Greedy Little Eyes (7 page)

I called Felicia’s apartment, got her voice mail, and left a message lamenting the lack of a pool. The fact there was no pool made me oddly forlorn. I stood at the window and watched life moving so far below.

I took the subway down to Broadway and Astor Place, wandered along the baking concrete through the sweating crowds and choked traffic, hoping the heat might cook the blue feeling from my guts.

Petra’s voice tripped around in my head. “Clinical,” she had said. “This is a good word for him. He is not a doctor, but he is clinical. He does not look at me the way he once did. I asked him if he had another mistress, and he said, ‘I don’t have time for that. Between my work and my family and you, I don’t have time for myself any more.’”

Along the sidewalks of New York that summer, women flip-flopped around with Chinese net slippers on their feet. Women of all shapes and sizes wore them with skirts, shorts or jeans. The slippers came in peacock, canary, silver—any shade you could think of—and were adorned with coloured beads and tinselly flowers. I ducked into a shop where stacks of them were displayed in the windows, and picked gold ones for myself. Since they were only $2.99 a shot, I grabbed a few pairs for the friends who had questioned why I would take off on a four-day trip to New York when I had debt and a pending deadline. People forgive you your foibles, I reasoned, when you can prove you were thinking of them all the while.

On the way back to the hotel, I picked up a deli sandwich and a couple of bottles of wine, one for myself and one a little more impressive.

Dinner in hand, I stood on the street outside the liquor store, turning one way and then the other. Finally
I put down my purchases to consult the map again.

“Are you lost?” A man stood near, his head tipped to peer at my face.

“I need the 6 train.”

Attractive in a lived-in, well-fed sort of way, he looked at my map and never quite in my eyes and it hit me how much I longed for eye contact. From anyone. I couldn’t help but look for his ring finger.
Who do you think is more faithful by nature
?

“You walked right in the wrong direction. Here, I’ll show you.”

I followed, glancing at the silver hairs woven into his temples as he walked me back in the direction from which I’d come. He asked where I was from.

“A Canadian! My sister-in-law is from Toronto,” he said.

“Canadians are the new Golden retriever.”

“Ha ha,” he said, “that’s funny.”

His laughter sent a soft flutter through my lungs. Then he stopped and pointed out the direction of the station. I stared at his back as he walked away.

“Before I came here, I was writing an article about a vineyard, a nice place in the Italian countryside. I invited Andrew and he said he does not like the countryside. He cannot
stand
it and he prefers to see me when I come to New York City after. Now where does he go? The country. Rural Connecticut. For
two days
.”

I thought of Petra’s words, back at the Waldorf, up to my nose in bathwater.

I could drown in that bath.

Petra spoke of a text message Andrew had received from the former nanny of his children. The babysitter, as Petra had called her, now lived in Massachusetts. He messaged her for longer than usual and, according to Petra, he was nervous. He announced that he would get together with the girl for lunch one day. Petra suggested she might join them, but Andrew changed the subject.

“Perhaps he sees the babysitter in Connecticut,” Petra mused.

I had envisioned the babysitter as a seventeen-year-old. But this one was thirty.

“And why must he always talk about his wife? Why do I need to know about these things, what he buys his children at FAO Schwartz. I don’t
care
.”

As I listened to Petra, a large dollop of wasabi charged my sinuses, piercing my brain with euphoric pain. I wondered briefly if there was a masochistic element to all great food and sex. I asked her if she had ever seen the film
The Ice Storm
, the scene with Sigourney Weaver and Kevin Kline in bed after some extramarital rummaging. Klein launches into a monologue about work and golf. “You’re boring me,” Weaver interrupts. “I
have
a husband.”

“Tell him,” I suggested to Petra, “
you’re boring me. I’m not interested in your little Weiner rats
.”

Her face lit up and she hooted. “Weiner rats! Ya!”

Cringing later at how like the smell of blood Petra’s
laughter had been, how it had sharpened my teeth, I slipped under the water of the Waldorf tub. I emptied my lungs, shook the water through my hair, and sank until my head tapped the bottom of an old memory.

My mother had just hollered again for me to get out of the bathtub. She had gone back to work part time and, I guess, as low man on the totem at her job she must have felt there was no reprieve. Lately every time she wiped a counter or picked clothing up off the floor, she sounded more exasperated. “Here she comes again, Queen of the
Shit
Jobs,” she’d say.

The phone rang. I could hear it through the bottom of the tub, imagining it to be whale song. Like Jacques Cousteau I swam, inspecting the floor of the ocean, wagging my head and watching my hair wave like seaweed in the water, listening to my mother’s garbled voice. Seconds later she stood over the bathtub, calling down through the fathoms. I shot up, gasping.

“Lila. Out. Now. Your father’s idiot battery is dead again. I have to go pick him up and I want you ready for bed.”

“Is Clay my babysitter?” I was six years old. Clay was in grade four.

“I’ll be back as fast as I can.” She scrubbed a towel over my head and body, then wrapped it around, secured it with a tucked corner under my armpit, and scooted me into the hall. “Clayton, turn that down.”

Clay was in my parents’ room watching TV.

“Clayton! How many times do I have to say it?” she yelled over the din
.
“I have to get your father. Make sure she goes to bed.”

The TV held his gaze.

“Put your
pyjamas
on!” she called over her shoulder as she rushed away.

I stood, looking in at Clay who sprawled like a prince on the big bed.

“Clayton!”

The volume lowered.

“I’ll be back as soon as I can.” She stalked downstairs.

I trotted into the bedroom and climbed up on the bed with Clay, rested my head on his chest while he watched men squeal their cars around the corners of grey city streets, punch and shoot one another.

The dishwasher’s hiss began downstairs. We heard the sound of my mother’s shoes rushing in the hall, followed by the groan of the clothes dryer, metal bits clacking inside its steel belly, and then, finally, the back door slammed.

Clay turned the TV up to where appliance noise was drowned to nothing. I recall closing my eyes a while, the shooting and screech of tires against asphalt blaring through the room, and then suddenly nothing but the mild plink of piano keys. I opened my eyes to a screen full of lips. One of the shooters from earlier was now with a pretty woman and they were sucking on each other’s mouths with altogether too much spit. It seemed to go on forever.

“Dad’s got a magazine on his side. In the cupboard thingy,” Clay said suddenly.

I was silent a moment trying to ascertain his point. Sometimes there was little left for me to do but use world-weary sarcasm. “So? Big whoop.”

“So, you should see where they kiss each other in there.”

I gawped up at him.

“There’s girls kissing each other’s kitties.”

“Shut up. They are not.”

“I’m not showing you, you’ll just blab and we’ll both get it. Me worse.”

“I’m not a blabber, stupid. Show me.”

Soon a glossy magazine with the words
Urban Swinger
across the cover came out of my father’s bedside cabinet. Clay turned the pages between thumb and finger with an anxious delicacy that made it seem all the more exotic and mysterious. These were
pictorials
, pictures with a sentence under each that told a larger story:
Jack and Amy meet Nadia
.

I gasped. “Ew! That’s where they pee out of!”

Amy and Jack taste Nadia. Nadia pleasures Amy
, my brother read. The word
pleasure
used as a verb was almost as strange as what they were doing: Amy’s tongue between Nadia’s legs; Jack’s tongue between Amy’s legs.

The skin of Amy was cake-white, the tongue poking toward her licorice red.

I sat cross-legged in my drooping towel, astonished. “It’s like ice cream,” I said. I meant the way the tongues reached, trying to get a lick of someone else’s treat. “Why are they doing that?”

Clay shrugged.

In the last picture, Amy appeared to be in some sort of polite anguish, her back arched.

“Ow—no! Does it hurt?”

Clay said that if he were to do to me what Nadia did to Amy it wouldn’t hurt, which brought on a spasm of giggles.

This is how I remember it: my concern about pain, Clay’s insistence that it could not possibly hurt. The pictures in the magazine, the two of us debating, and the nervous laughter—they were, after all, showing the bits we were supposed to cover up. Downstairs on our refrigerator door was an old picture of us in the bath together, me a toddler, Clay in first grade, bunches of thick bubbles bearding our faces. It had been made quite clear to us that we were too old to have baths together now. Too old.

I don’t know how much time had passed, but on television the men were shooting each other again. Clay put his head between my legs and kissed me square on the kitty. He stuck out his tongue and I laughed and wriggled, hands over my eyes—until we heard our mother scream.

All in a rush, there were hands and arms and smacking, Clay’s hair in my father’s veined hand, my brother dragged off the bed crying, my own squeals, and my mother’s screeching: “What is
wrong
with you?” The volume was of the sort that generally only happened if one of us had done something so life-threateningly stupid that neither parent could think what to do but
introduce a bigger, louder, more immediate threat. The cacophonic pitch of this, though, was beyond the most desperate we’d ever heard.

My mother yanked me to my feet, screaming over the TV as it railed and fired and honked and roared. “I told you to put your pyjamas on.”

“Clay did it,” I sobbed, though I didn’t know what he had done exactly, if we could get sick from it, end up in the hospital.

She slapped the towel back around me and then rushed to Clay’s rising cries. I followed her into the hall and watched as my father batted Clay with both hands. I said nothing in his defence. I caught a last look at my brother’s tear-streaked face, his red eyes and the hatred in them, before both our bedroom doors were closed behind us.

When it was finally quiet that night—the television squelched, voices silent—the air ached with its own bruising. We two were never left alone in the house again. They sent Clay to a psychiatrist.

I hugged a towel and stared in the bathroom mirror. Pulling on the hotel robe, I wandered into the bedroom and sat down on the bed to flip through the Waldorf catalogue. I was wearing the “Plush White Terry Robe” pictured. I straightened my spine, raised my chin, attempting the genteel bearing the copy mentioned. This hotel was one big commercial for itself. How could
we feel the occasion was rare or exceptional when everything was so haveable?