Me Times Three

by Alex Witchel

  A sign outside the window, in the alley, caught my eye. “For many years, even after I passed away, the story of the first flag was kept within my family. In 1870 my grandson Will, thinking to do me honor, saw fit to tell the world how I had made the flag. He added to my tale a touch or two of fancy, and I became a famous figure.”

  A touch or two of fancy? Her descendants were as counterfeit as their ancestor, a composite woman who sewed a composite flag designed by someone else, living in a composite house typical of the period.

  I walked out onto the street, dazed, and lit a cigarette. Fake. It was all fake—the historical figure, the lineage, the promises, the illusion, the hope. What wasn’t fake? The sex and the ice cream.

  What do I care?, I asked myself. I wasn’t marrying Bucky. I hadn’t seen or spoken to him in almost a year. Why did it still bother me so?

  I just hated the lie. Because I had jumped so high and so far to believe it. Because I had labored to satisfy some mythical standard of perfection—me, with my lack of manual dexterity, who could hardly thread a needle. And because I had yearned to belong, to be right, the right people, without even trying. That’s what it was about: to wake up in the morning and be where you were supposed to be. No striving. No wishing. There.

  It was all so pointless. Look at the Rosses. Where were they? The father with his cocktails, the mother with her afghans. Were they in any more of a “right place” than I was? Was their prized son—who wrecked my life, Carla Jones’s life, Beth Brewer’s life, and now that decorator, Wendy’s, life—was he in a “right place”?

  It’s over, I thought. It doesn’t matter. You’ve learned from it. Learned what? Not to trust men with blue eyes, for one thing.

  Well, not so fast. Mark Lewis was different, certainly. I had loved our dinner at Le Bec-Fin and had been thinking all day about where he’d invite me that night. Someplace casual, probably Italian. Get the full range of experience. And perhaps, afterward, I would even reconsider that nightcap.

  Back at the Rittenhouse, I looked for my concierge, but he had been replaced by a woman who returned my questioning glance with a blank stare. I went up to my room—it was after five by then—and found a note, written on hotel stationery. It was from Mark—he had slipped it under the door, but when?

  Hi, Sandy—

  I ran into some friends at the museum and we’ve decided to meet for dinner tonight. Also, with your indulgence, I’m thinking I’ll skip brunch tomorrow and take a morning train.

  Let’s talk early in the week. Thanks again for the shirt!

  Mark

  Oh.

  I sat on the edge of the bed. It seemed to be time to go home.

  #70 Me Times Three

  by Sandra Berlin

  In the palace of a King toiled a young female servant whose father lay dying on his bed. He turned to his only child, and she leaned in close to hear his final words.

  “My dear daughter,” he said, “I have kept this ring of your mother’s since she died giving birth to you. It is an enchanted ring, given to her by a troll who loved her. She wanted you to have it when you grew up, and made me promise I would save the wishes for you. The ring entitles you to three, and all you need do is put it on your finger when you make your wish and it will instantly come true.

  “But remember,” the old man continued, “you must not treat this gift lightly, for once your three wishes are up, you will never get any more.”

  “Oh, but Father,” the young woman cried, “during all these years, we could have used these wishes so many times! We could have wished to be free of servitude, we could have wished your illness to be cured, we could have wished that a prince would marry me and take care of us both forever.”

  The old man smiled. “No, my dear,” he said. “You must not use wishes merely to get what you want in your life. You must save them for emergencies, and by your own toil you shall earn the things that make a happy life.” Then he died.

  The young woman took the ring from her father’s palm and slipped it into her apron pocket. She thought of all the wishes she would like to make: to never have to work another day, to never have to date another servant with dirty fingernails, for the Prince to fall madly in love with her so she would be protected forever.

  But she remembered her father’s words and kept the ring inside her pocket. When she grew very sick herself, she did not wish to be well. When the Prince walked close by her side one day, she did not wish him smitten. She waited.

  In fact, she waited so long that years passed. Still she worked in the King’s palace, and still she pined for the Prince. Wishes filled her head, but she was so afraid to waste them that she started to be afraid even to think of them.

  Finally, one day, an affirmative-action notice for palace employees was posted, and the female servants were advised that they could meet personally with the Prince to see if they qualified to be his Princess. It was a very rare offer, indeed, and the servants primped for weeks.

  Well, the young woman knew that this was her chance to use her first wish. Still, she appeared for her meeting in a highly agitated condition; she had spent so long silently wishing that she had long ago stopped speaking. She was no longer used to social interaction. She walked toward the Prince and curtsied low. “Your Highness,” she murmured.

  “Please rise, my lady,” he said gallantly, and she did, though when she looked up into his handsome face, she panicked. She grasped one of her hands in the other, feeling for her enchanted ring, but when she found it, she could not bring herself to use the wish, so used was she to hoarding them.

  “You goose, you must wish now!” she told herself, but her eyes only widened, and her smile stuck upon her face, and when the Prince spoke kindly to her, she could only nod and bow her head again. Then she turned and left the room. Once the door had closed behind her, she fell to the stone floor, exhausted by the strain.

  “Oh, how I wish to become wise,” she said without thinking. “I wish I was worthy of becoming a Princess. But most of all, I wish I never had any wishes.”

  After she spoke, she looked down at her hand with horror. Any time that she had said a wish out loud before, the ring had stayed inside her pocket. But there it was, right on her finger. Her foolishness made her weep.

  But wait, she thought. I wished to be wise. I wished to be worthy of becoming a Princess. Those were good wishes. But then she realized that because of her last wish, she could never know if either of her first wishes had come true.

  The End

  13

  Four weeks later, it was Sally who picked me up at the airport. I had lied to Susie Schein that Friday morning, just before I left for the airport, claiming stomach flu. Since my last visit, Paul had been hospitalized and lost more weight. A big problem, Sally said, was a lesion on the roof of his mouth, which made eating painful. I wanted to say that he was probably glad to have a lesion where no one could see it, but this was not the kind of comment Sally would appreciate.

  She looked remarkably well, I thought. Tired, certainly, but her eyes were luminous. She was going to Mass every day and she was praying with Paul at home. Prayer seemed to have given her peace—one that I envied, actually. A lifetime spent corralled behind screens in the women’s section of the synagogue while the men ran the service had never provided quite the same glow.

  My mother knew how much Paul loved her potato pancakes and had made a ton of them. Like most people at that time, including me, she didn’t understand much about AIDS, but as a mother she understood the concept of a child starving to death, which is essentially what he was doing. She bought a pound of smoked salmon, which he also loved, and packed everything in a cooler for me to take to Los Angeles, where she was convinced they had no food at all.

  I explained this to Sally as I stowed the cooler into the backseat of the car. “It will be wonderful if he can eat that,” she said, smiling generously. “We’ve been trying to keep him drinking this milk shake the doctor told us to make, and he’s been doing wel
l with it, but only in very, very small amounts.”

  I looked at her. “How small?”

  “A shot glass full,” she said.

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  “No.” She kept driving. “Sandy, I want to try to prepare you for what’s been happening,” she said. “Paul has deteriorated very quickly. Since you were here last, he’s lost more than twenty pounds.”

  “I figured as much,” I said. “But he can still eat and gain it back.”

  “Also, he’s been, well, a little more difficult.”

  “Meaning what?” I asked. Most of the times I had called during the past weeks, he had been either in the hospital or sleeping; we hadn’t spoken much. He had called me once, at about two a.m. New York time, convinced that I had stood him up for drinks at the Mondrian Hotel and furious because he said there was something important we needed to discuss. He was so insistent and I was so asleep, I thought for a moment that he might be right. I even thought I was in L.A. and confused by the time change, which is why I’d missed the drink. But then I heard Sally in the background asking who was on the phone. “There, do you see what I mean?” he whispered urgently. “They’re all against me.” He hung up without saying goodbye.

  “A certain amount of dementia has set in,” Sally said, her eyes still on the road. “And he’s taken to spending lots of money.”

  “How? On what? He seems to have been barely conscious anytime I’ve called.”

  “When I’ve gone out, to church or to the grocery, he’s gotten on the phone and ordered things with his credit card. Last week, he sent himself five hundred dollars’ worth of flowers.”

  “He did?” Fucking Romano. Maybe he thought he was Judy Garland.

  Her voice remained calm. “Then, because he knows he needs to eat more, he called a local bookstore and had three hundred dollars’ worth of cookbooks sent over. Anyway, you’ll see how the situation has changed. It was a very big deal for him to get out of bed and get dressed tonight, but he insisted on it because you’re coming. He can’t go to his AA meetings anymore, so his group comes to the house instead.”

  I didn’t know how to respond. The gravity of what she was saying didn’t fit the congenial tone with which she was saying it.

  “Sally, are you getting enough help?” I asked.

  “I am.”

  “Does that mean you’re seeing a shrink, I hope?”

  She nodded again. “How about you?” she asked.

  “Well, I’ve been thinking about it. I certainly could use one. The closest I’ve come is going to one of those support groups, for caregivers.”

  She looked at me questioningly and I felt myself blush. “I mean, I know I haven’t been the caregiver—or any sort of caregiver, I guess, because I’m so far away—but I wanted to try to understand more about what was going on with him, or at least with people who are in his situation. And yours.”

  “How was it?” She seemed curious.

  “All right, I guess. I’m not sure it was terribly scientific. There was a lot of crying, but not a lot of information. The woman who leads these sessions, Bebe Stewart, is a concerned socialite trying to do the right thing, and she means well. If nothing else, I think everyone likes the idea that a rich person keeps hanging around this crummy building in Chelsea, listening to their problems.”

  Sally smiled. “I’ve read about her. But you shouldn’t be so hard on yourself, Sandy,” she said. “You’re doing the very best you can, being so far away.” She seemed to want to say more, but she kept driving silently.

  “What, Sally? What is it?” I finally asked. These people with manners just wore me out.

  She took a breath. “Well, I’ve been wondering if you’ve gotten tested,” she said, eyes focused on the road.

  “For AIDS, you mean?”

  She nodded, saying nothing.

  “Why would you even ask me that?”

  “Well, you know why.” Her cheeks flushed. “Because of your relationship with Paul.”

  We were stopped at a red light, in front of a strip mall. “Sally, why don’t you pull in here so I can get some cigarettes,” I said, and she obligingly turned into the lot. When I got back into the car, I opened a window in deference to her pained expression and lit one. She turned the key in the ignition.

  “No, wait,” I said. She faced me, pale and grave, as if she were holding her breath. “Sally, we have to talk about this. I want you to understand something: I have never slept with Paul. Ever.”

  She stared at me with a mixture of confusion and suspicion.

  “Did Paul tell you we had?” I asked.

  “Well, yes,” she managed.

  I gasped. I could just imagine him doing it, too, giving her his innocent look, inventing me as competition. Anything but the truth.

  “Sally, do you know that up until last year I’d had the same boyfriend since high school?”

  She pulled a tissue from her purse. She was just too young a woman to be so quick on the draw with a tissue, I thought.

  “I did know about that,” she said, “but I thought it was the same kind of situation that Paul was in with me. That you two had known each other forever, but then you went away to school and met Paul and realized how you both were really soul mates, so you weren’t sure if you were going back to your boyfriend, just like Paul wasn’t sure he would come back to me.” The hand holding the tissue trembled.

  “Sally, I met Paul on the first day of school and we have been close friends ever since, but we have never been romantically involved.”

  The tears slid down her face. At last, so much of this baffling situation made sense to me. Her formality, her excessively polite approach to every little thing. She thought I was the other woman. She believed that if Paul didn’t marry her, it would be because of me. That was mean. And even though Paul was not a mean person, he had kept her hanging all this time, convinced her to put me up in her home, serve me coffee as if she were my maid, and all the while she was fearing I might steal the love of her life. I felt a twinge. No, Sandra, not mean. Weak. Like Bucky.

  “He told Marie the same thing—about you, I mean,” Sally was saying, fumbling for another tissue.

  “What?” I yelled. A little boy walking through the parking lot with a Good Humor in his hand looked at me, eyes wide. He reached for his mother’s skirt. “Fucking Romano,” I said wearily after the boy was out of sight.

  Sally looked startled a moment, then smiled. “I think you’re telling the truth,” she offered shyly.

  “Sally, listen,” I said, turning to face her. “I don’t really know you, and I’ve never met Marie. But I am telling you this: The only thing I know about Paul’s family, apart from the fact that they are exceedingly wealthy, is that Marie is in love with you, and Paul grew up knowing that if he married you, he would make his mother the happiest woman in the world.”

  Sally sighed, running her thumb around the rim of the steering wheel. She seemed to think for a moment, hard. Then she put the car into reverse, and pulled out into the traffic.

  A few stoplights later, I realized we were headed back in the direction of the airport. “Where are we going?” I asked.

  “I want to show you something,” she said. “It won’t take long.”

  We drove for a while, and Sally made a number of turns until we were on a residential street lined with tiny houses, kids playing on the front lawns. I had the uneasy feeling that she had decided not to believe me about Paul and was now going to slit my throat and bury me in her housekeeper’s backyard.

  A few blocks later, she pulled up to a house on the corner and stopped the car. The house was neat and trim, part brick, part clapboard, with an aluminum screen door and a postage-stamp-size lawn. WELCOME, the mailbox read.

  “Okay, I give up,” I said impatiently. “Who lives here?”

  “Paul,” she said, studying my face. “Or at least he did growing up. But his parents still live here.”

  She could have shot me and it would have had
the same effect. I stared at her, then back at the house, as if it might be different this time.

  “Sandy, Paul’s parents are not wealthy and they never have been. Mr. Romano is a foreman in a processed-food factory.”

  That couldn’t be right. I lit another cigarette, trying to absorb it all. “His father made a fortune importing Genoa salami. Paul told me—”

  She shook her head. “No. The factory where he works manufactures salami, among other things.” She sighed. “The truth is that a lot of Paul’s money came from Dennis.”

  I blinked, trying to catch up. Dennis, the soul mate, the one who’d run back to Australia after Paul betrayed him.

  “Paul met Dennis his first year in college, and Dennis just took over his life, paid for everything,” Sally went on. “The clothes, the car. He took Paul to Europe and bought him that gold Rolex. That’s why you wouldn’t necessarily have known that he didn’t come from money.”

  “Wait,” I said, but she interrupted me.

  “Yes, I knew about Dennis, and I’ve already told you I knew about the rest of it, or as much as I wanted to know,” she said. “I love Paul. I have loved him ever since I met him at a church dance when we were fifteen, and I knew I would never be with anybody else.”

  “But—”

  “It never mattered,” she said so unwaveringly that the words in my mouth died out. “Actually, Dennis called last week,” she continued. “After he heard that Paul was sick.”

  “Is Dennis?”

  “I don’t know. Anyway, that happened to be a good day for Paul, so they were able to really talk. It was helpful for both of them.”

  I felt a flush of shame at how steadfastly I clung to my rules about life. No matter how many I amassed, no matter how crisply I organized them—love, real love, contagious and messy, vanquished them all.

  I looked over at the Romanos’ front stoop, on which there sat a wooden bucket of blooming red geraniums. “You know,” I said slowly, “in some odd way, this doesn’t change a thing for me. I can believe that Paul started here, learned to love the theater here. He wrote his drama-school admission essay on that moment in the dark before the show starts, when you anticipate magic and it comes on schedule, like fireworks or birthday candles. It’s also why clothes and all that stuff always mattered to him. Costumes. His daily transformation. But he’s always still Paul. Ready to find the next thing.” I reached for one of her tissues. “At least that’s how I see it. I’m not sure I’d be feeling quite so expansive if I were you right about now, I must say.”