Saturn's Return to New York

by Sara Gran

  I never knew, I almost say. But it’s too late for this kind of talk, the past is past, and she’s telling me now, so I bite my tongue. She’s telling me now.

  “I know that, Mom. Of course I know.”

  Chapter 14

  So listen to this,” says Crystal. “This’H kill you This’ll fucking slay you. Tony asked me to marry him last night ”

  “What’d you say?” We’re in my office at eight o’clock on a Wednesday. I’m taking advantage of Intelligentsia’s flex-time program even more than usual lately, working late some nights and taking off others. It’s easier to see Evelyn this way, with big blocks of uninterrupted time

  “I told him to go to hell. He only asked ‘cause he knows I’m seeing Sal again ”

  “Which one is Sal? Your ex?”

  “My ex-husband He’s clean now, so he says. Tony’s just jealous. If I said yes, he’d be screwing around again in a second A second.” She snaps her fingers for emphasis. “What’s new with you?”

  I tell her about seeing Austin again. She knows the story. Crystal knows more about me than anyone else at work, possibly more than anyone else I know. I haven’t told any of my other friends because I know what they’ll say; they were there when I came back to New York with no job, no plan, no apartment, and a broken heart.

  “No shit,” she says “You sleep with him?”

  I reach for her pack of Newport Lights “Nah. We were too drunk.”

  “You gonna see him again?”

  “I don’t know. I haven’t decided. He was so sorry” We both laugh. They’re always so sorry.

  “What was his excuse? This I’ve gotta hear.”

  “His mother died, it fucked him all up, he was drinking, doing coke, he couldn’t deal with it, blah blah blah.” I expect Crystal to laugh again, but she looks sympathetic.

  “When my mother died,” she says, “I was so fucked up I lost a month. A whole month out of my life, gone. I have no idea. One day I woke up in a hotel room in Atlantic City with two Jamaicans telling me I owed them a thousand dollars each ”

  “What did you do?”

  “I sneaked out the bathroom window. In a T-shirt. I had to blow the concierge for a new outfit and bus fare back to the city. I spent the bus fare on rock. Anyway, it’s hard when you lose a parent. The less love there was, the harder it is. It’s sick, I know “ Crystal once told me she saw her mother five times in her life, the first when she was born and the other four when her mother was asking for money “Speaking of, how’s your mother? Any better?”

  “No. Worse ”

  “Well, you’ll do better than I did Better than your friend did.”

  “Why do you say that?” I’m thinking, I’ll do worse. I’m thinking, if my mother dies I will die too, because I absolutely cannot imagine life without her

  “You’re a tough girl Tougher than I was Tougher than this guy of yours. Whatever happens, you’ll be okay.”

  This is the best news I have heard in a long, long time.

  Austin calls the next day. And the next. I’m screening all my calls through my cheap little drugstore answering machine and he leaves short, sweet messages.

  “Hi, it’s Austin I’ll try again later ”

  I’m home both times. I listen to the ring and the click and the whir of the tape and the beep and when he speaks a warm panic comes over me and I don’t know what to do

  “So,” says Kyra Desai “You want me to tell you what you should do with this man, mmm? I think this is what every woman wants to know, what to do with her man.”

  We both laugh. Kyra seems amused by my despair. She’s probably seen it all. divorces, reconciliations, infidelity, fights, boredom She’s refused to even speak to me about my mother, she says she won’t speak about illness, but I’m thinking I might squeeze something out of her about Austin Today her hair is piled in a huge bun on top of her head, almost bigger than her head itself, and she’s dressed vaguely like a ballerina, black choker, a pink wrap top, and black capri pants. On her feet are another pair of ultra-high-heeled sandals, these with strings that wrap a few times around the ankle. The extra toes peek out demurely from the strap of the shoes. Her fingernails and toenails are painted lavender.

  “Listen,” she says. “You want me to tell you the right decision But there is no right decision, only what the stars will for us”

  “So, what do they will for me and Austin?”

  “You know, Mary, I try to discourage people from this type of prediction, especially people I like. The gods give me a gift to use, it’s true, but they also give me discretion, judgment Knowing the future can take all the fun out of life.”

  “I’m not having fun.”

  “Yes, I see that Saturn is in retrograde. Venus is well aspected. Pluto is finally moving out of Scorpio. So I tell you this: Give him a chance. Talk to him Soon after, the path will become clear”

  “So, we’re going to be together?”

  “I didn’t say that, Mary. All I said was what I said Give him a chance. It’s in the hands of fate, Mary. You were going to do this anyway. I only tell you ahead of time so you can relax. And now I’m telling you something else, as a friend. Before you give him this chance, let him sweat a little. After all, it’s three years that you lived without him. Let him wait a little longer. You’ll both be better off for this”

  “That’s all you’re going to tell me?”

  “One more thing.” For the first time all afternoon she looks serious “He wasn’t lying when he said he still misses you.”

  He calls again that night. Ring. Click. Whir. Beep.

  “Hey, it’s Austin again. I’ll just keep calling until you pick up the phone and tell me to stop.”

  After he’s called five times, I start answering my phone again. For a few years now I’ve screened my calls to avoid bill collectors and telemarketers, but if I do that now, I’ll be picking up with him knowing that I know it’s him, and I can’t do that yet Maybe when I’m my mother’s age I’ll be mature enough to let a boy know that I like him, but not yet The first time I answer my phone it’s Visa. I hang up on them. The second time it’s Chloe. She’s seen the obstetrician today and everything’s good She’s picked out names—Nicholas for a boy, Nicole for a girl. The third time it’s Visa again. The fourth, it’s him. The plan was to pretend that I answered the phone by mistake, that I was waiting for another call. Then he says how glad he is that I’m speaking to him again and I don’t have the heart to contradict that. I lie down on the loveseat with the phone at my ear and we’re back in our own little world. He asks about my job, my mother, people we knew from Miami, the fake boyfriend. He asks, will I help him look for an apartment. It’s a favor, not a date, and I love to show off how well I know the city. There’s no reason not to say yes. Before we hang up I ask him, why did he move back to New York? For the work, he says. For the money. For the change of pace And because I was here.

  This does not make me happy. Instead, when we get off the phone, I feel like I’ve been co-opted, bought in a package deal, returnable for a full refund. The money, the scenery, and the girl. I know I’m nitpicking. I tell myself, I can always blame Kyra if he fucks me again.

  The concierge of the hotel where Austin is staying thinks I’m a hooker He’s asked if he can help me three times already, so I ham it up while I’m waiting for Austin to come down, crossing and uncrossing my legs, stretching my back into an erotic arch, examining my fingernails for chips I wish I had some chewing gum. I’m daring him to say it, I am dying for this skinny piece of shit in his cheap suit and hair plugs to try to evict me from his posh lobby, when Austin comes down

  First we look at a loft in the Flatiron District, near where I work. Or what’s supposed to be a loft; it’s actually a gutted six-hundred-square-foot studio with decent light for three grand a month This is the price range we’re looking in—three to five grand a month I pay seven hundred for my place in Inwood. This is how much more money Austin makes than me Next we see another fake loft
in the East Village, then a real loft that’s too close to the housing projects on the Lower East Side. Austin will have a studio in his loft and it has to be a decent enough neighborhood for models to troll around in their spike heels.

  We break for coffee at a little cafe on Ludlow Street Sunlight falls on Austin’s face, playing on the gray hair at his temples and the small wrinkles around his eyes I wonder, how did we ever get so old? The apartments have been awful but he looks happy anyway I think it’s because of me

  In the afternoon we look through North Brooklyn It’s only a little less expensive then Manhattan and the streets are exponentially dirtier. We see a flasher in a doorway of one of the buildings we’re supposed to look in, and when Austin sees a young woman heading down the block he waits with her on the corner until we can flag down a cop so she can get home safely

  I don’t see how monumental this all is until I’m back home that evening: I’m deciding where Austin is going to live. And wherever he ends up, I will have been there. No matter where he lives, I will have been the first woman in his apartment.

  Chapter 15

  0n March first the doctors, who we’ve largely given up on, finally reach a diagnosis. Grahm’s disease It feels like a verdict: not guilty by reason of Grahm’s disease. Or maybe guilty In this disease, it is speculated—speculated because no one actually has any fucking idea what it is, this is just their best guess—it is speculated that the small blood vessels in the brain, which supply oxygen, food, and water to the neurotransmitters, weaken and then slowly dissolve, eroding like beachfront property. The conscious mind is hit heaviest and first, like with Alzheimer’s, and so twenty years ago is now and yesterday never happened If Evelyn is lucky, the disintegration will cause a major stroke and she’ll die a quick and painless death, at most a year from now. If she’s unlucky, it will progress slowly, and she’ll die over the course of two long years. I try not to think about that.

  Not a whole lot of research has been done since Dr Grahm’s initial diagnosis in 1965—with only, at most, ten patients a year there’s not a lot of money in it—but now with the booming economy buzzing around biotech and gene research and alternative medicine, interest is perking. So Evelyn has plenty of experiments and trials to join, dozens of research studies to choose from, but there is no known cure.

  No treatment, no cure.

  Evelyn is calm, smooth, the only sign of what she might be thinking is that she chain-smokes now, lighting one cigarette off the last Other than the smoking she’s in great shape; she’s eating a vegan diet, taking long walks, swallowing handfuls of vitamins and herbs twice a day. Her mood is what it always is; cynical, optimistic, aloof.

  “I’m doing a drug trial,” she says. “It’s very promising, so I don’t want you to worry It’s a natural product They get it from ginger. It’s like concentrated ginger What does Dr Snyder know? You see how long it took him just to figure out what’s wrong, just to get me to the right specialists? An idiot. These new people, they’re specialists, this is all that they do. They’re the people who really know. I’ll believe it when I hear it from them.”

  Since the diagnosis I am angrier than I’ve ever been in my life Linda Lawrence, sales manager, asks me to put a Gris-ham novel in my column and I tell her to go to hell. She stands in my office, dumbfounded, and I tell her again. Go to hell Just go.

  I’m on line for a token and an old woman tries to cut ahead of me. I growl and she shows me her half-fare card, waving it in front of my face.

  “You are not,” I say, “cutting ahead of me on this line.” She waves the card again. “There is no fucking way you are cutting this line.” She looks like she might cry. I repeat myself. “No fucking way”

  This morning Austin was supposed to call at eleven, to plan another round of apartment viewings this afternoon. The plan was, he would read the papers that morning, make what appointments he could, and call at eleven to tell me where to meet him At 10 50, I was dressed and ready to go I picked up a collection of short stories by a young Swedish woman and read one at random. An SS officer in a concentration camp befriends a charming Jewish child and risks his own life to bring the child to safely

  11.01

  I picked another short story collection, this one by a young man from Mexico City. A charming Mayan child is left indigent by Mexican economic policies and becomes a street hustler, who then dies at the hands of a vengeful pimp.

  11 15.

  Something in my stomach flipped over, and then flopped back into place The constant anger, which had subsided at the prospect of another day with Austin, flared, burning up through my solar plexus I called Veronica, who was waiting on a call from the Greek Producer. We don’t deserve this, we told each other. We are too fucking cool to wait. Let other women wait, women with children and homes, women who watch Oprah. We are cool, urbane single women living the life, and before we’ve quite caught up with ourselves we’ve made plans to meet in one hour at a spa in SoHo, for a little schvitz and whatever else it is cool, urbane single women do. Waiting is for assholes.

  There is a large sign in the steam room that says SILENCE, PLEASE. Veronica and I are alone so we risk the consequences and speak anyway. I’ve told her the whole story of seeing Austin again. It felt like such a betrayal, to tell Veronica. I was not expecting her to take his side.

  “He was only fifteen minutes late,” she says

  “I don’t know that. I don’t know if he called at all.”

  “I’m sure he did He’s not that much of a schmuck ”

  “Veronica, this is Austin,” I remind her. “He didn’t call for three years ”

  “No, he didn’t call for like two months, and after that you wouldn’t speak to him again for three years That’s not the same thing at all”

  “Whatever. He should know better He should understand that I’m going to be sensitive about this Obviously it’s going to be an issue for me. Obviously.”

  “Mary, it’s fifteen minutes.”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “Fifteen minutes,” she says. “I have never been less than fifteen minutes late for anything, ever, in my entire life, and you’ve never been mad at me ”

  Her logic is denting the anger, but it’s not defeating it “Yeah, but you didn’t abandon me in the middle of a major relationship.”

  “I’ve done worse,” Veronica says. She’s right. She has. “Look, the problem is not that he was late, okay? The problem is that you have a fear of abandonment ”

  “I do not”

  “Of course you do. You lost your father under horrific circumstances when you were what, seven? Of course you do.”

  “That’s not the way it works,” I explain “First you have problems, then you make a diagnosis based on your childhood. You don’t turn a trauma into a prediction.”

  She waves a hand in front of her face “Whatever. What I’m saying is, the problem is that you are totally unable to deal with a little lateness. The problem is, you don’t trust him, and if you don’t trust him now, you never will.”

  “I don’t know about never.”

  “Believe me,” Veronica says. “This type of thing never gets better It gets worse Everything always gets worse ”

  There are three messages from Austin on my answering machine at home, the first from 11.05. I check the machine, check my watch, check my clock, and call the eight hundred number for the time. My watch, it turns out, is ten minutes fast. I left my apartment at 11.05

  Still, late is late.

  When I get home that afternoon I pick up the phone to call Chloe, my first instinct when something goes wrong And then I remember, things have changed with Chloe. Pregnancy is all-consuming. I don’t want to tell Chloe about Austin, or about my toothache, or the new book I read or the new sweater I bought or the shoes I saw in the window of Sassy last week, because everything seems so small compared to Chloe’s creation of a child Except for my mother’s illness, which seems unspeakably morbid Chloe spends time now with her sisters and her mot
her and other friends, friends I never even saw before, all of whom are pregnant or already mothers. Soon she’ll be a mommy, a regular New York City hip mom She’ll take her baby to Showroom 7 sample sales and the Sixth Avenue flea markets. I’ll be eccentric Aunt Mary, the crazy lady who’s had the same office at Intelligentsia for fifty years. I’ll be a piece of the scenery of the city. I’ll be furniture. Chloe will have new, Mommy friends and we won’t owe each other favors anymore.

  I’ll miss Chloe, when she’s buried in diapers and breast milk. She won’t want my help—no one would trust me around an infant—and she won’t have time for purely social visits. Sometimes I’ve thought that Chloe was my only link to the regular world, the universe of women and men who care about their jobs and have children and credit cards and co-ops, and now, if we’re not going to be friends anymore, my only link to that world will be gone I’ll be crazy Aunt Mary, rootless, floating, motherless, alone I hang up the phone.

  Chapter 16

  I’m taking a leave of absence from Intelligentsia, starting next week. A category reviewer—not Annette, a nice young man named Michael Chan—will write the “Spotlight” column while I’m gone. The original reason for the leave was to spend more time with my mother. Now that I’ve got two days left in the office, however, the reasons not to come back multiply like rabbits One big reason, the angriest reason, is that it’s inhuman to spend a third of your life working to make someone else rich (I like it when I think like this—I feel like a punk again). The most practical reason not to come back is, my job is boring as hell, and the last thing I want to do is move up in this company. If writing about crap books is mind-numbing, what kind of a life would it be to manage writers who write about crap books? There’s not a whole lot for me, here at Intelligentsia