Greedy Little Eyes (5 page)

“Port Coquitlam is not Vancouver though,” I said.

“The missing womens are from Vancouver. Nobody cared about these ones. And now the world is watching.”

I looked off to the bar where lawyers and finance sorts loitered, laughing animatedly as they shmoozed.

“I don’t think I can stand this.” I stared into my glass. “I’m starting to think I’m better suited to write about what it means if your lipstick and shoes match.”

She laughed: a staccato chortle full of deep throaty
K
s and bits of tinsel.

Old enough to have given birth at thirty-two and have a grown son to show for it, she did not take herself too seriously. Her laughter knocked away my embarrassment. Petra’s skin was smooth and elastic and that, along with hands that looked as though they belonged to an eighteen-year-old, a bobbed nose and starry brown eyes, gave her a childlike quality. But it was clear there was nothing naive about her. Her mother had been in and out of mental institutions and had killed herself when
Petra was twenty. The suicide note stated that having a daughter had been her mother’s worst mistake. She demanded that all personal effects go to Petra’s brother. Petra never married, and she raised her son on her own.

She had recently taken a married lover who spoiled her with adoration and appeared interested in her every word—why would she want a full-time man?

“Listen,” Petra said suddenly, after a third round of drinks and far too much confession on both our parts. “I don’t want to make this horrible pig man story either. I think I am tired of always these cynical worlds around me. Someone else can write it.” She sipped a quick breath.

“Just like that. You’re chucking your column?”

“Ya.” She looked at me, her mouth upturned but set. “I don’t feel happy to make it.”

I must have looked incredulous.

“This is how I do things. I make up my mind and I do it—But listen, we can’t be cruel to the editors, so I propose we make this last story together.” She raised her glass. “Do you say yes to this?”

Petra felt deeply familiar to me, as I suppose a person does when she fears or loves in a way that is similar to the way you do.

I picked up my drink. “Yes.”

Years later, when Petra called me in Vancouver, all I had in front of me was a deadline for a puff piece in a fashion magazine. It was summer and yet the drizzle outside
continued unabated. From the pap of my employment to the sog of the city, I was beginning to question the consequence of my existence.

“I’m coming to your side of the Atlantic,” Petra said. “My lover and I, we are going to stay in this suite at the Waldorf for two weeks. Why don’t you get out of that rain and come see me?”

This article I’d agreed to write was a companion piece to a recent sex survey the magazine was publishing. The editor had just faxed me the survey questions, suggesting I might use one as a jumping-off point. I had been considering:
Under what circumstances would you be most likely to have an affair
?

When Petra first told me of her affair years ago, I thought I saw a brimming affection in her. Though she had never used the word
love
and said she had no desire for Andrew to leave his wife. The European affair, I inferred, was likely based more on pragmatism than on romance.

“You’re still with him, huh?”

“Ya. We’ve been together longer than most people’s marriages.”

Listening to Petra on the phone now, I felt a longing to escape from my own world. I checked online as we spoke and found a cheap, last-minute flight. “You talked me into it,” I said.

“Really? This is wonderful!” she exclaimed. Feeling wanted made me positively effervescent.

When I hung up, I called Felicia, a friend who lived in Greenwich Village, to see if her couch was available.

I met up with Andrew and Petra on Lafayette Street in the East Village, not far from where I was staying. They had reservations in a pricey restaurant that had seen its day a couple of decades ago and was now a bit of a kitschy hangout for twenty-somethings. Full of deep, thudding beats, horns and synthesizers, the music was turned up to a level that made it impossible to hear others speak unless you were all bent far into the centre of your table.

Two young women at the next table, Hepburn thin in their sleek dark dresses, bobbed their elegantly made-up heads as they glanced mutely around the room. Their men leaned in to each other, mouths open wide to get their big loud words into each other’s ears, oblivious to the women in their company. I resented them for it.

My gaze turned back to Petra and Andrew, but because it was so hard to hear any conversation we tried to make, I did more observing than normal. Though perhaps that’s a lie. I have been accused, in the past, of sitting back, busily thinking up pithy descriptors that I might later use in an article. To some people this is the behaviour of a scavenger. Others like to have a witness on hand—it gives them a feeling of importance and security. Besides, in a way I
was
working.

I searched her face that night, looking for joy, an irrepressible spark of glee that she was in New York City with a man who was married to someone else.
But her smiles conveyed more diplomacy than pleasure. I scanned the lover too, hoping to catch sight of—I don’t know what—some keening sense of inevitability? Some suggestion of a trapped man who, though dutifully maintaining his role back home as husband and father, was tormented by the fact that his one great love was actually here, hiding out with him in the extreme public of Manhattan.

They did not hold hands; I saw no surreptitious brushing of fingers or feet. I saw no sign of their sultry need for each other. He seemed merely cordial.

Andrew had what was, to my ear, an unusual accent for a German. “My mother was a Londoner, you see. I spoke English at home first, and then, of course, German,” he explained. “I consider English my mother tongue.”

He seemed proud of that fact. His father spoke Swiss German, which, he said, had no formal grammatical rules and was not even a written language. “Only standard German is written,” he said.

My eyes drifted down his starched shirt to his manicured fingernails.

“And you are from Vancouver,” he confirmed. “What a coincidence.” It turned out his wife had Canadian citizenship as well as German—her mother lived in Vancouver. “My wife is also perfectly bilingual.”

I didn’t know where to look for a moment.
My wife.

Then he mentioned that his wife had just taken their two children to Vancouver. “They are there right now.”

My gaze moved to Petra, who casually sipped a martini, her expression inscrutable in the dim light.

I ordered another drink, deciding that I too would be impervious.

“Lila, my honey,” she said suddenly, “I have a proposal for you. Andrew and I, we will be making a trip the day after tomorrow and I am thinking it would be very nice for you to stay in our suite while we are gone.”

I stared and leaned in trying to hear better. “Did you just say that you’re leaving town?”

“Ya. It’s unexpected. And the suite will be empty for two days. Do you like to?”

I was disappointed and a little stunned. On the other hand, when would I ever get a chance to stay at the Waldorf again?

After dinner, the three of us went to The Campbell Apartment, a bar off the west balcony of Grand Central Station. The big room, once a financier’s private office, apparently looked just as it had in the ’30s and ’40s, like a room in a palace, furnished with Italian tables and chairs, a Persian rug on the floor, others on the walls, flowered vases, and a massive Florentine desk on which financier John Campbell once conducted his affairs.

When we arrived at the entrance, Ella Fitzgerald’s “I Got It Bad (and That Ain’t Good)” smoothed into our ears. The hostess gave us a blandly welcoming smile, her caramel-coloured mosquito-arms poking out of the capped sleeves of a blue jersey dress that advertised small hollows beside each hip and the pointy nubs of her shoulder bones. Her hair slicked back into the tight chignon of a ballet dancer, she breezily told Andrew his footwear would not be allowed into the establishment.

“These are Armani,” he said, lifting one sporty leather shoe as though the fine craftsmanship might change her mind.

“We don’t allow running shoes of any kind.”

“Let’s go,” Petra said. “We don’t need to be here.”

“No.” Andrew adjusted his shoulders. “You ladies get a table. I shall go back to the hotel and change. I won’t be long, it’s close.”

A career problem-solver, Andrew would not engage in any further debate, and he left.

“He likes rules,” Petra said after we had sat quietly a few moments. She gazed around the room, at the ceiling and eventually at me. “I am tiring of New York. It closes in and makes me suffocated.”

Andrew reappeared in only a few minutes, so few that I was startled. He sat down with a hearty hello as though to make clear that an insect in blue jersey could not possibly dampen his mood.

“Do you live in the centre of Vancouver?” he asked as another round of drinks hit the table. “My children love Stanley Park. My wife took them in a horse-drawn carriage through the park. Have you done that?”

“No.” I glanced down at the gloss of the brown oxfords on his feet now.

“
I
was in a horse carriage once. For New Year’s Eve,” Petra announced, her grin suddenly broad. “In Zurich! I was with Heinrich Vanderhoven. He’s—he’s a bit crazy.” Her tone was slightly malignant, but her pronunciation of
kwazy
mitigated my sense of peril.

“We came very late to a nightclub and he was wearing
blue jeans and a tuxedo jacket. At this club it is very chic and you cannot ever wear blue jeans. But he was
Heinrich Vanderhoven
!”

Andrew nodded, expressionless.

Repetition of the man’s full name seemed to be an important feature of the story. “Who’s Heinrich Vanderhoven?” I asked.

“He owned half the magazines in Europe. He once owned the magazine I write for now, but he sold everything and went to make a meditation by the sea in California.” Her shoulders bounced with laughter as she tilted forward. I wasn’t sure if the memory of Heinrich Vanderhoven’s denim-clad self was what tickled her so much or if it was the thought of him sitting hours on end, cross-legged,
ohm-
ing in the sand.

I tried to understand the nuance of the picture she painted. “He was your boss?”

“No.” Her eyes glittered. “He was my
lover
.”

The word
sultry
kept ringing in my ears the next day as I tramped up Park Avenue, pulling my suitcase. July in New York can be so oppressively hot and damp that the word
sultry
should never be used to describe it.
Sultry
implies a sensuality, an underlying lust that one can barely contain, when in reality the stifling mug of it renders the thought of another body lying sticky against one’s own nauseating. Or at least that’s what occurred to me as I caught sight of a billboard featuring some
oversexed nymphet hawking brassieres. Breathing the soupy air into my lungs, I wondered if I might be coming down with something or if I was fumbling toward an early menopause.