One night I say, “How’s it going with Richard?”
She’s ladling soup into bowls for our dinner, and the only sign that she’s heard my question is that she pauses mid-ladle. When she hands my bowl to me, she says, “You ask a lot of questions. The whole Q-and-A thing is so . . .” She moves her hands in a gesture of, How you say? “American.”
I think, We are Americans.
It reminds me of her sweet-sixteen party, when she forbade the singing of “Happy Birthday.”
Her speech becomes slow and serene. “There are a million ways to find things out.”
I think, Name a thousand.
. . . . .
I keep telling Dena that I want to pay rent, and finally I insist. That’s when she admits that her father bought the apartment for her.
I’m surprised. Her father is always trying to give her things, and she always refuses. I say, “It’s still your apartment.” I tell her I’d feel more comfortable paying rent.
She says no, but she lets me buy the groceries, and I fill the refrigerator, Flossie-style.
“We don’t need this much food,” Dena says. “It’s wasteful.”
I tell her I don’t want to emulate the diet of a boy who has only string to play with.
She says, “Are you making fun of me?”
I say, “I am.”
. . . . .
The previous summer, I watched Dena’s father try to persuade her to give up her old Saab and take the new Mercedes convertible he was trading in for a newer one.
We were in the den; a baseball game was on the huge television, and Dr. Blumenthal glanced at it while he made our martinis. He’d showered and shaved and was wearing a silk robe over trousers. Mrs. Blumenthal was still getting ready for the party they were going to; faintly I could hear the sound of a blow-dryer.
I didn’t know if he was serious about the Mercedes; he seemed to be trying to bait Dena. If he was, it was working.
Her arms were crossed in front of her. I knew that her reason for turning down the Mercedes was that she didn’t want to be a princess, but that’s what she sounded like turning it down. She acted more like a princess around the king.
As Dena got angrier, I kept thinking that maybe I’d casually get up and go to her mother’s dressing room and watch her dry her hair, which I’d wanted to do for years.
Dr. Blumenthal was enumerating the virtues of the Mercedes. He was on to safety now, and it occurred to me that maybe he wasn’t baiting her after all. He seemed genuinely concerned about her welfare, and it made me miss my own father and his concern for mine.
Dr. Blumenthal described the extensive plastic surgery he’d had to perform on a patient who’d been in a horrible car accident. He was saying, “An air bag would have—” when Dena interrupted.
Her voice was loud, her words drawn out: “No, Dad.”
I turned to her. “Bob.” My tone said, Don’t be hasty: “We’re talking about a convertible here.”
She said, “Shut up.”
I think she felt she could talk to me this way because we’d known each other so long that we were like sisters. But her saying shut up proved that we weren’t; in my family, we were taught that shut up was the meanest thing you could say.
“Okay, okay,” I told Dr. Blumenthal, as though giving in. “I’ll take the Mercedes.”
. . . . .
To compensate for the rent I’m not paying Dena, I try to be extra helpful. I clean the bathroom and the kitchen. When I do my laundry, I do Dena’s. I move her Saab from one side of the street to the other, as mandated by street-sweeping law.
I’m surprised every morning to find her stereo still in the dashboard. But I notice that even nice new cars are parked on the street now, and I don’t see the signs I used to in car windows—NO STEREO; NOTHING IN TRUNK OR GLOVE COMPARTMENT; and EVERYTHING ALREADY STOLEN.
When I mention it to Dena, she tells me that New York is safer now than it was in the mid-eighties, and I marvel at her ability to generalize.
. . . . .
Dena keeps promising to make a set of keys to the apartment for me. I remind her twice to no avail. It doesn’t matter in the morning—we leave the apartment together, she to work and I to temp—but it means we have to coordinate our return each night. When she’s going out and I’m not, she gives me the keys, but it doesn’t feel right for me to copy them.
. . . . .
She seems annoyed letting me in, even though it’s not late.
I worry that I’m getting on her nerves. If I don’t have an interview or an apartment to see or plans after work, I go to a diner in Union Square for a hamburger and drink diet Cokes while I read.
I realize my mistake one Sunday, when she’s making the week’s soup and salad; she acts like she just needs to know how much to prepare, but I hear the edge in her voice when she says, “Are you going to be out every night again this week?”
. . . . .
I tell everyone that I’m looking for an apartment; I check the listings in all the newspapers; I go to see every apartment I can afford, all of them unlivable.
At the Laundromat I see the sign for a sublet on Washington Square. Only one fringe with a phone number remains, but I call anyway.
The tenant, a graduate student named Dewitt, says the apartment is still available; I can see it if I come over right away.
I’ve just put the laundry in the dryers. I weigh how glad Dena will be if I get my own apartment against how mad she’ll be if I lose her laundry. But maybe New York is so safe now that no one steals laundry anymore.
I hail a cab.
The address is 19 Washington Square North—right on the square!—and I picture a town house like the one the judge from Oliver! lived in. I imagine myself as Oliver looking out the window at the glorious street scene below, and singing as he did, “Who will buy this wonderful morning?”
The sublet is a basement studio with bars on the windows, duct-taped pipes, a cement floor, and a urine-and-kitty-litter odor that makes me woozy.
Dewitt is going to Scotland to research Celtic folk songs in two weeks and desperate; he’s willing to lower the rent.
I tell him I’ll think about it, though I don’t have to. It’s the worst apartment I’ve seen or smelled, and even though it’s cheap I’d still have to use some of my father’s money because Dewitt needs all the rent up front.
Back at Dena’s, I’ve only begun to regale her about the horribleness of the apartment when Richard calls.
She talks to him for just a few minutes and comes back to the kitchen, where I’m washing the dishes. I say, “How’s Richard?”
“Fine,” she says, drying the silverware. Then: “His wife is back from Italy.”
I assume I’ve misheard her, and I turn off the water. “Sorry?”
She doesn’t answer, just sorts the silverware in the drawer.
Before I can stop myself, I say, “Richard is married?” and, “You’re seeing a married guy?” in the intonation of, Richard is dead? You’re seeing a dead guy?
She says a bland, “I told you.”
“No,” I say.
I wash and she dries the dishes in silence. We don’t look at each other. Afterward, she goes into her bedroom and closes the door.
It’s then that I remember the laundry. I rush downstairs and run all the way to Third Avenue. The Laundromat is closed. The woman who tends it is mopping the floor. I knock. She shakes her head. I knock again.
“My laundry’s in there,” I say when she comes to the door.
She tells me to come back for it in the morning.
Suddenly it seems criminal for me not to bring Dena’s laundry back—this on top of what I said about Richard. “Please.”
Maybe the woman sees how upset I am; she lets me in.
It’s close to midnight when I get back to Dena’s.
We fold the laundry together on the dining-room table.
I say, “I’m sorry I sounded so harsh before.”
Her face is
blank, neither admitting that I’ve done something wrong nor forgiving me for it.
I want to feel closer to her, but I don’t know how. “Are you in love with him, Bob?”
She says, “God, no.”
“That’s good, I guess. Right?”
She says, “It doesn’t really matter.”
I have no idea what she means.
. . . . .
In ninth grade, Dena told me that my boyfriend was cheating on me.
It was the beginning of June, early evening.
While I cried, she patted my back, which was totally un-Dena-like. She suggested I get in the pool. “You can scream underwater,” she said. “That’s what I do.”
It was hard to imagine Dena screaming. The most emotional I’d ever seen her get was annoyed. “What do you scream about?”
“My father, mostly,” she said.
I changed into a tank suit of hers, which was too big for me; she tightened the straps with a shoelace, racer-back style. I walked into the pool. Underwater, I cried and screamed.
When I got out, Dena said, “How was it?”
I nodded and tried not to cry. I knew I was letting her down.
When I could talk, I said, “I don’t know what I did wrong.”
Dena sighed. “You care too much.”
. . . . .
Dena helps me move into the basement on Washington Square, which she’s named the Heiress. I expect her to revise the name once she sees the apartment—the Airless seems more fitting—but she only has compliments for its raw, industrial feel. When I bring up the kitty-litter odor, she suggests scented candles.
Afterward we go to Caffe Reggio on MacDougal Street. We order cappuccinos, and she takes a few drags of my cigarette, which reminds me of when we were younger. I feel easier with her than I have in weeks, and she seems to feel easier, too, until we’re leaving the cafe.
She holds the door for me. “I keep forgetting to tell you,” she says. “Demetri called.”
“When?”
She admits that it was a while ago.
“When?”
“I don’t know,” she says. “Six weeks?”
“You just forgot?”
“I’m sure subconsciously I didn’t want you to talk to him,” she says. “You seemed so much better.”
I say, “Is that your subconscious speaking?”
“Sorry,” she says.
“Don’t do that again,” I say, and hope it encompasses the larger issue that I can’t quite name.
As we cross the park, she tries to make everything okay; she says that our apartments are probably the same distance from each other as our houses in Surrey.
In front of my apartment, she says, “Sorry about Demetri,” and I say, “It’s all right,” even though it isn’t yet.
As soon as I get back to the Heiress, I call him.
He says, “I didn’t think you’d ever call me back.”
“Sorry,” I say.
He says, “No worries.” He’s called just to talk.
. . . . .
By late August, I’m on my second sublet, and I’ve been working as a copywriter long enough to know I’m not good at it. I seem to be reliving the life I had when I was twenty-two, but I’m about to turn twenty-eight, which feels like the opposite of twenty-two.
When Dena calls to ask what I’m doing the weekend before my birthday, I tell her, “I thought I’d lie in bed and drink bourbon.”
She says, “That sounds good.”
A few days later, she invites me to an all-expense-paid weekend with her in the Berkshires, where she’s been renting a house for years with a bunch of friends I’ve never met.
The invitation comes in the form of a postcard she’s addressed to “Mrs. Robert Dylan” c/o me: “Mrs. Robert Orr requests the pleasure of your company at seven-thirty o’clock on the twenty-seventh day of August in the year of our Lord nineteen-hundred and eighty-eight . . .” On the other side, she’s done a pen-and-ink drawing of the house with its garden and surrounding hills, by which she’s written, “Ticks not pictured.”
On the appointed Friday evening, at seven-thirty o’clock, she buzzes my apartment, a walk-up in Hell’s Kitchen she’s named the Hot Plate. I’m not quite ready and ask if she wants to come up. She does; she wants to see my sublet.
I look around to see what she will see. I took a few tips from a House & Garden article on sprucing up your summer rental; red geraniums sit in front of the windows, and white sheets cover the sofa and armchair. In the magazine, the red and white brought out the blue of the ocean view.
Now I see that my red and white brings out the gray of the air-shaft view. The sheets over the furniture make my studio look like it’s waiting to be painted and emphasize that it needs to be; the bright geraniums accentuate its overall gloom. Neither address the apartment’s central flaw: It seems dirty. There’s nothing you can point to and clean, but you sense the dirt, as you do the presence of cockroaches.
Dena says, “Hey,” and walks in.
She’s wearing dungaree cutoffs that go all the way down to her knees; I call her Huck and tell her I have a polka-dotted satchel on a pole she can borrow.
She doesn’t answer; she’s looking around. “It’s not as bad as the Heiress,” she says.
I say, “It’s a different kind of bad,” but I don’t want to dwell on its particular badness, since I’ll be dwelling in it through November.
She says, “It’ll look better once it’s painted.”
I ask if there’s anything I need to bring to the country.
She says, “A bathing suit and water shoes.”
“Water shoes?”
“You know, those black slipper things.”
I say, “I don’t have black slipper things.”
She tells me to bring sneakers I can swim in. “I like the tin ceiling,” she says. Then she remembers that she’s double-parked, and says she’d better go down.
Once she’s gone, I say, “You do that.” Her appreciating the ceiling, appreciating anything about the Hot Plate except the sheets or geraniums, bothers me, though I can’t pinpoint why.
I put my tennis sneakers in my duffel bag and zip it up. I say, “See ya later, suckers,” to the cockroaches I can’t see.
When I get downstairs, Dena is standing on the sidewalk, her arms at her sides. Her Saab is gone.
. . . . .
A phone call to the police reveals that the car hasn’t been stolen but towed. Since the tow pound is on the river, out of reach of public transportation, we have to take a cab, and this seems to annoy Dena almost as much as getting towed. Dena is anti-cab; it doesn’t matter that I pay the fare.
We follow signs up a ramp and into a trailer. There’s a line, and we get in it. No one’s talking—too angry. We’re all waiting for one woman, the clerk, who sits bank-teller-like behind glass I hope is bulletproof.
When it’s our turn, she tells us that we owe $165 for the tow and $55 for the parking violation.
Dena’s eyes widen, and I think of the watercolor brush she uses so as not to waste any coffee dust.
I say, “I’m paying.”
“You are not,” she says. “It’s my stupid car.”
“I’m the one who was late.”
We argue—Yes I am; No you’re not—until the guy behind us in line says, “I’ll pay.”
I turn around and there he is, the nicest, funniest man in the world, and one of the shortest.
I ask him if he wants to come with us to the country.
He says, “Sure,” and asks where we’re going, and my eyes ask him to ask me for my phone number—though I’m not sure I’d be able to give it to him in front of Dena.
. . . . .
On the West Side Highway, I say, “I liked him.” We’re in traffic and barely moving; Dena maneuvers from the left lane to the middle and back, basically trading parking spaces.
She makes her thumb and index finger into a C for Context.
“The guy who offered to
pay our fine,” I say. “He reminded me of that skit.”
“What skit?”
When I open the glove compartment to look for a tissue, she says, “What are you doing in there?”
“Going through your private stuff.” I find my prop, a hanky that serves as the ribbon for the damsel who can’t pay the rent, the mustache for the villain who says she must, and the bow tie for the hero who says he will.
My favorite line is the villain’s, “Curses! Foiled again!”
“Where’d you learn that?”
I say, “My father,” so she can’t make fun of me; I learned the skit at camp.
. . . . .
Once we get past the traffic for the George Washington Bridge, we speed along. The cloth ceiling of the Saab is coming down and luffs like a sail in the breeze.
I say, “Think how nice it would be to have your dad’s convertible now.”
She shakes her head, but she’s smiling, and I am glad just to be leaving New York, glad that it’s the beginning of a weekend, glad the windows are down and the radio’s on.
My joyride lasts only until the exit for Riverdale, dale of my grandmother, whom I cannot bring myself to visit.
Dena says, “I’ll go with you, if you want.”
I appreciate the offer, but her mind-reading gives me a sick feeling: She expects me to do the same, and I can’t.
. . . . .
On the Taconic Parkway, we begin eating the picnic Dena packed—hunks of bread and slivers of cheese, almonds and raisins, water for her and beer for me.
She holds her hand out for the water bottle, and as I pass it to her I ask who’s going to be at the house this weekend.
She says, “Just Matthew.”
I want to ask about him, but she says: “Do you ever hear from Demetri?”
I tell her that he sent me a postcard with his new jokes on it.
“God,” she says.
“They were pretty funny.”
When she says, “Do you still think about him?” I wonder why she can ask me questions I can’t ask her.
I say, “I feel like I broke up with him partly to please my father.”
“Or maybe it was because the guy has a packing peanut where his heart’s supposed to be.” Then, in a softer voice, she says, “You don’t think you made a mistake?”