Emma's Table

by Philip Galanes

  Emma didn’t kid herself though; there’d have been hell to pay if that doorman hadn’t let her pass. She had half a mind to call Bobby, in fact—to warn him about the lax security of the place—but she wanted the element of surprise on her side still.

  She’d been more than a little surprised herself when the car pulled up in front of the building, 44 West Seventy-eighth Street—her husband’s secret hideaway. It was one of those huge residential towers, a developer building that had been slapped up in about fifteen minutes and christened with a fancy name to compensate for the overwhelming cheapness of its construction—“The Vanderbilt,” she’d bet, or, better still, “Ardsley Hall.”

  “Is this it?” she’d asked the driver. It looked so ordinary.

  He confirmed the address.

  “Wait here,” Emma said. “I’ll just be a minute.”

  The driver hopped out of the car and opened her door. She thanked him sweetly. She always seemed to manage sweetness best when she was a little afraid.

  She glided past the doorman.

  Every surface in the lobby was slick and shiny. There was a sea of cheap terrazzo on the floor, and ugly panels of milky glass attached to every wall. She walked on tiptoe; she didn’t want to make a racket.

  What were they thinking? she wondered, tapping past a small arrangement of Mies-inspired furniture. Vinyl would be a step up for these cushions, she thought.

  Emma was conscious of her every step, of lifting her feet so carefully up and placing them down again even more so; she didn’t want to slip.

  Wouldn’t that be the icing on the cake—breaking her neck in her husband’s love nest?

  Ex-husband, she reminded herself.

  She sailed past the mailroom and into a waiting elevator, which carried her straight to the twelfth floor. She found Bobby’s apartment at the end of the hall—number 12G. She fished the keys from a deep chinchilla pocket and pushed straight past the stubborn lock.

  I should remind him about pockets, she thought, rolling her eyes at Bobby’s carelessness.

  She prepared herself before she opened the door, as if composing a face for the television cameras. “Here we go,” she said, lifting her head high as she walked directly in.

  Emma felt her heart drop down to her knees as she took in the scenery, all hollowed out inside; there was nothing to keep that broken, beating thing in place. She’d expected something from a Crate and Barrel catalog, generic and a little low-down, suitable for a college student, maybe, or a little better than that—a suite in a business hotel perhaps. But her husband’s apartment defied her expectations. Every item looked chosen with care—fabrics rich and tweedy, the tables cut from a forest of burnished wood. She recognized some of the pieces from so long ago that she had only the vaguest memories of them; others she didn’t remember at all.

  And I’ve got a mind like a steel trap, she thought—when it comes to furniture.

  She opened the velvet drapes in the living room and looked down onto a pretty playground across the street. She spent more time gazing out that window, at the splintery see-saws and metallic swings, than she ever had looking out her own windows, onto her spectacular view of Central Park.

  Emma needed to sit down.

  She made her way to a club chair in the corner. It was upholstered in old kilim rug. Too much, she thought at first—all that color and pattern colliding—but she knew it was only wishful thinking. The fabric had softened beautifully with age, and it was perfect for the chair, she hated to admit.

  She picked up a section of the newspaper from a stack on the floor beside her. February 9, she read: just the day before.

  Bobby had told her he was going to the office.

  I need an Advil, she thought—maybe two.

  Emma rustled for a bottle of pills in her handbag. She choked a couple down, dry—even though the kitchen and its sink were just ten paces away. She tasted the sugary coating on her tongue, and fingered a loose button on the chair’s armrest.

  She wondered where the kilim chair had come from.

  Back when he was happy, she supposed.

  Emma stood up again and wandered all around the place—strolling through the kitchen and peeking into the tidy bath. She walked into the small bedroom just beyond it.

  This is worse than I thought, she decided.

  There was an old oak suite from somewhere in their pasts—a tartan spread and matching drapes. She was sure she recognized it.

  “From his mother’s house!” she gasped.

  This was no hot-sheets hideaway. Emma got the picture then: this was where Bobby really lived.

  She wanted to be furious; she expected at least that much of herself, but for the life of her, Emma couldn’t rip a single picture down or slash even one upholstered cushion. A sharp knife would be no use to her here.

  I can’t compete with this, she thought.

  She sat down on the corduroy sofa in the living room. It was camel colored, with crisp little arms and thin walnut legs. “And would you look at that picture?” she murmured, shaking her head at a breathtaking landscape on the opposite wall. She remembered Bobby’s admiring it—at a Sotheby’s auction, she thought, a million years before.

  “Absolutely not,” she’d said at the time. She’d never have a nineteenth-century landscape. Emma liked her art fashionable and contemporary.

  Now, all these years later, she admired it, and its hand-wrought frame too.

  Solid mahogany, she suspected.

  Emma was forced to unlearn, in a stroke, what she’d spent half her life believing to be the case. He does care, she thought—having convinced herself, long before, that all her home improvements sailed right over his head. Bobby cared plenty—just not about the home he shared with her.

  Emma wasn’t sure what to do next.

  All those vain promises he’d made when he came back to her weren’t worth a damn, she saw. She wouldn’t let herself wallow in hurt feelings though. Emma might feel frail at heart, but she’d be cast iron for the world to see.

  She stood up again, and settled on the familiar: she rearranged the furniture. She dragged the kilim chair from out of its corner—pulling it forward, toward the center of the room. Then she inched the sofa away from the wall—letting it breathe a little. She moved the velvet ottoman to the other side of the room.

  Much better, she thought, admiring her handiwork.

  She’d opened up the room.

  It was time for Emma to leave.

  She stepped into the hallway and nearly bumped into a girl who was rushing in the opposite direction. Looks like a prostitute, she sneered, fixing on her short, short coat and her tall black boots that shone a little cheaply. So much for the neighborhood, she sniffed—but she knew the girl was just young.

  “Emma Sutton,” the girl called out, as if it were the beginning of a playground rhyme.

  Emma nodded heavily and kept on walking.

  A few minutes later, she pushed through the revolving doors again, walking out to the street. She found her car waiting at the curb, right where she’d left it. She saw her weekday assistant—Allison—waiting in the backseat, her driver scrambling from the car once he’d seen her on the sidewalk.

  “Too late, Danny,” she said, in a punishing mood.

  Emma opened the door for herself. She stepped into the car and took her seat, waited for the driver to close the door behind her.

  “Everything all right?” her assistant asked. She sounded a little nervous.

  “Perfectly,” Emma said, settling into her seat again, as if she weren’t terribly hurt. She shrugged the fur from around her shoulders and sank back into the upholstery leather. “Why wouldn’t it be?” she asked, looking back at the girl through gimlet eyes.

  Allison looked down fast.

  Emma was sure she must be wondering what the hell her boss had been doing in some mediocre apartment building on the Upper West Side—for twenty minutes, no less—but she wouldn’t confide a thing in the girl. She’d already lea
rned her lesson on that front. She’d already sat by, stunned, as nearly every last one of the boys and girls who’d ever worked for her sang their hearts out to the New York Post, back in the thick of her legal woes. People would say just about anything, she’d learned, for the prospect of seeing their names on Page Six.

  She wasn’t going to give the girl the ammunition.

  “Any calls?” she asked.

  Allison ran down a list of three or four, but Emma didn’t care about any of them really. “And a Mr. Tanaguchi called at noon.”

  “Who’s that?” she said.

  “He’s from the UN?” Allison told her. She made it sound like a question; the girl made everything sound like a question. It annoyed Emma terribly. “Something about a Nakashima table?” she added.

  Of course, Emma thought—the little man from the auction house, her losing bidder. “What did he want?” she asked.

  “He said you knew where he could find a Nakashima table.”

  “I do,” she replied, a little defensively.

  She was on the verge of telling the girl to throw the message away.

  Why bother? she wondered. But something in her balked at the impulse: Don’t, she told herself, in no uncertain terms.

  Don’t what? Emma wondered.

  She sat quietly in the back of her limousine, an index finger pressed softly against her lips and a wave of guilt flooding over her. She drew a perfectly straight line between her terrible behavior at the auction house and the betrayal she’d discovered upstairs, as if her thievery of the Nakashima table had prompted Bobby’s abandonment of their life together. It felt as causal to her then as if the tiny Japanese man—or George Nakashima himself—had placed those secret keys into the palm of her husband’s hand.

  Emma needed to undo it at once.

  She’d make it up to Mr. What’s-his-name.

  “Call him back,” Emma said. Then she changed her mind. “No,” she continued. “Call Christina at Modern Edge first, and tell her that I’m coming by at five. Tell her I want a Nakashima table.”

  The girl was scribbling as fast as she could.

  “If she’s got anything for us to look at,” Emma told the girl, “call Mr.—”

  “Tanaguchi,” Allison said.

  “Yes,” she said, all determination. “Call Mr. Tanaguchi and have him meet us there.”

  “At five?” she asked.

  “Well, of course, at five,” Emma said.

  The car phone rang before the girl had finished transcribing her instructions. Emma had no doubt she’d botch the job. Allison answered the car phone, and turned to Emma.

  “It’s Benjamin,” she said, her hand covering the mouthpiece.

  “I’ll take it,” she replied, plucking the receiver from the girl’s quivering grasp.

  “Hello,” she said, the way some ladies do—a tad softer and a half note higher than her normal speaking voice.

  She was impressed with him for calling.

  “I want to apologize for last night,” he told her, without any warm-up or pleasantries at all. He sounded sincere.

  “Whatever for?” she asked. She’d just expected him to thank her.

  “Well,” he said, “I think I rubbed Cassy the wrong way. I think that’s why she snapped at us.”

  Emma didn’t remember her snapping at him.

  “That wasn’t your fault,” she said.

  “Well, I think it was,” he replied, contradicting her.

  It was sweet, she thought—his trying to take Cassy off the hook.

  “So I’m sorry,” he said, repeating himself.

  “She was just blowing off steam,” Emma told him. That’s all it was—a little sparring between girls. But she knew Benjamin wouldn’t understand that. He never seemed to have any steam to blow off at all.

  “By the way,” she said, “I’ve got your cell phone.”

  “Did I leave it?” he asked.

  “Well, I didn’t steal it,” she told him. Emma hated stupid questions. “We’ll get it to you later,” she said, handing the phone back to Allison, who looked at it as if she weren’t quite sure what to do with it.

  “Well, hang it up,” she said—which the girl proceeded to do.

  Emma sat back again, cradled in a sea of dark upholstery leather. She looked out the window to see how far they’d gotten—not very.

  She was pleased that Benjamin had made the effort—not that he could do much to improve her black mood. She could have dealt with a mistress in three easy steps, but a secret life—a whole world apart—was something else altogether.

  Emma felt beside herself.

  Plus, her trip to the Upper West Side had made her late. She was supposed to be in the studio already, shooting her self-styled version of the perfect home office.

  Emma was tired. And the day had lost its promise.

  Getting into Bobby’s apartment was the only item on her agenda that she cared about. And look how that went, she thought, a grim little smile baked onto her lips.

  “ARE THE SANTIAGOS HERE?” A VOICE CALLED—A woman’s voice. She sounded strict to Gracie.

  Her mother stood up right away, but the little girl kept her head down low.

  It was nearly ten thirty. They’d been waiting at the Free Clinic for a long time that morning.

  “Let’s go, sweetie,” her mother said, reaching her hand down to her.

  Gracie had watched her grow impatient long before: crossing her legs, then uncrossing them fast, flipping quickly through the big stack of magazines. Now that they’d been called at last, her mother was ready to get going.

  Gracie hadn’t minded the wait at all.

  There was a big chest in the corner, filled up with toys. She’d studied them leisurely before making her careful choice, carrying Mr. Potato Head back to where they sat.

  She liked the way people kept to themselves here.

  Much nicer than at school, she thought, where people always seemed to be butting in. She could have gone on waiting, in fact, and she wasn’t thinking of school then, or not only of school anyway—of waiting long enough to miss an entire day, or maybe gym class and recess, at least.

  She wasn’t trying to avoid a shot either.

  No, Gracie would simply have liked to go on waiting. She liked being left alone.

  “Sweetie,” her mother said, a little louder that second time, wriggling her fingers down at her, like squirmy bait at the end of a fishing pole. She was trying to hurry her along.

  Gracie looked up at the woman who had called their name. She was standing in the doorway that led back to the treatment rooms, a serious face to match her hard voice, and a clipboard held tightly in her hands.

  She’s old, Gracie thought, looking the woman up and down.

  She was dressed all in white—like a lady snowman—with curly white hair and a loose white smock, a pair of pants that looked like pajama bottoms. I’ll bet her shoes are white too, Gracie thought—resigning herself to her unhappy fate. She knew it didn’t matter that the woman’s shoes were blocked from view just then; she’d have her chance to see them soon enough.

  “We’re over here,” her mother called, standing tall, all ready to go. Then she raised her hand like a teacher’s pet, so quick to volunteer.

  Gracie began gathering her things from the floor as slowly as she thought she could get away with, collecting the plastic potato head and all its colorful features. She placed them neatly in the cardboard box.

  “I’m ready,” she said finally, rising to her feet.

  Gracie kept studying the woman with the clipboard in her hands. The more she looked, the less she worried. This might not be so bad, she decided, her nervousness melting like a strawful of Pixie Dust on her outstretched tongue.

  “Let’s go, sweetie,” her mother said, sounding tense. She began walking toward the door, pulling Gracie behind her.

  The woman in white was fat.

  Sometimes that’s all it took, Gracie found.

  She was confident in her jud
gment too. Gracie was a real expert at reading people. She’d had to be—with grown-ups especially. Their looks told her a hundred times more than their words ever did. Gracie kept a book of them at home, in fact—a book of looks: a black-and-white notebook with white spills running down the front, and a circle at the center with two lines printed through. Gracie had written her name in between them, painstakingly careful not to let a single letter touch. Inside, there was a pair of long columns—page after page of two long columns: one of X’s, another of O’s. They’d begun as a log of every compliment and criticism the girl received—an X for every admirer of her pink-and-white sneakers, or the cartoon book bag she carried down the hall; an O for every mean boy who called her “fatty” on the playground.

  The O’s outweighed the X’s by a large margin.

  But that didn’t dissuade her from her work.

  Gracie was scrupulous at keeping track, and her record-keeping had grown subtler over time. She still logged all the overt comments, of course, but she’d begun tackling trickier exchanges too; her notebook had become a catalog of nearly inscrutable looks: an X, she decided, for the man on the subway, who’d pointed his finger at her and whispered to the lady beside him—all bad signs, she knew, but overridden somehow by his kindly smile; an O for the nasty woman with them in the waiting room, huffing and puffing like the Big Bad Wolf. Gracie wasn’t sure those heaving breaths were meant for her, but she was sure enough.

  The woman in white hadn’t given herself away.

  Not yet anyway, Gracie thought, studying that chubby, neutral face—neither an X nor an O at the moment.

  The woman led them back to a room with a black leather bed at the center. She asked Gracie to take off her clothes—her sweater and her T-shirt, her beige corduroy pants. “You can leave your panties on,” the woman said, just to be clear.

  She opened the girl’s file and began to read it.

  Gracie hated the sight of naked flesh—her own especially.

  She looked down at her feet as she began to undress, and she hoped her mother and the woman in white were doing the same. She folded each article of clothing the moment she removed it, then she laid it neatly on the chair before she took the next piece off.