“Got it. Shall I bring champagne?”
“Yes, do. See you at six.”
She spent an hour in the garden, gathered peach and red and salmon tea-roses for vases in the house, and fantasized; imagined dialogue opening lines, thought about how sad it was that a man who was intellectually her match had finally come along—and he smoked. Maybe, if they fell in love, he would quit.
She spent the rest of the afternoon pretending not to care and getting the house just right. She put on the Beatles white album and cleaned the downstairs, straightened the pile of recent New Yorkers, rehashed the campfire scene over and over, dusted and polished the fine antique furniture, arranged the flowers in Chinese vases.
So, tell me more about your book. Oh, by the way, did you ever read The Ginger Man? ... One time, on acid, I thought ... When I was about six years old ... Rae and I were at the symphony last year ... Something or other is—oh, I don’t know, as rare as an Englishman with good teeth ... It’s funny how we become more and more like ourselves as we get older.... Yeah, like the old joke about kreplach.
She took a long hot bath, with classical music on the radio. After drying herself off, she stepped into a floral kimono, painted her toenails, nursed a beer, modeled clothes for an hour, and finally settled on the bedsore pants and the green silk blouse and the worn Frye boots. Then she put on mascara, dabbed Chanel behind her ears, and changed the sheets on her bed.
When the phone rang at five thirty, her heart sank and she walked angrily to the phone. James was going to cancel. Good.
“Hello,” she-said, rather coldly.
“Hi, Mama.”
“Oh, hi, doll!”
“Sharon and I are doing a play, so can I spend the night?” Then Rosie’s voice changed to an urgent whisper. “Say no!”
“What?”
“Ohhh-kay. I’ll come right home.”
Elizabeth laughed when she hung up. Rosie would take up whatever slack there might be. She sat down by the phone, daydreaming, waiting, thirty-eight going on fourteen. When the phone rang again, she glared at it, let it ring eight times so that James would know what an inconvenience it was for her to answer the phone, busy professional that she was.
“Yes?”
“Hi, Mama. Please change your mind.”
Elizabeth laughed again. “Well. All right, then.”
“Oh, great, thanks a lot. We get to go to McDonald’s for dinner.”
“Wow!”
“See ya tomorrow.”
Elizabeth stopped off briefly at the mirror in the hallway before heading for the kitchen. She opened an ale and created a still life on the kitchen table—a glass jar of crushed red peppers, tea roses in a Mateus bottle, a tiny bright enameled box, and the dark wood, grandfatherly pepper mill.
In the living room, she put Duets with the Spanish Guitar on the stereo and looked admiringly at the coffee table, which her mother’s mother had bought in Cairo and on which sat a bowl of fresh fruit—apples, oranges, bananas, kiwi—a blue bowl with gardenias floating on water, Saul Steinberg, beeswax candles. The room smelled great, of oranges and beeswax, and the early evening sunshine made the dark woods and rich cloths golden, elegant, alive. Everything was just perfect, and then the phone rang again.
“God!” It couldn’t be Rosie again. “Hello?”
“Hello, Elizabeth. I’m afraid I have some very bad news.” It was Mrs. Haas. Her voice was grim, but Elizabeth detected some pleasure mixed in.
She had, it seemed, offered Rosie and Sharon each a Fig Newton in town, and Rosie had reached out to take hers. Mrs. Haas gave Rosie a lecture on bad manners and had asked her what the magic word was. And Rosie had answered, “Fuck!”
Elizabeth had to pinch her nostrils shut to keep from laughing.
“The f-word,” Mrs. Haas said.
“I’ll talk to her about it. Thank you for calling”—you foolish nosy bitch.
“Goodbye.”
It was six o’clock. She was glad she’d worn perfume: she could smell that she was there. She had butterflies in her stomach; her heart was pounding: jungle drums. Be brave, be kind. A few minutes later the doorbell rang, and she waited a minute and made him ring it again.
CHAPTER 11
“Hi, Elizabeth,” he drawled shyly, extending his right hand, which she shook. In his left was a bottle of champagne, which he thrust at her. His eyes were as green as Rosie’s were blue, and his shirt was yellow—bright yellow polyester.
“Come on in,” she said. His face was full of anxious good cheer, and she looked down at the overgrowth of brown feathery hair which followed him like a wake. Yellow polyester, Rae; I rest my case.
“Great place,” he said, standing close to her. She resisted the temptation to step backward and cross her arms. He smelled of Ivory soap and cigarettes, he smelled like a man, and her perfume protected her like a force field. “You have the best roses in the neighborhood,” he said, as she led the way to the living room, to show off its beauty, its woods and bookcases and rich dark colors. He admired it all without speaking, nodded his head, impressed, and shook it in wonder, smiling.
“It’s beautiful.”
“Thank you. Follow me to the kitchen, if you like. I have some glasses in the freezer.”
He jammed his hands into his khaki pants and sighed deeply. Elizabeth had the impression of being followed by a huge puppy who might at any moment bound or flop into her legs. He leaned against the red wall of the kitchen, standing somewhat pigeontoed, managing to look as conceited as he did self-conscious.
“Here.” She handed him the bottle, picked up the two frosty tulip glasses, and walked past him toward the living room. They sat several feet apart on the blue velvet couch, and she looked at him politely while setting the glasses down in front of him on the table, next to Saul Steinberg.
He removed the foil. His hands were beautiful, long and broad, white moons on his big square fingernails. “Laurinda Almeida?” She nodded, pleased. “Martin Ruderman, on the flute.” Now he was showing off. She nodded. Now he’s going to pretend to have trouble remembering the soprano’s name, and would say, questioningly, as if without confidence, perhaps with one eye in a squint, “Sally Terry?” And he did.
He untwisted and removed the wire hood and worked the cork out slowly. Elizabeth was in a state of suspended animation, waiting for a glass of champagne, waiting in fact for the first glass to be gone and the second one poured.
The cork exploded out of the bottle and James deftly poured the first rush of bubbles into a glass, filled the other, then filled the first to the top. He gave one to her with a gentlemanly flourish, picked up his own and held it up to her.
God, you have beautiful eyes, she thought. “Cheers.”
“Cheers. Good to see you again.”
They poured down long sips. It was airy, pale, and gold.
“Are you and Lank friends again?”
“Oh, yeah. I don’t hold a grudge.”
“‘Published’?” she asked him, smiling.
He laughed. “Rude! Took my breath away for a second. But I’m glad you said it. I shoehorned it into the book.”
“Yeah?” He nodded. “How’s the book going?”
“Oh, all right. Up and down. No one’s offered me an advance yet, but I’m plugging away. So far, the best line in it is, ‘Published?’”
“Good. So, you said, it’s a book about you?” He nodded. “What happens in it?”
“I grow up. I go from thinking I’m a uniquely and almost unbelievably fucked-up person to thinking I’m a mostly benevolent crackpot.”
“It sounds good.”
“Thanks. What did you say you do again?”
“I haven’t quite figured out what I want to be yet. I’ve worked in the publishing world, but it bored me. I’ve thought about teaching, but I’m not sure I like children in large groups. I’d like to be paid to read and discuss literature, but I get so few job offers in any given week.” He smiled. “I spend a lot of the time in the garden,
a lot of time with Rosie, a lot of time at the movies.”
“Where is she?”
“At her best friend’s, overnight.” Elizabeth told him the best Rosie stories she could think of today’s encounter with Mrs. Haas, the falling star she’d taken to Show-and-Tell, the scene at Macy’s when she’d shouted, “Why can’t you just be happy that you don’t have bloody stumps for legs?”
Elizabeth got up, walked to the fireplace, and lit the newspapers under the kindling.
“When did your husband die?” he asked.
“Four years ago.”
“How?”
“In a car accident.” She returned to the couch, lowered her long lanky frame onto a cushion. “His car hit a tree, and he was thrown into a pool of water.”
“So he died by drowning?” She nodded. “Jesus.”
“Well, these things happen.” Why did she always say this? To convince herself that the freak accident really had happened? He looked at her with great compassion—there, that was it. She didn’t want to appear to feel sorry for herself. No big deal, these things happen.
“Were you totally in love?”
Were we totally in love? Elizabeth looked at the expanding l fames, heard them crackle, noticed that the record had ended.
“We were pals.”
He had never been married. He had lived with women twice, but hadn’t, when push came to shove, wanted to marry either of them. So they had left him. He shrugged. “You know, like the poet said, when one person’s whistling ‘Ol’ Man River,’ and the other is whistling ‘Trees,’ something’s got to give.”
She looked at him, captivated. His teeth were yellow from smoking, and one of the front ones were chipped. “Where are your parents?”
“Dead,” said James.
“Mine too.”
“Oh, yeah? My dad died last year.”
“Were you and he close?”
“No. Not really. He was the most powerful man in my life though, wanted me to be a businessman like he was, and I was, you know, not into it. I was relieved when he died. It was like, ‘Ding, dong the witch is dead...’ I felt I could breathe for the first time in my life.”
“What was his name?”
“James. I was always Jimmy. Now I get to be James, and we call him Dead Atterbury.”
“Who’s we?” she asked, smiling.
“Me.”
Dead Atterbury. She had to remember to tell Rae.
“We’ve just about finished the bottle.”
“And we haven’t even gotten to your parents yet.”
“I don’t want to,” she said, and got up. She turned over the record and put a log on the fire. “There’s a bottle of burgundy in the kitchen. Would you like some?”
“Are you going to have some?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay, sure, thanks. Can I take you out to dinner?”
“I don’t know. Thank you, but—”
“How about if we sent out for a pizza?”
She shrugged. Might as well.
“Do you mind if I smoke?” She shook her head, went to the kitchen to get him an ashtray. He was on the phone in the hall when she returned. “Will you bring us a pizza?” he asked. “Yes, sure,” He stared down at his feet, at tennis shoes. “What’s your name?” he asked.
“That’s a shitty name,” he said jovially. Elizabeth laughed. There was a long, long silence, during which he smiled at her without opening his mouth, and she smiled back.
“Ah, there you are. Okay. We’d like a medium thin-crust pizza with, uh—” he looked at Elizabeth—“sausage and mushrooms?” he asked her and she nodded. “And green peppers?” She nodded again. “Ferguson. We are at Thirty-six Willow, off Cypress.”
We.
She opened the bottle of burgundy and poured it into their empty glasses, held it up to the red glow of the fire, and, given a spacious bravery by the champagne, languidly stretched her legs out onto the couch, with her boots draped off the side several inches from the cushion on which he sat. Sultry, elegant, dangerous, she felt like Cleopatra, knew by now that they would go to bed. There was that strong and elusive sense of recognition.
“Are you very ambitious?” she asked.
“I like the questions you ask.”
“Well, are you?”
“I want to write an important book. I want it to be a success.”
“Would you settle for a modest success? Or do you want to be irretrievably rich?”
He laughed and pulled a spiral notebook from his back pocket, frisked himself, found a pen in his front pocket and opened the notebook to a blank page. “Irretrievably rich,” he said, and jotted it down. It pleased her. “I guess, if I were to be perfectly honest, I’d say I want the moon. Wealth, fame, praise from a select few.”
“And then you’d be happy?”
“Who knows? I already am fairly happy. I’m sure if I reached that goal, I’d come up with a new crop of desires.”
They sipped at their wine, relaxed.
“Who will publish it, ideally? Knopf?”
“Definitely. Although much of it will have appeared in The New Yorker previous to publication—but wait, then I wouldn’t get an Updike review.”
“Sontag will do The New York Review?”
“Yes.”
“And will there be a David Levine caricature?”
“Yes, yes.” He rubbed his hands gleefully.
“And who will direct the movie?”
“Is Bunuel still alive?”
“I don’t remember.”
“Fellini, Bergman, and Truffaut will collaborate; during the course of our work together, we will become best friends. I will fly them, on silly whims, to Rio: the four of us will sit in my suite, jamming. And we will pack our noses from a mayonnaise jar of pharmaceutical cocaine.”
“And who will play you in the movie?”
“Clint Eastwood, I think. Or Dudley Moore.”
“Yeah?” He nodded. “Well, I don’t think that’s all too much to ask,” she said.
“You haven’t mentioned the Nobel Peace Prize yet.”
“What about, do you get to be God of All the World, too?”
“Yes, eventually. When I’ve become modest.”
They were laughing, it was fun. The color and irregularities of his teeth began to grow on her. She wanted to feel them against her thighs.
But when the pizza arrived, and they sat on the carpet in front of the fire, with woven placemats, linen napkins, fine silver and red ceramic plates, the glow of the fire on his face and in their glasses, she watched him eat with revulsion. He chewed as quickly as a starving rodent—or her mother. She remembered the sound of her mother eating bacon, the wet crunch. God. It was making her sick. She summoned her noblesse oblige, some-how made it through dinner, but knew for sure now that she could not fall in love with this man. Love is details.
He was so close to her blueprint of the great good man, a lot like Rae in essential ways, full of fire, full of humor, full of kindness, but she could not imagine surviving a breakfast, complete with hangover, while he did his starving-rodent routine with fried eggs.
After dinner, he took the dishes into the kitchen and then went through her records, determining that they had most of the same ones: she had more classical, and he had more recent rock-and-roll. “And no opera,” he said.
“I love it.”
“I gathered. It unnerves me. Where did you get all these old jazz collections?”
“From my father. After he died.”
“When was that?”
“A long, long time ago. In my early twenties.”
He browsed through the books next, withdrew Malraux’s Antimémoires, and thumbed through it absently for several minutes.
“Have you read that?” she asked.
“No. Have you?”
“Yes,” she lied.
He stood reading it, and finally put it back. “It’s an excellent book,” he said.
It’s an excellent book: how prete
ntious.
Sunny and warm so recently, now she felt panicked and picky, wasn’t sure if she wanted him to stay. But they smoked a joint of hers and listened to sonatas on the floor. They stretched out in front of the fire, a foot apart, and stared into the flames. He lit another cigarette, while she contemplated sex.
“It’s nice to just lie here,” he said.
“Yeah.”
“I ate too much. I’m getting a gut.”
“We really shouldn’t be moved.”
After a while he said, “When I was six or so, I had this friend named Denny Hoods, my best friend until I was thirteen. In kindergarten he used to lift me up to the water fountain. And one day—this is when we were six—we were at a swimming pool with his mother. She had just gotten out of the water, in a one-piece suit with a little skirt, and a pink swim cap covered with pink rubber petals. And Denny was talking to her while she dried herself off, and then she lay down on a chaise longue. I was staring, just gaga, at her body, watching her rub Sea and Ski onto her legs. Remember the smell of Sea and Ski? It smells-like pennies taste. And she rubbed it in the length of her legs; oh, God, they were long and brown and I was going nuts inside. I felt desperate, but I didn’t know what to do. I think I wanted to lick them.”
She didn’t say anything. He sighed deeply.
She sighed deeply, and they both laughed. She turned to him with a level, bemused look, swept her black hair off her face, and waited.
He took her hand.
A little bit of juice ran through her stomach, butterflies and rocket fuel, golf balls, and affection. They watched each other, and she listened to the runoff in her mind, the streams of worry and judgment. He raised himself on an elbow, bent down, and kissed her. Their eyes were open. They kissed again.
“Well, that’s over with,” he said, and smiled, embarrassed. She reached out and stroked the side of his face with the back of her finger, tracing its planes, traced the outline of his half smile.
“James?” she asked soon. “Shall we go upstairs and make love?”
“Oh, God, yes.”
He undressed her in the bedroom and stared in awe at her large, large breasts, touched them tentatively, not breathing. Then he unzipped her jeans and slowly pulled them down. “God, you have a beautiful body.” She lay down on the bed, and he pulled off her boots, and pulled off her pants, and pulled off her socks. Then he kicked off his sneakers and sat down beside her, running his fingernails softly from her shoulder to her knees. They smiled, both shy, and he tore off his clothes.