Confessions of a Falling Woman

by Debra Dean

  “Then wear them once,” he snaps. He snatches a pair off the bed and lobs them into the wastebasket.

  “Mike, those are four-fifty a pair. What’s with you today?”

  I’m going crazy, he thinks. He’s not, but he wants to. What he would give for one day, just one, when he could blow it through the roof, get drunk, sleep with a stranger, and not live with the consequences. One day, and then he’d come back. Happily. It’s not that he doesn’t love Rachel and Noah. He would crawl over glass for them. But just one day.

  He can’t tell Rachel all this, though: the price of being given a second chance is that for the rest of his life he will weigh his words and be careful not to do anything irrevocable.

  He retrieves the stockings, but she’s already found a pair to her liking and is stretching the filmy material up the length of each calf.

  “I’m sorry. I’m feeling squirrelly today.”

  Rachel bounces on her toes, tugging the waistband up over her buttocks. “You’re nervous about seeing your old girlfriend.” She says this as calmly as stating the time of day. Even as he is denying it, Mike realizes that his mind is as familiar to Rachel as her body is to him.

  The babysitter finally shows. Mike watches his son gallop down the hall and thrust the toy fire truck into the girl’s hands. The boy’s eyes are round and hopeful, like an eager suitor’s. He tugs at her knee, trying to scale the leg of her jeans, until she absently scoops him up. Mike tries to imagine what is different about her from a string of rejected sitters, but there is nothing he can see that might account for his son’s violent adoration. That’s the way of it, he thinks. It’s just there, inexplicable as electricity. He wonders again how it will be to see Caitlin.

  While Rachel gives the sitter a few last-minute instructions about naps and fruit and phone numbers, Noah croons the girl’s name and tries to seduce her away with Curious George videos. Mike wants to kiss his son good-bye, but he is clearly a fifth wheel. He remembers the tearful scenes that used to precede every exit. He’s surprised to find he misses them.

  “We’ll bring you back a piece of cake,” he offers.

  “Don’t push your luck,” his wife whispers, and they slip out the door.

  The Sunday afternoon traffic is stop-and-go. Mike pulls out around some moron trying to make a left turn on Flatbush and has to lie on the horn and gun the sluggish engine just to get back into the left lane before he gets nailed. For all that, they get stuck at the light. He still misses his old Fiat, a spry little gem sacrificed on the altar of adulthood. Rachel hated it, insisted it made him drive like a maniac, but you have to drive aggressively in this city or you get crushed. Still, there was no arguing with the fact that a Fiat has no place for a car seat. He couldn’t bring himself to trade it in, so for months after they bought the sedan with the four-wheel drive and the good safety rating, he continued to rise at dawn every other day and move his old love to the alternate side of the street. It came down to the fact that at sixteen he had thought a sports car would complete his life, and twenty-plus years later it was hard to let go of the idea.

  They inch up the ramp onto the bridge. Sunlight flashes through the cable webbing of the spans, and Mike admires a ketch on the bay below. The sails arch taut, the boat heeled flat against the glittering water. He watches the boat skid toward the Verrazano Bridge, out to sea, and imagines the feel of lines pulling through his palms.

  Mike double-parks in front of the restaurant, and Rachel comes around and burrows into the driver’s seat, readjusting the mirrors.

  “You sure you don’t want to come in and watch the rehearsal?” he asks.

  “No, Macy’s is having a sale on OshKosh. Noah’s outgrowing his old ones. I’ll be back before six.”

  When Rachel pulls out into traffic, he turns and checks his reflection in the plateglass window. His face is still ruddy, a little tan left over from a weekend spent out at Montauk. Behind his glasses, pale lines splinter out from the edges of his eyes, like cracked glaze on pottery. There’s also a little silvering at the temples that wasn’t there when Caitlin last saw him. You could make a case that the gray hairs go with the suit and the tan. Makes him look successful, he decides. All in all, looking pretty good at thirty-eight, one of the last of his crowd who hasn’t gotten thin on top or thick in the middle. The thought that Caitlin must also have changed snags at the edge of his mind, but he brushes it away, tucks his glasses into his breast pocket, and strides through the front door.

  The restaurant is cavernous and cool, a former USO hall refurbished with yellow walls and large unframed canvases. Mike steps quickly through the bar and up into the main room. The tables have been cleared away and replaced with rows of chairs leading to a low platform swagged with ribbon and greens. A ponytailed man in leather jeans is standing on the platform, squinting up into the balcony over Mike’s head. Suddenly music crashes through the room, a screeching burst of violins and then silence.

  “Okay, okay, back it up and lower the volume a tad, hmm?” The man sees Mike and hops off the platform.

  “I hope you’re Michael. Oh, good, we’re just about ready to do a quick run-through. We’ll get this out of the way and let Andrea get dolled up. Phillip”—he serenades the balcony again—“the best man is here. Are you girls ready to go?”

  Phil bounds down the metal stairs and lopes toward Mike. He looks different today. Mike can’t place why, and then he realizes it’s the suit. Phil’s a musician who does carpentry on the side; his idea of dressing up has always been an old corduroy blazer on top of the jeans and cowboy boots. Today he is wearing a charcoal gray suit with an expensive Italian drape, a yellow silk tie, the whole nine yards. From the neck down, Phil is transformed, but the face is still too rugged for the costume. Mike is reminded of those photo booths at carnivals, the painted plywood scenes that you stuck your head into, your head on top of the body of a Victorian bathing beauty or an Old West cowboy.

  Phil claps Mike on the back and then grins self-consciously, flinging his palms out and stepping back so Mike can take in the full effect.

  “What d’ya think, man? I figured I’d dude up a little for the folks.”

  The man in the leather jeans is waving at them. “All right, front and center, boys. Is the music keyed up? Andrea, Caitlin, don’t forget to pause on the bottom step for your photo op.”

  Handel’s Water Music fills the empty restaurant. Mike stands next to Phil and peers up into the balcony, but he can’t see Caitlin. He whispers a quick, “How ya doin’?”

  “I feel like I walked into rehearsals for A Chorus Line.”

  “You got opening-night jitters?”

  “Nah, I’m fine, really man. The way I see it, I married Andy six years ago. I just wanted to see what she looks like in a dress.” Phil falters and tears blink in his eyes. He grins loopily. “I’m a happy guy, Mikey. What can I say?” Mike throws an arm around his shoulder and they clench each other, as awkward and passionate as teenagers.

  Phil has always been a relatively happy guy. Mike envies him his easy luck. Phil never crossed over that invisible line. He’s never had more than a bad hangover, never made mistakes he couldn’t live with, never threw away something good when he had it.

  The music cascades and the ponytailed man sings, “Okay, Caitlin, that’s your cue.” Without his glasses, Mike sees only a thin blurry figure wavering slowly down the stairs. Ten years blink away, and he recalls a riveting woman with Black Irish eyes and a mouth like a longshoreman’s, and she is going to spend the night with him and then her life with him and then she decides better of it. “In case you haven’t noticed, the fucking party’s over,” the mirage tells him. “It stopped being fun for everyone else a long time ago.” And then she is gone.

  The person coming down the stairs sharpens into focus like an ink drawing, something Japanese, a crane. The weightless line of her body, long fingers clasping an imaginary bouquet at her waist, the dark hair scissored short now. Her eyes are older, and the years have altered h
er in some other way that Mike can’t pinpoint, but she is still fiercely attractive. Mike feels a stab of regret, sharper than it was when she left him.

  He doesn’t even remember her going. By that time, he was so obsessed with drinking himself to death, a man dredging frantically for the bottom, that he’d felt her absence only as the removal of some obstacle. Suddenly everything solid had dissolved underneath him and he’d felt the bleary rush of getting closer to death. One dizzy exhalation. When he hit bottom, in a lozenge-pink room at Smithers, he’d been surprised to hear she’d left town months ago, gone to Texas.

  Caitlin glances up at him, or at him and Phil, he can’t tell, but he pulls the corners of his mouth into a smile. He wishes only to float above this moment and see the pattern, see where he might have ended up if he’d made different choices. He hears trumpets and kettledrums.

  “And now the bride. You look radiant, darling. That’s right, now pause on the stair, let everyone admire you.”

  Mike’s job, so far as he can remember, is to keep the groom from losing his nerve for another hour and a half. But Phil looks fine, loose-limbed and joking, trading Bloody Mary recipes with the bartender. Mike slips out of the conversation and goes looking for Caitlin. He knocks on a door next to the kitchen.

  “Andrea? It’s Mike. Can I steal a couple of aspirin?”

  The door cracks open, and Caitlin peeks through. “She doesn’t want anyone to see her before the ceremony. Bad luck. I told her that was just the groom, but…” She shrugs. “You still smoke? I’ll trade you for a cigarette.” She holds out two tabs of aspirin, and he shakes a cigarette out of his pack. He is fumbling with his lighter, but she takes it.

  “Not in here.”

  And she is leading him through the kitchen, past cooks and waiters arranging shrimp and cheese and grapes on platters. His heart is pumping, and he grabs her hand, his own palm so sweaty that his grasp slips. He remembers the first night, leaving a party half in the bag, following her ass out to the elevator. He was like a trained seal, its nose swaying to the rhythm of a herring. God, but she had rhythm, swaying, flailing in the boozy dark. Caitlin opens a metal door and steps outside. What did he say that night? “I want to make you happy.” What a joke. He thinks to himself that he needs a drink. He pauses and glances back at a waiter, tastes the bite of gin in his throat.

  …accept the things I cannot change.

  The words click on like a tape in his head, there unwilled. And pictures: Caitlin rigidly staring out a black window while a beady-eyed drunk, his evil twin, shrieks and rants behind her. Caitlin and the drunk being thrown out of a cab. The drunk coming out of a blackout with his penis wilted inside her.

  He changes his mind on the gin and tonic and follows her through the door. They are standing a few feet in from the street, facing the back side of an office building that shares the alley. He scans the length of the alley, open to the next block on the far end. The wedding guests will be passing by soon. He and Caitlin might be spotted here. He tells himself he won’t let anything happen, but he also hopes he’s wrong. Already, long shadows are stretching in shafts across the street. The top several rows of office windows catch the last of the sunset like square embers. Caitlin lights the cigarette, another orange glow.

  “How long you in town for?” His question hangs uncertainly in the air.

  Caitlin hands the lighter to him. “I’m leaving in the morning.”

  “That’s too bad.”

  Caitlin nods without conviction. “It’s good seeing everybody, Andrea and Phil. And you. I’m glad you’re doing so well, Michael. Andrea keeps me up on everybody.”

  “You should stay a few days and…” He can’t finish the sentence. And what? Let me make you happy?

  “I’ve got a meeting on Monday,” she says.

  “Hell, I’ve got meetings all week. You cancel them, reschedule. You should stick around. There’s a new restaurant in Soho I’ve been meaning to try.”

  “I don’t like it here anymore, Michael.”

  “What, you prefer Texas?” He says this jokingly, but honestly the idea seems incredible.

  Caitlin laughs. He casually hoists an arm around her thin shoulder.

  “Tell me about the life of a Texan beauty.”

  “It’s not exciting, but I like it. I have a house with a yard and a vegetable garden. I have a golden retriever. Dagwood. We go for walks down to this bridge every evening. You should see it, Michael. At sunset, bats, hundreds of them, swoop out from under the bridge and funnel up into the sky. They look like a twister.”

  “I don’t know, Cate, sounds pretty lonely to me.” He feels the warmth of her skin under his fingertips. She seems to be missing his cues, the heat that Mike feels rolling off him in waves. Instead, she continues to talk about the bats, a subject immune to subtle redirection.

  “No really, it’s beautiful. They do this thing, like sonar. They fly inches apart, wing to wing, bouncing signals off each other. They can’t see a thing, but it doesn’t matter because they can feel the shape of everything.”

  “My son dressed as a bat last Halloween,” he tells her. “He insisted on being a green bat, go figure. Rachel bought some green tights and sewed him green felt wings. We had to stand behind him at every neighbor’s door and mouth ‘bat’ so they’d know.”

  Mike can recall every detail of that night: Rachel kneeling behind their son and safety-pinning the wings in place, Noah’s round little belly protruding between his tights and a remarkably tiny sweatshirt. Everything still so small. Noah had refused to change out of his costume after they got home, and had fallen asleep with the felt wings wrapped around him like a blanket. Mike and Rachel stood over him, watching his little chest rise and fall, his face smeared with chocolate and flushed pink with sleep.

  Caitlin steps out of his clasp, drops her cigarette on the pavement and grinds it out with the toe of her shoe.

  “He sounds like a sweet kid, Michael.”

  Her voice wrenches him back, and he is momentarily disoriented. Despite the mugginess of this evening, he feels chilled, as though a fever were breaking. And then the afternoon slowly comes into focus, each moment leading up to this one, frozen like tracks behind him. This is one of the rewards of sobriety, an uncomfortable clarity.

  “Yeah, Noah is amazing. The whole thing, having a kid, I can’t explain it.” Mike has to struggle to remain in the moment. “I’m luckier than I deserve to be, Cate.”

  Caitlin grins and half turns toward the door. “You always were, you son of a bitch.”

  “I’m sorry.” He wants to say something else, but he doesn’t know what.

  “I know, Michael. Get over it.”

  All of their friends are there. Mike stands next to Phil and looks out over all the faces he knows. He finds Rachel sitting over to the left, studying the program in her hand as though there might be a quiz later. He can tell by her carefully erect posture that she is being brave. A wrenching tenderness grips his throat, unexpected, half-forgotten. When he finally catches her eye, she smiles brightly. He tries to return her smile in such a way that she will read what he’s thinking. You, he thinks. I swear it’s you.

  Caitlin sails forward up the aisle. Then Andrea. The judge says some words. In the presence of this loving community. This is an affirmation of life. What we do matters. Then there are the promises, in good fortune or in adversity, to seek with her a life…Mike doesn’t remember saying those words himself, though he knows he did. But he does remember hearing Rachel say them and seeing in her eyes absolute surety and calm, a faith in him that bound him to her irrevocably.

  He watches Phil and Andrea embrace, the moment stretching imperceptibly until it snaps back into real time. The room bursts into applause and laughter. He can see only dimly: flickering candles, the fluttering outlines of bodies rising. There is music again, plunging forward, triumphant, and then the bride and groom are swept into the crowd and everyone is swirling up the stairs. Mike steps into the vortex, searching blindly for his w
ife. She is there somewhere—he can feel her.

  THE BODHISATTVA

  You’ll never guess who I bumped into yesterday. Your predecessor, Dr. Fletcher. I was walking Porkchop in the park. No makeup, my baggy sweats. The split second I recognized him coming down the path, my first instinct was to climb a tree and hide. I probably should have, but there’s the problem of hoisting up a fat Pekingese. And it would be so typical for him to spot me up there, crouching on a limb like the Cheshire cat. Can’t you see it? “Abby, what a surprise.” I’ve humiliated myself enough with him, thank you very much.

  I just told you how I felt, didn’t I? I felt like climbing a tree. That seems pretty straightforward.

  I’m sorry, I guess I’m feeling a little defensive today.

  Get this, he’s bought a place over near Flatbush Avenue. Small world and all that. I actually said that when we saw each other. I mean there’re over two million people in the borough, why shouldn’t he be one of them? But I was so flustered. You’d think, after all this time.

  He sees me, he says, “Would you believe I was just thinking about you? How are you?” Which, coming from a shrink, is always a loaded question. No offense. And he squeezes my shoulder. Next thing I know I’m walking arm in arm with this man I haven’t seen in two years. Three, come July twenty-third.

  What do you mean, what did I do? I didn’t do anything. What could I do? Scream for help? Help, this man was my shrink and now he wants me to talk to him? That’s what you all get paid for, theoretically anyway. No, I just tried to act like an adult. I asked him about Bangkok. Turns out, there’s not much call for shrinks there. The Thais don’t talk about their feelings. Not out of a sense of decorum or rigidity, I gather, but they just don’t see the point. Given my own experience, I can’t help but admire the wisdom of that. And then the nail in the coffin for a psychotherapy practice, guilt is not a Buddhist concept. Karma takes care of that. He stayed a year and a half, counseling the American businessmen there, but it wasn’t enough to make a go of it.