by Melissa Bank
At 9:30, I unzipped my dress, put my bathrobe on, and ordered Chinese food.
At 10:00, the phone rang, and I said an icy, “Hello?” It was the doorman: “Food delivery.”
At 11:30, I called my friend Laurie.
“What do we know about this guy?” she said. “Tell me everything.”
I told her he’d grown up in Manhattan.
She said, “I probably know him.”
When I told her his last name, she said, “I know Bobby Guest,” and for a second she was excited by the coincidence.
I was afraid she’d gone out with him. “You know him?”
“I know who he is,” she said. She told me that he was one of a few boys who were famous for being handsome and cool in high school. A friend of hers from Spence had gone out with a friend of his at Collegiate. “I’m going to do a little research.”
When the phone rang at 1:00, I was still hoping it would be Bobby.
“He’s a bad guy,” Laurie said. He wasn’t just a womanizer; he’d betrayed friends, he’d mistreated acquaintances, he’d offended strangers. She said, “Everybody has a Bobby Guest story.”
While she enumerated his crimes, I remembered kissing him in Union Square, and I thought, I will never feel like I’m fifteen again.
“Eventually, Bobby Guest lets everyone down,” Laurie said. “That’s who he is.”
Even knowing this, I lay in bed that night going over everything I had said and done, trying to place the moment when I’d lost him.
. . . . .
On Sunday, I left another message for Bobby.
Whenever the phone rang, I ran for it.
Both my brothers offered to kill Bobby, and I thought what fine men they’d grown up to be.
. . . . .
At work, Sam said, “Well?”
I said, “His voice didn’t save our marriage.”
I felt sick all Monday and Tuesday. Satyr, I remembered saying; and, You’ll never get beyond your hardwiring; and, most of all, I miss you, too.
Late Tuesday night I finally told myself, Enough. Even if I had said something wrong, it probably wasn’t what I would guess.
Replaying everything was just like what I did when I got a shot: I’d pinch myself so I could feel like I was in charge of the pain.
. . . . .
Wednesday, I still hadn’t decided whether I was going to the last class.
“Are you nuts?” Laurie said. “What else do you need to know?”
“Go,” Sam said. “See what the guy has to say.”
On the subway down to the New School, I was disgusted with myself. I’d once read that Ronald Reagan always followed the advice of the last person he’d talked to. I thought, You’re like Ronald Reagan.
. . . . .
Bobby wasn’t in class.
I found my painting from the week before and placed it on my easel. It was so wild it was hard to believe it was mine.
Bert reclined into last week’s pose.
Margo moved her stool closer to mine. In a low voice she said, “I went out with Bert.”
“You’re kidding,” I said. “How was it?”
“Fun,” she said. “He drives a cab. Did you know that? I drove around with him.”
She acted like we were good friends, and just then we were.
For over an hour I looked from Bert to my painting and back. When Maureen came up and stood looking at it with me, I said, “I don’t know what to do with this.”
She said, “Maybe it’s finished,” and I decided it was.
I didn’t have time to start a new painting before our end-of-class party, so I went outside to smoke a cigarette.
. . . . .
Bobby was leaning against a car and stood when he saw me; he’d traded his crutches for a cane. “Be nice to me,” he said. “I’m a cripple.”
He lit a cigarette for himself and one for me. He said, “I’m sorry about Saturday,” in a tone that was polite and detached; he might’ve said, I’m sorry about your cold.
What I’d loved about him in Union Square was what I hated about him now: He made me feel fifteen. Polite and detached, I said, “What happened?”
“I was watching an old movie of my mother’s on TV. I mean, she just had a small part.” She was a nightclub singer, he went on to say; he struggled to remember the title of the movie, as though this was the information I wanted from him. “Anyway,” he said, “I passed out.”
“No,” I said. For a moment, I was as Maureen-strong as I wanted to be. “What I meant was, What happened?”
I saw now that his hand was trembling. “I don’t know.”
“Is that it?” I said. “You don’t know?”
He said, “We were moving so fast.”
I said, “We were moving fast.”
He sighed and said, “Thank you,” and the gratitude I heard was the only acknowledgment that he’d done anything wrong.
“You should’ve called me back,” I said.
“I know,” he said. “I wish I had.”
What I thought of then was that he had managed to write stories and sing them in front of people, but he couldn’t type them up and put them in an envelope.
Still, I waited for him to give me something—a sincere apology, a thorough explanation, a promise for the future—anything at all.
Instead, he reached for my hand. “What about Saturday?”
“What about Saturday?”
“Dinner and a movie,” he said.
“No.”
“No you have plans,” he said, “or no you won’t give me another chance?”
I shook my head.
“Wait,” he said. “This is all because I didn’t call you once?”
I stared at him, and the best-looking senior at Collegiate looked back at me.
“Jesus,” he said. “You’re tough.”
“No,” I said.
“One time I didn’t call you,” he said. “One strike and I’m out?”
It was hard to believe that the Bobby Guest who stood in front of me was the Bobby Guest I’d wanted so badly.
“Well,” he said finally. He walked with me to the door. “At least we talked. Just talking about this with you is a big step for me.”
I was about to say good-bye when he opened the door for me and himself. He’d come for the party, I realized; he’d wanted to talk to me first so I wouldn’t embarrass him in front of everyone.
“You know the problem?” he said on the elevator. “You expected me to change all at once.”
. . . . .
What made it a party was that Maureen had brought in bottles of soda, a huge bag of pretzels, and a boom box. A babysitter had brought Maureen’s daughter, who clung to Bobby. I marveled at the power he had even over three-year-old women. She was playing with his hair and ears; she was slapping his hands, as I wished I had.
As though nothing had happened between us or as though something still might, he winked at me.
Bert and Margo were sitting together on the fainting couch up on its platform; they looked like King and Queen of the May.
Only Michele stood at an easel. She was painting shocked letters that would soon spell, “Jimi Hendrix, Electric Ladyland.”
I didn’t hear any music coming from her headphones, and I said, “What’re you listening to?”
“Nothing,” she said. She smiled like she was letting me in on a secret.
I wondered what it was—maybe wearing the Walkman helped her feel less awkward or self-conscious; maybe it helped her to be alone. I kept my eyes on her, hoping she would tell me, and she did: “It’s a good hair band.”
She seemed to remember something and said, “Oh,” and handed me her dad’s business card. “If you need a DJ.”
I thanked her.
The cancer survivor had to leave early, and she came over to me to say good-bye. She held my hands and looked me in the eyes and said, “Be well,” and I said, “You, too.” She smiled at me and squeezed my hands; she seemed to know wh
at I’d been through with Bobby.
Then I heard her say the same thing to the principal and the accountant, who were having a good-natured disagreement about what art was, refereed by Great-Grandmother.
Before I left, I caught a glimpse of Cheryl, and I saw now what Bobby had meant; they were alike. Even though she stood by herself, she was performing. She touched her neck and filled her eyes with soul, practicing for the moment when she would be discovered.
THE ONE AFTER YOU
1.
I NEVEREXPECTED anyone in my family to change, and especially not my father, who changed first and most profoundly: He died. For a long time afterward, my mother was not herself. She lost weight. She had trouble sleeping. She caught every virus, cold, and flu. Once when I visited her, she scuffed around the house in pink pile-lined slippers you’d wear only while waiting for the police to discover you many days dead.
This was grief, though, and not change; what changed my mother was love.
The slippers were a present from her mother, with whom she had dinner every Friday. I said, “And they’re not returnable?”
My mother didn’t answer, and I didn’t press her. It was her birthday. To celebrate, we were reading the condolence letters that my mother separated from the rest—the Weepers, we called them. She kept the letters in an antique basket on her night table, and we had them spread out across her bed.
I liked reading them; a good Weeper could bring my father back to life for a few seconds. But there were letters in there that made the cut for reasons mysterious to me. I’d kept quiet about these—it was her basket—but more than seven years had passed since my father’s death, and now seemed like a good time to go back to normal.
In a voice trembling with false emotion, I read what was essentially a form letter from the office of the deputy mayor of Philadelphia: “ ‘. . . It was a privilege and an honor to have known Judge Applebaum.’ ”
She said, “I thought it was sort of a proclamation.”
“Hm,” I said.
“Well,” she said, “it is an honor.”
“And a privilege.”
She said, “Hush.”
For my next mystery missive, a card with nothing but a preprinted message and a signature, I said, “God, this one always gets to me.”
“Which?” my mother said.
“ ‘In deepest sympathy.’ ” I paused before taking a stab at the illegible signature—“Len Rollhoff.”
She looked over my shoulder. “It’s Lev,” she said, “Polikoff,” and I heard something in her voice that I’d only ever seen—dozens of tiny silver fish jumping out of the bay in Martha’s Vineyard—and it was as surprising and beautiful a sound as it had been a sight.
She took the card from me as though I’d intercepted a private note, and as though I had I said, “I already read it.”
I could hear her attempt at calm in, “I just thought it was . . . thoughtful of him to write.”
I said, “It is a thoughtful signature.”
The look she gave me said, Don’t take something nice away from me, and of course she was right.
“So who is he?” I said.
“He’s just somebody I used to know,” she said—and again the flash of silver fish.
I said, “Who?”
“Never mind,” she said.
She got up and scuffed over to her closet, where I hoped she would change into the ballet slippers she usually wore around the house, but she was just hiding there. She said, “I was thinking I’d come to New York for a weekend.”
She said this all the time. It wasn’t a memory problem; she liked to repeat herself. Saying the same things over and over seemed to have the calming effect of repeat-motion hobbies like knitting or needlepoint, while for me the effect was more like the repeat motion of knitting or needlepoint needles puncturing my eardrums.
As I hadn’t answered, she turned around and again said, “I was thinking I’d come to New York for a weekend.”
“You should,” I said. “And bring Lev Polikoff.”
She turned back to her closet, where she said that my apartment, a studio without a sofa bed, would be tight for the two of us. As ever, she added, “I hope that doesn’t offend you,” and, as ever, I said, “Not at all.”
Then she moved on: “I don’t think it’s a good time for me to stay with Robert.”
She waited for me to ask why, and because it was her birthday I did.
Then she got to say, “He’s just got so much on his plate.” It was true that my younger brother’s plate runneth over, with his adorable children and busy medical practice, but the real reason that it wasn’t a good time for my mother to stay with Robert was that he was married to Naomi.
I said, “They want you to stay with them,” which was at least half true; Robert did. My younger brother was so dutiful he didn’t even think of duty as duty; he’d been born with his duty gene lodged in the pleasure center of his brain.
My mother said, “I can always stay with Jack.” A dozen times I’d heard her ask, and a dozen times heard him answer, “Fine.” Thus, the arrangements were all set for the weekend that would never take place.
Her hypothetical host called a few minutes later. I could tell it was Jack by the relief in her voice, and I was relieved, too; my older brother was the wild card among us. She spoke with him for a few minutes, thanked him for his birthday wishes, and passed the phone to me.
He said, “What are you guys doing?”
When Jack visited, he made an effort to take my mother to see art and hear music—to do things she hadn’t done enough while my father was alive.
“We’re reading the Weepers,” I said.
“Great,” he said. “Where’re you taking Mom for dinner—the cemetery?”
I told him I wasn’t taking her anywhere because the birthday girl wanted to cook.
“So you’re in all night?”
“Unless I can get her to the movies,” I said.
“It’s already seven.”
I said, “We’re in all night.”
An operator cut in and asked my brother to deposit another seventy-five cents, and I said, “Where are you calling from?”
“Titty bar.”
“Seriously,” I said.
“Damn.” He told me that he’d tucked his last quarter into the stripper’s G-string. “Let’s just talk until we get cut off.”
When I said that the threat of being disconnected made it hard for me to talk, he said, “There’s something I have to tell you.”
“What?”
“It’s hard for me to say,” he said.
“Just tell me.”
“I’ve never told anyone.”
Then we were cut off, and I realized he’d been teasing me.
My mother gathered the Weepers and put them back in their basket. “Should we have a glass of wine?” she said.
“Sure.”
“I thought we could have wine in front of the fire,” she said, but instead she got back into bed.
I picked up the newspaper and looked at the listings for a movie my father wouldn’t have wanted to see, one with subtitles or without a plot.
She picked up The House of Mirth, which had now taken her longer to read than it took Edith Wharton to write.
. . . . .
While my mother started dinner, I built a fire, taking fake logs from the hall closet and real ones from the porch.
“Tell me about your job,” she said, nuzzling into me a little on the sofa. She’d become more affectionate since my father had died, and I tried not to mind.
I said, “I’m trying to get out of advertising.”
“Really?” she said. “I’ve always thought of advertising as glamorous and exciting.”
I said, “I’m not in that kind of advertising.”
“Isn’t advertising advertising?”
“Sure,” I said. “Like driving a bus and driving a race car are both driving.”
She said, “What kind of advertisi
ng are you in?”
She’d asked before, and I’d told her, but each time it was hard: “I write junk mail, Mom.”
“Oh.” Then she said, “A lot of people say that commercials on television are more interesting than the programs.”
We both looked at the fire. She said, “I meant to tell you, Dena’s grandmother moved into Grandmom’s building.” Then: “Do you ever see Dena?”
“No,” I said, though I had recently, at the farmers’ market at Union Square, buying apples with an older guy in loafers; her arm had been linked through his, which seemed if not exactly sexual not completely platonic either, and I wondered if he was Richard, the boyfriend she’d refused to call her boyfriend; he was married.
I’d never told my mother about Dena’s married un-boyfriend. It would shock her even more than it had me—it would horrify her, and permanently change the way my mother saw Dena, which seemed wrong, even if she was an ex-friend.
“She’s kind of standoffish,” my mother said. “Dena’s grandmother.”
“Mom,” I said.
She stiffened. “Yes?”
“Your slippers are depressing me.”
She said, “They were a present from Grandmom.”
“I know,” I said. “I think they might be a gag gift, though.”
She said, “They’re very comfortable.”
My mother was double-jointed, or something, and was sitting with her long, pretty legs snaked around each other, like a contortionist in repose. She looked down at her slippered feet; she studied them for a moment.
She took the slippers off, stood, and tossed them into the fireplace; unfortunately, like me, she lacked eye-hand coordination, and the slippers landed too far from the fire to catch. She used tongs to place the slippers on top of the logs, where the action was.
They caught right away, as pure synthetic fibers will. We watched them burn. It was fast but satisfying.
“I’m sorry,” I said, when she’d returned to the sofa and resnaked her legs. “You were telling me about Lev Polikoff.”
“It was a long time ago.” She smiled privately and seemed almost expansive, maybe as a result of the ceremonial slipper fire.
“When?”
She said, “I met him when I was working at the museum,” meaning the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where she’d been a tour guide after college. “He was an artist.”