by Liz Moore
She is uncertain about whether to wake him or simply to leave. First she decides to leave, thinking it would be romantic and unpredictable of her. Then she remembers that she must see Heinrich on Monday in the studio and figures that it might be less awkward if she said her piece now. She closes her eyes and rehearses a speech in her head: Heinrich, this was lovely, it begins. But you’re married. You have sons. And I don’t want this to get in the way of our professional relationship. Yes, that would be the thing to emphasize. The studio, the project. Before she can mentally conclude her speech, Heinrich opens his eyes. He sees Ellen standing in front of him and he sits up in bed. The sheet falls down from his torso and in daylight Ellen is shocked at seeing him shirtless: the hair of his chest, his slight paunch, his broad shoulders. She feels he might be a stranger. She barely remembers working with him in the studio. He isn’t the same person.
“You are not leaving, Ellen?” he asks.
“I have to go away for the weekend,” says Ellen. “To see my parents.” She cringes, imagining how young she must sound. “I have to go home to pack my suitcase and then catch a train.”
“Ah,” says Heinrich, sadly. “Well.”
Ellen picks up her bag from the floor and slings it over her shoulder and wonders if she should walk over to him, give him a kiss, embrace him? Just leave?
He doesn’t give her the option. He stands, and the sheet falls to the floor, and Ellen stops herself from gasping at seeing him completely undressed. She shuts her eyes inadvertently and forces them open again, keeps them on the floor. Heinrich notices but says nothing. He crosses the small room and takes her hands.
“You are bashful,” he says.
“No, I’m not,” says Ellen. She remembers her rehearsed speech and opens her mouth to say Heinrich, this was lovely, and then realizes the absurdity of a sentence like that.
“May I please call your cellular phone?” asks Heinrich.
“Yes,” says Ellen. “I have to go now, really, because my train is leaving soon.”
V.
The train is so crowded that two young men stand in the aisle until Poughkeepsie. They are marines and their crisp dark blues remind Ellen of Heinrich’s sheets—similarly fresh and pressed when she got into them last night. They were sweaty and wrinkled by morning, and she wonders if Heinrich washes them every day. Or maybe, she thinks, he had just planned to have her come home with him. The thought makes her dizzy.
The marines have their hats tucked underneath their arms. They look no more than eighteen. One of them resembles Ellen’s brother. They are touchingly well behaved, scrambling to help an old lady with her luggage when she gets on at Yonkers.
“Oh, nice boys,” she says. “God bless you nice boys.”
Ellen sits at the very front of the car in a backward-facing seat, her knees nearly touching the knees of the man who sits opposite her. Next to him is a woman, perhaps thirty-five, who Ellen thinks must be his wife, and next to Ellen is an older woman. They all know one another, and Ellen hides her face behind her trashy novel so as to give them some privacy, in case they want to talk. But they rarely do, and usually it is to comment on the view. The ride is a particularly scenic one: straight up the Hudson River, which catches the morning light brilliantly and tosses it straight back up in the air.
The three of them fall silent for a long time, and then the younger woman speaks abruptly, startling Ellen.
“Mom, did I tell you?” she asks, sitting forward a bit in her chair. “When Chuck and I—”
“Slow down and speak up,” says the old woman, who has been cranky for most of the trip.
“When Chuck and I get married, Mother, we’ve decided that we’re going to have two weddings: one in California, with Chuck’s family, and one in Niagara.”
“Nonsense,” says the old woman. “You’re not even engaged to each other.”
Ellen, behind her book, feels suddenly conspicuous. She wonders if she should put the book down and feign sleep. But she decides that this might be even more obvious. Instead, she puts her headphones on and listens to Billie Holiday on low volume.
“We are, Mother,” says the younger woman. “See?” She extends her left hand, pointing with her right to a modest ring, smiling at Chuck, who looks increasingly nervous and nods awkwardly. “Aren’t you going to congratulate us?”
Her mother does not respond, but turns and looks out the window again. The daughter frowns and falls into silence. She bears the aspect of someone who has been slowly collapsing into herself for years: her eyes are deeply set and dark; her lips are barely lips at all, but thin lines of pink flesh that she pulls in with her teeth. She is thin. Her arms are crossed beneath a meager bosom. Her neck is tensed so that the cords in it have become ropelike and conspicuous.
Chuck seems frightened and uncertain of his duty. He makes small birdlike movements with his hands, which he has folded in his lap, but he does not speak.
After perhaps a minute of quiet, the younger woman turns from the window and addresses her mother again.
“What was your wedding with Dad like?” she asks finally.
The old woman lowers her brow. “How you go on,” she says. She closes her eyes and leans her head back on the seat abruptly. “I’m sleeping—don’t you see?”
Ellen wakes just before her stop and sees that her seatmates have gotten off. She wonders how they managed to leave without waking her—she is normally a fitful sleeper—and then remembers that she did not sleep much last night. Then thinks of Heinrich and his wife, Lotte.
She begins to gather her things together. A man in a blue uniform comes by and takes the paper from the place above her seat and tells her her stop will be next.
“Thank you,” says Ellen.
The wheels hum against the tracks and the brakes squeal as the train pulls into the station. Through the dim train window, Ellen sees her mother, Maryanne, on the platform. She is pacing, as she always does: weaving in and out of people in the crowd, her eyes scanning the train. I’m here, thinks Ellen. Look here.
They greet each other as warmly as they ever have. In the car, Maryanne asks her about her album, how it’s coming.
“I told Margie that you were working with a famous German producer and she said, ‘Well, I never.’ You know Margie was born in Austria.”
“Yes, I knew that.”
“Your brother is excited to see you.”
In the middle of the car ride home, Ellen’s phone rings, and she scrambles to answer it. Her phone only ever rings when someone from Titan is calling her.
“Hello?” she says.
“It is I, Heinrich,” says the voice on the telephone. And Ellen knows, as abruptly as she answered the call, that she will see this man again outside the studio—she will sleep in his bed many times over the next months. She will count the curls of hair on his chest; she will run fingers over his forehead while he sleeps. In time, she will ask him for the names of his sons, perhaps even the name of his wife. Later, leaving his apartment, she will whisper their names aloud and cry on the way to the subway, imagining Heinrich and Lotte (whose real name is Ulrike) on their wedding day, at the births of their sons. It will be within her control to end her affair with Heinrich, but she will allow it to continue, knowing herself to be immoral and at fault, and thinking worse of Heinrich each day. The affair will last far longer than it should. It will end when Heinrich leaves.
“Heinrich,” she says, “can I call you back?”
“Of course, Ellen,” says Heinrich.
Ellen snaps her phone shut and closes her eyes.
“Heinrich,” says her mother. “Was that your producer?”
Yes, thinks Ellen, but she feels tired and wants to say more. All of her life she has hidden herself from her mother, and she presumes that her mother has done the same. Maryanne, who is driving with both hands on the wheel at ten and two o’clock, turns now to Ellen, awaiting her response. We keep ourselves from each other, thinks Ellen. We all keep ourselves alone.
&
nbsp; What follows is an impulse she is too weary to fight. Unswervingly, Ellen says, “Mom. I’m having an affair. With a married man.”
VI.
At the lake house, the breeze lifts the curtains in the hallway so that they touch Ellen’s cheek as she walks past them to her bedroom, suitcase in hand. It is a touch that brings her back to youth. She remembers her mother choosing the fabric for those curtains and sewing them herself. They are white and soft, with a tiny trim of cherries that dance around their border.
Her bedroom is just as it always is, drenched in sunlight, carpeted with a deep blue shag that dates the house impossibly. Her bedroom is the smallest, but the only one with a view of the lake. Ellen drops her small suitcase on the bed and shifts her gaze outside. She is greeted with a sense of deep relief. Her mother is somewhere else in the house, presumably crying or smoking or doing whatever a mother does when her daughter tells her she is someone’s mistress. Her brother and her father are not home.
Everything is damp here. She knows what the sheets will feel like when she climbs into bed tonight: sticky, as if in need of an extra five minutes in the dryer. The old oak clock in the living room chimes three.
The day is still; the water on the lake looks glassy and golden. Ellen feels that she has lost some innocence since she was there last, and apologizes silently to no one. To herself. I will take a swim later, Ellen says to herself, and then I will go to my mother. But what does one say? The truth: that the affair has not yet started, really, that it was a mistake. A lie: that she will end things with Heinrich. Her mother must have peace of mind. Above all else, her mother’s mind must be at peace.
She places a hand on the glass of her window and presses her forehead against it too, wanting its coolness, wanting its smoothness. Ellen will go for a swim and then she will apologize to her mother, who sits upstairs reeling and sweating from the news that her daughter is somebody’s mistress, remembering a young girl in her office, long ago, who had an affair that ended badly: she got pregnant, she quit her job. She is making plans to tell her daughter the story of this girl, whom Maryanne claimed to pity when she relayed the story tremblingly to her husband but secretly despised for her tight skirts and for a habit she had of singing under her breath around the office. Maryanne, upstairs, mimics her daughter unknowingly: walks to her window, places a hand on the glass, presses her forehead against it, and the house itself creaks a bit from its basement upward through its roof. Outside, in the distance, a tree releases its topmost branch—an old branch, a large and rotting branch—and down and down it falls, crashing through its lower brush, causing Ellen and Maryanne, on different floors of the same house, to straighten simultaneously. An animal in the woods, thinks Ellen. My husband; my son, thinks Maryanne, mistaking the noise for car wheels on their gravel driveway.
How will I fix this? Ellen wonders. She doesn’t know. She turns to unpack her suitcase, there on the bed with the blue and white quilt, but hesitates. She will leave it packed this time, perhaps. She will return to New York sooner than she had planned, perhaps. The lake casts a sudden sharp light against the wall, and she pivots to look at it out the window, wincing midturn at the brightness of the water, telling herself that now she belongs to the city.
14.
LENORE LAMONT IS THE NEXT BIG THING
My body is aching. Don’t want sympathy.
Come on. Come and love me.
Come on. Set me free.
—PATTI SMITH, “Privilege (Set Me Free)”
I.
Lenore Lamont has been crying for days. This is new for her; she rarely cries. She cried once while looking for her prom dress. Once she cried over spilled milk, literally, and then laughed at herself. She cries over the mundane, never over things like this—never over the end of a relationship, never over the death of a loved one. These things do not prompt in Lenore overt displays of emotion, and usually she cannot produce tears even if she tries. Her uncle in Minnesota, with whom she was particularly close, died last fall, and she fell quiet for a while but did not cry.
But Martin is leaving her, and Martin is kind.
“Martin,” she has been telling him as he packs his things, “I’m on a billboard in Times Square. Martin, I’m so messed up.”
But Martin seems not to hear her. These negotiations have been going on for days, and today Martin has finally decided to pack his things and leave. He is smiling slightly. It is his Buddhist smile, Lenore can tell. Martin is filled with universal love for mankind, but not for Lenore. Martin was a junkie until he had a semiprivate audience with His Holiness the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala in 1999. He has not looked at a needle since.
Can he not tell she needs him now? Martin: vaguely Teutonic, long-haired, thin-limbed. Martin: spidery. He is leaving and Lenore is crying. She wants to tell him, “Martin, I love you,” but the words will not come. Strange that they have never said these words to each other—strange that Martin has never said it to her. He says it to everyone: to dogs, to trees, to Lenore’s mother, for Christ’s sake. But never to Lenore.
These comings and goings. They always happen in the fall.
“Are you listening to me, Martin?” asks Lenore, and suddenly she is appalled at the way she sounds like everyone she’s ever left.
“Baby girl, baby girl,” says Martin, turning to her at last, sitting on the bed, placing his gentle Martin-hand on her cheek, “do not be sad. Why are you crying? I have to go because it is time for me to go, but you are going to be just fine, and you are going to keep making your music. You have got to trust me, baby girl.”
Martin, since cleaning up, has lost his ability to use contractions. Lenore thinks that at least she won’t have to deal with that anymore. Also, she hates being called “baby girl.” Still. Martin is gentle and carefree, and if he were an animal he’d be a golden retriever. She loves him; she’s sure of it.
She folds her legs under her, there on the bed, and collapses over them, surreptitiously wiping her nose on her pants as she does so. “Martin!” she wails.
Martin has all of his things together.
“My show,” she says. “My big TV show next week. I need you.”
Martin is backing out the door. He has the nerve to bow a little bit, to press his hands together, the way he imagines Buddhists the world over do.
Lenore realizes this is some kind of last chance and says what she will hate herself later for saying: “Martin, I love you.”
He leaves. Lenore has not ever been left before.
Two days later, Lenore plays Patti Smith on her iPod and goes for a walk. It is not a whimsical walk so much as a practical one: she has a meeting with Jax Powers-Kline and she has to get to it somehow. She has never been to the Titan building, preferring to meet at cafés or restaurants or, while she was recording, in the studio. But Jax called this morning and asked her specifically to come to the Titan building for a meeting, and the tone in her voice made Lenore think it was important. So she said, “Where is it, again?” and now she’s walking outside.
It is crisp outside and autumnal. New York is nice in autumn, and normally Lenore would be excited to wear her new leather jacket, the one she bought with her advance from Titan. It’s sharp. But she is distracted by other things. Not Martin, really, just the things she will have to face alone now that Martin is gone. She has already started to get recognized on the streets. She is unnaturally pretty, and also quite tall, so she is used to people staring, but now she must ask herself an added question: are they looking at me because they’ve seen me someplace?
The billboard in Times Square has been a blessing and a curse. At first, Lenore couldn’t get enough of it. She’d walk by it at any time of the day or night, just to see herself thirty feet high. She’d think of herself as a child, dreaming of billboards and magazine spreads of herself. Lenore has always been ambitious. Soon, though, the billboard began to occupy entirely too much space in her brain. She dreamed about it once, about the thirty-foot version of herself climbing down off the billbo
ard and having conversations with people.
Her record comes out next week. In anticipation of this event, she has been booked to play on the Late Show with Colin McAllister on Wednesday, six days from today. Before Martin left, she had been looking forward to it in the cool way she looks forward to everything. She had been thinking about the way her face would look on camera. She had been thinking about the backing band Titan has hired for her, whether they would upstage her (she doubted it). Most of all, she’d been imagining Martin in the audience, imagining herself sneaking a glance at him and smiling. She had imagined that Martin would be proud of her, glad to be her boyfriend. Maybe afterward he would say, “Lenore, I have to tell you something; I just can’t wait anymore,” and the thing he would have to tell her would be that he loved her. All of this had been running through Lenore’s mind obsessively prior to Martin’s departure. Now that Martin is gone, Lenore doesn’t want to do the show. She wants to get Martin back somehow.
She arrives at Titan with five minutes to spare, and goes up to the top floor. She is so consumed by thoughts of Martin that she is blindsided momentarily by the sight of the desk that faces the elevators, and the young secretary who sits behind it. The first thing she notices is that the secretary isn’t Cynthia. She has not thought of Cynthia in quite some time, but she used to hear her describe her work-place, and she realizes that Cynthia was very precise. She looks for the ficus tree and sees it in the corner, feels it is a friend. She has heard through the grapevine that Cynthia quit this job a while ago, so on the walk over she wasn’t afraid of running into her, but she imagines Cynthia sitting at this desk, briefly gets a visual that shakes her up a little, and then shrugs it off.