—Going good? he said.
—Mind your own business.
He barked again then stood up from the table and a tension eased that I’d barely been aware of. Later we went to another bar. That night I was their audience. Some pair they made, him in his old tuxedo and her in that secondhand cocktail dress
with her breasts spilling out and a cheap fur slung round her shoulders. Arm in arm we strutted the streets of Greenwich Village, three swells on a bender. Harriet would have been proud.
When I talked to Iris the next day she didn’t mention the last part of the evening. The place we’d gone to was hot and smoky. There was jazz. Sometime after midnight Iris and I were settled on bar stools, Eddie Castrol between us with his jacket off, his shirt unbuttoned, and his back to the counter, the perpetual cigarette hanging from his lips. He was damp in places with perspiration. He seemed to know everyone. They all came by to say hi and slap his hand. I asked Iris how she saw their future. I should have known better.
—Eddie? she said.
—Lover.
—My sister wants to know what your intentions are. You want to call the whole thing off?
She spread a hand across her chest and sang the line in a deep wavering tuneless bass register:
But ooooh, if we call the whole thing off, then we must part
—
Eddie pulled her to him, spilling gin on her dress, but she didn’t care. She was happy as a child to be handled by this long-fingered piano player from Miami: He reminded her of Daddy. She laid her head on his shoulder, one arm hanging free as he stroked her hair then kissed it. She lifted her face and he kissed her on the lips. He was watching me while he did it. My prediction: She’d wind up with a broken heart. She was a good kid to hang around with but she was still a kid. He was too old for her. Too old, too jaundiced. Too married.
I went back to the Dunmore a few nights later. I didn’t tell
Iris I was doing this, I knew how it would look, the adults conferring about her welfare behind her back. She’d be furious. And this was the second time. When I walked in he saw me at once. He played a few bars of
Moon River
then joined me in the booth. He said to what did he owe the honor this time, and I said I wanted to thank him. He knew what I meant.
—How is she?
—She’s suffering now, I said. She’ll get over it. What did you tell her?
He’d told her what I’d suggested he tell her. That was a few days earlier. I’d gone to the hotel and made it clear to him that he had to leave Iris alone. I said she was very young and he’d only do her harm. He didn’t protest. Then we’d talked about his family. We’d parted on good terms.
Now he was frowning at the table and tapping the rim of his glass. He gazed at me and shook his head.
—What is it? I said.
Then he had an elbow on the table, his fingers splayed across his forehead. The lounge was busy that night. Women stopped by the table to say hello. He was charming to every one of them.
—Ah, lord, he said.
—Don’t tell me you love her, I said.
—Do I love her? he said.
He lifted his suffering eyes to mine. What a performer he was. Then all at once his mood lifted. The clouds parted, he leaned in. He touched my hand. Now he was tender.
—It’d be different, he said, but there’s the kid to think of.
—Kids survive divorce.
—Not my Francie.
I had to excuse myself and go to the ladies’ room, where I sat
in a stall until I felt quiet again.
Kids survive divorce.
Did Sidney’s kid survive his divorce?
It was at around this time he came home from visiting his ex-wife in New Jersey and told me he had a serious favor to ask me. I was working at the kitchen table that day. I was engaged in the edit of a badly written manuscript from which I was deriving no joy but Ellen Taussig had asked me to do it, it was a special job. He wanted to know if I’d mind if Howard stayed with us for a few days. The mother was going into the hospital. I asked him what was expected of me.
—Just be civil.
Gladys would cook his meals and as he was a quiet child he wouldn’t trouble me in the evenings. We’d barely be aware he was in the apartment. Sidney didn’t know where else he could go.
So the next day I came home to find a thin, solemn boy sitting in Sidney’s kitchen with a plate of hot dogs in front of him. A curtain of hair the color of pale straw fell over his forehead, his arms and legs were like jointed sticks, and he had the fingers of a violinist. I guess my head was full of musicians then. He bore little resemblance to Sidney, who was a large heavy man of florid complexion and diminutive hands and feet.
He stood up when I walked into the kitchen, and I thought, Why, he’s a little gentleman.
—Hello, Howard Klein, I said.
—Hello, Mrs. Klein.
—Sit down, I said. Don’t you want mustard on those?
—No, thank you.
—Ketchup?
—No, thank you.
He sat down and I realized he wouldn’t be a problem. I remember thinking I was just like Howard at that age, scrupulously polite so as to guard my inner life from the adults. So the next day I suggested to Sidney that we get out of the city. He was busy with his book. He hated to be interrupted. I told him it wasn’t for myself that I asked, I thought Howard would like it.
—You’re right, he said. We could go visit your father.
—That’s not what I had in mind.
I’d had enough of Daddy. We’d spent Labor Day with him. Instead we drove out to Long Island and spent the weekend in Montauk. It was good to get away. It was too cold to swim in the ocean but we took long windy walks on the beach. There were dunes, and driftwood, and heaps of large flat stones, and big shiny clumps of seaweed swept in on the autumn tides. I watched Howard and his father kneeling on the damp sand to inspect a dead sea turtle. Sidney turned it over with a stick and Howard shrieked with joy when dozens of tiny black crabs came swarming out. We had dinner in a seafood shack. The wind had put color in Howard’s face, dabs of red high on his cheeks, and it had done the same to me. Sidney was pleased. He wanted us to be friends, Howard and I. He thought it would be good for me. It would get my mind off my father, he said, if I had to behave like a mother.
One night around this time I had to get myself all fixed up for a faculty party of Sidney’s that I didn’t want to attend. I was in the bedroom. I wanted to wear my gray silk thing. Sidney came in looking for his watch. He was concerned about the time. I didn’t feel like being nice to him. He hadn’t been sympathetic
when I told him that Iris had had her heart broken and was very depressed. He said it was simple. She should stop drinking and go into analysis.
—You’re making me nervous, I said. Can’t you go read the paper or something?
I watched him in the mirror. He sat on the bed and stared at his hands and frowned. I was pressing tissues to my face so it would stay matte in the heat.
I selected a lipstick. Poor Iris. That morning I’d visited her. I hated how she lived now. Her apartment was on the third floor of a tenement just south of the Manhattan Bridge. When I stepped into the lobby the smell of boiled vegetables almost made me sick. I climbed the three flights and found her door already open. She shouted at me to come in. The place was a shambles. She tried to keep it in some sort of order but she wasn’t a tidy girl and she’d been up all night. I heard the shower come on. I stood at the window and looked down at the street below. There were Chinese people scurrying along the sidewalk and bums sitting under the statue of Confucius. They were passing bottles in brown paper bags. The traffic was loud so I closed the window. Almost at once the tiny apartment became close and sticky. It was a dank, dull day in the fall and the sky was threatening rain.
She appeared in her bathrobe toweling her hair. She apologized for the state of the apartment. She’d been planning a big houseclean yesterday but she’d been called out to do a little
hostessing
, whatever that meant. She got a couple of cold beers out of the icebox and yawned while she looked for clean glasses. I no longer tried telling her she was made for better things. Then we were sitting at a low table heaped with lurid novels and
cheap magazines and medical journals, also a half-empty bottle of brandy, cheap Spanish stuff. After the breakup with Eddie they’d had a few last trysts in the hotel but now that was all over too and she was again foundering.
—What the hell am I going to do? she said.
I was very clear about this. I took her hands in mine and spoke firmly to her.
—You’re going to study medicine and work very hard and forget all about Eddie and become a doctor. That’s what you’re going to do.
She turned away. I’d aroused not even a flicker of resolve in her.
—I’ve got a bad feeling about it, she said.
—What do you mean?
—I don’t think I want to do medicine.
—Oh, for Christ’s sake. Don’t even talk like that. You have to, for Daddy’s sake.
I got impatient with her. She’d been able to laugh at herself once. Now she was so damn sulky all the time. When a thing’s over it’s over, I said. What was wrong with her? She began to grope in her purse. She fetched out her cigarettes and a lighter. I suggested we take a walk. I wanted to get her out of the building, it was unpleasantly warm and there was too much noise. Without a word she stood up and went into her bedroom to get dressed.
We walked east. The weather remained oppressive. Down by the Brooklyn Bridge the streets were deserted. The silence was a relief. There were a few pigeons around but no other signs of life. Half the buildings on Beekman were boarded up. The whole neighborhood was being demolished, warehouses,
printing establishments, liquor stores, barber shops. Where the rubble had been trucked away tracts of wasteland strewn with lumps of concrete stretched for blocks. It didn’t improve Iris’s mood but I got a kind of satisfaction from seeing a whole section of the city disappearing as though it had been H-bombed, and I felt the same about Penn Station, which was also coming down. I passed through it whenever I took the train upstate. They were turning it into a ruin. I liked ruins. I’d grown up in one, of course. Sweep away the old stuff, this was my feeling. Start over! Build it new! Then it began to rain. We were out front of a warehouse on William Street with no door.
We climbed the narrow staircase. The paint was flaking off the wall. One floor up the stairs opened into an empty loft with exposed brick painted white. Old iron radiators stood amid the trash and at the far end empty window frames looked south to the Wall Street skyscrapers. There was a picture of Marilyn Monroe taped to the brick and beneath it a rickety wooden chair. Iris sat down and lit a cigarette. The rain continued heavy. She stared at the floor and I saw a tear fall. She looked up, wiping her face. At times she seemed so young I was moved by her predicament. But mostly I just got impatient with her.
—I don’t know if I’ll survive this, she said.
—Are you serious?
—I’ve never loved anyone like this before. I’d better get used to it.
—To what?
—Being incomplete.
I cleared a space on the floor and sat down beside her.
—Oh, honey, I said, you’ll get over it, what are you, twenty-two?
She turned on me.
—Constance, will you just
shut the fuck up?
I guess it was a thoughtless thing to say. The wound was too fresh or something. I apologized.
—It’s okay. But you don’t have to reassure me. I hate being reassured.
I asked her why she wouldn’t get over him.
—We never got to the end. It was still growing. It would have gone on growing a long time. So it’s this unfinished thing in me.
I’d never heard love described like this before. As a growing thing, I mean, like a tree. So it comes to life, it grows to maturity, then what, death? It had never happened to me that way. A little later she asked me if I thought he saw a shrink.
—No.
—Why do you say that?
—I just don’t think he does.
—But why? He said he didn’t but I don’t believe it. Everyone in New York sees a shrink except me.
—He’s from Miami. He’s a piano player. He’s a lush. Honey, I don’t know, I just don’t think he does.
She didn’t want to hear the truth but at the same time candor was what she said she wanted.
—What are you doing tonight? she said.
—Some party Sidney wants to go to.
—Come out with me. It doesn’t matter about the party.
—It does to Sidney.
—Constance, please.
—Why is it a problem?
—I’m afraid I’ll lose you.
—Don’t be absurd. Iris, this is madness!
She stood up. She walked to the window and with her hands on the sill she leaned out. I was suddenly afraid for her. I’d never seen her like this. It wasn’t just the man. I told her to come away from the window. She said the rain had stopped. We could go.
We walked east to the seaport. The day was brighter now. The sun was breaking through. The stink of fish from the Fulton Street market made me feel nauseous. Iris suggested a cocktail.
—It’s not even twelve o’clock, I said.
—Just one.
We sat at a table in an empty bar on South Street. I’d never known her to drink liquor in the middle of the day and it didn’t make me feel any easier about her. When she decided to have another one I had to speak up.
—Won’t you need a clear head later?
—No.
—Why not?
—The work I do, you think they care?
When the affair with Eddie ended she’d quit her job at the hotel and joined an agency that supplied hostesses to nightclubs. They gave her three nights a week. It was enough to sustain life, she said. She didn’t have many overheads.
—Isn’t that the truth. But I’m worried about you.
It was true. I
was
worried. I didn’t believe Iris could be brought so low by a man—and a man like that! She laughed but it was hollow. As though she’d stopped caring what happened to her.
—It’s not as though anyone gives a damn, she said.
—I do.
She said nothing. Suddenly I felt not that she was losing me but that I was losing her. I didn’t know what was going on. I’d
assumed she was more resilient than this. She’d gone to the counter to get her scotch, and in the gloom of the place she was consumed by shadows and I couldn’t see her properly. I felt like she was drifting out to sea—