Michael’s worry over his halted novel didn’t seem to have affected his appetite. He ate the way my teenage sons used to, as if they were frantically refueling their racing engines. I remembered that they seemed to undergo a growth spurt after almost every meal. But Michael was a fully grown man.
For the first time, I allowed myself to really look at him, to observe the breadth of his shoulders in the black T-shirt he wore, and the smooth, hypnotic way his Adam’s apple moved when he swallowed. I’d made coffee for both of us, serving him the leftovers, the wreckage, of last night’s disastrous dinner with Ev, and he polished everything off.
When he was finished, he sighed his contentment and reached into his pocket for what I realized must have been cigarettes. But then he appeared to think better of it, and put his hands on the table, one on each side of his empty plate. He had long, restless spatulate fingers with close-bitten nails, as ravaged as mine were as a girl’s. And he appeared to have more than one of the bad, impulsive habits I used to have—maybe that’s why he’d seemed so familiar. “That was really delicious. Thank you,” he said, the way he’d probably been taught to say it as a child. The only thing missing was the word ma’am. Still, it was a lot more than I’d gotten from Ev in return for the same offering.
I cleared the dishes, refilled our mugs, and sat down across from Michael again. “Do you want to smoke?” I asked him, and he looked shocked, as if I’d read his mind. “It’s okay, go ahead,” I said, and I even smiled in encouragement. But I was actually pretty shocked, myself. I was my father’s daughter, in some ways, at least, and I didn’t usually allow anyone to smoke in our apartment. I had to suppress the urge to jump up and throw open the window.
As he reached into his pocket once more, I felt blindly around the counter behind me for something that could serve as an ashtray, and came up with the sunny yellow bowl that Ev and I used for household odds and ends, like loose pennies, the screw whose source we couldn’t figure out, and the collar button I kept meaning to sew back onto one of his shirts. I dumped the contents onto the counter, ignoring whatever had rolled onto the floor and under the stove, and presented the bowl to Michael.
“Would you like one?” he asked, extending the pack of cigarettes, Marlboros, of course.
I stared at the red-and-white box. It might have been made of plastic or fabric, an Oldenburg sculpture meant to comment on our stupid social mores. I hadn’t had a cigarette in . . . I did the arithmetic in my head . . . God, it was thirty-six years. I didn’t even know how much they cost these days. Michael was thirty-six; maybe I was taking my final puff the very moment he slid screaming into the world.
He tapped the cigarette pack and two of them popped up, one just a little higher than the other. I recalled the way it felt to do that particular trick: the heft of the pack in my hand, the silkiness of the cellophane, the precise amount of pressure in the tap. Voilà! And everything else about smoking that I’d loved came back in a flash: all the gestures and poses (I thought of Bacall and Bogart, Paul Henreid lighting up for two); the spark and stink of sulfur when the match was struck; the first gasp, followed by that little nicotine rush; and then the release of breath in a vaporous cloud, like an empty thought balloon floating around my head.
I hadn’t actively thought about smoking in years, except in a forbidding, negative way—warning my own children about its dangers, feeling pious about all the idiots who still ignored the surgeon general’s warning, and in a rage over the mendacity of the tobacco companies. But now this sweet young man, this writer of charm and talent and mystery, was holding out his precious pack of Marlboros to me, and I reached out my own hand to take one from him. Moses touching God, was my irreverent thought.
My fingers remembered how to hold it. How insubstantial it seemed, how purely white and perfectly cylindrical. I hoped he had a carton of them in his backpack, and for the briefest moment my father’s irate voice was in my head—“What the hell do you think you’re doing!” Then Michael flicked his lighter too close to my hair—there was actually a little sizzle—and I pulled it back from my face impatiently and put the cigarette between my lips, sucking in those delectable toxins the way I did at fifteen.
As soon as I inhaled, I felt woozy. “My,” I said, putting my fingertips to my forehead, and Michael leaned forward companionably and said, “What?”
I could see his clean, crooked part, and the comb lines in his hair, which I realized was the same nut-brown color and texture as the coat of a Lab mix named Corky I’d had as a child. And Michael’s head seemed almost irresistibly pettable to me then. Good boy, I thought, in a kind of delirium, but fortunately I had something else to do with my hands, another reason that I’d liked to smoke as a teenager.
Well, so Ev was a menacing bear and Michael a friendly puppy; ergo, all men are animals. And I remained supremely, irresistibly human, like Fay Wray. I might have been smoking pot, I felt so relaxed and witty. I think I even laughed out loud.
“What?” Michael said again, his pretty mouth, his whole expectant doggy being, poised to share the joke.
“Nothing,” I told him, composing myself, flicking my cigarette at the yellow bowl, and then looking with regret at the ashes settling at the bottom of it. What if Ev walked in at that moment? What if he never walked in again? “Nothing at all,” I said, after I took another, more satisfying drag. “So, tell me about Joe and Caitlin.”
15
Ev found a place to stay, a Midtown sublet, so quickly he couldn’t have had much of a chance to change his mind. I learned much later that the vacancy had been conveniently posted on the bulletin board at work the day he left, and he’d moved right in. That afternoon, after I’d directed Michael to the West Side Y, I went to the park for a while to try to sort out my feelings. But all I really did was stare at the mesmerizing movement of the river and wish things unsaid, undone.
When I came home I realized that Ev had been there in my absence. I’m not sure exactly how I knew it, but I did, as soon as I entered the apartment. I can only say that there was a disturbance in the air around me. It felt as if the place had been robbed, although I didn’t notice anything missing right away. Then I put my purse down on the kitchen counter and took in the space on the windowsill where Ev’s paperweight had been.
It was like that chilling moment in a thriller when the victim realizes she’s not alone, that her murderer is somewhere in the house. Except that the very opposite was true; my murderer had been here and was gone. In the bedroom, the door of Ev’s closet was ajar, and I could see the abandoned hangers dangling there.
I looked for a note from him in all the usual places—the bathroom mirror, the refrigerator door, my pillow—but all I found was a blue Post-it stuck to the cover of my computer, with his new address and phone number printed on it. I held the little square of paper up to the light, as if I hoped to find a hidden message, like the ones Jeremy used to write with the invisible ink in his junior spy kit, and that he’d probably cribbed from the Hardy Boys: “The treasure map is under the body.” “Watch out, Jim, the girl has a gun!”
The only invisible subtext on the Post-it was In case of emergency only. There was a slight depression at the edge of the bed, on my side, where he may have sat for a moment or two before he left again. I put my hand on it and it felt cool, but I lay down there anyway, where he’d so recently been. Now, as my father would say, I really had something to cry about. And I had plenty to tell Andrea Stern, too, if psychotherapy was, as I tended to believe, something like the oral installments of a serialized novel.
“Well,” Violet grudgingly conceded, “it’s something like that.” We were on a subway platform on Canal Street, waiting for a train to take us to Williamsburg and the live-in studio of one of her fellow co-op artists. “But with plenty of flashbacks,” she said. “And CliffsNotes,” she added.
I’d told Violet that Ev and I were having very serious problems, but not that he’d actually left. I suppose I felt ashamed, and afraid of hearing her op
inion. And I still hadn’t called or written to Dr. Stern, but my reticence there was inspired more by hopelessness now than by pride. When Violet asked, as we boarded the train, if I’d been in touch with her, I said, “What can she possibly say to make things better?”
“She’s not supposed to make things better,” Violet said with her usual annoyance. “She’s not a trauma doctor, for God’s sake. She can only help you to interpret your own responses to what’s happening.”
“Ah, the CliffsNotes,” I said. And we rode all the way to Brooklyn in silence. Violet sketched the sleeping man sitting opposite her as we rattled across the bridge, while I kept glancing at and away from the other passengers in our car, most of whom looked, to my alarm and sorrow, either like would-be terrorists or the potential victims of terrorists. And no one wanted to make eye contact any more than I did.
Long ago, when we were all more innocent, and when I still thought of myself as a writer, the strangers on subways and buses seemed to hold the key to existence itself in their infinitely complex inner lives. Each one was a possible lover or friend, and worthy of being the hero or heroine of a least one short story.
As Violet and I walked down the steps from the elevated tracks on Broadway, in Brooklyn, I took out my cell phone to check for messages, which I did compulsively these days. I felt her questioning gaze on me— she could always smell my troubles—but she didn’t say anything. There had been three calls.
The first was from Suzy, who lately often sounded as if she were still under the covers in bed, drowsing and warm, even when she phoned from her desk at the office. It was surely dangerous to be so conspicuously, complacently happy in such a miserable world, like flashing a wad of bills around in a bad neighborhood.
I hadn’t said anything to the children about Ev and me—that was his job, he was the one who’d left. But he probably hadn’t said anything, either, because none of them mentioned him when we spoke, except for the usual, casual “How’s Dad?”—which I answered with my usual, offhand “Fine” before changing the subject. Now Suzy wanted to know if she could bring her George around to the apartment to meet us. Could that be construed as an emergency?
The second message was from Michael, who had taken a room at the Y. He phoned at least once every day, even when I had seen him only hours before, and he seemed surprised and let down whenever he reached my recorded voice. “Hello? Alice, are you there?” he’d ask. “Can you pick up?” Sometimes I was actually at home, screening my calls like other paranoid New Yorkers, taking only every other one or so from him. And when we met it was in what I thought of as safe, neutral places, like the park or a coffee shop, to defuse whatever I had sensed was happening between us that first morning in my apartment.
“Hey, Alice,” he said this time. “I guess you’re not there. Anyway, I’ve been thinking about what you said, and it feels right to me. So, thanks.” Then he simply breathed for a while, like a crank caller, before he said, abruptly, “Okay. Later.”
I wasn’t sure what he was referring to; I had said lots of things to him about his stalled manuscript in the week he’d been here. Sometimes I offered the examples of other blocked writers I had worked with, who’d managed to find their way through the impasse. Once, I’d quoted Kurt Vonnegut, who’s supposed to have said, “God lets you write; he also lets you not write.” And I talked about Joe and Caitlin as if they were old friends we’d both lost touch with, but had remained curious about. Mostly, I tried to draw him out about what he thought had happened, to both his characters and his creative flow, but I still wasn’t asking any direct questions. And he didn’t offer any insights of his own.
Michael had left his pack of Marlboros at the apartment the day of his arrival, and I’d smoked one every evening since then in what had become a kind of secret ritual, after which I gargled with mouthwash, showered thoroughly, and aired the place out. You would think it was out of consideration for someone else who lived there.
The final phone call was a hang-up, which came through as several rings followed by that irritating recorded announcement: “If you’d like to make a call, please hang up and try again.” Coward, I nearly said aloud, meaning Ev, of course, who might or might not have been my third caller. Either way, the epithet fit.
Imogene Donnell, the artist we were visiting, and her girlfriend, Patty Berger, a textile designer, lived on Mezzarole Street, in a railroad flat above a bodega. Years ago, Violet told me, there’d been a pharmacy on that very corner that belonged to one of her father’s cousins and his wife, who were known in the neighborhood as Doc and Mrs. Doc. They had retired in their sixties and moved to Florida, where they both died a few years later. The store window, which bore a large banner announcing TENEMOS CERVEZA! backed up by a pyramid of beer cans, had once been filled with blue and yellow apothecary jars, and the dusty objects of those seemingly simpler times: rubber shower caps and metal curlers, trusses and glass baby bottles.
“Cousin Edgar removed cinders from people’s eyes, and offered second medical opinions, gratis,” Violet said dreamily. “And he and Rose sold cough medicine laced with alcohol and codeine, right over the counter. Nobody sued anybody and they were all happy.”
“I’ll bet,” I said.
Imogene was a small, shy woman who made enormous sculptures that crowded all the rooms of the apartment. Some of them almost grazed the high ceilings. I couldn’t imagine how she’d gotten the raw material— mostly rough, gray slabs of what looked like granite—up the narrow staircase, or how she would ever get the finished pieces out. They most resembled tombstones, and at first I felt like a child in a cemetery, awed and oppressed by such incontrovertible evidence of mortality. Imogene had even chiseled some words and figures onto her sculptures, although I was relieved to see on closer inspection that they weren’t epitaphs.
Her inscriptions were more like graffiti, the stuff that kids spray-paint on every available surface of the city. There were the nicknames of the living—Nicki, Chino, Mike, Kooby—not the permanent names and dates of the dead. And the drawings, of skateboarders and taxicabs, pigeons and bicyclists, were kinetic and cartoon-like, as opposed to the somber, stilled life, the carved angels and crosses, of genuine monuments.
She owed a clear debt to the action figures and urban slogans of Keith Haring. But there was something newer, and more ancient, about Imogene’s work, too. I was reminded of cave drawings. The raw texture of the stone and her primitive style contributed to that idea, but so did a sense of recorded history, a groping toward a common language that would withstand time and change. I was here, they seemed to say, just like the grunting cavemen and, later, the more evolved artists with their paintings on canvas of perishable fruit and people. The ghosts of Violet’s father’s cousins, the white-coated pharmacists, paced beneath us as an Afro-Cuban number beat its way up through the floorboards.
If I’d been there under any other auspices, I don’t think I would have been so generous in my assessment of Imogene’s sculpture. All those years of editing had hardened my critical eye, and these pieces were both undeniably derivative and determinedly odd. Typical of Violet’s nutty, artsy little circle.
I wondered fleetingly what it was like to be a lesbian. And where the hell did Imogene and Patty sleep? How did they find their way to the bathroom at night without breaking their toes? But because I had to write about this second-story graveyard for the co-op’s catalog, I was forced to try to understand, rather than to simply judge it. I scribbled into the notebook I’d grudgingly bought just for this unsolicited project. “Hieroglyphics in the age of terror,” I wrote. “Bigger than life.” But I quickly crossed out “life,” and put in “death” instead. I asked Imogene why she made art, hoping for something I could quote in the piece, and she just shrugged and said, “It doesn’t make much sense, does it, given the way things are. But I do it anyway.”
Then there were footsteps on the stairway, and Patty, a tall, leggy blonde, came in, breathless and bearing grocery bags. She and Imogene embraced,
and their domestic happiness was obvious and disquieting. The bags were emptied of milk and eggs and butter and a net sack of golden oranges. I wouldn’t have been completely surprised if they pulled out a chain of knotted silk scarves, and a live rabbit, too. For the first time I noticed the sculpture-sized refrigerator that Imogene had opened to receive all that bounty. And soon I saw the bed, with its rumpled Indian-print throw and inviting pile of jewel-colored pillows, behind a row of sculptures that served as a stonework screen. I wanted to wail. I wanted a cigarette.
When I came home, there was a new message flashing on my machine. Michael again. He wanted to talk some more about something I’d told him in the coffee shop the day before, while he shredded a little mountain of paper napkins on the table between us. “Maybe Joe doesn’t want to find Caitlin,” I’d said. “Maybe he feels guilty about something related to her.” It was only a stab in the dark—there was that almost incestuous scene in their childhood, and all the abusive men she chose ever afterward—and Michael had merely looked thoughtful when I said it.
Perhaps I had managed to spark a breakthrough, after all, but I didn’t feel like calling him back right then and reentering his novel’s dark, parallel life. For once, my own lousy life seemed to be all I could handle. Instead I grazed in the cool light of the open refrigerator—bits of cheese and fruit and pickle chips—and then I took my mother’s folder from my desk and got into bed with it.
I reread the letters from Tom Roman and the one from that editor at The New Yorker. And I went through the poem about feeding the ducks and geese in Central Park once more. When I shut my eyes the scene was instantly revived: the gritty feel of the bread crumbs as I sprinkled them at our feet, the beating of wings when the birds finally took off, and the shadows they cast across our faces. What was the invisible message here? And why did it seem so connected to that enduring burden behind my breastbone?
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