Distortions (26 page)

Eventually she will be caught. She knows that. This night she is very late; she should have called with an excuse hours ago. She uses the telephone at the entrance to the parking lot, trying to keep her voice soft and regular, counting the white lines that divide the lot into the parking places until his voice comes on the line. Something happened to her car, she tells him. It did? His voice is strained. She doesn’t say anything.

“There’s a man,” she says.

“Speak louder. You said the car broke down. Where?”

“In the parking lot. There’s a man.”

“Yes?”

“Who’s going to fix it.”

There is another silence.

“Will you call back if there’s any real trouble?”

“Yes,” she says.

He is waiting in the car. It’s all right, she assures him. He rides her to her car at the back of the parking lot. She opens the door and gets in. She watches his car drive away in the rearview mirror, and then she gets out of the car and stands in the parking lot. Standing there, she thinks of her lover, gone in one direction, and of Jim, in another. She watches the leaves blow across the surface and sees that now the parking lot is mostly brown, instead of black. Autumn always makes her feel uneasy. Autumn, or the fact that she hasn’t eaten all day. She gets in the car and drives home to make dinner.

N
oel is in our living room shaking his head. He refused my offer and then David’s offer of a drink, but he has had three glasses of water. It is absurd to wonder at such a time when he will get up to go to the bathroom, but I do. I would like to see Noel move; he seems so rigid that I forget to sympathize, forget that he is a real person. “That’s not what I want,” he said to David when David began sympathizing. Absurd, at such a time, to ask what he does want. I can’t remember how it came about that David started bringing glasses of water.

Noel’s wife, Susan, has told him that she’s been seeing John Stillerman. We live on the first floor, Noel and Susan on the second, John on the eleventh. Interesting that John, on the eleventh, should steal Susan from the second floor. John proposes that they just rearrange—that Susan moved up to the eleventh, into the apartment John’s wife only recently left, that they just … John’s wife had a mastectomy last fall, and in the elevator she told Susan that if she was losing what she didn’t want to lose, she might as well lose what she did want to lose. She lost John—left him the way popcorn flies out of the bag on the roller coaster. She is living somewhere in the city, but John doesn’t know where. John is a museum curator, and last month, after John’s picture appeared in a newsmagazine, showing him standing in front of an empty space where a stolen canvas had hung, he got a one-word note from his wife: “Good.” He showed the note to David in the elevator. “It was tucked in the back of his wallet—the way all my friends used to carry rubbers in high school,” David told me.

“Did you guys know?” Noel asks. A difficult one; of course we didn’t
know
, but naturally we guessed. Is Noel able to handle such semantics? David answers vaguely. Noel shakes his head vaguely, accepting David’s vague answer. What else will he accept? The move upstairs? For now, another glass of water.

David gives Noel a sweater, hoping, no doubt, to stop his shivering. Noel pulls on the sweater over pajamas patterned with small gray fish. David brings him a raincoat, too. A long white scarf hangs from the pocket Noel swishes it back and forth listlessly. He gets up and goes to the bathroom.

“Why did she have to tell him when he was in his pajamas?” David whispers.

Noel comes back, looks out the window. “I don’t know why I didn’t know. I can tell you guys knew.”

Noel goes to our front door, opens it, and wanders off down the hallway.

“If he had stayed any longer, he would have said, ‘Jeepers,’” David says.

David looks at his watch and sighs. Usually he opens Beth’s door on his way to bed, and tiptoes in to admire her. Beth is our daughter. She is five. Some nights, David even leaves a note in her slippers, saying that he loves her. But tonight he’s depressed. I follow him into the bedroom, undress, and get into bed. David looks at me sadly, lies down next to me, turns off the light. I want to say something but don’t know what to say. I could say, “One of us should have gone with Noel. Do you know your socks are still on? You’re going to do to me what Susan did to Noel, aren’t you?”

“Did you see his poor miserable pajamas?” David whispers finally. He throws back the covers and gets up and goes back to the living room. I follow, half asleep. David sits in the chair, puts his arms on the armrests, presses his neck against the back of the chair, and moves his feet together. “Zzzz,” he says, and his head falls forward.

Back in bed, I lie awake, remembering a day David and I spent in the park last August. David was sitting on the swing next to me, scraping the toes of his tennis shoes in the loose dirt.

“Don’t you want to swing?” I said. We had been playing tennis. He had beaten me every game. He always beats me at everything—precision parking, three-dimensional ticktacktoe, soufflés. His soufflés rise as beautifully curved as the moon.

“I don’t know how to swing,” he said.

I tried to teach him, but he couldn’t get his legs to move right. He stood the way I told him, with the board against his behind, gave a little jump to get on, but then he couldn’t synchronize his legs. “Pump!” I called, but it didn’t mean anything. I might as well have said, “Juggle dishes.” I still find it hard to believe there’s anything I can do that he can’t do.

He got off the swing. “Why do you act like everything is a goddamn contest?” he said, and walked away.

“Because we’re always having contests and you always win!” I shouted.

I was still waiting by the swings when he showed up half an hour later.

“Do you consider it a contest when we go scuba diving?” he said.

He had me. It was stupid of me last summer to say how he always snatched the best shells, even when they were closer to me. That made him laugh. He had chased me into a corner, then laughed at me.

I lie in bed now, hating him for that. But don’t leave me, I think—don’t do what Noel’s wife did. I reach across the bed and gently take hold of a little wrinkle in his pajama top. I don’t know if I want to yank his pajamas—do something violent—or smooth them. Confused, I take my hand away and turn on the light. David rolls over, throws his arm over his face, groans. I stare at him. In a second he will lower his arm and demand an explanation. Trapped again. I get up and put on my slippers.

“I’m going to get a drink of water,” I whisper apologetically.

Later in the month, it happens. I’m sitting on a cushion on the floor, with newspapers spread in front of me, repotting plants. I’m just moving the purple passion plant to a larger pot when David comes in. It is late in the afternoon—late enough to be dark outside. David has been out with Beth. Before the two of them went out, Beth, confused by the sight of soil indoors, crouched down beside me to ask, “Are there ants, Mommy?” I laughed. David never approved of my laughing at her. Later, that will be something he’ll mention in court, hoping to get custody: I laugh at her. And when that doesn’t work, he’ll tell the judge what I said about his snatching all the best seashells.

David comes in, coat still buttoned, blue silk scarf still tied (a Christmas present from Noel, with many apologies for losing the white one), sits on the floor, and says that he’s decided to leave. He is speaking very reasonably and quietly. That alarms me. It
crosses my mind that he’s mad. And Beth isn’t with him. He has killed her!

No, no, of course not. I’m mad. Beth is upstairs in her friend’s apartment. He ran into Beth’s friend and her mother coming into the building. He asked if Beth could stay in their apartment for a few minutes. I’m not convinced: What friend? I’m foolish to feel reassured as soon as he names one—Louisa. I feel nothing but relief. It might be more accurate to say that I feel nothing. I would have felt pain if she were dead, but David says she isn’t, so I feel nothing. I reach out and begin stroking the plant’s leaves. Soft leaves, sharp points. The plant I’m repotting is a cutting from Noel’s big plant that hangs in a silver ice bucket in his window (a wedding gift that he and Susan had never used). I helped him put it in the ice bucket. “What are you going to do with the top?” I asked. He put it on his head and danced around.

“I had an uncle who got drunk and danced with a lampshade on his head,” Noel said. “That’s an old joke, but how many people have actually
seen
a man dance with a lampshade on his head? My uncle did it every New Year’s Eve.”

“What the hell are you smiling about?” David says. “Are you listening to me?”

I nod and start to cry. It will be a long time before I realize that David makes me sad and Noel makes me happy.

Noel sympathizes with me. He tells me that David is a fool; he is better off without Susan, and I will be better off without David. Noel calls or visits me in my new apartment almost every night. Last night he suggested that I get a babysitter for tonight, so he could take me to dinner. He tries very hard to make me happy. He brings expensive wine when we eat in my apartment and offers to buy it in restaurants when we eat out. Beth prefers it when we eat in; that way, she can have both Noel and the toy that Noel inevitably brings. Her favorite toy, so far, is a handsome red tugboat pulling three barges, attached to one another by string. Noel bends over, almost doubled in half, to move them across the rug, whistling and calling orders to the imaginary crew. He does not just bring gifts to Beth and me. He has bought himself a new car,
and pretends that this is for Beth and me. (“Comfortable seats?” he asks me. “That’s a nice big window back there to wave out of,” he says to Beth.) It is silly to pretend that he got the car for the three of us. And if he did, why was he too cheap to have a radio installed, when he knows I love music? Not only that but he’s bowlegged. I am ashamed of myself for thinking bad things about Noel. He tries so hard to keep us cheerful. He can’t help the odd angle of his thighs. Feeling sorry for him, I decided that a cheap dinner was good enough for tonight. I said that I wanted to go to a Chinese restaurant.

At the restaurant I eat shrimp in black bean sauce and drink a Heineken’s and think that I’ve never tasted anything so delicious. The waiter brings two fortune cookies. We open them; the fortunes make no sense. Noel summons the waiter for the bill. With it come more fortune cookies—four this time. They are no good, either: talk of travel and money. Noel says, “What bloody rot.” He is wearing a gray vest and a white shirt. I peek around the table without his noticing and see that he’s wearing gray wool slacks. Lately it has been very important for me to be able to see everything. Whenever Noel pulls the boats out of sight, into another room, I move as quickly as Beth to watch what’s going on.

Standing behind Noel at the cash register, I see that it has started to rain—a mixture of rain and snow.

“You know how you can tell a Chinese restaurant from any other?” Noel asks, pushing open the door. “Even when it’s raining, the cats still run for the street.”

I shake my head in disgust.

Noel stretches the skin at the corners of his eyes. “Sorry for honorable joke,” he says.

We run for the car. He grabs the belt of my coat, catches me, and half lifts me with one arm, running along with me dangling at his side, giggling. Our wool coats stink. He opens my car door, runs around, and pulls his open. He’s done it again; he has made me laugh.

We start home.

We are in heavy traffic, and Noel drives very slowly, protecting his new car.

“How old are you?” I ask.

“Thirty-six,” Noel says.

“I’m twenty-seven,” I say.

“So what?” he says. He says it pleasantly.

“I just didn’t know how old you were.”

“Mentally, I’m neck and neck with Beth,” he says.

I’m soaking wet, and I want to get home to put on dry clothes. I look at him inching through traffic, and I remember the way his face looked that night he sat in the living room with David and me.