Crossroads (25 page)

 

The New York Center for Urban Advancement covers two floors of the newly renovated building that houses it. The architects, the planners, and engineers work side by side in large rooms with drawing boards. Only a few of us whose work is of a more private, contemplative nature have private rooms. I am one, and Frank Atkins, the landscape architect, is another. Frank was someone we'd stolen from Skidmore and he took a cut in salary but said he had to have privacy.

I never paid much attention to the men I worked with because I was married to Mark and then I was with Sean. But after I bought the bamboo lamp, I began to find excuses to go into Frank's office. He was more than happy to show me how to take a brick-filled playground that doubled for a garbage dump and turn it into a little rock garden. I brought in some working drawings for a group of renovated, burned-out fifty-unit dwellings whose roofs, once our contractors put them back on, I intended to turn into sunbathing and picnic areas. I asked Frank to help me with shade, and he said, “Sure, how about over dinner?”

Frank looked a little like a tree. He had green eyes and dark skin, dark hair. There was a coarseness about him. “I never really got used to living in the city,” he told me as we ate seaweed in a nearby Japanese place. “I'm a country boy at heart. I guess that's why I went into landscape.”

We had a lot in common. The next night we went to dinner and a Broadway play. During the play, he held my hand. His palms were a little sweaty. We saw
Loose Ends
, a play about the people of the sixties who suddenly found themselves in the seventies. “Boy,” he said afterward, “I can really identify with that. We experienced life differently because of the sixties. We saw a revolution. We had a feeling of commitment.”

Frank wanted us to go to Joe Allen's after the show and I said, “All right, but I want us to split it, O.K.?”

He clasped my hand. “But I like taking you out. You aren't under any obligation . . .”

“Oh, I wasn't implying that.”

In the restaurant Frank pointed to the posters on the wall. “Do you know that those posters are from all the shows that flopped?” Yes, I knew that.
Mata Hari
, with Bette Davis.
Home Sweet Homer
, a musical version of the
Odyssey
, with Yul Brynner,
Dude
, by the people who brought you
Hair
. Sean and I had once sat at dinner and laughed over those flops. Over all the flops. I cursed the love that lingered, and made a decision, as the seafood combos arrived, to have a nice, simple, friendly relationship with Frank.

After dinner, we went back to my place and he thrust his tongue into my mouth. When we completed that first, breathless embrace, he said, “I wish I'd met you months ago. I've been having a hard time.”

“So have I,” I heard myself say.

The next afternoon, Frank was completing a rendering when I stopped by his office. “Hi,” I said, leaning against the doorway, waiting to be asked in. “You sure left early this morning.”

“I wanted to get an early start. Didn't wake you, did I?”

I shook my head. “You going to be working late? I thought maybe we could go out for a drink.”

He was coloring a lawn a deep shade of green. “Oh, that'd
be great, Deb, but I really want to complete these drawings.”

“You don't even want to grab a bite . . .”

“Naw, I'm going to work straight through.” I was aware of the molding of the doorway as it pressed against my spine. I tapped it to see if I could identify the wood by its sound. Oak, spruce, pine. A cheap wood, no doubt.

For the rest of the week, I didn't approach him. Once he came into my office with half a tuna fish sandwich he couldn't finish. I knew I'd broken the cardinal rule: you should never date someone where you work. But on Friday he asked me to go out with him for a drink. We had the drink at Harry 0's. Then we went to see
Mean Streets
and
The Wild Bunch
at the Quad. Then we had dinner at Scribbles in SoHo. I told myself I wouldn't sleep with him, no matter what, but when it came time to go home, he asked if we couldn't go back to my place. I thought it was a little odd, since his apartment was just around the corner, but we went uptown.

On the way, he told me he thought I was really a great person. “Oh, I think you're great too,” I told him. “In fact, I'd love to see more of you.”

He said it could be arranged, except for this one little problem, “You see, I've got this lady. She lives part of the time in New Jersey and part of the time with me. But when she's in Jersey, we can get together.”

“Uh-huh.” I didn't feel so good. I'd eaten boiled chicken, and maybe it didn't agree with me. Or maybe it was
Mean Streets
. Or maybe it was Frank. But in my old age I was growing pragmatic. I didn't want to think about Sean. I didn't want to get involved with Frank or with anyone else. But I didn't want to be alone. I decided to expand my horizons.

I met George at La Fortuna. He was eating a cannoli and had powdered sugar all over his face. I laughed, then looked down into my cappuccino. “Not easy to eat these things,” he said. “Wanta join me?”

George Goldman taught sociology at Fordham and lived in the neighborhood. “I come here all the time. Best cannoli in the city.”

“I like to work here in the evenings sometimes,” I said.

“Oh, me too,” George agreed.

We started meeting at La Fortuna at night. He brought papers to grade. I brought my maps and sketchbooks. I was seriously thinking about returning to school in design, a fantasy I hadn't had in a few years. It was easy to sit across from George and draw. George was very serious. His watery gray eyes, like pools of brackish water, his reddish beard, his wire rims, they all contributed to the sense of seriousness he exuded. “Do you know,” he said once, looking around at all the homosexual couples, “why there aren't any S-and-M bars for men and women?” I couldn't figure it out. “Because men and women don't need them. It's built right into the relationship.” He started to laugh, and I thought, Good, a serious man with a sense of humor.

With a little coffee in him, George was very talkative. He could talk and he could listen. He liked to talk about problems, especially mine. “Why didn't your marriage work?” he asked me the second night we met at La Fortuna. “You know, marriage is very tricky stuff. I wrote my thesis on it.”

He reminded me of Mark in some ways. Mildly neurasthenic. Long, slender hands that moved all the time. Fine features. I wouldn't go to bed with him. I didn't want that. For the moment having someone to meet in the evenings at a local coffee house was fine with me. “My marriage? Why didn't my marriage work? Oh, you know. It was just one of those things that was sixty percent right and forty percent wrong. I mean, we had tons in common, but Mark was sort of . . .”

“Insensitive?”

I smiled. “Yes, he was insensitive. He was very smart. A good lover, but basically, deep down, I think he wasn't . . .” I searched for the right word describing what Mark was not,
which I knew was something Sean was. “Mark wasn't kind.”

“You still love him, don't you?”

“No, I don't love him.” I could now say that and mean it.

“Yes, you do. I can tell. I've done research in this area.” I shook my head. “It's written all over your face.” I looked at my reflection in the glass. “I bet you haven't been with anyone since you and your husband split.” I told him I'd been with lots of men, which was only mildly the truth. “Women,” he said sardonically, shaking his head.

George didn't walk me home that night because he had an exam to write for the next day, but Lila did. That is, she walked about twenty yards behind me. I saw her at the deli and newspaper store on Columbus and she watched me as I walked by. At least I think it was Lila. She wore a fuzzy, pink angora hat, the kind I'm sure Mark would have hated, and she was reading a copy of the
SoHo News
.

I think she signaled to me as I walked past her, but I looked away. Maybe she didn't signal me. Maybe I just wanted her to. I remember how Sean used to tell me I should just go up to her and tell her what I thought of her. But instead I picked up my pace. I knew she was behind me but I didn't want her to catch up. I didn't want to talk to her. As I crossed Columbus, I saw her reflection in the window of a store. The pink angora hat, the thin spindly legs. I wondered what she wanted. I wondered if she knew I'd spent a night with Mark. As I walked, I decided I should turn around and talk to her. I shouldn't be afraid to confront her.

But when I turned, I saw she was gone, if she'd ever been there at all.

It was comfortable, meeting George in the evenings at La Fortuna. It was easy, and after a while I suggested we go to my place for a nightcap. Usually he wanted to go home. He always had exams to prepare, lectures to write. But one night he accepted. He fidgeted and was nervous inside my apartment. “And this is where you lived? When you were married?”

“George, listen, that was a long time ago. I'm over my marriage. I've had another serious relationship since my marriage ended.” George downed his Scotch as quickly as he could and said he'd meet me the next night at La Fortuna. For a few weeks we met there regularly and from time to time I suggested going to a film, a lecture. He always had some reason why he couldn't go, and finally it struck me. I couldn't get him out of the cafe.

One night I asked him to dinner. I managed to pin him down to a Friday and he could find no reason not to come. I was preparing a fish casserole with sour cream sauce when the phone rang. “Oh, Deb, listen, something's come up. Have you gone to lots of trouble?” It turned out he had to teach a class for a sick friend that night, but I told him the food would keep until Saturday.

George arrived in jeans and a green turtleneck, without any wine. He poured himself several double Scotches and managed to get drunk enough to sit still for dinner. I put on Charlie Parker and lit some candles. After dinner, he said, “Boy, I love that music. Come on over here, baby, and sit by me.”

Half an hour later, George sat naked on the rug with his hands hiding his face, pressing his palms to his brain as if it were a grenade about to explode. “Look,” I said, “it's all right; it really is.”

“You don't understand. This has never happened before.”

“So then it probably won't happen again. I wouldn't worry about it.” I was putting my clothes back on.

“It's because you're so intense. I can't take all that intensity.”

“George, it's really all right. Let's get some sleep.”

He shook his head. “I couldn't possibly sleep here.”

He went home, promising to call. I waited three nights. Then I went to La Fortuna. George wasn't there, but Lila was. That is, she stood outside in a raincoat, wearing that same pink angora hat, and she stared in. It suddenly occurred to me that
she was looking for Mark. Just as I realized that, she saw me. My heart pounded as the two of us made eye contact for the first time since I'd learned she was sleeping with my husband. But then she got a startled look in her face, and before I knew it, she was gone again.

I buzzed Sally when I got in and we sat down to have a drink. “So,” she said, “how's it going? You look better.”

I shook my head. “I'm better, I think.”

She looked at me, puzzled. “You're not better?”

“The woman Mark lives with is following me.”

“Are you sure?”

I shrugged. “I'm not sure. I may be going nuts. That's another possibility.”

“And Sean?”

I sighed. “Nothing. I think about him all the time.”

“Maybe you should call him. And call her while you're at it.”

“I know I should. Everyone says I should . . . So tell me, what's new?”

“Roger called me.” Roger is a man Sally used to live with. “He's going out with my sister. Isn't that incredible? He's left the monastery and is dating my sister. So I called her and asked what she thought she was doing. She asked me, ‘Do you mind?' I said damn straight I mind. So she told Roger she wouldn't see him anymore. So now he calls me and wants to see me. The slime.”

Whenever I wanted to feel better about my life, I knew I could always talk with Sally.

A few weeks later I met a man named Samuel on a crosstown bus and he asked me out. He was doing his residency in sports medicine at New York Hospital. We started talking because there was an old woman sitting across from us, dressed like a baby in bonnet and diaper, nursing from a bottle. “You meet all kinds,” he said to me. Samuel took me to dinner a few nights later at the Saloon, where the waiters serve you on
roller skates. He ordered a caesar salad and asked the waiter to hold the anchovies. The waiter thought it was one of the funniest things he'd heard in weeks. “And man,” he said, “you hear some pretty funny things in this job.”

After dinner Samuel invited me up for a drink. He lived at Lincoln Towers in a studio and he had a huge poster of an orangutan over his bed. He had a large Snoopy doll with a stethoscope around its neck. Samuel told me his specialty was going to be the Achilles' heel, and we spent the rest of the evening looking at the x rays of famous athletes' mutilated tendons. As he walked me toward Broadway, a mouse ran across the sidewalk. “Aren't you going to scream?” he asked me. “I thought girls always scream when they see mice.”

I decided to stop at La Fortuna before going home to see if George was around. I just wanted someone to talk to. I walked in and he was sitting alone. “Hi,” he said, “I was hoping you'd call.”

“I thought you were going to call,” I replied.

“Well, I was hoping you'd call to apologize.”

I wrinkled my eyebrows. “Apologize for what?”