The Wonder Spot (34 page)

I didn't realize just how much she did not want to talk about Lev Polikoff until she said, “I should let you go,” and hung up first, a first.

In the weeks that followed, the only question I would ask was if she'd spoken to him, and she always had.

. . . . .

Jack had presented Mindy to me with less fanfare than her predecessors; he hadn't, for example, told me how much I'd love her. He'd hardly talked about her at all, which gave me the impression that she was peripheral and ephemeral. But the opposite was true, as I found out when he called to tell me they were engaged.

He asked if I had any objections.

“I have no idea,” I said. “I don't know her.”

He told me that Mindy was exactly who she seemed to be. “What you see is what you get.”

“Okay,” I said, “but I've barely seen her.”

We agreed to meet at a restaurant around the corner from Mindy's apartment on the Upper East Side, roughly a day's journey from mine in the West Village. The restaurant was elegant and casual, and there at the bar was my elegant and casual brother in jeans, a dark-blue blazer, white shirt, and an exquisite green tie with tiny orange giraffes on it.

“You're getting married,” I said, and he said, “I am.”

He was drinking a martini, which went with his tie, and he ordered one for me, too.

Placing the drink in front of me, the bartender told Jack that Debbie had called to say Mindy would be a few minutes late.

“Who's Debbie?” I said.

Jack said, “Her P.A.”

“Her P.A.?”

“Her personal assistant.”

I said, “Will she be your P.A. when you get married?”

He said, “I'll probably be her P.A.'s P.A.'s P.A.” Then he swiveled his stool around to face outward so he'd see Mindy as soon as she arrived. I swiveled with him, and noticed a huge arrangement of gorgeous blue flowers. I said, “Do you know what those are called?”

He said, “I'm pretty sure they're called flowers.”

Then Mindy walked in, and he went over to her.

They kissed, and he helped her off with what I saw was a real fur coat, one she hadn't found in a thrift shop or in her grandmother's closet. She was very pretty in her work clothes—a pale suit and chiffon blouse—and she walked in high heels with more grace than I did barefoot.

We said hello and held hands for a moment and looked at each other as the sisters-in-law we were to become.

Once we were seated at a table by the window, Mindy apologized for being late and apologized in advance for a phone call she would have to take during dinner; she was in the middle of a big deal. She worked in her family's real-estate business—The Bronstein Group—along with her father and two of her brothers and about a thousand employees.

A waiter told us the specials, noting which he thought Mindy would enjoy, and we ordered.

She caught Jack up on her deal, and I noticed that he was really listening to her, as opposed to pretending to listen or making a show of what a good listener he was.

I asked if she liked her work, and she said, “I love it.”

“What do you do, exactly?”

“It's different every day.” I could tell by the way she said, “You don't like what you do?” that she already knew.

I explained that I'd sort of fallen into advertising and now I couldn't get out.

As if I were a child trapped in a mine, she said, “We'll get you out,” and I heard her “we” not as she and Jack and I, but the entire Bronstein Group, as well as all of their buyers and renters, some of whom were probably celebrities, and all of their independent contractors, some of whom were probably teamsters; her “we” seemed to include everyone who had any power—political, financial, or physical—in Manhattan, on Earth, and in Heaven. She sounded so strong and so sure and so steadfast, I believed I would get out of advertising, and I thought,
This is what Jack loves about her.

When our salads came, I asked how Jack had proposed. I was really curious because he never said the expected thing, or if he did, it was always with irony, which would be all wrong and even unkind in a proposal.

He turned to Mindy and re-proprosed: “Will you marry me, please?” He spoke without any irony at all, even now, when he could've gotten away with some. “Then I gave her the ring.”

I realized I'd been remiss in not asking to see the ring earlier, which seemed to explain in part why I didn't have one myself.

Jack had designed the ring with a jeweler, a diamond set deep into a square-shaped platinum band, and I was trying it on when Mindy's phone rang. She took the call outside.

I held my hand away and said that if it didn't work out with Mindy, he could give me the ring for my birthday.

Jack said, “You really like it?” just as he did after I'd admired one of his screenplays.

“Don't be needy,” I said.

When I asked if Mindy was going to change her name, he said no, but he might change his; “I'd keep my maiden name.” In a Monty Python voice, high-pitched and English, he said, “Jack Applebaum Bronstein.”

I asked if they had a date for the wedding, and they did, almost a year and a half away.

“People will talk,” I said.

He was looking out the window at Mindy, and I looked, too. She was pacing the sidewalk. She lit a cigarette. She nodded, she nodded, and then she stopped; her eyes narrowed, her mouth turned down, and, as we watched, she began to argue.

I could see that Mindy was tougher than I was and tougher than Jack; I imagined him on the other side of that call.

Then she spotted us in the window, and she waved her pinky at us.

Jack said, “That's my mogul.”

. . . . .

As though sensing my fear of being stood up, Neil called me the day before our date, and the morning of. He asked me to meet him
at Jules, which I'd heard of; it had just opened and was impossible to get into—unless, he told me, Jules was the son of a patient of yours.

When my cab pulled up to the restaurant, Neil was waiting outside.

He wore a navy blue duffel coat—the kind with toggles—and was taller than I remembered and ganglier; he held himself like an adolescent, like his body was a rambling mansion he'd inherited and was just now moving into.

“Hi,” he said, and he took my hand and led me inside. The hostess ignored Neil until his words, spoken pleasantly, reached her ears: “Would you please tell Jules that Dr. Resnick is here?”

A moment later, Jules appeared. He said, “Hey,” to Neil and, “Glad to meet you,” to me, and led us through the restaurant, past the many models and the lay beautiful, children all.

I was shaking my head inside, until Neil offered the spectator seat to me and seated himself with his back to the runway.

He said, “Is red wine okay?” and I said it was.

I already knew that Neil was Jewish, like me; like me, he'd gone to public school; like me, he'd grown up in the suburbs, though his was Shaker Heights, outside Cleveland.

When we both ordered the steak frites, I remembered reading a study that showed that the more similar a couple was, the better their chance of staying together.

Neil had gotten a haircut, and was wearing a tie tucked into a V-neck sweater, a look last seen circa 1947 on Main Street, USA, or so I thought. When I complimented him on it, he said that he'd been talked into it at a store I knew to be a hip man's clothier based in London.

I'd liked the ensemble better when it had seemed sincere, but then Neil said that he'd bought it especially for our date and also that he was pretty sure he'd worn exactly the same outfit in junior high. He told me he'd been the dorkiest dork through high school, college, and med school.

I hadn't been cool or popular or even close to cool or popular in
high school, and yet no matter what I said I could tell that was how he saw me. When I told him about advertising, he said that he thought that was where the cool kids wound up.

I said that it was, and they were as callow as ever. “The dorks from high school are the people you want to know now.”

He said that he'd always just done what he thought was expected of him and was only now figuring out who he was and what he liked to do.

I said, “Like what?” Hovering beside him was a girl so thin she might have faxed herself; her sheaf of friends joined her and folded themselves into the next booth.

“Like books,” he was saying, “and movies. And music. I never used to listen to music.” Unlike me, Neil favored brand-new music; he named bands I'd never heard of that he was sure I'd love, like the Silver Jews, which he said he'd burn for me.

It took me a minute to understand that he was talking about making a CD. I confessed that I still listened to cassettes, and that many of my favorite songs were decades old: “Tupelo Honey” by Van Morrison; “Mercy, Mercy, Mercy” by Cannonball Adderley; “Knockin' on Heaven's Door” and a dozen other early Bob Dylan songs.

He said, “You have big ears,” explaining this was jazz lingo for
discerning listener.
“Bugsy.”

I said, “I also like ‘You Sexy Thing.' ”

He sang the line: “I believe in meerkls since you came along,” and I thought,
Here is a man who can sing Hot Chocolate on the first date.

When our steak frites came, I told him that I liked nothing on Earth better than a french fry.

“Same here,” he said. “Did you ever have the fries at the Corner Bistro?”

I had.

Probably the best, he said, were at Pastis, though the fries at the Four Seasons were out of this world.

I thought maybe he was trying to impress me, which was sweet,
but I wanted him to know exactly who I was, and I told him: I loved fries anywhere, from the fanciest restaurant to the dingiest diner; I loved them greasy, I loved them greaseless, I loved them fat and white and underdone, I loved them brown and loved them crispy. In my own
Let Us Now Praise Famous Fries,
I spoke as though telling him my most deeply held beliefs, and in a way I was.

He hadn't expected my principled lack of discrimination; maybe it didn't go with his notion of the cool and popular girl who hadn't noticed him in high school. I thought I saw his face say,
This is going to be harder than I thought.

“Okay,” he said, and I heard Cleveland in his voice. “All right then.”

We finished our identical meals at exactly the same moment, and I thought,
We will stay together forever.

A moment later, he turned serious: “I guess Robert told you that I'm divorced.”

I nodded.

“And I have a daughter?” He nodded to himself. I couldn't see past his glasses, and, as with our first meeting, I got the impression that he was looking in at himself instead of out at me.

He ordered another bottle of wine. He'd been married for sixteen years, he told me, and divorced for three; Ella was seven.

I admitted that I wasn't good at math.

He told me that his wife was a doctor, too; they'd met as premeds at Yale and had both gone to medical school at Harvard; Beth still practiced in Boston. “You'd like her,” he said. “She's very smart.” But the marriage had gone from rote to worse, and he said that he'd defended himself against his wife's contempt by receding. “As soon as I heard her voice, it was like a switch flipped my personality off,” he said. “Basically, I disappeared.”

I'd never been married, but I thought,
I've done that; I've felt that way.
“How long did you disappear?”

“Sixteen years?” he said.

He took a deep breath, and then I heard why: “I had an affair,” he said.

I thought of saying,
Taxi!
but he looked too burdened for me to make light of anything.

He took off his glasses; he closed his eyes; he shook his head. He told me that he had made a grave mistake, and I heard it in his voice. I heard that he had spent hours and days, weeks and months, going over it again and again. It was the worst thing he'd ever done, maybe the only bad thing, and I knew he would never do it again. It may sound strange, but his description of his infidelity convinced me of his faithfulness.

I felt in that instant that I was the one who'd had the affair, and I forgave myself for it. I took his hand and looked him right in his velvet-painting eyes, and I said, “What're you reading?”

A moment later, we were back to normal, back to the boyfriend and girlfriend we already seemed to be, and to the husband and wife we seemed on our way to becoming.

He'd just finished reading a new collection of short stories that he loved and I loved, and we loved the same dead writers, too—Hemingway and Fitzgerald but not Faulkner; neither of us had read
Ulysses,
and I said, “Let's never read it,” and we swore that no matter what happened between us, we never would.