Jake & Mimi

by Frank Baldwin

“Yes, Jake,” she said finally. “You can.”

  • • •

  “Somebody owes forty cents at the library.”

  Mark said those words when I walked in the door last night, and when he did I felt something inside me give way. All week long I’d grown stronger and stronger. At work Mr. Stein assigned me to what the partners call “midnight duty,” putting me on call to three of our firm’s biggest clients. I spent the days buried in the Tax Code, researching their last-minute ploys. Calling them personally, the heads of companies, to advise them or reassure them or gently dissuade them. An exciting relief from the drudgery of returns, but high-pressure work. Twelve, thirteen hours of concentration a day. All-consuming. And at lunch, at my desk, I took on Madame Brodeur. She wanted to know if the readings could be done in five minutes instead of ten. No. The roses would cost more than we thought — did we still want them lining the aisle? Yes. The check for the caterer was due in three days. Okay.

  Work and wedding and work and wedding and little else. And it restored me. Centered me. For long stretches I shut last weekend out of my mind. Shut out the hour in the closet at the Roosevelt. One weak, mistaken hour of my life, behind me now. I’d get home at eleven, or even midnight, too late for my run — or for anything, really, except a warm bath and a little soft music and bed. And then up early and back into the office and into the tax books again. A hard pace, but just what I needed. I felt my life returning to me.

  Yesterday, Thursday, I told Mark to come over after he put the magazine to bed. Come and stay the night, I told him. I wanted to touch him, to feel him next to me, to lie together in bed and talk. And when I walked in at eleven, he was already there. Sitting on the couch, holding up a book I’d borrowed from the library weeks before, his finger pressed to the time stamp.

  “Somebody owes forty cents at the library.”

  I must have just stared at him because he said, “Mimi, what is it? Mimi?”

  I broke out of it, shook my head, and smiled. “Nothing,” I said, going to him and touching my hand to his face. “You’re marrying a space cadet, that’s all.” But inside, I felt all of my resolve slip away. The resolve I’d built hour by hour through the week. And later, as I lay in the dark, his sleeping arm over me, his breath on my neck, I started to tremble. I tried to think wedding thoughts, to picture the church at sunset, only three weeks away now. Instead, I saw the dark closet at the Roosevelt, and the white silk ties lying still on the covers. I tried to remember our recessional song, “Greensleeves.” The first notes would come, so haunting, so beautiful, and then I’d lose them. Lose them and hear Anne’s breathing. Her rising, desperate breathing as Jake Teller worked her, so very slowly, on the bed at the Roosevelt. Her breathing and then her cries, and then her hushed voice on the phone the next night.

  “Mimi, there aren’t words…

  “Mimi, I didn’t know who I was. I could not have said my name.”

  This morning I dressed so quietly that Mark asked if I was okay. “Tell you what,” he said as I walked him to the door. “The company gets you until eight tonight — then you’re mine. I promise wine, candles, and exercise.” I kissed him. “Hold that thought,” he said, and then he walked out and I closed the door behind him.

  At the firm, Mr. Stein called me into his office to tell me that my work, all week long, had been first-rate. Our star clients were happy. I had a way with them, it seemed. “If I told Herb Sloan he was trying to run a tax dodge, Mimi, he’d see to it I was barred from the Harvard Club. You told him and he took it with a smile. Keep up the fine work.” I walked back to my office, sat down at my desk, and saw the pink message slip tucked under my lamp. I pulled it out and unfolded it.

  Tonight, you can watch.

  I stared at the note until it blurred.

  Tonight, you can watch.

  I stood, walked to the window, put my hands on the sill, and closed my eyes. I’d known this moment would come. All week I’d steeled myself against it, and until last night I’d known just what I would say.

  “No, Jake. Don’t ask me again.”

  I took a calming breath and walked slowly back to my desk. I picked up the note again. Four simple words on a piece of paper. I stood over the phone, my hand on the receiver, and then picked it up and dialed Jake’s extension.

  “Jake Teller.”

  “It’s Mimi. I can’t.”

  The line was quiet. I took the receiver from my ear and held it over the cradle. And then I heard Mark’s voice again, as clearly as if he were in the room. “Somebody owes forty cents at the library.” And I lifted the receiver to my ear.

  “Do you have a cell phone, Mimi?”

  “No.” I shut my eyes.

  “Buy one after work today. Write down this number — six four six, seven one one eight.” I opened my eyes again and wrote the number beneath his words on the pink message slip. “Call it and leave your cell phone number on the machine.”

  I did as he asked me. I walked to an electronics shop on Lexington and bought a small black cell phone. Two hours later, in my apartment, I dialed the number he gave me. “Seven one eight, eight one eight three,” I said into the machine, my voice sounding strange, distant. I put the cell phone down on the couch beside me and sat in the silent apartment, waiting. I sat very still, my back straight, as I’d learned in ballet as a girl. I stared into the painting on the far wall, the one Dad gave me for Christmas two years ago. An etching, actually, of a horse standing in deep snow. I concentrated on the details — the muscled flanks, the wet mane, the eyes that seemed, somehow, to look back at you, no matter which angle you viewed them from. So very beautiful, those eyes. Wild. Knowing. When the sleek ring of the cell phone broke the air, I jumped, answering it quickly, as though someone might hear.

  “Mimi Lessing.” The way I answer my line at work.

  “Mimi, it’s Jake.”

  “Hi.”

  “She keeps an apartment on Sullivan Street. I don’t know the address. Be in the Village from eight o’clock. When I’m prepared, I’ll call.”

  I stared straight ahead at the painting.

  “Mimi?”

  “Yes?”

  “No heels. And no perfume.”

  And now I sit at a table at an outdoor café on Bleecker Street, wearing a cobalt cardigan, three-quarter sleeve, with a deep V neck, over a pink dress. When I’m prepared. A spring chill is in the air, but I’m warmed by the electric heaters tucked into the awning above me. Moroccan music is playing somewhere. Faint, sensual. At the next table a young couple hold hands on top of the red tablecloth, while underneath it their legs touch shyly. A tall waiter serves them white wine, then pivots and sets a glass of red in front of me.

  “Arrowood cabernet,” he says.

  “Thank you.”

  I take a long sip. On our trip last summer, Arrowood was our favorite winery. I can picture the tasting room, its veranda cut into the steep, dusty hillside, looking out over a sea of vines. I remember Mark touching his cool glass to my sunburned shoulder, warning me what would happen if I got drunk and dropped my guard. “The inn is five minutes away,” he’d said. We were three weeks into our engagement then. We’re three weeks from our wedding now, and just an hour ago I called him from my apartment and told him that I was still at the office. I would be stuck there until midnight, at least, I said. Our date would have to wait until tomorrow.

  I take another sip. At the next table the girl is tracing her finger along her sweating chardonnay glass as the young man leans in closer and says something in her ear. She ducks her head and smiles. Beneath the table their ankles are twined now. He glances toward me, and I quickly look away.

  Mark’s love is unconditional. It is precious, and all I’ve ever asked for, but who will test me? I’ve always turned away from desire. I see that now. I’ve picked safe boys because I could have them without ever letting go. I can tell what Mark is thinking, can almost finish his sentences. A month ago that gave me such comfort. A month ago, when I thought of the two
of us at the altar, true partners, I would fill up inside. Now I sit in a café and think of Jake Teller. Of what he does to women. Did to Anne, as I listened just ten feet away. A part of me cannot imagine it. Bound. Helpless. And a part of me can think of nothing else.

  The lie to Mark was thrilling. It’s terrible, but it was thrilling, and ever since I’ve felt an… excitement, an urgency I’ve never known. As if, at last, I’m truly living. Living in the moment, the colors around me — the blue of the awning, the black of the maitre d’s suit — close and vivid, and the sounds — the snap of a purse — sharp, alluring.

  The young man’s hand is on her thigh now. He whispers something, and she blushes, looks down at the table, then back at him, and nods. He signals the waiter, hands back the menus, and asks for their bill.

  I drink the last of my wine and look down at my hands against the red tablecloth. At the sparkling engagement ring I picked out almost a year ago. “Clarity,” the jeweler had said. “People obsess over carats and wind up with a muddy diamond. See how this takes in light?”

  It does. Takes it in and sends it back out.

  “Another glass?”

  The waiter stands above me, looking down. I press the top of my dress to my chest.

  “Yes, please.”

  I stare again into the sparkling ring and remember something Anne told me a year ago, when she broke up with her boyfriend of two years. I asked her why she’d done it, and she said for his birthday she had told him that for one night he could do anything he wanted to her. Anything at all. No limits, she’d said. He’d taken her to Le Cirque, and then to bed at the Waldorf, between satin sheets. “I don’t understand,” I’d said. Anne had just looked away.

  She called me this morning. “He’s a bastard, Mimi,” she said. “Jake Teller. Six days, and he hasn’t called. Have you seen him?” I told her I hadn’t. Anne leaves for Spain on Sunday. Two weeks in Barcelona, Madrid, and Valencia. “I’ll have the only tan in the wedding party,” she said, promising she would be back in time to keep the bridesmaids in line.

  The table beside me is empty now. The couple is gone. A twenty lies in the bill tray, weighted down by a half-filled wineglass, its edges lifting in the breeze. The waiter returns with my Arrowood and places it before me. I reach for it but then I freeze. From inside the purse at my feet comes the muffled ring of the cell phone. I look up at the waiter, as if he might answer it. “The bill please,” I manage to say, and he pulls it from his pocket, lays it on the table, and turns away. The ringing is steady, insistent. I pull the small black cell phone from my purse, close my eyes, and press the pulsing button.

  “Three sixty-four Sullivan,” Jake Teller says, his voice a whisper. “Apartment two. We’re ready.”

  • • •

  Miss Lessing is not herself.

  All her delicate routines have fallen to the havoc of the season, and with them mine as well. No longer do I wait in the window at La Boheme and watch her step onto her block in early evening. Or stand at the clearing by the river for my cherished moments along the rail. A company car returns her home late each night now, and an hour later I lose her to sleep. This separation is cruel, but it will pass with the season. More troubling is her behavior tonight.

  I sit on a plastic folding chair at a bus stop in the Village, letting the buses go by, one after the next. Across the street Miss Lessing sits alone at a café table. She is just now ordering a second glass of wine, pressing the top of her dress demurely to her neck as the waiter looms over her.

  An hour ago she lied again to her fiancé, calling him from her apartment and telling him that she was at work. And that she would be there until midnight. Minutes later I heard the sound of the shower, and then of her hair dryer. Then the rustle of her jewelry box, and the soft swish of a dress lifted off a clicking hanger.

  Another bus pulls into the stop and blocks my view. It discharges its riders and then rumbles away, and I turn my head into my collar to escape the exhaust. I look up again to see Miss Lessing reaching down for her purse, then into it. She brings out a black cell phone, listens for only a few seconds, and replaces it in her purse. She pulls her sweater, a royal blue cashmere, tight to her neck, and places money in the bill tray. And now she stands. She is leaving. Abandoning a full glass of wine. The waiter looks after her as she steps through the small iron gate that sets off the café from the street.

  She looks around, as though to orient herself, and then starts east along Bleecker. I rise and follow her.

  CHAPTER NINE

  I turn the corner onto Sullivan, and the nighttime noises of Bleecker give way to the quiet of a residential block. In place of bars and street musicians are small trees and wide, empty sidewalks. The wind is stronger here, and I pull my sweater closer around me. The buildings are not like city apartment buildings at all. They are low and pretty, only two or three apartments to a building, and the street doors are wooden, carved, with ornate knockers of silver or brass. The numbers go down as I walk. 382… 380… 378… I touch my hand to the black wrought-iron railing that separates the properties from the street. 376… 374… Flowers grow along the window grates. I can hear my steps on the sidewalk, and I try to walk more quietly. 372… 370… Across the street is the lone shop on the block, the Caffe Lune. A man sits by himself at an outdoor table, stirring a drink. 368… 366… Bleecker seems a long way behind me now.

  Three Sixty-four Sullivan Street.

  I stop. Two large flowerpots, low to the ground and filled with rich earth and roses, stand on either side of a beautiful mahogany door. The door is closed, but something has been folded and slipped between the lock and the frame. I turn the knob and the door opens in, and a handbill falls to the ground at my feet. I pick it up.

  WHITE SWAN GALLERIES. A brochure for an art gallery. At the top is the crest, a sleeping, long-necked swan, its bill tucked into its breast. And below: NINA TORRING, DIRECTOR. I look from the brochure to the nameplate beneath the buzzer for apartment two. TORRING, N. The name is written in a woman’s hand, in fresh ink, as if she might have just moved in. I lay the brochure on the flowerpot, step inside, and close the street door behind me.

  I stand in a carpeted foyer that smells faintly of forest. Of pine. Someone has put potpourri on the marble credenza outside of apartment one. Straight ahead is the door to apartment two, and even from here I can see a sliver of light between it and the jamb. I walk to it. I push it softly, and it opens without a sound. I step inside, into a small kitchenette, and close the door quietly behind me.

  The living room in front of me is beautifully spare. Two silver Kaese folding chairs by the window, a glass coffee table with a vase of flowers on it, and a couch of black leather. On the far wall hangs a single painting, lit from below, the way you would see it in a gallery. This is the only light in the room, and it draws the eye to the painting, a stunning Parisian streetscape. Beyond the painting is a short hallway that leads from the living room to the rest of the apartment. And from down that hallway comes music.

  Violin music, playing very softly.

  I look down at the hardwood floor. I slip off my shoes and place them together by the door, then take a quiet step, and another, until I’ve crossed the living room and stand at the mouth of the hallway. It is six feet long, no more, ending straight ahead at the bathroom and, to the right, at the open door to the bedroom. I can’t see into the bedroom, but I can see the strange, muted light that comes from it. And I can hear the soft music. I press my damp palms to my dress. It is just a few steps to the bedroom door, but I can’t take them. My heart is moving too fast and my breathing… she would hear me. I step back into the living room. I need just a minute. I go to the painting.

  Breathe, Mimi. Slowly. The painting is of one block in Paris, and the artist has captured everything. The crumbling print of a tattered flyer on a bus-stop pole. The reflection of a leaf in the top corner of a café window. In truth lies beauty. My art history teacher would say that, whenever an artist stunned the class with detail.
I concentrate on my breathing and begin to steady. The colors in the painting are beautiful. The rusted blue of a roof shingle, the red of a child’s dress. And the light. This must be what they mean when they talk about Parisian light. It seems to pour from the painting, bathing the shops at one end of the street and then giving way, store by store, to shadow. I look again down the hallway, at the light from the bedroom door. And back at the painting. I listen to the violin, each soft note achingly clear in the quiet apartment. It is as if the music were written for this painting. I can imagine standing on the street itself, a busker playing this very piece just a few feet away from me. “We’ll live in Paris someday,” Mark said once.

  A sharp gasp cuts through the music. My legs go weak as I look down the hallway. It was a woman’s gasp. Of pain, it sounded like. Or of fear. Or… something else. I look across the room at my shoes, paired neatly by the door. A part of me wants to run to them. But I look again at the light from the bedroom, and after closing my eyes for a second, I hold my sweater to my neck and walk toward the door. I stop just before it, listening for another sound. From her, or from him. I hear just the violin. I put my hand on the cool wall and step into the bedroom doorway.

  The room is lit only by the light of three lamps. All three are trained on a four-poster bed. And on that bed is Nina Torring. Her eyes are covered by a black blindfold, and each of her wrists is bound tightly to a bedpost with a tie of white silk. Her legs are free. She wears a thin silver camisole with drawstring pants, and I see now what made her gasp. Jake Teller sits at her side, in corduroys and a shirt of rugged blue. He holds a pair of scissors in his hand, and he is touching the flat metal edge of them to her bare belly. His eyes look straight into mine.

  I clutch the doorsill to keep from falling. Nothing — no picture in a magazine, nothing I imagined — has prepared me to be here. To see this. Her. Real, in front of me. I feel the blood rushing to my head. I force myself to breathe. Jake’s eyes on me are steady and appraising. He waits a second, then looks from me to a hard-backed chair he’s placed three feet from the bed. He nods toward it. I look down at the floor. Carpet. The soft violin concerto is coming from a tape player on a dresser just above the head of the bed. She won’t hear me. I walk to the chair and sit down. I don’t know where to put my hands, so I clasp them together in my lap. And I look again at Nina Torring.