Big City Eyes

by Delia Ephron

  I heard a thunk above our heads, and ignored it, hoping she would, too. “Why on earth were you driving in this?” I asked.

  She ran a hand through her hair. “Coming to see you.”

  Had I invited her and forgotten? I didn’t think so. “So you missed the deer? I’m confused.”

  “Missed it, that one, but then another—” She wilted further. Her mouth crumpled up, she blinked rapidly. Another thunk. This time the ceiling vibrated. She jerked up, stunned.

  “The kids,” I explained. “Sam and Deidre.”

  “They’re there now?”

  The ceiling shook again.

  “Good grief,” said Jane.

  “I know. It’s like living in occupied territory. I have to talk to him about it.” I wondered if I would.

  We both gazed at the ceiling, waiting for another rumble.

  “Could we sit someplace else?” she asked weakly.

  We toted the vodka, my diet Coke, and a box of Kleenex into the living room, away from the sounds of aerobic sex. Jane snuggled into one corner of the couch, and I occupied the other, my legs curled under me. “So then what happened?” I asked.

  “I hit that second one. Smacked it. The back of the car scooted sideways and then swung back. I got out and was wandering around in this total downpour. I couldn’t see anything, I don’t know.”

  “How terrifying.”

  She nodded.

  “Did you walk here from the accident?”

  “No, I drove. The car’s smashed in front, I think, but it’s working.” Having told the story, Jane sighed, her head listed slowly toward the back of the couch and touched down there, a safe landing. Her eyes closed.

  I reached over to squeeze her shoulder. “You’re having an attack of the Bambis.” Jane’s eyes popped open, and I was inches away from a look so desolate, from pain so stark as to be unmistakable. “You know, it must have felt like you hit Bambi,” I babbled, plumping the patient’s pillows with my voice. “That’s why you’re upset. There are too many deer, and they’re all worked up into a mating frenzy.”

  “I think Jonathan’s leaving me.” She was dry-eyed now, and flat.

  “What? How do you know?”

  “He has a girlfriend.”

  “Who?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Did he say?”

  “No.”

  “The ponytail.”

  “Yes.”

  It had been in front of my face, niggling at me, actually. When I first met Jonathan, the day Sam and I put up the hammock, I had been struck by that ponytail. Jonathan was a tall, thin, sleepy-eyed guy. The way he dressed and carried himself suggested he had only a passing acquaintance with his own body. Narrow shoulders hid in plaid shirts, khaki pants bagged over a flat behind. He had a sweet face—soft round eyes with heavy lids, and a hesitant smile. As a couple they made sense: Jane all vigor and pep, Jonathan a quiet comfort. I was a little thrown by his glasses—brash angular black frames—but the real incongruity was his hair. Graying brown and wavy, it had receded to leave a smooth oval, a lagoon on the top front of his head. In the back he’d grown it out and fashioned it into a small ponytail. About four inches then, who knew what it was now. I was too preoccupied with my son’s invention in the hair department to keep track of anyone else’s. I had assumed Jonathan was compensating for the baldness on top, the way women of a certain age wear short skirts to show off their legs in the hope of distracting from the lines in their faces. My ruthless mother had pointed this out. “After fifty,” she said, “a woman with good legs should walk on her hands.” Jonathan’s ponytail was like that, a version of holding on to youth. “When did he start wearing his hair that way?” I asked.

  “Last winter,” said Jane.

  So it was fairly recent, and I’d underestimated its significance. How unusual, when leaping to conclusions was my stock-in-trade.

  Jane laid out the evidence coolly, as if Jonathan were somebody else’s husband. His golfing hours had changed, from early morning to late afternoon. But not always, which was the strange part for someone so orderly. Occasionally, for the first time in twenty-one years of marriage, he went out to lunch or disappeared for a few hours in the afternoon. And, Jane threw in the final proof, this man who never used to leave home except to golf, who spent hours isolated in his den hooked up to his modem, playing the stock market, remarked that he needed fresh air.

  “Oh, he offered an excuse for leaving, when you didn’t ask.”

  “Exactly,” said Jane. “And then”—her cheek twitched, leaking tension—“I made a joke about gambas and he didn’t laugh.”

  “Gambas?”

  “‘Shrimp’ in Spanish.” Jane smashed a tissue into her face in an apparent struggle not to wail.

  “Are you okay?”

  She shook her head. “I’m so scared,” she said, after blowing her nose.

  “I know, honey.”

  We smiled at each other. If Jonathan left, we’d end up together on Saturday nights, having cozy talks in front of the fire. Accompanied by vodka, I noted, as Jane finished her drink and poured another. She had an ease with liquor. She never held it in her mouth before committing to it, as I often did. Nor did she savor it. She just polished it off. Was this new? A subtle seismic shift in behavior?

  Jane pressed the cool glass against her forehead, then her cheeks. “We went to Barcelona ten years ago. We ate all these gambas. Gambas galore. They make the most delicious grilled shrimp in Barcelona. Have you ever been?”

  “No.”

  “Then we’d go back to the room and make love in the Roman bath. It was a gorgeous tiled sunken tub with steps. Do you mind my telling you this?”

  “Of course not,” I said. This was not true. Details about other people’s sex lives made me squeamish. The sounds of lovemaking upstairs might now be accompanied by a torrid narrative downstairs. I was in danger of being trapped in X-rated surround sound.

  “One night while we were in Spain, I had a dream about losing my underpants—only in the dream, my underpants were called gambas. It became our joke. ‘How are your gambas?’ ‘I lost my gambas.’ ‘What’s for dinner, gambas?’”

  “It’s a good word,” I said, realizing why I’d hated that story about the statue of Jesus. Because McKee and his wife had laughed about it together. The statue was their gambas.

  Jane ranted on, picking up speed. “So last night we rented My Cousin Vinny—that’s another thing, now whenever I ask him what he wants, from the video store, for dinner, anything, he says he doesn’t care—but we were watching, and I wasn’t really concentrating, because all I think about is how he doesn’t want me anymore, and that fills up all the space in my head. Anyway, this is so silly, but the movie’s about this car, and how to identify it, and I said, ‘By its gambas.’ Jonathan didn’t react, no smile, nothing.”

  Allan and I never had a gambas. The closest we ever came was my senior year at Barnard when we told my mother I was pregnant. He traveled home with me for spring break, and we were eating hummus, sitting on the low couches around her coffee table, a large brass Chinese tray balanced on squat wooden legs. My mother had gone through a big hummus-and-pita phase, and also a Middle-and-Far-Eastern-everything phase. The Chinese tray, curry, hummus, embroidered Indian pillows, kimonos—it was all one culture to her. One big bazaar. But hummus? I never could figure out how my mother, whose idea of providing comfort was to hold out a box of tissues for me to pull one for myself, could enjoy such an earthy food. “Didn’t you use birth control?” she’d asked.

  “No.”

  “It was a concession to aesthetics,” Allan added. This was a joke we’d already cracked to each other, and once again we laughed as if it had been so clever of us to end up in this predicament. My mother waited for us to get past our amusement, her eyes, hard as pebbles, peering at us over half-glasses. “How stupid,” she said. Allan threw me an anxious glance, and I jumped in, explaining that we really wanted to get married anyway. My mother, who pra
cticed the art of well-chosen silence, managed to convey the idea that this remark was not even worth responding to.

  So at twenty-two, when my friends began living the histrionic lives of single New Yorkers, something unexpected happened to me. I fell in love. With Sam. He passed through my ironic armor with ghostly ease. My tenderness for him felt almost illegal, born as I was into a family of non-connectors. On one of her rare visits to New York, my mother saw me leap from a park bench to protect Sam’s head from an errant swing. She informed me that I was fused with him. This infuriated me. My feelings were not twisted, just deep. What I felt for Allan was, in comparison, trifling. I had assumed that he was my match because of his attributes—the right Jewish boy with the right IQ, from the right family. He was no soul mate, but proper casting for the part. Besides, I was pregnant, and that had fueled my need to think him right. We came undone fairly quickly. At twenty-seven, with a five-year-old, I reentered single life as my former classmates were tying the knot right and left. I was doomed to spend my life out of step and over my head.

  “So that’s how you know Jonathan’s having an affair? He didn’t laugh at a shrimp joke?”

  “Plus no sex for ages, the ponytail, the so-called lunches.”

  “You connected the dots.”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m good at that, too.”

  We shared a silence, acknowledging the bittersweet fruit of our brilliant intuitive powers. And then Jane dropped the bombshell.

  “I went to the bank today and discovered he’d cleared out our savings account.”

  “What?” Even I was aware that my “whats” were remarkable. An utter capitulation to disbelief and astonishment. Very satisfying to the person at whom they were directed, I’m sure. Jane responded with a wan smile as Sam’s bedroom door banged open, and his and Deidre’s threatening procession downstairs commenced.

  “Oh God, no, bad timing.” I rose to greet them, but in almost perfect synchronization they lapped their bodies around the newel post at the bottom of the banister in order to make it into the kitchen without being accosted.

  “Good, a reprieve.” I flopped down again. “Now go on, whisper, they’ll never hear.”

  “No, I don’t want to discuss it.” Jane folded the quilt and rearranged herself, smoothing her pants, crossing her legs. “I want to have a normal conversation. I want to pretend my life’s okay.”

  “Maybe he made a bad investment, and he’s disappearing daily to brood.”

  “You don’t believe that, do you?”

  “No.”

  I heard the kids bumping around, cabinets opening and closing.

  “Let’s not talk about it,” said Jane. “Tell me what you did today.”

  I considered before answering. “Nothing much,” I said. “I didn’t feel like working, so I took a walk on Ocean Avenue, sneaked down driveways, checked out the mansions, it was fun.” So now I had lied to my close friend. Not only that, the lie came easily. I hoped this wasn’t the beginning of a descent into an underworld of intrigue and murder. Feeling a rush of competence, possibly excitement, I moved on to worm information out of her. “Do you know the Nicholas house? It’s beautiful.”

  “Yes. Lovely. He gutted it.”

  “He?”

  “George Nicholas. Bought it two years ago, around the time Jonathan and I got our new place and Simon had just left for college. It’s strange to wish for a time before, isn’t it? I pine for before.”

  “I think it’s clear we can’t talk about anything else.”

  “Yes, we can. Ask me a question.”

  “No.”

  “Please.”

  “Well …” I pretended to think. “Who is George Nicholas?”

  “Mid-thirties. In direct mail, whatever that means.”

  “That means rich. You know, Jane, if you owned one of those big four-by-four cars, hitting that deer would have been like swatting a fly. You wouldn’t have even known it happened. I saw a dark green SUV in the Nicholas driveway.” The lies were piling up. “Was that his?”

  “Maybe. Not sure. I think he drives something German. Lives in Manhattan, has an accent. Could be English, could be affected.”

  “His taste is affected,” I said, then realized with horror that, so gifted was I at sleuthing, I’d given myself away. How would I know his taste unless I’d been inside his house?

  But Jane wasn’t paying attention. “That shit,” she said. She was not speaking of George Nicholas.

  “It must take major bucks to service those mansions. I wonder how many people have keys to that house.”

  “The housekeeper, the caretaker if there is one, the contractor if the house is undergoing renovation.” Jane ticked them off. “Not the gardener or the pool man, but the security company.”

  “If the house has an alarm.” Was my pretending not to know lying or simply being evasive?

  “I look terrible, don’t I?” demanded Jane.

  “No, just sad. I wonder who Jonathan’s girlfriend is. Do you have any idea?”

  “I don’t want to know. I haven’t decided what I want to say or do. Until then I’m going to act as if I know nothing.”

  “How cold-blooded,” I remarked with some admiration. So Jane would go about her life, being cheerful, which she was awfully good at, while she contemplated her dreadful options. She might be coping with Jonathan by imagining him a tiresome client and chatting about the scarcity of parking spaces (a big Sakonnet Bay topic) or beach erosion or the advantages of gas heat over electric. “He’s planning to run away with her,” I said. “It’s obvious. He’s cleared out the account.”

  “My last four commissions.”

  “He’s going to split with that money, and you’re going to have a hell of a time nailing him legally, because he can play the market from wherever. All he needs is a computer. You better get a lawyer.”

  Now we heard some cupboards banging.

  “Sam? Sam, come and say hello to me,” called Jane.

  Silence. Possibly a huddle was taking place. Then feet pounded, and Sam and his giantess appeared in the doorway.

  “Hey.” He bobbed his head at Jane. He was carrying a bag of popcorn.

  “Hi, Sam,” said Jane.

  “This is Deidre Hall,” I said. “Deidre, Jane Atkins.”

  Deidre sliced the air with her hand, presumably a hello. She looked particularly ragged, in baggy jeans whose waistband floated somewhere in the neighborhood of her hips. A brief dirty white T-shirt left her belly button exposed, a tiny piece of her body that I had not had the good fortune to witness the other day. My life is like Appointment in Samarra. I fled death in New York City only to find it waiting for me in Sakonnet Bay. Deidre had to be the only person in town with a belly-button ring.

  “I hit a deer,” said Jane.

  “Majqa,” said Deidre.

  I explained that Deidre spoke Klingon, and Jane feigned ignorance.

  “What does ‘majqa’ mean?” I inquired.

  Sam scratched his cheek. “‘Good.’”

  Good that Jane hit a deer? Perhaps he hadn’t translated accurately.

  “It happened just before the turn to your street,” said Jane.

  Sam and Deidre exhibited all the interest of posterboard, which for some reason made me more determined to have a normal-range conversation. “There are too many deer. I’m covering a town meeting next week about it. Coral Williams, that woman who owns the Comfort Café, is head of Bambi’s Friends. She wants to institute a birth control program, do you believe that?” The words “birth control” echoed like some grotesque Freudian slip. Not that it embarrassed Sam and Deidre, but I lost the power of speech, and Jane came to the rescue.

  “My husband’s head of the relocation group,” said Jane. “They want to load the deer in a truck and ship them upstate to a farm.”

  “They should shoot them,” said Deidre. Speaking her first English words in my presence, she adopted the electronic, expressionless voice of a robot.

 
“Show no mercy,” Sam hooted. Deidre let loose a volley of machine-gun laughter.

  I didn’t dare exchange a look with Jane. The conversation had just sailed so far out of normal range it had docked in China.

  “They should shoot my husband,” said Jane. “Show no mercy.” She let out a hoot of her own.

  Sam and Deidre’s levity ceased abruptly. Sam scratched his head. He really was like a big dog. Possibly he had fleas. Deidre rolled her eyes in Jane’s direction, a smirk hovering, held back only by a bit of puzzlement visible in her shady gaze. At the same time her hand ventured into the bag of popcorn.

  “I’m kidding,” said Jane. “In fact, my husband agrees with you guys. He’s championing this ship-the-deer-out plan as a compromise. You know, Deidre”—this version of Jane could coax charms off a bracelet—“I met you once, when I was showing your parents’ old house, before your family moved. They weren’t home, so I let myself in. You were about eight and you looked so adorable in a Brownie uniform. You were watching—I think it was that wonderful show on Nickelodeon, Clarissa.” Deidre apparently did not appreciate being reminded of her normal childhood. She blinked a few times, that was all.

  Jane got up off the couch. “I guess I’ll go.” Deflated, she moved to the window and stared into the darkness.

  “You don’t have to. Stay as late as you want. Live here, it’s fine.”

  “No.” She walked past me, colliding with a footstool, before locating the path to the kitchen. I followed, and watched as she opened the refrigerator, poured herself a glass of milk, and chugged it.

  “Thanks to having no electricity, that milk’s probably not even cold,” I said.

  She chewed a hunk of Jarlsberg and downed another glass. “I am now officially sober,” she announced. I trailed her to the hall closet, careful not to dislodge or tread on a candle. Sam and Deidre were as we’d left them at the entrance to the living room: Deidre inserting popcorn into her mouth kernel by kernel; Sam on the floor, stroking the top of her bare foot.