Crossroads (21 page)

 

We decided we needed time to think and that we wouldn't see one another for a week. Though we spoke almost every day on the phone, I found I couldn't stop thinking about Sean. At night I slept fitfully, imagining him with other women. In the morning I'd boil three-minute eggs and stare at them. They'd become breasts, smooth and bouncing, bubbling breasts, the kind Sean had suckled the night before. I knew it was a vision. Morning after morning I'd eat my eggs hardboiled.

At work in the middle of meetings, while Bill Wicker droned on about supports, openings, jackhammers, and studs, I thought of Sean's peachlike body, his slender fingers, his sturdy arms. While the architects revealed models for low-income units, and planners rerouted traffic, I pictured Sean and me with Eurailpasses on swift trains through the Alps, making love on the upper berth. On the subway I missed my stops. One morning, certain Sean had sought solace elsewhere
the night before, I almost missed my stop and had to dash off the train. As the doors closed behind me, I realized I'd left my entire South Bronx development project in a briefcase on the train. “Stop the train,” I shouted as it pulled out. I ran to the token booth. “Please, I left my work on the train.” As I began to describe the light tan briefcase with the brown handles, a small crowd formed. An elderly man shook his head. “Poor thing,” he said, and people pointed at me. Soon I looked to see that they were pointing at the briefcase I held in my hand, the one I'd just been describing to the token taker, who was phoning ahead to halt the train.

I had fantasies of Sean walking right into my office. I'd be in the middle of reviewing working drawings for traffic islands with the landscape architect, and he'd come stand in the doorway. “Deborah,” he'd say, “I've got to speak with you.” I'd raise my hand—“I'll only be a minute, dear”—but he'd shake his head. “This can't wait.”

After not seeing one another for a week, we met for coffee on a Monday evening. I had a speech prepared but forgot it the moment I saw him. “I made a mistake. I'm sorry,” I said. “I missed you all week.”

He held my hand. “Deborah, you didn't make a mistake. I don't think you should feel that way at all. You have some things to deal with and I guess I do, too.”

We ordered cappuccino and pastry. “I've decided to tell Mark to file.”

“I think that's a good idea.”

“I want to see you.”

He shook his head. “I don't know,” he said. “I have to think about this . . .”

Even though Sean wasn't the kind of man to go back, he agreed to give us another try. On Christmas we drank Irish whiskey and went ice skating at Wollman Rink, and on New Year's Eve we went to a party given by a cousin of mine in New Rochelle. The guests were mostly dentists and importers of
rare objects. Sean seemed to be having a good time with the sister of my cousin's wife, an ex-hippie who ran a pottery mill in New Hampshire. After talking to him for about fifteen minutes, she said, “You know, you've changed a lot since last year. You're easier to talk to and I like the beard.”

“I've never seen you before,” Sean replied.

She looked at him from all angles. “But aren't you . . .”

“No,” he said flatly, and I dragged him away to meet a dentist who puts caps on famous actors' teeth. He'd done Doris Day. “She thought I was Mark,” Sean complained. “I don't even look like Mark.”

“And you certainly don't act like him, so forget it.”

“But doesn't your family know? I mean, shouldn't she know?”

“I'm not even related to her. She lives in a commune up north.”

“But shouldn't she know? Shouldn't someone have told her?”

My cousin, Chuck, caught me by the arm and said he wanted me to meet some people. I left Sean with the dentist, who was telling him how he did Lana Turner. Chuck introduced me to two importers, one who stood on the bow of ships and watched native boys dive for pearls and another who trudged through the streets of Tokyo in search of something that sounded about as mysterious and plausible as the Maltese falcon. I glanced over and saw Sean with his mouth open wide while the dentist pointed to certain teeth.

One of the importers said, “Tokyo's just impossible. Do you know they number their houses according to when they were built?” Someone handed us a platter of caviar. Chuck, the tall, Russian-looking redhead on my father's side, had married the daughter of a caviar king. “That's amazing,” I said.

Ilene, Chuck's wife, “the caviar princess,” as Chuck liked to call her, tapped me on the shoulder. “Ah,” she whispered,
“your friend . . .” She pointed to the punch bowl. Chuck had put seven kinds of hard liquor into the punch. Then she pointed toward the backyard.

I went to the window and, peering out, I saw Sean, in his jacket and tie, rolling what looked like the bottom section of a snowman down the hill toward the ravine. I sighed, excused myself, and grabbed my coat. When I reached him, I saw he was making not a snowman but a snow fort, and he had begun a small arsenal of snowballs for himself. “Hey”—I caught him by the arm—“what are you doing?”

“Fighting the enemy.” He sounded as if he meant it.

I tugged on his arm. “Come on, put your coat on. You'll catch cold.”

“Who gives a fuck.” I tried to persuade him to drive back with me to Times Square and watch the ball drop. He tried to convince me that there were gooks behind the shrubs and he was going to fight them with little snowballs. He sank down to his knees in the snow. “Those people think Asia is pearls and caviar.” He pounded the snow with his fist. “It isn't.”

I drove home while Sean slept in the back. He would never remember the car ride home. The last thing he'd remember about New Year's Eve was the dentist looking at his teeth. As I drove, I listened to the radio, playing hits from the early seventies—mesmerizing space-age and hard-rock songs I found indistinguishable from one another. It was the music I'd heard at the party with Bobby Jones, a night I preferred not to think about. I switched stations until I found something more familiar, the Beatles, Martha and the Vandellas, music I'd grown up with. The early part of the decade seemed a blur. All I remembered was Mark. The disc jockey reminded us, in case we'd already forgotten, what had happened in the last few years. Nixon had resigned, the war in Vietnam had ended, oil prices were soaring, inflation was out of control. The night the war in Vietnam ended, Mark was asleep on the sofa and the bells
began ringing. He opened his eyes and looked at me.

“Is it Christmas?”

“No, dear,” I replied. “Christmas was last month. The war just ended.”

And now at midnight of a new year I was driving my drunken, jealous boyfriend home on Riverside Drive, on the brink of a new era, when nothing was going to be clear-cut anymore, and certainly not love.

Sean was sick with the flu for a week and I let him stay with me. He left Kleenex all over the place, squinched-up mucky balls of it, which he wanted me to pick up. He wouldn't bathe or brush his teeth and he sent me to the store at all hours for orange juice and magazines. He called me Andrea and refused to say who Andrea was. When he felt better, he grabbed me in the middle of the night and kissed me passionately while the January winds whirled outside.

Then I was sick for a week. Sean stuck by me, but it was clear he didn't like taking care of me as much as he liked being taken care of. He felt restless being in a room with a sick person. One night he put the word “xerox” down on the Scrabble board and I challenged it. He lost and then said he didn't want to play anymore. “What's the matter?”

He sat at the edge of the bed. “I'm going to L.A. in two weeks. Just for a month or so, but I might move out there.” He ran his hand over the covers. “Do you love me?”

I patted his hand. “I care about you a lot. I don't know.” I grew sad. I knew that deep down inside me something had changed. I wanted Sean. I probably even loved him, but I knew I could do without him. I knew I could do without anything, if I had to.

As I reached up to touch his cheek, he grabbed my hand. “Come with me for a week or so. Maybe you'd like it.”

I thought of all those miles of freeway, all those traffic jams. I kissed him lightly on the cheek. “Thanks, but I hate L.A.”

I
T WAS
a jumbo jet filled with librarians going to a convention and they all wore yellow badges with their names on them. Because we were late leaving for the airport, we couldn't get those secluded seats by the window and had to sit, instead, with six librarians to our right. After “snacks” of ham sandwiches with little pickles, Sean complained that we should have blown the money and gone first class. I complained that we should have flown Pan Am for $99.

The stewardess announced they were going to show forty-five minutes of “60 Minutes.” The librarians laughed, especially Jane and Harry Hanover, who sat next to us. She read
Ulysses
while he talked to the baby. Sean turned to them and said, “I guess they must be leaving out the segment on the plane crash.” Jane stiffened and said, “That wasn't very funny.”

“So what are they leaving out?” He turned to me. Then he shook his head. “I must be getting in a West Coast frame of mind.” Sean had meetings with the producers of
Minor Set
backs
and he also wanted to start looking for new work. For a week before he left, he flossed his teeth twice a day. I could tell he wanted to make a good impression. When the forty-five minutes of “60 Minutes” came on, Sean asked the stewardess for a blanket. “It's hot on this plane,” she said. But she brought us a blanket, which Sean put over us both. He reached his hand under my skirt. Jane and Harry looked over, shook their heads, and went back to their baby and their books.

It had taken some convincing to get me to agree to come with him, but in the end I wanted to. I was sure I'd never see him again if I didn't come with him, that L.A. would sweep him away in its glamour and smog. Sean seemed happy as we drove along Olympic Boulevard, our Chinese cab driver chattering away about something neither of us could understand. When we got stuck in traffic, Sean's knee idled at about eighty miles an hour. “What'll we do tomorrow?” I asked, trying to get his mind off the bottleneck.

“I have meetings.”

“Oh, I know you have meetings, but after the meetings?” He shrugged. “I don't know what time I'll be done. I can't make plans for the next few days.”

He was preoccupied, and when he was preoccupied he couldn't make plans. I slipped my arm through his. “So we won't make plans,” I said.

“People in L.A. make me crazy. You know, they have no attention span.” He stared out the window as he spoke. “I wonder if prices have gone up here like they have in New York. I hope it's not that expensive. Hey”—he tapped the driver—“are things expensive these days?”

“Sky-high,” the driver replied in an Chinese accent.

“I don't know,” Sean went on. “We'll find stuff to do. What do you feel like doing?”

The last time I was in L.A., Mark and I had just been married and I was attending a conference on urban design.
“I don't know what I want to do. Let's eat Chinese food somewhere.”

“All right, we'll see. I can't make plans.”

Our hotel room was all different shades of plaid. There was a yellow and red plaid bedspread and an orange plaid rug. The curtains were black and red check. I glanced down on the street from the window and there wasn't a soul anywhere and here I was in this abandoned city in a plaid room. “I hate this room,” I said to Sean.

“What do you mean? It's just a hotel.”

“I don't like the way it's decorated. I don't like where it's located.”

“Debbie, Four Tracks Films are putting us up here for three nights. That's all. I didn't pick it.”

“But do you like the room?”

He shrugged. “To tell you the truth, I'm a little indifferent to it.”

We were doomed from the start. A man who was right for me wouldn't want to stay in a plaid hotel with a vibrating bed. Mark once told me California was a place where serious people turn into boiled potatoes in hot tubs. Mark would never have let us stay in a room with a bed that vibrated for a quarter. And suddenly I found myself thinking about Mark.

How long does it take to get over someone, I asked myself, even as I picked up the phone to dial. And why, once you think it's over, does it come creeping back—the face, the hands, the eyes? Why, when I was with a man who was about as straightforward as the Manhattan Yellow Pages, who kept a little book so that he could write down everything that happened to him, who wrote down every photograph he took so he could keep a record, who ate as many chocolate chip cookies as suited him, why did I let Mark come creeping back and spoil it? So I sought refuge in even deeper ghosts. I assured Sean that it was essential that I place a call to my family at that exact
moment. “I just want to let them know where I am.”

My father accepted the charges. “What's wrong?” he asked.

“Nothing's wrong, Dad. I just wanted to say hi.”

“It's two in the morning here. It must be three a.m. where you are.”

I heard my mother's groggy voice. “Why's she calling at this hour? What's wrong?”

“I'm in California,” I said. “I forgot which way the time changed. You're on Central Standard Time, right?”

“I think so,” my father grumbled.

“Oh, and we're on Pacific Standard.” I tried to explain the time changes to myself.

“You're going to be on Rocky Mountain Time if you don't get off soon,” Sean whispered.

“How's the weather, Dad?”

“The weather? It's the middle of the night. What kind of weather did you have when you left New York?”