by Alon Preiss
The best movies, Eden always insisted, were all half-completed, things so daring and uncompromising that production had to be shut down for lack of financial backing. Eden bought bootleg videotapes of movies that were never finished. She had a substantial collection. She would watch these films alone in the dark, and she would imagine what each might have been, and sometimes she would cry.
There was a reason for this interest, or obsession, Alice supposed, and she thought she knew what it was.
Eden left Alice at the entrance to the park, and she ran north to her apartment, sweating and exhilarated and sad, and thinking about Alice’s life, and her own. Eden lived over an Indonesian restaurant in a very old building, in a second-floor apartment that she and her boyfriend illegally sublet from an old friend who’d had it for years. She dashed up the stairs, unlocked the door with the key that hung around her neck when she ran. Roger was just waking up, lying on the floor in front of the convertible, which was half folded-up. The TV was on.
“Hey,” Eden said, dripping sweat onto the wooden floor of the front hallway.
“Hey,” he said. Hearing her voice, still looking at the TV.
He was smoking a cigarette and drinking coffee, and the hand that held the cigarette shook just a bit.
“That ‘rock star’ called you again,” he said with a laugh, not looking at her. When he said “rock star,” his voice was filled with ironic contempt.
“Thanks,” Eden said. “Were you nice to him?”
Roger didn’t answer.
Eden’s rock star was named Derek, and she’d never met him. He was her fantasy voice in the darkness, and she knew neither what he looked like, nor how he spent his time when he wasn’t calling her up and talking to her about nothing. His more-frequent presence in her life and her mind didn’t make Roger noticeably jealous, and Eden couldn’t understand why this was.
On television, a talk show host interviewed some sad woman whose thirteen-year-old daughter was a drug addict who slept with her priest to get crack. Darlene, the caption on the TV screen read underneath the mother’s crying face. Drug Addict Daughter Slept With Priest For Crack. The woman said that she’d thought she was coming on the show so that her daughter could surprise her on her birthday. She didn’t know her daughter smoked crack. She didn’t know her daughter screwed priests. “This is my birthday,” the woman said. “You told me I was coming on TV to get the mother of the year award,” and her little daughter said, “Fuck you mom”; the censors bleeped it, but you could read her lips. Roger was smiling, almost laughing. Behind him, hanging on the wall, a blowup of a photograph he’d taken of Eden in Utah, standing behind her as she sat cross-legged on the edge of a cliff, surrounded by hard grey rock sprouting little brownish shrubs; Eden stared off at a horizon of flat, level mesas against a clear blue sky. A snapshot from their vacation together. Roger had signed the photograph, and he had numbered it.
“Close the place down last night?” she asked. He was a bartender now. That was OK. But there was something else about him, since he’d become a bartender. His plans had changed. She remembered the project he had dreamed about when they’d first met, someday publishing a book of his photographs and corresponding poems. His photograph of Eden on the cliff would adorn the front cover, he’d promised, and its poem would go on the first page. His poetry had been so beautiful then, and his photography had nearly matched his beautiful words. At least that was the way she remembered it. He didn’t talk about his book anymore; changed the subject when she brought it up. He sat on the floor in the afternoon. Just running out the clock, waiting to get through this phase of his life, whatever it was. His smoke hung in a dense heavy cloud between them.
“Yeah,” he said, and he coughed. “I closed the place down last night.”
She looked him over, sitting there on the floor of the apartment, Roger in his white tank-top undershirt, his new gut hanging over his belt loop. Smoking a cigarette, watching some afternoon talk show and laughing knowingly and ironically, feeling above it all. Softly, she told him, “In five years, you’ll be a lawyer.” The very moment she realized it, she said it. He looked over at her, smoke drifting out of his nostrils, settling into the rug. “I don’t want to live through that,” she said. “You’ll spend your days helping mutual funds rape the Third World. You’ll cry about your lost life. I don’t want to be here to see you do that to yourself. Destroy what you could have been. Become a lawyer.”
He took another drag on his cigarette. “You’re just out of breath,” he said, as though that explained anything.
“The future Roger,” Eden mused, almost to herself. “I don’t know him yet, and I don’t want to. He doesn’t deserve me.” She tried to picture this man — older, with short clipped hair (what was left of it), stupid expensive tailored sharply creased suit, stupid shiny yellow tie, fat pale saggy face wearing a ragged bored sleepy dissatisfied frown. Up to no good, unconcerned with transcendence and beauty. She shuddered.
“After your shower, you’ll feel better.” He turned back to the TV show, and that little arrogant smile came back to his face, laughing inside at the people on TV talk shows, working class people with problems who wanted to get on television.
“I’ll feel better after my shower,” Eden said, “if I come out of the bathroom and you’re moved out. But I’ll give you till tomorrow.” Just like that — not even thinking about it, she just realized all of a sudden that she would feel better if he were gone, knowing that something would move into her life to replace him if she wanted. There would be none of the pain and uncertainty and long-lived, achingly painful longing that she’d always assumed would accompany such a breakup.
“We’ve been together four years,” he said. A little plea, without much energy. Four years wasn’t so long, after all. But a lot could happen in four years; a lot could change. “Do you want me to come to Alice’s surprise party?” he asked. “Do you want to still hang your arm off me? Just for support in an unfriendly crowd?” Unfriendly crowd. Roger was pretending to be helpful, really just reminding her of her failure, of the humiliation she would face tonight. She turned her back on him, walked out of the room and into the bathroom, shut the door. She turned up the steam, undressed, stood under the hot water for a half hour, imagining Roger in the shower with her, a couple of years ago when he was just different in a very good way. She remembered running down a carpeted hallway in some motel out in Utah, dripping wet from the swimming pool, and finding him in their room, sitting at the table, pen in hand, having composed the poem inspired by the sight of Eden sitting cross-legged on the rocks. She remembered him whispering the poem in her ear, and even now, thinking about it, she just melted. The heat of the shower pounded against her. It was as though the man in her living room sitting in front of the television had killed the man that Roger was supposed to become.
When she came out of the bathroom in her light-weight summer bathrobe, he was gone, as she had known he would be. She’d given him a day to move out, and instead he’d moved out right away. If she’d just told him to leave, he would have stayed for months. The TV was gone, all his clothes, all his LP’s and CD’s. That was that.
Alice glimpsed Blake Maurow for the very first time across a crowded room during the intermission of a concert of pieces by Schubert. Blake was sipping champagne, standing on the plush carpeting, talking to an older woman who wore a string of pearls, and whom he seemed to know only slightly. He was sleek and handsome and elegant in his well-pressed, tailor-made suit, but more importantly to Alice, he projected a general sense of dignity and kindness in the very way he held himself, by something in those deep eyes. He was so immediately complicated that she could describe her first impression of him only after years of having known him.
Alice was spending her days on the telephone with her accountant and with the bankruptcy lawyer her father had retained for her. Acquiring half a million dollars in bad debt in just a couple of days, she’d moved out of her luxury building on the East Side and into a li
ttle one-room apartment in Queens that was actually underground, and where it was always 2 a.m., and where she slept in a little fold out couch, rats running through the walls and screaming at her, a black and white sitcom often flickering through the darkness, and bills and collection notices and painfully threatening letters sitting noisily on a little table in the corner. Alice was working harder and harder and sinking deeper and deeper. No one would hire a failed entrepreneur in a stale economy — especially one who, pursuing her own nearly successful get rich scheme, had utterly neglected her studies during her final two years in college — and her collection of employer rejection letters filled a thick file folder. She was five hundred thousand dollars worse than broke, no one would hire her, no decent business or law school would enroll her. Her friend Stella, whose career was on the upswing, had brought her to Lincoln Center that evening, a trip that now seemed to Alice like a rerun of a long-ago canceled TV show, something that couldn’t really exist ever again, not exactly as it once had.
Stella, who worked in P.R., had once briefly met Blake Maurow. She whispered in Alice’s ear: Maurow was a saint. Some years back, Stella told her, Maurow was sitting at dinner with a group of business associates at a large table on a restaurant’s outdoor deck along the East River. A cruise ship drifted by on the currents, loaded up with lawyers from Seaman & Fliggins, a mid-town firm, a bunch of lawyers in suits sweating in the hot summer night. Passing the restaurant, the cruise ship capsized, just tilted over, tossing all the lawyers into the river. Some held onto the ship, some made their way to shore. A few bobbed about, clearly in trouble, waving their arms above them, sinking and trying to force their heads above water, blue and terrified in the darkness, their cries muffled as river water washed down their throats. Maurow heard their distress, jumped up from the table, kicked off his shoes, dived into the East River and returned to shore a few minutes later, dragging behind him three S & F lawyers, each gasping for air and coughing up brownish water. “Like Superman, or something!” Stella laughed. No one drowned, thanks to Maurow. “Is that really true?” Alice asked, and Stella said, “True? It was on Channel 4!” A morning radio DJ — the one who used to play records but then stopped playing records, and who didn’t have many nice things to say about anything — called up Maurow and interviewed him for a few minutes. Before hanging up the phone, the guy told Maurow, “I know I make fun of a lot of things, but, seriously, I really admire you. The world needs more people like you.”
Alice became instantly fond of him, intensely fond.
Of course, Stella also knew that Maurow was rich. Unlike Alice’s parents, who were only a little rich, Maurow could cover Alice’s debt. He’d hardly feel it. But Stella didn’t mention this. Alice was a young woman who, like many of her generation, judged her own self-worth partly by the money she’d accumulated. But much as she cared for her own money, she was apathetic to the point of hostility to the money of others. The idea of marrying a rich man would have repelled, Stella knew. Alice, who desperately needed a bail-out, would have felt honor bound to reject even the possibility of romance with great wealth. Stella hoped against hope — a careening, involved scenario spun wildly before her eyes here in the Lincoln Center lobby — that, while Alice would never mistake Blake Maurow for a pauper, she would fall in love with him, and he with her, before she learned of his relatively phenomenal affluence, leaving Alice no way out. With Alice safely married off and out of debt, Stella would have her old friend back, the girl who’d drink champagne with her at over-priced uptown sidewalk cafés. The one who’d smile a lot, that smile that made people happy.
Maurow spoke to Alice briefly that night as they stood in line at the bar. She told him about her business, about struggling to get out from under the wreckage and the flotsam and jetsam of the crashing ‘80s. Even as she spoke, she wondered how all that had come up. He was a good listener. She liked him. He seemed to like her. If only she thought, then what if, and finally why not?
Later, outside, she waited for a bus in the cloudy New York darkness, as a cool breeze whipped about her and she shivered slightly in her summer dress. Blake Maurow, as one might expect, rescued her from the elements when he offered her a ride home. He was now so handsome and young and bathed in the heady Manhattan lights that reflected up at him from street puddles and the slick sidewalk, shiny with a thin coating of rain water. She wondered how old he was. He had a nice car; the sort of nice car an older man might own. Late thirties, she estimated as well as she could. “Thank you so much,” she said. “I’d like a ride home.”
In the car, Alice, already planning far ahead, wondered if it was fair to let him, or anyone, into her life. Five hundred thousand dollars, Alice whispered in some dark corner of her mind. Half a million. Which sounded worse? Alice said: “I heard how you saved all those drowning lawyers. That was very brave.”
“It was a nice warm night,” Maurow said. “I could afford to get my suit cleaned. I know how to swim. I was in the middle of a very dull conversation and looking for a reason to leave. What did I have to lose?”
Alice smiled. “You’re being modest.”
He shook his head. “Everybody makes too much of this.” He stared ahead at the road. “Anyway, I think that you’re the brave one. I was in the right place, one time, and I saved a few people. Every day, you’re living a very brave life.”
Alice thought that was the very best way of looking at it.
After Alice kissed Blake Maurow for the first time, slept with him, even, and fell madly in love with him (and he in love with her, madly as well), and even after the subject of marriage was broached, she discovered that he was considerably older than she’d estimated on the wobbly night she’d first spotted him across the Lincoln Center lobby. She was far too young for him, at least according to the public standards of the moment. And too poor, she realized, upon visiting his spacious, well-situated and opulent apartment to sleep in his big bed for the first time. With no little chagrin, she realized that Stella had probably tricked her, using a small touch of well-intentioned dishonesty to manipulate and shape Alice’s life in ways that Alice never would have chosen for herself; however sincere, Stella’s scheming angered Alice and led to the slow but inevitable evaporation of their once vigorous friendship. But as for Maurow, she was hooked for good.
After Alice learned Maurow’s age, his clothes no longer showed his sophistication, or a certain sense of ironic humor, but rather conveyed his age. She could see new wrinkles, unflattering lines carved deep into his face, previously unnoticed signs of degeneration in the very way he carried himself, in the way he stumbled down the stairs in front of restaurants. She noticed a click in his knee. Whenever he stood up, his knee clicked. Every time. Your knee clicks when you stand up, she told him. I know, Maurow replied. I’ve had that for twenty years. She shouted: See a doctor! He replied: Nothing can be done. That just happens as you get older. She worried about the click to distraction. If the click were to vanish, she idly thought, then Blake will be young again. Like magic. She adored the man, but she hated his age; she felt that his age was Blake’s own enemy. She didn’t tell him this, nor did she admit that since learning his age, when she lay beside him, a man just slightly younger than her father, she now felt a hungry sadness in her stomach. The revelation of his age — and the discovery of the incurable click in his knee — produced an awful pity for his encroaching death, and a terrible yearning in her for the years they would not have together. Her late sixties in all likelihood would be spent without Blake Maurow’s embrace; as an eighty-year-old woman, she would not sit with him in their garden, quietly watching the flowers for hours, holding hands and saying nothing as the sun set behind the trees. When he asked her why she looked so sad, she could not tell him that she mourned him already.
Blake’s mother, who gave birth late in life, would be in her late 80’s if she were still alive. Blake did not know whether she still survived, given that Mrs. Maurow had run off with a man younger than her husband when her son was in d
iapers, and she was never heard from again. Blake’s father, who had died long ago, would be 110 years old, were he still alive. He’d made a fortune, which, as Blake sheepishly admitted after much delay, was rooted in the prophylactic business. That’s what Blake actually said — “prophylactic” — a word Alice almost didn’t even know. Maurow Sr. had begun his career in some more mundane, less lucrative business, and only funneled a little money into birth control when its respectability began to improve. From that, he made many, many millions, then diversified. By the end, he was arguably not a condom merchant. But Alice was well aware that, if not for Margaret Sanger, Blake would not have his life. He owed everything to Margaret Sanger. And so, Alice supposed, did she.
Maurow Sr. died during sex with a woman very much his junior, a woman who would have been seventy-two years old when Alice first met Blake. If she were to marry Blake, Alice realized, she would have a father-in-law from the 19th century, a man from another era of history entirely.