We listened together until the end of the record, after which Mal rose, took it off the turntable, carefully slipped it into the jacket, and put on the second disc. Through a long solo passage (“Sarabande,” Mal whispered at the beginning of the movement, raising a finger), the only other sounds were the crackling of the fire and the hissing passage of cars on the wet street below. We were in the depths of winter—the branches emptied of birds—and the flute sounded icy and patrician. Mal’s eyes were wide open but bore the inverted, rapt expression of someone reading. When we had listened to both sides, he put that record away and carried the jacket toward the kitchen. “Tea?” he said, refusing when I offered to make it.
I followed him anyway and watched with alarm as he dropped the record into a dustbin lined with a plastic bag. In it were several other records. “Don’t ask,” he said sharply. “I’m just thinning things out. And no, you may not have them. Nobody may.”
The next time I came over, I heard a sound I’d never heard at Mal’s before: the sound of a television. On one of his early visits to my place, Mal had commended me for not even owning one; he kept his, he said, only to watch videotapes in bed—concerts and the occasional film. Now it had been moved from the bedroom to the living room, where it was blasting out the day’s most sensational news.
“Yes, yes, I’ve succumbed,” said Mal when he saw my face. He lay on the green chaise, wrapped in a blanket. “Best over-the-counter anesthetic I know.”
“I’m not here to disapprove,” I said, though clearly I did.
He kept it on every evening now; if I peered across the street, I could see its epileptic glow clashing with the deco carpet on the wall. Once, I looked across and saw something quite different: bodies moving around, faces laughing, hands raising drinks. I was furious. I had assumed Mal no longer entertained and that if he did, I would be included.
The following night, I made my delivery late, on purpose, and found Mal watching the State of the Union address. When I came in, he barely greeted me. “Close your eyes and listen. Now if you had a voice like that, wouldn’t you have shot yourself a long time ago?”
I could easily have agreed, since George Bush sounded to me like Monty Python’s take on a nursery school teacher. But I said, “Do you care about the state of the union?”
“Union? Whose?” Mal laughed. “Just think. A year from now, my father might be groveling at the webbed feet of this toad.” I took from his lap a plate holding a half-finished chicken breast. He thanked me but did not look away from the telly.
I put another log on the fire and sat down across from him, puzzled. Two tiny presidents pontificated from his retinas. I had never seen Mal look so absent from himself. After a few minutes, he said, “Doesn’t that dog of yours need walking?”
“In an hour or two.”
“Well. I don’t need anything else. I can see this isn’t your dram of Glenlivet.”
“Nor yours,” I said. “Ordinarily.”
“Time for a new brand of ordinary. Or haven’t you noticed.”
I stood. “All right, all right.” As I started down the stairs, I heard him yell, “Oh ye who we who miscapeepoo! Up your wrinkled blue ass!” I heard a small crash. It sounded like the remote control bouncing off the telly.
The next night, I ran into Lucinda at the health food store. She unsettled me not just with her presence but by kissing me on the lips. “Hello, hello, has Mal told you we’re practically neighbors now?”
I told her he had not.
“Children never lose that teenage reflex, do they? Heaven knows the new tricks a mother might dream up to shame a boy in public! I’ve been here nearly a week.” She sounded bright and happy, full of wholesome determination. She had sublet a tiny studio near Washington Square (“No bigger than a beehive!”) where she would be staying for the next few months. The House, she explained, had won a grant which would pay her tuition for a crash-course degree in career counseling; NYU had the perfect program. “And Zeke wants me out of his hair while he ‘strategizes’ for his campaign—a good thing, since we rarely agree on politics, the kind that starts with a capital P. He’s fine with my playing at single girl, so long as I return to play the doting wife in front of all those cameras.
That
I can do in my sleep.”
“Well good for you—for your grant,” I said.
“I’ll be studying like a fiend—the Good Lord willing, I still know how!—but we mustn’t be strangers.” She took my hands in hers and squeezed so firmly that I could feel her rings marking my skin.
I saw in Lucinda’s cart several of the expensive fruit juices Mal now drank in abundance, as well as a medicinal tea I had seen in his kitchen.
“Drop by the shop,” I said. “Pleasant company can be scarce.”
“Sign me up,” she said, and kissed me again. I knew I should wait for her, offer to carry her bags, but she would be heading for Mal’s, and I did not want him to see us in tandem like that. I had read somewhere that people who are very ill become susceptible to the notion of conspiracies.
I walked home quickly, so she would not catch me up. In my foyer, I turned to look up at Mal’s window and saw, dismayingly, that telltale snowy flicker. But in the next minute, when I opened my mailbox, my attention was utterly hijacked by a large blue envelope bearing foreign stamps and a handwriting I rarely saw but knew on sight.
I set down my groceries and opened the envelope. It held an invitation to Tony’s show in Paris. I opened the card quickly. The vernissage would be held in four days. After the date, Tony had penned in parentheses
So be thinking of moi
. Nothing else. I closed the card and looked at the front.
Two pictures were reproduced side by side, both (as always) acute, almost uncomfortable close-ups. On the left, a cropped profile of a man’s face. You could see only a corner of his mouth, but you could tell he was laughing. At the top, the image ended just below his eye. I looked at the partial ear and the hair behind it. I kept looking. In the sliver of background, there was a tree at night, illuminated by a phosphorescent glow. The light cast by fireworks. I looked again at the ear. I held the card at arm’s length. Strange how I knew that ear, though I never see it from that angle.
The image on the right was another cropped profile of sorts: the outer edge of a man’s naked pelvis, waist to thigh. Beyond the pale hip, against a wrinkled paisley cloth, a dog’s black and white paw. My bedcover. My dog. My hip, obliviously sleeping. I would never have allowed the camera in my bedroom.
TWELVE
T
HE TICKET COST ME A FORTUNE.
Tony would have found a way to wangle some last-minute bargain, but I was not Tony. Anyone but.
I paid the boy in Mal’s building to look after Felicity; Ralph would take Rodgie. I told both Ralph and Mal that I had a family emergency in Scotland; my brother had been in a traffic collision. I have been deceitful, but I had never told such a wild lie (and one which left me superstitiously nervous on behalf of David, the brother I’d fictitiously injured). To tell it twice, vaguely answering their sympathetic questions, felt outrageously cruel.
But I would go for only three days. No one would miss me. Lucinda was here to play valet.
I booked a room at a small expensive hotel on the Ile St. Louis; I chose it because it was the only name that came to mind. My parents had stayed there once and loved it.
What was my plan? Did I have a plan? I had never experienced such a schizophrenic rage before, an anger helplessly pierced by moments of narcissistic satisfaction. Perversely, I was a star.
In the three days between the invitation and my departure, I suffered through ordinary life at the shop and a dinner with Mal and Lucinda at his flat. No telly, thank God, though Mal was testier than usual and did not invite his mother to bring out her pictures. When she did, he told her that while I might have enjoyed her show the first time, once was enough. I started to object (in fact, I’d been hoping for this distraction), but Mal’s dark look stopped me. Quietly, Lucinda put the pictures back in their envelope, the envelope back in her handbag, and did not mention The House or her girls again. This time Lucinda did not ignore her son’s fatigue, so our evening ended early. When I hailed a cab for her, I could see that she was disappointed I had not asked her over to my place.
“You’re just over there, right?” she’d said when we came out onto the street. She pointed to my building.
“Right up there.” I pointed. The windows were lit; when I would be out past sundown, I left a lamp on for the animals.
“You still have that gorgeous, charming parrot, don’t you?”
“Felicity. Yes.”
“I’d love to see her sometime. . . .”
“Come by the shop. I bring her with me every day. She’s sort of a mascot by now. That was how Mal convinced me to take her.” And then a taxi came our way.
“I’m glad you’re right there,” said Lucinda as I held the door. “It makes me feel safe.”
Though I can sleep decently in the cramped quarters of flight, this time I did not so much as doze. I brooded, trying in vain to see the night sky through the reflections in my plastic porthole, trying in vain to find calm in the soft, regular breathing of those sleeping soundly about me. Well then, I would have the afternoon for sleep.
But when I registered at my hotel, I was shocked at the price I had agreed to pay. It was one thing to hear it on the phone, when I had been in a feverish rage, quite another to see it in print, pushed toward me on an accounting sheet bearing my name. I could pay it, but such extravagance went against my nature, and seeing a figure which might as easily buy me a used car as it would three nights of lodging, I worried about the corruption of that nature. Everything connected with Tony defied my normal impulses; anyone could have diagnosed a case of self-rebellion, as if I were my own adolescent child. But here, having come this far for no clear purpose, my recklessness stood perilously tall, a monument built too hastily to stand. Yes, a folly.
So I went to my room, with its gray velvet furnishings and its complementary view of the gray velvet Seine, and I did not sleep. I paced. What was I doing, what on earth was I doing? After close to an hour of pointless flagellation, I had worked my gut into a small tsunami, so I left the hotel and walked a few blocks to a merrily crowded bistro. Having eaten very little on the plane, I made myself consume a heavy Alsatian dish of potatoes, sausage, and cream, the entire thing, and drank two glasses of an opaque purple wine. This time when I returned to my room, I fell irresistibly onto the dove-colored bed, to awake just as suddenly in the dark, befuddled only for a moment. When I saw the luminous digits of the clock (as plain and ugly here as at any chain motel), I sat up and groaned. The vernissage had been going on for half an hour already. When I looked in the mirror, my cheek was creased, my hair dull, and my teeth were mauve from the wine at lunch. I showered and dressed in a panic. It was too late to have my shirt pressed, and my coat was still covered with Rodgie’s white hairs.
Hence I was not, as I had planned to be, one of the first guests, able to walk in and stun Tony, throw him off balance from the start. I stepped through the glass door of Maison Pluto into a room which was scathingly lit and thoroughly packed with people, their faces blurred in a haze of cigarette smoke. (The gallery’s name, I learned later, was a sophomoric pun cooked up by the director to convey that his artists were all “far out.”)
Forced to slink my way in along the wall, I confronted, too intimately, the pictures. They were not as large as I had imagined, but their intense focus was arresting. The first I saw was of a hand, mine, on the crown of Rodgie’s head. This picture, I could see from a round red sticker on the wall, had already sold. I felt a surge of impotent fury.
The next picture showed the back of my head and neck against a sky flowered with distant fireworks; the one after that, my bare legs and feet on my bedspread, from an angle that showed a bookcase and, before it, several stacks of books which did not fit. You could read the title of every book.
I had come upon one of the pictures from the invitation—my naked hip, flanked by three red dots—when (rather than the other way round) Tony surprised me. I felt his hand on my shoulder first, and before I could wheel about, he was saying, “Beeyanvenoo, beeyanvenoo! I had a bet with myself about whether or not you’d make it. I think the larger part of me won.”
How could you; what the hell do you; what kind of cruel joke; who the hell do you . . . So many indignant openings did not make it to my lips as I took in his bantering smile, his mock French, and the strange combination of distance and warmth that his hand on my shoulder enforced. Seeing a few people glance our way—at Tony, not me—I realized that no one would ever put the pictures together with me, because my face, in its rare appearances here, was visible only in fractions.
“I don’t know why I came,” I said coldly.
“Of course you do.” Tony laughed and dropped his hand. “You came because you miss me. And you were dying to see the pictures.”
“I haven’t missed you at all,” I lied in a low voice. I could see a woman working her way toward us through the crowd, calling in heavily accented English, “Tony, you escape artist you!”
“You’re a petty voyeur,” I said.
“I?” said Tony. “I’m the voyeur?
Je suis un artiste, moi
!
”
The woman pushed between us and hugged Tony hard, covering his face with pigmented kisses and laying her head on his shoulder. He introduced her as Marie-Ange and wrapped an arm around her. He started to turn away, toward another fan, but said, “Are you coming to the dinner? It’s just down the street. Marie-Ange, give him
l’adresse,
see voo play.”
I could not make myself leave before seeing all the photographs: all anonymous yet invasive. I felt, if not raped, ridiculed, though I knew this reaction to be absurd. Did I secretly wish that my image were recognizable; that I, the physically present me, were not, to everyone here, just a middle-aged nobody of an uptight
anglais
in a rumpled shirt, squeezing my way around the room as if this event was really about the art on the walls?
I left the gallery with no intention of seeing Tony again, but after wandering the rue du Bac and the boulevard Saint-Germain for a damp chilly hour, I gave in and went to Marie-Ange’s flat. I was hungry again and, begrudgingly, enjoyed the food. (Well, I can still ignore him, I thought.) I sat next to an Australian girl who had recently befriended Tony and expressed the gushing wish that he would photograph
her
. “Isn’t he the most mysterious bloke you ever met? Even though he never acts like he is? I’m so fascinated,” she said. “He’s just got this bloody magnetic thing going, don’t you think?”
Magnetic as a black hole,
I kept to myself.
In the midst of this Tonyfest (Tony himself at the far end of the long crowded table, elbow to elbow with Marie-Ange, who was, I could see from her walls, a patroness if not more), everything she said about Tony made me feel small and banal, a worker ant on the labor line of love. She did not ask how I knew him—she seemed to assume the whole world knew Tony—nor did she ask what I thought of his pictures.
Before dessert, Tony worked his way down the length of the table, taking in congratulations and compliments. It had never occurred to me what a fine politician he might make. Deliberately, I stopped watching him and then, for the second time that evening, felt the shock of his hand on my shoulder. “There’s something I want to show you,” he said, close to my ear. Reluctantly, I stood. As I did, he kissed the Australian girl. “If it isn’t my Miss Koalafruit,” he crooned, making her giggle.
He led me down a hallway to a spiral staircase. “What do you think of this place—magnifeek, ness pah?”
“Yes,” I said curtly, but I followed.
At the top of the staircase was a large bedroom, exceedingly feminine (even by comparison with Ralph’s), all white lace trappings, the walls hung with dozens of black and white photographs. One I recognized as Tony’s, a shot from the lawn of the house on Charles and Greenwich. On the bed lay three Persian cats. One of them raised its head to growl, then lost interest.
Tony led me into a bathroom and closed the door behind us. He began to unbutton my shirt. I pulled away and reached for the door.
Tony took back my hand and held it against his waist. “Now is this the guy who flew across an ocean to see me?”
How absurd would it be to lash out that I had flown across an ocean because I wished I had never met him, I wished he would never return, I wished I need never fail at resisting him ever again?
“Don’t tell me you’re pissed about the pictures,” he said, though he did not pause in opening my shirt.
“Who wouldn’t be?” I said, not stopping his hands.
“Well I can think of lots of folks. You know, you are strange. Interesting strange, but strange,” he said. He touched his tongue to one of my nipples. His back was to the sink, and over his head, in a large mirror lit mercifully well, I saw the blood rise to my face. He pulled back just to say, softly, “Stop taking yourself so seriously,” and those were the last words from either of us before we returned to the laughter and champagne below.
I knelt on the white chenille rug, partly to avoid my reflection behind Tony, and as I fumbled at his belt—something new and expensive, a complex gold buckle—my hands stopped trembling.
I stayed not three days but a week. Although I called Ralph and Felicity’s young caretaker, I did not call Mal. I did not wish to be grilled—in either sense.
I returned to New York spent, demoralized, satiated. Customs was a nightmare, the drug hounds having sniffed up a frenzy at somebody’s unclaimed ski gear; by the time I walked through my door, it was close to midnight. The lamp I switched on woke Felicity, and before I could get off my coat, she had flown across the room and bitten me hard. Moderately kind, she chose my wrist, not my face, for expressing her sense of abandonment. She squawked mightily, flapping her wings, then settled onto my shoulder as I walked about turning on lights, glancing at the post, shedding my clothes. It was Saturday going on Sunday, and Rodgie would be in Princeton, with Mavis and Druid and Ralph. Ralph and I had arrived at a state of benign estrangement—my fault, I knew—while our dogs had become a contented threesome. My mother would have been scandalized, this heir to her diligent champions loitering with a pair of slack-brained spaniels.
I plugged in the kettle and sorted the post on the kitchen table. I had changed into my robe, after which Felicity reclaimed my shoul-der, avidly grooming herself against my left ear. When I reached up to scratch her neck, she gave me a cursory nip, a reminder that all was not forgotten, and uttered one of her falsely intelligible phrases: “Braggadocio,” she seemed to say, and I laughed. “Yes,” I said. “You’re not far off, lass.” Her taffeta rustlings made me glad to be home.
Sorting bills from catalogues, gym prospectuses, and a pair of postcards from tropical islands, I sighed at the thought of the accounting I had yet to receive, the cost of my transatlantic sprint. I had left Paris no more or less happy with Tony. I knew him no better; the only thing I had learned was that I never would.
In the bedroom, I settled Felicity into her cage by the window and folded back the coverlet, now more familiar to me from Tony’s pictures than from its place in my home. By the bed, the answering machine flicked its red light insistently:
STOP STOP STOP STOP
. Listen listen listen listen. A lighthouse gone berserk. I would have ignored it till morning but for the number of calls: 27. I stared at the number. Surely there was nothing to be alarmed about; once, gone only a few hours, I had come home to find the tape filled entirely with the monotonous beeps of a fax machine groping for contact. I sat on the edge of the bed and punched the button.
The first two were empty air, as if someone were waiting for me to pick up despite the message. The third beep was followed by a voice which, for an instant, sent a panic through my veins: my father’s. “Fenno, it’s Dad. No emergency . . . well, none that I know of. A mate of yours rang here this morning expecting to find you. Are you on your way, a surprise of some kind? Shall I make up your bed?” He sounded bright and healthy. After a pause, he said, “Didn’t say, but I think it was your friend Mal. Sorry I didn’t ask.”
The next message, a poet I knew from the shop; the man was fishing for a reading, though he pretended he’d like my company for lunch. I sped through his chirping voice. The next, a financial consultant looking for clients. The next, Lucinda. She sounded as desperate as I now felt.