A Certain Age (30 page)

"No—I have something better." Gideon removed the contents of the bag with a flourish. "A six-pack of beer for me . . . and for mademoiselle, a bottle of chilled champagne. Veuve-Cliquot. I hope that's okay."

"Divine." It wasn't the best champagne, but it was certainly drinkable—and had probably set him back fifty dollars. She went to the hall cabinets and removed a box containing her crystal

champagne flutes. The glass was so thin it was scarcely thicker than a piece of paper—ridiculously expensive, and already she had broken a couple. Several years ago she had begun buying fine china and crystal, as if shortly she would commence a married life of entertaining for which such things would be essential. This might have been inspired by attending someone else's bridal shower; she no longer remembered. Brandy snifters, martini glasses, a Tom and Jerry punch bowl with matching mugs in orange and blue, from the fifties—everything neatly bubble-wrapped and boxed for an existence that must have belonged to someone else.

She found a mug for his beer, and he popped the cork on the champagne bottle and filled her glass. Foam bubbled over the top and spilled onto the floor. "Cheers," he said as he cracked his can of beer.

"So what do you really do?"

"What do you mean?"

"You drive a cab—but I bet there's something else that you do, your real work."

"Yeah, sure. I, uh, I'm a writer. I haven't published anything yet, though."

"But you will. I bet your writing is really good."

"I must be the luckiest guy in New York, to have met you. I just think you're the best thing I've ever seen." He sat next to her on the couch and put his arm around her shoulder.

"I hope you're not going to be disappointed," she said. "I'm not usually this wild." She drank the champagne and he attentively refilled her glass.

"No, me neither," he said. "But what the hell, everybody's entitled to go crazy once in a while. I like you, being wild. I bet I like you just as much when you're not."

She slid out from under his arm. "Maybe I'll go to sleep now and see you another time."

"Hang on," he said. "Don't quit on me now. Look what Raffaello gave me." He took out the pipe and a nearly full vial. "It's so beautiful out. Aren't you having fun? We can go to Coney

Island, or whatever. Let's finish it off and you'll get your second wind."

"I don't know if I want to go on like this."

He lifted her hand to his mouth. "Look at your hands. You have the most beautiful dirty hands I've ever seen. I can't stand it. They're like swans—dying swans or something."

"I'm starting to feel kind of sick."

"You're not going to feel any worse, and you'll probably feel better. Then tonight you can sleep, and by tomorrow you'll be back to normal." He poured her more champagne, then he prepared the little pipe.

Somehow he had removed half her clothes. She was naked from the waist down, his fingers were inside her, and then he had unzipped his fly; his pants were halfway down and he was pushing his way in. "Hold on." She tried to scramble out from under him. "I'm not sure ... I don't even know you, can't we just..." It was impossible, she couldn't escape. "Just quit it! Get off me!"

But even while the top half of her protested, her lower torso rose up to meet him as if their bottom parts were organisms on the seafloor—blind, brainless—starfish or squid or sea cucumbers. "You want it? You want it? You want it?" He grunted. "Come on, tell me you want it!"

She heard something that sounded like a cat mewling and realized she was making the noise. "A condom." She managed to blurt out the words at last. "What . . . about . . . a . . . condom?"

"Don't worry about it." His fat thumbs dug into the tender area between her ribs so ferociously she thought she heard something crack, galvanized nails splitting a chunk of wood.

4

She Slept.
When she woke it was after five in the afternoon. Early evening, really, though at first she thought it was five in the morning. The date on the digital readout clock indicated it was almost forty-eight hours later. The ice cream truck jangled its demented tune on the street below. She remembered little of what had taken place. Most of the day, from the time she had arrived back in her apartment until the taxi driver had left, was a complete blank.

She was weak and had a splitting headache. There was nothing to eat in the kitchenette except for a packet of instant miso

soup. She boiled water and poured the mix into a mug. She was a little stronger after drinking it—she hadn't eaten in what must have been days; the salty taste was delicious—but she still felt awful, as if all that was left of her were the shell of some insect that had been sucked dry by a spider. Her skin had become a lampshade; her bones, powder inside the dead membrane. Her eyes beneath the paper lids were as dry as a carcass on a tarry roadside in the desert. A rattlesnake crushed by a car, still twitching. A brown paper bag. A handful of teeth.

But the worst part was that every cell in her body was alive and screaming for more crack. Her cells had never called out in individual despair before. But now each one felt like an octagon or mathematical shape in which one side had been removed. The cells hated having a hole, a gap; the only thing that could glue them together once more was to be filled or conjoined with cocaine.

She had not known until now what it really felt like to want to die. A part of her, something vital, had been sold for a mess of pottage and was gone forever. Her body screamed its hunger. Images of her animal behavior—worse than an animal—flashed jeeringly, mockingly, in front of her eyes, flickery as an old black-and-white TV set with poor reception.

Maybe there was some chocolate somewhere in the house. There had to be—half a bag of old Raisinets; half of a raspberry creme from that Godiva ballotin someone had given her ages ago (though maybe she had bought it herself) which she had stashed away to nibble at secretly during one particularly bad bout with PMS; a Callard & Bowser chocolate toffee. She opened every handbag she had, dumping out old dust and pennies on the bottom, hoping to find something. Finally the interior of the kitchen cabinets—way in the back—revealed an elderly chocolate Easter egg wrapped in shimmery foil, side dented in. She peeled off the silver. The chocolate was so old it had turned to whitish powder, but she stuffed it in her mouth.

No good. She still wished she had some coke. She turned on the water to take a shower and studied herself in the mirror. She

looked tired, but that was the only obvious change—perhaps no one would be able to tell the difference. The water was as hot as she could tolerate, but the cells calling for more cocaine were scarcely distracted. It occurred to her that she had Katherine Monckton's baby shower this evening—seven-thirty onward; it was written down in her diary. She had even picked out something a few weeks before, a silver rattle from Tiffany's, as useless a present as one might ever find, but the sort of thing that would be expected of her. It had cost a hundred and seventy dollars. But if she wasn't stronger, there was no way she was going to attend.

She turned down the hot water and turned up the cold. That was better. At least now her cells were jolted into insensibility, temporarily too shocked to continue their screaming demands, as if they were monstrous baby birds in a nest, pterodactyls ready to peck the mother bird to death.

She probably should stay at home. But she was so miserable and full of self-hatred, the thought of being alone with herself was repugnant. With shaking hands she spent an hour and a half shaving her legs, applying makeup, trying on and discarding one outfit after the next. Finally she decided on a mushroom-brown satin silk slip dress, over which went a sheer silk chiffon full-length coat in varying shades of brown and dull chartreuse. Her legs were bare beneath the dress; her shoes—hand-made in France—were pearly mushroom-kid sandals with a court heel. The outfit was simple, yet beautiful.

Still, no matter what she wore, no matter how expensive or nice, she always had the feeling that the dress or suit was a mere watered-down imitation of what elegance was supposed to be. A hundred years ago money could really buy clothing; things made back then had hand-rolled hems weighted with lead, delicately embroidered buttonholes, better-quality materials. Even the most expensive couture gown nowadays didn't have beadwork of real pearls. And then, too, she always had the feeling that whatever she wore was not quite up to date. If she bought it in a showroom—not on sale, but next year's things—by the time the weather was right for wearing it, other, similar items were in the stores. And by the

next season anybody who really knew about fashion had moved on to something new.

She tried to put up her hair in an elaborate nest, but after the shower it refused to obey, as wild as a bag of electric eels; finally she remembered her straw hats with tulle and she squashed one on her head. She was perhaps a little overdressed for a baby shower, but the address where the party was being held—a fancy one—was nearby. And at nine o'clock, the invitation said, the gentlemen were welcome. Perhaps she would be invited out to dinner afterward.

Anyway, the whole point was to never fit in
exactly:
ninety percent of the time it was better to wear tight black jeans and a black T-shirt to a somewhat fancy affair, making all the other women in little suits feel overdressed, or to wear a beautiful skirt or gown to something more casual, making the other women feel like slobs. It all had to be done within reason, of course. If the dress was too fancy—a strapless evening gown, say—then it was merely foolish, one couldn't relax, the other women would sneer. It had to be something beautiful yet simple and easy to wear.

At least, having spent so much time over herself, she felt better; it was a successful disguise. She studied herself in the full-length mirror behind the bedroom door, then decided some jewelry was in order to complete the costume. She pored through her jewelry chest. It was all junk, some things too trendy, the others out of date. All at once she remembered the bag of stuff that belonged to Virginia Clary. There were a few good things—there was no reason why she shouldn't borrow them to wear out for the evening; it was silly to have them just sitting by the door until she had time to bring them over to Quayle's.

She had to search for a while to find the Wal-Mart plastic bag. She must have moved it—or the housekeeper. Twenty minutes went by before she found it thrown behind a chair under some other things near a stack of boxes in the living room. She was running late by now, and poured the contents onto the sofa. She was uncertain, but it appeared that half the things were missing— at least the rings and the one valuable pin that had been in the

imperial-yellow Chinese purse were gone. Surely they were in the apartment. Perhaps she had tucked them away somewhere for safekeeping.

It was almost eight o'clock. She began to yank things from drawers, tossing them onto the floor and chairs at random; grabbing heaps of files, old folders, photographs, a box of Barbie dolls; opening the lid of a ceramic elephant that served as a coffee table and snatching a handful of matchbooks, an electric curling iron, rolls of Scotch tape, a tape measure, a screwdriver, a single lacquer chopstick, two miniature airline bottles of vodka, a broken traveling alarm clock, four cassette tapes of outdated pop music, an emery board, pens leaking ink, a silver turtle pillbox, triple-A-sized batteries that were probably no good, a large agate marble, safety pins, a dark red lipstick worn down to a stump—but the jewelry was nowhere to be found.

These things, these things—if her entire apartment had burned, there was nothing in it she would miss or even remember. There were people who lived lives of Zen simplicity. Their drawers were empty. There were no zippered cases stuffed with too many scarves and shawls under the bed. They did not open their medicine cabinets to have seven lipsticks, empty bottles of hand lotion and random Q-Tips topple out. But it seemed to her only the truly wealthy could afford to live without things. The more one had, the less one needed.

She gave up the search for the jewelry. The room looked as if it had been ransacked. She should never have started hunting while wearing such a fancy dress. Some kind of ointment or grease had made a spot—in front, just above the knee. She felt like ripping off the whole outfit and throwing it away. She grabbed the two vodka miniatures. There was one ice cube left in the top tray of the freezer, and the bottom one was completely empty. Only a slob would put an empty ice-cube tray back in the freezer. The remaining cube had a tired smell, but she put it in a glass— there were just glasses in the cabinet; somewhere along the line she must have broken or lost the others—and emptied the vodka into it.

At least she did not feel quite so shaky after the drink; she grabbed a washcloth and scrubbed at the spot with soap and water. A big wrinkled wet area formed a circle, but the darker center remained unchanged. There was no way she could wear this outfit. Probably the cleaners would be unable to do anything—grease on satin—and she would have to throw it out. The chiffon overcoat was one of those items that would never go with anything else. It would end up hanging in her closet, years would go by, and every time she remembered the coat and tried it on, she would be reminded of the dress, which had cost nearly nine hundred dollars at a sample sale in a designer's showroom.

She wanted to scream. She tried to pull the dress over her head but somehow got entangled in its various layers. She grabbed a steak knife from a kitchen drawer and slashed the dress down the middle, attacking it as violently as if it personally had done something to her. She stepped out of it, leaving a puddle of silky brown on the floor. She stuffed the whole thing into a trash bag under the sink, the trash smelled like spoiled milk and rotten cantaloupe—she should have tossed it out a week ago.