Valerie Martin

by The Confessions of Edward Day (v5)

  “Does Madeleine know you think like this?”

  “Of course not. I’m not stupid.”

  So he had contempt for Madeleine too. “How is she?” I asked.

  He swirled his bourbon in the glass and knocked it back. “She’s asleep.”

  Of course, I thought. He knew when Madeleine was asleep and when she was awake. And when she washed her hair, and what brand of toothbrush she preferred, and how carefully she placed those cotton balls between her toes when she painted her toenails. What Guy must know about Madeleine depressed me. “So you’re on the prowl,” I said.

  “I have trouble sleeping,” he said. “I walk around at night. But you know that.”

  We all stayed up late and burned the candle at both ends, so it had not, until that moment, occurred to me that Guy was an insomniac. It was sleeplessness, he implied, that had drawn him out on the pier that night. He was searching for sleep and he’d found a drowning man. And now he’d left Madeleine alone in a dingy apartment somewhere because he was too restless to lie by her side. The longer I spent with Guy the more I wanted to talk to Madeleine, but he was between us now, like an ogre guarding a princess, and he couldn’t even be counted upon to fall asleep long enough to get past him. All my anger against her had been washed out of me by the rain and I could feel the cold, wet shirt against my back, the squishy toes of my socks. I was a miserable wet dog in the manger if ever there was one.

  “Is she working?” I asked.

  “She’s not acting, if that’s what you mean. She’s got a job at the bookstore with me. She gets tired out pretty easily; the doctor says she’s anemic. She’s not going back to classes when they start up again.”

  “I’d like to talk to her,” I said.

  He pushed a few bills across the bar, studying me with his dark eyes. “I’m sure you would,” he said.

  She doesn’t love him, I thought. How could she? He’d caught her at a weak moment. She had no one else to turn to and he was there. He twisted his mouth into something like a smile and gave a quick chuck to my shoulder with the back of his hand. “She liked that photo I took of you,” he said.

  “What photo?”

  “In Connecticut.”

  My brain contracted around this information like an octopus engulfing a bivalve. “But you told me she didn’t know you were coming to see me.”

  “She didn’t know then. But when I got back I told her. And I gave her the money you sent. She appreciated that.”

  “I asked you not to tell her it came from me.”

  “I’m not going to lie to Madeleine for you. She’s my wife.”

  I rested my elbows on the bar and lowered my head into my hands. “Oh, man,” I said.

  Guy buttoned his jacket. “I’m off,” he said. “Nice running into you, Ed.”

  “Oh, man,” I said again. I didn’t lift my head until I heard the door swing closed behind him.

  He’d laid a trap for me and I’d waltzed right into it. God knew what he’d told Madeleine about our meeting in Connecticut. How could I talk to her? She clearly wasn’t going to return my calls, she wasn’t going to classes, and she worked in the same place as her husband. And even if I did manage it, what could I possibly say? It’s your own fault, I upbraided myself. You wanted to get away from her, you wanted a break, you welcomed it.

  That’s true, I protested in my defense. But it wasn’t supposed to turn out like this!

  The next morning I went down to SoHo to see if I could get my old job back. I was welcomed by my employer like the prodigal son. He was shorthanded; two waiters had quit by simply not showing up. He offered me a flexible schedule, including lunches and enough hours so that I wouldn’t need a second job. On Wednesday I met with Barney Marker, an avuncular, fast-talking hipster from Brooklyn who asked me a number of questions, the last of which was did I think I was up to Pinter. He knew the director for a production of The Birthday Party coming up at the Roundabout, which had recently moved from a supermarket basement to a theater on Twenty-third Street. It was Equity, reputable, and regularly reviewed. With a pair of glasses, Barney said, I would be perfect for the part of Stanley.

  I bought the glasses and a few days after that I read for the part, got a callback the next day, and by the end of the week signed up for my first substantial role in New York.

  I felt great; things were definitely looking up. I wanted to tell everyone; most particularly I wanted to tell Madeleine. But I realized that I didn’t even know where she lived.

  I called Mindy Banks. “I don’t think she wants to see you,” she said, but not coldly.

  “I need to talk to her,” I pleaded. “I don’t know what Guy told her but I’m pretty sure it was all lies. She won’t return my calls. I’ll have to go where she is, but I don’t know where that is.”

  “She works at a bookstore,” she said.

  “I know that, but where is it?”

  Mindy hesitated, consulting some code of female fealty. “It’s at Columbus Circle. She works on Monday and Wednesday night. They stay open late.”

  “Is Guy there too?”

  Again she paused.

  “Mindy, I’m desperate.”

  “He’s not there on Monday nights.”

  “Bless you,” I said.

  “Do you see Teddy?” she asked.

  “Only once since I’ve been back.”

  “Have you met this Wayne character?”

  “No, I don’t want to. Have you?”

  “I’ve seen him,” she confided. “I went by the gallery he works in. He thought I was looking at the pictures.”

  “What did you think?”

  “I think he’s a Chinese devil.”

  I laughed.

  “It’s not funny,” Mindy said. “Do me a favor and take a look for yourself. I’m so worried about Teddy it’s making me sick.”

  A surprising number of customers were in the bookstore, scanning the tall shelves and thumbing through the volumes on the display tables. The place was vast, wall-to-wall books, various niches and corners formed by free-standing shelves and an information desk that looked like a bar at the center where two clerks, neither of them Madeleine, dispensed helpful hints to the shoppers. I had no idea how she would feel about being accosted in her workplace and I was nervous. I glanced about, pretending to read the placards over the shelves: Science, History, Chess. At a checkout counter near the door a businessman unfolded his wallet before a youthful clerk, not Madeleine, dressed in the equivalent of a dashiki. A murmur of female voices drew me into the Fiction aisle but the two women who halted their conversation at my approach were bespectacled and white-haired. I passed them with a nod and entered Poetry, an impressive collection, just in time to see the heel of a black shoe and the flare of a red skirt disappear into Religion/Philosophy I followed; she turned again into Occult. She was carrying a book, and as I came around the corner, she stopped before a shelf and, stretching up on her toes, carefully slid the volume into place. Her hair was pulled back in an ill-contained knot. She was wearing a cerulean blue cardigan I’d never seen before that made her eyes, when she turned them upon me, glisten like captured bits of sky.

  “Madeleine?” I said, tentative as a schoolboy.

  Not a pause, not a moment of reserve or recrimination, no weighing of options or just deserts; she came down on her heels, her lips parting in a smile of such warmth that I moved quickly toward her, holding out my hands. “Edward,” she said, stepping into my embrace, her arms circling my neck, nestling her head against my chest. My heart swelled with surprise and then pity. What on earth had we done to ourselves? I pressed my lips into her hair, that familiar spicy fragrance, and tightened my arms around her back. “I missed you so,” she murmured.

  A theatrical “ahem,” issued from a professorial type happening upon us in his quest for an essential tome. We separated, holding hands. She didn’t look pregnant, I thought, and she certainly didn’t look anemic. “When do you get off?” I asked. “I’ll wait for you. I’ve
got to see you.”

  “It’s impossible,” she said. “Guy comes to meet me at eleven; that’s when we close.”

  Guy, I thought, Guy Margate. Her husband. How was it possible? “Can you leave now for a while? Can you make some excuse?”

  “I could go out for a few minutes.”

  “That’s no good,” I said. “Where can we go?”

  She gazed at the professor, flagrantly fingering book spines near the end of the aisle. A sly smile played at the corners of her mouth. “Follow me,” she said softly, and I did, awash with desire, past Theater, through Nonfiction, which went on and on, to a door marked DO NOT ENTER. We entered. It was a narrow dark office with a desk, a chair, and a battered leather couch. Oh, blessed couch. We made for it without a word, pulling our clothes aside, eager and abandoned, just as we were that first night under the staircase on the Jersey shore, that night when Guy Margate saved my life.

  It didn’t take long. Madeleine was stifling laughter near the end; she’d told me before that she found the “state” I got into amusing, which was another thing I liked about her. We gasped for a few moments, pulling ourselves apart. “God, Madeleine,” I whispered.

  She sat up, demurely rearranging her clothing, but I was too whacked to bother. “I’m going to go out first,” she said. “You can stay here a few minutes. No one comes in here at night.”

  “Don’t go yet,” I said.

  “I have to. I don’t want to lose my job.”

  “When can I see you?”

  “I don’t know. It’s difficult,” she said. She was feeling around for her hairpins, thrusting them into her hair.

  “Can’t you call me? Will you just call me, so we can talk? I don’t know what’s going on.”

  “I know you don’t,” she said. She stood up, brushing down her skirt. “It’s so dark in here.”

  “Will you call me?”

  She guided herself to the door by clinging to the edge of the desk. “When you go out,” she said, “don’t look for me. You should leave the store.” Carefully she opened the door a crack and peered through it. A thin shaft of light dashed across the floor and up the opposite wall. “I’ll call you,” she said. Without looking back she pulled the door just wide enough to pass and slipped away, leaving me on the couch with my pants around my ankles, satiated, stunned, and, as usual, completely in the dark.

  For two days I stayed close to the phone and checked messages when I couldn’t, but there were no calls from Madeleine. I called her service and left a message to call me at midnight. I figured Guy would be out walking. I got back from work at eleven forty-five and sat next to the phone, making notes on my Pinter script. Pinter is an actor’s playwright, there’s a lot of room in those loaded exchanges, a lot of choices to make, a lot to do or not do. I was finding it hard to concentrate; I kept staring at the phone, which was an old dial model, ponderous and obtrusive. Like Pinter it had a quality of menace. At twelve thirty it rang. “Talk to me,” I said.

  “Were you asleep?” she asked.

  “No. I’m studying my play and I’m waiting for you to call me.”

  “You didn’t tell me you had a job.”

  I laughed. “We didn’t talk, sweetheart.”

  “What is it? Where is it?”

  “The Birthday Party, Stanley, the Roundabout.”

  “That’s incredible,” she said. “That’s fantastic.”

  “It is,” I agreed. “I’m excited. When can I see you?”

  “That’s easier said than done.”

  This response irritated me. “Whose fault is that?” I snipped.

  There was a long Pinteresque silence which I steadfastly refused to enter. I listened to Madeleine’s breathing. Was it uneven? She was a weeper; was she weeping?

  “Yours, actually,” she said calmly.

  The eruption of mutual recrimination that followed went on for some time. It was unpleasant, but some errors were cleared up on both sides. In the midst of my lame explanation of the compromising Connecticut pub photo, she exclaimed, “Stop, darling, I can’t talk, he’s here.”

  “When can I see you?” I pleaded. “Where?”

  “Tuesday night,” she said. “At nine. I’ll come to you.”

  “I’ll be here,” I promised.

  “I won’t have much time.” The line went dead.

  What was I supposed to think of Madeleine? She was a complete puzzle to me, yet I felt, as I had during those weeks when we were pounding the streets for work, a bond of goodwill between us. She was married and pregnant and there was nothing either of us could do about that. I wasn’t excited about the prospect of a baby, to say the least, and I wasn’t looking forward to seeing her swelled up in that awful, ungainly, explosive way I find so disturbing. It would just get worse when the creature was out in the world, mewing, spitting, and shitting; demanding all the attention in the room. I’ve always known I wasn’t cut out for fatherhood. What man is? It’s a service role after all, unless one decides to take prisoners and call it family life. I wanted none of it.

  But just to demonstrate how truly perverse human nature is, Teddy, having discovered that he was not biologically inclined to perpetuate the species, was in a nesting mood. “Come by,” he said in his phone message. “I’m having a drinks party. Wayne is moving in and we’re celebrating. Saturday. Anytime after eight.”

  Within the hour Mindy called. “Go with me, Ed,” she pleaded. “I can’t face this by myself.”

  To buck ourselves up for whatever was in store for us, Mindy and I agreed to have dinner before the party. We were determined not to be early, so we met at eight in a little place she’d chosen near NYU where the food was cheap. She was looking great. She’d lost weight and she was dressed to kill. I wanted to talk about Madeleine but Mindy wanted to talk about Teddy. She feared Wayne would be the ruin of him. So far he hadn’t told his family about his mad affair, but this moving in together, which was so unnecessary, was bound to get back to them. His father came to the city regularly on business. Suppose he stopped by unexpectedly and the Chinese boyfriend answered the door in his kimono.

  “He could just be a friend,” I suggested.

  “Wait until you see him,” she said.

  We split a bottle of not good wine and picked at our food, comrades in rejection. When I asked how soon after my departure for Connecticut Madeleine and Guy had become an item, she was evasive. “We were both so busy, I hardly saw her all summer,” she said. “And then she called to say she was getting married and needed a witness.”

  “Did she say it was because she was pregnant?”

  Mindy chewed a lettuce leaf, considering my question. “She didn’t,” she said. “I thought she was in love.”

  “So maybe she wasn’t pregnant.”

  “I think she must have been.”

  “She doesn’t look pregnant,” I said.

  “So you’ve seen her.”

  “Briefly,” I admitted. “I went to the bookstore.”

  “That’s good,” Mindy said. “You two should be friends. I know she’s very fond of you.”

  “Fond,” I said.

  “She cares about you.”

  I finished the wine. “Let’s go meet the Chinese,” I said.

  A party, after all, is a kind of play There are entrances, exits, sudden outbursts of emotion, affection, or hostility, lines drawn, tales told out of school, and there’s a set. Many plays contain party scenes. Chekhov is fond of having them offstage, with characters drifting in and out and shouts going up from unseen guests. The eponymous birthday party that transpires in Pinter’s play is a kind of anti-party, a grim affair that includes threats, seduction, and a nervous breakdown but there is a song, a sweet love long, in the midst of the general decline. I wondered how my director would see this moment.

  Which brings me to the important difference between a party in a play and a party at a friend’s apartment in Manhattan: at the latter there’s no director.

  Teddy’s party was well under w
ay by the time we arrived; we could hear the sound of laughter and the gaggle of conversation from the hall. A young man I didn’t recognize opened the door and waved us in urgently, as if he was on a boat pulling away from a dock. “Drinks in the kitchen,” he instructed as we came aboard, returning his attention to a short, pale girl dressed in a tie-dyed caftan. Mindy stuck to my side as we made our way through the crowd, which was composed of small groups that yielded like amoebas to let us pass. I saw Gary Santos near a window, and Jasmine, poised beneath her brother’s artwork, in heels and a tight red dress, hollering into the ear of a seriously older man. I recognized a few others as actors, but most of the guests were strangers to me. “These must be Wayne’s friends,” I ventured to Mindy.

  “He’s over there,” she said, rolling her eyes stagily to my left. I looked past her shoulder and spotted Wayne without difficulty—indeed he would have stood out in any crowd.

  “Good God,” I said.

  “Don’t stare,” Mindy cautioned, prodding me on.

  “He looks like Genghis Khan,” I whispered.

  Which was true. Wayne had an amazing face, bizarrely flat with black slits for eyes and a shock of stiff black hair that stood out in all directions. A Mongol face that made the word “steppes” leap to mind. One could picture him wearing a yak-fur hat and a yak-skin coat, astride a tough little pony. Instead he wore a gray V-necked sweater that looked like cashmere over blue-and-red-plaid bell-bottom pants and loafers without socks. He was tall, slender, elegant; his hands were as delicate as a girl’s. I made these observations on closer inspection. In that first glance all I saw was that he looked completely foreign, not just from another world but from another time.

  In the kitchen we found Teddy setting out bite-size dumplings on a plate. The counters were freighted with trays of brightly colored snacks. He looked polished up, bright, as a painting does after it’s been cleaned; his colors were refreshed. “Here you are,” he said. “Come try these before they get snapped up. They’re fantastic.” Mindy approached him tentatively, as if she expected a rebuff, but he passed his free arm around her waist, kissed her cheek, and popped a dumpling into her mouth. “How are you, dear?” he said. “I’m glad you could come.”