A Certain Age (25 page)

"She is using my necklaces for her spring collection. I will only be selling them at a few select shops. This one is of blue topaz. Why don't you put it on? I think it would look very nice with your blue eyes."

"Very pretty." She studied herself in the mirror. It did look nice on her. She wondered if she should buy it. It was a lot of money, but perhaps she could pay him over a year or two. Silly not to get something if it really made her look fantastic—it was an investment in her future. She bowed her head so he could undo the clasp. "Let me try on a few other things."

"I think you're the most interesting-looking person in this room." A dark woman, rather plain, in a bright red suit with terrible puffed shoulders was standing next to her. "Are you buying anything?" The woman had a nasal voice, like someone trying to sound as if she had gone to boarding school. It didn't quite work. "I'm thinking of getting the amethyst bracelet. This is my friend Thor."

"What a nice compliment! I'm Florence Collins."

"You see, Thor? I told him, that's the most interesting-looking woman in this room. And you're nice too!" The woman scurried off, but the hapless Thor stood miserably nearby. He was very cute, but probably in his mid-twenties.

Florence took his arm. "I have to think about whether or not I'm going to buy something," she told him. "I'm going to sit down while I think."

He didn't seem to know whether or not she was inviting him to join her. "My name's Thor Thorson."

"Sit down with me for a minute. The jewelry's pretty, isn't it?"

He clumped dutifully alongside her to two of the black-and-white-striped dining room chairs that had been pushed back against the walls to make room for people to look at the jewelry. "Lisa's apartment's pretty, isn't it?"

"I think it's very daring, how she's done the dining room walls in off-black. Almost a charcoal black, wouldn't you say? It's nice."

"Yeah, it's nice."

He wore a pinstripe suit and Gucci loafers, with socks that were also pinstripe. She liked his eyes, baffled behind thick glasses. "Nice socks, Thor!" she said. "You rarely see a man who has pinstripe socks."

"Oh, do you like them? Sometimes I go a little wild, with my socks. My favorite pair has little turkeys on them. I like these too. This might be the first time I'm wearing them."

"Nice. Of course, the problem with socks is that if you have a pair you really like, you always lose one."

"I have a friend who wears garters to hold up his socks."

"That must cut off his circulation. It can't be very good for you."

"Are you a nurse?" Thor asked.

"No, I'm not a nurse." She tried to think of what to say to keep some semblance of conversation going. "Why? Are you a doctor?"

"Yes."

"Oh, that's . . . I'm really interested. What kind of doctor?"

"Actually I don't practice medicine." He looked on closer

examination to be no more than twenty-four, but perhaps he just appeared youthful. "I invest in companies."

"But you were a doctor?"

"Yes. I used to be a doctor."

"What kind?"

"I never really practiced after medical school. I decided to go into investing in new medical technologies."

"Wonderful."

"You know that new procedure they have to correct vision. That's going to be the wave of the future. I've got a lot in that."

"That frightens me."

"It's perfectly safe."

"If you had gone on to practice medicine, what kind would you have done?"

He shrugged. "Dermatology."

"I wish I had been a doctor. Not that I could have been. But I always wished I had become a doctor, and I would go on those junkets to Third World countries where doctors go on a ship and set up a floating hospital, or a jungle hospital, and they operate on children and change people's lives." For a moment she could really see herself surrounded by a bevy of grateful brown-faced children and their mothers, sobbing with gratitude, bearing armloads of watermelons and bunches of bananas. She smiled, more to herself than Thor, who had suddenly turned very white, as if she had slapped him. He rose to his feet.

"I'm doing good in the world by investing in new medical technologies. That will probably end up being of more benefit!" Without excusing himself he walked quickly over to his friend, who had attempted to push them together in the first place.

Maybe she was losing her touch. She had no idea he would be so bruised by her chitchat. Did he think she was accusing him? Anyway, there was something creepy about him—he hadn't seemed interested in her, it had been his female friend who liked her and thought she would be appropriate. He was probably just some minor con artist, hoping to find a rich girlfriend, and had assessed she had no more money than he. Or maybe he could see

she was almost ten years older. Perhaps he was very wealthy, but what he really wanted was some famous fashion model—they all did, didn't they?

It was twenty to eight. There was barely time to get across town, but she decided to meet Darryl Lever at the concert after all. She was about to ask the jewelry designer how long he was going to be in town, and see if she could leave him a deposit, when Lisa burst across the room pursuing a boy, perhaps in his early twenties, with long greasy black hair and a goatee, wearing a striped suit in green and blue—the outfit she recognized as being by a French designer known for his wacky and eccentric menswear. "Lisa wants to tell you something," the boy shouted shrilly to the jewelry designer. His voice did not seem to belong to his appearance, which was an attempt to resemble a guerrilla/pimp/music industry executive from Latin America.

"Charles says you should be giving me a necklace, or at least a choker, in return for my having this wretched cocktail party for you!" Lisa said. "It's so tacky, having a party like this! I might as well be having a Tupperware party!"

The goateed boy laughed uproariously. "I wouldn't announce that, Lisa."

"But it was your suggestion to have a party!" The jewelry designer looked as if he had been sent from Central Casting to represent a character in a forties spy film—seedy, mildly ominous, now reduced almost to tears by the wife of an SS officer or the Dragon Lady. "I haven't sold a thing!"

10

She got to Lincoln Center
only minutes before the concert was scheduled to begin. She wasn't even sure if Darryl would still be waiting for her, but he was standing in the lobby looking uncomfortably nervous; his face softened with relief as she crossed the floor. "Sorry."

"Hurry! Come on!" He grabbed her arm and hustled her upstairs; they were among the last to enter the auditorium. The woman usher at the door held an armload of programs and Florence reached over to take one. "Do you have a program?" the

usher said, retracting the pile from her grasp. Florence shook her head and again attempted to take one. "Do you have a program?" the usher repeated, this time with a surly curl of her lip.

"No, we don't have programs," Darryl said. The usher was about to hand him two, but Florence reached over trying to take the top one. The usher snatched both away.

"Do you have a program?"

"Do you
see
me with a program?" Florence said. She could feel a whistling hostility beginning to bubble up. The woman glared. "No, I don't have a program."

"Would you
like
a program?" The woman waited for Florence to respond. She couldn't bring herself to answer. The usher handed a program to Darryl—only one.

All right, perhaps the woman was crazy. She glanced down at the ticket stubs in Darryl's hand and took them from him to try to see where they were seated. "Do you need assistance finding your seats?"

"Yes, that would be good." Darryl was doing his best to soothe the usher—somehow, Florence felt, he thought she had done something rude to provoke the usher.

"I'll be happy to help you find your seats if you would let me see your tickets!" This was addressed to Florence; the woman was now directing unreserved hatred at her, and she couldn't help but feel hatred in return. She realized she was still blankly staring at the ticket stubs, and the woman seemed to think this was an act of deliberate malice on her part. Almost against her will she handed them over. The woman glanced at them briefly. "You're sitting down there," she said, pointing.

"Thank you so much!" Darryl was always exaggeratedly polite, particularly to anybody who seemed—in Florence's opinion—particularly rude, but it was a politeness without irony or hostility. Nobody ever interpreted it as sarcasm, as they no doubt did hers. Everyone was soothed by him. He led them down to their seats. She looked back briefly to see the usher staring at her scornfully. She simply couldn't fathom what had occurred. The woman had just seemed to take an immediate dislike to her and go out of her

way to act as if Florence was churlish. She wished she could learn to dismiss this type of incident or at least not take it personally. There was no use even asking Darryl if he thought something odd had happened. He was oblivious to such things. Or if he had noticed, he would have said that it was her own doing, that she often acted imperious. Perhaps she did act a bit arrogant. But unless she acted important, no one would treat her that way. How could Darryl understand this? He was a man—men, white men, were always treated as if they were important. He had been to Harvard. It was his own choice to work with the poor. Men who were at the top of the ladder could afford to be magnanimous to those positioned on the lower rungs.

He helped her into her seat in an almost motherly fashion and, when she was trapped in her chair, looked over at her with satisfaction. "I was almost going to tell you not to bother coming, after what you did to me the other night," he said defiantly. The orchestra filed onto the stage. They were badly dressed, in shabby black, apart from the women, who wore hideous bright tops in purple and green, as if the conductor had told them to "wear something bright and cheerful for a change." A panicky expression crossed Darryl's face—having been chastised, she might suddenly get up and storm out of the theater. "Just kidding," he said, taking her arm.

Some women, she was sure, might have found him charming, even sexy. Every nerve ending in her body twitched against him. He was so clean, like a little cat—not that she had anything against cleanliness, it was just that chemically her body rebelled against him. He wore his black hair curled at the back in an oddly old-fashioned little flip; his tiny steel-rimmed glasses were perched at the end of his rather aristocratically turned nose. Even his slight chinlessness contributed to his refined demeanor. He was vain—he had to be, with his small hands, white and plump, the nails buffed, and smooth, baby-soft skin—but what gave him the right to be? Didn't he see how silly he looked in his frumpy old-man's dark blue suit, probably bought at some thrift store?

She liked big blond men, California types, with a sexy stupidity to their faces, or those like Raffaello, with their tanned Euro-

pean ski-slope thuggishness. Thinking of Raffaello, she felt herself sink into depression. Was it that, since she had given him a blow job, he felt he had conquered her and no longer had any use for someone whose pursuit he had already accomplished? But she hadn't slept with him, and after all, Europeans didn't take such things seriously; they weren't the same as American men. If she had given Darryl a blow job, he would have been even more in love with her than he already was and would have accepted it as a sign they were engaged, or getting serious. If it was the other type of American male, the surfer dude, he might have fled out of fear. But surely Raffaello didn't fall into either of those two plebeian categories.

The soloist, a famous flautist, came onto the stage; the audience applauded and the music, a Mozart concerto, began. She couldn't seem to settle down. She looked around at the crowd. From the back the audience appeared almost entirely gray-haired. The woman next to her was wearing a really hideous long floral skirt, and from what she could see of the others, they were invariably dressed in crummy out-of-style tops, flowered, puff-sleeved, or with drab shawls over their shoulders, protection against the mostly imaginary air-conditioning. What was she doing here in the middle of this group, who resembled a bunch of old professors and grannies who knew nothing of fashion, of decent restaurants, of winter trips to St. Barts and summers in the Hamptons?

Darryl was in a kind of blissed-out state. No doubt he was so happy to have captured her for the evening and squashed her into a seat like a butterfly in a killing bottle. There was no way she could abandon him and flitter off with some other man. How could he just sit there, acting so absorbed in some out-of-date music? She knew that classical music was something she was supposed to enjoy and appreciate. It wasn't that she didn't like it; there was probably a place for it. Maybe as a sound track for one of those period films when the heroine attends a dance. But it was dead, it should have been locked in a box, it had no bearing on the world at the end of the twentieth century. There couldn't be any real

pleasure in digging up an old corpse reduced to dust and withered tendons.

Between movements Darryl turned to look at her, eyes shining in private ecstasy, as if expecting that during these lulls they would be united in a place she had never been. After the first movement she had caught on and during the next smiled at him, albeit weakly—it seemed to be enough. After each movement the audience broke out in a frenzy of coughing. The next piece was by Bach, the soloist a tiny Vietnamese violinist; this time after the second movement there was a hushed silence, following which the audience suddenly burst into a spontaneous sigh of rapture. "That was the finest ... I have ever heard it . . ." a man behind her muttered. Darryl was almost swooning alongside her. What was wrong with these people—or with her? Were they all simply pretending to be suffused with emotion, or was there something stopping her from feeling? All she could think about was intermission, and getting a drink.