When I got back to my easel, Bobby was sitting on my stool and smiling at my painting.
“Get away from there,” I said.
He said, “I’d like you to paint me sometime, Applebaum.”
. . . . .
That week, I worked with Sam on a pitch for L’Institute, a new line of antiaging skin-care products.
At fifty-two, or roughly 3,100 in advertising years, Sam knew about aging as no one else in the agency did. He’d once been a creative director and now was a freelancer; he’d once produced award-winning TV campaigns and now was designing a mail package containing a moisturizer sample.
I asked Sam what I’d been wondering ever since I’d started in advertising: “Where are all the older people?” Deadpan, he said, “Dead.” Then he said that maturity was valued almost as much in advertising as it was in cheerleading.
He was the only art director who still used a marker and pad instead of a computer. I kept the products on the windowsill for him to draw and me to try—facial cleanser and body scrub, toners, masks, and moisturizers for day and for night. I taped a sign that read L’INSTITUTE to my door, and Sam added MENTAL. I hung a poster warning of the dangers of sun and cigarettes and extolling the benefits of eight glasses of water a day.
When Sam and I ran out of ideas, I’d say, “Water,” and get us each a bottle. Or I’d hand him the moisturizer and say, “You look a little dry.”
We showed our work on Monday and again on Tuesday, and everyone loved it until late Wednesday when we met with Bruce, the highest of the higher-ups.
We took the elevator from 9 down to the lobby and switched elevator banks to go up to 23. We shuffled into Bruce’s big office with the teams from 18 and 20. At six o’clock, when everyone was still getting sodas from the fridge and joking around, I pictured Bobby walking into Mixed Media I.
It was after seven by the time Bruce said, “Good work,” to the other teams as they left to make negligible changes to their TV and print campaigns.
His face changed from pleased to disconcerted as Sam presented our concept of mailing the package from Switzerland, where le nonexistent institute supposedly was; he shook his head while I read the fictional director’s letter aloud in a Swiss-ish accent.
As though Sam and I were children living in a fairy tale, Bruce reminded us that there was no real institute, and these products had been developed in Trenton.
Time was suddenly short; Bruce didn’t even want to see the rest of our concepts. “It’s more important to show synergy,” he said, and asked us to execute mail packages off of the TV spots “A More Beautiful You” and “About Face.”
As ever, Sam showed nothing but his own equanimity. He took off his glasses and let them hang on their string around his neck. “What’s the time frame?”
Bruce wanted to see our work the next morning.
Sam and I didn’t talk on the elevator down, down, down to 1, or on the one up to 9. We ordered dinner. He called his wife. At eight, when we sat down to work, I pictured Cheryl standing outside with Bobby while he smoked.
“Why so sad?” Sam said. “You got a date, pal?”
I said, “No,” and felt especially dateless and lifeless and hopeless realizing how much I’d wanted to see Bobby.
Sam said, “You need water,” and got us each a bottle.
We put on night moisturizer.
I suggested the line “Trenton makes, The world takes.”
“Shh,” Sam said. “Hand me a bindi.” I passed him one of the Indian cigarettes he’d smoked since quitting smoking.
About three minutes later, he held up his pad and showed me designs for brochures based on the TV spots.
“How did you do that?”
Sam said, “When someone asks me to eat shit, I don’t nibble.”
. . . . .
Before the next class, I watched the door for Bobby, but he didn’t show up.
Maureen announced, “Bobby was in a motorcycle accident.”
I heard a gasp, and realized it belonged to me.
Cheryl and I spoke in unison: “Is he okay?”
“He hurt his leg,” Maureen said. “He’ll be here next week.”
When I opened my tackle box, inside was a paperback of Billy Collins poems. It was inscribed:
FOR APPLEBAUM,
GRUDGINGLY,
BOBBY GUEST
I assumed that Bobby had given me the poems to show that he was smart or deep or poetic himself; I assumed it was just Bobby saying his name out loud again.
Still, I took the book to bed with me. I thought I’d read one poem, roll my eyes, and go to sleep. I stayed up half the night reading.
. . . . .
“Listen to this,” I told Sam, and while he drew, I read the first stanza of “Another Reason Why I Don’t Keep a Gun in the House”:
The neighbors’ dog will not stop barking.
He is barking the same high, rhythmic bark that he barks
every time they leave the house.
They must switch him on on their way out.
“Go on,” Sam said. “What’re you stopping for?”
I read the poems at my desk during lunch and in line for the ATM; I read the poems waiting for the subway and waiting for a friend to meet me for dinner, and then I read them to her.
She said, “You act like Bobby wrote them.”
. . . . .
When Bobby walked into class everyone applauded.
He bowed and leaned his crutches against the wall. He hoisted himself up on the stool next to Cheryl.
Maureen looked exhausted and yawned before resuming class. She asked if anyone would mind if Bert changed his pose.
Only the retired principal raised his hand. He kept it in the air.
Maureen seemed to be lost, and Bobby, our wounded hero, rescued her: “I’m afraid you’re out of luck, Mr. Marshall.”
Tight-lipped, the principal lowered his hand. “Fine,” he said, “if I’m the only one.” His tone was punishing, though, and it occurred to me that he probably missed the authority he’d once had to suspend and expel.
I went over to Bobby and asked if he was okay.
He was, he said, and he thanked me for asking.
“I really like the poems.”
He said, “Good.”
“I love them,” I said. “Thank you.”
He said, “Anytime,” and Cheryl nodded as though the gift were from both of them.
Bert struck an excellent new pose in which his thigh obscured his penis from my view, and I found myself doing exactly as Maureen had instructed; I got all of him down, and he filled the entire canvas.
When Bert got up to take his break, Bobby said, “Psst, Applebaum.” He motioned to the door.
“Did you just say ‘Psst’? No one says ‘Psst’ anymore.” I followed him onto the elevator. “So, what happened?”
He didn’t answer until we were outside and I’d lit our cigarettes. “I got clipped on the West Side Highway,” he said. “Had a little too much bourbon.”
“You were drinking bourbon on the West Side Highway?”
“Not on the highway, Applebaum.”
“That is the stupidest thing I ever heard,” I said. “Are you just a fucking idiot, or what?”
That’s when he leaned forward on his crutches and kissed me. He kissed me, and I kissed him. Then he pulled back and said, “Yes, I am a fucking idiot.”
. . . . .
Upstairs, I painted sloppy and free; I painted like an artist on Quaaludes. Previously, I’d been desperate to make a painting that Maureen, or anyone, might think was good, but I forgot all about that now. I was painting what I saw and felt. I was painting large.
Maureen took a look, and her face said, What’s up, Pussycat?
At the end of class, I closed my tackle box and leaned my painting against the wall to dry. I stood there, waiting for Bobby to finish talking to Cheryl. Meanwhile, I studied the artwork of my classmates.
Margo passed me on her way out with
Bert, and her “Good-bye” was the unified kick of a hundred Rockettes.
Bobby was still talking or listening to Cheryl, who saw me and pretended not to. I headed toward him, losing heart at about two hundred beats per minute. I thought all I could manage was a good night to both of them; instead, I heard myself say, “You want to get something to eat or something?”
Bobby said, “Let’s go.”
. . . . .
We went to Cafe Loup on Thirteenth Street and sat at one of the front tables so we could smoke. We ordered red wine and salads and rare steaks with fries.
“So,” he said, “where you from, sailor?”
“Outside of Philadelphia,” I said. “A town called Surrey.”
“Never heard of it.”
“No one has,” I said.
Bobby told me he’d grown up in Manhattan and gone to Collegiate, a private school for boys on Seventy-eighth Street, and then to Yale. I thought I heard pride in his voice when he said he was one paper shy of graduation.
“That seems stupid,” I said.
“Obviously,” he said, deadpan, “it hasn’t held me back.”
“Didn’t it make your parents crazy?”
“They were already crazy.” He said they’d briefly acted in B movies—no, I wouldn’t have heard of them—and they hadn’t done anything but dress for dinner since.
I said, “Like what do they wear?”
“They dress,” he repeated. He described his mother in chiffon, his father in a dinner jacket.
“It sounds so elegant,” I said.
“It would be more elegant if cocktail hour didn’t start at noon.”
Answering my unasked question, he said the money came from his grandfather, who’d made a killing in the demolition business. He’d leveled Penn Station.
Bobby admitted then that he himself had done some acting—one soap opera, a few commercials, an off-Broadway play; he was good at it, he said, but it was bad for him. He wrote stories now. He half-read, half-sang them, accompanying himself on guitar, at a club in the East Village. A few months ago, a literary agent had seen him there and asked him to type the stories up and send them to her. But he hadn’t.
“Why not?”
He said, “What if she rejects them?”
“You’ll send them to someone else.”
He shook his head. “This way, I can always say an agent asked me to send my stories.” He said, “I get to be the one who stands in the way of my success.”
We noticed at the same time that we were the last table in the restaurant, and Bobby looked at the check. I said, “I’ll split it with you.”
He was adding it up. “You can pay . . .”; he paused, and instead of next time, said, “. . . never.”
At the coat check, I saw that the restaurant sold T-shirts and baseball caps with its logo, fingers making a shadow wolf.
Outside, Bobby asked me if I wanted to take a walk to Union Square.
“You’re crippled,” I said.
He said, “I’m fine,” and he was. He moved easily on crutches, and when I said so, he told me that he’d become an expert after his last motorcycle accident, when he’d also learned to write with his left hand.
I said, “Do you have some kind of death wish?”
I’d just lit a cigarette, and he said, “What about you, Smokey?”
At Union Square, he leaned me up against a wall and kissed and kissed me. He unzipped his jacket and pulled me inside it. I was fifteen just then, there in the park, at night, under the trees.
We could hear barking from the dog run, and he asked if I’d read the poem “Another Reason Why I Don’t Keep a Gun in the House.”
“I read them all.”
He asked if I had a favorite, and I said, “The revenge fantasy.”
Bobby said, “ ‘The Rival Poet.’ ”
I said, “I love: ‘You are the one below / fidgeting in your rented tux / with some local Cheryl hanging all over you.’ ”
“ ‘Some local Cindy hanging all over you,’ ” Bobby said.
“Isn’t that what I said?”
“You said ‘Cheryl.’ ”
“C names,” I said. “Are you sleeping with her?”
“No,” he said. “I’ve been living like a monk.”
“That’s funny,” I said. “I’ve been living like a monkey.” I waited a second. “Why do you sit with her?”
“So I can watch you,” he said, “from a safe distance.”
We kissed, and then he pulled back. “Hear that?” he said.
It was the wind, and we stood there listening.
I lit a cigarette and said, “Really, why do you sit with Cheryl?”
He pulled my hand over to light his cigarette off of mine. He said, “She reminds me of myself.”
“You’re kidding,” I said. “How?”
He thought a minute. He said, “When they were making Marathon Man Dustin Hoffman asked Sir Laurence Olivier why he acted—what drove him. You know what he said? ‘Look at me, look at me, look at me, look at me.’ ”
The barking was making Bobby feel guilty, he said; he needed to get home to walk his dog, Arlo.
I started to hum the chorus of Arlo Guthrie’s song “Alice’s Restaurant,” and Bobby joined in.
I was stunned by how beautiful his voice was.
He was lifting his crutch to hail a cab for me when I said, “You make me nervous.”
He said, “You make me nervous.”
“Good,” I said. Then I gave him all of my numbers.
. . . . .
I was in bed and had just turned off the light when the phone rang.
Instead of hello, Bobby said, “Why do I make you nervous?”
I said, “You seem like a lothario,” a word I hadn’t used since college, and didn’t like the sound of now.
He didn’t answer right away, and it occurred to me that I’d made him angry. But it wasn’t that. “I have been,” he admitted.
I didn’t say anything.
He said, “I don’t want to be like that with you.”
“Don’t,” I said.
I asked what made him nervous about me.
He said, “I’m not going to tell you everything.” Then he asked if he could take me out to dinner and a movie on Saturday night.
. . . . .
At work, I told Sam, “I think I really, really like this boy.”
I didn’t even realize that I’d said boy until Sam said, “Did you kiss him on the Ferris wheel?” Then, a moment later: “Can he sing?”
“He’s a great singer,” I said. “Why?”
“It’s nice to be around someone who can sing,” he said. “Gloria’s voice probably saved our marriage.”
. . . . .
That evening Bobby called to tell me how the sky looked over the river. Later he called from the restaurant in the Village where he waited tables between motorcycle accidents. He said, “What would it take to get you down here to smoke a cigarette with me?”
I was wearing sweatpants and glasses and needed to wash my hair. I told him I’d come if he promised never to ride his motorcycle drunk again.
He said, “Done.”
I said, “Give me an hour.”
The Lion’s Head was known as a writer’s bar, and the covers of books written by its patrons hung on the walls. The man Bobby introduced as a writer objected: In an Irish accent, he said to me, “I’m a schoolteacher—”
Bobby interrupted: “Whose book is coming out anytime now,” and the writer-teacher allowed this much.
Bobby was drinking bourbon with shots of beer. He said, “What would you say if I asked you to spend the night with me?”
“I’d say it was too soon.”
“You’re right,” he said.
. . . . .
After work, I walked over to Saks and bought a dress I couldn’t afford. It was a turtleneck but sleeveless, short but not a minidress. In it I was a woman who was soon to leave advertising for a new, thrilling career as yet u
ndecided; in it, I was a painter at my first opening in a SoHo gallery.
When I got home, the phone was ringing. I picked it up and heard, “I miss you.”
I said, “I miss you, too,” and then worried that I’d said too much, and kept worrying while we talked.
I told him about my brothers, and he told me he wished he was as close to his. His were much older, and both lived in Los Angeles, where one had a small part on a sitcom and the other, a producer, worked for “the Mouse,” which was what the worker mice apparently called Disney.
He asked me about my childhood, and I asked him about his. He told me a story about falling off the Hans Christian Andersen statue in Central Park; he’d cried, and his nanny had said, “Don’t be such a baby,” right before he’d blacked out.
“Was she fired?”
“No.” He moved right along: “I think you should know that in sixth grade I won the Faversham Cup for Best Athlete.”
“Not the Faversham!” I said. “Jesus!”
He said, “How long before you move in with me, do you think?”
I told him I thought we should wait until after our first date.
He said, “You know, we’re going to have to start making babies right away. Don’t drag your feet on this, Applebaum. You’re not young.”
. . . . .
Saturday, I went to the gym. I lifted weights for my impending sleeve-lessness. I ran on the treadmill and walked up the StairMaster; with every step I was closer to Bobby.
At home, my answering machine was overloaded with messages, among them Jack ordering me not to drink too much and Robert asking me to take a quarter for a phone call in case my date got fresh. There wasn’t a message from Bobby.
I was sure he would call while I was in the shower.
I was sure he would call while I blow-dried my hair.
I picked up the phone to make sure it was working. I listened to the dial tone.
At 7:30, I put on my new dress. I mascaraed my lashes, I blushed my cheeks, I glossed my lips.
At 8:00, I poured myself a glass of wine. I tried to read. I tried to do the crossword puzzle, but it was Saturday and too hard.
At 8:30, I called Bobby and got his answering machine. “What’s going on?” I said. “Call me back.”