Sunday's on the Phone to Monday (2 page)

Claudio had neuroses about the amount of money he spent,
feeling infelicitous if he thought about it too much. -
Why the fuck did I buy that overpriced fish dish; why did I ask the bartender for top-shelf gin? -
It always added up. To indulge himself, Claudio listened to music all the time—in the shower, as he slept, while he talked on the phone. Music made him wealthier.

Claudio grew a beard and hand-rolled his cigarettes and ate only black bread and trusted no one when he moved to New York. He wanted to appear older than he was but couldn't help attracting college students as friends, who'd come to his store and pick out records for their parties. Eight-tracks had long been out, and CDs were new, but neither sounded as good, as emotionally reviving, as the records. Claudio banked on nothing being better quality than records for a long time, risking his whole fiscal life on this.

He'd never even been to New York before. -
Get out, -
he'd told himself. -
Never come back. -
He'd have to make his own luck, which was fine. He'd never felt at ease depending on others. He'd only needed to find some people he could employ for family.

How'd you guys meet?
folks would ask.

Claudio always said,
we made out at a party on St. Mark's.

Mathilde always said,
we met through friends.

What really happened was they attended a party in an NYU undergraduate's apartment where vodka was dispensed through feeding tubes hung from the wall. The undergraduate, a friend of Mathilde's, had bought a Hall & Oates record from Claudio's store and thought that the way Claudio smiled with his tongue sticking out of his teeth while ringing her up was cute in a grainy way, so she invited him to her place.

Claudio drank vodkas because he didn't know anybody. Everything around him started to look like glass. The apartment had two floors with a steel staircase in the shape of fusilli and narrow circular steps, which Claudio fell down, responding to his own plunge with
Jesus H.
His ass smarted. All over the wall
were hundreds of cookbooks. Adjusting himself right side up, he noticed a pair of thin legs, then the woman attached to them.
Have mercy.
Mathilde looked mature. Maybe she'd be too grown up for such foolishness.

Nice rings.
Claudio scanned her hands. She wore two rings, but the left wasn't a diamond, so he could try his own hand with hope.
Is that where you live?

I'm sorry?

Where in your body do you spend the most time?

Well, my head,
said Mathilde.
You?
She thought, -
won't you beat me, so I know I did something wrong? -
And then she thought about a line from a play she did two years ago, titled
Pretend It's a Party
. The line was -
I'm tired of you laughing at me. -

No wonder,
Claudio said,
you look so much in la-la land. Anyone in particular you're thinking about?

Nobody too special,
admitted Mathilde. She'd been thinking of Milla from
Textbook Case
, whom she'd left in her brain with the rest of the characters she'd played. Milla didn't know how to read or write. She had no outlet outside of her head, and fear crowded her thoughts. Considerably speaking, Mathilde was much luckier than Milla. How she missed her!

Milla wouldn't have been so shy around Claudio. By this point, Milla would have been touching Claudio's arm, laughing at his jokes, feeling his swinish body hairs stand for her attention. Claudio would have thought Milla was more fun than Mathilde. A firecracker. -
You're making the wrong choice, buddy, -
Mathilde felt like saying.

She was being classic Mathilde. Thinking of her characters as though they were friends of hers. How could she tell Claudio that the people she missed most of all weren't real or that they were part of her?

Besides, Claudio would be sure to dislike her once he found out how juvenile she was. Mathilde had light-years of maturity
when it came to cognition—she could probably hold court with MENSA members—but when it came to her kinesthetic sense, she was childish. She mixed up her right and left, cried during happy moments, laughed during sad ones, and didn't know temperance when it came to corporal needs like falling asleep or needing to use the bathroom. Whatever she felt, she could not wait to do. Her body held all of her clout.

The party overflowed with people and expensive talk. Two a.m. in the city was like 10:00 p.m. anywhere else.
You need some water or something?
yelled Claudio. His word
water
came out as
waw-duh.
Lately and astoundingly he'd heard himself already start to have a New York accent, pronouncing forest
farrest
and almond
ah-min.

Soft fingers of smoke curled around their faces, an effluvium infection of their hair and clothes. This was pre-Giuliani, a time when everyone smoked indoors and felt their surroundings made them stronger.

Mathilde suggested they find someplace quieter, and so they came across the fire escape. Claudio opened the window and pinched the loose skin between her pointer and middle finger.
Hand fat,
he joked. Mathilde stuck out her tongue.

Here, we can fit,
said Mathilde.

You sure you're relaxed?
asked Claudio, watching his breath in front of his face. He felt like a cool smoker.

It's New York,
said Mathilde.
You get good at being comfortable in tiny and risky places.

The time felt necessary at the end of the party for Claudio to ask Mathilde,
do you want to go for dinner sometime this week?
He squinted and shook his head, as though Mathilde had already rejected him, though they'd Eskimo kissed for almost an hour atop a pile of coats. The effort was there: Claudio made moves but let Mathilde feel like she had some control over the situation. And Mathilde minded Claudio, letting him touch the side
of her back as he asked, letting his reticence fade. Touching her back felt firm, filling, sufficient.

Oh sure,
said Mathilde.

Mathilde had no way to know this, but the word
sure
rubbed Claudio wrong. He thought it beget a lackluster quality, that people said it when they didn't take things seriously. Maybe he'd made the wrong decision? -
Oh, come on, -
he thought. He never really dated in New York, just had girls he'd talk to, go to concerts with, and occasionally sleep with.

The last had been a lawyer named Viola. Viola with the barbed cheekbones and the body starry with moles. She ate his leftovers, held her own at parties, and they were a fit in terms of maturity: Claudio needed to feel older, and Viola liked to say she was born forty. Viola was okay. But for some reason he and Viola had always been in a fight. He didn't know how—it wasn't as if he ever looked for trouble. How did people go about having relationships? What kind of process was it, and how organic? He would've loved to date a girl had he known precisely how.

Cool, thank you,
said Claudio to Mathilde.
And don't worry. You can always trust somebody if you meet him upside down.

Claudio took Mathilde to dinner the next night at a restaurant in the West Village. He unmercifully muscled over drinks as his inhibition eroded. He was careful at first not to talk too much about himself, to approximate the time he spent talking with time he spent listening and asking questions, to find that perfect balance between not sounding like he was giving a speech or conducting an interrogation. He suddenly realized before his third whiskey that he'd been talking about Brian Wilson for however long it took the people at the table next to them to sit down and order and get their meals.

I should just stop talking,
he interrupted himself.
Especially about music. What else is there to say about music? I just like everything.

No,
marveled Mathilde,
you're fascinating.
God bless Mathilde,
and her face, which was old-fashioned, Claudio realized. Maybe it was the eyes, intuitive and weary. She looked like she could have been a product of one of the wars.
Well, you got me started,
he said.

Mathilde sparkled, her spectacular mouth making punctuation: a parenthesis, a befuddled backslash. When she drank water, her lips became ellipses. And how did Claudio's mouth look to her, he conjectured, making all sorts of hideous shapes? Without a doubt like the qualm of a question mark in discordance with the assured crudity of an exclamation point.

Claudio set the rules for himself: -
her mouth reminds me when to stop. -
A smile meant continue: they were on the same page. A frown meant the same: he had to justify himself, explain, maybe allow her to retort. A period, lips closed and ineffable, meant she wasn't interested anymore.

Over the course of the evening, Claudio discovered that Mathilde also loved music. Who didn't? But Mathilde liked music that moved her. She didn't just listen to it because it was there. Her favorite album was Joni Mitchell's
Blue,
closely followed by Fleetwood Mac's
Rumours.
She explained to Claudio how she wanted the qualification of being a person people thought of when they listened to certain songs.

Mathilde had a chimera cat named Penelope. Her favorite flowers were sweet peas. Her best outfit was her blue bell-bottoms, her grandmother's mink coat, and a peasant blouse that she got in the East Village for five dollars.

Why that outfit?

Because I'd wear it anywhere.

Even to your wedding?

Even to my funeral.
This dizzy chime, the urgent art of Mathilde's laugh, overwhelmed Claudio in a safe way.
Make sure I'm buried in it, will you?

I hope you've told some other people. Not because I anticipate not seeing you again. It's just, you'll probably outlive me.

Oh come on!
She laughed like he was kidding.
This is pretty morbid, for a first date.

It is?
He wondered if Mathilde thought he was brave, deep, different. Or did he seem like a phony? Taking such a wonderful person out to dinner was a goddamn idiotic idea. If only he'd taken some sedative. Even a hit of weed would've made him more comfortable, brought him to an orbiting lull. The soft way Mathilde studied him made him feel like maybe something about him was off, like his eyes were too cocoon-shaped or his hairline too focused.

After drinks, dinner, dessert across the street at a bakery, and then a nightcap three blocks down at another bar (Mathilde aggressively ordered some specialty cocktail Claudio had never heard of before called an
adios, motherfucker
), Claudio offered to drive her home. Over dinner he'd found out that Mathilde lived with her mother and brother, Sawyer, on the Upper West Side and commuted downtown to her college classes.

I wanted to dorm, but my mom's the cheapest rich person you'll ever meet.

That's too bad. My parents are poor, but they're really generous. Sometimes too much for their own good.

You have a car?
asked Mathilde.
In Manhattan?

I mean, I sometimes even drive it to the grocery store,
said Claudio. An old stretch limousine had been repaired, then for sale last year at an auto-repair shop in Holliswood, Queens. Claudio had had his eye on it for a month, buying it as soon as he'd sold enough records. It (or
she,
as he called it) was the first big thing he'd ever owned.

Claudio told Mathilde this, then all about how well his business had done in the past year, much better than he'd thought. How he spent all of his spare money on parking spaces for the car.
Seems like a waste.
Mathilde was truthful.

Well, there's nothing I can think of that I'd rather spend money on.

Don't you want to save it?

I wanted to own something larger than me,
said Claudio.

What about buying property?

You're kidding, right?
asked Claudio. They laughed in a way only New Yorkers could laugh.

Yeah, I guess that makes some sense.

And on that note, let me drive you home.

You don't have to,
said Mathilde, in the laudable way girls speak, offering not to be taken care of. Earlier she'd also held out her hands as a gesture to pay for her half of the bill, but Claudio had said,
my pleasure.

What kind of person would I be if I didn't make sure you get home safely?
clicked Claudio: traditional, bearlike.

Are you sure you're good to drive?

I'm a tank,
said Claudio.
And I like living. I have some things I want to do before I die. But I get it: you don't know me. You're going to have to trust me.

I'll trust you,
decided Mathilde.

Mathilde took a toothpick and the restaurant's business card while Claudio munificently tipped the coat check girl. A Muzak version of “It's Only a Paper Moon” tolled. He opened the door, and they were hit by the city air in uprising swirls. Mathilde's ears were touching the sky. Wasn't perspective a glorious and mad thing?

Come,
said Claudio. And Mathilde followed him.

He was thinking -
she hates me. -
Christ, she was tiny and hot. Parsley bangs snipped across her forehead, news-anchor skin. She'd gotten up halfway through dinner to use the restroom, and her shirt bottom swung up, a hint of split-upward unsweatered bare back just about killing his feral self. Her hip bones like monkey bars.