Among the menial jobs Trish had held to eke her way through her very first summer in New York, one of the less disagreeable was that of coat-check girl. In the last few years she had developed a habit of smiling at whoever was manning the closet as if to wish her luck or pass on some shred of optimism about the future. And she was tediously exacting about making Tim tip the girl generously. At this hour, of course, the tiny room was deserted; Trish glanced into it on her way out. There was no one minding it, the door was ajar, and the circular rack was empty except for a few forgotten items in the overhead bins—umbrellas, scarves, the odd briefcase or backpack, and one coat. The red coat. The red coat: ludicrously, solitary on the rack. Almost unwillingly Trish noticed it hanging there. Or not hanging so much as clinging precariously to one of the numbered hangers, one sleeve on, one sleeve already fallen off, as if it had been carelessly tossed there and left to its own wits to hang on or be trampled underfoot when the traffic increased. For a moment Trish actually believed she was going into the room to set something aright—to hang up the coat properly by buttoning the top couple of buttons. But instead she slipped the coat from the hanger and tucked it over her arm.
“I’m sorry?” she was going to say, if anyone caught her. “Oh, my God—how stupid of me! Of course it’s not! Jeez”—she would shake her head for emphasis—“I don’t know where my head is today.”
A block away, she stopped to replace her khaki trench coat with the coat she had stolen. Slipping her arms into the sleeves, she saw the coat’s lining: cheap red satin, rent in several places beyond repair. But as she gathered the belt around her waist and buckled it tight, Trish felt her head rise a few inches. She threw her shoulders back. It was getting dark out, and she wanted to be home.
The next week she met Evgenia coming out of the apartment, as she had suspected she might. Each of them smiled, and they said an awkward hello in the threshold. “Did you get the check I sent?” Trish asked her. “I’m sorry about forgetting that. I was so busy before the holidays.” Evgenia seemed to give her a strange look when she replied, and Trish was so preoccupied with reconstructing the whereabouts of the red coat (in the last few days she had moved it from the coatrack to her bedroom closet to a box under her bed, and finally, one evening when Tim was working late, to the storage locker in the basement) that Evgenia was nearly gone before it occurred to Trish to turn around to see its replacement. It wasn’t a proper coat but a jacket, an unflattering man’s football jacket in kelly green and black, with what looked to be a new zipper sewn in.
“What happened to your red coat?” Trish asked.
Evgenia made a disgusted noise in the back of her throat as she rang for the elevator. “I lose it—in a bar somewhere.”
“You’re kidding me,” Trish said. The recounting of the fact dismayed her. “You mean someone took it?”
Evgenia shrugged. “Is my fault—too much party.” She made a gesture of raising a glass to her mouth.
“But—that’s awful!”
“Yeah, and I really like that one, too,” Evgenia said, shaking her head.
“Did you go back and look?” Trish inquired. Still carrying her shopping bags, she came back toward Evgenia. “I mean—you asked at the bar and everything? Because sometimes—you’d be surprised—things turn up. People say New York is such a tough town, but people are actually really nice when you get to know them. People are honest—more than you’d expect. If somebody found it I’m sure they’d turn it in.”
“Jeez, what’s taking so long today?” Evgenia jammed her thumb against the lit-up call button several times. “I’m gonna be so fucking late!”
“Is this a bad time for you?” Trish said. “Or a bad day? Tuesday?” She moved closer to Evgenia. “Because you know, you just have to let me know—I mean, if you ever want to change. My schedule’s pretty flexible at the moment. I’m thinking of going back to work in the spring, but if that happens, I’ll be sure to give you plenty of advance notice—”
“God—finally!” The elevator had arrived, and the doors, which made a preemptive attempt to close, were stopped by Evgenia, who gave a little shriek and stepped between them.
“Oh, sorry!” said Trish. “You go ahead! Don’t let me keep you.” And, continuing on as if the cleaning lady had protested: “No, really—we can talk another time. I’ll see you in two weeks, Evgenia!”
Awkwardly, because of the bags, Trish pushed through the door of her apartment. She let it slam shut behind her as she looked around greedily, fascinated by the cleanliness of her home.
Binnie Kirshenbaum
Squinting against the late-afternoon sun as it cut through the birch trees, the sugar maples, the oaks, and the elms, the tips of the leaves yellow and red, Bee Elyot—Elyot from the Hebrew, a persuasion of which Bee decidedly was not, meaning God is salvation—parked her forest-green Saab or Volvo, whichever, behind her husband’s beat-up van. It irritated her, Jonathan’s van in the driveway, but hardly enough to disturb a marriage.
Middle-aged, forty-six to be exact, on good days Bee could pass for forty-one. Not that she ever lied about her age. In matters of small importance, Bee Elyot was excruciatingly honest. She prided herself on telling the truth, and she prided herself on other things too, such as her house. A Cape Cod with a fieldstone foundation and chimney to match, built in 1883, it was painted an eloquent shade of powder blue, which might sound atrocious but wasn’t. Jonathan had a stellar eye for color; it was his business. Painting houses. Not your everyday housepainter, Jonathan had trained as an artist. After four years at the Pear School of Art and Design, he came to specialize in Mediterranean glazes, Venetian plaster, decorative painting. He was an artisan; not exactly an artist but often people assumed they were one and the same, which was what Bee wanted them to assume. Like the owl and the pussycat or the fork running off with the spoon, there was something smartly unconventional to the marriage of an artist and a professor of biological sciences, as Bee was. A professor at Middle River College, which was not Princeton, but she had tenure, which was one half of that dream come true, which is one half more than most dreams are realized.
If only the interior of the house were as charming at the exterior, then Bee would’ve really accomplished something. Bee was desperate for, among other things, a new dining room table. Not a new new one. An old new one. The table she had was a reproduction. Bee wanted authentic antiques from the Spinning Wheel Shoppe in town. A solid-oak rolltop desk and a pair of captain’s chairs. There was a pellet-sized hole in her heart that only a maple tilt table with cherrywood inlay could fill.
Bee could not afford these antiques because she spent too much money on clothes. Her closet was not unlike a spinster’s trousseau. So many pretty things—silk, velvet, taffeta, even—pristine and waiting to be worn, with hope that grew slimmer with each minute for a day less and less likely to come. Bee had no occasion to wear such things until, along with the phone bill and The Penny Saver, came an invitation to the annual blowout hosted by the president of Middle River College. Faculty were rarely, if ever, invited, and Bee had been carrying on as if this invitation were an invitation to something amazing, like a trial by water or the Oscars, which is why Bee, not always the easiest person to like, was capable of inspiring love.
In the kitchen, Chelsea, mother’s helper and Middle River College sophomore, was at the butcher-block counter skinning cucumbers for the salad. Middle River had no immigrant population, but the college supplied a steady stream of exploitable help for a crappy six bucks an hour. Opal sat at the table, drifting off into space. That Opal was a healthy child was reason to feel blessed, particularly since Bee gave birth, for the first and only time, at age forty. Still, Bee clung to the chestnut: geniuses are often late bloomers.
An hour later, over dinner, as if the thought had just occurred to her, Bee said, “I’ll bet you Liv Barrett is going to be at the party. You know she has a daughter Opal’s age.”
“Bee.” Jonathan stabbed a cucumber with his fork. “Don’
t get your hopes up.”
Liv Barrett was Deliverance Barrett because this was New England and you still came across the occasional Patience Smith or Preserved Hutchinson. The Puritan mark, like that of Cain, although not always apparent, was by no means worn away. It was as if the flesh and bone of Abiah Frost and Fear Whipple, gone unto dust, had fertilized the soil and seeped into the drinking water.
“I don’t see why not,” Bee said. “We’re lovely people, and we have a lovely child.”
Another indelibility of the Puritan ethic was the adherence to the embodiment of the Matthew effect: For unto everyone who hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance. For those not favored by God, well, from him that shall hath not, shall be taken away. So it was written. Which didn’t mean it wasn’t still something of a piss-off.
If this story were “Cinderella,” now would be the time for the talented pair of white pigeons to show up, to help out with the shoes. Bee had big feet, size ten and a half—transvestite size. Because she didn’t much pay attention to her feet, and therefore assumed no one else did either, she blithely stepped into a pair of black, square-toed, chunky-heeled shoes best suited for nubby wool tweeds and all wrong for a red silk dress with a sweetheart neckline. Social suicide in some parts of the world, but this was Middle River, where the women routinely wore mukluks and Tod’s slip-ons, so, really, would anyone notice?
Bee came down the stairs. Jonathan got up from the couch and said, “You’ll be the envy of every woman there.” This was the best compliment; somehow Bee had the idea that to be envied was to be loved. Chelsea concurred. “You look way beautiful,” and in full agreement, Opal bobbed her head, keeping time with her hand picking at a scab on her elbow, which was maybe an indication that the child had excellent coordination skills, which would be nice, the possibility that the child had an ability.
Bee adjusted her husband’s tie. Now they could go. Bee closed the door behind her, as if closing a chapter in her life.
And indeed another door opened. Justin Langly, president of rinky-dink Middle River College, was wearing, for real, a blue blazer with a Harvard insignia on the breast pocket, which would’ve been sad enough if he were an alumnus of Harvard College, although to be fair he did get his doctorate from the School of Education. “Mrs. Elyot, welcome.” Mrs. Elyot? Surely Professor would’ve been more to Bee’s liking. “And Jonathan,” Justin Langly said. “Come, come. I have people waiting to meet you.”
Even since last summer when Jonathan did Justin Langly’s walls—the living room in yellow ochre threaded with genuine impure iron ore and the library a dusky rose, a color Jonathan mixed himself because the shade he was after demanded a twilight blue under base—Justin Langly had been bragging about Jonathan Elyot the way we brag about a little bistro we’d stumbled upon, and who ever dreamed we’d find braised rabbit, truffle emulsion, and foie gras with macerated figs in Connecticut? Although it’s not a word common to Middle River diction, all the same, Justin Langly was a spectacular schmuck.
Bee tagged along as Justin Langly led her husband to a coterie of five women and said, “Ladies, didn’t I promise you I’d invite him?” He ushered Jonathan into the group. “This is the artiste who did my walls.” All along, all these weeks, Bee had assumed they were invited to the party because of her, because of her position at the college. To learn otherwise made Bee’s face burn, as faces do burn with comeuppance.
A woman who looked a lot like the Quaker Oats guy gushed, “Mr. Elyot. Tell me, please. If the house is white, must the trim be Adirondack green?”
“Not at all.” Jonathan titillated them with possibilities of reds and mauve and sea green. With her husband occupied, Bee was free to circulate, although for the moment, unsure of her footing now, she stood still. The other guests—mostly significant donors to the college, which is analogous to a big fish in a cup of water—were decked out in their flashiest beiges, grays, and herringbones. Bee—her red dress, in these circumstances not unlike a negligee or a clown suit—took a moment to fake pleasure in the entertainment. A Celtic folk harper, in medieval garb, accompanied herself on a floor harp as she warbled aires and ballads, best appreciated when shitfaced.
“Professor Elyot?”
Smile ready, Bee turned.
“Shrimp with Creole dipping sauce?” A girl, a student, wearing the requisite black skirt and white blouse, held out a tray. Not quite jumbo shrimp, but not puny ones either, speared with toothpicks. Bee dipped one into the bowl of brown goo and held it over a paper napkin. With no trash can in sight, Bee surreptitiously put the toothpick and the soiled napkin in her purse, and edging near to a trio, two men and a woman, so tight as to be a huddle, Bee overheard the woman say, “The vet bills alone for those horses…” At that, Bee shifted direction. On her way to the bar, she caught a snippet of conversation about matching patterns for, Bee guessed, silverware or china. She stopped to join in the fun, and, the way a snapping turtle clamps its jaws tight, the two women abruptly quit talking and gave Bee a beady eye. As if matching patterns were a private affair.
The bar was manned by three college boys. One of them, Kirby White, was in her Bio II class the previous spring. Kirby White got a C in Bio II. Midway through that semester, Bee had spoken to him. “If you put in just a little effort, you are capable of a B,” she said, but B or C, he didn’t give a flying fuck either way.
“White wine,” Bee said, and Kirby made a face like he was going to barf, which detracted not at all from his overall honey-bunness, his sleepy green eyes and towhead.
“White wine? Forget that,” he said. “I’m gonna make you a cosmopolitan.” Cosmopolitans had been the drink of the minute the year before, but even light takes time to travel to Middle River.
After taking a sip of the frothy pink drink, Bee said, “Very nice. Really,” and Kirby’s smile warmed the room considerably.
Never the most beguiling of women—Bee did not always make a lasting impression—she had a nice figure and her dress showed some bosom, so you’d think the three men at the end of the bar would’ve welcomed her, if only to get a peek. One of them, a portly and bald guy, said to the others, “He’s applied for early acceptance,” and Bee, a tenured professor, on cue, stepped up—the fourth leaf to the clover—and asked, “Oh? To where?” At once, the cluster of men broke apart like the splat of a drop of water.
Bee sipped at her drink and studied the bookshelves as if she were at the library instead of at a party.
“Professor Elyot?” It was the same girl who’d before offered her a shrimp. “Salmon on toast points?”
“No,” Bee said. “No, thank you,” because there, all of two steps away, was Liv Barrett, alone, taking note of an object on a shelf, art for sure, and carved from stone, a shape of a woman, Botero-style, round, and headless. Set before it was a place card: PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH.
Barely moving her lips, which were so severe as to be almost sexy, and without looking over at Bee, Liv Barrett said, “Have you ever seen anything like this before?” Was she referring to the place card? To the implied threat of a YOU BREAK IT, YOU BOUGHT IT sign in someone’s house? Or to the art itself? And if so, praise or damnation?
To buy herself time, Bee brought her empty glass to her lips, like a child with a toy tea set, before coming out with it. “You know, our daughters are the same age. Opal, my daughter, is six. We should arrange a playdate for some afternoon.”
“A playdate?” Liv Barrett echoed, just as that putz of a college president stepped in. “I see you were admiring my…” Justin Langly steered Liv Barrett away, and Bee never did learn what that thing was, which was not a real loss.
Bee wafted through the party as if she were a faint and distant sound, not a seductive sound like a train whistle in the night or a foghorn, but rather, like the sound an old house makes when it settles, a sound not worth investigating. Even her own husband did not take note of her as she stood by while Jonathan detailed the secrets of a shabby-chic finish to the adoring women whose husbands did n
ot work with their hands. “The trick is the thin layer of gray undercoat,” he explained.
Having looked out each window as if there were a view to admire beyond the darkness and her own vague reflection, Bee returned to the bar for another cosmopolitan. That smile of Kirby White’s, and you had to wonder how many Middle River coeds dropped their drawers for him. “I hope this isn’t gonna get me kicked out of school or nothing,” he said as he handed Bee a fresh drink, “but I gotta tell you, you look mad hot in that dress.”
An impropriety to be sure, and forget the double negatives. Faculty, deans, and presidents of Middle River College employed students to babysit, walk dogs, clean out garages, serve at parties, but fraternization? Due to a mutual lack of interest and respect, they took not so much as a cup of coffee together at the Roasted Bean on Maple Street. But what woman would not go soft at mad hot? Bee arched her back and idled around the bar mad hot while Kirby went on about last year’s baseball season as if she were interested. “Third in the division,” he said.
“Is that good?”
“Fuckin’ A it’s good,” and he laughed. “Oops. Sorry.”
“I’ve heard the word before,” Bee told him.
“Last season I pitched five shutouts.” Half boasting, half shy, the cock-of-the-walk could still trip over his own feet.
“How about a deal?” Bee proposed. “I’ll pay more attention to the baseball team if you pay more attention to your studies.”
“Sure thing. As soon as Hell Week is over.” And off he went riding some story, the long version, of fraternity shenanigans. Unable to listen to one word more of this blather, Bee turned to see Deliverance Barrett, coat over her arm. Bee’s heart jump-started as if defibrillated. Leaving her drink on the bar, Bee slid into place as if stealing home plate. She could not let Liv Barrett leave, taking her hope away, the way some guests have been known to leave with a small object of worth—a Battersea box or silver sugar tongs—snug in their coat pockets—we all know there’s a klepto at every party. “Our playdate,” Bee said. “For the children.”
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