Annabelle patted my leg. “Tell me, Susanna. What have you done with your Boston days?”
Friends, I said. Bookstores, movies, a walk along the Charles.
“And what else?” This comforted me, our old way retained.
“Well, what?” I said. “Oh, I know.” I’d run into a boss from an early job. We’d had coffee. “And then he walked me to my car. We were chatting about the usual, his kids, his wife, and then he said, ‘I really want to fuck you.’” I felt a queasy thrill reporting this, myself center-stage desirable and the boss weak with lechery.
Annabelle said slowly, “Why are you sitting here, Susanna, telling me this, this, this unattractive story?”
Easy: long ago you and I bonded over the blatant dreams in the faces of men. We knew we could assess their obvious longing as they eyed our breasts, our mouths, our loose hair, as they shifted on their feet to close the air between us. We knew the uncanny fever we inspired in empty classrooms, as our professors flattered our minds, thought they seduced us; the bosses made pliant and ours because of our unequivocal, unafraid eye contact.
“I cannot understand why you imagined I’d want to hear this,” she said. It happened to me, I thought, dismayed; you always wanted to know what happened to me. We were quiet, the child’s song bumping against my dim confusion. I kept hearing my voice say “I really want to fuck you,” hearing “fuck” as if it were made of glass and rag and kerosene, a little bomb in my possession. Without agreement, Annabelle had dismissed sex, disowned her wonderful “fucking,” and I didn’t know where that left me.
• • •
When my first son was born, I sent out the announcements, and soon Annabelle called. We lived a country apart, her Cape, my Rocky Mountains. I couldn’t remember how long it had been since we’d seen each other, years of her kids’ stages and dogs acquired and divergent tastes formed. Her eldest was in first grade, her twins out of babyhood. As before, she knew vastly more than I did.
“Peter and I were talking,” she said with determined pleasure. I could picture the engaged face, and with a tiny excitement I sensed I’d recaptured her interest. “We wondered if you would like a very big box of pears or a very little box of steaks.” I stuttered, could find no comment. “What would you like, dear Susanna?” She meant to celebrate, but my mind was stiff with distress at what I’d done by becoming someone’s mother. I knew Annabelle wouldn’t get this, her own right family habits secure enough to make her sure of her many roles. Pears, steaks; big, little. Annabelle’s choices, when I was feeble with exhaustion. I sought the answer she wanted, wanted to be what she wanted, and then didn’t give a shit.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Now, come on, sugarfoot, what do you want?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well. You tell us when you do.” The warmth was gone, as if my not choosing was intended to wound her. I’ve failed her, I thought; my home, I felt, was already stuffed with failure. Suddenly formal, we said a strange good-bye.
• • •
A couple of years ago Annabelle called out of the blue and plunged us into our impressive conversation of novels, criticism, exhibits, her need to know, my compulsion to tell, our respective passions reinforced. We were guided by the terms of the youthful friendship.
“And your father,” she said. “Is he well?” He was well, had never succumbed to the possible emergencies of his health. “He must be terribly proud of your book? Is he?”
“Oh, Annabelle, ha. He told me I’d written The Magic Flute.” I was flat with this. My father hadn’t mentioned the contents of the memoir as he pointed out parallels of operatic structure. He congratulated himself devilishly on the genius of his interpretation.
Annabelle was ebullient. “How wonderful, Susanna. Don’t you see? He compared you to Mozart.”
I couldn’t argue with that.
Blind Date
The way Louise looked. That was the first thing people mentioned. My father described her looks after he hired her. The supreme paleness of her skin, her red hair in bright contrast. Her wrist, as it emerged like a stem from a thin cashmere sleeve. Limbs, height, long spine. Then her translucent eyelids, shut for emphasis as she pursued a thought. Late in our friendship I found this annoying, the way she became cloistered and rare, but while I loved her it was endearing.
My father always hired attractive women, intelligence required but beauty expected. He told me he would have seduced them were he not in the wheelchair, and married, of course. Infidelity was common practice in our family, reflexive, like reunions are for other families. But by now my father was paralyzed, couldn’t make a move. Couldn’t make his move. He watched, he enticed. Louise was in her early thirties and also married, about ten years my senior. She’d finished her MFA, then been sent to my father by one of the old goats who passed pretty, sharp writers around. To tell me of his day when I phoned, he’d say, for instance, “Louise took in a kitten. It’s Louise’s fifth wedding anniversary. Did you know Louise lived in Istanbul? I urge you to go to Turkey.” He loved saying her name. By the time he introduced us, we’d been pushed into an arranged sisterhood. Willowy, pale, she was astonishingly unfamiliar as a specimen. He spoke to her with rakish games and double entendres, and I felt like leaving the room.
Becoming friends with her was not hard, and I knew it pleased my father. Expert at the beckoning, Louise seemed to sense that she had a responsibility to bestow herself on others. She was accustomed to our gratitude. I’d come to my father’s apartment, where he edited the magazine, and I’d wait as she followed his last bidding, as she put away letterhead and galleys, wrapped her long neck with a scarf, got one arm into her coat. My father, seeing me wait, would keep her a few extra minutes, a last flirt, a final tease. She’d be laughing good-bye and good-bye as the front door closed and left us in the hallway, elevator button lit. There, she turned her shimmery gaze on me. By doing nothing, she promised elegance. I noted the merino blend of that coiled scarf, that she squeezed lemon juice onto her avocado salad. I read the articles and authors she spoke of reading. We talked each day, less and less about my father. What are you doing? Where are you going? “Would you like to come?” she’d say, sounding like I’d won something. We went to movies she suggested; walked dozens of city blocks, found specialty bookshops, and she gave me White Noise, which I devoured so we could discuss it. We had drinks in downtown bars, the tantalizing disorientation of Tribeca at night, where we’d be joined eventually by her husband, Bert. Bert was a gauze around Louise, less than her. He worshipped her, too, I assumed, and I approved. My father loved to hear from me those particulars of her life he had no way to see, and I loved to deliver them. He mentored her writing and thinking, but I could tell him what it was like to watch her buy shoes, to watch her accept the seat offered by an impressed man on the subway.
“My father thinks you should take voice,” I’d say to her. “Oh, that,” she’d smile, her private galaxy, but nothing more. And I wanted clues to him. I had begun to consider his promiscuous mentoring, the young women who arrived and sat near and left with their arms full of books. He complimented their boots, noted the tiny buttons up an ankle, took an interest in their ambitions. Still childish, I fell short; he had a genius for including me in the conversations so that he could point out to Louise what I had yet to do. She defended me, another reason she was my heroine.
I knew only a little about her. She was not forthcoming and used her privacy, a treat held apart from a puppy: she’d married right after college, then moved to New York. I knew she lived in Brooklyn in a second-floor apartment she described with maddening opacity as “small.” She had nephews. I pondered each discrete item of information, assembled the fascinating woman. I mimicked the flutter in her face, imitated her cadences, as if I might enchant myself and transform into her, which would demonstrate how deeply I knew her. I’d do whatever she suggested.
“You remind me of me,” Louise said, after meeting my boyfriend Noah. “I feel
protective.”
“What do you mean?” I said, pleased. She hadn’t liked him, I could tell, and I wanted her to say something outright. “Protective of me?”
“Of the two of you, as a couple.” She closed her lids, a smile half there, and she sort of shook her head at the ceiling. She could make me disappear. What if she’d said, Don’t make the mistakes I made? Then I could have said, What mistakes, what mistakes, and coaxed out her details. We could have gotten somewhere, grown.
• • •
She finally asked me over for dinner. I’d never been to Brooklyn. No one in my family, as far as I knew, had ever been to Brooklyn. I was a little scared I’d get lost, away from the reliable graph paper of Manhattan’s upper streets, so I met Louise after work, and she took me to the subway. Downtown she said, “We change here,” and shuttled us through the passageways. We came out at Court Street. Twenty-five years later, when I disembark there, it’s still hers, Louise Street. She pointed out the regular stops of her life as we walked—a public library, a Lebanese bakery, a toy store for presents. Her friends had babies. I decided I’d get a coat like hers, camel-colored with a tapered waist. I would buy baby presents. Finally we came to the slender building, where we climbed a flight, and she unlocked the apartment. There was Bert, setting the table.
In the close rooms, Louise was as formal as she was anywhere. Her lithesome hands, the empire in her posture, that conscious grammar. I sat on their bed, which occupied the front room. I said, “Can I see? May I look at your pictures?” She handed me an album and went through to the kitchen to pour wine. “You act too?” I said, looking at her college productions of Godot and Lear, Louise dressed artfully, her height and elbows and the new-penny color of her hair all dedicated on stage, her pallor a radiant moonlight amidst the grayer actors. “Oh, not anymore,” she said. “Bert directed those.”
I said, “Is that how you met?” and she gave her private, reluctant giggle.
After the dinner Lou and Bert walked me to the subway like a departing babysitter, the evening term expired. How could I get my life to be like her life, dinner for two on the table, a pepper mill, fresh candles pulled out of a drawer, a serious job where my intelligence counted? I hugged Bert and thanked him, hugged her longer, even as I could feel that thin stiff body release me.
• • •
I wouldn’t let myself know my boyfriend was a loser—an actual loser, at gambling—but my friends knew and tried to signal me. Annabelle in Boston had said outright she didn’t trust him, a blow to our friendship. I tried to think of Noah’s gambling as a course he was completing, which thus would come to a scheduled close. I marvel at that foolish, inexperienced girl—me—absolutely directed by vain hopes. Can’t you see, I want to tell her, that this will come to nothing? Anyway, my father encouraged him, speculated with his erudite charm on the effects of gambling—“You’ve read Dostoevsky of course?”—or he’d describe Monte Carlo in the ’50s, planting his cosmopolitan nostalgia in my Midwestern boyfriend. Was I meant to worry, or was I meant to laugh?
One day, in the park for a walk, Louise said to me, “You guys seem like us. It’s just—It’s just . . .” She had a careful concern, which made me consider my plight seriously for the first time. And hers. What did she mean? She and Bert were in step. There was no strain I could see.
“Yes?”
“Do you want to meet Will?” she asked. “He’s single, and he’s great. You’re worth a great guy.”
“Well, I know, thank you, but—” Noah and I had just paid a key fee on an apartment on the Upper West Side. We were moving in together. But Louise wanted me to say yes, and her intention and desire were impossible for me to resist. I didn’t know how to stay myself.
I met Will at the Lincoln Center fountain for the adulterous blind date. We talked, naturally, of Louise. Her rare looks, her golden confidence. I got him to tell me things about her from before I’d met her. She’d run marathons; she’d led choirs to competition victory. Of course victory. We sat on a concrete bench, where I thought about kissing him in the open, baiting discovery. Louise loved him, treated him like a brother, so I’d love him, too, step right into an affair, if he’d do it. Will wasn’t interested, wounded from rehab and getting sober. Over dinner at a fake-Southern barbecue place, he talked of petty trials at his job. He was the unhappiest person I’d ever met. Nothing like Louise, who could close her fluttering lids, render trials as inconsequential irritants.
I think Louise threw Will into my path so I’d stop watching her, just for a little while. She left Bert. I didn’t know this was coming. One day she phoned to change lunch and explained, as if she might as well mention it, that she was moving out. “You’re what?” This was a shock, our friendship redrawn in a cold instant as absent of the real confidences. I’d been trying to copy a phantom, had never had access. I’d been planning to become her, eventually, once I stopped following Noah to the backgammon parlor, stopped yelling on Broadway as we made our way home; once we made a little money. I would own long scarves, stand straighter, be supported by praise and esteem.
So she shunned the marriage and started to drop her friends. I thought she was dropping people who didn’t like her lover, a movie director; but she was shedding skins, I realized. She was becoming the next person. Panicked, I did not want to be dropped and upped my interest in the director. I came to his opening night. We stood as a threesome, acting out pretend conversation. When he went to the bathroom, she described sex. “Passionate mutual interests,” she said, head back, eyelids tipped closed, and a gush of laughter escaped her. She was not the elegant Louise I copied, not with this uncharacteristic candor. Fuck you, I thought. Come back, I thought. But she wasn’t really talking to me.
She must have taken the director to meet my father, who would have been jealous and punishing of her, while flattering the lover. Soon she left the magazine, and he hired the next attractive woman, my next unachievable sister.
• • •
Louise slipping from me, I was there for Bert. We could keep her going. I was careful not to equate our abandonment, but I wanted my extravagant loss hailed, too, a friendship death to his marital death, if not quite as traumatic. He should know that none of his friends, their friends, understood his sorrow as I did. Louise, who had claimed all our focus, and we’d given it over, was missing. We were disoriented, aimlessly investigating her disguised heart. We met in restaurants, recalling countless meetings, when we’d been the three of us, the four of us. A short while after Louise left Bert, I left Noah, willing to forfeit the apartment. “She was right about him,” I said. “Maybe she’s right about me,” Bert said, and I soothed him. For months we went on, evenings at small-scale theater productions, earnest phone conversations that lasted past midnight, Bert’s tardy arrivals at bars—he was gravely late, which had driven Louise mad, and they’d carry on a quiet fight for his first few minutes. I would watch her distress rise, hated that. Then she’d bat away conflict with the lilting laugh and puckered eyelids. “He should behave better to you,” I used to say in private, imitating her worldly concern for me, and she’d agree.
• • •
Bert offered to make a dinner. Baking had saved him during the divorce, a relationship to dough and heat that he could master. He turned out one tart after another, caramelizing pears, shaving apples that became crisp browned layers in the oven. When he invited me to his new place, we were by then closer friends than I’d ever been with Louise. Anguish and real rejection, Bert and I found, fed intimacy far better than worship had.
I stood on the platform as the subway left me there. Bert’s directions seemed complicated by excess details as I crossed streets, but then the brownstone appeared, confirmed the effort, and Bert answered the garden-apartment bell. He’d kept the cat, who dove behind the sofa. We were pleased and smiling, our mutual interest something we had built, that belonged to us, and I handed him wine to celebrate new starts. Without her, his habitat was fastidious, stripped of manuscripts and
brimming folders, no lilac-silk bathrobe on the back of the bathroom door. He had pens in an earthen cup on the upright piano and cookbooks alphabetized in the kitchen.
The dinner was a wooing as he set out grilled lamb chops and braised vegetables, took his time. We would sleep together, we both knew that. I took my chair and he stood, mixed a vinaigrette for the baby greens—walnut oil and champagne vinegar, my first taste of them. His pear tart and brewed coffee. We’d been heading here, our remarks increasingly sly, giving us excuses to bump shoulders, or slide into each other, my head resting against him at a play. I knew the smell of his coat and also the stronger, more complex smell of his T-shirt, couldn’t recall how Louise smelled. In the kitchen I stopped him from the dishes, turned him to me and kissed him, a question answered, like kissing Louise, or what remained of her. After we made love, he walked me to the subway entrance, where we kissed a solid, triumphant kiss, and I went home. Our affair lasted a few weeks, more evenings plotted like the first. I learned Brooklyn’s Sunday streets. Sometimes we were happy and silly, other nights just plain glad to be touched. How hard we were working not to mention her. How hard we worked to tend the faint red ember that was about to go out altogether.
Evidence
Working for the movie producer, I occupied a furnished house on the bay in Sag Harbor through the week. I can’t say I lived there. The producer, who didn’t want to leave the Hamptons, had rented it to be his office, and I was a sort of domestic assistant, tending both the professional duties and the several homelike rooms. He came in the mornings, killed his engine in the driveway. He had the Times and the Wall Street Journal under his arm, poured himself the coffee I’d made in the kitchen, then sat at his enormous desk, scripts and magazines spread around him. I was his D-Girl—scout, basically—and I read screenplays and short stories and typed coverage on an electric typewriter set up in one of the bedrooms, the door open so I could respond to him.
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