We Could Be Beautiful

by Swan Huntley

  Sometimes Dan came shopping with me. I tried to buy him a sweatshirt and he refused. He didn’t need anything; he was just having fun going to all these stores he’d never been to. But I must not have believed him, because later in the week I said, “I can pay you for your time, you know. For hanging out with me.”

  He looked upset. I wanted to take it back.

  When I told Susan about the sweatshirt, she said, “You two are spending a lot of time together.”

  “He’s my new Marty now that I don’t have Marty anymore.”

  “Yeah, but isn’t he straight?”

  46

  October seventeenth came and went. It was a gloomy, shit-streaked day, the sky gray-brown and oily. The air was windless, stagnant, chilly on my legs as I walked down the block to meet Marty for an afternoon slice of pie, right across the street from the café where William had proposed to me. I couldn’t quite go in there yet, but I was getting closer.

  Marty and I sat at a table by the window. I kept looking over at the café. The outdoor tables were gone now. Inside, I saw the white flash of a waiter’s starched shirt, the flickering of candles in the near-dark.

  “What are you looking at?” Marty’s leg jittered under the table; his eyes darted around. Sweat beaded his brow. He shoveled a piece of apple pie with cheddar cheese into his mouth industriously and chewed with the same productive energy, like eating was a job.

  “William proposed to me at that café.” I put my forkful of cherry pie on the plate. I was hot, uncomfortable. I slid my cashmere cardigan off my shoulders, too lazy to take it all the way off.

  “Eh,” Marty sneered. “I never met the guy, but he didn’t deserve you, that’s for damn sure.”

  “Thanks, Marty.”

  He ate the rest of his pie, pushed the plate away, drank his shot of espresso, added the empty cup to the plate. He did all of this in the most efficient way possible. “Having a kid, that’s a miracle. Doesn’t matter who the father is, it’s a miracle.” Marty adjusted the silk handkerchief in his breast pocket; it was purple today. “I have a kid—he’s nineteen. Did I tell you that?”

  “No.”

  “Yep. Thought I was straight once. I didn’t want to have it back then—shit was cray-zee—but now I think it’s the best thing that ever happened to me.” Marty tapped the table a few times with the knife that was there. “He lives in New Jersey with his mom. He’s a good kid. Plays baseball. We’re cool now, but don’t get me wrong, he was pissed about the gay dad thing for a long, long time. Long time.”

  “What changed?”

  “Time,” Marty said. “He got older. Older and wiser, thank God. He figured if you can’t change it, you better accept it.”

  47

  My mother gazed out the window, her chin propped on a ladylike fist, blue-green veins like skinny worms stretched across her hands. The wrinkles on her face were delicate, shallow; like me, she looked younger than she was. Her emerald silk blouse wasn’t wrinkled at all. They did the laundry well here. If my mother knew that, she would have appreciated it. Draped over her shoulders was a green angora sweater, darker than the blouse. She had always loved to layer complementary colors like that.

  “Here, Mom,” I said, “I bought you a new lipstick.” I had the small Lancôme box ready in my hand.

  She took it from me carefully. “Thank you, Catherine.”

  “You look very pretty today.”

  The ends of my mother’s mouth turned up, just barely.

  “We took a long time doing that makeup today, didn’t we, Mrs. West?” A woman appeared from the bedroom with a pile of towels in her hand. She was not Evelyn, though she looked a lot like Evelyn, except for her hair: it was very, very short. “She had me redo it about seven times,” she bellowed. Her voice was deep, raspy, the voice of a chain smoker, though she didn’t look like a chain smoker. Her skin was taut, unblemished. “Hi, I’m Denise.”

  “Hi Denise, I’m Catherine.”

  “Your mother talks about you girls a lot.”

  “Really?”

  “Isn’t that right, Mrs. West? You love your girls, don’t you?”

  Mom had uncapped the lipstick and was putting it on, but not very well.

  “Oh, no, no,” Denise said. “You let me do that, Mrs. West.”

  The door opened. “Knock knock,” Caroline said.

  “Well,” Denise said, “I’ll leave you to it. See you later, Mrs. West.”

  Mom gave a brief wave.

  When Denise had closed the door, I said, “Where’s Evelyn?”

  “Oh my God, I meant to tell you. You’re not going to believe this. They fired her.”

  “Why?”

  “They found a duffel bag full of stuff from a bunch of different residents. She’d taken two of Mom’s necklaces and a pair of earrings.”

  “Oh my God.” I had to laugh. “Mom,” I said, “I’m so sorry we didn’t believe you.”

  “Believe what?”

  “Nothing. Never mind.”

  Mom read, or pretended to read, the words on the Lancôme box. And then she was staring at me. “You’re pregnant,” she said.

  “I know.”

  There was no reason to remind her who the father was. There was no reason to cause her more pain. There was no reason even to say, “I forgive you, Mom.” The lipstick said that. My being there said that.

  She gazed out the window. Maybe she looked lost. Maybe she looked more lost than before. But she also looked kind of peaceful.

  “What are you thinking about, Mom?”

  “We are here.”

  48

  We went for a walk. The sky was bleach-white, dotted with dissipating gray clouds like ash tapped from a cigarette. I wore big sunglasses and carried a huge water bottle. I’d taken to carrying one of those everywhere I went. I mixed in pink-lemonade-flavored electrolytes so the water was pink. Dan wore sunglasses that hung on a blue cord around his neck. I remember that because I remember the mirrored lenses. I remember looking at him and seeing myself and thinking, God, you look so together and you’re so not. I remember it was when we had turned onto Thirteenth Street that he said, “Do you ever miss him?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, the words drawing out of me slowly. A mannequin had fallen over in front of a store. She was helpless.

  We got to the crosswalk. I wasn’t thirsty, but I took a sip of the pink water. Something to do. Something to avoid crying. Blame the hormones. We waited for the light to change. I tried to fit the bottle in the pocket of my coat. It wouldn’t fit. I tried the other pocket, which made no sense.

  Dan held out a hand. “Let me hold that for you,” he said.

  49

  On Thanksgiving, Caroline and I went to St. Luke’s, which was what we had done every year since college. My roommate at Sarah Lawrence had volunteered at a soup kitchen in Connecticut every Thanksgiving, and in an attempt to gain her respect (she was really cool), I had copied her. My mother thought it was a wonderful idea—great for my résumé.

  We put on our plastic aprons, our nametags. Billy, the guy in charge that day, assigned me as a greeter and Caroline as a dishwasher. Caroline wore a long pretty dress and didn’t seem bothered at all by how dirty it was about to get.

  “Hello, hello, welcome, welcome, Happy Thanksgiving, Happy Thanksgiving,” I said to the men and women who filtered in from the street, not overly excited, but like they had been here before, like this was part of the drill. On Thanksgiving you could count on food.

  Some carried so much—plastic bags, backpacks, fanny packs, rolling suitcases—and others carried nothing at all. Maybe those who carried nothing were living in a shelter right now. Maybe those who carried a lot were also living in a shelter, and paranoid. They smiled when I greeted them, or didn’t smile. Some said, “Happy Thanksgiving.” One man—long face, pinpoint pupils, smelled like a porta potty—said, “Happy, happy!” and the man after him—button-down shirt; he could have been on his way to work—walked like a zombie, his head hung low
.

  Nothing at the soup kitchen that day had changed from the year before, or the year before that—they came, they ate, they complained that the mashed potatoes were too dry, and they left—but something about being there felt very different to me. I think it was this one woman. Her name was Jan. We got to talking in the line, which had started to move very slowly. She wore jeans and a sweater that I knew was a James Perse sweater. Maybe a good find at Goodwill, I thought. But then she told me she’d had a great job as a legal secretary until six months ago. They fired her for drinking on the job. She couldn’t stop. She still hadn’t stopped. She was trying. She didn’t look like an alcoholic, or like a homeless person. She looked like anyone else with a nine-to-five. Maybe it was the pregnancy—I was so sensitive to everything. Blame the hormones. But I really had the feeling that I could have been Jan, I could have had Jan’s life. Maybe I was only a few bad choices away from being  Jan now.

  •

  The immaculate temple of the dining room at the Avalon seemed more immaculate than ever, and also more festive. Orange and yellow and brown leaves dripped from the ceiling, and a decorative arrangement of branches lined the wall. Mom wore pearls, a simple black dress, very light pink lipstick, and a confused expression. “Why are we here, why are we here?” she kept asking.

  “It’s Thanksgiving, Mom,” Caroline repeated with incredible patience, each time as though she were saying it for the first time.

  Mom’s face would go lax—“I love the holidays”—and then, a moment later, “Why are we here?”

  We gorged ourselves on Brussels sprouts and mashed potatoes that weren’t too dry. Mom and Caroline agreed that the turkey was cooked just right. I thought the same about my mushroom lasagna.

  “Let’s say what we’re grateful for,” Caroline said when the Indian man dressed in black placed our pumpkin pie slices in front of us. Each was topped with whipped cream in the shape of fanned turkey feathers.

  “Pie,” Mom said.

  “You’re grateful for pie?” Caroline said. “Okay, that’s a good one, Mom. I’m grateful for…” She looked at us eagerly, sincerely, maybe about to cry. “Family, and that we’re all here together.”

  The chandeliers cast a soft yellow-white light on the room; violin music played; the Indian man in black was refilling my water glass. The air was not too hot, not too cold. We were safe in here, protected from the foul smells of New York, its rat-infested subway tunnels, its litter and yelling, its choking heat, its bitter snow, its violence. Weren’t we safe? The light and the violins and the sound of clinking ice cubes and the Indian man now scraping crumbs from the tablecloth with his special crumb scraper certainly made it seem this was so. Of course it wasn’t so, but it was better than the alternative. It was much better than the alternative.

  “I’m grateful for the two of you, that’s the biggest thing.” I looked at Mom and then at Caroline. “I love you both,” I said. “And honestly?” I said, maybe more to myself than to them, “I am also grateful for money.”

  50

  My tree turned black. Lumps of snow perched on its dark branches like skeletal fingers holding sugar. I thought it was kind of pretty.

  I bought a tree for Christmas. I won’t lie. It was a little sad, but it wasn’t the worst thing that had ever happened either. I had planned to get a very small one, but the guy who sold it to me—Paulie with the gold tooth and the black bandanna around his head—talked me into a ten-footer. “You live right there? I’ll have my guys bring it over, no problem. Consider it done.”

  I tipped each of the guys fifty bucks. Lucia and I strung white lights around the tree, Lucia on a ladder, me down below, feeding her cord. She tried to push tinsel on me, which was absolutely not an option. “It’s good the dog is gone,” Lucia said. “He will not eat the tree.”

  “Yes,” I said, “it’s very good the dog is gone.”

  I waited to feel sad. I waited to feel lonely. I knew it was irrational, but I waited for the feeling of missing him. But none of those feelings came. Lucia said, “It’s good. You better now.” And that was true. Maybe I wasn’t the happiest woman on earth, but I was okay.

  •

  I wore a purple velvet dress by Carolina Herrera to Bob and Caroline’s Christmas party. I ate a thousand gingerbread cookies and read Spencer a story on the couch. Tonia, his nanny, sat with us. She told me she was a student at LIU. I didn’t know what that was. Long Island University. Oh. On Long Island? No, in Brooklyn. She was studying early childhood development. She said this with such certainty. “I am studying early childhood development.” She looked straight at me, as if it were so obvious—what else would she be studying? I envied Tonia’s youthful convictions for a second, and then I remembered that I’d been full of them at her age. No, it was good to be old. It was good to know that nothing was certain.

  Caroline and Bob looked happy enough. Not that it mattered. How were you supposed to know who was happy or not? There was no way to know that.

  My mother wore black velvet and pearls. She nibbled a cookie cautiously, like a baby tasting real food for the first time. From her perch on a chair, champagne elegantly in hand, she said, “That is a good marriage.”

  •

  I went home and drank tea and stared at the blinking lights on my Christmas tree and the presents underneath, and then I decided to open them early.

  Acquaintances had sent acquaintance gifts: chocolate, soap baskets, wine. From Ted, a Floridian ornament: a glass orb filled with sand. The little box from Susan contained a cute shrubby bonsai and a gift certificate for a spa treatment at the Mandarin Oriental. She had tastefully left the amount off the card. From Lucia, like every other year, a pair of pajamas from Target. This was a pants and top set with a pattern of flying pink pigs.

  From Caroline, a little painting of the two of us, in pointillist dots. It was us now, just our heads, side by side. Caroline’s rendition of herself was painfully honest: she had correctly included her fucked-up-tadpole eyebrow.

  This was the first thing I hung on all those white walls. I didn’t wait. I went downstairs and hung it in the entryway, so it would be the first thing people saw when they came to my house.

  51

  I still can’t pinpoint the exact moment things changed between us. Dan made avocado sandwiches for lunch. We went for a walk around Washington Square Park, and to a tea shop in SoHo he liked. It was a windless, snowy day. Dan wore a rabbit-fur hat with flap ears, I wore a cashmere beanie. We drifted past Film Forum, decided to see a movie. When we came out of the theater, the ground was covered in white, everything was white. Cabs crawled along the streets, following the tracks of other cabs. New Yorkers walked tentatively, unsure of nature. The usual frenzy of the city was quieted to a deep lull.

  He stayed with me that night, and then the next, and then he slowly started moving his things over from Brooklyn. He found Florence a great roommate; he interviewed the guy three times to make sure. He was worried about bringing Gandolf, his dog. He knew I thought pets belonged outside. When had I told him that? I said no, no, it’s fine, and it actually was fine. Gandolf was an old chocolate Lab, the complete opposite of crazed Herman. I didn’t love his dog hair on my couch, obviously, but it could be vacuumed.

  Besides Gandolf, he didn’t bring much. Florence’s new roommate bought all his furniture. He brought his books and his clothes and the collection of baby avocado trees he had planted from seed.

  “Did I ever tell you the apartment where I grew up was filled with plants?”

  “No.” He swiveled the cracked planter into the corner. “What do you mean by ‘filled’?”

  “I have a picture of it somewhere. I’ll have to show you.”

  “Yes.” Dan stepped back, considering the planter. “Is it okay there?”

  “Yes,” I said. “It’s okay there.”

  •

  Having Dan at home was wonderful. It was also an adjustment. Sometimes I would feel so exposed with him, like my chest had been unzipped and
turned inside out and exploded into confetti in the air and there was nothing left of me but a scattering. When this happened, I would crawl deep inside myself and retreat to the shower and sit there for an incredibly long time, with the water pounding on my head, like I had done with William.

  I was learning that a good relationship included work. It was hard. But we talked about it. That was the simplest and strangest change: actually talking it out.

  We talked about money, which made me extremely uncomfortable. I couldn’t seem to stop offering Dan money, or paying for everything. It was just second nature. Dan wanted to pay sometimes; he wanted me to let him do that. He also wanted to work. He enjoyed his work. He kept saying, “I’m not with you for your money, Catherine.” I’d say, “I know, I know,” but really, I didn’t know, and honestly, I’m still not sure I know sometimes. I know Dan doesn’t care about money like I do, and I know he cares deeply about me. But it’s scary, putting yourself on the line for someone, really and fully, with no strings to attach them to you. How do I know he’s not going to leave? We talk about that, too. There are no guarantees to change my fears. There is only trust.

  We had many long conversations about moving—is this house cursed?—and for now we’ve decided to stay. Here in this house with its red door. We will not run away from the past. Maybe a house uptown later, maybe near the park. I’m still very resistant to the idea of living in Brooklyn—Manhattan girl, that’s my thing, right?—though I will admit, Brooklyn Heights is very nice.

  •

  There are little rocks and pebbles all over the house now. A huge white rock from Long Beach on Dan’s bedside table, a piece of flint from Arizona in a dish by his toothbrush. I opened a drawer the other day, looking for Neosporin, and found a bunch of tiny black stones inside.