Under My Skin (6 page)

The trouble with Matilda had begun with Marilyn.

The
Marilyn.
Marilyn Monroe
.

One night he said it to her and now she could not let it go. He mentioned it in the afterglow and watched as she lit up in front of him. He made a casual remark out through the dark of his bedroom and she turned into a star right before his eyes. She did remind him of her – the high brows, the red mouth kiss, the sleepy sensuous eyes – but now he was getting tired of her. No, she was making him feel tired – which was a different thing. She was, he felt, somewhat ‘displaced’. Maybe even a little ‘unhinged’? One night she came wearing a blonde wig and a raincoat and not very much else. Every man’s fantasy, wouldn’t you think? But Glassman felt uncomfortable and a little afraid. He began to wish, in the most basic terms, that Matilda would simply go away.

‘Go buy a farm in Virginia,’ he wanted to say. ‘Have a cobra, ostriches, a boa constrictor, just find new ways to extend your madness.’

Now when she left her parents at their hotel she came back and banged on his door. And he let her in. ‘You’re my umbilical cord,’ she said and she slept on a chair again. She looked
beautiful to him then but this was something that he did not need to know. In the morning after she went to work he drank two cups of coffee and went to the bathroom, and here he cursed the medication for burning up his inners and looking into his own face in the mirror he congratulated himself on managing three rabbit pellets and a fart.

The next day, a businessman ordered chocolate ice cream at Darcy’s in the Village. He was celebrating the christening of his first granddaughter and he ate a fillet steak and fries before ordering a poached pear with chocolate ice cream. He did not know that there was a crushed almond in it and within minutes he was in anaphylactic shock and it was Glassman, who was on reduced hours now, who injected the adrenaline, even though he knew it was already too late. And as they elbowed each other around the gurney at St Vincent’s it was Glassman that was elbowed closer than anyone else. He was moved up from the end so that he saw the body jump and some kind of aura move upwards and then the man opened his eyes and he was able to tell him that his granddaughter was called Anna Louise. But then the pink and orange aura lifted again and he was gone, and before he died, he saw the face of Glassman.

And ‘What a face’ – that was what Matilda once said – ‘like a younger Samuel Beckett.’ But it all seemed too familiar to him now – the metallic grey of his hair, the weathered Cape Cod skin – and the deep lines from temple to jaw and each one with a story of a different woman and a different kind of song.

When Matilda wrote her column she called out to him for spellings and definitions. Whatever question she had he could always explain and then add new words. As he buttoned his
overcoat in the hallway he answered her and she made light tapping sounds on her laptop in response. Glassman had the gift of vocabulary. He loved words and gathered them around him – he kept some, used some, loaned some, explained some. He had a word for everything. He had words that could fix a person and a place. His apartment was full of books, read and underlined. And in his bedroom, he had begun typing words on his old Remington typewriter again. Old-fashioned expressions and feelings to remind him of something he once had. ‘Ardour’, ‘lustful’, ‘woo’ and then in his small neat letters a word that he would stare at and could no longer draw meaning from – ‘love’.

As she worked he went to see his own version of New York again and quietly visited each favourite place. But when he stood at the Stock Exchange he felt nothing. He was unmoved at the foot of the Empire State. He became bored at Writers’ Row in Central Park. He fell asleep during his favourite Broadway play. He even took a cab to Lugar’s in Brooklyn and ordered, something forbidden in his diet, fried onions and a red rare T-bone steak.

But in the early evening of the cold winter day he saw it, and he asked the cab driver to stop and he got out in the middle of the biting wind and the honks of commuter traffic on Brooklyn Bridge. He saw the Statue of Liberty and the World Trade Center and as if he had never seen them before, he caught his breath and marvelled at how she pointed upwards and how there were two other man-made giants to care for her – and Glassman felt something at last. At home he lay on his bed and took his medication and when Matilda went out for a run, he typed in small black letters, one word – hope.

He did not believe in God any more. But he believed in the power of the universe and the stars and the cosmos. So that
night, because he wanted something very badly, he typed it on a piece of paper and went up on to the terrace and sent his wishes out into the night sky.

‘I want my apartment to be empty again.’

‘I want to make something that no one else has ever made.’

And finally, without a flicker of emotion, just his blinking eyes and his beating heart, Glassman wrote his thoughts; in pure logic because it was all he had.

‘I want to feel something more than hope.’

And he stood looking out towards Ellis Island and watched as his wishes flew away.

When Matilda came home she called out to him from her bath, would he like sushi, or Chinese, or broccoli tempura? She had a knack of keeping her voice light and easy when things were going wrong. She used everyday things like the cable bill and the dry-cleaning and sushi to keep their problems at bay. Glassman hated broccoli and Matilda knew that. Now he wondered why these things were important. Sushi or Chinese or carrots or broccoli. Will anyone ever say that about him when he dies? ‘Here lies dear Glassman. He hated broccoli and he preferred sushi any night to Chinese, unless it was from Mr Chow’s.’ The small details that made one person different from another.

She had already set the table in the kitchen and there were three yellow candles and a box of matches waiting on the windowsill. Somewhere outside the Manhattan skyline flickered, and Liberty stood frozen in New York Harbor and he wondered for a moment if she could feel the cold. ‘God bless America,’ he thought, ‘on a night like this she could catch her death.’ The bathroom door was open and he knew that in
a little while Matilda would step out, steam lifting from her arms and legs, just hoping that he would see her there. Instead he noticed that she had left the polka dot napkins out with the chopsticks.

‘Chinese,’ he called. And he could hear the relief in her voice, just because he had answered her at all. Through the open door he watched as she dried herself. He was familiar with this aspect of women and how they needed to display themselves. The power they had and yet how his illness had rendered him and her, powerless. She leaned over and her towel fell so he could see, and in his mind they were labelled and marked down, the curve of her back, still wet, her ass, her thighs and her calves. Heavy oval breasts. Underarm hair. Low round buttocks. White transparent skin – and her best feature, her winning asset, the one that had won him at the start, her old-fashioned lips, beautiful, full, yes, and always red.

In every movement now she called out to him. She cried out in silence for him to touch her. And all the time, the air was cloudy with the small decisions of their short life together – the angle of the couch which they had agreed on, her books and his, the clock and the glass of water on the bedside table – the air was clouded with her hopes and fears and dreams and in her every movement now, especially the long stretch of her neck, which she knew he had loved, she called and called to him and Glassman in logic could decide to hear or not.

He walked the landing, past the ceramic plates from Denmark which she had bought and arranged, and past her blue coat and her blue scarf and her keys and the Persian rug over the dark wood. With each footstep he prayed for him and for her. He did not want to break her or break her heart.
She turned and she was smiling before she turned and he pulled her into his arms and kissed her neck in behind her ear. And when she turned towards him he could feel how her smile had changed her flow of skin and how she was breathing and her scent and aura said joy and all because he had noticed her after all.

She did not know that Glassman was only trying because his physician had told him he should. He had told him that the medication would affect him. That things would change, and now three months later Glassman did not know which part of his own mind to believe. So he walked the landing to Matilda and she offered herself up and he was always astonished by this. How big the crime and the hurt from the man and yet how quickly women could fold – and how softly – to forgive and forget and just give themselves. He bit her neck with his lips and she pretended to hurt. He kissed her breasts and left a mark. He took her hand and led her into his bedroom and opened her up and tried to find the way to her and prayed he would not forget. Glassman was a good lover. He knew where to put his fingerpads and his kisses and even his thoughts.

He told himself to get real now and to try to treasure her, and yet his spirit seemed to be somewhere else – and how she tried, God bless her, kissing him, taking him in her mouth, holding him, needing him, loving him and all the time –

‘God bless her again,’ he thought, ‘it must be like fucking a mannequin.’

Outside New York lived and around the city in studios with foldout beds, and under low hanging shades, and with a whore, freezing against a railing, other New Yorkers found their own version of New York Love. Afterwards she curled her body around him and made a neat line of kisses along his spine.
From behind he looked like an old man and he knew this and he also knew how much she loved him then. And they slept, her feeling safe and almost loved and Glassman thinking about the bruise that he had made on her breast. In the morning it might show in yellow and green and faint brown and how they would both be glad, somehow, that he had left a mark. And when Matilda slept he got up and wrote more words – ‘hollow’, ‘warmth’ and ‘soul’.

Later they ate Chinese that was not from Mr Chow’s but he had decided to make this Matilda’s night and she wore their love now like a ratty bathrobe. For now he had made her happy and she was flushed with it, and then – as she offered him some broccoli on a chopstick – he finally decided, in that New York minute, that he needed to simply walk away. He would take her to his friend’s wedding in early February and after that, he would end it. But that night she glowed and her cheeks were flushed and he could see how beautiful she was and he searched for a feeling, for Glassman knew he had a heart somewhere but it was empty now and not even sad for the hurt he was going to cause.

On Friday Matilda’s column was about Starbucks. He read it at the open fire on his taupe couch and that evening she came over again and in his mind he knew she had not been asked.

She sat on the rug and leaned against his legs and he wondered at how she could not feel his indifference flooding out from his every pore. She had written about Ray Oldenburg’s theory about the third place and how everyone in New York needed the office, their home and the third place to go. She had decided that it was Starbucks and in between making mind-boggling decisions about lattes and chai and grande and
vendi, people had found a third place to be. Glassman only went to Starbucks when he needed the restroom and even then they were never clean enough.