by Rita Ciresi
Chapter Ten
The Woman in the Ingres, The Woman in the Whistler
In the morning we made love the way I imagined newly—weds came together on their wedding night—more from obligation than desire. Then we had breakfast—coffee and rolls—lounging in bed. Strauss had arranged for a late checkout of four o’clock. “What should we do for the rest of the morning?” he asked. “The Frick doesn’t open until one.”
I nudged him in the ribs. “Why don’t you introduce me to your parents?”
“They’re in Jersey, at my sister’s. But didn’t you promise to call your mother?”
“I’ll call her. When you’re in the shower. Take a long shower.”
“Do you want to give your cousin a call?”
A call to Dodie was long overdue. The thought made me feel ashamed—as if I hadn’t been a good friend—until I realized that Dodie hadn’t called me either. He must have gotten totally swept up by his partner too.
For a moment I tried to picture Strauss and Dodie together, and it was like trying to force a puzzle piece into the wrong place. But why? Strauss and Dodie had more in common with one another—the world of business—than I had with either one of them. They both knew what T-bills and municipal bonds were. They could crunch numbers until the little fuckers practically screamed. They both liked baseball, for Christ’s sake. Yet the idea of them in the same room—sitting over espresso in some downtown bar, or eating stuffed croissants in a charming Greenwich Village bakery—distressed me. Dodie and I had our own language, our own way of being, that the mere presence of Strauss would alter and strain. Dodie would feel compelled to straighten up, wash out his mouth with soap, and put on the persona he assumed to go to work—there would be no “Bella Ciao,” no talk of butt—fucking Prince Charles—and I would have to put a lid on my exuberance too. The more I thought about it, the more I could not imagine a more awkward morning.
“You might not like him,” I told Strauss.
“Why not?”
“He just brings out the naughty in me.”
“I thought that was my job.”
“We’re really not that close anymore,” I said.
“But you were close once, weren’t you? You told me you were.”
“Now he’s got his own life.”
“Does he live with someone?”
“I think he’d maybe like to.”
“It would be a smart move on his part.”
“Why?”
“Because of AIDS,” Strauss said.
“That’s hardly a reason to move in with someone.”
“It’s certainly a reason to change your behavior.”
He doesn’t have behavior, I felt like telling Strauss. But when I tried to find a synonym for the offending word, the only thing I could come up with was conduct, which sounded even more censorious, and I decided I couldn’t blame Strauss for the failures of the English language, other than to remind him that Dodie simply had relationships with other people. “Just like you and me. In fact, right now he’s seriously seeing someone. So I’d rather not call him. I wouldn’t want to get in his way.”
Strauss paused. “Could I ask you something personal?”
“I should hope so. Since we’re lying naked in bed.”
Naked in bed was a vulnerable position, to be sure. Strauss had moved the breakfast tray onto the floor. So there was nothing between us—no wall, no sheet, no coffee cups, no place to hide—when Strauss turned over my arm and looked down at the whitish pin pricks in the crook of my elbow that hadn’t healed since Sarah Lawrence.
“I just noticed this—a few moments ago, and I don’t know why I didn’t see it before—on your arm. What is this from?”
I bit my lip. “Why are you asking me that?”
“For my own peace of mind. You told me you did drugs with him. He’s gay. There’s a link now.”
“You don’t have to remind me. We really just smoked pot together.”
“But what are these marks from? Were you sick at some point in your life that you needed an IV?”
I told him a truth that evaded the real question. “I donated blood plasma so I could buy books for my college courses. The marks from the needle never went away.”
I got up from the bed and went over to my suitcase, where I pulled on a silky robe that I regretted having brought—because Strauss, of course, was the one who gave it to me. In the mirror above the chest of drawers I saw Strauss watching me, and I felt like he saw through the Lisa he knew all the way down to the girl who had pressed her lips around countless joints and pipes and bong hoses, who stuck straws up her nose and one intravenous needle in her arm, which came courtesy of the very cousin he suggested we meet.
Strauss cleared his throat and the sound annoyed me, because it signaled the prelude of yet another lecture. And it ran like this: Strauss was sorry that sometimes things seemed a little touchy—a little off—kilter—between us. But it was only natural considering we had grown up in radically different ways—in different decades and even different faiths—and from what Strauss could make out, there was a rather significant economic gap between us—
When he said economic gap, I breathed a sigh of relief. For then I knew he had seen in me not the drug—sucking slut, but just a snotty kid who grew up wearing hand—me—downs from third cousins and jeans purchased from a bin at Railroad Salvage, who once confided, at college, to the only black friend she ever had, “Whenever I go into Macy’s I have the insane urge to steal everything” and who cringed like the fool that she was when her friend stepped back and asked, “Why do you automatically assume that I would feel that way too?”
“But, Strauss,” I said. “We don’t have an economic gap. You grew up just as bad off as I did.”
“For a while.”
“You said you felt uncomfortable around your fiancée’s parents because they were wealthy.”
“There are different ways of being wealthy, Lisar—or at least of spending money or holding on to it.”
“You said your mother mopped the floor on her hands and knees.”
“Waxes it. She does own a mop.”
“And you said you were embarrassed by the measuring tape your father wore around his neck—”
“I never told you that. How did you know that?”
I didn’t answer. It had slid out of my mouth before I could catch it, like a snake slithered out of a hole in the ground.
“I’ve never told you that, I’m positive. And last night you said my sister was anorexic. I’ve never told you Rache was anorexic. Or that Jeanne was Jewish—”
“Can I tell you something now?”
“I think you’d better.”
“But I couldn’t tell you before. I just couldn’t, believe me. When I worked in publishing—oh God, I was the proofreader on that book. With that interview. About your father.”
The look in his eyes was too awful to bear. I switched my eyes to the mirror, and not even able to stand that, I looked out onto the park, at the tops of trees and the wide expanse of lawn that led to the carousel and zoo.
“I forgot you worked in publishing,” he said.
“Well. I did. That was the house.”
“Small world,” Strauss finally said. Then he added, “You should have told me, Lisar.”
“I don’t know why I didn’t. I mean, I can’t tell you why I didn’t. Please don’t make me say why.”
From the hallway came the voices of people passing by—a man and a woman, engaged in some dispute about the room key. Strauss looked to the door and then looked back at me. With a calmness that dismayed me, he told me that I could take a shower first.
“You’re angry,” I said.
“Go ahead, Lise. Please. If you have any feeling at all for me—”
“What do you mean? Of course I have feelings for you—”
“You’ll just give me a few minutes to myself.”
I didn’t hesitate a second before I was in the shower, the bathroom door shut tight
and the water on blasting to cover up the sound of my own weeping. Now I was sure it was love, because he had the power to reduce me in a second to such ragged tears. Lisa, I thought, now you’ve done it. You’ve blown it. The man is pissed. It was too much to handle to look around the bathroom after getting out of the steamy shower and to see what a concerted effort Strauss had made not to be a bathroom slob—just for me—and to realize, after opening my cosmetics case, that I forgot to take my birth-control pill yesterday morning. I sucked in my breath and took two pills at once, chewing them to bits, as if this would make them twice as effective.
Then I wondered what it would be like to have a child with Strauss. It was easy, really, to imagine him wearily rolling out of bed in the middle of the night—for unlike Al Dante, he would be the kind of father who took turns with the feedings—and bumping into the bassinet before he bent down and scooped the wet, bawling infant from its blankets. I could hear the tape on both sides of the diaper rip open, and his soft voice trying to soothe the baby, and actually trying to reason with the irrational little creature, asking him or her to please be patient, for the agenda called for a diaper change first, and a bottle second. I saw him down on his hands and knees, patiently building a tower out of alphabet blocks that the toddler would keep pushing over. “The point is to build,” he would say. “Not break.” I pictured him rushing over to an electrical outlet (covered and taped) and firmly taking a little hand away, saying, “No, no, you know that’s wrong, so why are you doing it?” as if a child were born with moral sense—or as if a father really could instill it.
When I came out of the bathroom—dreading meeting him, and almost hoping he had gone to get some ice or fetch a newspaper—Strauss looked anything but fatherly. He was sitting on the end of the bed wearing his shirt from the day before and his undershorts, which made him look about as vulnerable as a patient on a doctor’s examination table. His glasses were off, and I wondered if while I was in the shower he had felt so depressed he needed to lie back on the bed and close his eyes.
“Let’s not fight, Lise,” he said. “I’d like to get along with you.”
My voice felt stiff as day—old frosting as I said, “I also want to get along with you.”
“I know it’s not easy sometimes. For either of us. But it’s worth trying.”
“I am trying. I’m just fucking up, that’s all.”
“Corne here. Sit down.” I sat down next to him on the mattress and tried to rearrange the towel around me in a more modest way.
“About the book. About that whole part of my life—I’m ashamed of not talking about it with you. But I don’t think it was right of you to hide that you knew of it from me.”
“But it was your business. We’re all entitled to privacy, that’s why I never brought it up. In the beginning I didn’t even link you back to it, and when I did, it was too late. Besides, you talked, Strauss. If you didn’t want anyone to know, why did you consent to the interview?”
Strauss shrugged. “I don’t know. No, I do know. My father always got letters in the mail from shrinks or writers—you might not like that he called them nosy writers, Lise—asking for interviews. It was the first time anyone ever had written to me, acknowledged it had some kind of effect on me. I was tired of being quiet. Now I see why my dad never said anything.”
“Does he know you talked?”
“God, no. He never reads anything but the newspaper. He won’t find out.”
“What if someone shows it to him? Or worse, your mother?”
“It’s just not likely.”
“What if your sister found it?” I asked, thinking of how pleased my own sister would be to betray some indiscretion of mine to our mother.
“She knows about it. She was angry at first, mostly because I told the whole world—that’s what she said to me, Why did you tell the whole world?’—that she had an eating disorder, but then she promised not to say anything to my parents if I never told Zalman—as if I would ever tell Zalman—she once OD’d on diet pills.”
“Doesn’t he know?”
“That she had a problem with food, yes. Of course. That he loves. It’s something to hold over her. He thinks he’s her savior. But he doesn’t know about the pills. That she had to be hospitalized. He wouldn’t go for that.”
“He sounds like a complete control freak, if he thinks he can change her past.”
“I told you he was extreme. But let’s not talk about it anymore. I mean, if that’s all right with you. I need to shower. And you need to call your mother.”
“She’s probably at church,” I said.
Only after I heard the water going—and after I tried my mother’s house twice without any answer—did I remember, too late, the following point: Strauss also had snooped on me. He had gone into my personnel files for less-than-professional reasons. He had picked up my manuscript from the coffee table and read it while I was on the phone with Al Dante. Of course, there was a big difference between The Cursed Generation and Stop It Some More. That more than anything seemed to throw into relief the whole foolishness of what I was writing. Who cared about a too-cute office flirtation when wars raged on the planet? Why couldn’t I write about something more earth—shattering, like ghosts beyond the grave, blue numbers, seeing your own name on a transport list?
Because it hadn’t happened to me.
I could steal it though, I thought. Or borrow it. Really it would just be appropriating it for a higher cause. And although the theft might come from the devil, wouldn’t the crime be redeemed by dedicating the whole thing to God?
Interesting rationalization, Lisar.
Most Machiavellian! I heard Dodie say.
The rest of the day was about as civilized as an ice-cream headache. Strauss helped me fasten on the necklace. He was such a klutz he couldn’t get the clasp and so patient he kept trying over and over again, until I chided him for being clumsy and he chided me for being so antsy I couldn’t sit still for two seconds. As we walked to the Barnes & Noble on Forty—eighth Street, a throng of parishioners and tourists came down the stone steps of Saint Patrick’s. “Here’s your chance for Confession,” Strauss reminded me.
“Confession isn’t heard on Sundays,” I said, suddenly longing for what I couldn’t have: a quick consultation with the priest who absolved me of my sins last time I went down on my knees to God.
At the bookstore I told Strauss, “Now it’s my turn to give you a gift.”
I picked out his reading material for the next few weeks, over his strong avowal that the only thing he really wanted and needed to read was the second chapter of Lisa Diodetto’s lusty opus. “I told you, I’m torching it,” I said as I bent down on my hands and knees to find something to keep him really busy—a black Penguin edition of Anna Karenina that showed, on the cover, a troika gliding through a blizzard.
He looked dismayed. “That’s a lot of words,” he said. “Besides, isn’t that the one where she throws herself under the train?”
“You’ll love it. You remind me of the character Levin,” I told him (not mentioning, of course, that I skipped over the long, dull sections—and there were many—where Levin pondered agricultural economy. Nor did I tell him that the scene where Levin’s wife, Kitty, painfully delivers their first baby was so convincingly written it made me swear I’d never have children).
We rounded the corner and I saw Strauss’s eye fix upon the very book we’d been arguing about yesterday—Jane Eyre. “Forget that,” I said. “You wouldn’t approve of that. There’s a scene where the hero cross-dresses as a Gypsy. Give me that book. I’m paying for Anna. She’s a gift.”
After another round of coffee—and rye sandwiches laden with roast beef and pastrami—we visited the Frick. The coolness of the lobby, after the heat of the street, seemed to soothe both of us. Strauss pressed the admission sticker directly above my left breast, plastering the gold chain to my blouse.
We walked through the museum in silence. Here it was possible to believe that on
this late—summer weekend all of New York had escaped for one last time to the Hamptons or the Adirondacks. Only a few others were moving through the Boucher Room, which was paneled with scenes of fluffy Cupid-looking children so pretty they made me want to get sick all over Henry Clay Frick’s beautiful Oriental carpets. We were the only English-speaking tourists in the Fragonard Room, full of canvases that Strauss, who had purchased one of the fifty-cent museum guides, clearly seemed embarrassed to inform me were collectively titled “The Progress of Love.” Out in the vestibule, we were the only ones to linger in front of the luminous Vermeers by the stairs—“Officer and Laughing Girl” and “Girl Interrupted at Her Music”—and to examine, for more than five minutes, the enchanting woman in blue by Ingres, whose finger coyly posed on the underside of her chin seemed to invite us to admire her and indicated she had a secret she wanted to share—which would never get said.
In the enamel room, the blue and yellow tiles reminded me of my mother’s fruit bowl—perpetually full of wax bananas and dusty fake Concord grapes. But these plates documented the birth and death of Christ—scenes lovingly crafted by guild artisans known as the Workshop of the Master of Large Foreheads and the Workshop of the Master of the Passion. I felt Catholicism emanating from every pore in my body. I wondered how Strauss reacted to these repeated images of the Annunciation, the Adoration of the Magi, the Madonna and Child, the Crucifixion, the Deposition. What was it like not to believe in Christ in a world full of crosses? I thought about all the gold and silver crucifixes I had, lying dormant in my jewelry box (gifts from Auntie Beppina on my name day and Holy Communion and Confirmation), and the miraculous medal I wore after I had the abortion and was making a concerted effort to change my ways.
I turned away from the enamels. Of all the sufferings of Christ (which we catechism kids had to repeat in chronological order as we made the Stations of the Cross), the one that most plagued my childhood imagination was the crowning of the thorns. The enamels were so bright and vivid that the thorns seemed to pierce my own skull. Either that or the double dose of hormones I took that morning was getting to me.