Any Place I Hang My Hat

by Susan Isaacs

  Gloria didn’t have to clink her glass with a spoon or even clear her throat.

  Everyone sensed she was about to speak. France fell silent. “Fifty percent of marriages end in divorce,” Gloria began. “Caroline and Tim always seemed to have a fine relationship and we’ll all be toasting them on their golden anniversary. But for the sake of argument, let’s say Tim runs off with Posh Spice, if that’s what that girl’s name is. Where does that leave Caroline?”

  “She gets another job,” France replied. I’d heard she came from that part of Pittsburgh where they spoke English with a Continental accent.

  “As what?” Dana demanded. “Either in London or New York, how many top magazine jobs are open to a woman who quit her last job and has been freelancing or—I don’t know-writing a book for two or three years? That’s a long time to be out of the game.”

  Gloria held her chopsticks midair. “Here’s another thing.

  Other than for jobs like Supreme Court justice or college president, how many men are there who would pack their bags and move for the sake of their wives’ careers?”

  “I don’t understand you,” France said. “Every man-woman interaction cannot be a confrontation. Women are more giving by nature. And we are amazingly adaptable. I could go to Afghanistan tomorrow and make a life for myself.” And fit right in with her four-inch-heeled, fuck-me shoes with ankle straps. “If you were with the person who was the love of your life, wouldn’t you risk everything to be with him? Or her?”

  Dana, the sport editor, cocked her head to one side. “I’d been working about a year and still going with my boyfriend from college. Dartmouth. This is when I was at Sports Illustrated. One night I was looking at his profile, a handsome, classic profile, Mark Antony, not Julius Caesar, but what I was really seeing was my future with him. I realized he’d got totally upset when I was going to cover the Super Bowl. I mean, what was I supposed to do, hand over my press credentials so he could get in to see the game? I tried to get him a ticket, but I couldn’t and he got even pissier. Right then and there, I knew the relationship wasn’t going to work. My work wasn’t important to him. I mean, I had a great job, but to him, my main job should have been him. He saw what I was doing at Sports Illustrated as a cute postcollege thing. That’s all I had to see. He was off my masthead like—” She snapped her fingers.

  “What are you saying?” Germany demanded. “That a fulfilling life means being able to love or to work? Check only one box? What about Onkel Sigmund’s Fähigkeit zu arbeiten und zu lieben? He said und.”

  “Forget und,” Dana said wearily. “For ninety-nine percent of us, there is no und.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  THAT MONDAY, I yearned for the flu, though I would have settled for bronchitis—anything that would not allow me to get out of bed. True, when I walked my usual running route through Central Park, I was somewhat heartened by the trees. Real spring at last. The cherries were in full white flower—though they could have been apple trees. I was not from the great arborists, since beside oak, maple, and the über-category of evergreens, all I could identify were crab apples. That was because some alumna had donated a grove of them to Ivey. Every spring when they bloomed we had the Grove Walk, during which we strolled along a path through the trees singing the alma mater. It was a tradition I cruelly mocked and secretly cherished.

  Now, it was crab-apple time in the park. My second favorite tree was flowering as well, a short, stubby thing with crackly bark, arthritic branches, and cascades of small, hazy pink blossoms that looked like upside-down mops. So much for nature. Maybe I was in a lousy low-endorphin mood from not being able to run. But God, how I wanted to go back to my apartment and instead of showering, get back to bed with a cup of tea I was too sick to swallow beside me. It’s not as if I was under pressure. I had more than a week to get out an article on the Democratic left’s evolving position on the Middle East. Yet it was precisely the sort of piece I most hated writing. Foreign affairs.

  Whenever anyone at In Depth did more than touch on an area outside his or her own bailiwick, the article had to be vetted by one of the editors with expertise in that particular subject. While intellectually I appreciated their input, correcting my errors and offering new insights, emotionally I wished they would drop dead, thereby leaving me free to write without petty qualifiers; I detested footnotes in any form. Gloria, of course, was excepted from this disfavor, as was the physics/earth-science guy who had gone over my environmental piece.

  But the editor for the Middle East was another story. A former academic, he had an upper-class English accent. I guessed it was upper-class: Though his mouth moved, he sounded as if his nose were doing the talking. His hair was parted slightly to the right of the middle so he always looked off balance. Both in coldest February and the tropical heat of a New York August, he wore three-piece suits. Ah, Miss Lincoln, he would say, luffly to see you. He thought me a fellow Anglo-Saxon and thereby felt free to make contemptuous remarks about Muslims and Jews. With people like him, I was more direct than usual. But saying Shut up, Philip or Philip, you moron, I’m a Jew amused him. He seemed to perceive the former response as coquetry and the latter as jest. It was only Monday, I told myself. I didn’t have to deal with him until Friday. Nevertheless, I felt like Frodo gazing upon a distant Mount Doom.

  Body and soul, I was worn out. Usually my legs came close to being perpetual motion machines. I’d go for my morning run, then walk the two and a half miles to work and never tire. Maybe the discussion at Gloria’s birthday brunch the day before had taken its toll. Love or work: a phony setup. No need to choose. Yet all I kept winding up with was work. Never a real, reciprocated love. I had no man. No family. No circle of beloved friends with whom I’d formed a clan to stand in for kin. No people or person I could be with and think, I’m home.

  Trudging down Broadway toward the office, I was in such a fog that somewhere in the thirties I stood on a corner waiting for the light to change from red to green and began crossing only when the light switched back to red again. Instead of legs, I was ambulating on two logs sawed from a sequoia.

  Spring had arrived for everybody else. Pedestrians promenaded with a tra-la-la gait. When I stopped by a deli near the office, there was a long, slow line of people requesting iced coffee and tea. I willed myself not to be impatient, but when I found myself focusing on a pile of grotesquely large apple turnovers, I asked the woman behind me to hold my place, telling her I had a quick call to make.

  I found myself in the back of the deli, standing before a pay phone, clutching three quarters in one hand and, with the other, holding the receiver against my ear—a repulsive necessity I had been able to avoid since the advent of cell phones, thus limiting my chances of contracting some new hepatitis mutation spread by drug dealers, the only ones I’d ever seen using the phone. On the other hand, the pay phone was caller-ID-proof. Even if traced, the number would be the one for Nate and Molly’s Delicatessen.

  Two seconds later, I was dialing a number I didn’t even know I had memorized. My heart pounded. I turned my head and saw that if I wanted coffee, I’d better make it fast. That would be easily accomplished because I had no intention of speaking. A voice said, “Hello.” I stayed silent. I stuck my index finger into my free ear hoping to hear more clearly.

  Was this my mother’s voice at eight forty-five on a Monday morning? It sounded fairly deep. Could it be a guy? Maybe Ira Hochberg was a castrato or, okay, a tenor, who left for work late. Possibly one of her sons was home from school, celebrating his voice changing. My heart banged harder. My stomach contracted into a painful knot. “Hello?” The voice was louder, sharper, but I still couldn’t tell, man or woman. I hung up, though unfortunately not quickly enough to avoid spotting drug dealer goop on the earpiece. My stomach went from a knot into a backflip and I decided to pass on the coffee.

  Five minutes later, I was in the office. After some time disinfecting in the ladies’ room, I went to my desk. The usual pile of newspapers was there, a
s well as the newsmagazines. I opened my bottom drawer and set them all there, then rested my feet on my desk while I listened to messages. Five or six from nearly deranged Democrats deprived of attention, one from In Depth’s bookkeeper wanting to know where my expense vouchers were for the Florida trip.

  And one from Steve Raskin, the criminal defense lawyer who had absolutely nothing wrong with him. “Hi, Amy. Steve Raskin. Hope you had a good weekend. Are you free this Saturday night? I’ve got a client who’s a ticket scalper, so I can get tickets to pretty much anything you’d like to see. I’m in court this afternoon, but I’ll be around most of the morning. Look forward to hearing from you.”

  What a nice guy. Thoughtful. Objectively attractive. The last quality raised only the slightest issue, that after theater he might expect a fourth act. I’d left my days of this-will-feel-good-even-if-I-hardly-know-you sex behind around the time I turned twenty-five. Well, he could deal. I called him back, had a really good chat about whether Donald Rumsfeld’s high-handedness with the press was a cover-up for insecurity or was simply unadulterated arrogance. I told him, untruthfully, I’d probably have to fly out to Iowa for a piece on the caucuses, so if I had to give him an answer today, it would have to be no. He was pretty cool, and suggested that if I didn’t go I should give him a call. Meantime, if something came up for him on Saturday night, he might take it, but then maybe on Sunday we could have brunch, take a walk. Was I interested in seeing the Klee exhibit at the Met? If I could make it home by then, that would be great, I told him.

  I liked Steve for many reasons, one of them being that he’d called right away. Tatty slept late, so I started making calls for my lefties and the Middle East article until I could get her on the phone and hear her say, Are you absolutely insane to put a man like that on hold?

  Tatty pretty much said what I’d expected her to say, and at great length. Right before we hung up, she said, “You’re still so sad about John.”

  “I am. Don’t tell me to snap out of it.”

  “I won’t. This is a rough one.”

  I got back to work, broke for a protein bar and a Diet Coke, and when I next looked up it was nine at night. I then had a moment of lunacy. I took a taxi home for the first time in my eight years at In Depth. How come I hadn’t done it before? If I’d ever analyzed it, which I hadn’t, I would have recognized that my budget could withstand the occasional cab splurge. Using feet and subway exclusively would not get my college and graduate school loans repaid years earlier.

  When it came to money, I was conservative. Some might call it cheap. Saving the extra napkins from a bag of take-out food. Collecting tiny bottles of inferior toiletries from the third-rate hotels on the magazine’s approved list, so I had two shoe boxes full of shampoos, conditioners, and body lotion I never wanted to use.

  Maybe it was knowing that if anything happened to me, I had no one to fall back on. Asking Tatty for money would be the end of what we’d always had, a friendship between equals. True, if I were in desperate straits, Chicky would try to come to my rescue. Unfortunately, that would put him in the difficult position of having to figure out how to raise capital: Hmm, armed robbery or burglary? He wasn’t particularly adept at either. Perhaps I needed a larger nest egg than most people of my age and income bracket because I worried that in time of trouble, I might not be able to resist taking the easy way out and going into the family business, felony.

  As the taxi bumped and squealed uptown, I watched the driver’s shoulders rising way up to his ears, falling, then rising again. From the back, it appeared an extremely French gesture, one that would go with saying Je ne sais pas with much fervor. Shoulders up, shoulders down, over and over. A man with a tic, I decided, not a schizophrenic responding to an auditory hallucination. I closed my eyes, but opened them again fast.

  All that day and into the night, whenever I stopped work for even a minute—to get a drink of water or massage the muscles in my neck—I kept hearing the voice from that morning phone call. Hello. And seconds later, the greeting again as a demand: Hello? Had this been my mother? It hadn’t been too deep for a forty-seven-year-old woman whose estrogen might be on the skids. I found myself analyzing that single word. An intelligent Hello. The speaker sounded calm. It had been minutes before nine o’clock, but no hint of gotta-get-to-work pressure. No sharp edge as if expecting some annoying acquaintance or a telemarketer. Certainly not the deadened Hello of a depressed housewife with expectations of nothing. On the other hand ... I closed my eyes again. It had probably been Ira.

  “Amy!” Rose Moscowitz exclaimed. “How are you?”

  “Fine. I figured that if you felt as unsure of yourself as I did about—you know—this actually being grandmother and granddaughter business, we’d both wait for months or a year before picking up the phone, and then we’d hang up because it would be awkward. Too much time would have passed.” Naturally, the instant after I said that, I worried she might respond with I beg your pardon in a Queen Victoria voice.

  “That’s just what I was thinking,” she said. “I didn’t know your work hours, so I wrote on my calendar Call Amy for Saturday. Not that I’d forget.” She paused for a moment. “I have a big calendar on the bulletin board in the kitchen. It comes every year with beautiful pictures of Utah. I have no idea why we get it. Why I get it. Maybe Selwyn made some investment out there. I love being in Boca and seeing all those snow and mountain and desert scenes. I’m sorry. I’m going on and on. Anyway, now when I look at the calendar, it’s nice to see Call Amy in one of the boxes.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Can I call you back? You shouldn’t run up a big long-distance charge.”

  “It’s fine. The magazine pays for my cell phone, it’s a flat fee. I’m constantly calling around the country.” I had opened the window for a breath of spring from the park and to hear the clopping of horses’ hooves, taking tourists in the hansom cabs on a ride to see how beautiful the city was at night. Unfortunately, one of my neighbors appeared to be cooking up a late supper of fried garlic. I got up and closed the window.

  “Good,” Rose was saying. “I’d hate to think of me chattering on and on and you being upset when you get your telephone bill. Tell me, are you working on something new? I bought the magazine Friday when it came out. Your article on the environment was brilliant.”

  “Readable, anyway.”

  “Don’t be so modest.”

  “Well, just think of it as your DNA in action.”

  I gave Rose a three-sentence summary of what my Democratic left, Middle East piece was going to be about. Even though I knew she was intelligent, her grasp of the issues surprised me. Everyone in the country had the TV tuned to Iraq for the war, and it was not a huge surprise that a Jewish woman who had made the move from Brooklyn to Boca was informed about Israel. Still, her knowledge of geopolitics, from preemptive counterproliferation to a comparison of Thom Bowles, Howard Dean, and Eugene McCarthy really wowed me. I actually jotted down a note to check whether McCarthy had in fact run for president against George H. W. Bush and Dukakis in ’88 as a candidate for some minor party.

  We talked for almost half an hour. Just as I was about ready to wrap it up, Rose said: “I called Phyllis.”

  My only thought was Oh shit, now she’ll know who the hang up was this morning. “You told her about meeting me?”

  “Yes. It wasn’t something I looked forward to doing, but I felt obligated. I hope you understand.” She hesitated. “Were you planning to surprise her?”

  I wasn’t planning on anything. If I were someone very objective standing outside myself, I’d have said it was inevitable that I’d try to make contact with her. But right then, from where I sat, I saw myself juggling four or five conflicting emotions, everything from What if I think she’s terrific and she doesn’t want anything to do with me? to What if I’m overcome by rage and want to punch out her lights? “Oh, please don’t worry. I wouldn’t—”

  “I know that.” I heard her take a sip of something. I i
magined chamomile tea.

  “How did she react to the fact that you know about my existence?”

  “Badly. Not that she got hysterical. She’s not that type. When she was a teenager, part of the reason we were so shocked by her rebelliousness and then the running away was because we didn’t fight. If we said, You can’t do this or that, we knew she didn’t like it, but we thought she was pouting. Not seething. Not running around with the worst kind of—” She cut herself off. “I apologize, Amy. I’m so sorry.”

  “Okay. Look, I really don’t want to talk about my father, at least not now. Let’s just say that his criminal record is probably longer than a single page. On the other hand, he loved me, he raised me during the times he had his freedom. To the best of his ability, he was a good parent.”

  “He sounds admirable.”

  “In some ways he is. In any case, I love him.” I wished I had some chamomile tea. “Did your daughter say anything about wanting to meet me, or not wanting to meet me?”

  “I couldn’t tell. It wasn’t clear. When I told her about meeting you, she gave out a gasp. Not a loud gasp, but still, hearing that much—I don’t know—emotion from her surprised me. I wanted to talk about you, about how lovely you are and how you look like Carol. I mentioned Harvard, but she kept saying in a very quiet voice, ‘Oh my God, Oh my God,’ and really, I could hardly get a word in edgewise.”

  “She didn’t ask anything else?”

  “Let me think. It started out ‘Don’t you dare tell Ira’ and then, before I could say I wouldn’t do a thing like that, she was being—how should I put it?—much less confrontational, much less emotional. More like her usual self. She said what a shock it was, how awful she felt that she never told us about you.” I wanted to ask Rose if she thought it odd that her daughter had not said how awful she felt about abandoning a child, but I didn’t. I wanted to ask what the hell was wrong in that family that my mother turned out the way she did. “Then she begged me not to see you again.”