by Liz Ireland
It was Saturday night, and we were not popular on the subway. I barely managed to squeeze on lugging a small chair in one hand, Max in his carrier in my other hand, and all of Max’s bowls and other paraphernalia in a duffel looped over my shoulder. My arm got tired and I really wanted to set my chair down, or maybe just sit on it. Then I saw Wendy reprimanding someone for putting down a shopping bag; I decided to tough it out rather than risk the wrath of Wendy.
Even with twenty-five people helping, moving was a pain in the butt.
By the time I dragged myself up to the new apartment, I vowed never to accumulate anything more. If something got lost or worn out, it would have to be replaced with something of lesser weight. For the rest of my life, I would make do with folding chairs and air mattresses. My next dog would be a Chihuahua. Or maybe a hamster.
But those thoughts were driven away as I was sucked into the vortex of the party. The apartment had seemed so big when it was empty, but now it was a mad crush of people, unpacked boxes, and shoppng bags stacked everywhere.
Andrea handed me a glass of champagne. “Circulate,” she ordered.
I did as I was told, though I confess that at first my heart wasn’t in it. In party situations, I revert to feeling like I’m sixteen again. Maybe everyone does, although sixteen in my case was a disaster.
I swigged down two glasses of champagne in quick succession, which helped put me into a partying frame of mind. Troy had brought dance tunes, which he promptly put into the boom box, turning what little free space there was in the living room into a dance floor. Mary Jo seemed to be enjoying herself, too. She was in the middle of a bunch of Wendy’s graduate school people, telling them about the time she had starred in The Diary of Anne Frank in high school. Lindsay was everywhere; for the first time, she seemed to fit in somewhere. In the mix of guests, she did not stand out, and she even seemed to blend in with the Wendy crowd.
In the time it took me to circulate around the room once, it felt as if I drank about four glasses of champagne. I felt great until I realized who wasn’t there. My friends. Or, more specifically, the few of the mutual friends I shared with Fleishman. I had mulled over the people we had in common and only invited the few who I thought were more mine than his. Apparently I had miscalculated.
“My God, you look like death,” Lindsay said, coming up to me.
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to be a mopey hostess.”
“That’s okay—it’s your party and you can…” She took a swig of champagne. “Well, you know.”
“It’s like I’ve been divorced, and all our friends are now his friends.”
Lindsay squinted at me. “Then screw ’em.” She held up a bottle of champagne. “Here, you obviously need liquid reinforcement.”
I let her fill me up.
“Have you met Rowdy yet?”
I shook my head. Poor Lindsay. Still trying to foist that guy off on someone. It struck me as very sad—sad for Rowdy. I took a long swig. The bubbly was really beginning to kick in. Finally.
“I had introduced him to a woman who used to work in production in Candlelight who now is a gopher for Regis Phil-bin. I’m hoping the celebrity angle will appeal to him.” She sighed. “I’m so ready for us to move on.”
“Me, too,” I slurred decisively. “I’m ready to move on.”
“Good for you!” Lindsay’s bracing slap on the back nearly toppled me over.
After that, things got fuzzy. I know I made my way to the kitchen to commandeer another bottle of champagne. I felt as if there were a smile pasted onto my face. I was moving on. I was having a good time. Everyone was having a good time.
The last thing I remember clearly was seeing Mary Jo dancing in the middle of Troy’s models. Then I have a fuzzy recollection of joining her.
After that, mercifully, I fuzzed out completely.
When I woke up on Sunday, the day was already almost halfway to Monday. All night I’d had awful dreams that I’d forgotten something, or let someone down. That I had come up short, basically. My head felt as if someone had been blasting a trumpet in my ear all night. I was staring at my clock, which, when I forced my eyes to focus, read eleven forty-three. It was strange to see my familiar digital clock radio in a completely new space. Mindful of my head, I rolled over, hoping to go back to sleep until my skull stopped throbbing.
Then I screamed.
The man who happened to be lying in bed next to me shot up to sitting. He wasn’t wearing a shirt. His bald chest was pale and freckly; the dusting of hair was just slightly more russet colored than the pumpkin orange thatch on the top of his head.
My first wild thought was of some red-headed obstetrician I’d read about a while back. Maybe this was another horrible dream.
But no. I had a vague recollection of seeing him at the party. Try as I might to dredge my brain for a name, though, I couldn’t think of one. I couldn’t even remember speaking to him. I certainly didn’t remember sleeping with him.
“Oh, hey!” he said, rubbing his eyes. “How’s it going?”
Sometime in the past three seconds, I had yanked the comforter from the bottom of the bed up to my chin. Which was a totally superfluous gesture on my part; not just because it was a little late in life to start protecting my virtue, but because I was fully clothed. I was wearing exactly what I’d had on last night—jeans, a tank top, and a fitted snap-front shirt that had come halfway unsnapped. I was even wearing socks.
“Where’s your shirt?” I asked. I could only send up a prayer that the rest of him was clothed.
“In the bathroom. I spilled orange juice on it. We made mimosas, remember?”
Oh God. “That would explain the tap dancing rhinos in my skull.”
He chuckled. “Yeah, you were really putting it away.”
“I do that every once in a while.” And it tended to end badly. I needed to remember that next time.
I was a little calmer now that I figured out that nothing had happened last night between me and whoever this was. At least I was pretty sure. I’d had many bizarre experiences before, but I had yet to have a man tear off all my clothes only to then put them back on again. That would have been both bizarre and insulting.
Come to think of it, it actually wasn’t all that flattering that I could wake up hungover with a guy and still be fully clothed. Not that I was a sexpot or anything, but I like to think I’m a little muss-worthy. Even with a man who had a certain Howdy Doodyishness about him.
Maybe he was one of Troy’s models.
No, on second thought, definitely not. He wasn’t up to Troy’s standard.
“Who are you?” I blurted out.
My bed buddy yawned. “Don’t you remember? I’m Rowdy.”
At that news, I clutched my aching head in both hands. I might have moaned. When I’d first heard about Rowdy Metzger from Lindsay, I had felt so sorry for him. Now I felt like we were one. The unwanted. The dumped. The foistable.
Nice try, Lindsay.
“You want to get breakfast?” he asked.
My stomach churned. “I don’t think so.”
He sighed. “I’m not really hungry either. But I need time to think how I’m gonna explain all this to my girlfriend. Lindsay—you know her, right?”
“I know her well enough to know that she’ll understand.”
“Isn’t Lindsay great?” Rowdy asked, a twinkle in his blue eyes. The question was purely rhetorical. “I can’t imagine life without her.”
“I’ll bet she can’t imagine life without you, either.”
I stumbled out of the bedroom into a world I still barely recognized as my own. It was strange, and it was a mess. Empty and half-filled glasses stood on moving boxes. Shopping bags of books had been shoved into corners and under the card table that was at present doing duty in our dining room. Our mishmash of other furniture seemed pathetic by the light of day. Like pitiful leftovers from a yard sale piled on top of one-hundred-fifty-year-old parquet flooring. In the middle of it all, Greg the super had
rolled out Wendy’s blue electric blanket on the floor and was sleeping one off. Max was curled up next to him, zonked.
I frowned and felt my way to the kitchen. Andrea was propped on a stool, eating a Pop-Tart. She looked like death. “I’m never moving again,” she moaned.
“Who’s sleeping in your bed?” I asked.
“No one, unfortunately. Not even me. For some reason, I left my mattress leaning against a wall last night and decided to sleep on the floor.”
“Maybe you got the idea from Greg.”
She frowned. “I hope this doesn’t become a habit with that guy.”
“Is Wendy up yet?”
“Up? She hasn’t come back.”
“Back from where?”
“Who knows. At two AM a bunch of people went clubbing.”
“Lindsay’s boyfriend is in my room.”
Andrea laughed. “Lindsay left with Wendy’s group. Gave ol’ Carrot Top the slip.”
I took a Pop-Tart. “Doesn’t it seem reckless just to dispose of a perfectly good boyfriend that way?”
“She’s young.”
“She’s just a year younger than I am.”
“You’re young, too.”
I was just two years younger than Andrea, who was all of twenty-seven. “But I’ve burned through a quarter century, and what do I have to show for it?”
Maybe that’s who I had dreamed I’d let down—me.
Or, no…I shook my head. And then I remembered. I had forgotten someone. Sylvie. Although that seemed like years ago now, I had told Bernadine I was going to see her this weekend.
Andrea remarked, “Well, pretty soon you’ll have a book documenting your early years.”
Some comfort that was. Just the reminder of Fleishman made me sad. And angry. And puzzled. I felt sloughed off; but something else pricked at my conscience. I started poking through boxes that we had stacked in the kitchen.
“What are you looking for?”
“Hot pickled okra,” I said.
It took me a while, but I found it. “Could you tell me how to get to Elmhurst Avenue?”
She squinted at me. “Are you kidding? I’ve spent the past four years trying to get away from there.”
“I just need directions.”
She looked at me doubtfully, but told me which train to take.
“I’ll be back this afternoon,” I promised. “Don’t clean up without me.”
“Don’t worry.”
Part of me was hoping for forgiveness. And part of me was hoping for wisdom. There was something about waking up from that party that made me crave seeing someone old. That was the trouble with being young, and in Manhattan. It felt like we were all babies toddling around without supervision, creating messes and being no use to each other whatsoever. That morning I felt like seeing Sylvie would ground me.
After some searching, I found her in a large retirement complex in Queens. When she opened the door, I half expected her to spit on me, or toss a few French curses my way for abandoning her. Instead, she smiled. “Rebecca! Come in, come in. You should have called first.”
“I’m sorry…”
“Well, never mind now. How’ve you been?”
I frowned. She seemed a little different. Besides being frailer looking; or maybe I had just forgotten how delicate she was—how she was so thin that it seemed like a sneeze could knock her over. Her skin was practically transparent in places, so that an occasional vein would seem dangerously close to being exposed. She wore her old uniform of ironed button-down cotton shirt, elastic waist pants, and Reeboks.
There was something else different about her. I couldn’t place it at first.
From what Bernadine had told me, I was expecting Sylvie to be living in the old folks home equivalent of a dorm room. Instead, it was more like an efficiency apartment. There was only one large carpeted room, a bedroom nook, and a bath, but it didn’t feel too cramped. There was also a little kitchen area, where she took my gift of pickled okra.
She noticed me looking around the place and rasped, “Isn’t it a dump?”
“Not too bad.”
“Not too bad, she says.”
I frowned. I realized what seemed different. Her voice. She didn’t sound like Sylvie. She sounded like Bernadine.
She settled down in her chair, which I recognized from her other apartment. I wondered what had happened to all her belongings. Her apartment in Turtle Bay had been four times this size, and crammed with stuff. “When I got out of the hospital,” she explained, “Langley had cleared out my apartment. He’d sold most of my things and arranged for me to live here. I haven’t heard from him since.”
“That’s terrible!” I said. “How could he do that?”
“He thought I was going to die, obviously,” she said. “He thought it was all his.”
“When he fired me, he kept talking about beneficiaries.”
She got a good laugh out of that. “He’s the beneficiary. He’s my nephew.”
“Your nephew?” I asked, confused. R.J. Langley wasn’t French. “By marriage?”
“No, he’s my sister’s son. She died, so he is about all the family I have left.” She shrugged. “He was a lawyer, so when I moved back I decided to let him handle my affairs.”
“Moved back?”
Sylvie nodded. “Back to New York City,” she explained. “Where I was born.”
“But—”
She laughed. “I know, I know. I have a confession to make. I should have told you before, but it didn’t seem any of your business. I’m not French. I didn’t even move there until I was seventeen, after I ran away from home.”
I was stunned. Sylvie was not French? It didn’t seem possible. It was like hearing that Sean Connery wasn’t Scottish, the pope wasn’t Catholic, and bears were doing their business in marble bathrooms. It was hard to absorb.
And yet, I now understood the way she had stonewalled the few scholars who used to track her down. She didn’t mind giving them a few harmless anecdotes; she just didn’t want to talk about herself.
But she had just tossed the news to me so casually, as if people spent decades pretending to be a different nationality all the time. As if living a double life was no big deal.
I leaned forward. “Did Picasso know?”
“Know what?”
“That you were a…” A fake was the word that leapt to mind. “…an American.”
She considered for a few seconds. “No, I don’t think he did. Or maybe he did and did not care. He was an artist, he understood about creating.”
“Is that what you did?” I asked. “You used yourself as a kind of canvas?”
“What else could I do?” she asked. “I did not like my life here. I did not want to spend the rest of my life as Sylvie Arshovsky, stenographer…or heaven knows what. I wanted adventure, romance. I wanted to be someone. Don’t we all?”
I guessed we did. “Most of us aren’t so successful.”
“Nonsense! You are doing very well at it yourself.”
“I am?”
She crossed her arms. “You showed me a picture once of your family and I did not recognize you. ‘Who’s the fat one?’ I asked. Remember?”
I remembered. I had barely managed to confess that the fat one had been me.
“You did not like that person you were, so you created someone you liked better.” She waved her hand. “Voilà! Art.”
“But you had a whole lot of people fooled.” To take the art metaphor to an extreme, Sylvie was a Rembrandt, while I was more like a landscape fashioned from a Bob Ross kit.
“The trick is to believe in this person you want to be. You can’t go through life thinking you are an imposter.”
I chewed this over for a moment. I could see a certain logic to what she was saying, but on the other hand, there were people like Muriel, who invented themselves right into psychiatric wards.
“Is that why you never wanted to write your autobiography?” I asked. “Or talk to any of the people who came
to interview you?”
She gestured dismissively. “No one is interested in me. They just want to hear about Harpo Marx and other famous people. So I tell them a few harmless things, and they go away thinking I’m just an old lady.”
That’s what I had thought.
“But now,” she said, “no one would come here to see me.” She looked around her apartment in dismay.
“Why don’t you move?”
“I have no money. Langley pays the bills here, but I can’t find him.”
“He absconded with your money?”
She nodded. “And sold my jewelry!” She seemed almost as upset about that as anything else. “Now I am stuck! I suppose I should be relieved he did not leave me homeless.”
“I don’t understand how he could have sold all your things.”
“I asked a lawyer about that. A man Bernadine brought over. That was before Langley disappeared. He told this lawyer fellow that I had signed over power of attorney when I went into the hospital, and that he had acted in my best interests.”
I had known that man was a jackass, but I hadn’t thought he was this evil. “There must be something you can do.”
“I don’t know what,” she said. “It’s difficult when you’re almost ninety-five, Rebecca. It’s hard to know where to turn.”
I nodded. It put my problems in perspective, a little.
“Who would I talk to?” she asked. “I don’t know any lawyer I would trust with something like this.”
An idea occurred to me. “I do.”
Chapter 19
At nine the next morning I was planted in a leather chair in the reception area of McAlpin and Etting. The waiting room had been all done up to look like someone might think a barrister’s office in jolly ole England might look like—it was all wood paneling and subdued lighting and old hunting prints. Or, maybe like the office itself, the prints were only made to look old. Knowing that my own fluorescent-lit office was just three floors down, I got the feeling that I was on a movie set of a lawyer’s office.