We Could Be Beautiful

by Swan Huntley

  I took a sip of my tea and noticed how the leaves on the tree outside my window were so much bigger and greener than they had been the week before. I thought, You can be in the same rut for so long, and then, seemingly out of nowhere, everything changes and you remember what the point is. The point, of course, is love. To love someone, to be loved by someone: that is the point.

  Even in my best relationships, I wasn’t sure I had ever been truly in love. This bothered me. A lot. I thought about it all the time. I was sure it was part of the incompleteness I had always felt. None of the people I’d been with seemed to be the missing piece. They were always the wrong shape, sometimes very obviously and other times in a more irritatingly mysterious way. I told myself I was not stupid to think that with William it would be different, though of course I knew I had said this many times before.

  I didn’t know why I was waiting to tell Susan about him. Usually it would have been the first thing out of my mouth. Maybe I didn’t want to jinx it. Or I didn’t want to find out that she hated him, because if she did, her opinion would be hard to cast aside. I had to tell her, though, and if I waited too much longer she’d accuse me of withholding. “Do you know William Stockton?”

  Susan looked up immediately. “Stockton, Stockton,” she said quickly. She was a person who talked very fast unless she was sad. When she was sad, she talked very slow. “I know Maureen Stockton, I know Callan or Cameron Stockard. William. William. Will-yam. Does he do Dick or Will or anything?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Not helpful.”

  I drank more tea, even though I knew it would be cold now, which it was.

  “Who is he?”

  I gave it to Susan in bullet points. Those resonated with her. “Met him at the gala, we had coffee yesterday, he just moved back from Europe, he knows my family, he knew them before I was born. Very good-looking, has a dog, literally just moved back.”

  “Huh.” Susan stretched her feet out onto the glass coffee table, with one foot on either side of the lilies I had bought earlier. She curled her toes back (her toenails matched her fingernails today: eggplant), then pointed them forward. She kept doing this, back and forth, and we stared at her feet because they were something to stare at. “Is he married? Kids? Why is he back now?”

  “Work.”

  Susan, a lover of gossip, squinted attentively as I went on to explain William’s memories of Eighty-Fourth Street and of my parents, and what he looked like (very tall, maybe six-four, gray hair, sensitive eyes, strong jaw, chiseled yet childlike features; I had been thinking about words to describe him), and the kiss at the end. I skipped the part about the haircut.

  “Sensitive eyes? Okay, you’re fucked.”

  “I know. But it’s good, right? Doesn’t it sound good?”

  “Definitely good,” Susan said, “almost too good.” When she looked up and saw my reaction to that—not happy—she said, “But listen, you deserve it. Oh my God, you deserve it. After the ride you’ve had, and Fernando—shit, girl.” She pointed a finger in the air. “Good stuff is coming, don’t worry.”

  By “the ride you’ve had,” Susan meant: all the terrible people you’ve chosen, including, most recently, Fernando Delarus, who asked you to marry him and then left you for someone else—not even a young model but an old, old woman, so the only problem could have been your personality.

  So yes, I was ready for the good stuff. I think, honestly, I hoped this business of getting young artists exposure and money would count as something Good I was doing, something to enhance the Good that would be returned to me by the universe. But that sounded so terrible and selfish and Bad that I wouldn’t have mentioned it to anyone, not even Susan.

  •

  Dan arrived just after the sandwiches, wearing his usual massage outfit: coal-gray stretchy pants and a white V-neck under a colorfully striped alpaca hoodie. When he smiled, the gap between his two front teeth reminded me, as it always did, of Madonna. It was also very endearing.

  “Hi,” he said, and kissed me on the cheek.

  “Dan-nay,” Susan said.

  “Susan.” He went to kiss her.

  “Can you fit me in or do you have a meditation retreat to go to?”

  Dan paused. He did this a lot. He liked to think about things. He looked at the ceiling. He often found the answer up there. “I can fit you in.”

  “Good. Sit.” Susan patted the couch.

  Dan rubbed his hands together—he did this as a reflex; it was what he did to warm his hands before touching skin—and did as he was told.

  “Okay, let’s go around. Updates, Danny, updates.” Dan and Susan hadn’t seen each other in a few weeks—she’d been in St. Bart’s avoiding the cruel end of spring. “I’m getting over the flu. Don’t worry, Dan”—she touched his arm—“I’m not contagious. Other than that, I am still single. Nobody good goes to St. Bart’s in May. I am considering buying a new car this summer. Not a red convertible, no. I am not having a midlife crisis, no, no. What else? My doctor told me to do yoga for my back. I hate yoga. It drives me insane, it’s too slow.” Dan and I laughed. “That’s it. Catherine, go.”

  “Met someone and feeling hopeful.”

  “Really?” Dan said.

  I shrugged. “We’ll see.”

  “Dan?”

  “I turned thirty-one this week.”

  “No you didn’t.”

  “I did.”

  “Baby,” Susan said.

  “I’m so sorry I forgot,” I said. “But we did get you a sandwich.”

  We moved to the table, the large glass dining table overlooking my tree and my street. I loved this street, and I had waited for a long time to buy the perfect home here. It was narrow and quaint and reminded me of France.

  Susan said, “I’m feral for this—I haven’t had real sustenance in days,” and dug into her sandwich (chicken salad), and Dan thoughtfully unwrapped his. I wasn’t that hungry, but I took a bite because it was there. It tasted mostly like carrots with a dash of cucumber because that’s exactly what it was.

  “Thanks so much for this,” Dan said.

  “Of course.”

  “You should come get a bonsai, Dan,” Susan said, her mouth full, “from the store. For your birthday.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah.” She went on to explain about the different kinds.

  He nodded at the right times, said “yes” and “okay” at the right times, took small bites of his wrap and chewed with his mouth closed. He opened his Coke, took a sip, placed the butt of the can back down in the circle where it had been. I always watched Dan with a certain interest because he was so strangely at ease with himself. How could a thirty-one-year-old be this comfortable in the world? Shouldn’t he be stressed, schlepping around on the subway all day with his backpack, going from one knotted back to the next, trying to make a buck?

  He was also so polite. His good manners came from being raised partly in Tokyo—that’s how he had explained it when Susan had asked once. He was half Japanese and exotically handsome (black hair and blue eyes), and it was odd that neither Susan nor I had romantic feelings for him. He was attractive, kind, and (I was pretty sure) straight. He just really felt to us like a younger brother; that’s what we said when we talked about it. But Susan was strict about not dealing with anyone under thirty-five anyway, and I was strict about my height requirements. Dan was five-five: way too short.

  Even though we all acted like friends, I sometimes worried that Dan secretly thought we were assholes. He never talked about money, but I assumed he was broke, maybe because he wore the same outfit all the time and lived in a neighborhood in Brooklyn I’d never heard of. I didn’t know much about his personal life except that he had a dog and worked really long days. I tipped him a lot, of course—I tipped everyone a lot—but then that made me feel kind of pathetic: rich lady buying friendship of young masseur. It was impossible not to be a cliché of yourself. Every little choice was just another opportunity to be so obviously�
��well, you.

  Susan crumpled her sandwich paper and flicked it a couple of inches away from her on the table. “I demolished that.” Susan talked like a stoner sometimes because she had spent her childhood in San Francisco. Her younger sister, who still lived there, actually referred to eating as “grinding,” as in “Let’s go grind some food.”

  “This was delicious. Thanks again.” Dan wrapped the half that was left and slid it into his floppy fabric backpack. He stood up, pushed his chair in. “I’ll set up the room,” he said, and went down the stairs.

  “Can I go first? Do you mind?” Susan looked at her phone. A sly smile appeared on her face in reaction to whatever she was reading.

  “No, that’s fine.”

  “Thanks.” She threw her yellow blanket/scarf/pashmina thing over the side of the couch, placed her phone on top of that, and walked her little fairy feet down the stairs.

  I cleaned off the table and put my uneaten wrap in the fridge. I knew I wouldn’t eat it later but felt too guilty throwing it away. This was a habit left from Jim, who had called me wasteful once.

  I could hear Susan laughing. I opened a book about apartheid. It was one of those books everyone said you had to read. From at least three people I’d heard “It takes some time to get into, but you have to read this book.” I read the opening paragraph and closed the book. (I had done this at least twelve times.)

  I looked around the room. It looked good. My gorgeous white house, my art: red Mark Rothko on one wall, lithographs of an obscure French printmaker on the other, Asian vases, huge ones, in the corner. A modern chandelier that looked like it was made from white rose petals floated above the table. Of course I couldn’t stop myself. I was always looking past what was good to what was wrong, and right now what was wrong was that the vases needed to be dusted. I knew Lucia was scared to touch them, but we had already gone over how to dust them lightly. I would bring it up again. A voice in my head said, You have become your mother. Another voice said, No, you’re fine, and you pay the cleaning lady to clean things, so she should clean them.

  Earlier that morning, before I had gone out to buy the lilies, William had written me an e-mail, which I reread now.

  Catherine,

  It was lovely to see you. I will be in touch very soon.

  Yours,

  WM.

  Even though I knew what it said, I reread my response: Look forward to hearing from you. C.

  Was my response too cold? Fernando used to call me cold. He’d even called me a bad hugger once. My mother was cold. But no, it was fine. He would be in touch very soon.

  I Googled him again. The thumbnail next to his bio showed William in a red tie, smiling with those brilliant-white teeth.

  “William Stockton, MK Capital. Head of Corporate Client Solutions. Mr. Stockton served as head of European investment banking at UBS, and prior to that was head of European rates trading. Mr. Stockton holds an MBA from Oxford University.”

  He was smart. He was fashionable. He was practical. He was classy. And as the time between yesterday and today widened toward dusk, he became smarter and more fashionable and more practical, and classier, and taller, and a more caring dog owner. His gait, which I now found a word for, was stately.

  I sat back on the couch, folded the computer. Kids on the street played with a ball—someone shrieking, “Arthur!”—and birds made noise, swarming the tree, and the traffic on Seventh Avenue whirred like a distant stream, or like the hum of a small and comforting appliance. The noises of the city reminded me of its constant movement, and this soothed me. Because I hated silence. Silence made me anxious.

  Sundays also made me anxious. I hated Sundays more than anything. Every week it was like time stopped to show me how lonely I was. People meandered in lazy, loping patterns, rudely forgetting how sidewalk traffic works. They had no direction, no goals. It was brunch time and family time and time to enjoy yourself, and it felt like an immense amount of pressure to be happy.

  I wasn’t unhappy, though, I reminded myself of that. Look at this house. How could you be unhappy here?

  I got up to look out the window—yes, there were the kids with the ball; one of them was the famous actor’s son—and I reminded myself that my home and the light in my home were beautiful and welcoming and that I was open to new, great people in my life. It would happen. And maybe—I thought and then unthought; I would not get ahead of myself—great things were already happening.

  I moved back to the dining table and began to fill an online cart with Frette pillowcases. I had been meaning to get some more for the guest room. These were sand-colored and Egyptian cotton, a thousand thread count. I clicked to see a closer view. Buying fabrics online was hard. It was better to touch them. But returning things was so easy nowadays. You just put them back in the bag. I often thought that a person could spend her entire life buying things and making returns. I was glad I was not that person.

  •

  Susan emerged looking jet-lagged and dumbly contented. “I’m leaving. And I’m taking the rest of the day off.”

  “Sure you are,” I said. Susan was terrible at relaxing. She wouldn’t take the day off unless she was bleeding from the head. This was another thing we might have had in common.

  “Seriously.” She poured herself a glass of water. “That man has the magic touch.”

  “I know.” I had been hovering the cursor over the Add to Cart button, and then I pressed it. I turned around to find Susan gulping the last of the water in the glass. Her yellow hair was sticking straight up from the middle of her head. She looked like a parakeet.

  “Aaaaah.” She set the glass in the sink and made her way over to her phone (quick look at the screen) and her yellow thing, which she put around her shoulders. She bent slowly to pick up her bag off the floor and started down the stairs. I followed her down and smoothed her parakeet hair on the way. “Your hair looks crazy. I’m helping you.”

  Dan stood in the doorway on the second floor. “Dan, aaaaaaah,” Susan said. I could see he had already changed the sheet in the room. He was so good. “You’re a miracle.” She patted him on the chest. As I watched her kiss his cheek, I thought Susan was a little touchy-feely with Dan today, but then she kissed me and I remembered that no, Susan was like that with everyone.

  “Call you later.” She hugged her yellow thing tighter around her little body as she made her way down the last flight of stairs and out the red door. That was the one thing that wasn’t white—the red front door.

  Dan, mocking the experience of a more formal—or a Japanese?—massage, gave me a short nod with prayer hands and motioned for me to enter. He could be pretty dorky.

  He waited by the door as I changed behind the shinju panels. It felt nice to be in this room. The windows were tinted to make the light feel bluer, and I’d chosen a nice thick carpet. The towel folded on the black lacquer chair was warm from the sunlight through the window. I didn’t really need to use it because I knew Dan wouldn’t look, but I threw it around myself anyway. I walked the few steps to the table, let the towel drop, and lay facedown and looked at the carpet, which, yes, had been a great choice.

  “Okay,” I said, “ready.”

  I heard his footsteps. Then I saw his feet, clean and manicured, with a normal alignment of nice-looking toes and a tattoo of a scorpion on his ankle. He smoothed the blanket over my back. It felt wonderful to be touched so sweetly. Dan did have the magic touch. He just got it. He knew how much pressure to apply and when. He knew what I wanted. From the first time he massaged me, which had been about a year before, around when we had sold Eighty-Fourth, I knew I needed him on the payroll. I wasn’t in love with the masseur I had before Dan anyway. Donald, a rough Swede, was all business and no warmth. While I had been dating Fernando, I used Dan’s touch as a point of comparison. During the week I would tell myself that Fernando was fine, and then every Sunday Dan would remind me that no, Fernando was seriously lacking in the touch department.

  Sometimes we liked to t
alk. With me on the table like that and Dan at work, he had more nerve to say the things he might not have said if we were sitting face-to-face, and so did I. Today he said, “So, tell me more about this guy.” He ran his hands up and down my legs, warming them.

  “I mean, it’s just out of nowhere. He seems very together.”

  “That’s a good thing.”

  Dan had this nonjudgmental nature that made me want to tell him things. I told him about Herman and how William had been so good with those kids at the park.

  “I can see why you feel hopeful,” he said.

  And then we said nothing for a while, and I drifted off. That was the other thing I liked about Dan: he knew when to talk, and he also knew when to stop talking.

  At some point I may have noticed that I was imagining Dan’s hands were William’s hands and that Dan’s breath was William’s breath. With Fernando, I hadn’t done that. With Fernando, all I could think was that I wished he would touch me like this. Fernando hadn’t been love. He was a stand-in, he was filler. And he wasn’t even great filler. After we broke up, I was finally able to admit that he smelled like salami most of the time. When Fernando wasn’t around, I didn’t pine for him; I didn’t even think of him much. He was like a figurine I moved around to the places in my life where I needed a plus one: Fernando in a tux at the ball, Fernando in Sperry loafers on the boat, Fernando, the figurine-man who posed in pictures beside me.

  4

  I woke up Monday morning with the feeling I always had on Monday mornings: relief. Sunday was over. We could get back to our real lives now.

  My tree outside the bedroom window looked like a painting of itself, flat and grainy purple in the early light. It was drizzling. Often in this hazy state, still half asleep, I would see my life as though it belonged to someone else. What did this room say about the person who lived in it? The pretty chaise longue under the window, cast in lavender light; the threaded floral embroidery on the duvet, white on white; the Roy Lichtenstein, the Shepard Fairey, the Renoir. These were interesting, tasteful choices. The person who lived here was tasteful and interesting.