A Certain Age (27 page)

"I'll take care of you." He hadn't even been listening to what she was saying. It was the first time she had allowed herself to reveal how deep her cynicism and bitterness went, and he still looked at her and smiled, his brown eyes peering over the edge of those antiquated little glasses. He loved her. If only that were satisfying in and of itself. Probably it would have been for most women; it would have been for her mother—but then, women were grateful for crumbs!

"You have nice eyes," she muttered. They were as thickly fringed as a Jersey calf s—what a waste on a man. He almost blushed with embarrassment and pleasure at her compliment. Suddenly she put her head in her hands and began to cry. "Oh, God, Darryl, what's to become of me? I need money. I need money. I need a job. I'm in debt up to my neck and I'm going to lose my apartment. I need a husband." He got up and pulled his chair around to her side of the table.

"Don't cry, Florence. Look, I'm here. I'll look after you." He got a handkerchief from his pocket and held it awkwardly under her nose; she grabbed it from him and blew into it, feeling furious

with herself. He put his arms around her shoulders and tried to hug her, but she pushed him away. "I said I'd marry you."

"Leave me alone," she said. "Don't do me any favors." Half of her knew his words had not come out exactly as he had intended. Darryl didn't pity her, he loved her. The poor man, he had stepped in quicksand.

"I'm just trying to help." He was hurt.

"If you really want to help, just leave me alone." Then an idea came to her. "Look, I have a bunch of jewelry. It's not . . . it's not mine. If I give it to you, would you hang on to it? I can say my place was broken into. Burglarized. The woman will get the insurance money, and . . ."

He pulled his chair back to his side of the table and began to shovel the now-cold food into his mouth. "You're kidding, right?"

"No."

"You're crazy."

"I don't want you to do anything. Just keep the jewelry in your place until I ask for it back."

"Florence, you're kidding, right?"

"Who's this going to hurt? I'm desperate. I don't have any family. Would you be happy if I lost my goddamn apartment? Then I could be one of your poor homeless clients! You'd really have to take care of me!"

He was looking feverish. He had devoured his entire plate of congealed food and stared at hers hungrily. She began to pick, absently, under the gaze of his animal stare. "There's nothing I can say," he said at last.

"So do you despise me?" She felt almost cheerful.

"No, no. I'm worried about you. I know you're not serious. But I've known you almost ten years now and I've never seen you so . . . desperate. That's not like you."

"So what do you want to marry me for, Darryl? Someone so desperate, thirty-two years old, who has what you would consider inferior ethics."

"Nonexistent ethics!" he blurted. Then he glanced away, ashamed. "I don't know what to say. I kept thinking I'd get over

you, meet someone else, we could be friends. But I remember our time together, and what it was like, and wishing I could go back to it. I have a feeling about you, Florence. I know you're the one for me."

Perhaps she wasn't as crazy as she thought. He had to be nuts! Their time together? She had gone out with him—or at least screwed him, intermittently—for six months, at most a year, and that was eight or ten years ago. It had never been a relationship; it had been two people meeting to go to the movies or Rollerblading, having occasional sex. Hadn't that been during her cocaine phase anyway, when along with two or three girlfriends—Allison had a trust fund—they would get high, go out to bars, pick up guys? Which was normal behavior, quite typical for recent graduates, what they later referred to, jokingly, as their "postgrad degree." "All I'm asking is for you to just keep a bunch of stuff for me. You don't even have to know what it is."

"I . . . Florence . . ." He took out a handkerchief and honked his nose. "God, you're mean to me. Here I am, telling you I have TB and I'm in love with you, and instead of seeing how romantic this is, you want me to harbor stolen goods for you."

"Yeah, yeah." Despite herself she had to laugh. "You should be used to me by now. If you really want to marry me, don't harbor any illusions."

"Believe me, I don't."

12

At home that night
she went through the bag of jewelry belonging to Virginia Clary. Tomorrow she would take the stuff over to Quayle's and leave it with Marge. She had never had any intention of getting Darryl to hold the stuff while she declared it stolen. She had only been saying that to test him—and maybe to test herself. She would never do anything immoral or illegal, however innocuous, mostly because she was afraid of getting caught. She had a guilty expression; it was part of her charm for men. It was

part of the reason why women didn't like her: the cat who ate the butter.

In the bottom of one of the little velvet sacks was another sack of yellow Chinese silk, swaddled beneath tissue paper, which she hadn't even noticed before. More junk, she supposed. It felt like a bag of rings. They would probably be costume, or zircons, or more low-grade diamonds and sapphires in garish settings that at the most would bring five hundred or a thousand apiece. The whole country was full of women weaseling gems from husbands or lovers, women who spent too much on garbage, shopping at jewelry stores in suburban malls so that they might glitter in front of other women. What man would appreciate a fat, puffy hand, fingers strangled with too tight bands? Dimpled hands, lacquered nails sharpened and glistening red. Women might as well have been in purdah for all the attention they got from men after, say, age twenty or twenty-five. Even before that, the men paying attention were mostly old greasy guys in their sixties, riding motorcycles, or pimpled employees of Hardee's and McDonald's. In Saudi Arabia the rich women bought couture outfits and—if they went out at all—had to hide under dark shrouds.

But to her amazement the jewelry in the bag was actually valuable. She couldn't be certain, yet as she peered at the stuff with her jeweler's loop, the quality of these stones looked very fine indeed. A huge ruby surrounded with pearls; an oddly shaped cabochon sapphire; an elaborate pink-diamond-studded flamingo not dissimilar to the one designed by that pathetic, sad little duke for the Duchess of Windsor. What should have been the romantic love story of all time had been turned into a farce. But this flamingo—it was definitely real. And then—there it was—an opal ring, the opal of truly great quality, intense, huge, a deep blue-black shot with explosive veins of candy-red fire.

She was up for hours, unable to go to sleep, wired, agitated. The same thoughts played over and over in her head. She had been

joking when she suggested to Darryl that he hold on to the jewelry so that she could report it stolen; now it was beginning to seem like a reasonable solution. After all, some of it hadn't even been listed; was Virginia Clary unaware of its existence? Perhaps she had forgotten all about it, in which case she would never miss it. Florence didn't even need to involve Darryl—she could just bring the other stuff to Quayle's and leave out the one valuable sack.

Against one wall of the living room was an old-fashioned wooden filing cabinet. She had never gotten around to actually filing anything—any papers she thought she needed to keep she merely flung inside—and now she emptied the contents onto the floor, hoping that among the scraps she would find some solution to her present predicament. Perhaps a letter rejecting her for a job but suggesting she apply again in a few years, or an overlooked bank account belonging to her mother that would now save her.

She remembered so little of her past. A manila envelope revealed a stack of photos from a ski trip taken eight years before; the man—boy, really—who had invited her, and paid for her to accompany him, had long since disappeared from her life. Who had he been? A lawyer, or perhaps an architect, now married to someone else, living in San Francisco. His ruddy-complected face was topped with a sheared crest of reddish hair. She didn't even remember his name. Why hadn't she married him? In retrospect, he was a nice enough guy. How dull he had seemed to her then. She was twenty-four and still thought that a famous artist, a rock and roll star, a billionaire, would come her way, that she would be attached to the kind of man to make other women jealous when she walked into the room. The architect (Brandon—his name came back to her) was boyish and ordinary, designing office buildings and weekend homes. Eventually, after marrying, he had gone off to start his own company with several boyish partners, all similar to himself.

Here was a picture of herself at Allison's baby shower—for the first baby—sitting on a couch between a girl named Daisy

and another named Clare. Or maybe it was Clare-Alice. Daisy was holding up a green terrycloth towel with a hood designed to resemble a dragon's head. The towel had a little spine of orange cloth as well. The child would be able to dry itself on the beach or after a bath by climbing into the dragon costume. Daisy had married a fantastically wealthy boy from Dallas, reputedly very stupid; Daisy was known for her terrible temper, which she had managed to keep hidden from her fiancé, though not from Florence. They had had a falling out shortly before Daisy's wedding, which took place in Bermuda. Daisy, she now remembered—the picture emphasized this—looked just like an ostrich, the same protruding eyes set too widely apart, the receding chin, an expression of gormless astonishment. She was nowhere near as attractive as Florence, yet she was the one who managed to end up with the rich boy. And Clare-Alice, holding up her gift, a stuffed-and-diapered ape almost four feet tall, the F. A. 0. Schwartz box on her lap. It had probably cost someone three hundred or more dollars. True, the man she had married had two children by an earlier marriage, who resided with them, but the year before he had been cowinner of a Nobel Prize in . . . chemistry, or physics. At the time of Clare-Alice's marriage she had thought how dreary it would be to marry an academic, a research scientist.

Everything was strewn in heaps on the floor. Old business cards acquired at cocktail parties, scraps of paper, corners of napkins and matchbooks with scribbled phone numbers belonging to first names that meant nothing to her. Postcards, Christmas cards, receipts, bank statements, credit-card bills. Photos, stamps of extinct denominations, restaurant reviews torn from the
Times
of now-closed restaurants. A valentine to her mother she had hand-made at age eight. A fake Chanel wristwatch she had bought on the street for ten dollars that no longer worked. Perhaps it needed only a new battery, but whenever she had worn it her wrist had turned green. Little bottles of perfume, given as gifts following various parties, along with five baseball caps: one from the opening of a new gym, another from a party given by a

French clothing company for an event in a giant warehouse on a pier. It was her entire life, her history of existence in New York, and all of it added up to exactly nothing. The negative results of a Pap smear, a keyring with a tiny attached flashlight in the shape of a fish. A mushy note from Darryl, inviting her to a black-tie dinner at the Waldorf, at which someone he worked for was going to be given an award. The note was ten years old; it dated back to when he was working for the prestigious old New York firm. Amazing to think that he had been in love with her— or at least had a crush on her—even back then. A letter from Carlos, after the abortion. He was wealthy. For a while she had been in love with him. There was even talk of getting married. But neither of them was ready for a baby. It had been their mutual decision. Shortly afterward he had gone back to Chile. She hadn't heard from him again. And a snapshot of her with James on the beach. He said he had outgrown it, but the fact that he had been gay—okay, it was at boarding school and the year after, in England—made her uneasy, that and his femininity; he was all too clearly looking for someone to be strong for him. How could she have known that within eighteen months after she broke it off he would come into a title and a huge estate in Scotland—or was it Wales?

There had been a million opportunities open to her—she saw now—and she had slammed the door on every one. She found a piece of stationery and wrote a note: "Dear Tracer. How's it going? Hope I didn't do anything to offend you, and that your idea of throwing a party is still on when you get back. Have a great trip— you're not missing anything here in NYC in August! Call me! Yours, Florence. P.S. Saw Darryl tonight and we talked about you!

A tiny hand, waving a white handkerchief, emerged at a great distance from the middle of a wave far out in the ocean. She woke from her dream in a dead sweat. The air was completely still. It

was so quiet it took her a moment to realize the sobbing air conditioner must have broken down. Its usual groans of torment and despair were gone, no musty and damp gusts flapped through the room. Only the bedside clock struggled glumly, counting off its morose seconds with bludgeoning ticks.

PART THREE

I

Despite the expense of
her monthly maintenance bills—almost fifteen hundred dollars for a one-bedroom—and the supposedly grand address, her apartment—and the building—was a complete mess, with antiquated wiring and a tendency for the fuses to blow if more than one electrical item was turned on at the same time. When she tried to turn on the light, half the time nothing happened. Everything in the place was a disaster. The windows were old-fashioned, with little panes; cold air blew in during the winter, and in summer they could never be opened fully. Probably the