“Another tall building?” she said. “Couldn’t we meet downtown somewhere?”
“I like tall buildings. And I’m meeting someone at five just nearby. Don’t be late.”
She protracted the conversation for a little longer, but he was calling from the airport and needed to move on. As she replaced the receiver, Mary was aware of the ache in her facial muscles that told her she had been smiling fixedly again.
In the sunshine of Herald Square, she stood for a moment deciding where to go. Downtown to her left she could see the Flatiron, nosing skew-whiff through the grid; to her right were the dun brick cliffs of Broadway; behind was a palimpsest of New York endeavor, the black names of superseded garment enterprises fading into brick: Bo-Peep Mfg Co, STYLE UNDIES, Weber Blouses; while opposite was a winner of the battle to survive, R.H. MACY, whose giant cast-iron-framed department store dominated the block. She had pictured him as a puritanical Kansas draper with rimless spectacles, something in the Harry Truman line, and had been surprised when Frank told her he had had his first shop in Nantucket. Perhaps Captain Ahab had hunted Moby Dick in a Macy’s oilskin.
She walked uptown a couple of blocks, then turned right onto 37th, a street she liked for its long view across the island; had it not been for the slight elevation of Fifth Avenue you could have seen straight through from coast to coast. She called in at a friendly-looking lunch place—deli, café, diner, she was never quite sure of the definition—and took a seat at the counter. There were sandwiches of the usual combinations, though what they were pushing was provolone or chopped egg with anchovy. She asked for a roast beef with mustard on whole wheat bread and a Rheingold Extra Dry beer, which the counterman produced at once in an iced tumbler.
Mary paused for a moment as she sipped and felt the cold intoxication trickle down inside.
“He called me in,” said the man on the next stool to his companion. “He was in sportswear. He wanted to expand. I had an opportunity.” He chewed noisily on his corned beef sandwich. “Can I get another pickle here?”
Mary felt dispensable to the life of the city, with its hustling for a break; there were few places on earth where her absence would be quite so unremarked, but this did not bother her in the least. There was no doubt that the intensity of her inner life had made her more than usually observant of the place, as though she sought to locate some correlative of her elation in glass and steam and stone; but the indifference, for example, of self-absorbed Park Avenue to her passing steps did not cast her down.
Then her mind turned to her mother. She had spoken to her father before she left Washington and he reported that Elizabeth, while weakening, was in good spirits; there was no reason for Mary to be in London yet, though there would shortly come a time. Her father strongly resisted her offer of going then and there; he said it would be more difficult for him; he suggested that her presence would intensify the bizarre uncertainty, his feeling of time suspended.
Since the day Frank had returned from Oregon and she had gone softly into his bedroom with the tea, Mary’s sense of time had been similarly affected. Dying, loving, facing some wreck of truth and choice: so long as time did not move, nothing changed, everything was possible. She could have more than one life; she could be with Charlie, with her absent children, with Frank and with her mother, alive or dead. Would her mother, when dead, be any more absent than her children were now? She was not bound to choose, not this instant, perhaps ever—to bow to the literal pressure of a clock.
As she stood up to leave, she slid the picture of Richard and Louisa furtively from her purse. She kissed their small, ridiculous faces. “It’ll be all right,” she murmured. “I promise you. Somehow … I’ll make sure it’s all right.”
She began her preparations at four-thirty, with an hour-long bath, but she was so excited at the prospect of seeing him again that she could not make the time pass. She had exhausted her repertoire of Rodgers and Hammerstein and spent twenty minutes making up, but still it was too early to be the ten minutes late she planned. Eventually she settled on the cotton sheath with the dots and set off once more into the streets.
She wanted to linger in front of shop windows, but it had clouded over again and was beginning to rain, so she arrived at Rockefeller Center, breathless and five minutes early. The elevator rocketed her upward through the circles of purgatory, and as she entered the bar on the sixty-fifth floor, she breathed in deeply, trying not to smile too much in her lofty paradise.
He was not there, and a waiter took her to a table at the edge, by the window, to wait for him. Manhattan lay steaming under drizzle and cloud. She could vertiginously make out the symmetry of the Empire State Building, stepping inward as it neared the top, the golden radiator caps that crowned the Chrysler and the uncompleted Pan Am giant rearing up over Grand Central. She ordered a gin and tonic from the swift-footed waiter who had appeared at her elbow.
She imagined Frank at ground level, hurrying down his numbered street, lost somewhere in these insoluble equations. She scanned the horizon as though she might see this little figure, her microscopic destiny, like an atom flying in chaotic mass. On the East River was the huge blurred outline of the Manhattan Bridge; beyond the Hudson she could see the lights of Hoboken, refulgent, foggy yellow on the water. She gulped the drink. My darling, she thought. Come soon. Come before I die of wanting you.
When he came, she found it hard to speak and asked him questions so that he would have to do the talking. What was it in that face that was a self-renewing source of wonder to her? Each time she looked away, she found she had forgotten it; she could not memorize its features. She could enumerate them if he was not there: the blue-brown eyes, the bony forehead with a hint of vein running up into the cropped hair with its early dusting of gray, the lean cheeks, slightly tanned, the long, narrow-bridged nose and the incongruous handful of freckles beneath the eyes. But the composition would not stay in her mind as a completed picture. Was this evanescence the key to its peculiar power over her, or was it the other way around: did the fierceness with which she gazed at him cause the loss of focus? It didn’t matter, because the result was the same, a hunger for his presence that his presence could not sate.
They each had a second drink before Frank called over the waiter and settled the dizzying check. In the elevator, Mary clung hard to the deco handrail and swallowed aggressively to uncork her ears. Her legs wobbled slightly as they emerged and walked over the floor, to which, she noticed, some cruel engineer had given a slight and unnecessary slope. Frank hoisted his umbrella and put an arm around her shoulders as they went outside; she leaned into his sheltering embrace.
“I booked a table at a place nearby,” he said. “We can walk if you like.”
The restaurant was a house number added to a street number divided by the number of an avenue, but inside it was a world. A huge cold room, with a door like a large version of the fridge door in Brittany, lay to their right as they went down a dark wood-lined corridor. In its lit refrigerated space hung rows of beef carcasses. The dining room was low-ceilinged with a collection of delicate smokers’ pipes suspended by hooks; on the walls were framed playbills, and the light, from innumerable candles, was orange and low.
Frank smiled at Mary as she settled onto a wooden bench with her back to the wall so that she could face out into the room. He offered her a cigarette and she remembered how Charlie had noticed that she was not smoking her usual brand in France. She did not mention the incident to Frank, however, because they did not talk about Charlie: he was from a different life, her other life, and there was no need to complicate things.
Frank ordered half a dozen oysters, but they brought seven, to show that this was a magnanimous place for American people. In other ways, it was a typical Frank selection, Mary thought: it had all the things he liked, snapper, scrod, bluefish, blackfish, broiled, charred, scarred, and steak, of course, with pots of creamed spinach and baked potatoes big as footballs. Intimidated by the sight of so much meat through the win
dow of the cold room, Mary ordered fish.
Frank talked, and Mary heard herself talking, though by the end of the night she had no recollection of what they had said. Perhaps it was on this occasion that he explained to her the difference between cherrystone and littleneck clams; perhaps he told her his thoughts on Richard Nixon, how as a congressman he had sponsored an early version of the McCarran Act, which allowed U.S. citizens to be picked up on suspicion of subversive sympathies and sent to FBI detention camps (“concentration camps” some people called them) without trial; or perhaps this was one of the evenings on which he told her of his life in Chicago, of the terrible jobs he had done before the war, as a porter in the slaughterhouses and, when he tried to improve himself, as a stock boy in a candy factory for sixty cents an hour.
He may have smiled when he spoke, because when he recalled bad times he seemed not so much bitter that they had existed as grateful that there had been a means of escape. Sometimes Mary thought she saw him shudder with the sheer relief that he had become something, someone, a man who could go into a steak house, order what he wanted and tip the waiter handsomely. It always surprised her, this sense of striving in him. Because she loved him so much, admired him and in many ways deferred to him, it seemed extraordinary to her that he had had to strain so mightily to create the man he was. His grace, to her, was given.
He flung on his coat and took her out again into the rain, where he hailed a taxi with a stockyard whistle and ordered the driver downtown. Sliding on the slippery backseat, they moved into each other’s arms, staying fixed together till the cab pulled up alongside some steps going down into a basement where a bulb hung over a rainy doorway.
Inside, they elbowed and slid their way through the press to a corner where Frank was greeted with familiarity by a tall waitress.
“Wanted to take you to the Five Spot,” he said in Mary’s ear, “but Ornette Coleman’s pretty much taken up residence there. I think you’ll like these people better.”
There was so much smoke beneath the low ceiling that at first Mary found it difficult to make out the stage, a tiny raised platform only a few feet away over broken glass and a sticky floor. She tried to concentrate on the music, focusing on one player at a time. The saxophonist, a burly man in a pork pie hat, closed his bulging eyes when he played his solo, but occasionally the lids would half open to reveal the whites only, the irises having slid up in rapture out of view. The pianist, a white man with college-boy spectacles and a striped blazer, seemed barely to touch the instrument, his long fingers resting flat and delicate on the keys, his right leg, never near the pedal, jerking up and down to the awkward beat. Though the horns played into microphones, the volume was low enough for conversation to be heard over the quiet passages, and aficionados next to the stage would look round accusingly if a noise disturbed their trance.
“Apparently,” said Frank with his lips against Mary’s ear, “Coltrane’s left Miles Davis. Some guy just told me.”
“Is that bad news?”
“You could say so. They had the best little band there’s ever been. They’re on tour in England. I blame you.”
A man with a beard and a pipe moved in front of their table, blocking Mary’s view; his head nodded up and down incessantly and there was a self-congratulatory smile on his face. Mary studied him and his girlfriend, a young woman with a boy’s haircut, a black roll-neck sweater, slacks and pumps, until Frank said something in the man’s ear that caused him to move over.
On stage the bassist, whose forefinger was splayed flat from plucking, had his moment alone, before the trumpeter picked up some bleak and lonely notes that only he seemed to know where to find, floating out in the dark somewhere, spearing each one like a bubble he was bursting. It was an extraordinary sound, Mary thought, lyrical, yet desolate. She turned to see Frank’s face tight with pleasure. The trumpeter’s fingers lay flat across the keys, squeezing and releasing as he blew, so she could sense the resistance of the air beneath his hand; when he inhaled it was not his cheeks that filled, but some odd pouch beneath his ear. His eyes were fixed, open and disconsolate; once he lowered the horn from his mouth and a long tongue shot out across his lips. Behind him the drummer worked his brushes in a circle without taking them from the skin; he cocked his head toward the fragile movement, like a doctor performing some delicate investigation.
In his apartment, later, Frank played her Miles Davis and John Coltrane playing “So What” and “Freddie Freeloader”; he seemed mollified to think that, with all their drugs and furies, they had at least managed to record some songs together. They were in bed by now and Mary stroked his hair as the sound of the trumpet drifted through the open door. She looked back toward the living room, and saw his unfinished drink on a table by the window, and the dotted sheath that had gone the way of all dresses, lying on the floor beside it.
“What are you doing?” he said. “With your fingers?”
“I was writing my name on your skin. Like this. My full name.” She traced out the letters, Mary Elizabeth Kirwan, over his shoulder.
“Egoist,” he said.
“Write something on me,” she said.
He rolled her onto her front, and traced something with his finger down her spine.
“What’s that?”
“My army number. I think. Good God, you know, I think I may have forgotten it.”
“Good.” She kissed him.
At first when they had made love, Mary was surprised that a woman of her age should still have a hunger for these actions, ungainly, coarse—and pointless, too, because she took every precaution that they should not end in pregnancy; she would not have thought that she could still feel so desperate to perform an act which she had mentally relegated to her past.
But when Frank touched her, with the music still drifting through the door, she pictured for a moment the drummer’s circular caress of the skin. As her thoughts became less coherent, she closed her eyes. She did not think she was “good” at this, if there were standards or comparisons; and it was odd that the feelings she had were so little like love as she understood it—what she had felt for Charlie, or her mother or her children. The deeper into sensation she went, beneath his weight and his urging, the more it was like going into a room of utter darkness, which she felt was familiar from a time before her birth; it was something other, or beyond; it was like death, or very near it.
When she returned and found herself still lying there, with his adored face close to hers on the pillow, there was nothing for her to say.
In the morning she awoke to the high metal screech of the garbage trucks collecting on Grove Street. She was alone in bed.
Frank came back with bagels and muffins and a selection of newspapers, which he let fall on the table before he set about making breakfast. When she had returned from the bathroom, Mary sat on the couch and leafed through the papers while she waited for the coffee to be ready.
“Sorry I was out for so long,” said Frank, from the kitchen. “I got talking to the super. Giovanni. He always wants to talk about DiMaggio and Crosetti and when the Yankees won the pennant in ’41. You like your bagel with sesame seeds or plain? He thinks I’m Italian. He can’t believe I don’t speak a word of the language. Then it’s how Rizzuto replaced Crosetti because shortstop was an honorary Italian position. And I made the mistake of mentioning a couple of guys who’d played for the Cubs, Cavarretta and Dallesandro, but Chicago doesn’t count for Giovanni, it’s only the Yankees.”
“Is this American football?” said Mary. “Or basketball?”
Frank put a tray on the coffee table and sat down next to her. “Best not to ask,” he said. “What would you like to do today?”
“I have to go back and change,” said Mary. “That’s the first thing I have to do. Then, I don’t know. Maybe I could come back, wander round the Village a little. Have lunch.”
“Or I could come up to join you. We could—”
“But, Frank, I like it down here.”
“Okay. I tell you what. If you really like it, there’s a guy I met in San Remo’s the other day who asked me to some party tonight. Poetry, mime, that kind of thing.”
She saw his suppressed grimace. “You sure?”
So they did what Mary had always wanted to do, wander from shop to shop, from Pierre Deux antiques on Abingdon Square, via Li-Lac Chocolates to Zito’s bakery and Chumley’s defunct speakeasy. Frank, initially reluctant, told her that Minetta Street was on top of an old trout stream called manetta, the Canarsee Indian for “devil water.” Mary did not know if he was serious, but she liked his commentary as they walked down streets which to her looked fashionable in a bohemian way, with goods displayed across the sidewalk, as in Europe. They had coffee in a pavement café near the Sullivan Street Playhouse, and Mary felt hungry from the morning’s walk. She scraped the grains of brown sugar from the bottom of her cup.
“And what would you like to do now?” she said.
Frank looked at his watch. “It’s getting close to lunch. Me, I guess I’d like a dry martini and a steak as big as a blacksmith’s apron, then maybe go back to the apartment and …” He spread his hands delicately.
“I recognize that phrase,” she said. “ ‘As big as a blacksmith’s apron.’ ”
“It’s famous. It’s from that story by Irwin Shaw, ‘The Girls in Their Summer Dresses.’ ”
“Yes, that’s right.” Mary nodded. Something made her feel uneasy. “You read that, did you?”
“Sure. Not quite your American primitive.”
“Of course.” Mary frowned, then gathered herself. “Well I’m hungry too. Let’s go down there, shall we?”
“You don’t want to go there. Below Houston Street it’s kind of a slum. Hell’s Hundred Acres. I only go there to report industrial accidents.”
“I’m sure I went there once when you were away. A lovely bar.”
“Well, maybe there’s some places. Perhaps the beatniks are moving in. After all, when a slum’s hit the bottom there’s only one way it can go.”
On Green Dolphin Street Page 23