Authors: Katia Lief
“Your
real
art. I’ve been looking forward to it.”
“I was touching up the piece I’m working on now, though I’m not sure I’ll show it to you.”
“OK.”
“Don’t make this so hard for me!” We both laughed.
We walked up the street and into his house. He pushed open one side of the double doors, standing back so I could walk in. When he touched my lower back as I passed him, I could feel the heat of his hand through my shirt.
He led me through a living/dining room with a couch piled with cushy pillows and a rough-hewn coffee table I guessed was an antique. A fireplace with an ornate marble mantle was fronted by a blackened screen and guarded by unpolished bronze pokers. Beside the fireplace was a basket of Barbies, pushed against the wall – and the moment I saw it I
pictured
his little girl, imagining her with burnt-red hair like his, crouched over the basket as she selected dolls for today’s play. As quickly as I saw her, she transformed into a brown-haired girl,
me
, bent over my own doll box when I was little … my father emerging from the kitchen with an apron smeared with brownie batter … my mother in the living room armchair, her head thrown back against a crocheted lace doily, eyes closed. “Then I’ll steal a nap,” she had announced when Daddy said he intended to bake. He loved to make my favorite treats, reveled in it almost. I could practically smell sweet chocolate wafting through Rich’s kitchen as we passed through a rear door and into a rectangular yard that was covered in autumn leaves. At the back of the yard was an old barn-like structure, two stories high.
“What’s your daughter’s name?”
“Clara.”
I smiled. Clara. How lucky to have a daughter. But then I was lucky, too, to have a son.
“Do they live nearby?”
They
being his former wife and Clara.
“Closer to you, actually.”
He opened the door and we stepped into his studio. It was not in fact two stories, but one high-ceilinged multi-windowed loft-like space filled with paintings. They were everywhere: hanging off walls, high and low, and from rafters twenty-five feet up.
They
leaned against surfaces. One was covered with a dirty drop cloth – presumably his newest, the one he wasn’t sure he wanted to show me. His canvases were mostly large and abstract, dense with color and energy. I loved them without knowing why. Painting was something I didn’t understand but responded to (or didn’t) and these had the impact on my brain of miniature explosions of energy. Or flavor on the tongue. Or feelings in the heart. They were alive, is what they were.
“They’re beautiful,” I said.
“They’re full of rage.” He breathed deeply in, then fully out. The air was sour with fresh paint but he had to be used to it.
“Rage?”
“I did all these after Lucy left me.”
“Ah – she left you.”
“Yup. For another guy.”
“Who she lives with now?”
“They broke up, which I thought would make me feel better at the time, but it didn’t. And I don’t really want to see her unhappy; it’s bad for Clara. That was three years ago and we’re on an even keel now. We let Clara know that we’re still a family.”
“I actually tell Nat the same thing. That Hugo is still with us and we’ll always be a family.”
Rich’s eyes settled on me. “I understand.”
“Well.” An awkward pause.
“So now you’ve seen my work. How about that glass of wine?” He stepped close to me and touched my elbow, to lead me out I guessed, but it was all I could do not to put my hand on his arm and draw him closer. Everything about him came at me as
right
. Which had to be, somehow,
wrong
. Didn’t it?
“Actually, I’m starving.” Staying here felt too tempting – dangerous. “Want to go straight out to eat?”
“Whatever you say. Let me change first.”
I waited in his living room, looking at family photos on his mantle, while he went to a back bedroom to put on clean clothes. He rented the ground floor, which had two bedrooms, one very small which was Clara’s on her alternate weekends with him.
Lucy and Clara looked alike, I saw: both trim and dark, Mediterranean. Both had long shiny hair parted in the middle and tucked behind their ears, only the mother wore hoop earrings and Clara, of course, did not. She was five now, which made her two when they split up. I wondered if it was better for a child of a broken family to have no memories of the time their parents were together, when the family was technically intact. Or was it better to have a conscious recollection of that time, if only as proof that it was somehow possible that these two had ever
loved
each other? These pictures would supply Clara’s memory: frozen moments she couldn’t actually recall. Nat’s mind on the other hand was filled with an endless loop in surround sound of a father he had known very well. Which was better? I almost envied Rich his daughter’s lack of consciousness when it came to the Family Pain. It distressed me to know that Nat’s awareness of his father’s loss would always haunt him and would probably even become a leitmotif for his life.
We went to a local Thai restaurant, a pretty, dimly lit space decorated with oversized lanterns, tall stalks of bamboo and orange lilies crafted from delicate paper. Nat had always refused to eat here; he called it “prissy” but I knew he was afraid to try what he deemed exotic food simply because he’d never had it before.
It was Rich’s and my third dinner together and as usual there was a sense of furtiveness about it, as if we were grabbing time we shouldn’t have been allowed. Tonight was a little different, though, because neither of us had a child to return home to, no babysitter to relieve or in my case marginally independent adolescent to check in on. Nat wasn’t due home until tomorrow. Clara was with her mother for the entire weekend. This freedom began to feel like added pressure; I enjoyed this man too much. But was I ready? Would I ever be?
We kept the conversation light, typical early-date talk, touching up blank spots in the skeletal personal histories we’d already shared. I knew that Rich had grown up on a working ranch in Montana, had disappointed his father and thrilled his mother with his budding artistic talent, and devastated both of them when he moved east to study painting at Pratt Institute. And I knew that, ever since, he visited home twice a year, at Christmas and for a week in the summer. Now I learned that despite the distance that had grown and solidified between him and his childhood, he had found a way to keep a physical connection to it: on Wednesday afternoons and evenings, he worked as a horseback riding instructor at the Prospect Park stables. And it was no coincidence that he’d chosen to live in a former stable.
“Have you thought of moving back to Montana?” I asked.
“Not as long as Clara’s here.”
“Of course not.”
“Can I take you riding some time? The trails in Prospect Park can actually make you forget you’re in the city.”
“It would be my first time on a horse.”
A glint in his eye, he grinned and said, “Giddy up!”
I burst out laughing. I
liked
this man – too much.
After dinner I tried to say goodnight outside the
restaurant
on Smith Street but Rich insisted on walking me home, though it wasn’t really necessary. It was a Friday night and the neighborhood hummed with activity. At ten o’clock it was still early for some, though not for us. Rich’s day at school had begun at eight thirty and mine had gone full-speed since nine. We were both suppressing yawns as we turned the corner onto quiet, leafy Wyckoff Street – my block. Trees threw a gridwork of shadows over the middle of the street, which glowed with the ambient light that bathed the city at night, preventing it from ever being completely dark, except in the vestibules and alleyways you quickly learned to avoid. On these old brownstone blocks the menace was in the velvet darkness that soaked beneath stoop entries, like mine, with a deep shadow that fell off the stoop in a triangular slab.
We came to my house. I opened the half-gate, rusted iron squealing, and stepped into the blind spot.
Private entrance
, the real estate ad had read. Duplex, two bedrooms, one full bathroom, one half-bathroom, clean kitchen, high ceilings on parlor floor, private garden, private entrance. The ad had failed to note that the arrangement of rooms was in fact awkward, with the kitchen, living and dining areas downstairs where the ceiling was lowest and there was less light and the bedrooms upstairs in a carved-up parlor floor which would
have
been a pretty place for a living room. But that was Brooklyn. It was because this was an old hatchet-job renovation and not a swanky new one that I had been able to afford this place and this neighborhood without digging into the principal – Hugo’s life insurance policy – that was going to fund both Nat’s college education and supplement my retirement. Renting this duplex suited me perfectly at the moment. I had decided not to buy right away, that moving to New York was an experiment to bring us closer to my mother and try a new life on for size.
Rich stayed right behind me, not hanging back to say goodnight on the sidewalk as I’d hoped he would. Hoped, because I yearned to invite him in.
I turned around to face him, my back to the outer gate of my door. In the darkness his eyes glowed and his hair looked chestnut brown. He was staring at me, trying to get up the nerve to kiss me, at least I was pretty sure of that. His hand tilted forwards to touch my arm and I felt it again: heat. My whole body seemed to flush with it. I couldn’t help myself: I stepped forwards just slightly and lifted my face.
His lips were softer and thinner than Hugo’s, more pliable. His tongue more elastic. Different. This close, I breathed deeply of that unidentifiable scent I liked so much. One of his hands came around my back and gently pulled me closer. I didn’t resist, nor
did
I help, but allowed the pressure of his hand to sink into the curve of my lower back. Our tongues and our lips and our mouths joined deeply, lazily.
Dessert
, I thought. He was delicious. And I was a woman. And Hugo had been gone so long. Wasn’t I allowed this?
But he was Nat’s teacher. I pushed him away. “I think we should say goodnight.”
His smile was forced but conciliatory, accepting. He didn’t like it and neither did I but saying goodnight was what we were going to do.
“I’ll watch you go in,” he said, almost whispered, “and then I’ll go.”
We both breathed heavily. It was almost comical, embarrassing. I turned to put my key in the lock and that was when I noticed that a plastic bag was hanging off the knob.
It crinkled loudly when I removed it, saying, “What’s this?” The first thing I thought of was Abe Starkman – had he been here? But he would never leave sensitive documents out in the open. And then I thought of Joe. Whatever was inside the bag was heavy and flat, like a book. I stepped out of the shadow and into the dim light. It was a gift, wrapped in green and gold striped paper.
“Don’t tell me it’s your birthday,” Rich said.
“My birthday’s in April.”
Taped to the front of the gift was a card, no
envelope
. A little brown bear smiled cutely and held a bouquet of red and blue flowers. It looked like a greeting card for a child. Maybe, hopefully, someone had mistakenly left it on my door, but I doubted it. I lifted the top of the card, which read: “Roses are red, violets are blue. When am I not, thinking of you?” Inside, a childlike hand had written in black pen: “For Darcy, Love Always, Joe.”
My expression must have altered because Rich asked, “What’s wrong?”
I looked into his face, warm and concerned, and asked him to please come inside.
My house was a mess but so what? Hugo had been the neat one and I had stopped caring about clutter around the time Nat was born. I paid a woman to come in weekly to deep clean; she also took it upon herself to stack up our messes. We had only been in this apartment for two months so it wasn’t so bad. Now, with Rich walking in behind me, I gave the same explanation I offered everyone: “I’d say ‘excuse the mess’ but it’s actually in pretty good shape for us.”
He smiled. “Looks lived in.”
“It is.”
We settled on the living room couch, blue velvet, in front of which a glass coffee table was cluttered with books and magazines. A half-filled glass of water, Nat’s from last night, tilted atop a paperback.
It
was a miracle Mitzi and Ahab hadn’t knocked it over, the way they darted around.
“So who left you a present?” Rich asked.
“This guy at work,
Joe Coffin
.” I rolled my eyes. “He used to live on the Vineyard too and he’s decided to take a shine to me. He’s about twenty-two years old. It’s ridiculous.”
“Wow.”
“Right.”
“I guess he’s persistent if he’s leaving you gifts.”
“Oh, persistent isn’t the word. On Monday my editor and I are putting in an official complaint.”
“So this guy knows where you live.”
When he said that, a bolt of queasiness shot through my stomach. I ignored it. “You can find almost anyone’s address on the Internet,” I said, “and don’t forget we work at the same place. He’s called me here; I already figured he knew the address.”
“He’s called you?”
“Sixty times. I counted.”
“Darcy, have you considered talking to the police? This doesn’t sound good.”
“It seems premature.”
“Doesn’t sound like it to me. It sounds like he’s stalking you.”
That was the second time that word had come up – stalking – only the first time I had said it to Sara in a fit of part-humor part-anxiety and this time it was
being
reflected back to me by an innocent bystander, so to speak. Each time I heard the term it raised the ante on my worry about how far Joe intended to go with all this. Every day this week I had promised myself he would back off
any minute now
. Then it was
any day now
. Soon,
any week now
. Was Rich right? Was this more serious than I allowed myself to think? It’s just that – a stalker? Why assume the worst when patience (and a word from the director of Human Resources) might just do the trick?