Me Times Three

by Alex Witchel

  I reminded him of this exchange one morning—or, I should say, one afternoon—when he didn’t appear for class. Though this happened occasionally (how could it not when he’d start barhopping at midnight and get home at six a.m.?), it was not the norm.

  Around one o’clock, I’d gone to his apartment and rung the bell. No answer. I got scared then and started pounding on the door. Finally, I heard something inside, an awful noise between a groan and a roar.

  “Open the door,” I yelled in a panic. “Right this minute!”

  It took more screaming and pounding before Paul finally did open the door, at which point he turned abruptly and fell facedown onto his bed.

  “Romano, what is the matter with you?” I yelled, following him, trying to get him to sit back up. He clutched at his pillows and squealed into the mattress, imploring me to leave.

  “Okay,” I said, suddenly, in the calmest tone. “I’m just going to sit here and say nothing, and when you’re ready, you can tell me what happened.”

  He was silent. And I sat, for almost ten minutes, while he seemed to be praying, with all his soul and all his might, that I would disappear. When he eventually realized that God wasn’t listening, he turned the slightest bit toward me.

  “What is wrong?” I was almost whispering.

  “Bad night,” he muttered.

  “Do you need a doctor?” I asked.

  He groaned. “No,” he managed, before putting his face down again.

  “Do you want me to leave?” I asked.

  About ten seconds passed. “No,” he said.

  I was encouraged. “Okay,” I said. “I’m going to stay here, and you can tell me what you want to do next.”

  He thought about that awhile, then turned over. There was a swelling bruise next to his mouth that was turning reddish purple.

  “Will you let me put ice on it?” I asked, and though he shook his head no, I got up and filled a plastic bag full. I handed it to him, and he moaned when it touched his face. I went back into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator. Two bottles of vodka.

  “Okay, here’s the deal,” I said, returning to the bedroom. “It’s two o’clock, and I’m leaving now. At three I’ll be back, and we’re going to get some coffee and food and make sure everything on you works.”

  He glared.

  “That means when I come back there’s no banging on the door, or I go straight to your super. Okay?”

  His eyes shone with hate, and with love.

  “Okay,” he said.

  An hour later he was waiting for me on the street, cleaned up and dressed. We went to a crummy luncheonette, where he had coffee and toast, which I buttered for him. But after eating two pieces, he stopped.

  “You don’t have to tell me,” I said, lifting my glass of ice water to his mouth.

  He shrugged. “Too many drugs,” he said. “And the guy took my money.”

  “Do you need to cancel your credit cards?” I asked, instantly efficient.

  He half smiled. “He only took cash,” he said. “My money clip.”

  We sat for a while without speaking. He started to look less gray, and even ate a third piece of toast. When he pulled out a cigarette and his gold lighter, I felt better.

  “Well, at least he left the lighter,” I said.

  He nodded, seriously. “I was glad about that,” he said. “It was my grandfather’s. From Italy.” The lighter was a deep shade of gold that looked foreign and aristocratic. I liked the sound it made when he closed it, a quick, resonating clunk.

  I pulled out a cigarette too, and he lit it.

  “Romano, let me ask you something,” I said. “Does Sally know anything about this part of your life?”

  He looked as if he might cry. “Well, no,” he said. He waited a moment and added lamely, “You know, we’re just friends, really.”

  I looked at him hard. “And you’re telling me that your mother has no idea you’re gay?”

  He flinched. “No,” he said. “And she never will. I’m going to marry Sally.”

  “Even though you’re just friends?” I asked as the waitress arrived with the coffeepot to give us refills. He didn’t answer, and I didn’t push it.

  He looked up from his coffee, wincing from the weight of the cup on his lip.

  “Come over to my place,” I urged. “You’ll take a nap, and we’ll watch Brideshead Revisited and order in pizza, and if you can’t chew, I’ll make you soup. And you can keep ice on your face and no one will see you but me.”

  He looked unsure, and I started to laugh. “Do you think you’re going out tonight and showing that puss in a bar?”

  “Okay,” he said. As we got up to leave, he turned to me. “Sally and I really are getting married.”

  “Great,” I answered lightly. “I just think you might let her know there’s a possibility you’re going to come home like this, sometimes.”

  Like most people leading a double life, Paul counted on the notion that one day he would simply wake up and choose, just like that, and everyone would embrace his decision. I wondered about Sally. I could only hope she was having wild sex with someone, anyone, in between papal visits. Life was too short for this type of deception.

  Meanwhile, my own double life was progressing unchanged. Every time I was in the city, I felt I was missing something in New Haven. And more often than not, Bucky had to have dinner with the client and I was left sitting in the brownstone by myself, reading. When he got home he was usually exhausted and fell into bed, then got up for work at six a.m. Finally, I opted for meeting him in the city, or in Green Hills on the weekends, instead.

  Toward the end of my last year at Yale, Bucky decided to “trade up,” as he called it, on apartments. He had been sweating out the final weeks of the year, waiting to be summoned and told what his bonus was. The eighties were in full flower, one of the senior executives had left, and I remember numbers like $100,000 being bandied about. For a kid. But he was working day and night, Bucky kept saying. He deserved every cent. When his check arrived, he wasted no time finding a beautiful place around the corner from where he was, in a nineteenth-century brownstone. It had tin ceilings, tile work, and oak floors. It was gorgeous, perfect, as if I had chosen it myself. And the best part was that the brown plaid couches disappeared without my interference. Bucky had a decorator now, an older British woman with whom he would drink tea at the Regency. Each appointment would end with his signing more checks. Though I wasn’t thrilled about how much money he was spending, it turned out that his decorator actually had good taste. Mrs. Ross was genuinely furious when she was informed that there was no place for her needlework except, as the decorator sniffed, “bundled off to the Goodwill.”

  When I got my degree, I moved back in with my parents. The idea of living with Bucky before we were married had always made me uncomfortable—like cheating, somehow. I wanted to do things right, in order. I knew that we would be spending the rest of our lives together, and I trusted him completely. When he told me stories about how his married friends went to golf tournaments just to pick up women, we scoffed in unison. How bored they were, how pathetically unfulfilled.

  Later that year I planned to move in with my friend Sharon, down in the Village. Sharon was another student from the drama school who couldn’t find a paying job in the theater; she was now studying to become a therapist. She was an only child, and her widowed mother still bought all Sharon’s clothes and cooked full meals that she delivered weekly to her daughter’s refrigerator. That unyielding attention had sent Sharon into individual and group therapy long before she surrendered to it as a profession. She was a small girl, with sallow skin and masses of dark orange ringlets, who seemed to cry hourly—the kind of person you see on the bus, red-rimmed eyes fixed on the floor, an advertisement for the misery of city living. On an up day, she wore a beret.

  Our agreement was that she would have the bedroom and I would pay less to sleep in the living room. Though Sharon never seemed to find the right guy, latel
y she had been seeing a gynecologist named Dr. Hyman.

  “Don’t you think he should change his name, or at the very least his job?” I had asked after their first date. We were collapsed in laughter. “Really!” she gasped, but I also knew she had no bargaining chips, because it was Sharon’s specialty to bring guys back to the apartment, suggest they take off their clothes, get into bed, and “just sleep.” Though for a gynecologist, that might constitute its own eroticism.

  None of that concerned me, of course. Living downtown, I would be only a few subway stops from midtown, where I would certainly spend most of my time.

  By this point, Bucky was pretty well entrenched at Klein Chapin & Woodruff. All the right people liked his work, he said. He had dinner during the week with all those right people, and played tennis every weekend with them. We also went to some right-people parties, the idea of which excited me no end. This is what I had been waiting for my entire life! To be a right person. Even by association.

  The party I remember most clearly was at a big-deal country club near Green Hills. I borrowed a grown-up silk dress from my mother and arrived in high spirits. Most country clubs I’d seen, including the Jewish ones, tended to look nice but never nice enough, as if their members hadn’t wanted to cough up funds to replace the worn carpet in the hallways or repaint the flaking heating vents in the ladies’ rooms. This one was no different. But there was a genuine buzz near the bar, and the lighting set off the wood paneling in the library, where the drinks were served, and I felt the same release as at the end of a good bedtime story. Everything was as it should be. I was in the right place with the right guy. I was safe.

  The men soon broke off into one group, the women into another. I was welcomed by Nancy Dickinson, the wife of Bucky’s good friend Arthur. The Dickinsons were the epitome of right people, as far as I could tell, with a huge apartment on Fifth Avenue and an estate in Oyster Bay, where they went on the weekends, complete with stables and a well. Nancy was big at the Junior League, and we chatted about that for the longest time, or at least she did, telling me all the good deeds they were doing for poor children in Harlem. I nodded knowingly and what I hoped was enthusiastically.

  At dinner I found myself next to Arthur. We had a merry time rating New York restaurants: Arthur was the rare WASP who not only liked to eat but genuinely knew a lot about food. Nancy preferred peanut-butter crackers, as she would be the first to tell you, but Arthur ate out every day for lunch and for as many dinners as he could manage. While the country-club food left much to be desired, we talked so much about good food that I barely noticed it until the plates were cleared away.

  It was time to dance then, and Bucky spun me around the polished floor until Arthur cut in. Then it was Bucky again, and then the men went back to talking together and drinking brandy and Nancy introduced me to some of her friends, who mostly talked about tennis, so I stayed quiet. But I looked at the floodlights outside the window, illuminating the lush sweep of lawn, and watched as the valets drove the cars up to the front door, helping the women tuck their mink coats inside, and I saw the long warm bath of my future life before me. I smiled at Bucky and he smiled back, pleased to see me so happy.

  It was actually one of those men sipping brandy that night who recommended to Bucky that we visit Seven Maples, a resort in Vermont. So a few weeks after I started at Jolie!, we packed up the car and headed north for the Fourth of July weekend.

  As promised, it was lovely. We wandered through crafts fairs, watched Wimbledon on television, and went to a steak house in a real log cabin just over the border in New Hampshire. I remember that the menu had a description of how the steaks were cooked, and medium rare was described as having a “hot pink center.”

  “That’s just like you,” Bucky said, and I blushed and laughed and thought how good my life was, how fortunate I was to have this through line, this person I had known since high school who knew me so well, who was always on my side, who was so successful in the world that he could afford these extravagant weekends. I started making lists in my head of all the places I wanted to go, all the islands, the inns, the exclusive, beautiful hideaways the world had to offer. True, I had no interest in sailing, Bucky’s latest hobby, but I could go along and lie on the beach while he was offshore. There wasn’t a situation in the world that could trouble me; I could adapt to anything. Being an editor meant reading manuscripts, and I knew I could do that anywhere. And my blank books, filling slowly with practice tales, were always with me. The stories I had written so far didn’t seem quite right for children, but I knew that would change once I had some of my own. Everything was working out fine.

  On our last day in Vermont, Bucky went into town without me and came back with a copy of Ancient Evenings, by Norman Mailer.

  He showed it to me by the pool, where I was sunning, waiting for him. “Doesn’t this look great?” he asked.

  “It does, but you’d like John Irving better. I told you that. The World According to Garp.”

  “Well, this looked harder,” he said valiantly.

  “Okay, you’ll tell me how it is,” I said. “What else did you get?”

  He smiled and handed me a small stuffed bear and a big stuffed porpoise. “They’re going to be your company on all the nights I have to do business and you have to do business and you’re by yourself,” he said. “They’ll keep my place warm until I come back.” I cooed over them, and him, and we cuddled for a while before jumping into the pool together.

  We swam laps side by side until finally I clung to one end, breathless. A man in lime-green pants sitting poolside smiled down at me and I smiled back, feeling the heft of the riches my future life had in store. A brand-new porpoise and valet parking. Their world wasn’t so mysterious, after all. It would soon turn into the world according to me.

  4

  There are certain moments in life when you realize that nothing will ever be the same. They can thrill you, those moments—like the morning after Bucky proposed, when I woke up and remembered that something wonderful had happened.

  The moment that came that night at the Met, though, was of a different sort. It wasn’t when I expected it. Not when Carla Jones first stood in front of me, when Bucky’s friends gaped, when I realized that somehow I had been left out of my own life.

  It came outside the museum, a little while later. After Carla had presented herself and we sat down in the midst of the party and the noise resumed and the girlfriends and the wives who knew better prevailed upon their lesser halves to go and get them another drink pronto, we got up and left. That was Carla’s idea. She walked and I followed, eyes down, the smooth marble floor beckoning the way tile does in the bathroom after you’ve been sick and there it is, so close and cool, a place to rest. But my feet kept pace with hers, and aside from the rushing in my ears the only sound I could hear was that of our heels, clacking.

  On the steps of the museum she turned and faced me. “Do you want to come back to my apartment?” she asked. “There are a few things I think you should see.”

  That was the moment. I didn’t look at Carla then but at the steps, stretching out, it seemed, for acres. Ghostly gray cement. And I knew that this was it, knew in some hard part of my brain that if I accepted her invitation I was taking nine years of patty-cake bliss and throwing them away. I knew it whole at that moment, that small, hard part of me standing there, nodding and saying in the clearest tones, “Yes, I will go with you.”

  Carla Jones lived in a high-rise in the West Fifties with a roommate, she said, who was not home that night. I couldn’t see much of the apartment as she led me straight to her bedroom, but the living room looked, well, efficient, with its track lighting, glass coffee tables, and cubed couches. There was probably an expensive stereo behind the cabinet doors of the mammoth wall unit. Stew coop, I thought. Isn’t that what they used to call those apartments that stewardesses shared back in the sixties and seventies? A perfect place for a drink and a screw on the way out to dinner?

  She
switched on the lights in her bedroom, and the first thing I saw were the stuffed animals littering the pillows on the single bed. I felt a stab in my stomach. There was a bear, different from mine but a bear all the same. No porpoise. A monkey, instead. And though there were no flowers, I saw that she had saved, in the frame of her mirror, a note card from a bouquet. This was a recent habit of Bucky’s—ordering long-stemmed roses over the phone, charging them to his American Express card, and having them delivered with a note that declared all his love in the florist’s handwriting.

  Somehow I’d thought a girl like this would have had a king-size waterbed and a few whips and chains tossed nonchalantly over the closet door. But there were only lamps as decoration, with frilly, bowed gingham shades. I don’t remember a desk or a bookcase, but the carpeting was thick and creamy, wall-to-wall. They must have fucked a lot on the floor. That was Bucky’s idea of avant-garde.

  We proceeded inside with the intimacy of friends, throwing our coats on the pink velvet chair, sliding off our shoes, sitting cross-legged on the bed. I noticed her checking out my legs, which were shorter than hers, and I could see her tally one for her side.

  She leaned over and pulled a file from a drawer in her nightstand. She was incredibly prepared for this, it seemed. She had collected evidence. She was laying out her case. Now she was about to present it.

  But first, as they say in the kind of books I save to read on the beach, she let the other shoe drop.

  “Do you know Beth Brewer?” she asked, settling against the headboard.

  “Yes,” I said. She was also an account executive at KCW, as I recalled—in any event, Bucky called her his friend and I had met her once or twice. She was short—her legs were shorter than mine, as a matter of fact—and plain in a way that was only accentuated by her bow-tie blouses and shag haircut. I thought it was nice that Bucky had a woman friend in that piggy world where men reigned supreme.