—and immediately back down a notch or two. How sobering is it that I’ve become too old for full-volume Madonna? (Alas, the movers must have packed the boxes with the CDs I actually listen to, the newer ones, down at the bottom, and the ones I’ve had for a million years at the top; I essentially have my entire musical youth stuffed into my bathrobe pockets.) So I’m singing and putting on makeup and have been having a great time for all of one minute when someone starts pounding on the door. I’m quite certain who.
I slide the chain lock into place, unbolt the dead bolt, click apart the bottom lock, and open the door. There’s Simon in lounge pants and a sweater, the dog tags, and leather bedroom slippers.
“Okay! Okay! I’ll turn it down!”
“No way!” Simon hollers. “Turn it up!”
Now I have to turn it down to make sure I heard right.
“‘Like a Virgin’ is one of my personal anthems! May I borrow? I lost my tape at a party in nineteen eighty-nine. You’d think if you invited friends into your home, they wouldn’t steal your music as party favors, but everyone was in a nasty phase back then, doing all that coke. I swear that’s when my hair started to go. Speaking of”—he waves his hand toward me—“much better color. Somebody’s face has a fresh coat of paint, too. Big date tonight?”
“If you must know, I’m getting my picture taken.”
“Let me in,” he orders.
I unhook the chain, and he steps into my living room and moves in closer.
“Hmm. What is that on your lips, Bobbi Brown Number Four? Nice on you for daytime, but for a photo not so much. Where’s your beauty booty?”
I point into my bathroom, at the makeup bag balanced on the edge of the sink. He picks it up and inventories its contents: mascara, eyebrow tweezers, the worn-down nub of a drugstore concealer stick, the Bobbi Brown lipstick I wear five days a year, the ChapStick I wear the other 360, a pot of goopy lip gloss I have worn all of twice, and a used-once compact of candy-apple-red powder blush that was supposed to have given me a fresh-faced glow but only made my cheeks look as if they’d been attacked with a can of red spray paint.
“Lambie,” Simon says, “where’s your beauty drawer?”
“There isn’t one.” Unlike most women, I don’t have a stash of gift-with-purchase samples. Unless you count my miniature trove of The Elixir, which Simon has just discovered in the medicine cabinet.
“How miraculous is this stuff? You’ve got to keep it in the fridge, kitten, so it stays fresh longer. I use it by the gallon on my cuticles.”
Good grief. Am I the only one in this city who isn’t rolling in disposable income?
“Muffin,” Simon continues, “you don’t have a lot to work with here, but I can whip something up. You wouldn’t possibly have a Q-tip, would you? Never mind. Be right back.” He disappears down the stairs.
It’s all so unfamiliar. The only time Californians see their neighbors is after an earthquake—a significant earthquake. Even then you converse only on the front lawn. I can’t imagine any circumstance in which a virtual stranger would insinuate himself not just into my home but into my makeup bag, unless he had broken in to steal it.
“I’m back!” Simon calls as he springs up the staircase. “I know, I know, running with scissors. Don’t put it on my permanent record. You don’t mind if I bring a friend, do you? He insisted on following me up here.”
I don’t understand what Simon is talking about until I see he’s holding scissors as well as a Q-tip, and that Rocky is snorting and wheezing up the stairs behind him. It’s the first time I’ve crossed paths with the silly little animal in several days, and to my surprise, I’m happy to see him.
“Hello, Rock.” I bend down to pet him. Rocky licks my ankles. “Is Rina feeling better?” I ask Simon.
“Rina. I hired that woman to wear Rocky out, and it’s just not helping. I’m starting to put a hole in the ceiling, not to mention ruining my broom.” Simon begins a detailed pantomime of grasping a vertical handle and jabbing it up above his head. “Don’t tell me you haven’t heard the pounding. I’m beside myself. Who knows what I’d do if I had a higher ceiling, like yours. I’d have to stand on a ladder. Honest to God, the banging-broom bit is the only thing that shuts him up.”
“Woowoowoowoowoo!”
“Rocky, shush,” I say. Rocky stops barking, settles obligingly onto my instep, and nibbles my bathrobe tie.
Simon stares at his dog. All at once I remember I’m half dressed and pull the robe extra tightly around me.
“Don’t worry about it, honey; nothing I haven’t seen before. Now, give me that lip gloss you have in there, and that blush. We’ll need a little plate, too. Also a butter knife.”
I’m genuinely curious about what he plans to do, so I get him what he needs and watch as he uses the knife to scoop a glob of the clear gloss onto the plate.
“Brawny,” he orders, the way television surgeons say, “scalpel.” I fetch a paper towel from the kitchen. He wipes the knife with TV-doctor precision, then digs out a chunk of blush and deposits it on top of the glob of gloss. Using the Q-tip, he blends the two together into a sheer, sparkly red.
He wipes my lips with a paper towel. “Now put this on.”
I dab the mixture onto my lips.
“Kitten, for the love of God, it’s not poison. And don’t use that; it’s too dainty.” He plucks the Q-tip out of my hand and attacks my lips with his fingers. Amazingly, the color looks great, instantly transforming me from average Iris to foxy Iris.
“Where did you learn how to do this?”
Simon looks pleased. “In the military, if you believe it. Try it on your cheeks. Use your fingers.” He pats his dog tags. “Fort Polk, Louisiana, early eighties. I used to glam up some of the girls before they went off base. There wasn’t a lot to work with, so I learned to make do with what we had. Now, go ahead, kitten; try it.”
I do as I’m told. What do you know? There’s that fresh-faced glow I’d been aiming for.
“Not bad,” Simon pronounces.
“Thanks so much.” I mean it. “What a difference.”
“Not so fast.” Simon picks up the scissors. “That hair has got to go.”
Val’s building in Greenwich Village is storybook charming: black-painted brick with white trim, authentic Federal-era iron star ornaments on its corners. Boxes of crimson geraniums grace each paned window. Behind the adorable facade, the place is crumbling. Val’s buzzer doesn’t work, and since I’ve forgotten my cell phone, I have to call her from an infectious-looking pay phone down the block. The booth is surrounded by garbage: empty beer bottles, dog feces, a half-eaten pizza. While I’m dialing, a wild-eyed man lurches by screaming, “You can’t make me! You can’t make me!”
When I return, Val is at the front door. “You’re gorgeous!” she shouts as she leads me up flight after flight of stairs. “What happened?”
I’m feeling too good to let Val’s backhanded compliment bother me. Simon’s custom-blended makeup would have been enough, but he’s also given me a hairstyle I would never have considered for myself: pixie short and tousled. I’m no longer a generic thirty-three-year-old; I am, as Kitty magazine might put it, a “doe-eyed gamine”—viewed in the right light and at the proper angle. I was so grateful, I sent Simon home with the Madonna CD.
“Who cut it?” Val unlocks her apartment door.
“My downstairs neighbor.”
“You said he was a neurotic pain in the ass!”
“I was wrong. He’s a hairdresser.”
As proof of Simon’s genius it takes Val just six tries to get a digital photo we both agree is suitable, and while she loads it onto her computer to send to Matemarket, I reposition a spiky purple blossom in the large flower arrangement on her coffee table.
“They’re dahlias. Read the card.” Val taps a command on the computer keyboard. “Guess who sent them.”
I remove a small white card from among the dahlia stems: “Let’s do it again.” No signature. I have ze
ro desire to know anything more.
“I sent them to myself!” Val crows. “Listen up, because you’re going to start dating again and it’s a trick you should know. Whenever I think I might bring someone new home, I have my florist put together a big bouquet with a card saying something suggestive. Just knowing there’s someone else sending me flowers drives them insane with lust!” She clicks a last button. “Okay, your photo is downloaded. I just sent you your account name and password. Now”—she shuts off her computer—“let’s go out.”
We walk over to Bleecker Street. It’s a warm night, and the bars and restaurants have spilled their tables out onto the sidewalks; people are drinking, laughing, and talking. I’m lost in my own thoughts, which at the moment all center on the mystery of Vickie’s husband. I’ve witnessed for myself his erratic schedule, the copy-shop clerk asking about his blond bombshell.” Yet despite it all, despite that I myself couldn’t stand him the minute he walked out of his building that first morning, why does he seem a decent person? He’s been nothing but kind to me. Even his outburst Friday seems justifiable. Who wouldn’t be upset to find out his spouse had hired someone to watch his every move?
Val tugs on my sleeve. “I’m going to go talk to that guy eating the salad.”
“Uh-huh,” I answer.
Because my thoughts have unexpectedly led me to a different and unwelcome recollection, a moment in my life like a million other inconsequential moments—one my brain would surely have relegated instantly to some inaccessible corner, never to be retrieved again, had it not been for a fateful, and unforgettable, twist. I recall misty sunlight glaring off the white-stucco exterior of a Valley strip mall, the smell of damp eucalyptus, a familiar voice coaxing me out of a blindness I’ve foolishly imposed on myself. I recall a faltering, unseeing journey across patched asphalt as I cover my face to block the light, the voice calling, “That’s dangerous, Iris. You’ll get hurt if you don’t open your eyes.”
You have to open your eyes, I tell myself in my memory. You’re being reckless. It will hurt a little, but the alternative is far worse. And so, because I am not reckless, I open my eyes to see where I’m going.
My world hasn’t looked quite the same since.
FOURTEEN
I don’t offer her a cookie.The truth is, her very presence throws me off. Vickie seems out of context in my apartment, the way your grandma would seem at your Monday staff meeting, or the UN secretary-general would at your neighborhood block party. She takes in my four hundred square feet, and I’m sure she’s thinking, I didn’t know Iris was so down-and-out.
Still, I can’t quite bring myself to confiscate her shoes. She sits regally in my armchair while I teeter on the garage sale footstool Teddy helped me refinish one weekend early in our marriage.
“Tell me everything.” It’s an order as always, but Vickie sounds less commanding than usual. She brushes back her bangs, a forced nonchalant gesture, and in doing so catches several strands in her gold charm bracelet. She inhales sharply and begins working on the tangle, holding her left wrist, the one with the bracelet, up near her ear so as not to pull her hair.
I start by reminding Vickie that her husband does not know I’m working for her. Steve simply thinks, I tell her, that he and I have struck up a casual friendship. I must be getting better at this. The lie rolls right out.
“Did he admit to cheating?”
“No, but—”
“Did you tell him he needs to be nicer to me?”
“He told me you need to be nicer to him.”
Vickie’s face goes two shades of pink. “Nicer to him? He wants me to be nicer to him?”
“That’s what he said.”
“Why should I be nicer to him if he’s committing adultery? If you’re such good friends now, why can’t you find out if he’s running around on me?”
Her mind-set is all wrong. “I thought we were here to save your marriage. The idea was to find out why he’s unhappy at home.”
“How can he be unhappy at home if he’s never at home? Get him to answer that. Just come right out and ask him, ‘Hey, Steve, are you cheating on your pregnant wife?’”
I’m starting to rethink my choice not to take her shoes. I stay quiet for a few moments, long enough for what sounds like several cars that have been idling under my window to finally roar away. “It doesn’t work that way. When you run a focus group, the way you get people to talk about themselves is, first you build trust and then you get into the tough questions.” Of course, Steve also said he wouldn’t answer any questions.
“This isn’t a focus group, Iris! All I want to know is, is he cheating or not?”
“Why don’t you ask him?”
“As if he’d tell me.”
“He won’t tell me, either. Maybe if I could meet him more than a couple of times I could ask, but if I did it under these circumstances, his guard would go right back up. You hired me for my expertise, so why not let me do my job?” Another clump of idling traffic starts to gather under my window.
Vickie grips the arms of my comfy chair. “I did not hire you for your expertise! I hired you because you begged me to hire you. But I’ve had enough. I’m going to find someone else. This is just ridiculous.”
It’s probably not worth mentioning that I never begged. “Forget the money. You don’t have to pay me anymore. The advice is on me.” Actually it’s on your husband. “And I was just about to tell you that men who are unhappy at home are also tempted to find someone else.”
“Is that so.”
“Yes, it is.”
“Says who?”
This is starting to sound like a playground spat. What’s next, a volley of “is not,” “is too”?
Actually no. For perhaps the first time ever, I’ve got the last word. “Says your husband. He says when men feel unloved by their wives, that’s when they start looking around. Sounds familiar, right? Now, do you want to hear the rest, or would you prefer to bury your head in the sand as what’s left of your marriage disintegrates?”
For the next half hour I play back yesterday’s conversation with Steve. I tell Vickie her husband thinks she should consider how much she criticizes him, because, he says, too much criticism is emasculating to a man. I tell her that according to Steve, if she’d try not to point out so many failings, he’d feel a lot more content and relaxed with her.
Vickie is so still, she barely appears to be breathing. When I’m finished speaking, she stays quiet a long time. Then: “He has never used the word ‘emasculating’—ever.”
“Maybe he doesn’t feel comfortable saying it in front of you. But it’s something he wishes you knew.”
She rubs her eyes. “This is too strange. My husband is complaining about me to a perfect stranger.”
“I think he just wants to tell somebody his side of the story.”
“How am I supposed to do the things he says? It’s impossible not to criticize him. Do you know how hard it is to watch him put dishes in the dishwasher? He throws them in there every which way. He never rinses them first. That’s on a good day. Usually he leaves his coffee cup or ice cream bowl lying around until it drives me so crazy I do it for him. You can’t possibly imagine how irritating that is.”
“I can. To this day, my husband doesn’t know how to put clothing in a hamper.”
“You have a husband?” Vickie glances around the apartment, perhaps expecting one to pop out from his secret hiding place.
Should I be insulted at the way she emphasizes both the “you” and the “husband”? As if she sees me as nothing but a pathetic spinster whose sole purpose in life is to serve her needs? I sound huffy, defensive: “Is it so hard to believe?”
My window air-conditioning unit, which has been grinding laboriously in its efforts to keep the heat outside at bay, decides at this moment to take a break. The unexpected stillness makes my words even more emphatic. Vickie lowers her eyes. “Forgive me. I didn’t mean it that way. I’ve just never heard you talk about being mar
ried. Why did you never mention it?”
“Because . . .” Because that would require me getting a word in edgewise. “. . . it isn’t easy to talk about.”
Vickie says softly, “I understand how you feel.”
The sky, already gray, has grown darker. “You do?”
“Sure.”
Never have I considered a scenario in which Vickie Benjamin Sokolov might be nice to me. It’s simply too out of character to process. “It’s not important anyway.” I turn to take a long look out the window. There’s the cause of all the traffic: a moving van double-parked in front of the building across the street. Burly men are loading it with bubble-wrapped mirrors, blanket-covered sofas, plants in cardboard boxes. I wonder to where the owner of these objects is lucky enough to be escaping.
Vickie says, “I can’t imagine not being annoyed beyond words at my husband ten times a day. Did he say how I was supposed to not bring up the dishwasher?”
He didn’t, I tell her.
“How do you handle it with your husband, then?”
I shrug. “I filed for divorce.”
Vickie gasps.
I did just joke about a scenario looming pretty large in her own life. “Maybe . . .” I want to make it up to her. “Steve and I set up another meeting next Wednesday. I figured you’d want me to. Maybe I could ask him about the dishwasher then.”
“Would you?”
“Of course.”
“Thank you in advance.” She stands up to leave. “By the way, your new haircut is pretty on you. The color, too.” She crosses to the door to let herself out, then stops and turns back around. “This was more interesting than I thought it would be,” she says.
“Don’t go quite yet.” I get to my feet, too, and step toward the kitchen. “You look like you could use a cookie.”
It's About Your Husband Page 14