I paused. “Did you win in Atlantic City?”
“No,” he said.
There was another pause while we watched television a moment and he served himself another helping. Then I said, “I wrote my real father a letter today. I thought I’d tell you.”
“Why would you do a thing like that?” he asked.
I watched the fork raise from the plate to his mouth, thankful that he was not looking at me. “You said—”
“I beg your pardon.”
“You said that if I—” I tried again, but instead, “It didn’t seem an inappropriate thing to do.”
“You might have waited until you had a place of your own,” he said. Since all my mail did come addressed to him, another man, this might have been a consideration.
“I don’t suspect that it will matter in the end,” I said.
“What’s that?”
I signed the card that would make me executor of my mother’s estate in the event of her death, and took it out in the hall to the mail chute. One moment more, my ear against the slot, I listened to the card fall sixteen floors—foosh, foosh, the way a doctor described the murmur of my seven-year-old heart, which would heal by itself. I recalled a conversation that I had once with a friend when she lost her sole remaining parent.
“I’ve always wanted to ask,” I began. “Is it at all liberating?”
She looked at me with wide astonished eyes and grabbed my wrist. “Yes,” she said. “Yes.”
EACH TIME I WALKED INTO my new apartment, I had to orient myself anew, for I had a picture in my head of how it should all eventually look, and I would be slightly awed, somewhat pained to see that the wood floors had not been bleached, the harlequin pattern laid in the kitchen, the right sofa purchased, or any of the blueprints of my imagination realized yet. I was longing for things out of proportion, the way a Piranesi etching dwarfs human beings in the foreshortened area before a ruin. Yet if I longed for things with a spurious scale, one that made everything seem huge and distant in the short forefront of desire, I do not think this kind of longing unique to me, but as common to my generation as a popular song. But to want and want and want, and not to know that you’re wanting, means that you’re never sure of anything. It means that you do not know how vulnerable you are, how open to attack. It means that you don’t know how great the space of your longing is until there is a specific object to fill it.
The man I had lived with finally called me a month after I had moved out to tell me that Gershwin the cat had died of diabetes in an animal hospital.
He said, “I thought you would want to know since you were the only person he ever liked immediately. In fact, I called to ask you to join me at the hospital, but you weren’t home. The doctor had given him a 200-to-l chance against survival, and said that it would be less expensive to put Gershwin to sleep, but I said we had to take the chance. Cost was no consideration.”
“How much did it cost?”
“Three hundred dollars. We did what we could, though.” He began to cry a little into the phone. He apologized for himself, and then he began to sob. I was certain I knew what he was thinking: had he taken the cat to the vet a month ago, the cat would have lived. I suspected that if he were still crying now three days after its death, he had been blaming himself all along. I even hoped that this was the case.
“I just got back from burying him in the country where I found him ten years ago. On the way home I wrote a eulogy for the poor thing, which I was going to deliver to you by hand. Maybe I could come over now.”
I did not want him to see my apartment until it was finished. What’s more, there were a couple of things I had left in his apartment in the hope that I would be able to collect them and see him again, but I never had the courage to go back uninvited. And I had also convinced myself that had he wanted to see me he would have called. “Do I have any mail there?”
“Yes, lots,” he said, more cheerful now. He began to read me the return addresses, none of it at all important until, “And here’s one from your father! Shall I bring it with me?”
“No, no,” I cried out. “I’ll be right there. Wait for me.”
I knew I could get to him faster than he would to me, for there were twenty short blocks between us which I could run without effort. I rushed out the door without my keys, ignoring the phone as it began to ring again. A saxophone teacher who lived in my building was giving a music lesson. His student yearned to play with the urbane detachment of the teacher, but whether it was breathing, or phrasing, or whatever determines these things, I do not know; he played feelingly. And whatever his intention, it was the way he played the song that I heard the lyrics as I ran, “Time and again I longed for adventure, something to make my heart beat the faster. What did I long for, I never, never knew.”
It was that time of the year when the sun appears to set down the center of Manhattan streets. It was that hour of the evening when the dusk light makes the surface of things important. Everything seemed suddenly proportionate and complete. I felt as if I were running back in the face of time to meet a stranger to some part of myself.
The apartment door was open when I got there. I walked in and saw him sitting on the edge of the bed with the receiver of the telephone in his hand. When he smiled at me it was with the smile of one mourner to another.
“You’re out of breath,” he said.
“I ran.”
“You look good,” he said, and embraced me. Once his face was on my shoulder he began to cry again. He cried so hard that I had to lower him to the floor. The bottom of his sweatshirt did not cover his stomach, and I could not decide if that was because he had put on weight or if the shirt had always been too small. I sat on the edge of the bed and tried not to look at him. Something about the way he wept told me that he did not blame himself for the cat’s death after all, for having diagnosed its illness as one he had suffered himself, for having prescribed it the same homeopathic medicine he had prescribed for himself. A kind of dread came over me, maybe phobic, maybe instinctual, as if I should be prepared to bolt, and which suddenly forced me to wonder: Why hadn’t I ever noticed this air of failure about him before? Were all men like him? Was I?
“You have something for me?”
He reached behind for the envelope I could see in his back pocket, and handed it to me with a grateful smile. It was the eulogy for the cat, which he then waited for me to read. His beautiful handwriting only made the contents more mawkish, made it easy to imagine him covering the Upper West Side giving individually written copies to the doormen of buildings where his friends lived, the envelopes marked By Hand.
“I’m touched,” I said. He had managed to remember me in the cat’s eulogy, as if it were a will. “It’s lovely.” He nodded, smiled again, and looked down at the floor.
I paused with due respect. Then, “The letter from my father?”
“Oh, that,” he said. He didn’t move. “I tried to call you. I was only joking.”
I leaned forward, as if to urge someone on in a bank line. “What’s that?”
His tragic smile disappeared. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t think that you’d run all the way down here for that. You said he never meant anything to you.” Then he smiled again.
I didn’t bolt. Walking out of the apartment I considered the value of what I was leaving behind: a Mexican knit sweater, a picture of me in the same sweater, half obscured in shadow and dark glasses, and a hat. I went into the hall and held the call button down, hoping that the elevator man would think there was an emergency, although the arrow above the door indicated that the opposite was true.
“I am sorry,” he said in the doorway. “Really, I had no idea. Maybe someday you’ll even blame yourself,” he said hopefully, meaning that someday I might forgive him.
Someday, yes, I thought, but there was no hurry. I started running down the white marble stairs. The walls were wainscoted with the same marble, although polished and not so worn, and the frosted windows made
the light in the stairwell gauzy. I swung from one flight to the next around the banisters at each landing. On one of the landings below me there was a model in a winter coat, and a photographer with a shiny umbrella on a tripod. He had turned his camera on my descent. I could hear the accusation of his shutter release. He thought he was so lucky. But I was running too fast to stop, and I was certain that if I ran hard enough, fast enough, and in the right direction, I would find myself back in the raw heart of time, that point of detachment, and be beat out again, with nothing at all behind me.
ANYTHING YOU WANT
Christopher Coe
The DAY OF HIS FATHER’S WEDDING, when the boy came down in the morning, he was ready to out-perform himself in the water. Most days, he swam thirty lengths, six sets of five, but earlier in the morning, the boy had made up his mind that before he would visit his mother in the hospital on his way to the church, before he would stand up for his father, he would swim six sets of ten.
His grandmother was out by the pool when the boy came down. She was in her wheelchair, putting on lipstick, giving herself a crooked mouth. A smoking cigarette was burning the smoked ones in the small glass ashtray that the old woman had set on the wheelchair’s arm. In the glass in her hand, the hand that she did not need for the lipstick, his grandmother clutched what the boy was sure was a bullshot.
“It’s morning,” he said. “I mean, pardon me, but isn’t this still morning?”
The old woman made a show of looking up, of squinting at the sky to read the time of day. “So far,” she said. “So far it’s been morning all day. Your point is?”
The boy said, “Only that it’s approximately ten o’clock in the morning last time I looked, and you’ve been told you can’t smoke, Angel Pie, and how much vodka have you got there in that glass?”
“Skip it,” the grandmother said. “Just drop dead right now.”
“But Angel Pie,” the boy said.
“It’s not every day,” the grandmother said, “that we have a night like last night.”
The boy said, “That’s a stunning reason to be killing yourself at ten o’clock in the morning.”
The old woman went once more around with her lipstick, widening her mouth. She was the boy’s mother’s mother. The boy was hoping that his extra swimming would make him tired for his visit to his mother. Lately, for about a year, the water had been kept warm, even hot enough to give off steam on all days but the hottest, and most days his swim made the boy feel languid.
“It’s a perfect reason,” the grandmother said. “Such a stunt.” She screwed the lipstick down, snapped it shut.
The boy frowned at the grandmother. “All right,” he said, “keep the drink, but give me the ciggie. You can’t smoke, Angel Pie.”
“Look,” the grandmother said, “I’m an old lady. I can do anything I want.”
The boy shrugged. He hung his robe over the back of a garden chair and went toward the pool. At the edge, he turned somewhat theatrically to his grandmother.
“Let’s all do stunts,” he said. “You can smoke those ciggies and drink those drinks, and I’ll go down to the bottom of the pool and think of reasons not to come up.”
Then the boy stepped into the shallow end and began his sets of ten.
THE WATER WAS HEATED for the women. The grandmother complained of a shoulder that she had broken years ago, and the heat was also good, the old woman said, calming for the boy’s mother.
His grandmother claimed that the steam was her secret for the jade trees that grew around the pool. The boy never said what he knew to be the truth, that the jade trees had thrived around the pool long before the old woman had come to live in the house, long before the pool began to steam. He did not remind the old woman that the jade trees had thrived around the pool through the years that the water was kept cold for his father, who liked to start each day with an invigorating plunge.
His father was a man who pursued invigoration.
The boy did not. He did not take to water with a swimmer’s form or rhythm. Every day, he swam where his form showed least, not on the surface but under it, brushing along the pool’s floor with strokes that made no sound as he swam from end to end. The women floated themselves, in dark glasses, drifting on their backs. The boy swam where the women could not float.
Since his father left and his grandmother came, every morning, the heated water made him feel slow, and most nights, when he looked out the large dining room window, he could see the steam rising in the garden that was lit up every night, through every dinner with the women, and in the glass itself he could see his mother from behind, her hair worn up, steam rising over the back of her head, surrounding her in her new place at the head of the table.
Upstairs, the boy was standing in his mother’s three-sided mirror when he heard his grandmother wheel herself into the elevator downstairs. He heard the elevator, and next, the inner and outer doors, sliding, banging, and then the faster, high-pitched sound of the old woman’s wheelchair, its motor bringing her around the stairwell, until she stopped at the open door of his mother’s room.
He saw her from three sides, surrounding him. He saw that she had freshened her drink.
He was dressed for his father’s wedding, rubbing his mother’s vitamin E cream under his eyes.
“How do I look?” he asked.
The grandmother stayed in the doorway. She said nothing.
The boy said, “I should look better.”
The grandmother wheeled herself into the room, toward the mother’s desk. She took a cigarette from a cut glass cigarette box and lit it with a matching lighter that was set on the desk. She took an envelope from a stack of mail that had been waiting for the mother, opened it, took out what was in it, and with the cigarette in her mouth she folded the envelope into a shape for catching ash.
She flicked ash into the shape she had made.
“By the phone,” the boy said. “Mother keeps an ashtray by the phone.”
The grandmother said, “I know that your mother keeps an ashtray by the phone. It may interest you to know that I happen to know where things are in this house.”
“You didn’t answer me,” the boy said.
“I didn’t answer you what’?”
“You didn’t answer me how I look,” the boy said.
The grandmother blew smoke at the ceiling.
The boy said, “I don’t like it either, but I have got to do this thing today for Daddy.”
“Call in sick,” the grandmother said. “Pretend it’s school.”
In profile, the boy sucked in his stomach where it did not stick out. He rubbed more vitamin E cream under his eyes. He was using his mother’s vitamin E cream because his mother had stolen and used up the anti-aging cream that the boy had sent away for the week he turned sixteen.
She had also stolen his skin-tightening cream and his three new eyelid creams.
As he had read to do, the boy rubbed the cream into his face in upward, outward strokes.
“I don’t know about you,” the grandmother said, “but usually, most of us put our faces on before we get dressed. We do our makeup first, then our clothes, just like men shave.”
The boy looked at the old woman in the mirror. He rubbed cream around the comers of his eyes. “This is a finishing touch,” he said. “If I did it first, how could it be a finishing touch?”
“This is not a day for you to go to a wedding,” the old woman said.
The boy closed his eyes. He raised both hands to his face and began to rub the cream into his eyelids. He did this slowly. He took a long time with it and was nearly finished before he gave the old woman an answer. “They’ll have champagne,” he said.
“We have champagne here,” the grandmother said.
“Not on ice,” the boy said, still with his eyes closed. “Mother drank it all last night.”
“She wanted to get them down,” the grandmother said, disgusted.
The grandmother meant the boy’s pills. The pills the moth
er had taken had belonged to the boy. The boy’s pills were medicine; he took them every day because he had to. “It makes sense,” the boy said. “You think it’s going to be your last taste on earth, you want some sparkle.” He opened his eyes; the old woman was looking at him in the mirror. He said, “You want effervescence.”
The old woman smoked.
He said, “In your last taste on earth you want a lively pétillement.”
“What’s that?” the grandmother asked.
“Wine-talk for sparkle,” the boy said. “Time to flick an ash, Angel Pie.”
The grandmother said, “You’re right. You should look better.”
The boy rubbed vitamin E lightly over his lips. He said, “I find more and more as I get older that nothing is the end of the world.”
“You find wrong,” the grandmother said.
The boy could not drive. From his mother’s desk, he made the first of three calls to taxi companies. When he was in a hurry, when he was not, it was his practice to call three taxi companies and to take whichever cab came first. The old woman always said that she was the one who had to stay behind to hear it when the late taxis came and the drivers blasted their horns down on the street.
“Someday they will all catch on to you,” the old woman said. She had wheeled herself across the room, to the mother’s dressing table. “Then, of course, you know what will happen, don’t you? They will all stop coming, and the day will come when not one taxi cab company in this town will come to this house, and how are you going to like that?”
The boy was on hold. He took up the envelope that the grandmother had used for ashes and emptied it into the ashtray by the telephone. He took up the drink that she had left on the desk and tried a short taste. The drink was a bullshot. If it had not been a bullshot in the garden, it was a bullshot now.
He took a longer taste.
“Then what are we going to do?” the grandmother said. She was selecting lipsticks from a drawer in the mother’s dressing table, testing colors on the back of her hand. “What are we going to do when, because of you, we can’t get one cab in this entire city to come to this house?”
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