else?” said Jim.
“Why else what?”
Talmadge said, “Sweetie. Get your mind in gear. Harry wants you to crash.”
“How am I supposed to do that?”
“You show up,” said Jim. “It’s a restaurant. Not Buckingham Palace.”
“Then what? When I saw him today all he did was yell at me about his paper.”
“You sit at a table and look good,” said Talmadge.
She snorted, the cigarette trembled, and she brushed the ash off her skirt. “I’ve been right there on the same damn floor as him looking the way I always do for almost four months now.”
“Yeah, well, the closer he gets maybe the colder his feet get,” said Talmadge. “Marriage is a big deal for Catholics. Just ask Jim.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Jim doesn’t even like Matthew,” said Ceinwen.
“I like him fine.”
“Oh please.”
“Let’s say I’m resigned to him. Anyhow I can’t stand to see you moping around the apartment anymore. You’re reminding me of that Garbo movie you made us all watch last year.”
“She’s shown us, like, six,” said Talmadge.
“The one where she’s a hooker. But a high-class hooker.” They looked at Ceinwen and she rolled her eyes. “Come on, I’m totally blanking here. She gets sick at the end.” It was Camille, but she didn’t want to talk about it. “What’s wrong with you? Did you eat dinner?”
“This is what low blood sugar does to a person,” said Talmadge.
“Y’all were always the ones telling me not to call,” she reminded them sharply. “Now all of a sudden I’m supposed to crash his dinner.”
“You’re not there to throw your arms around his knees or something,” said Talmadge. “You’re just there. To jog his memory.”
“If I just show up out of nowhere I’m going to look pathetic,” said Ceinwen. “Believe me, I feel pathetic enough.”
“Not gonna lie, honey,” said Jim. “I don’t see what difference it’ll make either. But your big-deal genius boss knows Matthew better than I do.”
“A math genius. That doesn’t mean he’s a people genius. It probably means the opposite.”
“I give up,” said Talmadge. “You work on her. I’m calling Sammy.”
“You better have some actual pull with this one, Talmadge.”
“He told me he could get me in anytime. He just couldn’t, you know, pay.”
Jim plopped next to her on the couch. “Here’s how I see it. There’s nothing to lose at this point. We go. If nothing happens, and it probably won’t, you promise me you’ll accept it and move on. Nobody expects you to get over him right away. But I want you to get out of the house every once in a while. Please. You haven’t even forced a John Ford movie on us in two months.”
Talmadge had already dialed the phone. “Darling, how’s your evening going … Oh, mine too … Yes, definitely … Remember when you said …”
Jim pulled the cigarette out of her hand and stubbed it out. “We’re working with what we got, dress wise. So that means the halter.”
“… But could you swing a table for two even if you’re not working? … You said before …”
“You said the white washes me out.”
“That was when you were a blonde.”
“… That’s fine, just call me back …”
“I can’t go to this place. I don’t have enough money to pay my own way, let alone two.”
“I’ve got a credit card,” said Jim.
“When did you get that?”
“Last year. I figured we should have at least one adult around here.”
Friday night the rain began as the sun went down, a steady, quiet pour that was supposed to build as the night progressed. The temperature had plummeted and she wore a thin raincoat to pro
tect her dress.
Il Primo Cerchio was at the top of a twenty-story building way down near Centre Street. The elevators opened into a marbled foyer, coat-check area on the right, the passage to the dining room just beyond it. On the left a bank of windows showed an empty terrace furnished with lounge chairs and benches. People were handing their umbrellas and the occasional raincoat to the fellow working the large, half-empty cloakroom, a guy about her height who seemed even skinnier and younger than she was.
It was one swank crowd. Eau Sauvage and Coco, jackets and ties, teetery heels, flashing rings and watches, those quilted Chanel purses she couldn’t stand, a lot of lipstick even by her standards.
“Oh look,” said Jim. “It’s the Armani trunk show. We’re just in time.”
She checked in her coat and her cheap umbrella, which had been falling apart ever since the last big rainstorm, in May. Jim told the attendant that they were supposed to see the maitre d’. She smoothed down her dress. “Do I look okay?”
“I’m reconsidering my entire lifestyle.”
“You don’t have to lay it on that thick.”
“Hey, my sister says all it takes is the right girl.” She thought he looked better than any of these Wall Street guys. That double-breasted suit Talmadge gave him for Christmas practically made Jim look like a model, albeit a bookish, ever-so-slightly uptight sort of model.
“Good evening.”
And there stood one of the best-looking men Ceinwen had ever seen in her life. Must be forty at least, hair barely turning gray. Still. This was Harry Belafonte territory.
“How may I assist you?” She barely managed not to giggle at this butler-like greeting, but good lord, he sounded good, too. His voice was so deep she felt her chest vibrate.
This was Jim’s cue, but he wasn’t picking it up. He was staring, and the man was staring back. Finally they said, almost in unison, “I know you,” and started laughing.
“Palladium, right?” asked Jim.
“Yes! That’s it! I knew it. You were with a blond guy …”
“My roommate,” said Jim. “He’s a friend. He knows Sammy.” He looked both ways and added, in a conspiratorial whisper, “That’s how we got the reservation.”
Missing Reels Page 38