She walks down the stairs, stops in front of the landing window. She looks into the next house, where she sees – for the millionth time – the landing so much like her landing she could be looking into a mirror. Except that, as always, she’s not there. Except this time it’s not so funny.
Where is she?
Her heart begins to pound.
I’m here, she tells herself, I’m here. It isn’t a reflection. It’s a copycat house.
How long will I be in this house, though? How long can we get away without paying the balloon payment? What is the IRS going to do to us?
How long will I be permitted to continue to exist?
Where is my bedroom today? Where will it be tomorrow? What is the point of watering the plants, fixing the shelves, ironing the clothes, if I’m not here tomorrow?
She leafs through her calendar. It’s full of fictitious business appointments. Lunches that never were. Doodles designed to look if she had been doing them all year when in fact they were the product of one night. Last night. Next to the phone is a phone log, also the product of last night. It is full of fictitious calls that Mitchell has skillfully mixed in with the real ones. Which ones are real? she asks herself – and then the phone rings.
‘Hi.’ It’s Mitchell.
‘Did you do the baskets?’ he asks.
‘Yes, I did.’
‘Good,’ he says. ‘Thanks.’ He pauses. ‘I hope you didn’t take everything out.’
‘Of course I did! That’s what you told me to do.’
‘Oh shit.’
‘Mitchell, this is crazy,’ Becky informs him.
‘I know,’ he says. ‘I know. It’s crazy. But everything we own is riding on it.’ Another long pause. Then he says, ‘I’ve got it. This is what you can do for me. Go into the study and put yourself in front of the computer and print out a few files. And then crumple them up and put them into the basket next to the door – no – the basket next to the desk. We have to make sure things look casual. OK, honey?’
She feels flames flaring out of her nostrils. ‘I really think that’s unnecessary.’
Well, do it for me,’ Mitchell tells her. ‘And while you’re at it, double check those files, OK?’
‘About what in particular?’
Pause. ‘I’m not sure. But I’ll get back to you when or if I remember.’
He hangs up. She goes into the study – except that it’s not the study any more. Now the study is next door. She goes next door and selects some files at random. She prints them out.
What she sees on the printouts is not funny at all.
What she sees are early plans for projects that never came off. The marina, the wind farm, the complex in Petaluma. The import/export scheme. The early optimistic letters clogging up menu after menu. Followed by another new idea and another slew of optimistic early letters. Where will it end?
While the printer clatters on, she wanders to the window. What does an IRS field auditor look like? Is she already there on the street? Why did she, Becky, agree to this? If Mitchell has so many ideas about how the house should look when she arrives, then why the hell isn’t he here arranging things instead of issuing her instructions from his office?
The phone rings again.
‘Have you fixed the baskets?’ he asks.
‘Yes. And now that I have, I want you to stop calling me.’
‘OK, but there’s just one thing you have to check for me first.’
She taps her foot.
‘Pretty please?’
She lets out a sigh.
‘Thanks, hon. Now here’s what I want you to do. Go into the study.’
‘Which one?’
‘What do you mean, which one?’
‘The real one or the fake one?’
‘Don’t even say that, Becky. Don’t even think that. Until that woman walks out of our house, you have to believe from the bottom of your heart that our office has always been where it is today.’
‘So what do you want me to do?’ she says.
‘Take out a ruler and measure your foot.’
‘What’s up? Thinking of putting a bid on a shoe factory?’
‘Just do what I say. I’ll hold.’
‘It’s ten and a half inches,’ she informs him.
‘OK, good. Now go into the study – the study where the desk is NOW – and get me the dimensions.’
‘In foot measurements?’
‘That’s right. Using your foot. Make sure you walk in a straight line. I mean as straight as you can.’
‘God! Did you think I was going to do zig-zags? I mean, I went to fourth grade, too, you know!’
‘Becky, please. Go do this last thing for me?’
She obeys him, thinking really, she is doing it for herself, isn’t she? It’s her money.
Returning to the phone, she tells him, ‘It’s twenty footsteps by thirty-one and a half footsteps. Excluding the bay window area which is eight footsteps wide with each of the three windows just under four footsteps.’
‘Thanks. Now freeze until I get back to you.’
Time passes. She considers making coffee but is afraid to touch anything. She pours herself a glass of water but no ice will come out of the icemaker. Then she remembers why. She opens the freezer. It is defrosting. Shards of green glass are floating around in three inches of water. There is a horrible smell. She closes the freezer door. She drinks her water without ice and then opens the dishwasher to stack the glass, but it is full of clean dishes and she doesn’t have the energy to put them away – or the courage, because one of the cabinets is full of rogue files and she can’t remember which. This is not her kitchen any more. It is a stage set.
Before she can pursue this thought, the phone rings. It is Mitchell! Again! Hooray!
He sounds hesitant. ‘We have a little problem.’
‘What?’ she asks.
‘First things first. Measure your foot again.’
She does.
‘Now, you’re absolutely sure you’re measuring it correctly? From heel to toe, I mean.’
‘God, you’re condescending!’
‘Make sure both feet are the same size.’
She does. They are.
‘That’s unbelievably rare, you know.’
‘Mitchell, believe me.’
‘In that case, one of us did the original measurements wrong.’
‘You’re the one who did those, Mitchell dearest.’
‘That’s not how I remember it, but I’m not going to argue about it now. I think we’re going to have to go with the two-room concept.’
‘The WHAT?’
‘Listen, Becky. We have got to act fast. Go into the living-room and do a footstep measurement. Now.’
She obeys him. Comes back to the phone. Gives him the measurements. ‘Hold on,’ he says. ‘Let me work that out on my calculator.’ There is a pause followed by some unattractive mumbling. Then he says, ‘Terrific. It works out to a little more than one fifth of our total floor space. We’re going to come out of this baby looking clean. All you have to do, hon, is move around some furniture.’
‘Which furniture?’ she asks.
‘You have to get the desk back into the living-room.’
‘How am I supposed to do that alone?’ she asks.
‘Tape cardboard shoes to the legs and then slide it. And don’t forget to put the basket in there too.’
‘Not the real living-room, I take it. The current living room. Right?’
‘Right. Then take the old living-room stuff and put it into the kitchen.’
‘It’s going to look gross in there.’
‘It doesn’t matter. OK, then take the kitchen couch and put it into the present study, which from now on will be our waiting room. We’ll keep the table as is in there. And maybe set up the old coffee maker?’
‘Mitchell. This is going to take hours.’
‘Not if you start now,’ he says.
She puts down the phone and goes into the fake/
present/soon-to-be-a-waiting room/was-until-yesterday-the-living-room/study. She looks at the heavy oak desk. She tells herself she can’t possibly move that desk by herself. That cardboard shoe idea. What could be more ridiculous? Men! she screams internally.
Then she thinks about what will happen if Mitchell gets what’s coming to him and what she’ll lose. She has a change of heart, goes into the kitchen, makes cardboard shoes for the desk legs. She puts them underneath the desk legs, wraps them around them as best she can and starts pushing the fucker into the ex-living-room. Half-way there one of the shoes falls off. The exposed leg makes a long, deep scratch on the parquet floor.
Great! she thinks. Eight hundred dollars worth of floor sanding and two weeks of disruption down the drain! Terrific! What’s even more terrific is that the field auditor will see the scratch and know right off what’s going on. So. She’s going to have to cover the scratch up with the living-room rug.
And she does. But it looks like shit. But what can you do. Beggars can’t be interior decorators. Soon everything is in its appointed place except for Becky. And Becky does not have the faintest where that is.
The phone rings. Where is the phone? She hunts for it, finds it on the fifth ring. She picks it up, and surprise, surprise, it’s Mitchell.
‘I did everything you told me to do, OK?’
‘Oh, I’m sorry to hear that. Because I’ve been mulling it over. And I don’t think it will work.’
‘If it doesn’t work it’s too fucking bad. I’ve had it, do you hear?’
‘Becky, now let’s be reasonable.’
‘I can’t be reasonable! I’ve flipped my lid. And you’ve done it to me, you asshole! You know how to handle this woman, you say? Then you handle her.’
‘Honey, I think, when you calm down, you’ll see it’s our problem.’ But he is not saying it to Becky. He is saying it to the walls and the open door. Becky is already backing out of the driveway. Becky and Baby are going for a drive.
Her car heads like a homing device for 2238 Hyde. And while it does, I imagine …
47
Charlotte, standing in her doorway, waving goodbye to the policewoman, who had been a treasure, and not the only one: everything a person would want to happen in a situation like this had happened. A neighbour – imagine! – had noticed their front door flapping on its hinges and reported a suspected burglary to the police. Policewoman O’Riley had been standing in the kitchen addressing her walkie-talkie when Charlotte had arrived back from taking the kids to school. As there was nothing missing, Charlotte had had to conclude that Trey had left the house in a hurry and forgotten to lock up …
‘God! Men!’ was the policewoman’s response. She couldn’t have realized, when Charlotte echoed her, that Charlotte was fed up not with one man but with two. Nor could she have known that the last thing Charlotte wanted to do at that point was sit down with PC O’Riley and have a heart to heart. Since six that morning, she had been wading through obligations and more obligations, all to get to her office for two hours of peace and then along came Policewoman June to eat up all her free time.
Not that she meant any harm. Policewoman June had been nice to the point of being a feminist pinup fantasy – profession in the male sense of the word, caring in the female sense of the word … you would have thought she had walked off the set of Sesame Street Charlotte is ashamed of herself for the surge of joy she feels when Policewoman O’Riley stands up to go.
Charlotte looks at her watch and sees eleven fucking o’clock. Perfect, she says. Morning almost gone. If she cancels her lunch with me, she can still salvage it, get some work done before her seminar. But that would mean breaking a rule.
I have asked to see her, it sounds urgent, she has committed herself to being there for me in this type of crisis no matter how fucking annoyed she feels, and so she’ll go.
She spends the tail end of her free morning clearing the fridge and the tables and the dishwasher and the bulletin board and the answering machine, and sweeping the floor, and mopping the floor, and watering the plants that were still, due to some miracle, Trey-resistant and alive, and discarding the plants that had withered under his simulated desert conditions. After which there is only just enough time to gather her books and her papers and position a few vital messages before she has to get into the car.
The downstairs door to 2238 is open. The elevator is waiting. When she gets to the seventh floor, she stops to compose herself, and this is when she hears Becky say, ‘I don’t know who I am any more. I don’t trust my feelings. Not even my feelings for you.’
Then she hears me say, ‘Oh darling. Please.’
Oh darling? Please?
As Charlotte’s finger hovers next to the doorbell, and as a surge of what she can only call unadulterated panic passes through her, she is tempted to stand there and listen and find out. Is this why I have been distant and irritable lately?
Now Becky says, ‘He’s the one who loused things up. He’s the one who should speak to the auditor.’
And I say, ‘I couldn’t agree more.’
Which means? Which means that she, Charlotte, is reading extra meanings into everything today. Becky and I aren’t lovers. We’re just friends, and friends in a way that she had despaired might never be possible between a man and a woman. We are talking about the auditor, for God’s sake. And here she, Charlotte, is experiencing sexual jealousy. What can it mean, this sudden surge of what she has to concede is unjustified possessiveness? Is she being dishonest with herself about my importance in her life? Or does it mean that she has been picking up confusing signals from me and therefore feels insecure?
Another topic to raise over lunch, she tells herself. But then, as her finger still hovers over the bell, she asks herself if it is going to be possible to go out to lunch at all now that Becky is there. What will I have told Becky about this lunch date? A lie or the truth, or worst of all, a half-truth?
She tells herself she is overintellectualizing. She rings the bell. No answer. She tries the door. It’s open. She walks into the foyer, turns to look into the living-room.
Blomp. Two terrified stares.
The first thing she notices is an angry red mark on my neck. The second thing she notices – it can’t be, she must be seeing things, hallucinating clichés! – is some lipstick on my collar. And what else? Some lipstick on my lips. Which is the same colour as Becky’s lipstick. She feels hysteria rising through her like mercury. Every little thing she sees now, the lipstick still in Becky’s hand, the fact that Becky has no shoes on, the way she is sitting, the way I am acting – looks suspicious.
‘What can I do for you?’ I ask.
‘What can you do for me?’ Charlotte exclaims. ‘That’s a good one.’
I scratch my head. ‘Oh, now I remember.’ I dive into my pocket and fish out a stud. A red stud. I give it to her. She stares at it. ‘What is this supposed to be?’
‘Isn’t this what you left behind?’
‘No, it isn’t,’ says Charlotte.
‘Actually,’ says Becky, ‘that’s mine.’
‘Oh,’ I say. I give it to Becky. Then I turn back to Charlotte.
‘Just tell me what colour it is,’ I say.
‘As you know full well, it’s green.’
I give her the green stud.
‘That isn’t it either,’ she says.
I give her the purple stud. Handing it back to me, she says, ‘What I forgot was a gradebook.’
‘Oh,’ I say, and then I dig into the laundry basket and bring out her gradebook.
She says, ‘I guess this is your way of telling me you don’t have time for lunch.’
‘What lunch?’ I say.
Several things continue to puzzle Charlotte when she sits herself down in her office half an hour later.
One is why, when she knew for sure she wasn’t seeing things, that she had definitely walked into a tryst, she felt no emotion, felt compelled instead to go and get herself a glass of water.
&n
bsp; Why, when she said so listen, it’s just as well, I have a thousand things to do this afternoon, she actually meant it.
Why, as she drove to work, she suddenly found herself laughing about it, actually imagined herself sitting down with Policewoman O’Riley and saying, Now top this one.
Why, when she went to deal with the secretaries, she was so unbelievably up: Any messages? Oh, thank you! And oh, I love your scarf!
Why, when she saw a student approaching her in the corridor, she backed into the women’s room and hid.
But most of all why, after she had decided not to go to her office, because she knew I would be trying to reach her, she then went straight to her office, in fact ran, in fact grabbed the phone the moment it rang.
48
Leave her with her hand on the receiver and spare a thought for me. I knew that I had handled Charlotte badly, and I knew she deserved better from me. The question was, what? I wasn’t sure, from her cool behaviour, how upset she was. But I didn’t want her to think I had been involved with Becky all along. That was why I thought it was important for her to know it had only started the night before.
Of course this did not make her feel better. She wanted to know why last night, when last night, and exactly what? That was when I started redesigning my story. I am afraid that before long I was telling her that all we had done was heavy petting.
This was when Charlotte’s tone turned from confused to accusatory. She was saying, ‘What you’re trying to tell me is that you don’t consider this important because you didn’t actually ejaculate inside her?’
Imagine also that while I was carrying on this conversation I was trying to feed our kids their lunch. They resented having to share my attention and acted accordingly. Add to this confusion not one not two but three other incoming phonecalls.
The first was from Ophelia. She wanted to know if I was going to make it to Green’s for lunch at one. I said yes, that you were arriving to relieve me any moment. I terminated this call somewhat abruptly.
The Stork Club Page 29