In a burst, a figure suddenly appeared filling the entire window frame, surprising the hell out of me. She leaned all the way out the open window, arms dangling down, and it took me a moment, until she lifted her head, to realize that it was Y.G. I looked to see if I could see Arthur Weeman reflected in the Sub-Zero refrigerator, but there wasn’t a trace of him.
Y.G., in her Gardener jacket, held a video camera out the window and pointed it at her friends in the schoolyard. She pushed her elbows into the brick windowsill to steady the camera. I held my breath. I couldn’t believe she was there, in his apartment, in the middle of a school day after what had happened in the playground.
Her face was long and narrow, but pretty, with an angular jaw. She left the camera, precariously, stupidly on the windowsill, and then disappeared out of my view.
Behind me, Mrs. Williams finished her conversation, assuring the administrator that she would send her husband back there in a car service, and hung up.
“I’m going to stay here today and make sure you’re okay with Howard,” I said, not taking my eyes off of Arthur’s window. Y.G. came back to the window holding a goblet filled with dark liquid. She was definitely pretty, I decided, but she wasn’t the prettiest one in the playground.
“No, dear, I think it would be better if you went.”
I turned to look at her, trying not to show the panic I was feeling. Arthur had Y.G. in his apartment. But where was he? She didn’t seem to be talking to him, in fact she seemed to be entirely alone. I had to stay. I couldn’t be turned away now. “I think it would be better if I stayed,” I said. “I can call the car service.”
“No. I want to be alone with Howard. I know how to call the car. You just dial all sevens.”
“I think I should stay,” I said, defiantly. “He could get violent.”
“This isn’t your house, dear,” Mrs. Williams said.
“I know,” I said, my voice quaking I was so angry. “But I can just stay here in the kitchen and make sure everything’s okay.”
“This isn’t a rental property, dear. You’re not invited to stay right now.”
“Fine!” I said, infuriated. “If you don’t want me here, I’ll go!”
I tried desperately to think of a way to stay at the window.
“May I at least please use your telephone to make one important local call?” I said, with sarcastic formality.
“Of course, dear, as long as it’s quick.” Why don’t you looneytoon out of here? I thought.
I grabbed the phone, and stretching the long cord as close to the window as I could, and never once taking my eyes off Y.G., I dialed Mr. Moviefone.
If you know the name of the movie you want to see, press 1.
I couldn’t press 1 because Mrs. Williams had a rotary, but it didn’t matter because the only movie I wanted to see was the one in Arthur Weeman’s window. I wanted to see it more than anything.
I went to Serendipity and sat there for an hour and a half wedged in with a hundred children, fuming at Mrs. Williams, and Arthur Weeman, and my father, and myself. All I did was help other people all day long. I had given myself away like a box of UNICEF pennies. I helped my father, and wrote inspiring letters to Arthur Weeman, and nursed that ungrateful old cunt Mrs. Williams. I was like Paul Revere riding in the night to save a nation, but I wasn’t exactly making history. I was making appointments for my father, and salami sandwiches for Mrs. Williams, and wasting all this time. Sitting in the old-fashioned café chair, I prayed for some Freaky Friday magic to take me back down my time line to age thirteen so I could be sitting on the cement bench in the Gardener School playground again and Arthur Weeman could invite me upstairs to sip dark liquid from a goblet, give me his video camera, and turn me into somebody as great as himself.
That night I had a morose date with Isaac. He looked terrible, unshaved, with a strange bleached spot on his jeans right at his crotch. He was wearing his beloved Quille baseball cap and I almost wondered if Ivy Vohl had been right about him that day in La Petite Lolita, if maybe he was too intense in a strange way. He was upset about his career. He needed some sort of nasty scoop on some sort of celebrity, the sort of picture that could earn him a hundred thousand from The National Enquirer.
I really didn’t know what to say to him. Helping Isaac get into The Enquirer didn’t exactly make me feel like Eleanor Roosevelt helping her husband lead a country out of the Depression.
As we walked home from the restaurant, just as we got to the northwest corner of Washington Square Park, a gust of wind blew his Quille cap right off his head and into the sky. It wasn’t even a windy night, there was just that one menacing gust. It happened in an instant. The cap was gone.
“My hat!” Isaac shrieked. He looked around wildly and then started running down the street. At the corner, he looked around wildly again and then ran back to me. “We have to find it,” he said.
“You can get another one.”
“They don’t make that one anymore. Goddamnit.”
“I’m sure we’ll find it,” I said.
For the next three hours, we searched the park for Isaac’s hat. I opened every gate leading to every town house and searched the bushes and stairs. Isaac stopped and looked up at every tree. We looked behind benches, surveyed the playgrounds, eyed the drug dealers. Finally we just stood in the middle of the putrid deserted dog run. The acrid smell was overwhelming. Behind Isaac was a sign that said DOGS LEFT HERE ALONE WILL BE BROUGHT TO THE ASPCA.
I was really starting to consider leaving Isaac there.
“I just wanted this night to be nice,” Isaac said.
“Well, it isn’t.” I felt my high heels sink further into the pisssoaked gravel.
The terrible smell reminded me of something, but I couldn’t think of what it was for a moment. It was something beautiful and exciting like the circus, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. Then I realized it was when I had first talked to Isaac, standing next to piles of manure from the horses across from the Pierre.
“What can I do to make it better?” he asked. Something caught his eye behind me, and he rubbernecked around as if he was looking at a half-naked woman, but it was just a black plastic bag he had mistaken for his hat. That was the thing about losing something—you never really stopped looking for it. “Sorry. Please tell me what I can do to save this night?”
A crazy thought came into my head. You can ask me to marry you, I thought. I didn’t know why I thought it, it was probably just force of habit because I was tired of all these men never bothering to propose. I barely knew Isaac and I certainly wasn’t too impressed with him at this moment. I was thirty-three years old. I’d done nothing with my life, except spend what felt like half of it looking for this man’s hat. By thirty-three, Arthur Weeman’d had three wives. By thirty-three, Paul Revere’d had four wives. I’d been pregnant but had no children. I’d lactated but never nursed a baby. My father had two daughters, but I didn’t know my sister. It seemed like it was time to get on with it.
“I was wondering if you wanted to marry me,” Isaac said. “I was planning something romantic, but then my hat blew away and everything got ruined.”
In Little House, the book not the movie, Those Happy Golden Years to be precise, when Almanzo proposed to Laura, he took her for a ride in a horse-drawn carriage. He said something like, “I was wondering if you would like to have an engagement ring?” and she said, “Well, that would depend on the man giving it to me.” Then he said something like, “What if the man was me?” and she said, “Then it would depend on the ring.” I read it just once, never going back to read it again in case it would somehow be spoiled, and I don’t know if that’s exactly what happened word for word, but that’s how I remembered it. Reading that was the single most thrilling moment of my entire childhood. No, I would go further than that. Reading that was the single most thrilling moment of my entire life. Until this one.
“Then it would depend on the ring,” I said.
“I thought you made
it pretty clear that you wanted to choose the ring yourself.” I had actually made that clear by cleverly telling a story of my friend who wanted a certain ring and was proposed to with something else, and never liked it, and ended up calling off the wedding. “But I will get down on one knee.”
I tried to stop him from kneeling in all that dog piss, but he insisted.
“I love you,” he said. “I tried to get you that flower you like but leave it to you to like a flower that doesn’t exist.”
“What flower?”
“Wisterious.”
“Wisteria?” I said. I remembered he’d asked me what my favorite flower was but I hadn’t known why. I remembered Almanzo had taken Laura in a horse-drawn carriage to pick wild grapes.
“I’ve put aside twelve thousand dollars for the ring. Eight to twelve. I don’t want you to spend less than eight or more than twelve.”
“I don’t want to spend less than twelve,” I said. I liked being proposed to with a budget like that.
“So whadaya say?”
“I always want to live in New York,” I warned. “And I want a dog.” I wanted children too, but I didn’t want to scare him.
“We’ll write it into the ketubah.”
The word ketubah reminded me of Ivy Vohl. “One more thing. I don’t want to hear the name Ivy Vohl ever again.”
“I can’t promise that. That’s crazy. For one thing, we have to invite her to the wedding.”
I pictured Ivy in a tux standing next to Isaac at the altar. “She doesn’t even like you, Isaac. She thinks you’re strange.”
He cocked his head up at me. “She’s coming to the wedding.”
“We’ll see.”
“You still haven’t said yes.”
“Yes,” I said. “Wait! I want to go to Venice on our honeymoon. ”
“You already said yes, all negotiating is over.”
He rose and we stood in the dog run and kissed.
We left the park and kissed again on the corner of Fifth. A bus passed us, and when I looked up I noticed ONE IF BY LAND TOURS on its side, written in giant red, white, and blue.
The next morning after Isaac and I watched one of the most suspenseful episodes ever, in which Pa lets Laura adopt a pet raccoon she names Jasper and gets bitten by another raccoon that might have had rabies, but thank God didn’t, I went to my father’s office.
He was sitting at his desk looking at a chart.
“Dad, something happened last night.”
“Oh?”
I sat in the patient chair. “I got engaged.”
“Are you pregnant?”
“No,” I said, feeling the whole thing dampened. My news was never big enough. Being pregnant would be much better than merely being engaged.
“I didn’t even know you were seeing anyone.”
I didn’t know you had another daughter, I thought. “I wasn’t and then I was. It happened quickly.”
“What’s your man’s name?”
“Isaac Myman,” I said.
“Well, your man is my man,” my father said. He smiled at his own joke. “I think it’s wonderful, Toots. As you know, I am a great believer in marriage.” I laughed because I thought he was being sarcastic. “I’m serious, I think marriage is the greatest thing in the world. Having someone you can really talk to, to really talk to, is the closest thing there is to a heaven.”
“You hated being married,” I said, shocked.
“No, I didn’t. Your mother was impossible but I would have loved being married to the right person.” He was being serious. He was talking about Irmabelle. “You’ve really made my day,” my father said.
“Thank you,” I said, totally confused by the way this was going. I had expected him to curse and scream and say I wasn’t ready. That five months wasn’t long enough to date. That I hardly knew this person. That I was a fool. I had expected to call him a coward for keeping my sister from me, defy Sascha’s wishes, and finally confront him with it.
“So my daughter’s getting married,” he said. One of them, I thought.
“Let me know if you want a wedding. I’ll give you money for it. I’m very proud of you.”
I almost fell out of my chair. I was so surprised, I felt my old love for him. Money! I got a little overexcited until I reminded myself that there was money and then there was my father’s idea of money, but still I felt supported by him.
Then I felt a little angry that the only thing I ever did to earn his approval was agree to marry some guy, any guy off the street really, who he hadn’t even met yet. He didn’t care who Isaac Myman was as long as he was willing to marry me. His approval was giving me cold feet.
“Well,” I said, “you might not like him. He’s a paparazzo.”
“A what?” my father asked.
“He photographs celebrities.”
“Ahh, I don’t care for all that,” my father said.
“He was there that night at the Ziegfeld. At the Arthur Weeman movie.”
“Oh right, I remember,” he said.
“And he’s very strange.” I sounded like Ivy Vohl.
“So are you,” my father said, smiling.
I smiled too. It was the single nicest thing he had ever said to me. He meant it lovingly and it was true. Isaac and I were right for each other. My love and sureness about Isaac returned full blast. I was like Marilyn Monroe with wind blowing my skirt up, in love and vulnerable.
“How’s your head?” my father asked.
“What do you mean?”
“Your head. Any headaches?”
“No,” I said, astonished. I had a strange giddiness from the neck up, a lightness, and it took me a second to realize that’s what it was not to have a headache. And now that I thought about it, I hadn’t had one in months.
I closed my eyes and tried to remember what they had felt like, the galloping horse, the sides of my skull tightening like a drum, my neck and shoulders turned to stone, the drilling at the very top of my brain, the three tender points on my face like the eyes of a coconut. Without my headaches I was a different person. A part of me was gone.
Once I had answered a personal ad that said Migraineur Seeks Same. It sounded so romantic, like a French film, two migraineurs in bed, in a darkened room, moaning with pain. The man called and we made a date, but he canceled at the last minute because he had a headache.
But those days of headaches and personal ads were gone.
“You see what going to a real doctor can do for you, Toots,” my father said. “You took the medicine I prescribed and your symptoms subsided.”
“We don’t know that,” I said. “It coulda been a lot of things that cured me.” Like knowing the truth about Sascha. Like love. Like Isaac.
That night I lay in bed with my fiancé.
The phone rang and I answered it. “Hello?”
“Hi, Rebekah.” It was Derek Hassler. “It’s Derek.”
I paused. “Derek?” I said. “Derek who?”
“Derek Hassler.”
“Oh, hi,” I said.
“I was just sitting here sort of thinking about you.”
I sank back into my pillows, ready to enjoy the moment. He had called. They always called. You might have to wait a while, but in the end the call always came. Even if they got married right after breaking up with you and had a daughter named Catherine, you could rest assured the call would come. Even if, right after they broke up with you, they became an Orthodox Jew and moved in with a rabbi in Brooklyn, the call would come. Even if they moved to Oregon and you heard they were dating some trashy nurse and were paying for her adopted daughter’s karate classes, the call would eventually come. It was one of those moments of pure pleasure that made being single great.
“I’m sorry, what did you say?” I asked.
“I said I was just sitting here thinking about you.”
“Oh that’s nice. I’ve thought about you too, Derek. But I thought you didn’t want to feel like you had to call me.” I let out the carefr
ee laugh of a beautiful single girl.
“Well, I didn’t have to call you now, but I wanted to.”
“How come?”
“I have two tickets to the Daytime Emmy Awards, and I . . .”
“Oh, I love the Daytime Emmys!” I said, interrupting him.
“Well, I was just remembering what a good time we had when we went to the MTV Awards. You know, our first date.”
“Oh, right, that was our first date,” I said, as if searching my memory.
“Who’s that?” Isaac asked.
“No one,” I said.
“Who’s that?” Derek asked.
“Actually, Derek, I’m already going to the Daytime Emmys with my fiancé. He’s photographing the event.”
“Oh,” Derek said, sounding shocked.
“Yes, Derek, I’m to be married,” I said.
He didn’t say anything.
“Yes, we’re very excited about it,” I continued.
“All right, well, I guess that’s that then. Bye,” he said.
“Bye,” I said. And my moment was over.
20.
At 33, she relies on her editor as Steinbeck relied on his during the writing of East of Eden
The next morning, after the schoolchildren helped make a bell for the church, I went to look for my ring. I went straight to Once Upon A Time, the antique jewelry store on Eleventh Street, where I had always known my ring would be waiting for me. I picked out three, like Goldilocks, and chose the right one as soon as it slid onto my finger. Using mental time-lapse photography I watched my hand grow old and knotted and decided the ring would always suit me.
I called Isaac and told him he could come any time and pick it up.
“Wow, that was fast,” he said.
It was thirteen thousand and he’d told me to spend no more than twelve, so I was comfortably within my budget.
Making that call, I had never felt so loved in my entire life.
I left Once Upon A Time and walked to SoHo to buy shoes to go with my ring. I stopped into Kelley & Ping and ordered wide sweet and spicy noodles which I ate with enormous chopsticks under the sloping skylight in the back. I’m engaged, I thought. I’m engaged. Then I started thinking about Thalia. I’d gone off and gotten engaged while she was naively writing letters to Arthur Weeman who was possibly screwing a twelve-year-old. How she would burn if she knew what her awful writer had done behind her back! But then another thought occurred to me. What if his actions with Y.G. were in some way an extension of his feelings for Thalia? What if Thalia had in some way shown him what could be possible, sent Arthur Weeman over the edge, or over the ledge, or over the schoolyard wall? Or had he done this a thousand times before? I wondered.
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