by Ann Packer
Inside there were giant flower arrangements, and vast, glittering chandeliers hanging from the distant ceiling. The walls were creamy white marble, shot through with flecks of gold. People stood talking in small groups, important-looking in their suits, their carefully groomed hair.
The Palm Court was in the center of the lobby, dozens of white-draped tables surrounded by towering potted palms. Miss Wolf waved off menus and told the waiter to bring us a full tea.
“There,” she said when it arrived. “Will you pour, Lane?” There were pitchers of hot water and cold milk, and the waiter had set a filigreed tea strainer across a small, shallow bowl. The lemon was in paper-thin slices, set on a plate, each piece flat and barely touching its neighbor.
I took the cup Lane offered me and sipped from it.
“Tell me,” Miss Wolf said. “How are you holding up?”
I set my cup down and looked at Lane, who gave me a quick, exaggerated frown, as if to apologize.
“I’m OK,” I said. “I’m fine.”
“And you’ve been here how long?”
“Almost three months.”
Miss Wolf lifted her cup and took a sip. “Smokier than usual,” she said. “Not that I mind that.” She set the cup down with a clatter. “I’m interested in you,” she said to me. “You remind me of myself when I was young. I was from the Main Line, of course—quite different, as you perhaps know—but the story …” Her voice trailed off and she closed her eyes. Sitting there like that, in her good wool suit, her powdery old face as creased as a crumpled piece of paper, she struck me as almost unbearably sad, something so forlorn about the traces of haughtiness and grandeur that were still in her.
Lane reached across the table and put her fingertips on Miss Wolf’s sleeve.
Miss Wolf opened her eyes.
“I’m not sure Carrie’s read your book,” Lane said.
Miss Wolf pursed her lips. “I didn’t say she had.” She reached for a slice of cake from the three-tiered stand the waiter had brought us: some kind of pound cake, a narrow piece lying on its side, sprinkled with powdered sugar. She pulled away the doily it was sitting on and bit in, leaving a few specks of sugar dust on her upper lip.
Lane turned to me. “Miss Wolf’s first novel was about a woman who left behind an invalid friend to go to Europe.”
My face grew hot, and Lane gave me another look of apology. I shook my head a little, because rather than offended I felt intrigued, and curious about the book.
“That’s the plot,” Miss Wolf said a little peevishly.
“How’s the pound cake?” Lane asked her. “I think I’ll try one of these.” She reached for a small crustless sandwich, triangular and so thin it was hard to think there could be anything inside. “Cucumber,” she said, taking a little bite. “Delicious. Carrie, try one.”
“You girls need to move,” Miss Wolf said.
Lane set her sandwich down, and we both looked at Miss Wolf, her fingers laced at the edge of the table.
“Lane, this goes for you, too. Listen to an old lady who knows. Go to Europe, go to the Far East, go far enough away so that the telephone will be too expensive, but go. The family is the enemy of the artist—of any young person trying to live seriously and meaningfully. You have to go.”
I looked at Lane, but she was carefully avoiding my glance, a thoughtful expression on her face as she listened politely to what she’d heard many times before.
“You think I don’t mean it,” Miss Wolf said.
Lane dabbed at her mouth with a small cloth napkin. “If I went,” she said gently, “where would that leave you?”
Miss Wolf flapped her hand. “Dead. Give me a year or two, that’s really all I want.”
“Miss Wolf,” Lane said.
Miss Wolf turned my way, her deep brown eyes boring into me. “You’re listening,” she said. “I think you’re hearing me.”
When we were finished the two of them caught a cab, and I headed west on Central Park South, past hansom cabs with their broody, snorting horses, past cars and taxis stalled in traffic. It was cold enough for fur now, and when I had to pass close by a tall woman in a long dark mink, I snuck a hand out and felt it, all cool and silky.
The family is the enemy of the artist. I recalled the day Lane and I drank tea in her bedroom, how she said she disagreed with Miss Wolf, that she thought the family was the artist. Just like the sky is, or all the books you’ve ever read. Her book with its periwinkle blue cover—by what process had its contents come into being? She was different from Simon and the others: she never talked about poetry as something to strive for; it seemed more inside her, something to draw out. If I had something like that in me—well, I’d be different, I’d be someone else.
The dress, though. The dark green velvet dress, up there in Bergdorf’s. In a way I felt I had a version of that dress in me, somewhere in there, possible. At Sixth Avenue I cut down to 57th Street and made my way to the fabric store I’d found in October.
It was quarter to six, fifteen minutes till closing. An older man watched me from behind the cash register, an apron tied over his white shirt and his wide polyester tie. There were three dark green velvets, one cotton, one rayon, and one silk, and I chose the silk for its perfect piney color. I found a shimmering satin for the cuffs, in just the right green, and I decided to go all out and get China silk rather than acetate for the lining. At five to six I sat down with a Vogue pattern book and within minutes had found almost what I was looking for, a plain, fitted dress with a round neckline. Almost but not quite. I looked up at the man, standing with his arms crossed over his apron, ready to kick me out despite the three fabrics I’d put on the cutting table. Could I depart from the pattern, substitute buttons for the back zipper, find a way to design my own deep cuffs? I stood up and found the Vogue patterns, tracked the numbers until I’d located the right drawer, rolled it open and riffled until I’d found the right pattern number, then my size. I carried the envelope to the cutting table and set it down, then I opened my wallet and reached for my credit card.
CHAPTER 25
I sewed. Velvet makes dust, and there were fine green fibers all over Kilroy’s dining table, a skirting of them on the floor around my chair. I’d never worked with velvet before, and I was slow and careful, the sheer weight of it reminding me that this was serious. And exciting: I had to recruit knowledge from previous projects to figure out the back buttons, experiment with tissue paper and muslin before I could determine the right shape for the cuffs. My solutions worked, but I longed for more certainty, the sureness Kilroy brought to cooking or navigating the subway lines: a sureness born of knowledge and experience.
Christmas filled the city, and Kilroy and I visited the tree at Rockefeller Center, crept in late to a performance of Handel’s Messiah. When I commented that he seemed to like Christmas, he said no, no, I had it all wrong: it wasn’t Christmas he liked but the preparation for it, the intentness of people. For me the two were indistinguishable.
On the evening of December 21st we walked out of a Spanish restaurant in the West Village to find that it was snowing lightly, flakes like tiny petals passing through the illumination of the streetlights. Above the spindly black trees the sky was yellow. We stopped in our tracks, delighted. Our eyelashes caught flakes, our hair. We held our heads back and let the snow come into our mouths, soft and then cold and then wet. We walked slowly northward, watching the city go white. I was flying to Madison the next morning.
Back at his place, he handed me my Christmas present.
“Can I open it now?”
“Of course.”
He’d wrapped it in a section of Sunday comics, some kitchen string for ribbon. I pulled the string off and peeled up the tape. Inside there was a framed photograph of a building, or part of a building—the top story and the roof, steeply pitched and gray, and above it a sky alive with clouds. Behind the roof there was a clothesline strung with white underthings: a man’s and a woman’s mixed together.
“It’s Paris,” he said, and I looked up at him.
“And you took it.”
He wiggled his finger a few inches from the surface of the picture. “I lived over here for a while.”
“I love it,” I said. “Thank you. Did you frame it yourself?” The frame was beautiful, wood painted the exact gray of the roof.
He shrugged. “I always think the nicest presents are the ones you make yourself.”
I suppressed a smile. I’d made him a corduroy shirt, in hours stolen from my dress. I went over to the closet and withdrew the shopping bag in which I’d hidden it. I said, “You can save it for Christmas morning if you want,” and we both smiled: after the Thanksgiving Day phone call, I was assuming he’d spend Christmas alone, walking the deserted streets and then sitting in his apartment reading a brand-new book he’d bought for the very purpose. Did he have siblings? Would a whole clan of Frasers spend Christmas Day together, a whole clan minus one? Or would his parents be alone together, having a cow?
“I think I’ll go ahead,” he said.
The shirt was dark burgundy, a pinwale corduroy that had left its own fine dust all over the place. He pulled the paper off, then opened the box. “Nice,” he said, pulling the shirt from the box and shaking it out. “Really soft.” He laid it on the table and ran his hand down the front of it. I’d been careful with the nap, and a downward stroke flattened the corduroy, darkened it. At last it dawned on him: he pulled down the collar to look for a tag.
He looked at me and I nodded. He let his head fall back, and his neck stretched taut. He said, “I don’t know what to say.”
“ ‘Thank you’ will do.”
“Not really.”
He carried the shirt to the window and peered out. We’d left the lights low and I could just make out his reflection, a ghostly smudge against the darkness. He stroked the shirt and then turned around. “See, no one’s ever made me anything before, not—not in a really long time.” His voice was wobbly; I could hardly believe it. “This is incredibly nice.” He came back to where I was and with the edge of his hand pushed my hair away from my face. “You are coming back?”
In twenty-four hours I’d be there, sleeping in my old bed on the second floor of my mother’s house. I’d have ridden in from the airport with her, down streets I knew I would find wide open and eerily quiet. I’d have seen Christmas trees framed by living room windows, colored lights along gable after gable. New York would be a dream by then, barely trustworthy in the face of so much that was so well known. What I wanted was for Madison to be the dream—for this room, this evening to be what lasted.
“Yes,” I said. “It’ll go fast. You’ll see.”
Asleep that night, my plane ticket ready in my purse, I dreamed Mike healthy again. I was at the bottom of the stairs to my Madison apartment, watching him go up backward, on his butt. He was dressed in khakis and a plaid flannel shirt, and he had the halo on, but I knew there was nothing wrong with him—that if he’d wanted to, he could have walked.
Then we were on a hospital gurney together, making love. There were no sheets on the gurney; we were right on the vinyl. He was heavy on me, his ass hairy and damp in my palms, and I could hardly breathe, though I was also incredibly aroused. He thrust into me again and again.
In the morning the sky was blue, the air outside Kilroy’s bedroom window bright with the recent snowfall. With Kilroy still asleep beside me, I got out of bed and went to look out. Several inches had accumulated, and the sidewalks were frosted; the wide expanse of Seventh Avenue was shiny wet. Down at the coffee place across the street, a couple pushed out the door, capped cups in their gloved hands, and walked the slow walk of the first snowfall until they were out of sight.
“Hey.”
I turned and saw Kilroy lying on his side looking at me, his head propped on his hand.
“It stuck.” I came back to the bed and got in next to him, the sheets on my side still warm.
“What stuck?”
“The snow.”
He smiled and reached over to touch me. “Too bad you’re leaving. We could have gone tromping.”
“Isn’t that something you do in a field?”
“Urban tromping,” he said. “It’s a subcategory.”
“Where would we have gone?” He thought for a moment. “Gramercy Park.”
I’d spent over three hundred dollars on my plane ticket, another big charge on my credit card. I’d RSVPed to the wedding, for which I’d worked diligently to make a very expensive dress. I was expected at the rehearsal dinner tomorrow night—Rooster’s mother had called me herself to echo Rooster’s invitation. My own mother had asked me to save at least one evening for a special dinner with her. And I’d sent Mike the Empire State Building postcard with See you soon written on the back—I’d sent it to him at home, because he was there now, out of the hospital, ready to start the rest of his life.
But I didn’t want to go. I was very clear on that all at once: I didn’t want to go.
“Maybe I’ll stay,” I said.
Kilroy raised his eyebrows. “Do you want to?”
I nodded.
“Then do.” He touched my shoulder, stroked it a few times and then moved his hand down my arm. He had the nicest touch, dry and firm. He ran his fingers up and down my forearm, then over my collarbone and down the very center of my chest, between my breasts. Next was my face. He traced my forehead, my jawline. He took his time, gave attention to every part of me. Mike had been a faster lover, less democratic. My dream rose up in my mind and I tried to bat it down: Mike’s big, heavy body on me, pressing me to the gurney. Kilroy’s fingers were between my toes, up my shin. My knee and the inside of my thigh. His palm slid up my hip and higher, to my breast. I ran a hand up his leg, to the soft, wiry nest of his balls. I closed my eyes but it didn’t matter: Mike was there, too, standing against the door watching us.
I had to call my mother at work, and I got her voice mail, left a message saying there was a change and I’d try again later. Then I phoned the Mayers’ house. I was sure I’d get Mrs. Mayer, but John Junior answered, his voice lower than the last time I’d talked to him. Mike? Sure, he was right there.
“It’s me,” I said, and right away I knew he knew: he stayed silent, let me hear his breathing. “Listen—”
“Don’t.” There was a pause, and he said, “OK? Let’s just—let’s talk for a while, can we?” And I nodded, as if he could see me, my heart bent on itself, a mangled thing. I’d brought the phone into the bedroom and closed the door, but I could hear Kilroy in the kitchen, moving around, making coffee.
“How is it to be home?” I said.
He hesitated. “Good. We’re still kind of working things out.”
“And where are you right now?”
“In the living room.”
The living room. Sitting in his wheelchair. Would he stay in one place for a long time, or would he wheel around, antsy? The Mayers’ living room was crowded with furniture: couches and tables and the big antique Mrs. Mayer called the whatnot. At Christmastime everything got moved around, crammed even tighter.
“Is there a tree up?” I said.
“An eight-footer.”
It had always been Mike’s job to string the lights—how hard it must have been to watch while someone else did it. The ornaments in their tissue paper, the mugs of hot cider, the carols on the stereo—the whole process had always been such a reminder, of that first kiss of ours under the mistletoe.
“So why aren’t you coming?”
I’d decided that a good, solid excuse was the way to go, but now I balked—an excuse would be for me, not for him, to make me feel a little less unkind. “I just can’t yet, Mike,” I said. “I don’t want to.”
“That’s what I figured.”
“When you heard my voice?”
“No, when Rooster told me you said yes. I didn’t tell anyone, but I figured you’d change your mind.”
I sighed, and then I sighed again, for having let him h
ear the first sigh. I said, “Don’t hate me, OK?”
“Why not?”
It was a good question, a question for which I had no answer.
“I don’t,” he said. “But I don’t know why I don’t, either.”
A little later, Kilroy and I went out for a late breakfast. I felt happy and sick. People walked gingerly past the restaurant windows, careful on the snowy sidewalks. Traffic moved at a crawl. When we were done we headed for the brownstone so I could take a shower and change. It was a Saturday, but no one was around—out Christmas shopping, maybe. I felt a pang, remembering we’d opened our presents last night. What would we do on Christmas Day? Go to a movie, maybe. Or cook something Kilroy would know about, something involved and delicious. Or both.
The sky had clouded over again, and as we headed across town snow began blowing off the sidewalks, little gusts of it swirling at our feet. I’d never been to Gramercy Park before, a rectangle of townhouses built around a small locked park. A light snow began to fall, and the houses formed an intimate enclosure for the leafless trees. I might have imagined we were in another century but for the Acuras and Lexuses parked everywhere, many with their trunks open to receive the bounty of a holiday to be spent outside the city.
“Nice, isn’t it?” Kilroy said.
I looked at him, wondered for a moment if he was being sarcastic—because of the fancy cars, the obvious priciness of the houses. But he seemed serious.
“It’s beautiful,” I said. “You can almost imagine you’re in the old days and cars don’t exist.”
He gave me a wide smile. “That’s exactly what I was thinking—exactly.” We’d paused in front of a red brick townhouse, and now we started walking again. He said, “I sometimes wish I’d been born in another century, you know? Things would’ve been harder. Just think of all we have now—think of electricity alone: lights, heaters, refrigerators. Not to mention all the fancy stuff like computers.” He looked at me hard. “Imagine if there was no electricity—no way to read at night without a candle. Imagine having to chop firewood and carry it inside, or freeze. Think of the physical exhaustion of achieving even a minimum of comfort.”