Thirty-three Swoons

by Martha Cooley

  Her low laughter broke my reverie. We were a few yards away from The Fourth Wall. Two men stood in front of my shop. They were facing away from us, but when Danny whistled softly, they both turned around.

  “Hey,” Sam called. Smiling, Stuart gave one of his signature waves, a circular movement performed with the flat of his hand.

  “What . . . ?” I exclaimed.

  Stuart slung an arm across Sam’s shoulders. “We always meet like this,” he deadpanned. “Coincidence. It never fails us.”

  “Plus there are such things as telephones,” said Sam, pointing at Danny.

  I turned to her. “You called them both? From the park?” I asked.

  “No, dumb-dumb,” Stuart answered for her. “She called me, and I called him. Phone tag! I got here first, of course.”

  Danny stepped forward and kissed them each on the cheek. “Thanks for coming,” she said quietly.

  “Thank him especially,” said Sam, indicating Stuart.

  Stuart swept the sidewalk with one foot like an embarrassed boy, then grinned boastfully. “No, wait, it’s true! Me especially!”

  “Okay,” I said, “what are you talking about?”

  “I thought it wise to bring the three of you together,” he answered. “So when you told me you were going out to Brooklyn to see Danny, I asked her to finagle it so you’d end up here.”

  “It wasn’t hard,” said Danny. “Cam invited me.”

  “Even better! I told Danny to call before the two of you headed back to Manhattan,” Stuart continued, addressing me, “so I could give him”—he indicated Sam—“a heads-up. Timing’s perfect!”

  “So what’s the deal?” I asked.

  Stuart drew himself up, inhaled loudly, and spread his hands like an emcee welcoming an audience. “This gathering, Camilla! I had to figure things out first—wrap my head around what was happening. I chewed on the whole question while Carl and I were in Belgium. He got fed up with me, claimed I was ruminating too much.”

  “What whole question, Stuart?”

  “The question of you.” He pointed two finger-guns at Danny and me, forefingers aimed, thumbs cocked. “It began with that hunting expedition of yours, upstate. I wasn’t keen on it, remember? It seemed like a big red herring. For my money, the real action was right here in New York. And so it was—what with Danny in her cave in Brooklyn and Cam pulled into herself like a turtle.”

  Hunching with knees and ankles close together, he lowered his chin to his chest and covered his head with his hands in a parody of self-protection. “This, I said to myself, is a no-good situation these girls have gotten themselves into.” He unfolded, once again upright. “I wasn’t sure what to do about it, though. Nor could I tell what role Sam here was playing—though I admit that at the time, I wasn’t giving him much in the way of credit.”

  Hands laced together, he extended both arms straight upward and executed a brisk 360-degree twirl on one foot, then quickly reversed direction and spun on the other foot. “Bet you can’t do that,” he said, coming to a stop and snapping his fingers in front of Sam’s nose.

  “Got that right,” replied Sam equably.

  “Just making sure you’re present and accounted for, buddy.”

  “The screen may appear blank,” said Sam, “but I’m plugged in.”

  Stuart saluted him. “Your ex and I have become better acquainted recently,” he said to me. “I’ve been misreading him. No surprise there! I frequently misread men. It’s women I’m so clever about. A shame, that! But I digress. You’ve been terribly distracted all summer long, Cam. I’m used to your paying a fair bit of attention to me, which just wasn’t happening. And I knew it had to do with Danny, and all those dreams you were having.”

  “Dreams?” Danny broke in. “She didn’t mention any dreams to me. What were they about?”

  “I’m not going to divulge the details,” Stuart answered. “As Cam’s unofficial dramaturge, I’m bound by rules of confidentiality.” He mimed a zipping motion across his mouth. “Suffice it to say that a wide range of characters showed up in her dreams. Some of them did repeat performances—most notably a Russian theater director, a guy named Meyerhold. On whom our dreamer here has become rather, uh, fixated.”

  Danny turned to me. “You dreamed about that Russian who did the sketches?”

  “What sketches?” asked Sam.

  “Order!” Stuart clapped his hands loudly. He gave me a stern look. “You’ve been holding out on me, Miss Camilla.”

  “I planned to update you,” I offered.

  One of his eyebrows arched skeptically. “We’ll deal with that later. As I was saying: I spent much of this summer feeling like I’d been elbowed aside. There you were, night after night, watching this drama—acting in it, too . . . And even though you told me about your dreams, I knew you weren’t being open about your feelings. I had to think up something to lure you forth! Hence our little session in there.” With a hitchhiker’s thumb, he indicated my shop.

  “What kind of session?” Danny asked, not realizing he was alluding to the makeover I’d told her about.

  “Hypnosis, maybe,” said Sam. “Stuart seems capable of that.”

  “Why, how complimentary, Sam! No, it was a makeup session, actually. You mustn’t ask me about it,” Stuart added peremptorily. “It’s entre nous.” He tipped his head toward me.

  “Would you do me a favor and cut to the chase, Stu?” I said.

  His hands went outward and downward in exasperation. “The point being, I finally managed to rattle you! So when Danny called, you were ready to deal.”

  “Aren’t you forgetting something?” said Sam. “The photo?”

  “Hold your horses, I’m getting to that.”

  “Before you do,” I said, “do you think we might have this encounter somewhere other than on the street? Like in my apartment? Or even better, on the roof, so I get to see at least a few minutes of the sunset?”

  WE WERE in time to witness the last swaths of burnt orange fading on the horizon. They were followed by a pink-gray blush that gradually turned milkier, paler, as dusk went to evening.

  We ferried everything we needed—glasses, a bottle of wine, a cutting board with some cheese and crackers—up the metal ladder at the end of the top-floor hallway and through the roof hatch. Luckily we had the roof to ourselves. I found four old director’s chairs, leaning against the building’s central air-conditioning unit. We lined them up in a westward-facing phalanx, then plopped into them like tourists on the deck of a cruise ship. As the sunset’s colors cooled, we drank and nibbled in near silence. When the sky had dimmed to a light gray, Stuart began speaking.

  “The photo,” he said quietly. “That Polaroid snapshot, the one I noticed on your desk. Remember, Cammie?”

  I glanced at Danny to see how she was reacting, but her expression told me nothing. Neither Stuart nor Sam, both on the other side of Danny, was visible to me. I didn’t want to talk without being able to look at their faces.

  “Yes,” I answered. “But first, can we pull these chairs in a circle so I can see everyone?” In a few moments we were reconfigured. “Now, what about it—that picture?”

  “Let’s see . . . Maybe I should start by saying this: during my brief phone chat with Danny this afternoon, I gathered you and she discussed that same photo today. And I took the liberty of passing along that information to Sam. Which means we’re all on the same page, so to speak. With respect to matters of . . . paternity. No need to tiptoe around.”

  “Nicely summarized,” said Sam. He didn’t look at me. “By the way, can I see the photo now? Since I’m the only one here who hasn’t?”

  I turned to Danny. “I gave it back to you,” I said. “In the park.”

  Danny pulled the photo from her bag and handed it to Sam. He stared at it for a moment, turned it over, and nodded. Then he handed it back.

  “Yep?” she asked him.

  “Yep,” he answered quietly.

  “Explain to Camilla,” Da
nny ordered Stuart, “what happened after you figured out it was Sam in the picture.”

  “Wait,” I said. “Stuart, you figured that out?”

  “Danny and I both did. Separately.”

  “But you—how?”

  “I often misread men, but I rarely missee them. I have a highly acute visual memory. Among other things, I’m very good at guessing who’s behind the masks at Halloween parties. It’s a special skill—ask Carl! It’s not just a matter of faces. I notice how people hold themselves, how they stand and move and so forth.”

  “You’re saying you recognized Sam in that picture?”

  “No, I wouldn’t put it that strongly. When I first saw the photo, something rang a bell. I knew I’d seen that man before; his stance was familiar. But I didn’t push it. You have to let these things sit for a while, see if your memory will produce the goods on its own.”

  He refilled our wineglasses. “The other day I was sitting in my living room, waiting for Carl, who’d gone out on an errand. You know that wall of photos we’ve got? I found myself staring at that handsome shot of you, Camilla, which I took around the time you met Sam. I should say I enjoy admiring my own camerawork. God knows what Ansel Adams here would make of it!”

  He rolled his eyes in Sam’s direction; Sam chuckled. “No comment,” he said.

  “Anyway,” Stuart continued, “there I was, entertained by my own photograph, when a memory popped into my head—a memory of Sam. From the very early days of your relationship. Like, close to twenty years ago.”

  Sam, I noticed, wasn’t acting perturbed or surprised. Evidently he’d heard this story already, and so had Danny: Stuart’s words weren’t catching her unawares. She was attentive but unruffled.

  “First,” Stuart went on, still addressing me, “I remembered the two of you entering Backstage Books together. Sam was his usual natty self: nice pants, a good sweater, well-made shoes. You introduced him to Carl—they hadn’t met yet. And Sam looked relaxed, except for one minor clue, which I recalled next: the way he was holding his left hand. He was doing what I call a thumb-flick. The hand hung down, like this, and his fingers were spread apart”—Stuart demonstrated—“and the tip of his forefinger pressed on top of his thumbnail, as if he were about to use the thumb to launch something into the air.

  “Now, to a mime, that particular hand posture always suggests anxiety. Which was natural, I thought, in this case. I mean, it’s always tricky meeting a lover’s friends for the first time . . . Anyway, that’s the memory that returned to me. But why it, and not another? Well, because of that photo I’d seen in your office. The gears clicked, and I got it: the masked man next to Eve in the snapshot had held his hand the same way, and his clothing was very similar—same cut, same style. And the man’s body . . . it all added up. I was certain the guy in the picture was Sam.”

  Sam said nothing. I looked at Stuart. “How did I manage to miss this? How come I didn’t see what you saw?”

  “That’s simple. You and Sam are too close.”

  He was right: I wouldn’t have noticed something so familiar. “So then what did you do, after you’d realized . . . ?”

  “I made the phone call I had to make.”

  “To Danny, you mean.”

  “Uh-uh.” Stuart shook his head. “To Sam.”

  AND SAM hadn’t been the shocked listener Stuart anticipated.

  Just a day or two earlier (Sam recounted, taking over from Stuart), he’d received another call, from Danny. That one had been the shocker.

  Stuart and Sam had agreed to meet, and during their conversation Stuart made it clear he wasn’t accusing Sam of deception. Rather, he was concerned about how I would handle the truth about Danny’s father. Lila needn’t be informed (Danny and Sam had already agreed on this), but I’d have to be—and how would that play out?

  Let Danny tell her, Stuart had advised. It will be easier for Cam to assimilate the news if it comes from her. Easier, and better.

  So it had unfolded.

  AFTER STUART’S narrative ended, none of us spoke for a time. Then, with one long-armed sweep, Stuart retrieved our empty wineglasses (holding them by their stems in a cluster, like a bouquet of flowers) and bowed.

  “Your waiter for the evening,” he intoned, “is now going home. After washing these.” He tinkled the glasses lightly. “Least I can do to express my appreciation for such a nice Beaujolais! Thank you for sharing, Camilla. No need to come downstairs, I have a key to your door, remember? As for our father-daughter pair here”—he bowed again, to Danny and Sam—“I can only say I’m a little envious. I haven’t been so lucky in the daddy department. Mine’s gone missing, and I’ve no intention of finding him. But your story’s got a different ending.”

  “Stuart—” I began, but he cut me off with a flourish.

  “We’ll debrief soon, my sweet.” He opened the roof hatch, swung himself neatly onto the ladder, and began a one-handed descent, glasses aloft. “Meanwhile, enjoy the rest of your evening”—now only his head and the glasses remained visible—“with your family.” The hatch closed softly behind him.

  YOUR FAMILY. Had Stuart ever used those words before, in conjunction with Sam and Danny? Not that I could remember. Your family was myself and two dead people, not me and this pair. Not this trio.

  “So,” said Sam.

  “You two,” said Danny, “need to talk.”

  “Do we?” asked Sam.

  “Don’t be a goof, Sam,” she replied.

  “Well, do we need to talk, Cam?” He looked at me now. “Because I’m not sure you want to.” Pausing, he added quietly, “Correct me if I’m wrong.”

  Before I could answer, Danny stood up. “I’m going over to The Fourth Wall,” she announced. “Cam, may I have your keys? I’ll need both—for the gate and the door.”

  “You planning on doing anything in particular over there?” I asked.

  “Redoing. Your window display’s terrible! You’re showing all small things—they’re not visually catchy. I’ll add some larger items, make the whole thing interesting. It won’t take me long.”

  “Do me a favor,” I said. “If you’re really serious about going over there, don’t work on my window display. Do something instead with that wall of masks I’ve been trying to assemble. But really, are you sure you feel up to it, Danny?”

  “I need to busy myself for a while.” She picked up her backpack. “I’m wired. I feel like using my hands. Don’t worry, I won’t stay late. What wall of masks?”

  I handed her my keys. “Off to the right, near the middle of the shop—where I have that pair of silk screens from The Mikado, remember? You’ll see it. And you know where I store all my tools and supplies. Help yourself to anything you need.”

  “Where’s the main light switch? I can’t remember.”

  “To the left of the door as you enter. Run your hand along the doorframe, you’ll find it. I’ll come over in a little while and—”

  “I’ll be fine. You’ve got spares of these, right?” She jingled my keys and left.

  THE ROOF’S hatch closed behind her with a click, and Sam and I were alone. I couldn’t make out his face clearly. He pulled his director’s chair closer to mine.

  “Bonjour, Camus,” he said.

  That had been his morning salutation when we were married. He’d normally risen well before me so he could make coffee and scan the newspaper. I’d enter the kitchen and he’d hand me a mug of coffee and say, Bonjour, Camus—his standard opener. Nothing standard about it now, though; not nine years post-divorce. It was a gambit.

  “So why’re you doing this with your wife, Sam?” I asked.

  “Doing this with her?” he echoed.

  “Why conceal from Lila the fact that you’re Danny’s father?”

  He exhaled slowly. “I wasn’t figuring we’d talk about Lila,” he said. “I thought we might talk about you.”

  “Oh go on,” I said lightly. “Answer my question.”

  He shrugged, capitulating. “
There’s no reason to tell Lila,” he said. “She understands I’m like a father to Danny. She’s glad about that, in fact. But it’d be different—hard on her—if she knew—”

  “So you’re sparing her. Is that why you didn’t tell me the truth a long time ago? To spare me?”

  His expression was unreadable; there wasn’t enough light. “Which truth would that be?” he asked quietly.

  “About you and Eve. Obviously.”

  “When I first met Eve . . .” Sam hesitated, and I could sense him gazing at me, requesting permission. When I nodded, he continued. “She had intense sexual energy, which I briefly mistook for interest in me. Until it became clear that I barely existed for her.” Again he paused. “Those couple of days . . . it was like being fucked into invisibility. I remember thinking she was so aggressive and so withheld at the same time. Not mechanical; it wasn’t that. But she was off in her own world. Absent.”

  Eve at sixteen, in her bedroom, arranging perfume bottles on a shelf. Arming herself with my father’s arsenal. Readying for all the erotic contests that lay ahead, which she knew she’d win—all but one.

  “During those couple of encounters, I found out next to nothing about her. Except for the fact that she lived upstate and worked as a landscaper, I never learned what sort of life she led. I got the impression she was a total loner.”

  “She didn’t speak of my father?”

  “Not outright. The only person she mentioned was a man, someone with whom she said she’d almost had a sexual affair. A widower. Then—I recall this clearly—she said he’d released her. When I asked her why, she said he’d been certain that if they became lovers, she’d suffer for it. She said they’d stayed friends, yet something about the way she said it made me think she was still tied to him.”

  “Did she name him?”

  “No.”

  “So how do you know it was Jordan?”

  Sam grunted in appreciation of the question. “Each time I was with her, Eve wore a certain perfume. A memorably nice fragrance. After our second encounter, I asked her what it was. That’s when she told me about the widower. He’d given her the perfume, she said. She didn’t identify it by name.”