Lucky in the Corner (26 page)

They busied themselves filling in the blanks with a running sequence of questions, small revelations, fresh beats of one of the private jokes they now shared. She had already brought him out to meet her parents. (Lynette let Art “persuade” her to sing “Volare” while Harold accompanied on the piano. Nora was excruciatingly embarrassed in the moment. But over the weeks since, “Volare” had become a kind of code word between her and Russell for her family’s idiosyncrasies.)

She would meet Russell’s family at the end of the summer. He was going to take her home with him to Illinois, to Decatur. His father ran a hardware store there. Russell had three brothers, two sisters—some already with children of their own. They all gathered at their parents’ house for Labor Day, no matter what. His mother put out a ham. She had a small smokehouse and was locally famous for her bacon. Nora dreaded meeting her, being confronted with her pioneer spirit, and with all of Russell’s siblings, who apparently whiled away the long holiday afternoon with a rough and tumble lawn game—contact badminton. This was part of the tradition. Nora’s family had no traditions. When she thought of going into Russell’s tradition-happy family, she feared she wouldn’t be up to the task, weathering all the hale-and-heartiness. And she couldn’t imagine Russell shielding her from any of it. He was too congenial, and would expect congeniality from her as well.

They had waited to have sex until after the two movies and one of the readings. With Russell, it was a wordless, industrious affair, reminiscent of her afternoons on the basement couch with Teddy Frey, and satisfying in the same down-to-business way.

Now, on Saturday nights, they stayed in. They watched old movies on TV. He went downstairs and brought back carryout. He had a studio in Chinatown, above one restaurant and across the street from another. There was always a heavy current on the air that drifted up and through his windows, a Morse code of oil and meat, pepper, fish. Nora was hungry within minutes of arriving.

Sundays, they got up early and went running together. She enjoyed the weight of him beside her in the universe, the soles of their sneakers hitting the asphalt path in syncopation. She wanted a boyfriend, wanted that slot filled, and now it was. Now she didn’t have to worry about not having one.

“How’s the roundup going?” Celeste asked one morning, a few days after she had given Nora the assignment.

“I have a concept.”

“A concept is a start.”

“‘Read My Lips—What Your Lipstick Says about You.’”

Celeste looked up from a layout. For once, she actually looked directly at Nora. The look had absolutely nothing to do with business, even as she said, “Liner. No matter what those lips are saying, they have to be lined. Our three largest cosmetics advertisers want us to feature lip liner.”

Nora stood, listening and not really listening, noticing that as Celeste was casually looking at her, she was also assessing, taking a reading. It was a look that was both saying something and asking something else. Nora went a little wobbly.

A couple of weeks later, artwork for the lipstick roundup had come in late, by messenger. A lot of the shots—a few too many in Nora’s opinion, but no one was asking her—dealt with how to use a brush to outline the lips before filling them in with the color that would most succinctly telegraph the wearer’s personality.

“This peach looks a little weird,” Nora said when she and Celeste had the slides laid out on the light box.

“Maybe,” Celeste said. “Let’s get a better look.” She went over to flip off the overhead fluorescents. The light coming up through the slides was the only light in the room. In this moment, Nora learned something about how it was with women, how it could happen in a brief series of seconds. The way time elided, transformed from something tocking between marks on a dockface into pure liquid, something to slide along on. How long did they stand there, hands flat on the translucent glass, almost touching, both of them listening, like pulmonary specialists, to each other’s breathing—an hour? half a minute?

Beyond that, how long before one of them made a defining move? How long did they stay in Celeste’s office, first on the sofa, then on the industrially carpeted floor? The fat man came home, watched TV in his briefs (electric blue), went to bed.

“I hope you understand, tonight changes nothing,” Celeste said much later, when they had both signed out in the lobby in the middle of the night.

Nora wanted to believe her. She wanted to believe nothing had changed. Celeste didn’t know that she had just brought Nora out, and Nora didn’t want to give her that piece of information. Neither did she want to make a big deal of what had happened. After all, this was Manhattan, and it was the seventies—way into the sexual revolution. Tonight was not about being gay. She didn’t want it to be about that. That looked way too hard—the social stigma thing, but more the boundlessness. Stevie, her closest friend at school, was a lesbian, and Nora didn’t want to be that wide open, that tragically earnest, that annihilated by desire. The music Stevie listened to was also earnest, and ghastly—campfire songs only about women loving women, sisters leaning on sisters, instead of about cowboys on the range.

Nora didn’t want to care as much as Stevie did, to bleed that way. But this was precisely what happened with Celeste through the rest of the spring and into the summer when her internship ended and Celeste hired her on as a part-time assistant. This arrangement gave them a couple more months through which they took afternoons out of the office—ostensibly to visit model agencies or scout locations for shoots. In reality, they headed straight for Nora’s apartment, where they pulled the shades and slipped out of their clothes within moments of arriving, like firemen in reverse.

Like the job, the romance led nowhere. Celeste lived with a famous TV journalist. She was not going to put that relationship at risk, she had been candid about this from the start. And even if Celeste were available, she was not someone Nora could imagine as a partner. Celeste thought fashion had real importance. She talked seriously about accessories. She was vain and shallow, ruthless. Her highest aspiration was to be promoted to senior fashion editor for the magazine, a bigger stupid job. She would cut a deal with the devil to get the current occupant of the position to drop into a manhole.

But in these long, hourless afternoons in bed together, fashion was rendered temporarily irrelevant. In this context (which was really a retreat from context), Nora found she had the power to soften Celeste, to make her leave her datebook in her bag across the room, make her not call the office for messages, make her forget her next appointment, her famous girlfriend, and focus tightly on what she wanted from Nora, what Nora made her ask for, politely, made her say please.

Nora’s sexual experience was limited; she had never been naked with anyone the way she was with Celeste. And so she made the mistake of translating this nakedness into more. There were wide flat stretches of pillow talk and afterglow during which she opened herself in ways that seemed extremely foolish later, when Celeste backed off suddenly.

She had to let Nora go at the magazine, and was simultaneously no longer available outside the office.

“It’s just starting to be a very busy time for me” was how she put it. “I’m going to have to tighten my focus. It’s nothing personal.”

Nora was stunned. All she could do was stand there looking at Celeste’s perfectly made-up face and see clear through to her vacant soul, unable to make any use at all of the knowledge that Celeste was utterly worthless as an object of affection.

She went back to her apartment, reviewed the affair, and came to a rough understanding that this eventuality had been on its way all along. Nonetheless, she behaved badly for a while. A little petulant stalking, a scene on the sidewalk outside a bookstore. From there, she behaved better but felt just as bad. She never wanted to feel this bad again; at the same time, she suspected she had just wandered onto the edge of a vast landscape of pain.

Through all this, her romance with Russell glided along on cruise control, staying on the same slick surface of old movies and Chinese food and earnest chat sprinkled with references to a future that implicitly included each other. Nora acquired the skills necessary to seal what was important away from the rest of life—the practical, daylight part. In September, as planned, she drove out with Russell to visit his family, and got through the long weekend, his smokehouse mother, even the rough and tumble badminton. She ascribed her nausea on the trip to too many hours in the car followed by four days of country cooking—breakfast biscuits with cream gravy, dinner ham with cream gravy, fritters, shortcake with whipped cream. When she continued to throw up after their return to New York, she went to the doctor, who took blood and urine. Nora’s fears were clenched around a murky diagnosis of something malignant. And so she was totally baffled by an unequivocal diagnosis of pregnancy. In the first seconds after receiving this information, she inhabited a small flurry of confusion, linking the baby with the high-voltage connection to Celeste. Actual thought had to be brought to bear on the matter before she saw that, of course, this development was about Russell, with whom the sexual connection had the approximate wattage of a toaster. Still, somehow, that sequence of quick, industrious gropings had been enough to break a rubber and reset her direction. Nora saw in a telescopic way that she would tell Russell and they would get married and have the baby together and everything else that had happened this summer would be consigned to a private, unopened album.

NORA HAS BEEN TAKEN HOSTAGE
by the new terrible version of herself. Today, instead of going home after work, she fabricated a chiropractor appointment for a fabricated pulled shoulder (from yanking out renegade sumacs in the back of the yard the other day) and drove down to Hyde Park. With some winding around, she found the address, a brooding, ivy-strangled six-flat, then the apartment where Pam is putting in a new kitchen. The owners have taken off to avoid the dust and disruption, so once again she and Pam are alone in someone else’s home, like bad babysitters.

Nora finally caved in to Pam’s voicemails and agreed to meet her. She gave herself a dispensation for this meeting by telling herself it would be their last. On the drive down, she prepared her side of the conversation: They simply have to stop. She has thought things over. The time-out has helped clear her thoughts, given her room to see that where she really belongs is with Jeanne.

And this speech is exactly what the better, more reasoned, and responsible version of herself truly believes, and so it should have been possible to say these prepared lines straight off. And so she has only the hostage theory to account for not having said any of it, even though she has been here more than an hour. Instead, she is naked on the primitive-print sheets of strangers. She is lying on her back with an arm draped over Pam’s shoulder while Pam, with an ear to Nora’s breast, listens to her heart beat.

They are both quiet. They are keeping the communication physical. Talking has become more complicated. If Nora were saying anything, it would have to be her carefully worded extrication, which, given the circumstances, would sound a little ridiculous.

She shouldn’t be fucking Pam. She should be furious with her. That little visit to the house the other day to rattle Nora’s cage. The explicit message yesterday, and not on the cell phone, but on Nora’s work voicemail, to which Mrs. Rathko has the password, which means she probably played it for herself before Nora got to the office. Pam understands she is supposed to be totally circumspect in what she says in any messages she leaves at work, encoding everything as much as possible. Any message with the word “pussy” in it is not encoded.

But, instead of feeling angry, Nora, in a weird way, admires Pam for taking this affair with long, bold strides, while she herself crouches in a corner, afraid of everything about it, even (especially) the happiness it has brought her.

The two of them sit up. Pam goes to get a couple of beers from the refrigerator, while Nora pulls a cigarette from the pack on the bedside table—
her
smokes. Pam has quit; she’s wearing the patch. Now Nora is the only one smoking. On the table, she notices a small bedside clock. She sees with a slight sinking sensation, but with no real surprise, that she should have left here at least half an hour ago. Behind the clock is a framed photo of a couple on a hiking vacation, leaning in toward each other on a boulder, backed by a photogenic vista.

“Oh boy,” she says as Pam comes back into the bedroom. Nora props herself on an elbow, reaching over to pick up the picture. “I know this guy. Jeff Fanning. He teaches at Berlitz with Jeanne. Eastern languages, Himalayan dialects.”

“They’re in Tibet,” Pam says.

Nora falls back against the pillows, takes a better look around the room. “I left my coat on this bed. We came for dinner. Maybe five years ago. They made something incredibly ethnic. A little grill on the table. Something on skewers. We drank out of wooden cups.”

“She wants a clay oven put in the kitchen,” Pam says, as though she’s trying to help Nora reconnect with these old acquaintances.

“We’re in their bed. I’m here with you sweating up the sheets of Jeanne’s colleague. Someone I’ll have to chat with at the school cookout next summer.”

Pam doesn’t see the problem. “They’re not going to pop in on us. It would take them about five days to get here if they left right now. They’d have to start out on a yak.”

“It’s not being discovered I’m worried about. It’s not them knowing I was here. It’s
me
knowing. I don’t want to have these sorts of secrets.”

“Me either. I want to drive around with you. Go to a restaurant. A movie. Be happy when we run into friends.
Have
friends.”

Nora tries to imagine who their friends might be. Pam’s friends? The two or three friends of Nora’s who won’t have abandoned her after her breakup with Jeanne? Stevie and Lauren? They would stick with her no matter what. Probably.