Me Times Three

by Alex Witchel

  But then the Grenadines trip happened and she had found a new hobby. She showed me her folder filled with notes documenting how Bucky lied to her about the time he spent with me (she had discovered from Ed that I was not in the past tense—Ed’s motive for sharing that information wasn’t mentioned, but, looking at Carla up close, I could guess), and then she showed me her notes about the times Bucky had spent with Beth. They were arranged in chronological order.

  So, yes, she was crushed that all this had happened. Maybe New York wasn’t really for her after all, she had been thinking lately. Vast sigh. A close friend of hers worked in Miami. She would just have to wait and see what happened next. Obviously, she stressed, she would never marry Bucky now. She could never trust him again, and the one thing she had learned from her parents’ unhappy marriage was that trusting someone after they betrayed you never really worked.

  I nodded, as if I knew what she meant.

  She drew her knees up to her chest, flaunting a mile of calf, and yawned. We sat for a while in silence.

  “He talked about you a lot,” she finally offered, perhaps feeling guilty. “He said you were the smartest person he had ever known, that you had influenced him more than anyone. He took harder courses in school to prove to you he could. He went to the theater and listened to classical music because you did those things and you didn’t make fun of him for liking them. You made him read books, just for fun. He said that Ancient Evenings changed his life.”

  Finally, I laughed. She looked at me oddly, but I didn’t bother to explain. What a literary giant he fancied himself now, all on the basis of one book. I could just hear the meaningful conversation about it they could share—though Carla seemed like the kind of girl who’d rather wait for the movie.

  Oh! But that was it! That was the real reason I was here. I felt some relief at the realization. My brain must still be alive.

  This girl obviously didn’t care what I looked like, because physically she was ideal. There would never be any contest on that front with me. But Carla Jones, college dropout, community-college dropout, had outsmarted Sandra Berlin, Yale graduate. That was her victory. Forget Beth; Beth was a bore. But Sandra? Sandra was the smartest person Bucky had ever known. And after all these weeks of sleuthing, Carla had waited for the perfect moment to play her hand, to do it in the most exquisite way. Why bother to appear at my apartment or at the magazine for a confrontation? Who would know except me? No, this was a girl who had mastered the fine art of turning heads. The only thing she hadn’t counted on was Bucky’s last-minute defection to Minneapolis. Think how much juicier her party scene would have been with two supporting players.

  It was almost four-thirty. I stared down at the Cartier watch on my wrist and, for a moment, had the heady sensation that I was someone else—there was the proof that this was not happening to me. But I could hear Mimi Dawson saying, “You deserve it, don’t you?” and then suddenly I couldn’t hold my head up one more minute.

  “I think I’d better go home,” I said, pulling myself up from the bed. “Listen. I appreciate your telling me. I, um, I guess you’ve saved me a lot of trouble.”

  She smiled. “We’ll talk tomorrow,” she said, warmly, conspiratorially, walking me to the door. “After he’s back. Get home safe, now.”

  I stumbled from the elevator through the lobby and onto the empty street. The beginnings of dawn showed in the sky. I walked several blocks without seeing a cab. The street stayed empty. You could hear the grinding when the traffic lights changed. How foolish they seemed, hanging there heavily, signaling no one.

  It was past five by the time I got home. Without even taking off my coat, I dialed Paul. It would only be two a.m. in L.A. Maybe he had gone out and would just be coming in.

  No answer. No machine.

  I didn’t really lie down on the couch so much as fall onto it. Numb. Numb wasn’t necessarily bad, I thought, the tweed of the cushion against my face. I had never realized before that numb came from the head as a direct command, not from the body part you imagined to be numb. I could feel the numb message thrumming on the switchboard, sending itself out, over and over, though my hands, wedged underneath my chin, stayed icy.

  I tried Paul again.

  “Hello?” His voice was sharp, pissed.

  “It’s me,” I said.

  “At two-thirty in the fucking morning?” he asked. “Who died?”

  “I did.”

  5

  It must have been near six when I hung up with Paul, and remembered that my long-awaited lunch with Miss Belladonna was at one. First I cried, convinced I should cancel. That lasted about ten minutes, until I realized I wasn’t getting married anymore and needed a job.

  The restaurant was crowded and Miss Belladonna was late. Not that it mattered, but her assistant, Kate, kept calling the maître d’ with updates every three minutes. I knew that Miss Belladonna was making Kate call only to torture her, keep her jumping, just for fun. Kate was a solemn, bottom-heavy girl who fought her weight constantly. During her thinner phases, she told us, Miss Belladonna was exceptionally nice to her. Whenever she gained weight, however, Miss Belladonna either completely ignored her or worked overtime to make her crazy—like the time a hot new restaurant opened in TriBeCa and Miss Belladonna had to be there that very day and she had to have a fabulous table since she was bringing Calvin Klein. Kate called for hours and got only a busy signal. By noon, Miss Belladonna ordered her to type up a request and take it to the restaurant in person, with a warning not to return until the correct table was secured at the correct time.

  Kate’s weight must be up, I figured each time the host came by. Miss Belladonna finally appeared, spouting airy apologies as she looked at all the other tables to see who was there. I was surprised that she even remembered my name.

  There was indeed Perrier. And salad. I couldn’t remember a word Laura Lattimore had told me and I didn’t need to. Miss Belladonna, it turned out, didn’t know a thing about art either—or theater, or movies, for that matter, unless someone French was in them, and then she only knew who they were sleeping with when they weren’t onscreen.

  While she was talking, I caught sight of my reflection in a mirror on the opposite wall. Hair combed, sitting up straight. Sometimes nodding, sometimes speaking. By the time coffee was served, she asked if I wanted the job, and I said yes, working up some real enthusiasm, gushing about how much I loved the magazine. She nodded, satisfied, while renewing her lipstick, studying herself in her compact mirror. Good. Done. Onto the next.

  They could only give me an extra two thousand dollars, she added, almost as an afterthought, as we rose to go. She hoped I understood. I said I did. As much as I understood anything in my life.

  Though I wanted nothing more than to catch the next train to Green Hills, I still had to go back to the office to return the Cartier watch, safe inside my purse. Also, it would be nice to share my promotion with Pimm and Coco. Pascal wouldn’t care because Pascal cared only about Pascal—and the free international calls he could make from his desk. Every morning when I came in he was already speaking to “Papa,” who lived in London and to whom he spoke in French—even though they were both American. I guess it was his bid for privacy, sitting in an office with three nosy women.

  When he wasn’t chatting with Papa, or anyone else to whom he could say “Oui” and pronounce it “way” in a manner to assure any eavesdropper that he knew French and she didn’t, he would stand in the middle of the room and tell tales, gesticulating grandly as he described whatever cocktail party he had been to the night before. Coco and Pimm loved his stories and begged for more. I would watch him perform, like a poodle begging for treats, as I answered my phone and tuned him out.

  But one day I came in early and he was not chatting with Papa and no one else was in yet. He was sitting at his desk, drinking coffee, with the gray face of someone who hadn’t slept. He looked awful.

  “Pascal, are you okay?” I asked.

  He glanced up, surpris
ed. He knew I didn’t like him, just as I knew he didn’t like me, with my abrupt New York manner and intense lack of interest in all things Eurotrash. But he was in bad-enough shape to want to talk, even to me.

  It was a girl, he said. A girl whom he had loved for more than a year now, who cared for him not at all. He had never told her about his feelings, just loved her from afar, but it was hopeless, he sighed. Entirely hopeless. I listened with as much sympathy as I could muster, and then in my own irritatingly pragmatic way asked if he could just stop feeling bad about it and come right out and tell her his feelings. Really go for it.

  He looked at me, thoroughly miserable. “I would,” he said slowly. “Except that she’s having a rip-roaring affair with her brother.”

  I almost laughed, but quickly realized he wasn’t kidding. Thankfully, at that moment Pimm arrived and took over, endlessly sympathetic. After that, for a few days at least, Pascal and I smiled and said good morning, but I stopped asking questions and offering advice. Green Hills had certainly never prepared me for a dilemma like that one.

  After the lunch with Miss Belladonna, I arrived at the office midafternoon, full of my news triumphant and tragic, but no one was around to hear either. I sorted quickly through the mail and headed to the fashion closet to look for Mimi. Instead I found a convention.

  Except for Susie Schein and Miss Belladonna, everyone on the staff seemed to be there. A few of the girls looked as if they’d been crying.

  “What happened?” I whispered to Pimm, who was standing near the door.

  “It’s Mimi,” she said solemnly. “She was fired, and there’s going to be an investigation.” I reached nervously for the watch. Could this be my fault?

  It was even worse than that. It seemed that Mimi had had an elaborate barter system going with a boyfriend with whom she traded Jolie! luxury items like Rolex watches for cocaine. At least ten thousand dollars’ worth of borrowed merchandise was gone.

  “The magazine has insurance for things like that, doesn’t it?” I asked.

  Pimm looked horrified. “I’m sure it does, but that’s not the point, Sandy. Mimi was stealing from the company. And making herself sick in the process. Didn’t you realize how skinny she was, how hyper?”

  Well, sure I did. But I thought being skinny was every girl’s dream come true, and I thought she was hyper just because some people are, and I believed that anyone from the South had to be as different from me as possible. I was happy to sit on my behind and read for hours on end, so I figured that Mimi was just a latter-day Scarlett O’Hara who was running the accessories closet instead of the plantation.

  And while we were talking about judging appearances so expertly, why was no one rushing toward me with concern, saying, “Oh, Sandra, what’s wrong? You look like you haven’t slept all night, your life must be absolutely ruined!” Well, as Jolie! could tell you, never underestimate the power of a good under-eye concealer.

  “Are they going to press charges?” I asked.

  Pimm shrugged. “No one knows. But Susie says they are.”

  I’ll bet she did. I sidled through the crowd over to the safe, where Buffy Parks stood guard. She was one of the fashion editors I loathed, the kind of woman who talked with a clenched jaw, like a character from one of those fifties teenage movies—the priss who ran the sorority. She had a list, handwritten in that Miss Porter’s School rounded penmanship—feminine yet insistently childlike.

  “Buffy, Mimi lent me this watch last night because mine broke,” I said, handing it to her.

  “Well, what took you so long?” she chided. “We told everyone this morning to bring back whatever they had.”

  I stared at her coldly. “Sorry,” I said. “I was having lunch with Miss Belladonna.”

  “Oh.” She barely even spoke, practically breathed the word, so awed was she by my brush with greatness. “That’s all right, then,” she added meekly.

  I turned around and left the room. What the hell was going on? I really liked Mimi Dawson. I truly had no idea that she was taking drugs. I felt a stab in my stomach, thinking about this, and about the night before. For a smart girl, I seemed to miss an awful lot.

  I gathered my things together and left.

  My mom picked me up at the Green Hills train station. When she pulled her car to the curb she took one look at my swollen face, makeup be damned, and I saw her own face turn pale. I can’t say I was ever that close to my mother. We were so very different—I eternally trying to figure out every last detail of how the world worked and why, and she resolutely escaping the world for the confines of her lab and her classroom. Although we had very few interests in common, she was always great in an emergency. And this qualified.

  I immediately started crying and told my story all the way home—punctuated by her indignant yelps—and on into the garage, through the door, into the den, and onto the couch, where I sobbed with the fiercest sobs I could muster and all my tears fell on her cashmere sweater. I finally stopped long enough to finish the story, every last detail, as if someone might be listening who could stop and reassure me that I was indeed wrong. She clucked me on, all the way until I got to “finished Jewish girl.” Then her eyes darkened, and her mouth tightened, and she shook her head with a terrible finality that seemed to make the phrase sound that much worse.

  She fixed my father a plate for dinner, but we stayed in the den, smoking and talking. She drank vodka, I drank Scotch. We chewed over every detail for hours before she switched to assuring me that my life would go on. I assured her it would not. The conversation lasted throughout the weekend, during which time my father stayed mostly in his bedroom, emerging only to go to the library. He seemed to know what was happening, but he kept his vow of silence, for which I was grateful. There was noise enough in my head, with the continual replay of the call Bucky had made the morning after the Met. At 7:38 a.m., to be exact.

  “Sanny?”

  I had picked up the phone and said nothing, blowing my nose.

  “Sanny, is it you?”

  “Yeah.” It came out like a honk. “Where were you?” I couldn’t believe I asked, but I was so damned anal, I had to know. Forget the betrayal. All I could think of was how long I had sat on Carla’s bed, looking at the pad with the daisies in the margin. “What hotel?”

  “We weren’t at a hotel,” he said. “It was a country club somewhere outside of Minneapolis.”

  Oh, how perfect. More right people.

  “Sanny, I’m sorry,” he said. “You have to let me explain.”

  “Never,” I said. “Never.” And hung up the phone.

  When it rang again, I let the machine pick up. Another heartfelt plea. He was calling from the airport, he said. He knew what had happened at the Met because Ed—that fucking double agent—had called his machine to tip him off. Along with all the gory details Ed had offered the advice that maybe Bucky should think about staying in the Twin Cities, that real estate there was looking good, ha ha. When Bucky repeated that to me, he tried to laugh, but all that came out was a harsh rush of air. I still didn’t pick up. We both waited, each listening to the other’s silence. Finally he said “I love you” and hung up.

  I stayed true to my word and refused to speak to him. He delivered to my apartment a mostly incoherent ten-page letter in a shopping bag that also contained his Amherst baseball jersey. What was I supposed to do with that? I almost cut it up into little pieces and sent it back, but I put it on instead and wore it every night for the next few weeks, which I mostly spent eating Ben & Jerry’s Coffee Heath Bar Crunch ice cream and not sleeping. He kept calling, and I kept hanging up.

  I refused to read the letter. Sharon read it to me instead, even volunteering to call her mother back rather than talking to her the moment she called. Now Sharon had another full-time lunatic to take care of. Between the two of us, a family-size box of Kleenex didn’t last a week.

  Sometime after the letter and the jersey arrived, Sharon came home late one afternoon with a present. We had recentl
y gone out for brunch, where she espoused her pet theory that all the women we knew should band together and file a class-action suit against MGM for producing a lifetime of movies about men in tuxedos loving women in evening gowns that only fostered unrealistic expectations for those of us in our pajamas. Then we shopped. I saw a pink flannel shirt that looked pretty and warm—safe, somehow. But it was forty dollars, which was a ridiculous price for a flannel shirt, and I left the store without it. Sharon had gone back and bought it for me, and had it wrapped as if it were my birthday. I cried. “Everyone should have a pink shirt,” she said. I hugged her, then put the shirt on over the jersey and wouldn’t take either one of them off except to go to work.

  This lasted a few weeks, until Paul called one day and, instead of giving me a chance to talk, announced that the moping was getting old, the whining even older. He demanded that I meet him in Palm Springs for a complete overhaul.

  We agreed on Memorial Day weekend, and then it became something I was actually looking forward to. So what that the town was filled with ninety-year-olds waiting to die? I knew just how they felt.

  At the Los Angeles airport, I checked my answering machine before catching the connecting flight. There was the requisite daily message from Bucky: “I know you hate me, I know you’ll never forgive me, but you’ve got to see me, you’ve got to let me explain.” I erased it.

  In Palm Springs, the desert air hit the doorway of the plane with a weight of its own. I headed for the baggage claim, determined to enjoy my R and R. Paul had explained that we didn’t have enough money to go to Two Bunch Palms—the best spa in the area, which only William Morris clients could afford, not William Morris mailboys—but he knew another place that used to be a tennis club. It also had a pool and a view of Bob Hope’s house on a hill nearby. The house had a roof that slid open, Paul said, so that you could see the stars.