The Four Temperaments (17 page)

“It's just that getting her, finally getting her, feels like I'm saying good-bye to the other thing.” William looked confused. “I guess it's hard to accept that I'll never have one of my own.”

“Oh, but she will be your own,” Ruth couldn't help saying. “You don't know that yet, but she will be. She is already.”

“How can you say that?” asked Betsy, staring intently into Ruth's face. She seemed not hostile, but curious. “You've had children of your own. Three of them. How can you know what it feels like for me?” Her voice sounded as if she were ready to cry again.

“I don't,” Ruth said, desperate not to offend but equally desperate to comfort her. “I just know that what makes them yours doesn't have that much to do with carrying them and giving birth to them. It has to do with the way it feels when they're in your arms. Holding them, feeding them, bathing them, loving them. That's what makes them yours.” Ruth's face felt all red and flushed. She saw that Oscar and William were staring, not sure what to make of this. Just then, the waiter appeared with the appetizers—prawns, baby egg rolls, soup with curls of steam that rose from its golden surface—and they all looked down at their plates and chopsticks until he was gone.

“I never really thought of it that way,” Betsy said slowly, looking at Ruth as if she were revising every single thing she had ever thought of her. “But now I will.” She picked up a spoon and began to eat her soup. William casually draped an arm over her shoulders, managing to eat his food with surprising grace despite using only one hand to do it. The rest of the meal passed without incident. When they said good night, Betsy hugged Ruth tightly.

“Thank you,” Betsy said into her ear, “so much. I'll call you before we go, all right?”

“Do that,” Ruth said, returning the embrace. Then she turned to her son, who kissed her not once but twice, on either cheek, like a dapper European gentleman.

Later, as
Ruth was lying next to Oscar in the peaceful oasis of their bed, he turned to her, hand propped under his head.

“You amaze me, you know,” he said quietly.

“Amaze you? After all this time?” Ruth's tone was playful; surely he was teasing.

“Yes, you really do,” he said, and she realized he was not mocking at all, but instead quite serious.

“In what way?” she asked, turning to face him so that their noses were almost touching. She had always thought Oscar had a fine, beautiful, even noble nose.

“It's your desire to mend things. Most people don't bother to fix what they've broken. But you're different.”

“Well,” Ruth said, not sure how to respond to this unexpected and lovely compliment. Was it true? She couldn't say. She only knew that she had to keep trying, as Oscar said, to put things together again.

They made love after that and when Oscar rolled away from her, back to his part of the bed, Ruth thought some more about what he had said. He seemed to have great faith in her power. But as she watched her husband's recumbent form relax and drift into sleep, Ruth herself felt strangely powerless. She wanted to physically shake the feeling off, as if it were an annoying insect hovering around her head. Still it persisted, buzzing steadily and quietly all through the night.

GABRIEL

G
abriel had
always been a collector. As a boy, he gravitated toward the usual assortment of boyish things: bottle caps, seashells, polished rocks, mint-condition coins that winked brightly in their protective plastic cases, albums filled with page after page of lavishly colored, exotic stamps. He also collected ticket stubs and programs from the ballet performances he went to with his mother; he even saved a few pairs of signed point shoes—the dancers often gave them away to fans—but he quickly abandoned that. The shoes were bulky and hard to store, and he didn't want to hear his brothers' teasing about them anyway.

As he got older, his collections grew more arcane and specialized. There were the vintage game pieces: Bakelite dice, poker chips and faded wooden markers that began with the thirty-pound carton he bought on a whim at an auction in Massachusetts. Then there was the outmoded scientific equipment—hydrometers from the 1930s still in their crumbling, cardboard boxes, turn-of-the-century glass beakers and cork-topped test tubes—that he purchased from a dealer in Queens.

Most recently, he had started to collect old neon signs, a habit that Penelope would not abide, at least not in their apartment. “You mean you would bring those awful things in here?” she said when she saw the first one, a green sign that read
HOT COFFEE
on one line and
ROLLS
on the line below. In between was a stylized, green neon coffee cup with a vivid orange plume of steam emanating from its surface. “Isn't neon a poisonous gas?” When he assured her that it was contained, she didn't believe him. “What about seepage? Don't you read the newspapers? Don't you know anything?” She also objected to the colors, which she found garish, and the noise, a soft but raspy buzzing sound, rather like the intermittent humming of insects on a hot summer night.

Gabriel hadn't intended to collect the signs, but that was true of most of his collections—he didn't set out to do it, but somehow the object, whatever it was, found its way to him, like a signal, a portent whose meaning was only that which he conferred upon it later. The first time he became interested in neon, he had been visiting with clients up the coast and, on the drive home, had to stop because of construction in the road. At the same time, a group of men were dismantling an old, roadside diner. As Gabriel slowed his car to a halt, two of them were carrying the
HOT COFFEE/ROLLS
sign almost directly past his open window, to a large Dumpster nearby. “How much do you want for that?” Gabriel found himself saying. The men looked around, not sure what they had that could be of value. “The sign,” Gabriel said, gesturing toward it. “The one you're carrying. How much?” The two looked at each other and then back to Gabriel. The shorter one said, “You mean you want this? What for?” Gabriel couldn't answer that, but got them to agree to put it in the trunk of his car. At first they didn't want any money, but eventually they accepted the pair of twenties that he pressed into their palms.

The rest of the way home, Gabriel was acutely conscious of the sign he was carrying. He felt warmed and reassured by its humble promise of food and drink; the steaming cup was an unexpected visual delight, a gift of sorts. He could hardly believe it was his. When Penelope vetoed it, he was not surprised or even bothered; he just took it to his office, where it seemed to fit right in.

After that, he began hunting for signs, tracking them down at out-of-the-way places: a family-run drugstore about to succumb to the might of a large, national chain (he loved the stout red cross surrounded by a red circle he found there) or a shoe repair shop (where he was drawn to the deep blue cat's face that was meant to advertise the once popular Cat's Paw brand of soles and heels) whose owner had recently died. These signs, and many others, came back with him, and joined the first on the large white wall of his office that he had cleared just for that purpose. There was a blue rectangle with the word
OPEN
inside it; a set of crimson block letters that spelled out
BERKELEY MEAT MARKET;
a sign in pink script that read
LOLLY
'
S HOUSE OF BEAUTY
and showed a woman's face in profile. Her features were not rendered, but her long hair was wonderfully articulated in delicate curls and waves of pink neon.

They began to attract notice, these signs Gabriel had been accumulating. First the other architects in his firm would stop and comment on the shape of one, the color of another. Then it was a client. “They're like poems that you just find in the urban landscape,” said Austin Levy, the husband of the couple from Santa Barbara, the ones Gabriel had pretended to be visiting the time he flew to New York to see Ginny. Austin asked if Gabriel could get him a sign for his living room. So Gabriel came up with a pair of rakish green-and-yellow neon cocktail glasses that floated in a yellow oval of neon. The word
BAR
was written in green script above the oval. Austin was delighted, couldn't stop exclaiming about it. Soon other clients started requesting them too and Gabriel found himself tracking down the perfect vintage neon sign for a health clinic downtown, an upscale art gallery and a fancy house in Palo Alto. His boss, the senior partner in the firm, was pleased with the way Gabriel's idiosyncratic hobby had turned into a sought-after design element.

Gabriel thought the whole thing rather funny. Still, he kept looking for and buying signs, mainly because he continued to enjoy them himself. And as long as they did not enter their apartment, Penelope didn't mind them either. In fact, apart from this latest interest of his, she generally regarded Gabriel's collections with a kind of indulgent fondness. He had told her about all the things he collected as a boy, even the pointe shoes. Which turned out to be quite handy when she discovered—in the most unlikely way, since he was sure he had hidden them safely—the pair of battered salmon-colored pointe shoes that Ginny had given him.

As they
were leaving the hotel room in New York, Gabriel noticed that Ginny was about to toss out the pair she had worn during the performance the night before.

“Why are you throwing them out?” he had asked.

“Oh, they never last more than one performance. I usually do it at the theater, but I was in such a hurry last night.” She beamed at him. “No sense lugging them back across town, though. The bag's heavy enough as it is.” And she tapped the large, rather soiled zebra-print tote that was slung over her shoulder.

“Let me have them,” he said impulsively.

“Well, all right,” she said, clearly pleased. “But I won't sign them, okay?” So the pointe shoes had flown back across the country with him, tucked way at the bottom of the small bag he carried. They remained there for quite a while; after the scene with the shredded paper and the reconciliation that followed, he had actually forgotten that he'd taken them. When he did remember, he thought he'd bring them to the office. Penelope almost never went there, and when she did, he was always with her. It was unlikely that she'd search his desk or file cabinets, so he felt reasonably comfortable with the thought of putting them there. Once they were there, he could consider at length the best place to keep them. So he slipped them into a bag and the bag into the glove compartment of his car. Penelope claimed not to trust Gabriel's natty little Audi, and unless there was some pressing reason, she never drove it. So how was he to know that during the brief few hours between the afternoon he tucked the shoes into the glove compartment and the morning he would have taken them to the office, Penelope would decide that she needed a flashlight in her car, look all over their apartment and, when she didn't find it, check that very glove compartment in search of one?

“What are these?” she asked, coming into the apartment, holding the shoes aloft.

“Those?” Gabriel willed himself not to look alarmed.

“Aren't they ballet shoes? Toe shoes?”

“They're called pointe shoes, actually,” he said calmly enough.

“Oh, so
these
are what you used to collect?”

“That's right,” he said, hardly daring to believe that she herself had supplied the alibi he so desperately needed. “Though I never had that many to begin with.”

“I thought you got rid of them,” she said.

“I did. But I found those tucked into a box somewhere. So I thought I'd keep them after all.”

“A little bit of your youth?” she said, smiling now.

“A little bit of my youth,” he agreed. She handed him the slippers, nestled toe to heel, their sweat-stained satin ribbons binding them neatly together. He could feel the relief coursing through him now as his hands closed around them. Goddamn it! Almost caught again! And he had sworn he would be so careful! She turned to leave the room.

“Whose were they, anyway?” she asked over her shoulder.

“I honestly don't remember anymore,” he said, looking down at the book he had been reading when she first came in. The shoes were never mentioned again.

Spring came
slowly to San Francisco. There was lots of rain and even when there wasn't, there seemed to be an uncommon number of damp, cold days. Penelope and Isobel remained indoors much of the time, Isobel toddling around their now fully baby-proofed apartment and Penelope trailing after her. Gabriel spent long hours at his office, working mostly, but also logging on to Web sites that he dared not log on to at home, like the one for the
New York Times,
which gave him access, albeit indirectly, to Ginny. In the Arts section, he could read reviews of her performances. One critic described her as “magisterial” and Gabriel knew precisely what the reviewer meant. There were other reviews too, equally stellar. He read them over and over again, imagining her dancing in ballets he remembered from childhood.

Finally, it
got warm. Late in April, they had a birthday party for Isobel—her first. There were only the three of them in attendance, but Penelope bought paper hats and streamers and even produced a heart-shaped cake made by an organic baker. Gabriel thought it tasted like sand, but he didn't say so. There were no balloons; Penelope had read of too many cases where a baby ingested a scrap of popped balloon and died as a result. Still, Isobel seemed delighted, waving her fists in the air and pressing her thumb into the sliver of cake that Penelope offered her.

Gabriel's parents called earlier in the day and despite a certain anxiety he detected in Ruth's tone, there was no overt reference to Ginny. Instead, both his parents asked to speak to Isobel, and although usually Penelope insisted that Isobel was frightened by the telephone, today she relented enough to let the baby make a few babbling noises into the receiver. Both Ruth and Oscar seemed to be listening when she did this; Gabriel could visualize their heads close together, one almost on top of the other, as they strained to hear their grandchild. Then there was the news about William and Betsy's new baby, who had arrived a few weeks earlier. “She's just darling,” Ruth told Gabriel when the phone was passed back to him. “I've never seen eyes quite like that—so big and so dark. I can't wait for her to meet Isobel. They're first cousins, after all.” Gabriel thought about that for a few seconds: he could imagine Penelope's fears about strains of foreign viruses being transmitted between the babies. Probably best to delay this meeting for a while, though he didn't say so to his mother.

In July,
the New York City Ballet went to Saratoga, in Upstate New York, for a month; Gabriel learned this from logging on to the NYCB Web site, which tracked their whereabouts. He was pleased to find short profiles of all the soloists and principal dancers, and since Ginny had recently been made a soloist, hers was among them.

Sitting in his office in the early evening, after everyone had left, he stared at her image on the screen. The light had just begun to fade outside, and a few minutes before, he had turned on, one at a time, all the neon signs on his wall. They filled the room with their noisy, convivial hum. Ginny wore a long-sleeved black leotard, cut very low in front so that he could make out, even on the screen, the shallow division between her breasts. The tiny, crescent-shaped scar at the base of her neck—a freak childhood accident involving a dropped knife that ricocheted off a table—was hidden though, and this made Gabriel feel happy; a private bit of her to remember and savor that was not on view to the world. Over the leotard, she had on a long, diaphanous skirt, under which her legs, in their pale tights, were clearly visible.

He learned that she was born in Bakerstown, Louisiana, that she started studying ballet when she was eight, that
Serenade
was her favorite ballet. He studied her face for a long while. She was heavily made up in this picture, as she was the night he met her at the hotel. Still, he could see that she was not beautiful, at least not in the way that Penelope was. But even in this frozen, digital likeness, he could see the animation that sparked her face, her body. She was avid, rapacious, bold, eager; Gabriel wanted to inhale, ingest, consume her, incorporate those aspects of her being into his own. What a pair of contrasts they were, his wife and lover. One was rich, well educated, classy, beautiful. The other was low-class, poor and without even a decent high school education. But how alive she was, how completely, totally alive. Whereas it often felt as if something in Penelope had died. He hadn't realized just how exhausting his life with her was until he met Ginny; Penelope's fears and anxieties had led to so many small renunciations and denials. But Ginny renounced nothing; to be in her presence was to be embraced.