The Wonder Spot (16 page)

And,
I thought,
I am about to have dinner with the man I love.

Outside Szech West, I changed from sneakers into pumps.

Josh sat at a corner table, studying a page of the yellow legal pad he wrote poems on. He stood up and gave me a kiss that was more suited to a cheek than lips; his embrace seemed to be holding me off instead of pulling me in.

I reminded myself that this was Josh: He was reserved; I couldn't take his personality personally.

He picked up his menu and, handing me mine, said, “I need food.” He seemed to think of being hungry or tired as an early stage of illness.

After we'd ordered, he reached for my hand and held it. “How's your grandmother?”

“Hard,” I said.

He nodded, which was how he told me to go on.

“I don't know.” I said, “She's always talking to me about getting married,” and I looked at his face to see if there was anything on it for me to know.

“You should ask her about her life,” he said. “Where she came from. That's what I talk to Bubbe about.”

Up until that moment, I'd been at the earliest stage of love, when you feel it will turn you into the person you want to be. Now, his gentle voice and sage advice took me to a later stage: I felt I needed to pretend to be a better person than I was so he'd keep loving me. This was hard because it made me hate him.

I couldn't look into his eyes, so I looked down at his hand. I'd never said anything about the turquoise ring he wore; usually, I tried not to notice it. “Where'd you get the ring?” I asked.

He said, “I bought it myself in Santa Fe.”

I nodded. It was good that the ring had not been given to him by one of the ex-girlfriends he maintained contact with. But, like Josh, I had principles, and one of mine was that, except for a watch and a plain gold wedding band, a man ought not to wear jewelry. A ring, even this small and un-diamond, put him in a country that a man in a fur coat ruled.

“You don't like it?” he said.

“No,” I said. “I like turquoise.”

. . . . .

I spent all day reading the manuscript I would have to report on. It was a novel called
The Wives of Armonk
, about women with a lot of money and how they liked to spend it plus have affairs with young men who had big penises. The main character, Jacqueline, fell in love with the pool man. He was skimming the pool for leaves, and she dived in naked. Then they were in the pool house, and she was saying, “Yes . . . yes . . . oh, Lord . . . yes.”

At dinner, my grandmother said, “So,” and I could tell she was about to bring up Josh.

“You know what I was just thinking?” I said. “I don't know too much about your childhood.”

“I was a little girl,” she said, and I realized I'd asked her this question before. She sometimes said she grew up in Austria, other times Germany, and once Poland, and she'd left when she was twelve, fourteen, and sixteen. Her family was always very poor, but sometimes her father was a shoemaker and other times a farmer.

“What was your father like?” I asked.

“Sick,” she said.

“What was wrong with him?”

Tapping her chest, she said, “Weak lungs.”

Finally I asked why she didn't like talking to me about her past. “Is it painful?”

“To tell you the truth,” she said, “I don't remember.”

. . . . .

I was a slow reader, and I didn't start writing my report until midnight on Sunday. I stayed up all night and at sunrise saw the Harlem River turn unscenically from black to brown.

I proofread my report twice and was especially proud of the last line: “This is dreck.”

I didn't have time to take a shower, change my clothes, or put in my contact lenses. I took the express bus down to Manhattan and got to Steinhardt Publishers just before five.

The receptionist asked for my name, and I told her.

As she picked up the phone, I said, “I'm just supposed to drop this off.”

She said, “I'll tell Honey you're here,” and a moment later, out came Honey.

“Come on back,” she said, taking the manuscript and my reader's report from me.

Incoherent with sleeplessness, I tried to apologize for wearing jeans.

She shook her head like I was a little crazy.

I sat in her office while she read my report. She tipped herself back in her chair and her eyes widened as she read. Then she laughed.

I hadn't made any jokes in my report.

She laughed and laughed, and when she could speak, she told me Steinhardt was publishing
The Wives of Armonk
.

“Oh,” I said. “Sorry.”

She said, “No.” Then she asked me when I could start.

. . . . .

When I gave my grandmother the news, she said, “How much are they paying you, if you don't mind me asking?”

The salary was very low, and I didn't want to say the number out loud. Instead, I told her what my father had told me: I was an apprentice, learning a craft.

She turned her head to one side.

I was too tired and too happy to let this bother me. I said, “Maybe I'll cook you dinner one night before I go.”

She said, “That's nice,” but I could see she didn't care for the idea.

She sat down with me on the sofa, where I was splayed out in my exhausted bliss.

She said, “I bet you'll be happy to leave your old grandma.”

“No,” I said. “No.”
Yes, yes,
I thought in the cadence of an Armonk wife,
oh, Lord . . . yes.

When she began to ask me about Josh, I said, “Listen, Mamie.” I looked at her, old lady to old lady, and said, “I don't want to talk about my romantic life.” It occurred to me that
romantic life
was the phrase you'd use if you didn't have one; for a moment, I went back to the night when I'd faked a date with Josh and wandered around midtown in the rain.

“Why,” she said, “if you don't mind me asking?”

“I don't know,” I said. “It makes me feel bad.”

She took one of my cigarettes and lit it. She puffed but didn't inhale. It reminded me of a picture she had of herself with my grandfather in a nightclub. They were sitting at a big round table, and she was wearing a shiny dress and lipstick.

“I'm trying to tell you how life is,” she said.

I said, “Things have changed, though.” I tried to make my voice sound certain. “Things are different.”

“How?” she said.

I thought of the professor who taught Introduction to Women's Studies at Rogers and tried to think of some sure, smart thing she would say. Instead, I remembered that she'd broken her foot and even once the cast came off she walked with a cane. For some reason, this seemed to weaken my case. “Women have careers now,” I said. “We don't care as much about, you know, men.”

“Is that so?”

I wanted to give her a specific example of my new modern relationship with Josh, but all I could think of was that we split the check. It was his idea, an offshoot of the principle that everything should be equal between us. When the check came, Josh divided it, calculating how much more my soda and coffee were. He himself drank only water.

“Anyway,” I said, “I don't want to talk about it.”

She got up from the sofa and went to the kitchen. In a few minutes my dinner was set out.

I said, “Thank you.”

“You're welcome.”

For the first time, she didn't sit down with me or hover nearby. She turned on the television and pretended to watch it.

The chicken was undercooked; it was pink inside. I considered putting it back in the oven, but I didn't. I got up from the table and hid the chicken underneath other garbage in the pail. I cleared my dishes and washed them, without any protest from her.

“I'm going to take a walk,” I said.

She said, “Have a good time.”

I went across the street to the pizza place and ordered a slice. I sat there eating it under fluorescent lights. The only other diners were an old man and a young couple with a child who whined. They didn't seem unhappy or happy. It was impossible to learn anything from looking at them.

Sitting there, I thought of my grandmother saying,
I only want what's best for you,
and I knew that if I could get myself to believe this
I'd feel better about her and myself. But like everything else I was supposed to think, it didn't feel true.

. . . . .

Robert called to congratulate me on my job and asked if I'd have dinner with him and Naomi. Jack was coming, too. “Bring Josh if you want to,” Robert said.

When I mentioned the invitation to Josh, he said that he was at a critical stage with a poem, but if the dinner was important to me he'd go.

He seemed to be stating a principle of his, though I wasn't sure exactly what it was and didn't ask. Lately, his principles had begun to feel like bars on a cage I was supposed to fit inside.

I said, “It's not important.”

. . . . .

At Robert's, Naomi gave me a hug, and I thought,
Is all forgiven?
In the kitchen, I saw that Robert's
MEAT
and
MILK
labels were still on the drawers and cabinets.

There were only four places set at the table, so I knew Cynthia wasn't coming, and Jack himself came late. He walked in tired and full of jokes about what he called “the shoot.”

I asked him what the movie was about, and he said that the shoot was for a commercial.

“I thought you made movies,” I said.

He said that commercials were the company's bread and butter.

Robert and Naomi had cooked a big dinner, a lamb stew and some mushy starch that was supposedly Middle Eastern and made me think the two of them and my grandmother could benefit from a cooking lesson from Cynthia.

Robert kept smiling at me in what felt like the private way of our pre-Naomi past. I thought maybe he was proud of me for finally getting a job.

I mentioned that my new boss was an old girlfriend of Jack's.

Jack said, “How did you know that?”

I said, “She wouldn't stop talking about you.”

Robert sounded like a little boy when he said, “Were you nice to her?”

Jack said, “I satisfied her needs”—I think to mortify Naomi.

But Naomi stood up to him; she said, “How do you mean, Jack?”

At dessert, Robert came out with a bottle of champagne.

I thought it was sweet of him to celebrate my job, and I was about to say so when he held up his glass and announced his engagement to Naomi.

I made my mouth smile, say, “Wow,” and kiss them both.

It was hard not to feel happy for Robert, though, since he seemed so happy for himself. It reminded me of the way he'd looked in the mirror when I'd helped him get ready for his prom.

Seeing himself in his tuxedo, he'd said, “Good, right?”

. . . . .

Jack and I walked out together and down Broadway.

I had keys to Josh's apartment; I was supposed to meet him there after dinner. I knew he was probably already home from the library, but when Jack asked if I needed to rush off to Ovid I said that I didn't.

We went to a bar on Broadway, and Jack ordered scotch for both of us. I pulled out a cigarette, and Jack took my matches and struck one for me. We sat there with our drinks and didn't talk at first, which felt nice.

“Well,” he said, “there goes our little boy.”

I remembered Jack saying,
What happens between me and Cynthia is between me and Cynthia,
so I hesitated before saying, “What's wrong with Cynthia?”

He said, “There's not a thing wrong with that woman.”

“I mean, why didn't she come?”

He thought for a moment. Then he told me that he'd suspected Robert's announcement. “I think Cynthia wants to get married.”

“Oh,” I said. “Do you want to marry her?”

He said, “I am giving it some very serious thought,” but the way he said it made me think he wasn't.

I remembered my father's speech about what Jack was capable of
and wasn't; he'd said,
It has nothing to do with how much Jack loves you.
I thought about all the girls he'd stopped loving; it was like he had a timer, and at a certain point it just buzzed.

I said, “Does she say she wants to get married?”

“She's from Alabama,” he said. “She doesn't talk like that.”

“So, how do you know?”

“She's thirty-two,” he said.

“That sounds like something Grandma would say.”