Stages (20 page)

“You want anything, now, you just call me,” the maid reminded him. “I expect Mrs. will be done with her tennis soon.”

Jack’s eyes followed the maid out of the room. Then they dropped to his lap, where his hand lay like a bird flown into a window.

After a while Jack fell asleep and dreamed, as he had when he was an adolescent. He dreamed of ascending into the air above Fifth Avenue, of hovering outside the windows of rich people, of seeing all the things that are not for the eyes of a boy from the Bronx.

36

The apartment was just perfect, Paula’s mother thought. From a tiny foyer that had plastered walls just like a wine cellar she’d seen in France, you walked into a nice living room with parquet floors. At one end of the living room was a wide closet with two murphy beds in it, and at the other end was the cutest little dinette, built in, and a swinging door into the kitchen, which had a window. A hallway led to the bedroom. Off the hallway was a bathroom that had a pedestal sink that Paula’s mother said was
exactly
like the ones in rooms at the Plaza.

Together Paula and her mother shopped for furniture at Bloomingdale’s. Although there was a wait for some of the deliveries, in the end Paula’s mother was very satisfied with the results. The colors her daughter had chosen might have seemed a bit wild, but you couldn’t expect young people to have perfectly refined taste.

For her own part, Paula was reasonably content in her new lodgings. She’d settled in passively, and lived in the apartment with equal passivity, rising to the occasion when the alarm clock went off, preheating the oven at seven every evening to put in a Stouffer’s meal, watching the ten o’clock news. Sometimes, in an odd moment that was not taken up by routine, she would stand by the living-room window and look out on the street, cocking her head in mild curiosity. Once, on her way home from work, she’d walked into a pet shop on impulse. Looking at a cage crowded with parakeets, she’d whistled softly, and they’d all watched her, bright-eyed but unruffled, until she went away. They’re a lot like me, she’d thought.

Work was easy. Paula would answer the telephone and make waiting clients comfortable with the kind of small talk that was compatible with the soothing hum of the air conditioner. When the client was a man, the conversation could become pointed. And it was always pointed in the same direction: places where the lay of the land was as familiar as the language spoken by the natives, places like Maxwell’s Plum and P. J. Clarke’s, way stations on the route to bed.

Many of the men who came on to Paula were married. A few were not. Paula could always tell the difference, though, which was that the single ones were never as anxious as the wedded ones, who always seemed to be trying to make up for lost time, or to make the most of these little hours pilfered from their wives.

Why she went out with some of these guys Paula did not know. Part of it, she imagined, was the fascination of seeing their attraction to her. That, she told herself, was not an attraction to the real Paula but to this new face that plastic surgery had created. Paula’s face still intrigued
her,
for that matter. There were evenings when she looked at herself before going out and thought that she had been given a magical power to lie to the mirror. Such a deception was certainly the right company for a married man, so Paula wasn’t at all troubled by the fact that the person who allowed herself to be escorted by Eddie or Stan or Dave or Ken wasn’t the genuine article.

Eddie and company all had the same life story to tell, with additions if they were trying to impress her and deletions if they were pouring out their hearts. The sad facts Paula would usually hear about after midnight, in a bedroom overlooking the street lamps, and with the horns of taxis sounding in the distance.

After listening to such narratives for a while Paula had begun to wonder if there was a married man anywhere who didn’t feel closed out of life’s possibilities; when they scored was the only time they weren’t being cheated, evidently. Otherwise, the deck was stacked.

One night, a Fred said to Paula, “If I knew back then what I know now, I sure would have done a lot of things differently.” To which she replied, “If you
had
done a lot of things differently, would you have noticed me this afternoon? Would you even have been in that office?”

“I’d have noticed you anywhere,” Fred replied. He was untangling a sheet, ready to go about the business of getting a night’s sleep.

“Then what difference does it make what you’ve done, or what you might’ve done, I mean as far as what’s happened between us?” asked Paula.

“I have a wife,” Fred said. “And kids.”

“I don’t know why you guys keep turning over every mattress in your past,” said Paula. “You all wind up in the same place, back in the crib waiting for Mommy to pick you up.”

“What are you, a shrink?”

“No, they go from analysis to sex and I go from sex to analysis. Just forget it. Go to sleep. I’m sorry I brought it up. The best way to spoil a good time is to look for meaning in it. I’ve got to remember in the future that postcoital letdown should be allowed to be the conversation stopper God intended it to be. Good night.”

“Good night,” said Fred. He turned over on his side. Five minutes later, when Paula was just drifting off to sleep, he said, “Believe it or not, I really
do
love my wife.”

Fred had come into Paula’s life on a Wednesday afternoon and was gone Thursday morning. The very next day Morris materialized. Morris’s story was no different from the rest, but the way he told it was. After they’d had dinner at Proof of the Pudding, after they’d gone back to Paula’s apartment, after they’d made love (it was one o’clock in the morning) Morris crawled out of bed and began to root around in his sports jacket. In the dim light of the bedroom, the bald spot on the back of his head shone like a little gray moon.

“You didn’t leave your wallet in the restaurant or anything, did you?” Paula asked.

“No, I didn’t,” Morris said. “I just want to…play a little tune.”

“What?”

Morris held up a harmonica and said, “It relaxes me.”

Then he pulled a chair up to the open window, gazed out wistfully at the city lights, and put the harmonica to his mouth.

He was good.

The tune Morris played had the soul of a train whistle. It yearned for so much, and yet each soaring note seemed to die without a penny. It longed for summer, and got cold wind crying, like the rebirth of winter.

In spite of herself, Paula was moved.

When he’d finished, she said, “That was…beautiful. Do you know the words to it?”

“Sure,” Morris said. “It’s one of those old tear jerkers. There were a lot of them, about being in prison, drowning in a flood, losing your son on the battle field…” He treated Paula to a couple of spoonfuls of syrupy lyrics.

“It’s turn-of-the-century Bobby Goldsborough stuff,” Paula said after hearing his third selection. “Why does it make me want to cry?”

“Do you miss someone?” Morris asked.

“No,” said Paula.

“You homesick?”

“No.”

“You lonely?”

“You’re not the first”

“Do you belong at Weiss, Weiss, and Sussberg?”

“Why do you ask that?”

“Because when I saw you sitting there, behind that desk, you know the line that went through my mind? ‘You oughtta be in pictures.’”

“You should go on stage with that harmonica.”

“Sure. With a wife and three kids.”

“You know, I
did
want to be an actress….”

“What stopped you?”

“I was terrified. Of going to an audition.”

Morris put his harmonica back in his jacket pocket and climbed into bed.

“If you’re not afraid of sex, how can you be afraid to
act
?” he said. “My mother’s a psychologist, and she says that all women’s fears have sexual origins, except their fears for their children, and even those become sexual soon as the kid reaches puberty.”

Paula thought, and then she said, “Maybe you’re right. When I think about what I felt outside those theaters, I guess it was that when I got inside, I’d be naked.”

“One of the most irrational fears is the fear of being naked in front of people
—especially
when you’ve got the body to get away with it.” He burrowed underneath the covers. “I gotta go to sleep now. I got a meeting at nine-fifteen in the morning.”

Paula kissed him on the forehead.

She didn’t get to sleep until almost five-thirty. She was wide-awake, feeling that there was something she had to get up and do. She couldn’t; though, she would be helpless until tomorrow. Which would be the last day of her life as Paula Rubin.

37

Paula had—as her mother would have said—woken up to herself. It was as if since her nose job her whole life had become accidental. She fell into jobs, fell into bed, lived in a daze. She was living the kind of life, she realized, where you could misplace days at a time, months even, and wind up old and bewildered, wondering where the time went. She had been right about one thing, anyway. Paula Rubin wasn’t a real person.

Who was this then, in the bathroom mirror?
I know who you are,
she thought, touching herself lightly on the chest with her hand,
you are flesh and blood, you’re real, and Paula Rubin is nothing more than that pair of white sunglasses her mother bought for her in Saks.

“So who am I?” she asked herself. “What should my name be?”

Her hands on the sink, she leaned into the mirror and thought,
Maybe it should be Harmonica? No…what then? What rhymes with harmonica? Veronica? Monica is closer, but it also makes you think of monochromatic—my mother’s living room. That’s backsliding. Okay, Veronica. Makes you think of Verona, Italy. Gondoliers playing the harmonica in the moonlight. Good. I like that.

What about my last name, though?

Searching for the other half of her identity, Veronica went back into her bedroom. The sheets and blankets were still tousled from the night before. As she pulled one corner of the fitted sheet back over the mattress she saw the label
Simmons Beautyrest.

If Veronica had sprung from this mattress, shouldn’t she be its namesake?
Veronica Simmons.
Not bad. Really not bad at all.

Nobody in Paula’s office ever got to know Veronica. Veronica showed up the following Monday looking for all the world like Paula. She sat down at Paula’s desk, unwound the long red scarf Paula had bought for a weekend in Bucks County that hadn’t panned out, and unbuttoned the cashmere and wool cardigan Paula never wore because the smell of moth crystals made her feel embalmed. Then she began taking calls for Weiss, Weiss, and Sussberg. Every one of them she connected to the deli down the street, which was run by an Israeli who despised two classes of people: cheapskates and lawyers. Paula had often stood outside his place tittering while old ladies fled from his shrieks.

Then Veronica removed all the papers from four manila folders and shuffled them. Opening the personal drawer in Paula’s desk, she took out a bottle of nail polish, a fingernail file, and a matchbook with a telephone number written inside the cover. Veronica poured two bottles of liquid paper into the wastebasket and refilled them with Paula’s vermilion nail polish. She used the fingernail file to make whimsical adjustments inside the IBM Selectric. This was not enough, though. Paula had to be buried with a wooden stake through her heart.

Veronica got up and went straight to the closet. There, inside, on the floor, were a pair of black Totes rain boots, which, when you put them on, instantly turned you into one of the tiny salesladies who have been working at Hammacher Schlemmer’s for forty-nine years.

Almost running, Veronica snatched up the key to the ladies’ room and went out the door into the hall. One of the junior partners eyed her with mild curiosity. He thought she probably had that intestinal flu that was going around.

In the bathroom, Veronica, smiling wickedly, filled both of the Totes with water. Being careful not to slosh any, she hurried back to the office. One of the boots she put on Paula’s desk. Hastily Veronica unwrapped a single rose she’d bought on her way to the office. She stuck it in the boot.

She then whipped the red scarf around her neck and, fiendishly delighted to see that she was alone, went to the door that led to the inner offices and gingerly propped the second bulging boot on top of it, leaving it just far enough ajar so that it balanced against the frame.

Time was running out. Veronica switched on Paula’s IBM. It began to tick ominously.

With a fling of her red scarf, Veronica walked out the door. Just as Mr. Weiss, trailing pipe smoke, was coming out to ask Paula if she had any idea why a call he was expecting had been delayed.

Looking, she thought, like Mary Astor in
The Maltese Falcon,
Veronica walked out into the street. She discarded the matchbook from one of poor Paula’s would-be lovers in a trash receptacle. And she went back to Paula’s apartment, where she stayed for two days, poring over copies of
Variety
and
Backstage,
and making calls, and even making dinner the second night—for Paula’s distraught parents, who had to tell her all about their daughter’s nervous breakdown, and where she should go to get help.