by Sally Koslow
Is it possible to annul a relationship and begin again, Luey wondered? Would Cola even want to be a real sister-friend? Maybe they both could change. Maybe she’d lose the baby. Many maybes.
@notanarcmarc: Live dangerously. Take the job.
22.
“You’ll never sell your apartment in this market,” Stephan chided, after he approved of Nicola’s kitchen paint job, Luey’s cleanup, and my considerable efforts to reduce shaggy clutter to Shaker simplicity. I am always eager to believe Stephan may be wrong.
Before a listing hit the broker’s Web site, the downstairs neighbors, who now employ Opal for 90 percent of her time, got wind of my plans and bid. The amount falls short of the asking price but nevertheless, I choose to see their offer—all cash, ka-ching; quick closing, ka-ching—as a jackpot. The couple is used to getting their way and wants to move with haste.
“I’m thinking of accepting,” I tell Daniel at his gallery, where he is hanging a show.
He stops straightening the art on the wall. “What does your broker say?”
I look past his eyes. “That ‘we’ can do better. So I’ve asked her to perform whatever incantations it takes to get these people to sweeten their offer.”
The broker checks in at least once a day, always with an idea that tends to involve cleaning or painting. She is a hard worker; I can’t say the same for myself. I’ve filed applications to substitute teach at fourteen schools, but with dusty credentials, the phone isn’t ringing. I’ve applied for dozens of jobs as a fundraiser, but the hundreds of thousands of dollars I’ve raised for organizations where I’ve volunteered apparently count for nothing, since I’ve never written a grant proposal. The only work I’ve been able to find is helping a handful of high school juniors, harassed by their parents, to rewrite essays for the college applications they won’t be filing until next fall.
“How are you doing with selling my art?” I ask.
I’m counting on the proceeds to support three people—soon, possibly four—until when I’m not sure. I have said good-bye to our prize, a minor Andy Warhol, along with an Alex Katz dog litho, a David Hockney print of a swimmer who reminds me of Ben, an early Cindy Sherman—not one of her best—an Irving Penn photo of a grinning Miles Davis, and some oils by artists whose careers have never taken off, old friends all, as well as our first acquisition, an enormous Gone with the Wind poster that hung like a benediction over our bed. When we made love, I felt as if Rhett and Scarlett might join us.
“You know it’s all on its way to auction. The secondary market isn’t having a stellar year. When it’s sold, you should see about two to three hundred thousand dollars. Maybe.” Daniel strokes his chin. “George, I don’t want to criticize but let’s get back to selling your apartment.”
I am getting ahead of myself. “Sounds like a mistake, right?”
He lifts his shoulders and extends his palms, though not before I catch a glimpse of his hands. I’ve always wanted to ask if he gets manicures. “If you have to move out fast, where will you live?” Daniel could be talking to a child.
“The beach,” I answer. “For now.” Spending the late winter and a damp, drab spring near the blustery Atlantic would allow me to see myself as a proud, chapped heroine given to wooly scarves and solitary dog walks. I would fling the word greed into the sea and become as self-righteous as a New Age goddess. I’d learn to predict the outcome of cloud formations and cook giant pots of chowder. I stop at picturing fish heads in the soup and making my own soap.
“Did you forget about your daughters?” Daniel brushes aside a black ringlet that escapes over his forehead. I’m sure Stephan must be nagging him to get a trim. I have never known my brother’s hair to be anything less than fully disciplined.
“They’d come along.”
“Good thinking, Mother Superior. Nicola has a job in the city.” Daniel’s smile is back.
Despite what she’s told me about Stephan’s appreciation of her work, knowing my daughter, by the time the apartment sale closes she’ll be back in Paris, if she doesn’t pick Reykjavik or Sao Paulo instead. Still, I take his point. “I’ll help her find a studio if she can’t find a place with friends or”—and in a flash of chutzpah midwifed by necessity, say what’s on my mind—“you and Stephan, for example, have a big house right over the river.”
“I suppose she could stay with us,” he mumbles, “assuming Stephan agrees, of course, but—”
“Don’t worry, not Luey,” I hurry to say. “She’d come with me, wherever, and next semester, hopefully, she’ll be back at school”—if I can pay for it.
For the moment, Luey needs me, and if I’m being truthful, I need her. I miss my husband, my inscrutable husband, and I do not want to be alone. Technically, my daughters might be adults, but all of us know they are caught in a bog. My work as a mother is incomplete, and as long as Nicola remains outsourced to learn a trade with Stephan, it is Luey in the hot seat. Her pregnancy, if it continues, has put a rush on this order, lengthening my job description. Having to be a solo parent in chief is yet another reason to be furious at Ben.
“You’ll sort this out,” Daniel says, as I sense him rehearsing what he will say to Stephan. “I trust you’ll make the right decision.”
That is what I need to hear. I am a woman who requires approval like others do potato chips and reality television, and Daniel is a friend I can count on to supply it. I could never expect ovations from my mother, and Stephan was her accomplice, piling on self-improvement suggestions until he became first violin of critics. My father? I believe I was his favorite, but he delegated the task of raising me to Camille.
My husband, I now realize, allowed me to maintain the illusion that I made decisions, but on anything he cared about more than if we ate lamb chops or salmon, he seduced me to his viewpoint as seamlessly as a sorcerer would his apprentice. Being pliable is the sweet fruit of intimacy, I’d tell myself as I fell in line.
I didn’t just love Ben. I was—and am, damnit—in love, a state that I sensed many of my practical women friends have, like a starter house, left behind without a backward glance. Am I bitter? I am trying not to notice. Despair can anesthetize you into a stupor I can’t allow, which is why I’m eager to take action and get rid of the apartment. Not that I’ll see real money. By the time I use the proceeds from the art and my jewelry to pay off the mortgages, the brokers, and the lawyer, I’ll break even, but at least I won’t be on the hook for monthly fees that dig a hole in my dwindling coffers.
I return to the apartment, where Luey meets me at the door and clangs a bell close to my ear. Whenever she closes an eBay deal, she rings Camille’s crystal bell, the one my mother jingled, to my horror, to signal her maid to serve the next course. After compulsively organizing and cataloging our possessions, many of which now reside in coffin-sized plastic bins, Luey is selling everything from monogrammed bread and butter plates to my spoon ring collection. I’ll see some cash there, too, I hope, even if it’s only fairy dust tossed into a dark, looming sky.
“Daddy’s antique beer steins?” she says, ringing the bell again. “Goin’ to Biloxi.” At her feet is a box and bubble-wrap.
“How much for those freaks?” When Nicola began having nightmares about the beer mugs, alive with fiery dragons, I stored them on the highest shelf.
“Seventy-three bucks a piece, times six, and one eighty for the giant tankard.”
I give Luey a thumbs-up as I head to the kitchen to hang my coat near the back door and take out Sadie. That’s when I see three boxes waiting for me. The return address: Wally’s firm. I back away as if they might be bombs left in the subway. If you see something, say something. I say, “Holy crap.”
The most memorable nugget of advice I can remember my father giving me was to fake courage in a panic. He was convinced that even a counterfeit sentiment could carry you the distance. “I didn’t bring you into this world,” he’d say,
and pause dramatically to puff on his cigar, “so you could be goddamn intimidated, George-a-le.”
I stomp to the drawer, find a knife, and gut the bulkiest package as if it were a fish. Out spill tax returns, each year neatly clipped, going back five years. I filet the second box, which yields expense reports and credit card statements. The third contains insurance policies, more cell phone bills, and a phone without a charger, quite dead.
I’ve already reviewed Ben’s stacks of cell phone bills, which showed nothing more untoward than that he called our daughters more than I realized. I take a second look. These records are for an unfamiliar Long Island number. Now it is time to quote my grandmother, who was enamored of all things she considered to be truly American. “Cowabunga,” I say, as Luey walks in and asks, “Whatcha got there?”
It’s hard to deny a roomful of documents. “I’m not sure,” I admit. I might simply be looking at the records of a mediocre businessman.
“You need help with that, Ma?”
Luey’s face is scrubbed clean. She looks as if she stepped out of a family album from my mother’s adolescence. I pull her toward me, wrapping her in my arms. “Keep going with eBay and that’s help enough.” The last thing I want is my daughter to see anything as stony and disillusioning as irrefutable evidence.
One of the loudest, longest arguments Ben and I had in our marital history was after he praised another woman’s shrewdness. “Are you saying I’m not shrewd?” I asked, as my mother, for instance, never would. Ben howled with laughter as I wriggled away.
“Shrewd?” he said as he followed me, wiping a tear as he vibrated with mirth.
It would be disingenuous of me to call myself stupid. I can recite the periodic table and tell Corinthian from Doric. I don’t conflate Liszt and Chopin, and can identify which of Verdi’s operas were inspired by Shakespeare. But in the moment of Ben’s remark I knew canny would never apply. I didn’t speak to him until a day later, when he got down on one knee with a bouquet of French tulips and said, “Georgia, shrewdness isn’t even a quality I like in a woman. You, darling, have an endless list of far sweeter attributes, and what’s more important is that I love you exactly the way you are.”
I liked hearing that then, but lacking inborn cunning is like having a Q in Scrabble without a U. I long to make a bold move. As the afternoon progresses and I pore over papers, I keep returning to the cell phone bills. I’ve been tempted to simply pick up my cell or our ID’d landline to dial the number, but a swell of shrewd-free pride along with confusion stop me—if someone answered, what then, especially if it is Clementine?
Throughout the day I rehearse my interrogation. When, Miss D’Angelo, did you take up with my husband—and why? Where did Ben come on to you, or did you hit on him? How often did you do it and where—in our house? Where you worked? Hidden in the dunes when Ben took Sadie for long strolls at sunset? Did your meetings happen after careful deliberation or after a sudden wham of passion? The voice I imagine on the other end refuses to answer on the grounds that it is none of my business.
I’d like to exorcise the pictures of Ben and Clem enacting every bad movie I’ve seen, drinking Cabernet in front of the fire or rolling around on our bed, rumpling the sheets and kicking the creamy matelassé coverlet to the ground. After they do their X-rated business, which I’m grateful my mind censors, Ben lights a cigarette with a candle he has placed on the nightstand, although smoking is a habit he gave up in 1999. He and his darling Clementine pass a cigarette between them, until he extinguishes it in a saucer he’s brought up from the kitchen. It is my grandmother’s china.
As my mind wanders to this bleary B-movie, I force myself back to sorting through more records. It takes until midafternoon to notice a pattern—gaps in the calls that correspond to our vacations. That Ben ignored Clementine during his absence is no consolation.
At ten p.m. I leash up Sadie for her bedtime constitutional. As we round the corner I find what I’d hoped to see, a relic from another era—a pay phone—and I stop. Even if I’d had the hubris to make a call, the phone has been beheaded, its cord dangling like a noose.
I return home and put myself to bed, but warm milk and an airport novel can’t soothe me. I throw the book across the room, as disappointed by fictional love as the real thing, and toss throughout the endless night. When my alarm wakes me, I am flattened like a decal ironed to my sheets, cheated out of the refreshment and common sense you depend on in a new day. At ten, a reasonable hour for an unreasonable act, I call Daniel for counsel.
“Have you tried to look up the number online?” he says, playing his regular role of IT support guy.
“You can do that?” I, the technophobe, ask. I wouldn’t be able to explain a Twitter hashtag if I stepped on one and it gave me tetanus.
“Search the number and reverse directories come up. They’re kind of spotty, but one might list the owner of the phone.”
Who knew you can make such quick work of espionage? I thank him and exercise my credit card on nine different online directories. None yield a result but now I am a woman possessed. I fill my pockets with loose change and four blocks from home I find a functional pay phone, a young woman chatting away on it, oblivious to what is more than the light shower that the morning newscaster described. As I stand a few feet away under Ben’s golf umbrella, her conversation continues with whoops of laughter, clickety-clack Spanish, and sweeping gestures, as if her caller could see her. After a few minutes, she puts her hand over the receiver, turns to me, and scowls.
I wait outside this young woman’s private office on the corner of Seventh Avenue and Fifty-fifth Street until the gutter fills with water and apparently her coins run out. She sashays away. I approach the phone, hands stiff from the rain, and drop in the required quarters. The phone rings once, twice, three times, four. As I am ready to hang up, I hear a woman’s voice. I’m not sure what I hope for; “Adam and Eve Landscaping,” perhaps.
“Hello,” a woman says.
I try to recall Clem D’Angelo’s voice.
“Hello,” she repeats.
I can’t be sure if this is Clementine.
“Is someone there?” she says again.
I have a thousand questions and ask none. In the background a huskier voice calls out, “Who is it?”
“No one,” she says. I hang up, shivering less from the weather than from the electroshock of reality.
Every time I walk Sadie throughout the day—four times more than usual—I pass the phone. It is on the last walk of the evening that I muster the nerve to once again drop coins in the slot. This time the phone obediently answers on the first ring. The voice is robotic. The number, I am informed, is no longer in service.
I slam down the phone so hard that I’m sure I damage the earpiece. One less pay phone for midtown Manhattan.
As I lumber into the apartment, music blares. Luey shouts “Hey!” but she doesn’t lift her eyes from her laptop. I collapse on the couch next to her, finish off a pretzel sitting on the coffee table, note the comfort delivered by food with absolutely no value, and think that tomorrow I’ll have to lecture Luey on prenatal nutrition, though pregnancy has graced her in a way that perhaps only a mother would notice. With her hair pulled back to expose every plane and poreless inch of her face, the effect is ethereal. Her skin is the clearest I’ve seen since she was in seventh grade. As she leans back, lamplight shines on her slightly softer face. My daughter looks ebullient. This is the sort of girl I was myself, the sort that Luey abhors. She’d choke on wholesome, but tonight I could imagine Luey leading a group of volunteers building a school in Senegal.
“Where’s Cola?” I ask.
“Don’t know,” Luey says, transfixed by a YouTube video of a performer gyrating in front of a keyboard. “Isn’t he amazing?” she asks. I think it is fair to call her expression starry.
My musical taste stalled at K.D. Lang, Sting, and Diana Krall.
In my playbook these are singers whose talent qualifies as amazing. “What makes him ‘amazing?’” I want to know in the same way I struggle to understand how anyone would willingly pay good money to see movies where characters guzzle blood as if it’s tomato juice.
“Everything. The package. The records he picks. His originality. The way he plays guitar to the melodies on the turntable, how he moves his body.” Luey sighs and laughs. “Should I go on?”
Now I’m curious. All the camera is showing is the neck-down portion of a thin, pale body with hipbones visibly jutting under snug black jeans. He’s wearing a white T-shirt that could have as easily cost a dime at a yard sale as two hundred dollars in a designer shop. His muscles are elongated but defined, although he doesn’t look like the sort who’d put in time at the gym. There is a long close-up of fancy footwork that seems to have nothing to do with the music. Maybe he’s got a dog’s ability to hear sounds in a register I cannot.
The camera pans to the performer’s head. I lean forward and squint. He is wearing a brown-and-white hide headdress with cowish eyes and white horns; it covers him from the neck up. I scrunch my face to take a closer look. “Does he always perform in this getup or is it some sort of stunt?” I ask.
Luey beams and I admire her mouthful of small, straight, naturally white teeth. Four years of braces. “He calls himself Buffalo Bob and this is his regular act. Isn’t it genius?”
Underneath the headgear he could be Keith Richards or the kid who bags groceries at the supermarket. “How old is this big-headed brute?”
“Twenty-five and his shows are sold out everywhere.” I hear pride.
“People pay to watch this?”
“Lots. On college campuses, mostly, but he’s toured in Europe and Australia.”
I upgrade him from a mole living in his parents’ basement to a man in a van filled with unwashed roadies, stubby joints, and blister packs of beef jerky. “So Buffalo Bill is successful?”