by Bill Barich
“How are you doing?” Anna asked her. “I can still cancel if I have to.”
“I’ll be fine.” Julie applied a shredded tissue to her streaked cheeks. “If I don’t get over him soon, I’m going on Zoloft, I swear.”
September in Manhattan. The city was in the grip of muggy weather, broiling under an ugly brown chemical sky as impenetrable as a lid. All the tabloids at the corner kiosk guaranteed that the heat would continue through the weekend and shatter a record set during the La Guardia administration in the 1930s. Anna stood in the moil and fumes and tried to hail a cab. Since her return, she had felt like a stranger in New York, a hick out of synch with the flow, somebody who lacked the proper skills to survive. As if to validate that status, four vacant taxis sped right by her before a fifth finally stopped. The cabbie was singing along with some loud Nigerian dance music. He gave her a rainbow smile and assured her that the roads through Central Park were all open and would provide them with a shortcut to the East Side. The true odds were no better than fifty-fifty, but Anna was already running late.
There were, predictably, sawhorse blockades midway through the park. The cabbie began to gesticulate and explain, regaling her with a tale of profligate yesterdays when such roads were never closed, but Anna tuned out the static and let her head rest against the seatback. In spite of the heat, a few trees had already taken on a hint of autumn color, and she found herself recalling her first autumn in the city and how in weather that in memory remained forever crisp, cool, and clear, she and her new husband would take bike rides together, splurge on grand picnics in the Sheep Meadow, or drive up to the Cloisters to look at the old masterpieces all cracked and tarnished and then stroll along a bluff above the Hudson while the leaves blew about them and fell. She had seen herself as a perfect inheritor of the civilized world back then and never as just another small-town girl going through an urban rite of passage.
Anna remembered their first apartment on Sixty-ninth Street, a tiny, one-bedroom gem in a rent-controlled brownstone that a colleague of Bud’s had handed down to them for a modest bribe. She remembered the thrill, terror, and ultimate disenchantment of actually Living with the man she had married and adapting to his vagrant domestic habits—almost all bad, from neglecting to roll up the toothpaste tube to failing to lower the toilet seat. Every night over dinner, she had to listen while Bud reported on his adventures at his law firm, a bastion of public probity and backroom scandal. She would repress her own interests, scarcely aware that she had any, and repeat to herself how fortunate she was. Everyone else reinforced that perception—everyone except her father—as she shared in Bud’s victories and pumped him up when he endured a rare defeat, never doubting any of her choices and yet doubting them all in secret, wishing that she had the nerve to leave him. Instead, she had built a wall around herself and forced him to make the move.
The restaurant on Lexington was new to her. It was a French-style bistro with splashes of Moroccan decor. She was almost thirty minutes late and would have been in a frenzy if Sam McNally were the type to get rattled, but he sat calmly at a corner table nursing a martini, the thinning hair on his head in subtle disarray and his eyes behind half-frame reading glasses scanning the sports page of the Times. He was a courtly, witty, generous man, a Georgian by birth, who could be counted on to spot her from across the room, rise to take both of her hands, and say with genuine warmth and affection, “Anna, it’s so good to see you!”
She made the usual apologies—the traffic, a crazy cabbie, the humidity, and so on. “I’ve lost my survival skills,” she said with a harried smile. “I might as well be from Peoria.”
“A drink? Iced tea?”
“Iced tea would be lovely.”
Anna had known McNally for about three years. He held the title of executive editor at a medium-size publishing house and could have been a vice president if he had any ambition, but Sam had come into some family money early on and enjoyed his creature comforts. She had met him not too long after her divorce when he went out of his way to escort a jittery, egomaniacal, and much-heralded author of his (“Our postmodern Proust,” the ads had trumpeted, but Anna, trying to read the novel in question, felt as if she were being force-fed bricks) to her store to sign some books. Anna was embarrassed by the tiny size of the crowd, but McNally took her aside and charmed her out of it. He had a talent for making her feel good about herself, and they embarked on an on-again, off-again relationship that Sam would have liked to make more permanent. Twice they had reached that threshold, and Anna had split with him both times.
“You look wonderful,” McNally said after a waiter had taken their orders. She had done herself up for their lunch, pulling back her hair in a bun held with an ivory comb and choosing a short but fashionable skirt that showed off her legs. “Your vacation must have agreed with you.”
“It was hardly a vacation,” Anna corrected him. “But some good things did come out of it.”
“Some bad things, too?”
She nodded, her eyes averted. “Some bad things, too.”
“I was sorry to hear about your mother, Anna. How’s everybody else in your family doing?”
“Surprisingly well. My father’s sick of being a farmer, so he hired somebody to manage his vineyard. He’s staying in the house he rents in town. My brother Roger—have you ever known anyone who’s always happy, Sam?”
“Only holy idiots.”
“Well, maybe that’s what Roger is. He has his problems, of course, but he gets over them in a flash.”
“More power to him,” McNally said.
“Anyway, he’s in Tokyo with a massage therapist. They’re delving into the mysteries.”
McNally grinned. “That’s a California story, for sure,” he said. “Mind you, I’m not knocking it. One of the best weekends I ever spent was in a hot tub up in Topanga Canyon.”
“So you’ve been baptized.”
“That’s right. I have been baptized.”
Anna was staring at his hands. He had no calluses, bruises, or scratches. She sniffed lightly to see what she could smell of him, but there was nothing distinct, only a faint odor of cologne.
“Are you getting a cold?” McNally asked her solicitously.
“It’s the air-conditioning.” Anna patted his wrist. “Tell me everything, Sam. What’s on your fall list? Is Alfred Fletcher ever going to finish his book?”
This was McNally’s meat. He was a veteran of the midtown publishing lunch and adept at its intrigues. “Fletcher has decided to jump ship,” he said in a stage whisper. “He’s going to sign with Simon and Schuster.”
“But you earned him a million on his last novel!”
“It is Fletcher’s opinion,” McNally intoned, “or the opinion of his agent, that we cost him his reputation with the critics by wrestling him onto the best-seller lists. He used to be compared to Graham Greene. Now he’s compared to Robert Ludlum.”
“So now that he’s rich, he wants to be poor again?”
“Something like that. He wants respect. He wants praise. He’s a writer, Anna, so he’s batshit. They’re all batshit, every last one of them.” McNally sipped his martini, enjoying himself. “It’s about ideals, Fletcher says. Money doesn’t enter it.”
“Ah, I get it,” Anna said. “They made him a better offer.”
“How clever of you,” McNally replied playfully. “I think you have a future in this business.”
Anna had always responded to Sam’s conviviality. He was funny, informed, droll, and nasty in just the right measure. Talk rolled off his honeyed tongue and kept her entertained throughout their lunch. She learned from him and fenced with him, parry and thrust, and once they fell into the beat of a conversation, they could go on for hours. It seemed to her at times that Manhattan was made up of words and voices such as theirs, concocted from monologues, dialogues, tropes, diatribes, rhetoric, and liberal doses of the sheerest hyperbole. The city could not have existed without a language to create it, whereas Carson Valley was
as still, solid, and permanent as the moon.
“I have a proposal for you,” McNally said to her over coffee. “Why don’t you come out to my place on Long Island this weekend and get away from the godawful heat.”
“Is that a threat or an invitation?”
“Both. Nothing would make me happier.”
“Thank you, Sam,” Anna said. “Let me think about it, okay?”
“Naturally. You can decide at the last minute, if you like.”
“I may do that.”
“I have plenty of bedrooms.” McNally was pretending to be serious now, but it was his least plausible mode of discourse. “We can be perfect grown-ups about the whole thing.”
“That would take some doing in your case.”
“Ah, Anna,” he conceded with a smile, throwing down his napkin. “You know me all too well.”
Walking up Lexington to Fifty-ninth, Anna passed miles of men. Tall, attractive, well-dressed, vigorous, decrepit, crawling on all fours, carrying briefcases and folded newspapers (the Post had slapped a grainy black-and-white of Fiorello La Guardia in a bathing suit on its front page, and it was not a pretty sight), hatless and hairless, louche, depraved, deep into fantasies, their desires writ large—how she had rushed by them in the old days, ashamed to have provoked their admiring glances and hurrying home to preserve the great gift of herself for her husband! The image struck her as wholly comic now, with Anna Torelli cast as Virtue Embodied while she tried to outrun the very experiences that she had most coveted. She ducked the glances now, too, although for a different reason. Romance was for the young and foolish, she told herself. So was passion and its compliment, the unavoidable remorse. A mature woman ought to be grateful for (if not exactly ecstatic about) the rogue attentions of a Sam McNally.
Anna got back to the store about three and picked up her messages from Julie. The poor child was still downcast. Three nights a week, Julie studied fashion design at a junior college in Queens. She went in for black clothes and pierced body parts, but her favorite author was J.R.R. Tolkien. She could recite passages from The Hobbit verbatim.
“The Doubleday salesman is coming in next Tuesday, if that’s convenient for you,” she told Anna. “And some guy from Carson Valley called.”
Anna snatched up the message slips, but she lost her excitement when she managed to decipher her clerk’s backslanting scrawl, Jack Farrell just wanted to say high!
“He sounded like he might be a psycho.” Julie paused to blow her nose. “I think I’m coming down with the flu, Anna. I threw up while you were gone.”
Anna touched her forehead. “You don’t feel hot. Could it be something you ate?”
“All I had was a Sprite for breakfast,” Julie said defensively. “Can I ask you a personal question?”
“As long as it’s not too personal.”
“It isn’t. It isn’t to me, anyhow. How come every guy I really care about dumps on me? Is that normal?”
“No, it’s not normal,” Anna said, thinking Normal is a useless concept, dear. “You’re just having some tough luck.”
“I hope so because I’m fed up with it. It’s like you’re born with a certain amount of love from your parents and from God, right, and you start giving it away to guys you trust, and they dump on you, and before long you don’t have that much love left.”
“You’ll have lots of love when the right man comes along,” Anna told her, thinking I am a million years old!
“Yeah, well, I better meet him before I’m dead.”
“You won’t be dead for a long time, Julie.”
“I’m not so sure. I get bad ideas in my head sometimes. Black ideas, you know?”
Anna sent the poor child home to nurse her broken heart and upset stomach. Broken hearts must be epidemic in the city, she thought, as numberless as the men and women who walked the streets. The two were doubtlessly related. Had she ever broken a heart herself? Probably Atwater’s. The realization caused her some grief and led her where she didn’t want to go, back into the sadness. But how did people cope with affairs of the heart? Anna couldn’t think of any advice her mother had ever given her on the subject. They had never talked openly about either sex or love. Claire Torelli always fell back on pieties and platitudes, a farm woman to the core. Only once had she dared to visit her daughter in New York, in fact, wide-eyed and frightened by turns, tramping patiently through art galleries and botanical gardens before confiding that what she wanted more than anything was to see Man of La Mancha on Broadway. She owned the cast album and had a crush on Richard Kiley. There were mysteries beyond mysteries.
Ah, love! It was a plague, it was a bane, it was the pits. Anna had loved not only Bud Wright but also Eddie Santini, a track record best kept under wraps. It comforted her to note that the immortals whose pictures graced her bookstore walls hadn’t fared any better. T. S. Eliot and F. Scott Fitzgerald had nutty wives, while the caped and piratical Ezra Pound was a virtual bigamist in his dalliance with Olga Rudge. Hemingway could not be seriously discussed in the context. Edmund Wilson fucked chambermaids, Dreiser masturbated daily, Faulkner chased skirt whether drunk or sober, and Jack Kerouac seemed to have no idea which end was up and became a Buddhist lover of the universe instead. So much for the men, but how about the women? Hardly a winner in the bunch. Virginia Woolf, George Sand, Willa Cather, Gertrude Stein—well, you couldn’t knock Gertrude. She had been a devoted husband to Alice B. Toklas.
The pace accelerated at the store around five o’clock when burned-out office workers began pouring through the door in search of a sanctuary and the solace of print. They bought books on stress management, beta carotene, the Zen of golf and tennis, and exceptional diets conceived in foreign lands, as well as thick books of nonfiction and slender volumes of verse. Alfred Fletcher’s latest bestseller, Storm Over Tehran, new in paperback and soon to be a major motion picture, was selling briskly, Anna observed. Her night clerk, wholesome and dependable, his heart apparently intact, relieved her promptly at six, and Jane Weiss came in right after him toting a gym bag. Jane had recently taken up fitness with a vengeance.
“Quitting time,” she said, fingering her watch. Her style was not unlike a drill sergeant’s. “Time to pump some iron, girl. Chest-fly time. Time to firm it up.”
“I can’t face those machines tonight,” Anna said wearily. “I’ve had it, Jane. I don’t want to be a new woman anymore.”
“Sure you do, honey. Even men want to be a new woman.”
The city at twilight seemed softer, rounder, and more palatable to Anna, freed for a while from the ratchety grinding of the money wheel. It did not grate so forcefully against her nerves. Jane’s health club was on the upper floor of a converted warehouse a few blocks away. They changed in the locker room to the slap of bouncing feet and the push and grunt of bodies being toned. Steam billowed from shower stalls, and the air was thick with hairspray and perfume.
Halfway through her usual exercises Anna stopped, too tired to continue, and collapsed on a mat with her back against a wall and her knees clutched to her chest. Through the big warehouse windows she could see a hazy indigo sky. Early evening was the hardest time of day for her, the time when Atwater came unavoidably to mind, and she would join him again on the porch of the old farmhouse and look downriver to the great oxbow of the Russian. She could hear the crickets, the frogs, and the sorrowful song of the sparrows. Lambent—that was the word for it. Everything was lambent. She imagined herself reaching out and running a finger over Arthur’s lips, encouraging him to move closer. He was grinning that toothy grin. Atwater, she told him, I have to forget you. I’m sorry. Go away. But he refused to budge.
Jane treated her to a light supper at the club’s cafe, and they strolled up Columbus Avenue afterward. Manhattan had given in to the mugginess and turned itself inside out, spilling private lives recklessly into public. They could have been in the tropics, in Rangoon or Sumatra. People wallowed in the sultriness and sat half-naked on stoops and fenders or roamed the s
treets in noisy packs sniffing out adventure. There were smells of marijuana, cooking grease, pizza, and cigarettes. Anna saw couples holding hands and fondling each other in alleys, lazily exploring while cats rubbed up against their legs. Laughter and music echoed from taverns, along with curses and woeful sighs as the perennially sagging Mets sank further into the cellar ooze of the National League East. Hips swayed and voices babbled. The night was a tongue lapping at things.
“This weather reminds me of New Orleans,” Jane said, swinging her gym bag in a cadenced, girlish way. She was still riding an aerobic high, flushed with healthy color. “What we need are some gulf oysters and a couple of sailors.”
Anna fell into stride with her. “I’ve never been to New Orleans,” she said.
“Ever had a sailor?”
“Nope.”
“Then you have two reasons to go,” Jane told her. “It’s a marvelous town, really. I got so steamy down there I didn’t do anything but lie around in my hotel room, drink Pearl beer, and daydream about sex. All that natural lubrication. You’d like it, I bet.”
“I like every place in the abstract,” Anna said. “I’m just never very happy where I am.”
Her friend gave her a questioning look. “‘Happy’ is a lot to ask for at your age. Why don’t you try ‘contented’?”
“Are you contented?”
“Yes, I am, right now. But I may be a malcontent again in the morning.”
“So you change from moment to moment.”
“Precisely. We all do.”
They passed a team of young rugby players still in uniform, who were streaking toward an Irish pub in a muddy, grass-stained throng. Pints of frothy Guinness were waiting for them, the glasses already lined up. Some helmeted cyclists zoomed by and almost collided with a homeless man plucking crushed hot dog buns from a trash can. The arc lights of the Korean greengrocer loomed ahead and cast an eerie, flying-saucer glow over the avenue.