After Suzy and I hung up, I went to my computer to retrieve the Post-it that clung to its cover like a strip of toilet paper to the bottom of a shoe. Then I poured a little more wine into my glass and lit another cigarette to stall for time and to give me courage. Still, I had to walk around the apartment with the phone in my hand for a few minutes before I worked up the nerve to dial the unfamiliar number that I immediately committed to memory.
He didn’t answer for several rings—maybe he’d forgotten where the phone was in his new place—and then he picked it up and said, “Yes?” cautiously, as if I might be a telemarketer. Or maybe he was more afraid that it would be me.
“It’s Alice,” I said. I heard his sudden intake of breath—had he taken up smoking again, too? No, he just wasn’t prepared to hear my voice, and that was something like a home-team advantage. “We have a problem,” I told him, and I paused just long enough to let him imagine the worst, before I went on. “Suzy called. She wants to bring her sweetheart here to meet us.” That appellation, I knew, wasn’t idly chosen.
“What did you tell her?” Ev asked.
“Nothing,” I said. “Just that I would inform you. She wants you to call her tonight, by the way.”
“You didn’t say anything about us?”
“No,” I said, and I blew some smoke rings at the ceiling. “I think that’s your responsibility, don’t you?” Normal people, I thought bitterly, would be saying, “Should we use the good china? What do you think about veal? Or would the chicken with prunes and olives be more festive?”
“Al,” he said plaintively, and I wondered how my name tasted in his mouth. I couldn’t bring myself to utter his.
“What?”
“This is really awkward,” Ev said. “I mean it’s such a bad way for Suzy to start out with this guy.”
“Yes, I suppose it is,” I said, and then I waited, not filling in the silence nervously as I was ordinarily inclined to do. When he still didn’t say anything else, I finally gave in and said, “They want to come here next Friday night.”
“Oh, shit,” he muttered.
“Do you have other plans?” I asked in that mock-pleasant tone he hated more than sincere anger. “Or didn’t you intend to ever tell the children?”
“Eventually,” he said. “Soon. You can tell her Friday’s okay. That’s if it’s all right with you.”
His careful courtesy infuriated me. “You can tell her yourself,” I said, and I hung up. Then I counted the cigarettes left in the pack, like a miser totting up his gold. There were only six of them, so I picked up the phone again and called my supplier.
16
Michael wanted to see me the next day to discuss his manuscript and whatever I had said to help liberate his writing, but I’d made plans to have lunch with Lucy Seo, and to visit my father after that. “I have an idea,” I told Michael. “How would you like to go to a nursing home with me?”
“Gee, already?” He laughed, and I smiled in response, even though he couldn’t see me. How easy it was to cheer him up.
“I meant just to browse,” I said. “The thing is, I have to visit my father there, and I wouldn’t mind some company.” And maybe a witness, I thought, not knowing exactly what I meant by that. “You just have to remember that
all
experience is useful to a writer.” That old workshop chestnut again; it’s a good thing he wasn’t paying me by the hour.
“Yes, ma’am,” Michael said.
“And we can have coffee somewhere afterward and talk about the book.”
“Sure,” he said, and we arranged to meet in Midtown right after my lunch with Lucy.
Those plans were still in my head as Lucy and I read the menus at Gillie’s, the big, brightly lit deli I’d chosen because we wouldn’t run into any of the literary lights who frequented the more elegant restaurants nearby, like the Union Square Café and Gramercy Tavern. And I had a contrary craving for the school-cafeteria ruckus of this place, the blood-clogging daily specials, the aging, sardonic waiters in their dated tuxedos. It was like the old days, cramming lunch in during a frantic day at the office, and Lucy was, as always, slightly, comfortably overweight and very wound up, but willing and able to unwind for our brief respite.
I didn’t mention that I was meeting Michael later, but as we leaned toward each other across a bowl of pickles, I talked about his book. Lucy seemed to be infected by my excitement and, like me, she loved the title
Walking to Europe.
I told her that I hoped to show the manuscript to someone at G&F when it was ready, instead of just giving Michael the names of some agents and editors, my usual method when the writer has no connections of his own. Together Lucy and I sketched possible jacket designs on paper napkins—footprints traversing a globe, a cubist rendering of Caitlin’s three tattoos—like teenagers trying out the name of some newly beloved in a loose-leaf binder. Then we shared a massive corned beef sandwich, dripping with mustard and Russian dressing.
Over coffee, I told Lucy that Ev and I were having a marital crisis, without offering any details, and she grabbed my hands and expressed her sympathy. Unlike Violet, she didn’t ask too many questions or offer unsolicited advice, and she was in a happy marriage herself. My friendship with safe, lenient Lucy was much more casual and occasional than the intensity Violet and I shared. But maybe I needed that extra challenge, as I’d seemed to need it in my marriage, an edge that often threatened to become a precipice you could throw yourself from when the going became too difficult.
“I’m seeing that shrink again,” I told Lucy.
“Well, good,” she said.
“Not just for that, though.”
She looked inquiringly at me, and I said, “Something’s really been bothering me.”
“What is it?”
“That’s what I hope to find out.”
“You’re not sick, Alice, are you?”
“No, no. It’s just an uncomfortable feeling I’ve been having, a little, you know,
angst.
” Another deficient description of that thing in my chest, and I began to feel uncomfortable just talking about it, so I said briskly, “Enough about that. I’ll work it out. Tell me what’s new in the literary world.” And she finally dropped her searching glance and began to fill me in on all the publishing gossip, which I still stubbornly, voraciously wanted to hear—about the latest firings and hirings, and the hot new books. But I listened without the usual yearning this time.
When Lucy saw Michael waiting eagerly outside Gillie’s for me, she appeared startled, then thoughtful. He was supposed to have met me at the subway entrance on the next corner, but I’d mentioned the name of the restaurant, and he’d taken his chances and waited there. His hair seemed wet, as if he’d rushed over after a shower, and the idiot had brought flowers, a bunch of heavy-headed magenta dahlias that I tried to ignore. I quickly introduced him to Lucy as that writer whose novel she’d probably be designing before long.
I felt myself going rashy red, though, as if I’d made that up on the spot, and I saw that Lucy took critical note of my unease and of the way Michael gazed at me. Our earlier, easy mood seemed to have completely dissipated. But she shook Michael’s hand politely and told him that she looked forward to working with his book. Then she turned to me and said, purposefully and as if we were quite alone, “Alice, I really hope everything works out.”
“Well, thanks,” I replied breezily. “I’m sure it will.”
As soon as she was gone, Michael asked, “Are you okay?”
“Of course,” I told him, in the same dismissive tone I’d used with Lucy. “Why shouldn’t I be?” And I stepped to the curb and hailed a cab to take us to Riverdale.
My father had no other visitors that day, but he didn’t seem very pleased to see me. I had warned Michael about his senility and his mood swings, that he might not even know who I was. But my father, who was at his usual station in the wheelchair next to his bed, said, “Oh, it’s you,” sourly, almost accusingly, as soon as I walked into the room, with Michael trailing a few feet behind me, still carrying the bouquet of dahlias.
“Daddy, how are you?” I said, bending to kiss his cheek, and then I tugged Michael forward a little, feeling the weight of his reluctance. “This is my friend Michael Doyle—he’s brought you these lovely flowers. Michael’s writing a wonderful book that I’m editing.” Again, that sounded like a convenient lie, and my father’s face was as skeptical as Lucy’s had been. “Michael,” I resolutely continued, “this is my father, Dr. Samuel Brill.”
Michael’s extended hand was conspicuously ignored, and my father stared up at him with undisguised contempt. “So this is the fellow,” he said.
Now
what? “You have some nerve showing your face around here, mister.”
“Daddy, stop that,” I said.
“Maybe I ought to wait outside for you,” Michael murmured, and I touched his arm and said, “No, stay, please.” I turned to my father again. “What are you talking about?” I asked.
“Maybe this isn’t—” Michael began, but I stopped him again, and his bicep rippled nervously under my fingers.
“Why do you bring that filth, your . . . paramour in here!” my father demanded. “Are you getting even?”
My heart thrummed, but I answered him boldly. “For what?”
“Oh, don’t play dumb with me,” my father said. “I know your game.”
“Sam,” I said softly. “There’s no game. You know I would never hurt you.”
He put his face into his hands then and began to make odd, gulping noises that I realized, after a perplexed moment, were the spasms of dry sobbing.
“Jesus,” Michael murmured. He sounded prayerful rather than blasphemous, but he was riveted now, and instinctively protective. His hand gripped my shoulder, and all the heat in my body seemed to go to that juncture.
“He thinks I’m my mother,” I whispered to Michael, and to myself. It was like translating the dialogue of a foreign film without titles.
“Oh,” he said.
I knelt at my father’s chair and pried his hands away from his face. “It’s me, Daddy, it’s
Alice,
” I said firmly, and I saw the comprehension slowly take shape in his eyes—a clearing between clouds—and I watched his jaw relax. I opened my purse and took out my mother’s untitled poem, rattling it a little to hold his attention. “Daddy, listen. Do you remember Mother’s . . . do you remember Helen’s poems?”
“Yes. Of course I do.” His old, edgy hauteur was restored. “My wife is a poetess,” he said, addressing Michael, who looked searchingly at me, uncertain of his next lines.
“I especially like this one,” I said, still kneeling, forcing my father’s roaming gaze. Then I began to read the poem aloud. The room was still, and I could see the shadow of a figure standing in the doorway, listening. When I finished, someone began clapping, slowly and deliberately. I looked up, slightly disoriented, almost expecting to see the old crowd in my parents’ living room at one of my little poetry “recitals.” But it was only the person in the doorway, a wraith-like inmate in baggy sweats. For a few seconds I didn’t know whether it was a man or a woman. A woman, I decided as she wandered away, and I saw the long white hair escaping from a kid’s pink plastic barrette.
“Jesus,” Michael said again and he sat down on the edge of my father’s bed.
I took my father’s mottled hand. It was the same lizard-like temperature as my own. “Did you like that, Daddy?” I asked. “It’s about Central Park, where Mother and I used to feed the birds. We’d come up and meet you at the hospital afterward. Do you remember?” I could summon up those events clearly, myself, and with all my senses: my mother’s fragrance giving way to the antiseptic odors of the hospital; the sound of Miss Snow’s heels as she led us into the inner sanctum of my father’s consultation room; the way he always stood up to greet us, dwarfing the plaster models of the heart and brain behind him, making him look taller than he actually was; the plush, majestic Lincoln bearing us home through the fading day.
“Not bad. For an amateur,” my father said.
But she wasn’t!
I wanted to shout. Instead I took my hand back and calmly said, “Well, maybe it’s not her best. I’m not sure I even understand it. I mean, who do you suppose the goose in the poem is?”
“Why, it’s you,” he said promptly.
“Me?”
“Certainly.” And only his mouth smiled. “Goosey girl.”
I sank down on the bed next to Michael. “My God,” I said.
“What is it?” Michael asked. “Alice, what’s this all about?”
I was going to say it was nothing, that my father was crazy, that’s all, and not responsible for the things he said. But I could only wave my hand weakly at Michael until he took it between the twin furnaces of his own.
Later, in a diner on Broadway, I told him everything: about my mother’s death and my father’s decline, about the loss of my job and how I’d become a book doctor, about the feeling in my chest that I’d been harboring since April, even about the Grimms’ Goose Girl, and all the letters and poems in my mother’s folder. The only thing, the only one I left out of my story was Ev.
But Michael wanted all of the pieces or, at least for him, the most essential one. “You’re married, aren’t you?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said. “Sort of, anyway. We’re separated,” I added, and the impact of my own words was so acute, I might have been reporting a disaster that had happened only moments before. I should have changed the subject then—talked about the weather, the bitter coffee cooling before us, the city scurrying past outside the windows—anything at all would have done. Neither of us had even mentioned his manuscript, the reason we were meeting in the first place. But I seemed to have lost the desire or the ability to speak.
He kept looking at me with his dark, unguarded eyes until I had to glance away. Then he picked up my hand again, turning it over as if he were going to tell my fortune, and pressed his mouth against it. An electric thrill went directly from my palm through all the circuits in my body down to my curling toes. “Oh, Alice,” he said. Exactly what I was thinking.
There was so much time for the spell to lift, for the sequence of events to falter and stop, like a torn strip of film. Michael dropped a few bills on the table and led me outside to another cab, which took long minutes to find. And there was the usual late-day crosstown traffic; we didn’t fly through the park to the East Side. We moved slowly through a sunlit aspic all the way to my building, where we went right past Luis, my favorite doorman, and up the nineteen flights in the stately, sluggish elevator.
Then I had to find my key ring in the usual morass at the bottom of my purse, and isolate the right keys, and fit them into the proper keyholes, and open the door. All such nerveless, astonishing feats of skill. He shoved me up against the wall as soon as we were inside, and I shoved back, but not in resistance. When he kissed me, my head banged a little, but even that didn’t bring me to my senses. What if Ev had come home before us? But of course he hadn’t; the apartment was empty and waiting.
I could smell furniture polish, the moth sachets in the closets, our mingled, intoxicated breath.
What is this?
I thought, as if I didn’t know, and
help me,
and
please,
and even
alas, queen’s daughter.
The word
paramour
blazed up like a migraine aura on the velvet screen behind my eyes. All that before my knees folded like paper and fell open.