The Love of My (Other) Life (2 page)

It was a dogwalker, and he was grunting and rubbing the lump on his forehead where I had banged into him. He was shepherding at least a dozen animals, shifting their leashes around in his hands and muttering about how unsafe the Upper West Side had become. “You’re worse than the bicycle delivery guys!” he barked.

Now that was just mean.

But I had slammed into him at full tilt. “Sorry!”

I whirled around, trying to disentangle. The more I thrashed, the more the leashes tightened up on my legs. Suddenly, I was upended, legs in the air over my head, my messenger bag flopping away and disgorging all its contents: drawing pad, Vosges chocolates for Mrs. Leibowitz, lipsticks, tampons, receipts from Pearl Paint on Canal Street.

Brian reached through the tangle of leashes and righted me.

“My skirt!” I swore as I beheld a tear in the fabric. “I can’t go home and change. I have to get to work.” Mostly, I didn’t want to have to run back and forth by José again. José was like the enforcer for the co-op board, and they were none too happy with me.

“Your skirt’s better with that slit up the side,” Brian said, admiringly. “You’ve got great legs! Wow.

I’d forgotten!” He grinned and dodged out of the way to retrieve the drawing pad and box of chocolates.

I scrambled for the lipstick and unmentionables.

“This is bad. This is very bad. This is my good skirt.

Oh no.”

“It’s just an article of clothing. It’s replaceable,” Brian said, popping a truffle into his mouth. “You drew this? It’s amazing!”

Okay, so he had fine aesthetic taste. I had to allow myself a modicum of thaw, it was only fair to acknowledge his compliment. “Thank you.” I fixed him with a steady gaze. Why did he look so familiar when I knew I’d never met him? Why wasn’t I more creeped out by him? I should be. Even if he complimented my drawing.

“I didn’t know you were such an accomplished draughtsman.”

“I’m a better painter,” I said. “Used to be. Am again, since this week.”

“You’re no acrobat,” said the disgruntled dogwalker. He stomped away, shaking his head.

Brian ignored him. “The people are so alive and joyful at their picnic.” Gazing intently at my handi-work, he helped himself to another truffle.

“They’re not having a picnic,” I said. What the hell was he talking about? Didn’t he have eyes? I needed to get rid of him. “Give that to me. Stop eating those, they’re for Mrs. Leibowitz.”

Brian looped his arm around me. “I didn’t know you had this kind of talent, Tessa. You must be famous.”

Not yet, but someday. Soon. Now that I was painting again, anything was possible. “I’m too busy taking care of old people to be famous. But someday my art will be well known, it’ll inspire and uplift people, and I’ll be known as the new Turner.” Wait, was he trying to look down my shirt? “Ugh, stop that! I have to get to work.”

“I’m not looking down your shirt,” Brian said, as if reading my mind. He narrowed his eyes at my jacket, then reached over to straighten it. “You have dog hair all over yourself.” He brushed his hands over my chest—hey, was he copping a feel?

“Stop that!” I said, slapping his hands. “Get away from me.” Somehow, in some weird way I couldn’t explain, I wasn’t offended. I was amused. I felt a distant twang of nostalgia.

Maybe I should be on medication?

“I came here specially to see you,” Brian said with some urgency. “My time is limited. I only have five days, four hours, well, now it’s about three hours and thirty-seven minutes.”

“Why do you keep telling me about such a specific amount of time?” I wondered aloud.

“I told you, it’s decoherence—”

But I had to stop humoring him. I couldn’t explain why my instincts liked him, when my rational mind was screaming at me to shake him loose.

But, for once, I had to pay attention to the voice of reason. “Look, a monkey flying a kite!” I exclaimed, as if in wonderment. In addition to being a talented artist, I am an accomplished liar.

Brian turned to look.

I raced away.

A large poster in the rotunda advertised: A NIGHT

OF MUSIC WITH YALE MUSICIANS.
Waiting to enter, a crowd muttered and stamped at the doors to the magnificent auditorium with its Grecian-themed murals, white columns, and high, vaulted ceilings.

Brian, wearing a Red Sox shirt, held a program and pointed to a name printed on it.

“Look, Rajiv, Tessa Barnum,” Brian said, reverently. “She plays the cello. She’s talented and beautiful. And smart.”

“Everyone at Yale is smart.” Rajiv craned his neck to look over Brian’s shoulder. In a heavily accented voice, he said, “She doesn’t know you exist.”

“Minor detail.”

“Rama is in the details,” Rajiv observed in a sympathetic tone.

“I like the way her eyes get all soft sometimes.

What is she thinking about? It’s not diffy Q’s,” Brian murmured.

“That’s because you’re not teaching diffy Q’s,” Rajiv said.

“I’m going to ask her out.”

“Bri, man, she’s got a boyfriend from home.”

Brian grinned. “I have to apply inertial force and remove his gravitational influence from her frame of reference. I’m researching her so that I have leverage.”

“Gravity isn’t yet part of the quantum scenario,” Rajiv offered.

“That’s because gravity isn’t a force, it’s a warping of space-time.” Brian would have elaborated, but the doors opened and people streamed in to find seats. Brian and Rajiv hustled their way into the fifth row, center.

Rajiv spied a square-jawed guy with perfect hair taking a seat in the third row. The guy was chatting a little too amiably with a girl with slicked-back hair, heavy black eyeliner, and a diaphanous shirt with a plunging neckline that arrowed between black-painted nipples.

“That is him,” Rajiv said. “The guy with Debbie Doll. She’s the woman in our class with the arm like Yogi Berra.”

“His name is David Mills, and he drove down from Dartmouth,” Brian said. He scanned David coolly. “What’s he doing with Debbie Doll?”

“They say Debbie Doll doesn’t wear underwear,” Rajiv said with a look of supreme curiosity.

“Yogi Berra was a catcher. And a Yankee. What did I tell you about the Yankees?”

“We don’t like the Yankees.”

“I don’t like David Mills,” Brian said.

“He’s hot, you have to admit. Look at him,” Rajiv said.

“He’s trying too hard. He looks like Dudley Do-Right.” Brian would have expounded on the principle but the lights dimmed.

A man in a tux walked onstage and gestured for quiet. He made the appropriate opening remarks about the musical talent at Yale and then introduced the opening choir performance. After the choir removed themselves from the stage in an orderly fashion, stage hands bustled about, clearing a space and setting up a more intimate diorama, four chairs with a cello and a viola.

Out walked a string quartet that included Tessa.

Her hair fell around her shoulders in a magical, shimmering sheet and she wore a slinky-but-classy, strapless black dress that dropped low on her back.

The guy sitting in front of them gurgled. “I can see the crack of her ass! Is that a heart tattoo?”

Brian leaned forward and tapped the guy’s shoulder. “Excuse me, that’s my future wife. Keep your eyes in their sockets. If you want to keep them.”

David, sitting one row in front of the gurgling guy, heard and swiveled around in his seat. He locked eyes with Brian.

Brian nodded slowly. “Game on.”

I was panting and bedraggled as I let myself into the little office inside Collegiate Church where I practice eldercare, and for which I sometimes even get paid. I paused in the foyer beside a poster I had painted: RETIREE DANCE FRIDAY 7:00 PM, WITH

BINGO! An artfully rendered bingo board graced one corner of the sign, and waltzing white-haired people entwined in each other’s arms enlivened the other corners.

I had painted them after my most favorite charges: Mr. Woolstein, caneless, with his leonine mane of white hair, holding Mrs. Leibowitz in his arms and twirling her over the floor. I imagined that they had cherished a secret, unconsummated flame for each other during their decades long lives, both of them remaining faithful to their marriages while a private tenderness lay dormant, a seed not ready to shoot forth tendrils. Now in the third acts of their lives, they were emancipated into their new, old love.

Come to think of it, was it this very poster that had broken the impasse, that had unlocked the block that prevented me from painting for the last few years, since David had left me? Perhaps. Other signs advertised Bible study, youth groups, and homeless breakfasts, but they were crudely finished. They were not in the same league as my dance poster.

My dance poster was almost real art.

My boss, Reverend Thomas Pincek, swept past me. “Tessa, welcome, welcome. We have a full house waiting for you today. You’re such an angel, you’re packing them in!”

“Thanks, Rev,” I said. “Sorry I’m late. Where’s Mrs. Leibowitz? She was feeling under the weather last week. I want to make sure she’s okay.”

The rev pursed his lips. “Don’t know. Stop by her apartment later if you like. Mr. James here isn’t getting his meals-on-wheels. I told him you would fix him up!” Reverend Pincek clapped hunched-over Mr. James on the back.

Mr. James, who was more than ninety and exuberantly decrepit, coughed and nearly fell over.

But the rev didn’t notice; he was already bustling away to solve twenty other problems for his flock.

I helped Mr. James reconfigure into his walker.

“C’mon back to my office, Mr. James. We’ll call for you. You look sprightly today, are you working out?

Is that a six-pack beneath your cardigan?” I poked my finger at an oblong moth-hole in his faded blue sweater.

Mr. James, whose mind was still as sharp as a scalpel even as his body degraded around it, cackled joyously. “I do one-armed pushups so I won’t lose my girlish figure.”

Then we were laughing together as I guided him through the pews, where were seated a crowd of waiting old folk, toward the tiny, cramped office in back with my desk and a couple of metal folding chairs.

Mr. James coughed—his emphysema was acting up today—but he beamed at me with bright eyes and a big, gummy smile. I was reminded of why I stay in this job for which I was never trained and get paid too little to pay my rent. No matter how much I’ve screwed up my life, no matter what I’ve lost and where I am in my creative process, I always feel uplifted by the appreciation of life the elderly so often display.

Reverend Pincek careened to my door with his secretary and two volunteers in tow. “Only two hours, Tessa. Tithes are down and we don’t want to take advantage of you. We can only pay you for two hours.”

“I’m here to help, Rev. Money’s not my main priority.” But even as the words were emerging from my mouth, I had a flash of myself as a homeless person. I was wearing Mr. James’ ragged sweater and standing beside Brian… . I smacked my head.

The rev was speaking, which helped me tear myself away from the image. He said, “Right now, it’s ours. I’m praying for some earthly angel to make a big donation, else we’ll lose some of our social programs. There’s a lot at risk: the soup kitchen, Harlem outreach. Even eldercare.”

● ● ●

Reverend Pincek’s words still rang in my ears three and a half hours later as I exited the church and closed the door behind me. I’d solved Mr. James’ meals-on-wheels problem, helped Mrs. Anders with her Medicare forms, set up a Gmail account for Mr. Blonstein so he could email his grandson, negotiated with a pharmacy for regular delivery of Mrs. Vaccaro’s medications, called the building super to fix the leaky faucet for Mr. Jelonek, and left messages for the respective doctors of Mrs. Altendorf, Mrs. Crane, Mr. King, and Mrs. O’Reilly. I’d tried to phone Mrs. Leibowitz, but there was no answer.

What would they all do without me?

“I have to help Reverend Pincek,” I said aloud.

How to do that …

“I can’t wait for someday when I’m America’s J.

M. W. Turner. I’ll sell my paintings for millions of dollars and donate 50 percent of it to the programs here.” I could envision it so clearly: I’m at an elegant art opening. I’m the star artist, of course. Adoring art lovers swoon at my landscapes, which float, beatified, in a haze of golden light on the walls.

It was so real to me—I could have been standing in the spotlight of that swanky gallery that even smelled, vetiver-like, of class and money. I’m wearing a black silk sheath gown. I’d better start running again so my ass is in shape. My ass is a whole size smaller. I love my imagination! Everyone loves me.

I’ve finally left my past far behind; maybe it’s even a charming anecdote to tell my new husband, who wouldn’t leave when I screw up. No, he’d thoughtfully, compassionately, lovingly, help me right my career. I even pay my co-op bills. Great art redeems everything.

Then the lusciousness of it all fractured around me. Someone had barreled into me and was saying my name.

“Brian,” I spat. “What’s going on? Are you stalking me?”

“Yes. No! I just want to explain.” He stepped too close again.

Damned if I didn’t get a flash of a UFO whirling through the blue sky. “About your spaceship?” I asked, and it wasn’t my kindest tone of voice, though I do, as a sacred rule, try to be kind.

“Decohering device,” Brian said, earnestly.

“Listen, Brian, you have to take a hint. I don’t know you, and you have to leave me alone.”

“The decohering device will return me to my universe,” Brian said, as if I hadn’t spoken. He grinned ruefully. “My molecular resonance isn’t synced to here. It’ll decay. It’ll dissolve into a pool of sub-molecular slime.”

“Sub-molecular slime?” I slid away from him.

Where did he get this stuff? “Are you on drugs?”

That would explain a lot—though not my subliminal ease with him.

“Drugs? Never!” He looked offended and then grimaced. “Well, there was that one time at a Blue Oyster Cult concert … ”