Any Place I Hang My Hat (23 page)

“How does it feel now when you walk?”

“Now? It hurts a little.”

“Wellll,” he said, too patiently for my taste, “don’t you think the jarring of running would make it hurt more than just a little?” I’d always made it a point not to respond in any way to condescending rhetorical questions. “Walk your route for the next six weeks. But build up to it slowly.” He was still twirling his pen, either a nervous habit or a display of some trendoid writing instrument that made a Mont Blanc look like a Bic.

“What about travel?” I asked. “Flying?”

“Following the candidates?”

“I have to get down to Florida.”

“Same as the running. Well, I’ll let you decide: four to six weeks. If there’s a problem with air pressure on a plane …”

I’d implode or explode. My ribs would crack into shards and stab me in the pericardium. But I said, “I fly all the time. I’ve never been in a situation where there’s been a problem with air pressure.”

“Amy Lincoln, you are a very determined woman.” He did that nodding-smiling thing, a display of amused tolerance that works in George Clooney movies but not in life. He glanced at his watch. “I’ve got to grab lunch. I’m in surgery all afternoon.” I realized his last sentence was, according to tradition, music to female Jewish ears, but for me it might as well have been Mahler. “Interested in grabbing a quick bite?” he asked.

A quick bite? Imagine a chorus of every woman in New York, from Tatty to Aunt Linda to Senator Clinton. They’d have sung out in a single voice: What have you got to lose? It’s a half hour and a tuna sandwich.

So I was on the verge of saying Sure when suddenly John popped into my head. Not the notion of John. Not a vision of John at lunch, halfway through an overketchuped burger, but John as I’d seen him that night at the concert, smiling and gazing with such pleasure at La Belleza. It should have been all the incentive I needed to say yes to Shea D’A. Instead I mumbled, “Sorry, I’ve got a deadline,” and I was back at my desk before my next coherent thought. Of course that thought was of John.

I left the office around seven feeling as low as I could go. I was one of those season/weather/mood people: summer good, winter bad. Yet even though we’d just gone over to daylight savings time and the sun was doing its damnedest to brighten the cold dusk, all I could see was the coming dark.

I considered calling Tatty for a bracing You’ll meet someone and be happy in no time pep talk. For her, all a person had to do to get rid of the miseries was snap out of it. Psycho plus pharmacology equaled a word that was hard to spell and a waste of time.

For serious blues, her prescription was lightening your hair a couple of shades and getting a deluxe manicure. Since I was okay with my hair and could not afford to have my nails done in one of those pricey places that employed breasty women named Svetlana, I stopped in at my usual, Jane Nails, around the halfway point of my nightly walk home.

The owner, Jane, greeted me with her usual “Amy!” Genuinely happy to see me, though appropriately short of ecstatic. Other than my teachers, the only other person in my life who had visibly brightened upon seeing me was John. Even when I was beginning to sense Uh-oh, maybe this relationship isn’t going to be the one and it’s not only me thinking it, I’d return to a restaurant table from the ladies’ room anticipating the polite hoisting of cheek muscles that creates the dating smile. Instead, he’d light up. Hey! he’d say, with a genuine smile. Then he’d lean forward a bit, the vestigial remains of the old etiquette: a gentleman standing when a lady approaches a table.

Jane said, “Five minutes,” while holding up five fingers. I sat in a plasticized version of a leather tycoon chair, set down my backpack, and pulled out my cell phone. I also dry-swallowed a Percocet because my ribs were hurting so much I was actually contemplating spending money on a taxi to get home.

I cradled the phone in my left hand and did that staring-at-keypad thing, trying to decide whom to call. I’d noticed that people like me, who lived alone, tended to fondle cell phones in those tough moments when it hit them that not only did they live alone, they were alone. Any human voice would do at such a moment—a friend, a relative, a Time Warner Cable rep.

Well, I needed a less-than-five-minutes person, so I decided on Freddy Carrasco. The last I’d spoken to him, I’d broken my ribs. Why had he called that night? Oh, about his meeting with Mickey Maller, the lawyer I’d set him up with. He’d been planning to spend the weekend with his girlfriend going through his mother’s papers, looking for something that might tie her to Thom Bowles or to Bowles’s father, William Bryson Bowles.

Freddy’s “Hello” sounded upbeat. Had he actually found out something that linked his mother to either of the Bowleses?

“Hi. It’s Amy Lincoln.” No response. “Freddy?”

“Yeah. Hi.”

“How are things going?”

“Not bad.”

“Did you and your girlfriend find anything about—”

“Listen, can I call you later this week? I have a class tonight and I’m already late for it.”

“Sure. I’ll speak to you—” But that was the end of the conversation.

Had Freddy been in that much of a rush to get to class? I didn’t think so. In fact, I was thinking he couldn’t wait to get off the phone with me.

It was still cold enough for my nails to dry to diamondlike hardness by the time I got home. Ergo, I was unable to avoid opening my mailbox. I extracted a few envelopes that looked like actual mail along with catalogues offering such life-enhancing objects as an American flag copper weather vane.

Actual mail was a MasterCard bill, two invitations, and a pink-and-white gingham cutout of a butterfly announcing the birth of Zoë Hannah Duckworth Levine. It took me a few seconds, until I got to the elevator, but then I remembered Zoë’s father was an astronomy major I’d gone out with briefly in college, a man with as many flakes of dandruff on his shirts as there were stars in the sky. All I could now envision of him were white specks on green flannel.

In the elevator, whose fine brass buttons had been replaced with a fingerprint-streaked digital pad, I opened a brunch invitation from Bunny Morales and David Vale. They’d both lived in my building in the project and Bunny and I had kept in touch. When I got to my floor, I opened the second invitation. It was from a Democratic pollster and a Chicago Tribune reporter I’d met at the conventions in 1996 and 2000 and spent-tops—twenty minutes each talking to them about subjects non-Democratic. I had no clue they knew each other, much less loved each other. I also drew a blank as to why they wanted me at their nuptials in Sonoma Valley, at Gray Acres, which sounded like a graveyard but was probably a winery. Since I’d no doubt see them again in 2004, I had to send a gift.

I let myself into my apartment and took out two slices of pizza from the back of the fridge, then threw them out, uncertain whether the randomly placed convex white circles were icy pepperoni slices or fungal growths.

Each birth announcement, whether a mini–Sports Illustrated cover spotlighting seven-pound, eight-ounce Max beside an actual football, or something pink and cherubic on vellum regarding the arrival of eight-pound, fourteen-ounce Jordana, was a reminder that the father of the child I was determined to have was most likely going to be an anonymous sperm donor-some medical student whacking off for a hundred bucks to thoughts of getting blown by Reese Witherspoon. Every wedding invitation made me feel as if eligible men were evanescing at an exponential rate instead of a merely arithmetical one.

I wound up drinking a glass of milk and eating a bagful of sugared almonds I’d gotten at a friend’s wedding a half year earlier. An excellent custom, Italian. I’d been invited with a date, and naturally asked John. When the band leader called on all the single girls to catch the bouquet, I held back. “You’re not going to join them?” John asked casually. I looked over at the gaggle of squealing, giggling women, muscles taut, ready to leap, as if in the final game of an Olympic volleyball match. Not wanting him to think of me as one of those shameless, desperate gigglers, I’d merely shaken my head and stood my ground, which was beside him.

I heard a sharp crack: an almond and not a tooth. But it was one of those instants when not only do you become hyper-aware—suddenly tuned in to every atom of nut and grain of sugar sticking to your gums—but also farsighted. You not only look at that particular moment with especial clarity, you observe your life. Okay, maybe there was no actual panorama, Desertion by Mother leading directly to Me on the Couch with Three Remaining Almonds and a Quarter-glass of Milk. But I found myself re-viewing that wedding to which I’d taken John.

Maybe my refusal to join the gleeful female New York twenty-somethings elbowing one another aside to catch that bouquet of peach and white roses hadn’t demonstrated to John how cool I was, how not-desperate. “You’re not going to join them?” he’d asked. Instead of a casual inquiry, might he have meant Are you going to be one of those women, ready to declare herself for marriage? When I stood my ground in my pale blue silk slip dress, my hair held up by two silvery combs, thinking how cool I seemed, did John see a woman who was interested neither in marriage nor in him?

Another time: after the planes hit on 9/11, when he called and I went to his apartment on the Upper West Side. We’d stayed watching TV for hours on end. I’d asked him, “Don’t you want to go up to Connecticut to be with your family?” As in, Are you crazy, not getting out of Manhattan when you have an alternative? He’d shaken his head. No. The next day we went downtown, as close as the cops would let us get, and he filmed for a while, asking the people who looked nailed in place, staring downtown, where they’d been when it happened, how they’d gotten home. Good documentarian that he was, he got many long stories. “Do you have an idea how you’ll use this?” I’d asked. He’d said, “No. I doubt if I’ll ever use it. It’s not really professional quality. I may never even look at it again. Maybe I’ll save it for my great-great-grandchildren. Although when you think about it, how much does Pearl Harbor mean to our generation? Whatever. At least it will be a personal link between them and some dead guy who lived in the early twenty-first century.”

A few minutes later he said, “You be the journalist and I’ll be the cameraman.” I didn’t want to. All I wanted to do was get the hell uptown, away from that thick air with its stench of melted steel, vaporized printer ink, burned-up flesh. But I went over to a coffee shop owner washing his windows. As he talked to me he held his squeegee the way the farmer in American Gothic held his pitchfork. He told me about the people he’d watched jumping from the towers. Some of them held hands, he started to sob, but none of them made it all the way still together. He’d been up all night praying for God to give him some sign that they’d died before they reached the ground or their hands simply slipped apart. No, he hadn’t gotten any sign as of yet. John filmed us until the guy sat down on the curb to weep. I asked him to stop shooting. I took the squeegee and finished cleaning the window while John turned off his camera, sat down beside the guy, and put his arm around his shoulder while the guy wept into his hands.

That night, I went back to my apartment. He kept asking me why, and I said, “Look, I don’t want to be in your way if you want to go up to Connecticut.” He told me, “That’s crazy, if I wanted to go that badly, you’d come with me. Unless you wanted to go to your aunt’s house in Brooklyn. Or see your father …”

I honestly felt he needed his space. John enjoyed being alone. He could keep himself endlessly occupied: reading, screening other people’s work, listening to every kind of music, going to lectures on arcane subjects, playing pickup basketball. I didn’t want him to feel he had to be polite. Or that I was being sneaky, using the nation’s nightmare to slide into his apartment and his life. Because then he’d be stuck. How could he get rid of me?

Well, by asking. But back then, that thought never occurred to me. I can’t say for sure what I pictured: not me at ninety, going out to buy dental floss for my two remaining teeth. I suppose I imagined John at long last (two weeks? two years?) sitting me down to explain why it wasn’t working and how I’d have to go. Or just getting so disgusted living with someone who kept straightening out the forks in the drawer that he finally screamed, Get the hell out!

Yet John had been so clear on wanting to be with me. If I’d thought about it, I would have realized it was the time everybody was clinging to the person or people closest to them. And there he was, not going up to his family, but wanting to be with me. What had I been thinking when I left? No clear thoughts at all, just a need to leave. Why? Because I was the one who really needed space, but rather than admitting it, even to myself, I’d lobbed that need over to his side of the court? Or had my heart known something my head couldn’t acknowledge, that having been a guest at everybody’s family occasions had only reinforced my Véronique-genes’ proclivity for avoiding entangling alliances?

I was, and probably would always be, alone. All those weddings that weren’t mine. All those babies I wasn’t having. Sitting by myself in the emergency room, no annoying relative or concerned friend by my side. Being the loner invited by people for Thanksgiving turkey or Hanukkah latkes so they could feel benevolent. I could remedy all that. A baby. But was it fair for me to have a child simply because I needed a family?

I sensed I’d gone over the line from a cozy melancholia into serious self-pity, but Passover loomed a week and a half away. When I’d said goodbye to John’s parents at his cousin’s wedding, they’d said, “See you at the Seder.” Where would I go? Okay, almost anywhere, since tradition says a stranger has to be welcomed because of Jews having been strangers in a strange land. But the one place in the world I’d felt I actually belonged was with the Orensteins.

Well, not anymore. I thought of everyone I knew who lived alone, single, divorced, abandoned, widowed. Did they sit around staring at three candied almonds, thinking that at some point they’d better start amassing pills for that final night alone? Was that the alternative to a life spent with no meaningful connections? Or did they simply shrug, turn on TCM, and watch Lady L?