I had, by then, a catalogue of coats. When I was a student, and for sometime afterward, I did not have a proper coat, or a coat that recalled in one iota the coats I had worn as a child, made of corduroy or worsted wool. In the spring and fall I wore an olive-green suede jacket I had bought at a second-hand store, which was missing the top button. The lining was acetate, peach-colored; in some places the lining was rent and torn under the arms and had separated from the hem in the back. The suede had rubbed off around the buttons and the button holes, and at the cuffs. These places were a sad, rusty brown, as if the jacket had been scorched and then doused with water. When it was very cold I exchanged the jacket for an equally old black nylon jacket I’d found left after a party at the apartment of friends who lived off campus: I’d worn it home when it started snowing. Although I’d dutifully inquired, no one had claimed it: it was the kind of apartment in which a stray jacket could have resided for months. Along the seams the black had weathered to pearl, and tufts of feathers, like cotton wool, interlaced the baffled stitches. The linings of the pockets were torn, so that for years in the winter I would find that my keys or spare change had migrated to the back of the coat, and I would have to take it off and shake it in order to pay for a coffee or unlock a door. To me these coats proclaimed that I was uninterested in clothes: I was a vagabond or, better, a tramp, my mind set on other things: Hold on tight, I would say to myself, and, they called me the Hyacinth girl, and Come in from under the shadow of the red rock. The impression was entirely false. I cared in my own way desperately about clothes, and it did not occur to me that there were others, too, going around in tattered clothes reciting; the friends I admired and coveted seemed to wear their clothes like ceremonial armor, as tatting made from the cigarette smoke, cocoons from which some had already emerged as butterflies. About my purdah in tatters I was like a novitiate who has given up the world out of fear.
The first coat I coveted as a child was blue. I was five when my parents bought the white house outside the city in which I would grow up with my sister and brother. The house had iron windows with catches that opened with the turn of a crank. My room had a window seat and a closet with a window: it was a house to look out from. For many weeks my mother had looked at houses; this house, she told me, had belonged for thirty years to a man called Mr. MacGregor. The MacGregors had fixed the window cranks, the MacGregors had bought a new boiler! There was a screened porch with a door whose catch stuck. The screen door to the kitchen locked. Mr. MacGregor showed my mother how the radiators needed to be bled.
When we are children our fears are uncontainable, there is no yesterday in which something did not happen. As a little girl, I knew by heart the story of Peter Rabbit who is nearly killed by a farmer because he has disobeyed his mother. I repeated in my mind the story of his mad escape from the assassin who, before the story begins, killed his father and put him in a pie. Running from Mr. MacGregor, Peter is caught in a gooseberry net and is snared by the large buttons on his jacket. I was a child who had been brought up in the city. I had no idea what a gooseberry net might be—it was confusing to think of a net to catch berries. But next came a sentence that seemed to me then of great beauty: It was a blue jacket with brass buttons, quite new. I immediately wanted such a coat. My mother no longer made my coats; instead, they were handed down to me by an older cousin. Nothing in the bags my mother unpacked remotely resembled a blue coat with brass buttons that had been made for a rabbit. The space inhabited by my mother and me included even then my utter inability to describe to her what it was I wanted. But had the coat saved Peter? By abandoning his coat, by sacrificing it to Mr. McGregor, he had escaped as surely as if he had traded the coat for his life. A fair exchange, it seemed to me, a coat for a rabbit. For after all, in the end Mr. McGregor hung up the little jacket and the shoes for a scarecrow to frighten the blackbirds. From our new house, my father took the train into the city very early in the morning and returned late at night. When I looked out the window from my window seat, my mother was in the garden that had been Mr. MacGregor’s, setting out bulbs.
The second coat I coveted had belonged to my father. It was a covert cloth stadium coat, lined with brown plush. He had worn this coat when he was in college in New Hampshire, and the belt, which had a leather buckle, was frayed. It hung in the attic closet next to my mother’s silk shantung dance dresses. These dresses had watercolor patterns in pinks and blues, and the waists were small. The closet was lined with cedar. Next to the dresses my father’s coat was a behemoth, pocked with tiny moth holes. In the left pocket, which was lined with chamois, was an old half-finished tube of lipstick. The case was black Bakelite and the color was Splendor Red. It had been made by Elizabeth Arden. After I finished school and returned to New York I hardly ever stayed again with my mother and father for more than one or two nights, but one of those nights I came down from the attic with a paper bag into which I had folded the coat and asked my father whether I could have it. My father is a tall, broad-shouldered man. He is a person who takes up space in a room. When I put it on, the frayed belt went twice around my waist and the hem skimmed the floor.
I retired the black baffled coat. Each time I had been moved to wash it the dye had further bled. In many places it was no longer black but the color of smoke. I wore my father’s coat for a series of winters, to the large office building where I worked at a magazine, and I wrapped it tightly around me while I waited for whomever I was going out to lunch with to finish a cigarette in the shadow of the building where we were protected from the wind, and I wore it to parties where I left it in the pile of coats in a distant bedroom of huge apartments that belonged to people who were decades older than I was, whose medicine cabinets were filled with dried-up bottles of Mercurochrome and vials of tranquilizers. When, instead, there was a rented coat-rack in the hall, I would carefully put my coat on the floor, rolled up and behind the tote bags of editors who were bringing galleys home to read on the train. It seems clear to me now that no one would have stolen my coat or mistaken it for their own, but I was wary. Much later, when I began to have parties in the apartment with the long hall, when I went into the bedroom to make sure that no one had left a cigarette smoking on the windowsill, I would notice furtive signs that reminded me of my own—a jacket tucked carefully into the corner behind the bookcase, a bag hidden behind the armchair pushed against the wall.
In that apartment, by the time I began to shift the winter and summer things in the closet it was usually either too hot or too cold. Winter jackets had been pulled to the fore and crammed between the summer things, or the reverse. I often found crumpled juice boxes in the boots, and cheap toys that had been given to the children as favors at birthday parties which I’d stuffed into the closet, planning to throw them out after they’d gone to bed. These toys were usually in paper bags that also held candy which had turned white and was smeared with mold. The mold in the boots and the forgotten candy was no one’s fault but my own. It wasn’t remotely possible that anyone but me would clean out the closet.
At the time, I had a dozen coats. These coats included the first coats I had bought, and the last one, which had been bought for me. My father’s coat, with its fraying hem, was among them. I found it impossible to give it away to the annual thrift shop drive at the school the children attended. This thrift shop opened for one week a year, in the basement of Synod Hall. The school was on the grounds of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, and the years the children were there transpired in an atmosphere of damp stone and crying peacocks. I usually worked at the thrift shop, which was part of a fair on the close—there was a bake sale, and a plant sale, and children ran around and squirted water pistols—and for weeks before I sorted through the children’s clothes and brought over large shopping bags of outgrown party shoes and snowsuits. At the shop I liked sorting through the bags other people brought. In those years the shop was a kind of clothes swap—months afterward at a party I would find that I was wearing the ho
stess’s Japanese skirt, which she’d given to the thrift shop; at a piano recital another mother was wearing a jacket with purple buttons I’d had made for me in the early nineteen-eighties. I had even acquired one of my coats there: a blue cape with a funnel hood.
The first coats I bought were in Venice, and I bought them on the same day. I had just been married for the first time. My husband and I had expected to begin our trip in Rome, but we had spent almost a week, unexpectedly, in Sperlonga, a seaside town between Rome and Naples. When we decided to leave Sperlonga, and pick up our trip, as we had intended, Rome—where we had originally meant to stay in a friend’s apartment—had become for various reasons insupportable, and we went instead to Venice.
It was chilly in Venice. Our hotel was next to the opera house, and the voices of singers hung in the cold air of Piazza San Marco. At night a fog curtain closed over the lagoon. I had brought my green suede jacket. The lining by then had deteriorated to a fretwork of peach satin in the seams. We walked all day, and in the late afternoon, when my fingertips had turned white and then yellow, I would return to the hotel and turning on the tap full blast, lower myself as best as I could into the hip bath in the tiny bathroom in order to get warm. My husband had not been to Venice before. While I was in the tub he would be out, drawing. In the tub I read The Golden Bowl. One afternoon when it was warmer, rather than retreat to the tub after my husband had departed to draw and smoke cheroots on the Accademia Bridge, I found myself staring into a shop window lined with pale leather handbags in ice cream colors. Toward the back of the shop I could see a rack of coats. Inside, the lights illuminating the glass shelves in the window lit up their beveled edges. The coats were black, brown, crimson, and loden green. The store was deserted. Perhaps the shop girl was having a coffee in the back? If she had been visible, eager to help, I probably would not have gone in and tried on a coat, but alone I felt emboldened, a child playing dress-up. The lines of the coat I put on were nineteenth century. It had rounded lapels, a wasp-waist accomplished by back darts, a bell-shaped skirt, and a single row of embossed pewter buttons that reached the hem, which was ankle length. The sleeves were full but cinched at the wrists with matching buttons. The buttons said “Fendi.” The general effect was equestrian. Perhaps because I had recently left behind in Sperlonga a pair of gold and coral earrings that I had not bought, although I now pined for them, a week later, with a kind of desperation (I’d even written to ask if they were still in the shop), I wouldn’t have thought of buying it.
I stood for a long time looking into the mirror, in a kind of dream; it was the kind of dream, as the years went on, I know now, in which most of my decisions occur, as if my life were a cloth in which I had missed essential parts, that I was filling in stitch by stitch, like Penelope. I could not afford the coat, even at the very reduced price (seventy-five percent off!). I did think about whether my husband would like the coat: he would, I thought. For a number of years I had been wearing almost exclusively silk and cotton crocheted dresses—garments that many years later had a second life by appearing regularly in Shakespeare productions put on by children. (I spent so much time in the shop that sold those dresses, drinking sauterne with the owner, Lola, that my husband had adopted one of her daughters, who was called Violet, as a model, and had begun to take an interest in the colors the clothes were dyed, which took place in the back. Later, Lola’s husband, who did the dye lots, tried to run her over with a tractor, on a place they had upstate, and the shop closed.) My husband liked the dresses, although many people did not. He would like the coat, I thought. While I was trying it on a girl had appeared. She was a tall girl, with very high-heeled black patent-leather boots and matching hair—she stood, slightly bored, by the cash register. When I felt I had looked at myself long enough I asked her about the boots on the floor. I wanted someone to talk to. They too were seventy-five percent off. Only a few days before I had refused to buy a pair of earrings that were roughly one fiftieth the cost of the coat. I realized I didn’t want her to know how much I wanted the coat—I wanted her to think I bought coats every day of the week, at the drop of a hat. In the moment, convincing the shop girl, whose patent-leather hair, I could now see, was threaded with red glitter, of this entirely untrue fact was of utmost importance. I was wearing the coat—a garment from which it was clear to me I would never be parted.
In order to sit down and try on the boots I had to sweep the voluminous skirt of the coat to the side. There was only one pair of boots in my size. The soft leather was the color of cognac, and the top of the boot, which stopped a few inches above the ankle, was scalloped. I have had those boots now for over a quarter of a century. The leather of the shoe has almost completely disintegrated, and where the leather meets the soles, there are holes that the shoemaker (to whom I have taken the boots countless times) has finally despaired, and encouraged me, with the air of a sister of mercy, to throw them out. Then, without looking at the price, I put the boots on the counter for the girl, who was beginning now to show interest: perhaps I would like to see something else?
No, I was finished. Could I wear the coat out? The girl cautioned me that the coat was not returnable: ricevuto di ritorno. I spread my fingers in a mock gesture of supplication: what the gods had willed was not mine to choose. She raised her eyebrows. And what, we seemed to say to each other, could be returned anyway? The girl folded my old suede jacket and put it in the bag with the boots—I was tempted to give it to her. Outside the shop it was colder. Damp was beginning to seep out of the stones. I walked back to the hotel by the opera house, which was quiet now in the late afternoon, and when I got there I took off the coat, hung it up in the wardrobe, a black affair trimmed with gold leaf and a picture of a pagoda under a lotus, lay down on the bed, and went to sleep.
When I woke up an hour later my husband had returned. He was sitting in a chair by the bed, wearing his anorak, and he was drawing me. “Don’t move,” he said. I stayed as I was for a moment, on my back with my right hand flung over my head and my left leg bent. Then I stretched. “I found something for you,” he said. He had come in so recently that his beard was still beaded with water. He looked like Neptune—he often looked like Neptune. When I think of him now, of those years, for I still often see him—after all we were together for almost a decade and a daughter together, although we parted soon afterward—I imagine him at a distance, as if he were always either walking toward me or away from me. When he painted he held the brush between his teeth. We were both subject to fits. He was visibly pleased by what he had found for me, and when he suggested that we could go look at it I was happy to go. You can’t have it now, he said.
I had woken in a paroxysm of guilt. The long coat, unbuttoned, hid in the closet. I put on my old jacket, which wasn’t warm enough, and we walked through the hotel’s red lobby into the streets, now lit up like electric eels against the dark. We passed a wine bar we had liked the day before, and a few paces beyond it, in a cul-de-sac, was a shop. The doors were closed and locked, but the windows were illuminated: in one arched window was a hip-length suede coat. The suede was the color of pale cocoa, and the shoulders and button placket were outlined in thin bands of chocolate leather. Reflected in the plate glass, my tattered suede jacket was superimposed on the coat. At the back of the house by the cove where as a girl I went with my mother and father in the summer, there was a cellar door you could stand on. It was painted copper, with rust-resistant paint, and even in the morning, the metal was hot on my bare calloused feet. There weren’t any mirrors in the house, except for the medicine cabinet over the sink. If you stood on the door, you could see yourself in the kitchen casement window. When we returned after almost a year away, I would stand on the door and look. Behind me were the pine trees, their green needles ending in spikes that matched the cellar door, as if they’d been singed. I would scrutinize my reflection, which came back to me neatly divided into quadrants. Had I grown? I had no idea of what I looked like. I saw a middle-sized
girl, slightly round in ways she found detestable, with a furrow between her brows, squinting.
My taller reflection on the shop window wavered. There was condensation on the glass. My husband drew an X with his finger. “There’s your coat,” he said. He had seen it earlier this afternoon. They were holding it. I could try it on in the morning. He would have bought it but had wanted to make sure it fit. I burst into tears. How could I have not known? In the shop, trying on the coat I had bought, with its snake of buttons and swashbuckling skirt, how could I have not known that a few blocks away, perhaps at that very moment, my husband had found a coat for me? A chasm opened. At the bottom I could see coats piled willy-nilly: beautiful coats, fur coats, tattered coats. When I was eight years old, I was in love with my best friend, Joanne, who lived a few minutes’ walk from my house on a street called Beach Drive. “Beach Drive” I used to like to say to myself. Where was the sea? The street led nowhere near the sea. We played almost every day at her house or at mine. At her house we were often joined on the swing set by Gus, who lived next door, who was a dwarf. He was older than we were, but he was smaller. He was kind, and he knew everything. He was, my friend Joanne said, “a font of wisdom.” Gus knew how far we were from the sun, and when the sun was likely to burn out and leave us in cold and darkness. Sometimes we played at cold and darkness. We draped an old tarp over a bush. If it was winter, we took off our coats. It was important, Gus told us, to feel the cold. His birthday was on leap year: although he was twelve, he was really only three years old. There was no end, I was learning, to conundrums. My children have grown up in New York City in apocryphal times—after the Twin Towers exploded we began to worry immediately, when the children left for school, or when we went to the store or to work, whether we would ever see each other again, a worry that took root and grew leaves in every cell of our bodies. If you took apart our veins you would see the snake eyes of those shoots whose tendrils have rooted us to a spot of fear, colonized by small, skittering wild life. Because of this our children do not take the bus or the subway or walk anywhere alone until they are old enough to walk away, without us.
An Enlarged Heart Page 9