by Lisa Zeidner
According to the Four Seasons’ elegant clock, it was almost four, which means that I’d met Zachary less than five hours ago. It felt like far longer. In fact, when I hit the air of the lobby, a gnawing fatigue overcame me, which was fine. I was in a hotel, with a bed. Except that only then did I remember I’d blown off the afternoon’s appointments—not even called to explain, or reschedule, but simply failed to show up.
I went into the room braced for the phone’s message light to be frantically, accusatorially blinking. I could hardly imagine how I would cope. But there were no messages. No one in the world knew I was here, except the Four Seasons management, and they didn’t even feel the need to ask if I planned to stay on, so clear was it that I did. Why would anyone voluntarily leave? I kicked off the shoes, wadded the cash on the end table, lay down clothed on the bed, and slept.
A word about the tools of my trade. Many modes of communication were available to me. I carried a cell phone in my briefcase, and a pager. E-mail could be fired at me both through my port at work and through a commercial server. I had voice mail at work and an answering machine at home, fax machines at both home and office, and a secretary at a tastefully decorated work station answering an 800 number, should anyone crave the sound of a live human voice—not exclusive use of her, but use of her. Perhaps because we expected blessedly little of each other, she included my productivity, the smooth, orderly hum of my schedule, as part of her reason for being. She knew the system. She could check orders, run interference, if it was required.
As a backup I had a husband who was always, if not asleep, in the shower, watching TV, or talking to me, easy to locate at the office, in his car, or at the hospital. He had a secretary, a beeper, and a paging system ready to summon him from any location at the hospital, from the surgical theater to the urinal. How dare people call doctors arrogant? Kenneth is so shackled to his work he might as well be wearing a prisoner’s monitoring device on his ankle. Once or twice a month we had dinner or a movie out alone or with another couple. Once or twice a year he went to a medical convention. At one of these, after several of the worst years that can be wished on a person, he had one lousy indiscretion. But I could have gotten in touch with him, I am convinced, even at the moment of orgasm.
And for what? Aside from keeping hearts beating in patients on gurneys, what is the payoff for all of this instant communication? In major metropolises, women now saunter into restaurants in their tight little black dresses, holding not pocketbooks but remarkably tiny, slim phones. What do they really need to hear over dinner? Offers for new gold credit cards? Charity solicitors? These are single women with tight hips and pursed lips—not the mothers who, in cell-phone ads, are always stranded on the side of the road, in dangerous thunderstorms. “Sorry,” I always imagine the restaurant ladies hearing as they rush to answer, dainty dandelion greens stuck to their teeth. “Wrong number.”
Once a week, I had a maid. She particularly enjoyed causing deep, random grooves on carpeting with a vacuum cleaner. Like the secretary, she loved me because, since Ken and I were rarely there, we made only mouse-size messes. We didn’t splatter the oven. Most of our laundry went out, as dry cleaning. When she was in the house she picked up the phone if it rang, and could recite from the magnetized list on the refrigerator door, in English, all of the most likely places for a message to me to be expeditiously intercepted. On the days when she was there she gathered the mail off the floor, where it scattered from the slot in the door, and arranged it in an artful fan on the kitchen table. Like everyone, I got mostly bills. Who writes, with cell phones, answering machines, faxes, and e-mail?
Hardly anyone ever called me at home. My mother called two or three times a month for her frail, melodic “How are you, dear?” My father had been dead for long enough that my mother had been forced to start over, before it was too late, in Florida, where she had a circle of chipper, supportive cronies and even a boyfriend. Like my secretary, she required almost nothing from me. Neither did my brother, whom I’d never been close to anyway: a big blond hearty accountant, who golfed and fooled around with a boat.
As far as friends: I had them. But it had been a while since anyone I knew was mired in any urgent business. No one was getting married, pregnant, madly in love, or contemplating divorce, going bankrupt, or awaiting biopsy results. Except for the odd dyslexia or food allergy, the children were all in good health, skipping through that breezy bower between difficult toddlerhood and difficult adolescence. Even if my friends had troubles, they probably would not confide in me, since my relatively recent woes still officially eclipsed everyone else’s. I could not convince them that I asked for no prizes for suffering or endurance. There had been an accident. It had changed things, inevitably. That it was simple did not make it painless. Nevertheless, I understood that all of our feet were pretty much glued to the same wet bed of domestic arrangements.
For confirmation that we had selves—that we existed as people someone might seek out, for advice or diversion—we all had our own Rolodexes, Filofaxes, and computer address lists, numbers automatically programmed to dial from our cordless phones. Jogging buddies, spicy food buddies. Friends from college. Those who felt ennobled by ballet subscriptions, those willing to get soused at ball games. I had a girlfriend with shapely feet—high-arched and reliably pedicured, with toe polishes in unexpected colors, who wore nice sandals in summer and swung her crossed, tanned legs and made me feel good to drink in the sun beside her at an outdoor café. If I called her, she would be sympathetic. I could wake her up in the middle of the night; she would speak to me. I had coworkers with whom I could engage in serious conversations about product development or the future of health care.
I did not have, it is true, friends who were parents of my kid’s friends. Women to gab with near swing sets. But as someone who made not a single friend in childbirth class, I had never much warmed to those kinds of alliances. Maybe when my son had gotten older they would have become more indispensable. As it was, I hardly had to give any up.
I was no one’s mother. A mother might be the only person ever called out for, in the middle of the night, in a way that matters. “You need to feel connected,” Kramer had admonished me, repeatedly. Well, sure! Who didn’t? Still, I contend that my loss only highlighted the inevitable loneliness that everyone feels, even my friends with children sleeping across the hall, faces haloed by night-lights.
It would not help to volunteer in the preemie ward or join a grievers’ group. And just because I was rational did not mean I was without emotion. I simply could not be, could never be the kind of person who either looked milkily skyward and said, “My son is with God now,” or hurled myself down to wail and beat the soil with my fists. I might not be a creative person, a sculptor or philosopher or curer of cancer, but I could still live with energetic, clear-eyed purpose; I could try hard to be airily grounded, a woman with both heart and brain.
Right now, I realize, I was just floating. Trying to float. Skimming over my life, letting life tickle my feet. I had no plans to glide off entirely. Soon I would dip a toe in, test the temperature. Was that so bad? Why did I not have that right? Why did I need so many distractions, disruptions, tugs, and knots?
And I was a salesman. That was my “living.” My “livelihood” depended on generating “contacts.” I was good at it. I was serious yet fun. Eager, yet never pushy. Competent but no automaton—I could drink at lunch, laugh at a joke, generate lighthearted e-mail messages. Bestow that “personal touch” essential to selling medical equipment so dull, ugly, and without personality that anyone would feel a chasm of churning emptiness open beneath them to have to deal with it on a daily basis, however much we proudly remind ourselves that such goods “matter” (as opposed to, say, push-up bras at Victoria’s Secret).
As far as I was concerned, my job itself was reason enough to feel suicidal. My job itself was reason enough to lie on a bed at a hotel in a strange city, refusing to pick up my messages. If I arose from that bed and d
ouble-clicked the mouse on the tracking system for my current orders in progress, no less the problematic back orders or the lists of clients with whom I was in the process of developing relationships, I could probably get myself into a frame of mind appropriate to hurling myself through the sound-insulated, double-plated glass of the window onto the steamy pavement far below. As far as I am concerned, knowing that it was not the time to call clients or check orders represented sanity, self-control.
This is not, Kramer, “dissociation.” Let’s use more positive language, a more optimistic mind-set. This is “getting some distance,” “giving yourself a break.”
But I did it. It had to be done. After a short nap I got up, gritted my teeth, and checked my messages.
Thirty-one of them. It took almost a half hour just to record them all. They were pretty much what you’d expect, except for four notable things.
First, the multiple pleas, pardons, and updates from Kenneth I’d anticipated did not exist. He’d left one message only, on work voice mail, clipped and emotionless as an Rx on a prescription pad: “I will leave no more messages.” Good for you, Ken! At last!
The second was from the secretary at the office, asking how I would like her to deal with a call that had come in, from my husband, and another, subsequent phone call from him, retracting the first and saying never mind, he and I had merely missed each other, everything was fine; and a call from the purchasing officer at the Children’s Hospital in Philadelphia, asking to talk to my supervisor. She thought she should check with me first. Since it all seemed kind of strange. Before she passed the message on to Jack, who was not only my supervisor but the executive vice president, and she could easily hold off on doing so because, truth be told, he wasn’t in town anyway. She hadn’t seen me in a while. “Well, have a nice day, wherever you may be!”
Then, Dr. Kramer, whom I called Dan to his face as I’d been encouraged to do—I’m not sure why, in my mind, he existed so curtly as Kramer—but whose message had a halting formality I wasn’t used to from him.
“Dan Kramer here. I am in a bit of an awkward position, Claire, and could use some guidance. I am leaving this somewhat elliptical message on your voice mail rather than on your home answering machine for the obvious reasons, and trust that your messages are listened to by you exclusively. I am sure you can understand why your husband is concerned. I have no way of knowing if his version of events is an accurate one, and in any case I cannot, will not, ethically, intervene on his behalf, as I have explained to him. On the other hand, it is my impression that your husband may be behaving or contemplating behaving in ways that could have unpleasant repercussions for you. So if you are okay—and I trust you are, did my best to assure him that you were, in all likelihood, fine—you should probably make that clear to him. Meanwhile, I assume you know that you’re welcome to call me.”
Lastly, Zachary, on the hotel’s voice mail. He did not leave his name, but of course I recognized him.
“Yo!” he said. “Doctor! Gotta problem. The shoes. She called fucking security. I’m down at the house phone, ‘getting a Mars Bar.’ So. Want to, like, ring once, hang up, meet me at the pool? Then how the fuck do I get them back into the room? I should of just told her I loaned them to somebody but by the time I got back she had three dicks up here. Your shoes are in evidence. Better just write ’em off. Sorry. So anyway. It’s almost five. Bye.”
I brought both pairs of running shoes to the pool. Zachary brought the candy bar that was providing our cover. The scenario made me feel giddy. I could have worn sunglasses and a raincoat, as a joke, but the latter item was not currently available to me. I got there first. When he came in I nodded to him spy-fashion across the couple of stray splashers. In his baggy shorts and T-shirt, sockless in sneakers, he looked his age. But my shame seemed to be gone, I was interested to note, replaced with curiosity. It was refreshing to see him. I felt braced by the cognitive dissonance of his zitty face, his brash movements, and the grown-up sex I knew we’d had.
“Do you want brand-new shoes or hers?” I asked.
“You bought more?” he asked, surprised. “That was stupid. Hers. While she’s in the shower I’ll put them under the bed or something. Pretty lame when she had three security guards in the room with notepads and flashlights. Three! They were trying to look concerned, but you could imagine what they’d be saying the minute they left. Can you believe it? Storms in from her facial and marches right for her running shoes. Because she’s in the same city as my dad, right? All of a sudden she has to be Linda Hamilton in Terminator 2. Now she’s lining all the jewelry up on the bed. ‘Let me think. Did I bring?…’ I mean, fuck. Her fucking Hermès scarf from Paris that has pictures of fucking bicycles on it. Right. Very hot item. They’re just dying to get their hands on her fucking Hermès scarf. Maybe we ought to wash these off or something,” he said, turning the shoes over to inspect the dirt ground into the treads. “But maybe that’s worse. I mean, maybe she forgot she doesn’t run.”
For punctuation, he opened the candy bar with exaggerated force, as if he were doing a Greco-Roman wrestling hold on the plastic, ate most of it in one bite. “Gonna ruin my app-etite,” he added mincingly, in Mom’s voice.
“Are we having dinner together?”
“I told her I met a lady cardiothoracic surgeon at the pool,” he reported, mouth full. “She said there were no women in that field. They’re all big, dumb jocks, she said. Frat brothers. Guys who enjoy crushing beer cans in their bare hands.”
“Well, she’s basically right.”
“So what about you?”
I did a classic bodybuilder’s pose to show off my swimmer’s shoulders.
“There’s something wrong with you,” he observed, holding his hands out for the shoes.
That was true, of course. But I did manage to extract the time of their dinner reservation, and the site: Le Bec Fin, a lavish French restaurant utterly inappropriate for a teenager. She would have had to make the reservation months in advance.
“You looking forward to that?”
His face twitched, then went blank. Shorted out. He was watchful behind that blankness, though, surreptitiously trying to process who I was. And it didn’t look as if he was having much luck. Who could blame him? Clearly I didn’t compute.
He did, though. And this is when my airport X-ray vision shifted into gear, shifted into overdrive. I felt as if I were scanning him, not only who he was now but who he would be—the outlines of his adult self shifting into focus, shadowy but present, as you’d read a sonogram. His acne-scarred adult face leaner but also more open, more forgiving. I could see him exchanging confidences with a woman huddled in the crook of his arm. He’d just made love to her. Eventually he would marry her. Tickling her back in the aimless way men will sometimes, after sex, he was telling her about this marginal lady surgeon he’d bedded at the Four Seasons Hotel in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in the weeks before his freshman year at college, by no means his first fuck but a formative one. How so? she asks. (Just then I notice she’s Asian. Vietnamese, actually, her darkly lustrous hair an oil slick. Won’t his mother be surprised!) You know, the Older Woman, he says. But because this girl is important to him and he knows it without yet knowing it, he softens, adds, “I don’t know. She was nuts. She had a dead kid. She hadn’t really gotten over it. I guess I was part of her cure.”
And the girl whispers, “How sad.” Those two plangent words. He answers, “Not really.”
“Well that’s good,” she says, and they both laugh.
Then I swear to God I was imagining their children, the hybrid curve of their eyes, their dark but imperfectly straight hair, their thin, elegant, dusky hands. The wife is so fine-boned. Their son will not be Zach’s size, will not be athletic, but Zach won’t mind; it will surprise him that he doesn’t mind. And won’t he be surprised when their daughter turns out to be the athletic one, pushing right past ballet to karate and gymnastics, a tumbling powerhouse with a pert ponytail and black belt, and I
could see them in bed again, discussing how to handle her, because as much as they love to imagine themselves in slow motion, cheering her at the Olympics, their eyes wet with pride, they don’t want her to have that kind of life, who would wish that on a child?
This all came to me in several seconds, with the force of prophecy. Then dispelled. Nothing similar had ever happened to me before. I liked it. Thereafter I would feel less disdain toward the detectives who call in psychics to aid in murder investigations.
When I came to, the teenage Zachary was staring at me, concerned. “What’s with you, anyhow?” he asked. “Can’t you take a pill?”
“You’re my pill, Zachary. Didn’t you know that?”
“Don’t fuck with me,” he said coldly.
“A little late,” I observed. “I just want some company on the road, in a strange city. What’s the big deal? Besides, my son’s at Brown too. Isn’t that reason enough?” He sighed. He didn’t seem to remember, or care, that I’d already blown my own cover on the lie of the son at Brown. “You won’t like my mother,” he said, but I told him I was sure he was wrong. I was immensely curious about her, about why she had an opinion on surgeons, about (and I realize this sounds stupid) how she would look, how she would look at her boy.
The first thing I noticed about her were her feet in sandals. I saw her feet first because as we’d agreed (oddly, since we were all coming from the same place), I was already at the bar, seated, so as they approached her feet were closer than the feet of strangers usually are. Plus they glittered. The impeccable toenail polish, thick as car paint—I tend to notice such things because I’ve never indulged in a pedicure, am about as likely to do so as I am to learn to bungee jump or speak Japanese—sparkled, as did the shoes, which were in some kind of spangly pewter. They were confident feet.