Still, the contract was needed, and so she went to the office just before ten on a scorching morning, dressed in a beige linen skirt and an eggshell-colored silk blouse. She found Constantine at his. desk, looking so hectic and overworked, so much like the living embodiment of those conditions, she suspected that upon hearing the outer door opening he had picked up the phone, lit all three hold buttons, and begun scribbling nonsense words on a yellow legal tablet. She thought it might be a public-relations gesture, a protocol designed to seduce creditors and investors alike, and as soon as he saw her he'd relax, hang up the telephone, sit back in the big wheeled chair that produced a harsh, serrated sound whenever it moved over the clear plastic panel Constantine kept on the floor behind his desk to protect the carpet.
But he kept talking. “—I said a low estimate, if that's your idea of a fucking low estimate, Jimmy, I don't know what to tell you—” He waved at her, a chopping gesture at once welcoming and dismissive. He pointed to the right-hand corner of his desk, where she laid the contract. He mouthed the words Thank you, and continued talking into the receiver.
“—I want you to get a good price, is what I want, you want me to tell you what a good price is, I'll tell you, a good price is—”
Mary turned to go, anxious to return to the relative hush and clean, cushioned surfaces of her own life. She came flat up against Nick Kazanzakis's secretary, what was her name, the fat girl she'd met at the Christmas party two years ago.
“Oh,” Mary said, and smiled. “Hello. How are you?”
What was her name? Martha, Margaret. No, something foreign.
The girl stood staring at Mary with an expression so empty, so dumbly astonished, that Mary suspected she must be feebleminded. She had something of that look, fat and small-headed, with blondish no-color hair pulled tightly into a little blond fist at the top of her head. Mary's first impulse was to speak slowly and distinctly, as she would to a child. She might have said something like, I'm Mrs. Stassos, what a pretty dress you're wearing.
“Hello,” the girl said, in a voice harsh and accented but not in any way simple. Mary saw her face fill with expression just as a colored glass fills with clear liquid. Under her makeup the girl's face became petulant and triumphant, as if she alone knew of some past transgression of Mary's, an ancient sin Mary had thought was safely buried away.
“We've met, I think,” Mary said. “I'm Mary Stassos.”
“Magda Bolchik,” the girl said. She continued looking at Mary with a victorious hatred so naked it seemed to emanate from her in waves, like heat rising from asphalt.
“The Christmas party, I believe,” Mary said. “I'm on my way out, I just dropped off some papers.”
“Yeah, the Christmas party,” Magda said.
“Yes. Well, it was nice seeing you again.” Mary stepped around the girl, went to the door, and she might have left with no more than a puzzled feeling, a sour sense of unrest, but she turned and saw it. She saw that the girl had stepped quickly around Constantine's desk and that she stood there with her hand on his shoulder. She saw Constantine brush the girl's hand away and she saw him look up at her, at Mary, with panic in his eyes, even as he continued talking about the proper price to pay for lathwork.
This was the girl.
Mary lost herself; she lost her own inner convictions of cause and effect. She'd known Constantine was having an affair but the girl she'd imagined was so different, so superior to this one, that the very laws of physics seemed to have been violated. If this plain, overweight girl could be sleeping with her husband—could be her rival—then the papers on Constantine's desk could shriek, rise up like birds, and fly around the room. The coffeepot could explode, the walls could crack. Mary stood through the moment as Magda stared at her with the furious satisfaction of a gorging bear and Constantine looked up pleadingly, guiltily, while he argued into the telephone.
Mary did the only thing she knew how to do. She said, in a pleasant voice, “See you later.” She touched her earring. And she left.
She found that she couldn't be in her house, even after she'd taken a pill. The rooms felt infected, filled with a silence so dreadful it seemed weighted, as if a lethal, invisible gas were seeping in through the walls. It occurred to Mary that her breathing trouble might come from something in the house, some vapor floating up through the earth that was poisoning only her because she spent more time there than anyone else. Of course, that was ridiculous. She'd had these fits of breathlessness most of her adult life. Still, she couldn't be in the house right now. She couldn't breathe there. She couldn't stay at home. She couldn't go shopping. She couldn't visit a friend because all her friendships were formal ones, related either to Constantine's business or to her own charities. The women she liked best, the calm well-bred women who chaired the committees and gave the luncheons, had never offered her more than the outer edge of their affectionate attention. While she'd subsisted on that for years she could not have it now; she couldn't possibly pay an unannounced call on someone who would cordially tolerate her presence. Assuming she was received, accepted into a living room and given a glass of iced tea, she was too afraid she'd break down. And if she broke down in front of any of those cool assured women she'd be little more than an immigrant, full of an immigrant's hysterical, bottomless trouble—gesticulating, babbling, keening at the white ship as it sailed away. She knew they'd treat her kindly but she knew as well that they'd think her pathetic, and she knew she could not survive that.
She drove, instead, to New York and took a room at the Plaza.
The Plaza calmed her a little. In the ornate golden hush of its lobby she felt, once again, like a woman who could handle herself, a woman of power and means who could do whatever must be done. She let herself be shown to her room, murmured something to the bellhop about her bags arriving later, and when she was alone she turned the air-conditioning on as high as it would go and lay down on the double bed. Her room faced south, which was not as she'd wanted it, but there'd been none available overlooking the park, at least none available to a woman arriving alone, without luggage or a reservation. Outside the window, New York lay bleached and roiling in the heat. It didn't stop, not even on a day like this. Taxis still bellowed down Fifth Avenue, and across the street, in Bergdorf' s, saleswomen still moved with swift, icy assurance among the racks. Heat didn't stall this striving, this wide-ranging quest for perfection, the slipper or the jewel or the glass of wine; the golden egg you could hold in your hand and say, Yes, here it is, this, right now. New York was the opposite of Garden City. There time altered itself to match your mood and there, if you let yourself fall into torpor or futility, the world seemed to share your lapse of faith, which it demonstrated by showing you empty rooms full of furniture, the bird feeder standing unused as old Mrs. Ramble across the street came out in her coat and scarf to remove a scrap of paper that had blown onto her lawn. New York carried on, it didn't mind about you, and for nearly ten minutes Mary was able to lie on the bed in a state of relative peace, breathing, surrounded by muffled street noise and the immaculate gelid luxury of her room, the roses on the wallpaper, the basket of expensive toiletries she knew would be waiting beside the sink.
Then she thought of the girl again, with her sated expression and the row of pearlized plastic buttons shining on her synthetic, apricot-colored blouse. Touching her husband's shoulder. The girl Constantine had chosen.
Mary sat up and dialed the telephone. She wanted, suddenly, to talk to her children. Not, certainly, to tell them what their father was doing, but simply to hear their voices, to receive whatever affection they had to offer her, to be reminded that their lives had been set in motion and would continue. Billy was the one she most wanted to talk to but Billy was off somewhere, traveling, following a mysterious itinerary, having refused all courtesies beyond the promise to drop a postcard in the mail every few weeks. In a year she'd gotten three cards, one from San Francisco, one from Gallup, New Mexico, and one from British Columbia. She tried Susan in Conn
ecticut but she got no answer, and as the phone rang she could see the empty rooms of her daughter's house, the prim Early American antiques and the sedate, formal wallpaper. She felt a loneliness more piercing than any she could remember. Finally she dialed Zoe's number. Zoe lived less than a mile from where Mary lay on her rented bed, but she seemed, somehow, the most remote of the children; the one she was calling from across the greatest distance.
The phone rang three times before someone picked it up and said, “Hello?” It was a woman's voice, husky and dark.
“Oh, sorry,” Mary said. “I've got the wrong number.”
“No, no, this is Zoe Stassos's number, she just stepped out for a minute. I'm the maid.”
“I beg your pardon.”
“Little joke. I'm a friend of Zoe's, she'll be back in about two shakes. Can I give her a message?”
“Well. This is her mother.”
“Oh. Mrs. Stassos. I've heard so much about you.”
“Really?”
“Mm-hm. I'm a friend of Zoe's, I've actually been dying to meet you. My name's Cassandra.”
“Oh, yes,” Mary said. “Zoe's mentioned your name.”
Zoe had not, in fact, as far as Mary could recall, said anything about anyone named Cassandra. Still, one offered these little gestures. The woman sounded older than Zoe, which seemed strange, but she had a warm, refined voice. Better than that homely, gallumphing child Tramcas, and the other oddities Zoe had brought home over the years.
“Shall I have her telephone when she gets in?” Cassandra asked.
“No, that's all right. Just tell her I called to say hello.”
“Certainly.”
“I hope she's managing in the heat,” Mary said. “I hope you both are.”
She knew it was time to get off the phone but she wasn't eager to return to the silence of the hotel room, the uncertainty of this hour and the next. She'd talk for a minute or two, just ordinary idle things with a pleasant stranger.
“Oh, I don't mind the heat,” Cassandra said. “I learned the secret years ago. You have to give yourself over to it. When it gets like this I put on not one lick of makeup, and I don't care who I scare on the street.”
Finally, Mary thought, here was someone who spoke in a language she could understand. Here was someone who didn't scoff at nylons or makeup, who didn't insist on going around bare-legged, wild-haired, dressed in scraps strangers had thrown away.
“I only wear silk and linen in the summer,” Mary said.
“Perfect,” the woman answered.
“And can I tell you a little secret of mine?”
“Please do.”
“I put my bra and panties in the freezer overnight.”
“Oh, I'm going to try that.”
“It's wonderful,” Mary said. “And if you get enough sun on your legs you can sneak by without nylons.”
“I love the sun. But you know, I freckle terribly.”
“You want to watch that if you're fair.”
“I'm the exact color of an egg.” Cassandra sighed. “Scandinavian stock, all my forebears just huddled around the banks of the fjords and kept marrying the palest girl in the village.”
“Oh, but very white skin can be lovely. What kind of lipstick do you use, do you tend toward frosted pinks?”
“You know, if I get too frosty and pink I can look like somebody who just washed up on the beach after a couple of weeks. I know this may shock you, but I've started dabbling in red. I mean red red. Scarlet.”
“Really?” Mary said.
“You couldn't wear it just anywhere. But you know, here in New York I sometimes find it's best to shock them before they can shock you.”
“I suppose. Hey, I shouldn't be taking up your time like this.”
“Not at all. I've enjoyed this little talk immensely.”
“Me too. I'm sure I'll be speaking to you again.”
“I hope so. I'll tell Zoe you called. Bye bye.”
“Bye.”
Mary hung up the phone and lay down on the bed again. As she expected, the silence and uncertainty were waiting for her. But she felt, in some small measure, comforted. There was someone in the world she could talk to about simple unimportant things, a charming woman who spoke without grandeur or condescension. Mary looked up at the snowy plaster of the ceiling, listened to the jostle of traffic. The next time she talked to Zoe she'd chide her, gently, for keeping this lovely new friend of hers a secret.
1979/ The songs said love was everywhere. Under Will's window a man in a hunter's cap and crusty plaid pants spent half the night crying out, “Hey, do you love me, do you love me, hey, motherfucker, I'm talking to you.” You could call the police but he just came back again—this was his territory. Will played records to drown him out, rock singers and jazz trombonists who were all asking, with music, the same insistent question. Do you love me, do you love me, hey, fucker, do you love me? Will couldn't seem to fall in love with anything so complex and elusive as another person. He didn't worry. He didn't worry much. He shared a big cold apartment with a woman friend and her five-year-old daughter. He had a tight little orbit of friends. Romance happened elsewhere, to other people. It could come to him in its own time. He was twenty-six, and didn't dislike himself too much. Only a little, only at moments. Sometimes, when no one could hear, after a day of classes he sat at his desk and let himself emit a series of sharp little moans over all the meetings, the shifty victories with students, the potential for humiliation that seemed to grow endlessly from the seam connecting his job as the students' master to his more complex, and perhaps truer, role as their servant. Will thought sometimes of the night years ago when he'd looked into his father's angry face, his steady feeding, and said, 'I'm going to be a teacher.' He'd said it merely for effect, to confound his father's expectations. But afterward he'd kept thinking of his father's outraged response: 'You got to go to Harvard to teach pickaninnies?' The speck of sauce on his father's chin, the soft dead blue of the dining-room wallpaper. As Will had traveled around the country, picking up jobs as a waiter or an errand boy—as he'd prepared himself to leave his childhood and begin a life of work—he'd found his old ideas about architecture slipping away and he'd begun to know, gradually, with a kind of heady, satisfying helplessness, that a teacher was what he would in fact become.
So he taught fifth grade on Beacon Hill, for sixteen thousand dollars a year. He had his friends, his carefully inexpensive dinners out, his French or Italian movies. He walked, read, bought clothes in discount stores. He looked for love.
He met the man on an ordinary night. He met him in a downtown bar where old men offered drinks and porcelain smiles, the muscular hunger of fathers, to young cowboys just off the bus. Will went there for the strangeness of it. He wasn't expecting anything. He'd drink a beer or two, talk to the old guys. He liked them; he thought of them as ghostly heroes gone to the shadow realm. They came from another era. They'd spent their best years crouched in public toilets, bravely searching the silences of city parks. Now they were like refugees arrived in a land of plenty. If their smiles were ravenous, if they bird-dogged some kid just in from Worcester or Fall River, Will could forgive them. They were his uncles, they'd been misused. They had stories you wouldn't believe.
The man stood near the door, drinking a beer. He stood in the jukebox light as if it were an ordinary thing to be so large and fair and handsome, to have a firm heavy jaw and shoulders broad as the wings of a plow. He was too much for this place. Even the uncles were afraid of him. The uncles could manage a nervous boy from a dying textile town. They could speak with wry insistence into the face of some skinny kid's jerry-rigged self-assurance, because they knew what was in his heart. They knew fear better than anybody. They'd lived fear, they'd survived it. They'd married without love, they'd been beaten by criminals and by the police, spit their own teeth out on the pavement. Now they sat boldly on bar-stools, neat and perfumed, prosperous, talking in gentle voices to the more privileged manifestations of themsel
ves from twenty or thirty years ago. They had the serene disregard of child emperors grown old. But this man was too perfect. No one went near him.
Will leaned on the bar, talking to a man named Rockwell. Rockwell was a ringer for Everett Dirksen. He wore a hothouse tulip in his lapel. “Must be some mistake,” he said, sipping at his daiquiri and nodding toward the man. “His feathers must've caught fire and he plopped down on Washington Street. It happens sometimes, you know. They fly too close to the sun.”
Will said, “I don't think he's real. I think he's a hallucination we're all having. It's mass hysteria, you get enough gay men together in one place and sometimes their dreams sort of, like, coalesce.”
“Oh, he's no dream, Willy. He's real, he's on the prowl. Trust me, he's out tonight looking for something.”
“Love,” Will said. “Love love love love love. What's anybody looking for?”
“Lots of things,” Rockwell said. He sang, “Most gentlemen don't like love, they just like to kick it around. Cole Porter, the sage of our century.”
“I don't know,” Will said. “We're afraid of love, don't you think? We say we want what we can get. If we can get laid, we say that's all we want. But really, don't you think everybody just wants to fall in love?”