A Certain Age (19 page)

Florence didn't respond. She was wondering if Tracer was telling the truth. She couldn't imagine it could really be natural, mainly because she couldn't imagine anyone who didn't do something to alter their appearance. In her own case, there was nothing that was real—except, thank god, for her nose and her jaw, but that was a lucky accident of fate. In a few years, she had already planned, she would have her eyes done, and then after that her

face, though she still had time. She might have it done when she was thirty-five.

"So do you think I should call him?"

"Who?" She was so busy thinking about her face-lift she had forgotten where she was.

"Darryl."

"You're not still thinking about Darryl, are you? I can't believe you'd actually have a crush on him. Sure, call him. Why not?"

"Yeah, but what am I going to say? I'm not real good about asking guys out. Maybe I should give a party or something. If I gave a party, would you come? You could invite your friends. Hey, what if you gave a party, but we could have it here, and I would buy all the booze and cook something."

"Oh, gosh," said Florence. "I don't know." It didn't appeal to her, to supply Tracer with a ready-made bunch of friends, all of whom would probably like Tracer immediately, and more than her; anyone who met Tracer, and saw how rich she was, and how gullible, probably would find all kinds of good uses for her. On the other hand, it might do something to restore her image, and anyone who came to her party wouldn't dare say mean things about her—at least not right away.

"Please say yes. He's your friend. You could call him up to invite him and it wouldn't seem like I was coming on to him."

"No, that's not weird. This is New York—people do stuff like that all the time. They're probably used to it."

"Why don't you think about it, though," Tracer said. "I love to cook. I'd love an excuse to cook. Call me later tonight, or tomorrow or something. You want to go get something to eat? I'll take you out to dinner. Or we could just order in. Are there any places in the neighborhood you like? I only know about two places near here."

"I should get going," Florence said. She grabbed the bag of jewelry. "I've got all this stuff I had to get out on Long Island, and it's making me nervous to carry it around. Thanks for the drink, though."

"It's Monday night in the middle of the summer, and there's

nothing to do!" Tracer paced agitatedly. "Please say you'll give a party with me or I'm just going to go out to Aspen for the rest of the summer—this city makes me so nervous."

"Fine, sure, I'll give a party with you." She turned to wave good-bye in the hall and, as she shut the door, caught one last glimpse of Tracer, a frightened dray-horse startled by slippery cobblestones after a rain.

She staggered in the door of her apartment, exhausted. At least Tracer had seemed to be genuinely friendly, one of the only women she had met in ages who didn't give her a blank, superior stare, a form of domination used in Manhattan by women upon other women; the look that managed to say, "I really have no idea what you're talking about and I'm afraid I can't be bothered with someone as peculiar as you." It was a look that inevitably managed to put down the one who was looked upon. She had used it herself on occasion. Now her spirits were lifted at having spent even a little time with someone who seemed to admire her. Maybe she really would have a friend, someone to talk to, someone who would understand her predicament and fix her up with some rich, cute, young guy. Maybe Tracer knew someone in Bucks County, or Aspen, who wouldn't think she had been around a bit too long and who would want her to come and share his life.

There were no messages on the machine. She was so tired she almost fell asleep in the bath, reading an article in a travel magazine about an exclusive island in the Bahamas where in the offseason rooms were available for six hundred dollars a night. She wondered if she should book now to get away for a few days at Christmas. Maybe Tracer would want to go with her? By then she would have had time to get Tracer made over: suggest a fluffier, softer haircut; motivate her to lose weight; go shopping with her for new clothes. Perhaps there was still some hope for the future. The main thing was not to let anyone know just how low she was

feeling. She could look at her life as a half-empty glass: two years past thirty; a low-paying job that was going nowhere, and where she was disliked and in trouble; a seedy, rundown apartment that she couldn't afford to hang on to; no real boyfriend or relationship; thirty; having slept with too many men in what was basically a small town. Or she could take the same items and rewrite the script, packaging it into an acceptable treatment: barely in her thirties and never looked better; a classy job in an auction house; a charming apartment that was located in the best zip code in Manhattan; pursued by many men.

' The perfumed bubbles frothed and hissed in the old-fashioned bath, releasing their fizzy tuberose perfume. She put the magazine on the floor and, pulling the plug, turned on the tap. The water gushed rustily while she held on to the sides of the tub as if it were a lifeboat going down.

5

Marge Crowninshield and Sonia
were in her office. When she walked in they stopped speaking and stared at her. Sonia burst into uneasy laughter.

"Good morning," Florence said after a pause. "Marge, I'm sorry I wasn't here to see you yesterday. I had an appointment in Maspeth I couldn't get out of."

Marge looked at her skeptically. "Anything good?" "A small lot, nothing really special, but the woman was desperate, and it may bring twenty or twenty-five thousand. I thought

we could put it in the winter sale. A bunch of small things, but we did so well with the small things last year. People seemed to like the inexpensive stuff for Christmas presents—I don't know if it will be any different this year. There's one piece—" Suddenly she realized that the things were still in her apartment. She had meant to bring them to work that morning and get them into the vault. The security in her building was not that great. The doorman had the keys to all the apartments.

"I wonder if I could see you in my office after lunch." Marge, nearly six feet tall, with a ridiculous lemon-and-white chiffon scarf around her neck, swept out the door.

"Of course. Two o'clock?" Florence said, more to herself than Marge. She pushed past Sonia and sat down at her desk. There was no reason Marge couldn't have spoken to her now. She just wanted to make her sweat it out until afternoon. Sonia stood looking at her, an evil little grin on her thin-lipped face. Florence thought she was about to make some cutting remark, or give her a warning, but with the contented sigh of a hippopotamus about to stagger into its water hole, Sonia turned and shuffled down the hall.

She had gotten a good night's sleep, hadn't had anything to drink, but she still felt tired. It was as if a huge bird, perhaps a vulture, invisible to everyone, had landed on her head and nested up there happily, with heavy claws fastened onto her shoulders, determined not to budge.

Someone had raised the blinds; the office was dark except for an hour or two in the morning, when the light slanted in, collecting on top of the green metal filing cabinet in a dirty pool. She couldn't stay in this prison cell, though she had come in with the best of intentions, determined to put in a full day's work cataloging—she had a whole list of simple, easily identified pieces of jewelry on which the research had already been done. What excuse could she make up to get out of there? Maybe nobody would even notice that she was gone.

Raffaello still hadn't called; she would be damned if she was going to sit there all morning waiting and hoping. She could say

she had to look up something in the library at the museum, or talk to someone over there (a piece actually had come in, some time ago, whose age she had been unable to determine, possibly Celtic in origin). Maybe nobody would ask. But there was Sonia, positioned at the end of the hall, door open, spying on her every coming and going.

She walked past Sonia's office; to her relief, Sonia looked up at her with a guilty expression—she was bent over a box of something like a carrion bird over roadkill.

It was another beautiful day, crisp and windy, all too rare for the end of July in New York. Pedestrians sailed by, summer garments stiffened in the breeze as if they were vestments or the starched linen uniforms of another era. Up on Madison the restaurants crowded the sidewalks with outdoor tables, the doors to the shops were open, and there was a circusy atmosphere of celebration in the air. She wanted to stop at one of the cafés and get an iced cappuccino, but there was the risk of being seen.

She passed a tiny store that sold Italian hats; the window, done up to resemble the stage of a children's puppet theater, pink and red and blue, was full of straw cloches and boaters dyed the color of bruised fruit. Each hat was covered with frothy tulle, yellow-and-pink netting, strewn with glossy brown strands that looked like molten sugar on cakes.

Before she knew it she had gone in and was trying them on. The woman who worked in the shop was also the designer, a diminutive woman who fluttered around plucking the hats from the stands and chirping as she put them on Florence's head. The hats were so amusing, and looked so good on her, she couldn't choose and bought two. They were four hundred and fifty dollars each. She wanted desperately to wear one out of the store, but if she returned to work in something different than what she had arrived in, probably Sonia would wait and comment on the new item when Marge appeared. "And I'll pick them up this evening," Florence said, signing the credit card slip.

"No? You don't want to wear? You should wear now. It looks so good on you, with that outfit!" Once a tiny milliner from Italy

would have been among the poorest of the poor, working her fingers to the bone for rich ladies. Now a hat designer—with her own shop on Madison Avenue—was a rich girl, desperate to prove that she had talent, that she had a business, whether or not it ever made any money. There were no jobs for poor women as milliners now.

In Central Park the middle-aged men sailed their three-thousand-dollar handcrafted sailboats across the little lake. These guys, ruddy, glossy, in white shirts and khakis, were in their mid-forties and trying to squeeze out the last drops of boyhood. They were would-be actors, or stockbrokers playing hooky; they had ex-wives and kids; they had sexual problems that came from living in New York—or the problems were why they had come to New York in the first place. They were not real people, only imitations. All day long women and men cruised the pond, eyeing them, trying to pick them up.

She stopped and sat on a dry patch of the low wall that retained the water. A yellow retriever, illegally chasing a stick, jumped over the wall and plunged into the murky water, almost knocking down a child. She imagined, briefly, that this must be what places in Europe were like—Europe was somewhere she had never been. If things didn't work out for her here, she supposed she could always go there, but really she wouldn't have a clue: how to get a job, what kind of papers she would need, where she would live. It was awful to have worked so hard to acquire a veneer of New York sophistication but, due to circumstance, be basically provincial underneath. Her friends—her acquaintances—were widely traveled; Paris, London, Prague, all these places were nothing to them.

Anyway, it was twelve-thirty now. She was permitted to be seen having lunch; even Marge couldn't complain if someone spotted her. She walked back to Madison Avenue. The outdoor café tables at the various restaurants were already fully occupied. A bit higher up she entered a very expensive bakery/sandwich shop. A table for two in back was empty. She ordered a glass of dry white wine scented with a slight hint of woodruff, and the day's sand-

wich—tapenade, sun-dried tomatoes and smoked mozzarella, served on thickly sliced peasant bread.

She sat staring blankly at the wall, and when her sandwich arrived she chewed methodically, without tasting, like an animal at its feed. But whether that was because the food, though attractive in appearance, in fact had no flavor, or because she was distracted, she didn't know. She was oddly unsatisfied, as if she had just consumed an illusion. The sandwich came with a tiny salad—a spray of mung bean sprouts, three yellow pear-shaped miniature tomatoes, a leaf of endive. Nevertheless, she couldn't understand how she had spent almost twenty dollars for a lunch that was nothing more than a few bits of things that tasted like salt and rubber.

She had done her best to put Raffaello out of her head, but it was no use. It was as if a huge bubble were rising up from her stomach, a bubble with thick, viscous walls; the bubble was making her rummage in her pocketbook for change, for a pen and paper—the bubble wanted her to call him. For the past day she had done her best to fight the bubble, popping it with a pin, weighing it down, but the bubble would not be stopped: it grew back, its walls thicker, more determined than ever. She had to speak to him.

She settled her bill and found a phone in the front entryway. "Hi, this is Florence." She spoke to his answering machine. "Are you there? I thought we were going to get together for lunch. Give me a call when you get a chance." She tried to sound nonchalant, but her voice had the creaky squeak that came into it when she was uncertain.

As soon as she hung up she was sorry she had left a message. She should have waited until he was home and answering the phone. She had no one and she was nothing, she told herself. She was completely alone in the world. She was thirty-two years old and there was no hope for her future. Life was like a game of musical chairs. Ninety-nine percent of them were taken, and she couldn't see where the empty ones were positioned. Besides, if