“What?” I asked.
“It’s just that I wish I knew what you look like.” He reached his hand out. “May I?”
“May you what?” I asked.
Without explaining, he grabbed my face in his hand. He quickly touched one eye, which remained open, my nose, cheek, ear, jaw, and mouth. He touched my forehead, hairline, and hair. He was beet red.
“You are beautiful, aren’t you? Thank you. Sorry.” I giggled awkwardly and he grabbed his shaving kit, briefcase, and judge’s robe and left the room.
I sat in my chair touching my face with my hands for a very long time. First it felt cool, then hot. My eyelashes felt short. My eyebrows felt like silk cord. My cheeks felt fat. My bottom lip felt thick. My skin felt like the red velvet wallpaper of a Chinese restaurant. After a while I couldn’t feel anything at all. I became invisible. I looked like everybody else.
That night I had dinner at my usual place, across the street from my new apartment at the Olive Tree Café, not to be confused with the Olive Garden restaurant. The Olive Tree was an old Village café with stained glass lamps, slate tables you could write on with chalk, and Charlie Chaplin movies playing round the clock on a white screen on the wall. The Olive Garden was a tacky Italian restaurant chain that I wouldn’t set foot in for all the all-you-can-eat scampi in the world.
I slid into my usual booth at the Olive Tree, and the waiter came over to take my order. He had silky brown hair and wide eyes. His name tag said, “Waitress in Training.”
I was staring at a photo of me in a sombrero. My husband had taken it in Mexico.
The waiter picked it up and looked at it. “Are you a model?” he asked.
In the photo my face is swollen and my nose is bright red because we had spent the whole day in the desert trying to find my sunglasses. My husband had devised a system of marking cacti so we would know what territory we had searched and wouldn’t let us stop looking until we found the sunglasses, which we never did. I carried the photo around with me to remind myself that life with him had not always been fun.
“No, I’m not a model,” I said, relishing the word. “This is just a photo that my ex-husband took of me on the worst day of my life.”
He looked down at it again. “I thought it was one of your, what do they call it, portfolio shots. I’m serious. I think you look beautiful here.”
“I look awful. I have sunstroke.”
He smiled at me, embarrassed, and I remembered from The Rules that men do not like loud sarcastic knee-slapping girls and I suddenly felt old. You should have just thanked him, I thought.
“Thank you,” I whispered.
He got a roll of masking tape from behind the bar, ripped off a piece, and came back to my table. He wrote “er” on it and put it over the “ress” of Waitress. “This was driving me crazy,” he said. “People are such assholes. I’m new to New York.”
It was never a good idea to date a guy who was new to New York. In fact it was a terrible idea. You never felt more used than when you spent all your time taking some guy who was new to New York to Coney Island, etc., only to find him gone after six months because he missed his mother’s gumbo. It was always a waste of time, especially when they also turned out to be gay. I told him I had to go to the ladies’ room.
“Good luck,” he said.
He wished me luck because the Olive Tree Café had a comedy club in the basement called the Comedy Cellar. Going to the bathroom there was always a humiliating experience because you had to go downstairs and walk past the stage to get to it. The comedians made fun of anyone taking the long walk to the bathroom.
I could hear laughter as I descended the stairs and felt the dread building in me. I walked quickly down the aisle and saw the pathetic flailing comedian and the clusters of out-of-towners all stop what they were doing and watch me.
“What’s your hurry?” the comedian said. My whole body tensed. They never let you just walk by. “Get out of her way, ladies and gentlemen. This woman pees more than any human being on the face of the earth.” No one laughed. You’d think a man who looked like that, with long red hair past his waist, would just naturally get a lot of laughs without even opening his mouth. “Don’t forget to wash your hands this time,” he said.
“I didn’t come down here to use the bathroom,” I said. “I came down here to give you a message. Your mother just called and said you’re forty years old and it’s time you got your own apartment.” The whole audience exploded in laughter. I walked triumphantly to the ladies’ room. When I was done I had to walk past him again but he didn’t stray from his act.
Then he came upstairs and said, “Hey, you’re a pretty funny girl.” When a comedian tells you you’re funny it means he really hates you.
“I just want to be able to pee.”
“Yeah, well, I just want to be able to survive,” he said. He looked so miserable that I decided I would never use the bathroom there again, I would start using the bathroom at Caffe Reggio, just down the street.
I turned my attention to the screen and watched Charlie Chaplin. He was unicycling on a highwire with three monkeys jumping on his head. One monkey’s tail curled into his mouth. I laughed out loud. The comedian gave me a nasty look.
When I got home I shoved my wedding video into the VCR and watched myself say my vows. Love had made me strong and sure and honest. “For as long as we both shall live,” I watched my-self say. I rewound and watched his vows. “Forsaking all others …” I rewound. “Forsaking all others …” I rewound. “Forsaking all others …” I paused the tape and saw his face frozen on the filthy television screen. I marveled at his Academy Award–quality performance. “Forsaking all others.” “For as long as we both shall live.” I watched it over and over again.
Violet called and asked what I was doing.
“Nothing. Watching TV,” I said. My husband was frozen on the screen with his lips pursed about to say the “for” of “forsaking.”
“What are you watching?” she asked.
“Nothing. Flipping around.”
“I hope you’re not watching the wedding again,” she said. Violet didn’t like the video because she thought she looked fat. For a moment I hated her for accusing me of doing something that sad and pathetic.
“I don’t do that anymore,” I said. The pause time on the VCR ended and the tape started to play. “Forsaking all others” boomed through my bedroom.
I quickly hit the mute button. “You’ve gotta stop watching that thing. You’re not married to him anymore!” Violet announced as if I wasn’t aware of that fact. I thought about saying it wasn’t my wedding video, it was just a soap opera or something, but it was midnight and she would know it was a lie. “I can’t help it,” I said. “It’s my favorite movie. If I had a video of my divorce it would make a great double feature.”
“Promise me!” she said.
“I promise,” I mumbled. I had no idea what I was promising.
“I had a Hitler sighting,” she said. She was referring to her ex-boyfriend, David, who had recently grown a little square of hair over his lip and moved to her neighborhood. Everyone who lives in Hell’s Kitchen sees each other at least twice a day because there are only two diners, the Westway and the Galaxy. “I walked into Westway and there he was wearing bike shorts and carrying a briefcase. What an outfit. I ran out but I think he saw me.”
“You’ll wind up face-to-face with him sooner or later.”
“Not If I’m careful.”
I watched the strange muted groom on the television screen step on the wineglass wrapped in its red linen napkin. I watched the silent rabbi mouth his gobbledygook. I watched the spellbound groom raise the nine-hundred-dollar veil of the beautiful, laughing-like-an-idiot bride, and then, the way I am surprised by the end every time I watch Gone With the Wind, I am shocked to find that that bride that that groom is about to kiss is me.
I got off the phone, turn
ed up the volume, and fell asleep to the sounds of the reception, and Violet running like a linebacker to catch the bouquet.
The next morning I had been looking forward to sleeping late because Jerome didn’t need me until twelve-thirty, but I was awakened by the phone ringing. It was my ex-husband calling from an airplane. I had made the mistake of leaving my number with his secretary. “Did I wake you?” he asked.
“Not at all,” I declared, like a sophisticated divorcée.
“It’s only nine-fifteen your time,” he said, self-importantly, as if my time were somehow inferior to the time of the rest of the world.
“Well, I’ve already had breakfast and made love,” I said. I stretched my arms and smiled when I said this like Scarlett O’Hara when she wakes up after a tumultuous night with Rhett. Then I said, “Why are you calling me?” very curtly. Talking to him was like eating already chewed food.
“Come on, be nice,” he said, “I’m calling you from a plane.”
My call waiting went off and I made him hold on while I got it. It was Sprint trying to win me back from AT&T. I decided to stick with AT&T after considering my options for a while and then clicked back to my ex-husband.
“Well, I should go, this is costing me seven dollars a minute. I just was thinking about you and I had a feeling that I should call.”
I hated when people had a feeling like that for no reason. Especially someone on a plane. It creeped me out.
“Well, I’m fine.”
“Shows you I’m still a good guy.”
I didn’t say anything to that.
“Liv, have you put any thought into what you’re going to do for a career?”
“I’m going to think about it right now, hold on,” I said. I put the phone down next to me on the bed. I tried to force myself to think about a career.
“Liv … Liv …” I heard him say into the phone.
The night I finally left him I stood waiting for the elevator with my pathetic luggage and the tourist’s straw hat we had bought together in Mexico. I was a tourist in that building, in that life. I should have taken a picture. Then I would have seen that I was not the worldly sophisticated woman I thought I was, a woman with a past, a newborn divorcée. I would have seen myself holding my hat in one hand and a garbage bag of shoes in the other, with a certain wronged expression on my face, feeling at once very old and very young, as he stood screaming in the hallway, “I’m a good guy, Liv! I’m a good guy! Goddamnit, Liv! I’m a good guy!” He had followed me out to the elevator in his blue bathrobe and his hairy legs and his leather slippers. I could hear him screaming as I went all the way down in the elevator, “I’m a good guy, Liv.”
“I’m back,” I said into the phone.
“That wasn’t funny,” he said. “Comedienne should not be one of your career choices.”
“What do you suggest then?” I asked. “How about divorce attorney? Maybe I’ll go to law school.” Suddenly this conversation was making me feel worse than our whole marriage.
“Well, you do love to argue and you’re pushy enough,” he said, laughing. “You’re a pushy New Yorker.”
“I take that as a compliment.”
“You’re so pushy you could be a real estate broker,” he said, laughing hysterically like a seal. “A bro-kuh.”
Now he was being just plain insulting. We had made so much fun of the man who had sold us our apartment, a sad little man named Sandy.
I got off the phone. I knew that he had only called because he was bored on his flight and wanted to try using the airplane phone. He probably wanted to impress the person sitting next to him.
I went to my window and looked at the beating rain. Then I put on a T-shirt and panties and opened the front door. I wanted to see if anyone had The New York Times lying in front of his door so I could look at the help wanted ads again. I didn’t know why I was bothering because this wasn’t exactly the kind of building whose tenants read the Times. I dashed up one flight and saw a pair of child’s rain boots, neatly lined up on someone’s doormat. They were green rubber and looked like they might belong to a six-year-old boy. I didn’t think there were any children in the building.
The boots looked so incredibly sweet that I thought I might cry. I wanted to hold them. I wanted to remember the feeling of a small green rubber boot. I picked one up and then the other. Then I brought them down to my apartment and locked the door behind me. My heart was beating loudly.
I sat on the floor of my living room with my back against the wall and held the little boy’s boots in my arms. I put my hands in them and made them take little steps. It was time to get on with my life. I couldn’t sit here forever with my hands in a pair of stolen boots.
I got dressed, brushed my teeth, and returned the boots to their mat. Then I grabbed an umbrella and went down for the paper.
6.
BLCNY OVRLOOKS RIV
Judge Moody is retiring and there’s going to be a little party for him this afternoon here in the building,” Jerome said. “I would like you to escort me there. It will be our first official outing together. It will be like our first date, won’t it?” He looked straight in my direction with a bold blind look on his face.
Ray the bailiff had warned me about the party already and I had come in appropriately dressed for once. I wasn’t wearing a suit but I was wearing a really nice black-and-white velvet vintage dress.
“I’m afraid it’s going to be boring, isn’t it?” Jerome did this very English thing of saying something and then tagging a little question onto the end of it, therefore putting the burden of the conversation back on you. With other English people you could just nod or shake your head but with Jerome you had to answer.
I didn’t say anything.
“Isn’t it?” he asked again.
“I don’t know. I’ve never been to a judge’s retirement party,” I said. “Have I?” I added.
“No, I don’t suppose you have, have you?”
“No.”
This was typical of our conversations.
At five o’clock, Jerome flipped back the glass on his watch and felt the time. “Shall we?” he asked.
I stood up and started to the door. He met me there and grabbed for my elbow. I felt like a nurse taking a patient for tests in another part of the hospital. I did not want to be a nurse. “Velvet!” he said. “Lovely.”
We walked into the party and just stood a little to the right of the entryway. No one noticed our arrival and I really didn’t know what we were supposed to do. How did a blind man mingle? I wondered. I decided to describe the whole room. “We’re in a sort of a hall,” I said, “with very high ceilings and a mosaic floor with a geometrical star pattern and portraits of judges on the walls.”
My husband was right, I really could be a real estate agent. I sounded just like one. A Seeing Eye dog and a real estate agent weren’t that different. You led people places and barked. “As you can see the hall has the grand dimensions of a United States courthouse, yet it’s somehow warm and cozy as a country cottage,” I said, practicing my new career. “Isn’t it just drop-dead to die for?” I added in a Long Island accent.
“Would you please stop that,” Jerome said. “That’s terribly annoying.”
“The space has marvelous bones,” I said. An old woman with osteoporosis who had shown Jack and me an apartment had said that to us and I had always remembered it.
“What on earth does that mean?” Jerome asked.
“I’m not sure,” I said. “My ex-husband thinks I should be a real estate agent. What do you think?”
“I think it’s a vile idea, isn’t it? I can’t think of anything less relaxing than being in the company of a budding real estate agent.” I wasn’t aware that it was my job to relax him. “On the other hand, you’d probably be very charming at it, and I understand you don’t have to be a good speller, do you?”
It was true you didn’t
need any skills or an education. If you grew up in New York and got divorced, it seemed inevitable. You had to do it. But you usually did something else first. All the brokers who had shown us apartments had first failed at something else. One had been an investment banker, one a CPA, one had owned a consignment shop called Crème de la Crap. I wondered if it was possible to skip the doing-something-else part and just go into early partial-retirement as a real estate agent at twenty-six. Certainly failing at marriage was enough to qualify. It didn’t seem like a bad idea if I was just going to end up doing it anyway.
“Actually I really am going to go to real estate school,” I said. “I’ve been keeping an eye out for something to, you know, do, and that seems like the best thing.” I shouldn’t have said eye out.
“Really,” he said, flustered. “You neglected to mention that, didn’t you?” His hand dropped from my elbow. He didn’t know if I was kidding or not and I didn’t really know either. Standing in that hall with all those judges made it feel almost official, like a ceremony. I felt as if I had made a vow. “You promised me a year, Liv, and you’ve only given me a month,” Jerome said.
My husband had promised me a lifetime. “Well, I start in two weeks,” I said. I had no idea when I started but I wondered if it was somehow true.
“Good for you,” Jerome said, bitterly.
We stood in silence until an old man wearing his robe open to reveal a Hawaiian shirt finally walked over to us.
“Jerome, Bob Moody here.”
“Congratulations, Bob,” Jerome said. “We’ve been trying to get rid of you for a long time, haven’t we?”
“I’m the last person in this room who should be retiring. I look fifteen years younger than all of you.”
I laughed. For some reason I really liked judge humor.
“Is that true, Liv?” Jerome asked me.
“You all look pretty old to me,” I said.
Jerome put out his hand very close to his side like a robot and Judge Moody shook it. “Well, Bob, this is a happy day for all of us, isn’t it?” Jerome said cheerfully. Jerome introduced me and said, “Liv is my new reader and she is also, I just found out, an aspiring real estate agent. Isn’t that right?”
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