Julie printed out e-mails written to her by two close male friends and showed them to me. One had recently moved to New York; the other had retreated from her life after objections from Angus. Both professed feeling adrift in their lives, without the easy intimacy they had with Julie to sustain them through each day. One said that he could not see the interior of an almond without thinking of the colour of her skin.
Julie said, “This happens to me sometimes. People think I’m the person they connect with best.”
Not me, I thought. I felt superior, a kind of calm bitter triumph that no one really knew me.
I SAW JULIE and Angus together only once. One evening I met Julie at their house before we went to a movie. We were in the kitchen. Julie was standing with her back to the greenhouse and I was sitting at the antique oak table, facing it. Angus came up behind her, put his arms around her waist, and swung her around, laughing.
I noticed that his gums showed as he laughed. This made him seem like an altogether different person than I had imagined, more eager and vulnerable.
He heaved her up and swung her around, let his head fall back. His gums looked hard and streaky, not a uniform pink.
I thought I detected that he was careful not to look at me.
Still laughing, walking with a dizzy clumsiness, Julie went down the front hall to get her purse. When she was halfway along the hall, she stopped and did a little jump with a sideways kick.
For a long time after that, I tried to replay what happened next, tried to rescue it from the canals of memory and set it before me like an artifact, so I could determine whether I saw what I thought I saw. I had been drinking tea while Julie put on her makeup, and I had left my cup half-full on the counter. While I was watching Julie, I thought I saw, out of the corner of my eye, Angus pick up my teacup and hold it to his lips in a casual but lingering way, then take a long sip. By the time I turned to him, he had put the cup down and lowered his arms to his sides as if nothing had happened.
WHAT HAPPENED NEXT I am sure of.
I went to Julie’s when no one was home and let myself in. Julie always left the back door, the greenhouse door, unlocked. I took a roll of quarters with me and stopped at a pay phone to call her house every ten minutes on my way to make sure no one was home. It was a cold, windy day, and as I stood in the phone booths, I imagined the wind would blow the glass in on me and I would have to go home to Stephen cut and bleeding, possibly disfigured and knowing I deserved it. I came up with a story about why I was cut in case this happened. My story was logical and I took care not to make it too dramatic. I had spent the past week being vigilant about nearly everything—it was not easy to be as watchful, as detail-conscious, as vigilance required but also to be so broad about it, noticing everything from the chipping paint on the windowsills to the fingerprints on the metal of the toaster to the background voices on Julie’s answering machine.
It was two o’clock, and I knew from the e-mails Julie sent me from work that she didn’t generally leave until four o’clock.
I knocked on the front door, then the back door to affirm again that no one was home. Then I eased the door open and went inside.
I thought, What I’m doing is fine because I know it is not fine. I’m not a bad person if I think I’m a bad person. As I looked again through the cupboards and listened to her answering machine, I repeated to myself that as long as I understood my fundamental badness, everything I did remained in the realm of the acceptable.
I started up the stairs to look through their dresser drawers and their bathroom cabinet, then I doubled back to the kitchen and opened the door to the greenhouse. It was hot again inside, and the heaters were churning loudly. At the far end, Angus’s desk had been cleared of papers. I went over and stared down at it before opening its top. It was an old-fashioned desk, a large version of a child’s school desk. In high school, Julie and I had had desks like these, but they were connected, the seat of each moulded into the desk behind it. Sometimes we rocked aggressively in our chairs, trying to topple the whole row. This was a solid desk, an antique, and the top creaked loudly as I raised it. The inside was a mess. All the papers had been stuffed in and some pieces were half crumpled. It was one of these that I took, smoothed out, and read: “I will always remember the flat underside of your forearms, your sideways smile.” This line was written over and over, at different angles all over the page. I put it back and pulled out another. The writing was cramped and difficult to read.
She looks at me through the distance of waves.
She tells me
asking gets us less
and less will never give to more.
It’s all liquid in memory:
loving her too much
is the swell through me.
The sound that crests quietly on the surface,
but resounds in the lapping wide deep
far below.
I flipped the page over. On the back, the sentence “I would have allowed you anything” was crossed out and he had written above and below it, “Your long thick hair, your path-worn stare.” I stuffed these papers back into the desk and tried to make it look as disorganized as when I started.
I sat on Angus’s chair. This was my moment. The pile of evidence that confirmed the theories I had been amassing. Angus was a man with secrets. Julie did not really know him. He was the kind of man a woman could never really know, a man who holds his privacy as privilege. At this moment, I was certain he had drunk from my teacup. I was certain that he had held the tea on his tongue, turning it over like fine wine, possibly even hoping my saliva was in it. I ignored the real smile on his face when he had spun Julie around, the goofy splendour of it. There was nowhere my mind didn’t go. I planned that we would have dinner parties when we were together. Although I hated cooking, I imagined that we would invite Julie; we would adopt her and feed her nourishing food as a break from the frozen dinners she would be addicted to. She would be gracious about our efforts and she would entertain us with stories of her hapless loves, the men who stuck around but failed to please. There would be a rich dark library in our house, books piled up against walls everywhere, and we would sit in leather armchairs while Julie cheerfully wallowed and we would pity her the fleeting joys she magnified to get herself through each day.
Did I think the poems were written for me? I do not know. Later, I allowed myself to acknowledge that there had been a framed black-and-white photograph of Julie on top of the desk, and that there was a difference in her smile, something lopsided and careless, and beautiful.
Then, though, walking home, I did not think that I wouldn’t talk to Julie again. That I would be besieged by visions of Julie and Angus in bed, images of Angus laughing at me with his arm fixed around Julie’s waist. Julie didn’t call me for days, and I became convinced that they had a hidden camera in the greenhouse recording all my actions and that they watched it at night in their den, whispering to each other words like unbalanced, congratulating themselves for installing surveillance that rescued their marriage from me. I heard the word rescued, its world of protection and companionship, over and over until I crawled under the covers. When the phone did start ringing, I let it ring and ring through the day. I did not know as I walked home that I would feel so virulently that I had no choice other than this course of action. That it would be months before I could even regain enough sense to ask myself who I felt I had lost.
No, that day as I walked home, I felt euphoric. There was even flight in my step. There was an energy in the trees that week, a windiness that was caustic and rowdy. Branches scraped our windows while we slept. A truck tipped over on the highway. Sometimes the wind was loud, gusty, and we could hear it ripping around outside, whistling like a kettle, banging up against buildings. Sometimes it was quiet, rolling evenly over the city. The day before, Stephen had come home with a cut the length of his cheek—when he was walking home, a branch had snapped off a tree and flown into his face.
As teenagers, Julie and I had lo
ved winds like this. On our way home from school, we would toss aside our knapsacks and stand facing the wind, letting our hair whip around until it was tangled up in knots. It was the only ritual of our friendship, the only thing I could look back on years later and know that we had shared in invention. Leaning into the dusty currents, we would trudge uphill, chins upright, like young women coaxing older lovers.
We always reached her house first, and I would leave her there, waving, on the doorstep, then make the rest of my way home alone. I would think of how the school day never seemed to be over, as I gathered up its contents and examined them, mapping each hour’s grievances and victories, contracts broken, the sullen intimacies, and my peculiar, unmendable mistakes.
A MATTER of FIRSTS
Your father’s New York mistress was the one you met. The exotic one. She used to say, “‘Balls,’ said the queen. ‘If I had two, I’d be king.’” That was her expression, whether something irritated her, like losing her keys, or whether there was a pleasant surprise, like one last piece of birthday cake in the refrigerator. Balls, said the queen. Your father tried to correct her usage. The phrase had exasperation in it, he claimed, and was appropriate only as a response to something negative. She said, “Perhaps you’re right,” and smiled, but you could tell she was not the type to capitulate in action.
Of course, it was not open to you that she was your father’s mistress, although you clearly knew, and they knew it. Your father often went to medical conferences in New York, and he couldn’t tolerate hotels, their bedsheets gave him a rash, so he stayed with her—Ella, an old friend from medical school. This is what he told you and your mother, although there was an impish smirk about him when he said so, a conspiratorial wink, as if such patent untruths, and the acceptance of them, were in keeping with the true spirit of family. Three times when you were thirteen he took you with him to New York because your mother had to look after your grandfather, who was in and out of the hospital. Around you, they acted stiff and professional, no sly looks or illicit touches. Of course, the minute you saw her, you knew she was no doctor. It was the body that halted your gaze. Unexpected: its creamy fatness, so graceful, so much itself, that it challenged thinness everywhere. A fatness impossible to reduce with euphemisms. A soothing romantic welcome. This body rolled out of itself. Said, I am the way to be.
She lived in the Bronx on a quiet dead-end street lined with trees in an old brick house with high ceilings and a rickety wooden porch in the back. The air smelled like freshly cut grass and homemade shepherd’s pie. On the other streets in her neighbourhood, the air smelled like fried food and smoke, traces of cumin and paprika drifting by on the breeze. You could hardly see to the sky. Everywhere you looked were apartment buildings with fire escapes zigzagging down the crumbling brick. Groups of teenagers lounged on front stoops, yelling at each other in languages you didn’t understand. Your father wouldn’t even let you walk off Ella’s street alone. Her house was big enough for a family of eight, but she lived there by herself. She had bought it with her first husband, who had left at her request two years later, gladly signing the house over to her because he hated the way it felt empty no matter how much furniture they bought, the way their voices echoed in the large square rooms. He said that people start off with a backyard vegetable garden, not an acreage of farm: a marriage needed a small, fertile space in which to grow.
“There is no such thing as being prepared for marriage,” Ella said to you. “I was prepared. But not that prepared.”
She told you that she had dated that husband for seven months, and then one night during a walk through the park, he got down on one knee and proposed. (This was an essential part of the story, the getting down on one knee. It exposed their romantic folly, the traditional gestures that failed to pan out into traditional emotions.) He had no ring at the time and insisted that a store-bought engagement ring wouldn’t be good enough for her. He would fashion his own with the minimal help of a jeweller. For the next two months, he drew up sketches hour after hour in his tiny apartment. He picked up pencils in restaurants and brainstormed designs on greasy napkins. Six months later, the ring still was not made or even in the works. The sketches had been abandoned and he said to her one day, “You don’t really want an engagement ring, do you? It’s such an extravagant expense.” And she had said no, of course not, she was not an envier of diamonds.
They got married not long after, with plain gold wedding bands, and went on a honeymoon to Key West. It was on that honeymoon that she was reluctantly, forcibly, made aware of what the engagement ring incident just dimly foreshadowed. She and her husband went out to dinner one night to a restaurant that was dusty and poorly lit. It was on a narrow downtown street, a street with no other shops or restaurants, and there were flies on all the tables. Her husband was always on the lookout for the cheapest restaurant, always had an eye out for a deal. They ate the same dinner, the same food, crabs and black-eyed peas, but he was violently sick later and she was fine. They were sitting in the hotel room, and he was shivering, crouching on the bed with a blanket wrapped around his shoulders. Then he took off for the bathroom.
He was there for a long time while she sat on the bed reading Sister Carrie. After a while, she thought maybe she should check on him. What she saw, across the long, narrow bathroom, was her new husband, naked, on all fours, vomiting into the toilet. He had all his clothes in a neat pile at the door, and he was naked and heaving. On all fours. She had the back view. She told you it shook the foundation of her belief in what she was doing, this perspective like an aerial view of his penis hanging down, his scrotum tightening each time he heaved. An aerial view.
In every word he spoke after that, every touch of his hand, she saw the aerial view, and with it, the chipped affection, the shock of revulsion, the bitterness and fatigue—the detritus of a thirty-year marriage—piling at the door of their week-old union. She even made an unsuccessful attempt to book a plane ticket home. She saw the direction they were headed, the headiness, the glorification, the dependence, then the genital views, the aborted optimism. The triumph of the unflattering. Only twenty-two and married for three days, she already knew that one corner of her marriage was over, the corner in which she stored hopes of rescue and release, where she still believed ecstasy could be a daily event. Before she had left, her mother told her, “There are things that scare women on their honeymoons. No matter how long you’ve known him, there are things that will scare you and make you want to come home. You can’t come home.” Ella was prepared. But not that prepared.
This story, combined with her favourite expression, caused you to see her as a woman eminently concerned with balls. In those days, vulgarity and glamour were inextricable in your mind, bound together in all things attractive. There was nothing in these early exchanges about genitalia that troubled you. Already you had separated your relationship with her from her relationship with your father. The story about her honeymoon helped you understand why she liked your father, why being with a man as remote as him was freeing to her when it was only oppressive to you. But everything else about them was separate. To you, she said, “Love is a euphemism for lying. Falling in love is lying to yourself. You think you’re falling in love with someone, but really you’re falling in love with someone wanting you. Bear this in mind.” And you did, for years and years.
The other thing you bore in mind for years and years was that first day you met her, Ella standing on the front lawn of her house under the shade of a willow tree, looking exactly the opposite of what you had imagined. As you sat next to your father on the plane to New York, you pictured a woman who always wore red pumps and silk dresses. You hoped for a cool elegance, a high-heeled woman rarely affected by heat. Shiny straight hair. A doctor’s air of presumption, that New York woman’s mix of candour and detachment, deserving. It was July, and in fact the mistress was sweating so profusely that she looked as if she had just stepped out of the shower. When she looked at you, you could not help but smile. Marr
ied men do not introduce their children to their mistresses. You knew this. There is a wrongness about it—a cheeky, bald-faced wrongness—but somehow the mistress’s fatness made it right.
“The gap between your front teeth is about the width of a cracker,” the mistress said. Just like that, even before her name. She extended her hand palm down, as if waiting for a kiss.
The name “Ella” made you think of a beachy calm, sustenance and refreshment.
You could not stop smiling.
Leaning against the willow, she stared at you with mellow concentration, as if she were holding a ruler up to that gap, approving of these places you broke off more than the places you stayed together. A look that transformed your plainness into something less neutral. You tried to imagine how she might be seeing you, but you could not settle on something reliable. Whenever you heard a recording of your own voice, you thought it sounded juicy and plump, like the voice of an ugly person. When you saw yourself in the mirror, you looked much wider and lumpier than you expected. This always disturbed you, not because you were less attractive than you hoped, but because of the constant misleading of self, the inaccurate cataloguing of your own value, the predictable return to foolishness. While Ella looked at you, you tried to stand erect and forthcoming, like someone open-hearted, yet discriminating. You worried she might just see a sogginess, a frizzing that wouldn’t be tamed.
“Lovely,” she said. “Just lovely.”
On that perfect hot day in the honeyed laziness of air that doesn’t move, at the age of thirteen, you learned what it might feel like to be memorized.
ON ONE OF THE New York visits, you heard them in Ella’s bedroom at two o’clock in the morning. It was the only time you ever heard them together. They didn’t say much, but each sound was lined with erotic urgency, a moody pulse. The tender coercions of love. The mistress was a woman who knew how to say baby. As if she had thought things over, and it was the only word she could come up with.
The Virgin Spy Page 11