Solos (16 page)

She looks around her loft, suddenly appalled.

How many of her possessions has she actually bought and paid for?

There's her big maple bed, a castoff from Laurie. The pretty little rag rug on the floor next to it, which Lamont found in the trash and mended and cleaned for her. The wall of bookcases Anstice had made for certain selected tenants the year she gave them a marginal rent raise and then felt guilty about it. The coffee table and rocking chair Emily found on the street and painted yellow. The funny little pink lamp: She and Pat both spotted it at the Salvation Army, and fought over it, and Pat bought it for two bucks and ended up giving it to her anyway. The kitchen table she made herself out of a piece of plywood, some oil cloth, and a set of fancy legs from her mother's attic, and the four chairs one of Sophie's clients begged her to take away when she was remodeling her kitchen. Izzy, found on a rooftop, and Otto, given to her by Hattie and Gaby after Harry died and Hart left her. Even the washer, chugging away, is a relic of her marriage—her divorce settlement consisted of the washer, the dryer, the car, the Trollopes, and the junk upstairs in Anstice's storeroom.

The snowflakes are gathering in greater numbers, like crowds surging onto a subway platform at rush-hour. Winter is coming, which means not only cold and dark and the occasional snow or slush but also freedom from her gardening job and time to do more photography. Given the unprepossessing elements of her life (no money, few prospects, wealthy siblings, unrequited love), she realizes she has no right to be as happy as she actually, usually, is. Her failures nag at her, but they are unchangeable elements of her existence, and she tries to accept them, as she accepts the polluted air of Williamsburg and her size nine feet. With an effort that is partly physical, inhaling deeply through her nose and exhaling through her mouth the way she learned in a yoga class she took years ago at the Greenpoint YMCA, Emily banishes her bad mood to the furthest, dimmest cellars of her mind.

She's just finishing up Chapter Three of
Miss Mackenzie
(“This was the first occasion in her life in which she had gone to a party, the invitation to which had come to her on a card, and of course she felt herself to be a little nervous”) when the phone rings. Izzy, as always, squawks and flies to her head. Otto, asleep beside her, wakes up and gives the bird his what-a-jerk look.
(What does he think? That it's for him?)
Emily considers ignoring the phone, but it could be Marcus, who has been elusive:
After he has walked the dogs, what does he do all day?
She hasn't seen him since they went to the polls together on Tuesday, when he entertained her with choice presidential quotes, like “A low voter turnout is an indication of fewer people going to the polls,” cracking up all the English-speaking Williamsburgers in line. The Saturday before that was her triumphant Scrabble coup, when she clobbered him with
aquifer
on a triple word. Emily smiles, remembering his pathetic comeback with
squire
, using a blank and wasting an S for a measly fourteen points before going on to beat her in the next two games—but narrowly. Suddenly she misses Marcus desperately, and remembers that she wants to tell him, among other things, her discovery that “two plus eleven” and “one plus twelve” not only have the same answer but use exactly the same letters. On the fifth ring, she picks up the phone.

“Hello—is this Emily Lime?” a man's voice asks.

“Yes.”

“Well, hi Emily, my name is Hugh Lang, I'm a friend of Pat and Oliver's.” He begins talking too fast. “Well, not a
friend
exactly, I'm the father of a couple of their students at Taggart, but we have, actually, become friendly over the last year or two, you know, they teach my children, and so I have a certain amount of contact with them.”

Emily says nothing, and there's suddenly a huge silence in her apartment. The cello suite is over. The washer has stopped its waltz and is waiting to have its clothes transferred to the dryer, which she should get up and do, but Otto has started his gentle snoring again, and she hates to disturb him. She looks out the window, thinking
Everything is dark except for the lights
. The lights in New York never go out, and the sky is never allowed to get black. Anytime, anywhere, in New York City there is someone awake, with a light on, a concept that is both comforting and worrisome.
The city never sleeps
. But maybe it should, maybe it should turn out the lights and get some shut-eye for a change. Somewhere out there, she thinks irrelevantly, is the Williamsburg rapist, the man in a mask and a hood who forces women at knife-point into alleys and to the roofs of abandoned buildings and down to the desolate wasteland by the river. His last victim was one of the Kent Avenue hookers, just two days ago—she also got her face slashed. The one before that was the young Polish girl who used to work at the Pink Pony Thrift Shop. After her rape, Emily heard, she went back to Krakow.

“Hello?”

Emily says, “Oh. Yes.”

The man on the phone continues. “So they mentioned that you play poker, and I was wondering—well, you wouldn't believe how hard it is to find poker players in this city! You can find people who do every damn thing—you know, niche things—like my next door neighbor is a Greek acupuncturist who plays the bagpipes—but poker players are hard to find, for some reason. So I was wondering if you'd like to join our little game? Friday nights? Usually at my place—for obvious reasons. I mean, I'm single, so I have no—I mean, I'm not
single
, I'm
divorced
, actually, but my kids aren't here on weekends. What I mean is we do play poker here most Fridays, and we'll be playing this week, I'm on the Upper West Side, Amsterdam near Ninety-fifth, and if you'd like to come, that would be great. We play nickel-dime-quarter, a friendly game, none of us are sharks or anything like that, but we're pretty good, not amateurs, there are usually five of us, sometimes six, but we could use a new face, some fresh blood, and I think you might find it's quite a lot of fun.…”

Hugh Lang's voice trails off. Izzy, on her head, is murmuring softly, and Otto's snore rumbles against the inside of her left arm. She knows she has to speak, and though she knows what she will say, she is reluctant to say it. She doesn't like to lie, and yet she doesn't want to tell the truth, either, which is that she has no interest in Hugh Lang's poker game or in Hugh Lang, that she is mildly angry at Pat and Oliver for having given him her number, and that she hopes he will never bother her again.

She takes a breath and says, “It really does sound delightful, and I'd love to come, but I'm afraid I can't. Friday night is my—” she hesitates for only a moment “quilting night.” She looks down at her black and red quilt and smooths a seam that was meticulously stitched by a woman named Melicent Harris in Pennsylvania in 1845. “My quilting
bee
,” she corrects herself. “Every Friday. Seven o'clock sharp. We're a very dedicated little group.”

“Really.” His voice is deflated. “Well, I'm sorry.”

“Yes, me too. It's a shame, but—well, there you are. Isn't it weird how everything is always on the same night, so that you never really get to do anything?” She doesn't wait for him to answer. “I do appreciate your thinking of me, though.”

This is a sentence that, she hopes, indicates she wants to hang up now. He gets the hint, and after a few more stilted exchanges they say good-bye. She immediately feels awful. What crazy Yogi Berra thing did she just say?
Everything happens at once so you can't do anything?
Her only consolation is that Hugh Lang probably found her such a dingbat, not to mention a transparent liar, that he is relieved she didn't agree to join the game.

Remorse makes her energetic, and she eases herself out from under Otto and puts the clothes in the dryer. The washer and dryer, combined with the poker game, remind her of her married days, when she and Hart used to play poker with Joe Whack and Jeanette Jerome, the Jeanette whose loft Elliot C. is subletting while Jeanette is in London for a year, on sabbatical from her job teaching American literature at Brooklyn College. It was a pathetic poker game. Joe was really sick then, and Hart was a mediocre player who became sullen and offensive when he lost a hand. Emily was so busy trying to keep everyone happy that she couldn't concentrate, and so Jeanette always took all their money, gleefully quoting Hemingway's strategy—“Never call, always raise or fold”—as she raked in the chips. But Emily loved those poker nights anyway, and it occurs to her that she would, actually, enjoy very much playing in a poker game exactly like the one Hugh Lang just described.

She stops, suddenly, with her hand on the dryer knob.

What is wrong with me?

It's such a familiar question she doesn't even bother to grope for an answer. She stands holding the knob, contemplating the zipper around her wrist. She does her deep breathing.
Think of something nice
, she instructs herself, and she shuts her eyes and lets her mind travel back to 1977, the day Elvis died. Her mother wept on her father's shoulder, her brother Milo put on an old Elvis album, and her parents slow-danced together to “I Want You, I Need You, I Love You,” while their children watched, entranced, swaying in time to the music. Emily was eleven.

Feeling better, she starts the dryer.

Then she pours herself some tomato juice (left over from the Scrabble session), puts on the second CD of the cello suites, and returns to Miss Mackenzie, who in the course of Emily's evening goes to Mrs. Stumfold's tea party, is called on by the handsome Mr. Rubb, spends Christmas at the Cedars with Lady Ball and her eligible son, and attends a dinner party in London. Miss Mackenzie makes Emily ashamed of herself. But, as Marcus reminded her at the polls, President Bush once memorably declared, “The future will be better tomorrow.”

Emily snuggles up with Otto, feeling sure that this sentiment, while stupid, is probably true.

12

No! it is opposition

Marcus gets to the Botanic Garden early, so he can take a walk before his father arrives and transforms it from a green and beautiful refuge into a place of bad memories. So far, Marcus has only good memories of the garden, which he discovered soon after his move to Williamsburg in the fall of 2000, when he was nineteen, and had only a hundred dollars in his pocket. He was drawn to Brooklyn by the presence of his father. Broken and motherless, Marcus was too realistic to expect to find family, connection, or roots, but he was also vulnerable enough to want something that at least resembled those things. And he needed money. Hart, he heard from Tamarind, was still some kind of art dealer, with a gallery of his own, and he was married and living in a loft on North Third Street.

Marcus figured he must have improved since the Honesdale days.

But when he arrived and called the number he was given, a woman's voice told him, curtly, that Hart no longer lived there and no, she didn't have a new number for him. As it turned out, though, Hart wasn't hard to find—he had emigrated across the river, and was renting a place on Crosby Street. He was the proprietor of a small gallery, trendily located in Chelsea, that specialized in what Hart called “the aesthetic of blood,” including the work of the soon-to-be-famous wound-painter Selma Rice.

A big surprise was that Hart wasn't sorry to see Marcus. His son's sudden appearance in his life seemed to amuse him—a son who, as he gleefully pointed out, had failed to take his advice, and now look at him. “Did I tell you to get out of that fucking backwater, or what?” he asked, more than once. He was still a smoker, and his voice was a rasp, like a saw that needed sharpening. “But did you listen to your old man? Huh?” He cuffed Marcus on the shoulder. “But hey, kid, I'm glad you turned up.” Hart put Marcus up for a night on the couch in his shabby apartment, and gave him an old but warm tweed overcoat, a couple of shirts, and a pair of leather gloves that needed repairing. They were all too big on Marcus, a fact Hart enjoyed (“Jesus Christ! My son the twerp”). Marcus endured his merriment in exchange for enough money for a security deposit on an apartment and a month's rent. Hart had not, in fact, changed much, except that he looked older and was actually willing to part (condescendingly, chuckling, with a couple of remarks about losers) with some of his money.

They went out to dinner in a bar at the top of the World Trade Center—champagne in an ice bucket, and the city like an open jewel box far below. Marcus gazed down at the view, which was both sublime and frightening, while his father launched into a tirade reminiscent of the long-ago night at Mario's Olde Italian Inn—people are jerks, illogic rules the universe, the art world is stupid and venal, etc. etc. Marcus let his father continue talking until Hart's steak arrived. Then, after a suitable interval as his father attacked the meat and Marcus worked on a vegetarian mushroom-and-pastry thing that reminded him pleasantly of his mother's cooking, he asked one of the questions he had come to New York to hear the answer to.

“So, Pop—why didn't you ever marry Summer?”

Hart looked up from his steak and surprised him by actually answering. “I'm not the marrying kind, son.”

“But you married that other woman.”

“You know what her name was?” His father smiled. “You'll like this. Emily Lime. Get it?”

But Marcus wasn't listening. “So if you aren't the marrying kind, why did you marry her?”

Hart's smile dissolved into a frown, as if the question truly puzzled him and he was actually searching for some kind of self-knowledge. He gazed off into space for a minute, sipping his champagne, and then he said, “I'll tell you the truth here, Marcus. I think I thought I could become the marrying kind by, well, by getting married. You know—walk like a duck, talk like a duck.…” He shrugged.