I leaned forward and pushed the pause button. “This guy is saying his wedding vows?”
Caroline turned to me. “This was Simon.”
“Original.”
She smiled. I started the tape again.
Simon:—new color. When she would come in, I’d know about the lipstick. Sometimes I’d go into the bathroom right away and sometimes I’d wait until I got home. When I got home I’d undress and lie on my bed and lay the cigarette butts all over my chest. I’d put them under my tongue and in my ears and my nose and even in my ass once. The lipstick carried the perfume, the faintest essence, and then … well, then I did the usual, the business. I didn’t consider this depraved. She was a fetish, a beautiful fetish. After a few weeks, Ashley came to recognize me ever so little … a smile, a politeness. Maybe she sensed something … my quivering attentiveness. I tended to sweat, I tended to take away her plate too quickly, like I was hurrying her out. I realized that I had to keep my job. I became the best busboy at Dante’s Café. They wanted to make me a waiter but I refused. Waiters, I saw, were too busy. They couldn’t stand at the back of the room and study the people. This I could do. I could watch her talk, I could watch her listen, watch her get cigarettes out of her purse, then smoke them and put them into the ashtray. She usually came in with a crowd, maybe once a week. Actors, TV people, Broadway people. Someone else always paid. Ashley didn’t even offer, not once. She would come in wearing jeans and a baseball cap, and it worked, or she would come in wearing a mink that went all the way to the floor and weighed about a hundred pounds, and that was right, too. Men didn’t scare her—this, by far, is the most erotic quality a woman can have. She loved men—in their varieties. She was a little older than she looked. She was twenty-six. She could be witty and quick. It seemed that she was spending more time with movie people. Some older guys, directors. And also one man in particular. He was her new guy, and it looked pretty serious to me. God, did I watch them carefully. She listened to him. There was something about her that he understood. Sometimes they took a table in the back where they just sat there reading, sometimes he would read aloud to her. Once I saw that he was reading to her from The Confessions of St. Augustine. I went out and found the book and I read it. What a fucking classy thing to do together. A couple of times they stayed till closing time. They seemed to take great pleasure in each other. It was about sex but it was about a lot of other things, too. He matched her vitality. Here he was sucking in other men’s cigarette smoke, vitally, in a pressed shirt and reading St. Augustine to one of the most beautiful girls in the city. Then one time he came in carrying an ice chest, a big one. It was early, maybe six in the evening, before it got busy. He had the ice chest up on his shoulder and took it into the kitchen. There were four yellowfin tuna in there, maybe forty pounds each. I was stupid with awe. Maybe I was at an age where I just fell in love with everybody, I don’t know. Anyway, the guy said he had caught them that afternoon out in the Gulf Stream fifty miles off Montauk. He held up the fish. They were huge. Beautiful. [Simon pulls a match from the matchbook and lights it contemplatively, watching the flame burn toward his fingers.] Each fish was a grotesque amplification of his manhood. I was fascinated. [He throws down the match.] I would never have what he had, never. He gave one fish to the owner and another to the chef. He was going to have a bunch of people in that evening and he wanted the other two fish cooked for his table. God, he was fabulous. He was handsome and well dressed and becoming famous for something, and he was arrogant. Who wouldn’t be? He was about thirty-two or thirty-three. He was very sure of how it would go—I heard the conversations, of course—I was invisible, I was a shade, I was the smoke behind the table. [Simon lights another match, blows it out. Now his face is cold, dull.] Then, a couple of hours later, when the man had just come back from the men’s room, on the way to his seat he turned to me with a sort of conspiratorial whisper. I was thrilled for a moment, then he said something like, “One of the crappers isn’t flushing, pal.” That was what he said. I said okay and went into the men’s room. The fucker had stopped up the toilet with paper. All the fixtures in the restaurant were old as hell, and I had to unclog the toilets every couple of nights. But this was too much. I collapsed in that toilet stall on my knees and looked at his shit and the shitted-up toilet paper and I fucking wept. [He looks up at the camera.] I wept because I was an ugly fucker, Caroline, I wept because I was just smart enough to understand my own misery. And I guess I wept for love, too. I wept for love. I can’t really say it better than that. I was certain that I would never be loved. Never. I swore that if I ever had the chance for somebody I loved, I would take it right away. Never hesitate. I was in the stall for something like ten minutes. Finally the manager came in … [He rubs his eyes, breathes, looks away.] This is always who I’m going to be, Caroline. I’m always going to hate myself, I’m always going to be that fifteen-year-old kid, Caroline, always outside, always fucked-up somehow. I’ve made three big movies now, and each one was more successful than the last, and they gave me the Oscar, and I’m glad, I’m ecstatic. Now everyone thinks I’m a genius, but what does it really mean? Why am I saying this? I am trying to say that my whole life I have been trying to be happier. I have been trying to find my best self, and I don’t think I’m getting there much. So … my vow to you is that I will love you as best I can, but I warn you that I am a fucked-up person in many ways, Caroline. [He sits looking at the camera, then exhales, gets up, retrieves another cigarette, and returns.] Now, if you would, please open the small box that came with this videotape. Okay? You have it there, I hope. I made some calls from the plane while I was thinking of you and had a guy meet me. What you have, Caroline, in your hand, is a Roman antiquity. The stone is camelian. If you hold it up to the light, you’ll see that it refracts the light through it, sort of in a star … the gold band is highly imperfect. The figure on the stone, the goddess with a helmet on, is Athena. The dealer told me it was made by hand two thousand years ago, more or less, and was discovered in a cave in Italy in about 1947. Some Brazilian millionaire owned it for a long time. We’ll never know who wore this ring, Caroline, but its first wearer was probably a young Roman girl born to a wealthy family. Perhaps it was passed on for a number of generations, perhaps it was stolen and buried in the cave with the other loot. I don’t know but I don’t care. I want only for you to have it … I hope I don’t disappoint you, Caroline. We’ll have to—see, when I saw you in the bar, I was the boy who worshiped Ashley Montgomery, except now it was you I worshiped. Today I saw a woman who had been places, who could take it, who could take me, who would fucking kick it back at me if she had to. This is my excitement and this is my terror … You see, my heart thrills to your heart, Caroline, my dark heart thrills to your dark heart. That is my vow, Caroline. My vow to you. [Simon gets up from the table. Static. End.]
I found the performance wildly self-indulgent yet strangely moving.
“We were secretly married three days later, back in New York.” Caroline’s voice betrayed no happiness at the memory. “I didn’t bother inviting anybody—the whole thing was too weird. He arranged for a judge to come to his apartment. I took a taxi. We hadn’t even slept together, but that night we did. He asked me not to use birth control, and I said okay. I don’t know how I didn’t get pregnant. We knew each other all of six months, and in that time we had, like, seven weeks together. He was working on films, flying to L.A., that kind of stuff. He bought this apartment and we started to pick out furniture …”
She stopped. All of what she was telling me sounded pre-partory to something else, but I said nothing. “I’m sure he slept with other women in that time, but he was very caring toward me, and given the strangeness of the way we’d met, I didn’t complain, although in time I would have. He came back to the city in August, really busy. He had an office in the Village, and he was busy there, and he had meetings with people—studio people, production people, screenwriters, whoever. At night we would spend some time together and I’d go
to sleep. Then Simon would go out. He had a guy who drove around with him, Billy Munson. Billy knew the city really well. Simon would go out and just look for things, situations, whatever. I once asked him if I could go with him and he said no. Sometimes he made tapes.
“So after one of those nights he didn’t come back. I wanted to call the police but I waited for an extra day, because I knew that if I was wrong, he would be angry about the publicity, people saying look, his wife doesn’t even know where he is. Then I called them and the days started to go by and I started to get really, really scared. Of course as soon as he started to miss appointments, everyone started to call, freaking out, worried. And then the police found him downtown …” Caroline tilted her head back, eyes shut. “Somehow I wasn’t really surprised. But I was mad. How could he have the nerve to die or get killed or whatever just when we’d gotten started? I’m still sort of angry at him. But very sad, too. We used to sit up at night watching movies, and he’d see something and stop it and go back and explain the camera angle and the light and how the dialogue worked. He knew all the dialogue.”
Caroline stood up and as she began to drift along the walls of the apartment, I admired the length of her legs, the perfection of her neck. “For a long time I used to think the detectives would figure it out. They say they haven’t given up, but I guess they have. The stupid private detectives are worthless, truly, except that one of them got me a copy of the file, the one I showed you last night.”
“Has the studio helped?” I asked.
She shook her head. “It’s a whole bunch of new executives from the time he was there. He’s dead, so he can’t make them any new money, you know? I mean the movies he did still make money, but it’s all residual—” She interrupted herself. “Do people come to you with all kinds of problems? Things they know about?” she asked. “I imagine you know all sorts of important city officials and everything.”
“People sometimes come to me, yes.”
“Like what, who?”
The answer, I saw, was a necessary step for her. She wanted to understand herself as doing something that was not extraordinarily strange. “A couple months ago,” I said, “the girlfriend of a cop came in and told me about how her boyfriend beats up dealers. That’s not unusual, except that one of the dealers is his brother. Then I had one not so long ago, an old guy who reads my column tells me how his wife, who had an artificial hip, they live in Brooklyn, got run over by some kids in one of those boom cars—ran her over going forty miles an hour and didn’t stop. Never caught. That kind of thing, people come in, you know.”
“They want notice, some sort of—”
“They want a transaction, they want to tell about what happened, what they feel about it.”
She pondered this.
“Of course, some just want attention,” I added.
“I’m not exactly in that category, I don’t think. I don’t want you to mention me in your column.”
“Right.”
“I want it all kept between us.”
“Right.”
She lifted an eyebrow. “You were very drunk last night.”
“Yes.”
“You said—”
“I said the crazy things drunk men say.”
I suppose these words challenged Caroline, for she smiled and came over and stopped an inch before me. I examined her face carefully, the smooth forehead—younger than my wife’s—the eyebrows and large blue eyes—flashing with amusement as they watched my own—the high cheekbones, the nose, slightly on the strong side, the mouth, the lips pursing suggestively, then her eyes again. So blue you could just go into them. She was adding velocity to whatever it was that we were about. She drew a little breath and held it, looking straight at me. She had returned from the place that I wanted to go; she knew why people went there, she could show me my truest self, she was amused by my turmoil, she expected me to succumb to her, yet she would not judge me by it, for it was in the natural order of things. She let her breath out and glanced downward, her lashes dark, then glanced up again, then pressed her index finger against her bottom lip, pressing it ever so lightly, the fingernail the beautiful waxy white of cake icing, and then the coy pink tip of her tongue appeared, touching her finger, which then, ever so slightly wetted, the swirl of the fingerprint glistening, moved from her lips through the air to mine, and when I looked from that finger back to her eyes, she was staring into me with an appetite that went past me and whatever sexual ministrations I might be capable of and beyond, into the far reaches of her own desires.
“If I were you …” she whispered.
“Yes?”
She pointed at my waist. “I’d turn it off.”
She kept her eyes on mine.
“Turn it off?” I said.
“Turn it off.”
The beeper.
“You’re fun,” I said.
She nodded once. “Yes. I am fun.”
Her bed was enormous. She pulled a barrette from her hair and tossed it onto a dresser, followed by her watch, then began to take off her clothes, pulling her T-shirt above her head and letting it fall inside-out onto a chair. Her bra was delicate and black and pressed her breasts toward each other. Then her eyes looked downward as her fingers touched the button of her jeans. Never have I felt such guilt, never such excitement. I could feel the blood filling my penis heavily as I slipped out of my shoes and shirt and pants and underwear. At my age, I’m neither embarrassed nor proud of my body—I haven’t gained the weight that a lot of men do, and I still get to the club maybe once a week. She, on the other hand, was magnificent in her nakedness. She had not dieted away her essence like so many women in New York; she was fleshy and full, with muscle in her arms and back and thighs.
“Just stand there a moment,” I said.
“Why?”
“You know why.”
I noticed a cluster of lines and colored shapes on her shoulder blade.
“What’s that?”
She turned and looked over her shoulder. “That’s what’s left of my butterfly. That was the wing.”
“Tattoo?”
“Yes. I have one more time. The doctor uses a laser.”
“Hurt?”
“Not too much. The laser breaks up the ink.”
“I sort of wish I’d seen it. The butterfly, I mean.”
She looked at me. “It was beautiful.”
Then she slipped beneath the sheets.
“You’re shaking,” she said.
“Yes.”
We took our time. Her passions did not embarrass her. The winter light was low across the city outside the window. She held my tongue tight with her teeth; another moment, in another position, she closed her eyes and frowned, as if concentrating on an intricate piece of music. I remember her fingers splayed out on the sheets, grasping and releasing, I remember the blonde hair caught in her mouth, and the earring that came loose and fell upon the sheet that she reflexively whisked to the floor, and the width of her hips in front of me, and my sucking as much of one of her breasts into my mouth as possible, suffocating on it, and the firm tumescence of her nipple, which I could feel touch the roof of my mouth. I remember that in the last moment I pushed as hard and deep and as urgently as I could, pushed against my own inconsequence and with the meanness that most men possess. And later, I pressed my face into her warm flat belly and felt a gladness bloom in me, a gladness that life was still presenting me with possibilities—that, right or completely wrong, I had embraced, in the form of this woman, the strangeness of possibility itself. I was wrong to have fucked her, but I had not been wrong to have wanted to; no, that was very right.
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