Under My Skin (32 page)

Later in the kitchen, in between scraping plates, the Lemon explains marriage to me.

‘When you’re single,’ he says, ‘you get a jar, and every time you get laid you put a peanut in the jar, and pretty soon your jar is full. When you get married,’ he continues, ‘you take a peanut out of the jar every time you get laid… when you get married you never have an empty jar.’

Jack smiles at me from the sofa. He winks and holds one hand up. Five fingers and they’re like a secret code between us now. Around me everyone seems to be drunk from eating all that food.

The firefighter’s girlfriend arrives. Her name is Caitlin and she is wearing a new outfit because she is meeting her
boyfriend’s family today. She smiles brightly and nods at everyone and then she puts down a cake that looks like a chocolate hedgehog. And when they walk out into the kitchen someone whispers that ‘She is the one.’

The Lemon is worried because he is losing his hair and Maggie tells him that ‘Baldness is a sign of virility in a man,’ and he says, ‘Any more virile and I’ll go mad.’

We eat more dessert and I discover Snicker Doodle Cookies and then The Chief pulls up a chair.

‘Tell me about your husband,’ he says, and as the voices around me grow louder and the wind keeps howling outside the door, I tell a complete stranger everything I know. The date he got here. The last telephone call he made and how we think he was working near the World Trade Center but no one is really sure and how his family tried to find him but gave up quickly and went home. I tell him I believe that he is still alive and asked what did The Chief think – really? And he tells me the truth, like a good doctor would, that he really doesn’t know. Then he looks at me again and asks me a final question: ‘His name is engraved on his wedding ring?’ and I tell him ‘No’, that Larry put my name inside his and I took his for mine. And he nods here and his face is expressionless like a man who has seen it all before. And then he tells me he will do what he can to speed things up. I give him a photograph of Larry from my wallet and he tells me he will keep it safe. He takes out a cigar and moves towards the kitchen door and then he turns for a second.

‘Hope… right?’ he says and then he leaves without waiting for an answer and I watch as he sits outside on his own and smokes.

Willow Street is quiet and it feels like Christmas night. I step outside and wonder where the rest of the world is. The shops and diners are closed and behind every window families sit around tables and give thanks. My head is aching and my throat is sore and when I stood up to leave, the room was spinning around.

‘Do you know what they are doing there?’ Frankie had asked. ‘They’re giving girls wedding rings and zip-lock bags of dust.’ I didn’t even tell him that I had booked my flight.

Recently I’ve got it into my head that Larry might have jumped.

I think, knowing him, that he would have wanted the last ten seconds of life to himself.

And he would have fallen with grace, and landed silently, like a single white feather on the ground.

I leave the Thanksgiving dinner and walk towards the bridge. The lights are on and it makes me feel less alone. Across the river there is the Manhattan skyline and then I look towards Jack’s house and nothing will persuade me to go in.

I walk to the payphone and I am thinking about the only other person I know on Thanksgiving Day in New York. And I begin to push the numbers slowly and carefully and somewhere on the Upper West Side a telephone begins to ring. It rings eight times, long shrill bells, and my heart is suddenly beating fast. Then there is a click and the receiver is lifted up. There is a delay before she speaks as if she can’t quite find the word. She might have been sleeping or having a long soak in the tub. A cat miaows beside her and after that I can hear the sound of freeform jazz. When she speaks her voice is smooth and quiet and as if she has spent many years just practising each and every word. I am not able to speak at all then and when I finally manage to say her name her voice
comes back like music and Matilda is smiling and saying, ‘Hello.’

Parallax n. The angle between two imaginary lines from two different observation points meeting at a star or celestial body that is used to measure its distance from the earth.

Matilda sits at the piano. There is a cigarette between her lips and the smoke moves in a curl over her nose. In between talk of men and mortality, the piano has been nudging at us all afternoon. Three Slowballs later and she is sliding her fingers over the lid and then lifting it up as she gently touches the keys.

The little sign says ‘Please do not play the piano’ – it is the one Cole Porter played after all. Around us there are photographs of Grace Kelly and John F. Kennedy but she seems to be completely at ease. She leans back a little then, her back slightly hooped and swaying, and she begins to play some far-off old-fashioned tune. Her cocktail is resting on some sheet music – just to show she is in no hurry at all – and beside her chair, her handbag has turned over and three bottles of pills have rolled out on to the floor.

‘Uppers and downers,’ she said casually as she broke one into her gin. She doesn’t care what people think and I already love her for this. Grief picks at us in different ways. There have been tears all over the city and now there are no more tears left. The businessmen walk through dust on Wall Street but up on Park Avenue, at the Waldorf Astoria, everything is art deco and covered in cream and gold.

When Matilda called the waiter over and asked for afternoon tea it was as if nothing bad had ever happened in the world. She orders food in odd numbers.

‘Five tea sandwiches. Three pastries. One savoury tea pie. Three scones with Mascarpone and please – no Chantilly cream.’

She says she likes odd numbers, she likes that they have pointed edges whereas even numbers are round. And the waiters tiptoe around us walking a fine line between humour and respect.

When she orders tea she asks for ‘One silvertip’ and ‘One Darjeeling’ and I have no idea what any of this means.

In the city there is talk about hedonism. She wrote about it yesterday in the
New York Post
. And how those who are alive suddenly want to live, and live and live. There is a new tolerance in New York, Matilda wrote – but when she sits at Cole Porter’s piano the waiters’ eyes are suddenly full of fear. They stand in twos and confer with their silver trays balanced casually on their hands. They could be talking about the weather but they are looking at my Converse runners with the hole in the toe, the rucksack, the black beret. The hat was a find this morning at her favourite thrift store on Angel Street – and this is the only sign of mourning she will allow.

Beneath the palm trees and at white linen tables, the Manhattan girls have afternoon tea and cocktails and talk. They drift in and out of conversations and when Matilda starts to sing their words begin to slow down and finally stop.

She is wearing a tight lilac cashmere sweater, a pale lemon pleated skirt and white high-heeled shoes. I have never seen anything like her. Her earrings are like pink seashells, angel wings or slipper shells. I can’t remember which. Her hair in a blonde bouffant style.

‘We are all misfits,’ I said after the third cocktail and she laughed and for some reason she seemed to really like that. The head waiter walks towards her but her voice, tiny and
tired and without any real tune, begins bravely to come through.

‘As I lie in my bed in the morning, without you, without you,’ and around us in a matter of seconds there are eyes filling up with tears. When the maître d’ appears he signals to the waiters to leave her be. ‘Let her sing,’ someone says and her voice begins to ring out into the carpet and chandeliers. And around us people are beginning to join in and sing. When Matilda sings she is lost to the world, she seems to lift herself up into the sky and float, and everything I have ever been sad about, in all my life, comes out in her soft voice. And when she finishes there is a round of applause and she beams at her audience and bows. Then she lifts her glass and empties it and bows again before stepping away.

‘I lost someone too,’ she says and her voice is tragic and full of pride and pain.

After tea we walk together from the hotel and the doorman rushes to the door and bows. And she links my arm and we walk down Park Avenue, in the still warm autumn sunshine, in a ladylike and old-fashioned way. We browse in shops. She buys a pretzel and insists I have a real hotdog. We call into a small boutique on Broadway that only sells hats and gloves. She buys her Christmas cards. Small and with a simple black and white photograph, showing a couple holding hands and walking over Gapstow Bridge in the snow.

‘Isn’t that the most romantic thing you have ever seen?’ she whispers. And I nod and turn away because her eyes are filling with tears. Then we take a cab to Barneys where she has an appointment at Robert Sweet William. ‘My brows,’ she says as if they are a matter of life and death, and I wait like a child while they work on her and when she sits up, her face breaks into a beautiful smile and there is no trace of tears.

On Madison Avenue she calls a cab and takes me to Grand Central and we stand there on the steps and watch as everyone rushes for their trains. One of her favourite places in New York is Whispering Gallery and she even gets me to stand in one corner and she runs to the far end and whispers something to me. I will never know what she said but already she is the kind of woman I would hate to disappoint, so when she waves I just smile and wave back.

Her apartment is on the second floor in a tall brownstone on W78th and Columbus. Inside there is a narrow mosaic hallway and a tiny kitchen and a new red pullout couch under a bay window. Even now in the almost winter she has left the window open and the white curtains float back into the room. The cat glares at me from under a radiator and I envy him his simple life and how he greets her, lazy with his manners and himself. She has a small spare bedroom and in here she has already made up the single bed.

‘It’s actually a closet,’ she says, ‘but there’s a window and it’s cosy and warm.’ And around the walls there are pictures of old movie stars – Rock Hudson, Cary Grant and Marilyn Monroe.

She makes tea in the kitchen and we sit on two blue-painted stools at its old-fashioned stove. She tells me what she has in New York and what matters to people here – the black and white floor tiles in the kitchen, the exposed brick wall in her bedroom, a cat that does not ask for much, a nice neighbour downstairs, and because of him, she tries not to make noise, and because of him she has put down rugs. She has a Steinway piano, inherited from her mother, a proper bathtub, and a bay window in her living room that gives good light. ‘I have a good life,’ she says, and as I look through her stack of sheet music I think she must be one of the loneliest women in the world.

When she sits on the red couch, the autumn sun begins to go down behind the brownstones across the street and it is red and gold. She says she loves the Fall and that tomorrow she will take me to Central Park to see the leaves. She curls one leg under her then and says –

‘I became an orphan when they put my momma away,’ and this is offered up with a sad little smile.

‘I was angry… bereft,’ she whispers and there is silence in the room and it is just us in the small apartment that is growing colder now and losing the light from the sun.

‘It is difficult for me to talk about
him
,’ she says then, and I am looking around the room for a prompt. I can only presume she is talking about the man she loved and lost. And then she begins to talk quickly and the words spill out and embarrass us both. At first he was like a father to her. A very attractive older man. He was the first man that she trusted. ‘The first man ever in the world.’

And every day something new happened, something that made her want to say, ‘Thank you, God.’

‘Every day – there was another joy. It was love – one big love –’ she says. ‘That’s what everyone gets. And to remember each day that he gave to me – I would make a little mark – it was like keeping a diary about a woman and a man – one big love,’ and she says it again.

And I nod and listen and I am beginning to feel cold and sad inside.

‘What sort of mark?’ I ask.

‘On my skin,’ she answers simply.

She reminds me of a broken bird, hopping around, trying to live and eat with one wing hanging down.

‘And he’s not dead. I know that,’ she says quietly.

‘How do you know?’ and my voice is gentle.

‘He’s pretending,’ she says and she smiles at me.

‘Why would he do that?’

‘It’s a little game,’ she says and she is still smiling.

The marmalade cat gets up and walks across the room and his tail is held high and proud.

‘He was the kind of person that could walk into a room and everyone just wanted to stand near him,’ she says and then, ‘Sometimes I think he was an angel. You know, not quite real.’