Trophy House (8 page)

On the way over, I stopped at the bar and ordered a whiskey and water, from which heat. It heated my chest.

“Hi, Dannie,” Tom said. “Having a good time?”

“I'm having a very nice time, thank you.” I stuck my hand toward Judith Levy's midsection. “I'm his wife,” I said. She told me she was pleased to meet me as the color of her cheeks deepened to a dark pink. I looked for a wedding ring. No wedding ring, though she wore a rather large and showy star sapphire on her right third finger. Tom introduced us. He told me Judith had been auditing one of his courses, then decided to take it for credit. “She's acing it.”

“How nice,” I said. I felt like a Meg Ryan character—assailable, slightly addled—while trying not to let my confusion show. I asked Judith a string of polite questions: What had she done in Boston? What sort of science writing did she do? Tom kept nodding as she answered.

I decided that Judith Levy was far too anxious to earn an A from Tom. I hate people like that. They're so damn transparent. I drank another whiskey and probably shouldn't have driven home by myself. But I made it without anything untoward happening.

I was in the kitchen, heating some leftover bean soup, when Tom came into the kitchen. “Nice party,” I said.

“I thought so too,” he said. He opened the refrigerator and stuck his head inside. “Is Beth here?”

I told him she wasn't. He emerged with a thick wedge of cheddar. Then he looked for something to eat it on top of. Men never know where anything is in the kitchen.

“Where's that bread?”

“Which bread is that?”

“What's the matter with you, Dannie? Did I do something wrong?”

“I just can't believe you let that woman brown-nose you that way…”

“Oh, for Pete's sake, Dannie, leave the poor woman alone. She's working very hard. It's not an easy course. Lots of statistics.”

I could have pursued this line but decided not to, though I couldn't have said why. “Guess what Raymie's going to do?”

He found the bread in the bread box and pounced on it, waving it in front of me as if he'd discovered Atlantis. Subtext: I had deliberately hidden it from him. “Raymie?” he said. “What's the old girl up to now?”

“She's going to move in with our neighbor, Mitchell Brenner.”

“She's a fool.” He stuffed his mouth with food and began to chew it.

Beth came home before he had swallowed. “Were you two out somewhere?” Without waiting for an answer, she told us she'd got an apartment in Jamaica Plain with one of her friends. “It's got two bedrooms and it's a block from the Pond. They just did the kitchen over.”

“That's great, Beth,” Tom said. “How are you going to pay the rent?”

“I'm temping at John Hancock 'til I find something I really want to do.”

“What happened to your plan to go back to New York?”

“I'm going to wait. Maybe in a year or so. Anyway, I like being near you guys and Mark.”

This was gratifying but I knew it was only partly true. She couldn't face New York without Andrew. She shouldn't let him continue to determine the direction or shape of her life. This was like one of your basic stories: “From beyond the grave his evil influence continues to hold sway over the brokenhearted maiden.” Except Andy wasn't dead. Maybe I'd just kill him.

“I'm beat,” Tom said. “I'm going to bed.”

I
INVITED MY NEIGHBOR,
Alicia Baer, for coffee on the morning before I left for New York. What I had in mind was for her to let Marshall out into the backyard a couple of times a day and walk him if and when Tom hadn't come home by seven. This was something she'd done for me in the past. I felt a little guilty asking her, but she seemed agreeable enough; I always brought back a small thank-you gift for her. Alicia's married to a surgeon named Barney, who has this habit of turning a fishy stare on you, as if he were trying to decide where to make the first incision. Alicia is in her sixties and is an editor, semiretired, in an ancient Boston publishing house. That day, as soon as she sat down at the counter in my kitchen, she remarked that I looked especially “bright and bushy-tailed.” I took this to mean that my excitement had broken through onto my cheeks and lit up my eyes. “How long since you've been to New York?” Alicia asked.

“Three or four years, I guess,” I said. “I really have no reason to go.”

“No exhibits? No galleries? No friends?”

“I suppose I ought to,” I said. “There's nothing to stop me.”

What I didn't want to get into was that Tom wasn't all that high on New York and that inevitably some of his reluctance to go there had rubbed off on me; I didn't want to appear to be buying into my husband's opinions wholesale. New York, he insisted, was noisy, crowded, dirty, unsafe—even before September 11. It was expensive; risk lurked everywhere from the cabdriver who tried to stiff you to the maid in the hotel who probably went through your things. He admitted he found it exciting at night. The lights and the constant buzz of people having—or trying to have—a good time, was, as he called it, infectious. Usually, when we went there together, he took the West Side subway to Columbia to see his pals and colleagues while I visited galleries and shoe stores.

I had known Alicia for more than ten years, so I was surprised when she now told me that she had, more than twenty years earlier, almost split with her husband and gone to New York to take a fabulous job in a classy publishing house. “Trying to decide whether or not to leave here was one of the most awful periods of my whole life; I think I actually may have gone a little nuts. I wouldn't want to go through that again.”

“How did you decide?” I said. “I hope you don't mind my being nosy.”

She brushed this off, saying she didn't consider me the least bit nosy. “I guess I just tried to measure the potential pain of leaving my husband against missing out on a great career move. The trouble was, of course, that since both were in the future, how could I do this? Either one would have to be just a guess.”

“Can I ask you a question? And if you don't want to answer, I wouldn't blame you,” I said. “Please don't feel you owe me an answer.”

Alicia told me not to worry. Beating around the bush was not her style.

And so I asked her if she regretted the choice she'd made. And she said, surprisingly, “Sometimes.”

But why should that surprise me? No human being on earth reaches fifty without dragging behind them at least a few regrets. If there are folks out there free of this baggage, I'd very much like to meet them, although they're probably unbearably smug. I, for one, regret that I didn't let my high school sweetheart, Barry Chang, make love to me. He was the most adorable boy. He played the bassoon and was an All-State track and field champion. I wanted more than anything to have sex with him; my whole body went into a meltdown whenever he touched me. But I wasn't brave enough; I still can't think of Barry without flushing. Regret stings.

“Here I am,” Alicia said, “a year or so away from retirement. What do I do then to keep me busy? I don't know anything but editing. I'm not very good at keeping house, mainly because I don't really care if there are dust mice under the couch. Martha Stewart strikes me as a freak of nature—God, look what she's done to make the American woman feel inadequate. But I have Barney—he's good company when he's not seeing patients. Did I tell you, he's stopped doing surgery? He developed a slight tremor in his hands. That's it for the scalpel. But he still consults. He loves medicine the way I love publishing. So there you are. We're going to have to figure out how to give each other the most pleasure—and I'm not just talking about sex. I'm talking about enjoyment. Sounds pretty drab, doesn't it?”

I didn't think so.

“And you know what,” she said, as if remembering to stick the rosebuds into the icing, “I told Barney I wish I had a spa, one of those tubs with lots of fierce nozzles and a whirlpool, in our bathroom. And of course I didn't need it, a luxurious and expensive item like that. And he urged me to go ahead and have one installed. And when I asked him why he was so easily persuaded to spend that kind of money for something so self-indulgent, you know what he said? He said, ‘'Cause it makes you happy.'” With that, Alicia looked at her watch. “I've got an eye appointment at eleven. I've got to run. Don't worry about Marshall; he'll be fine. And have fun in New York.”

 

I took the new Amtrak Acela to New York, a smooth, almost silent ride that's supposed to shave almost an hour off the trip down the so-called Northeast corridor. However, the train mysteriously stopped outside of Bridgeport for forty-five minutes and thus took about the same time the slower train would have taken. I had decided to stay with my cousin Caroline and her husband rather than at a hotel, mainly because I experienced an unusual spurt of family loyalty—we had spent summers together as children; it might be nice to trade versions of family history. I arrived at her apartment near the U.N. complex late in the afternoon, took her and her grouchy husband out to dinner at a neighborhood restaurant, and went to bed on the early side. I thought I was too nervous to fall asleep quickly, but the opposite was true and when, the next day, I got up refreshed and went into the kitchen where Caroline was cooking bacon in the oven and brewing coffee, I was actually delighted to hear about her perfect children.

“How do I look?” I said.

“You look great—very black. Who's this person you're seeing?”

“It's a man I've been working with for years. We've never met. He's a fan of my work. He wants to see my photographs.”

“Do you mind if I tell you something?”

I shook my head, certain it would be something less than lovely.

“That last book you illustrated? The one about the vegetable stand in Maryland? If you don't mind me saying so, it wasn't your best work.”

I seethed and said nothing. Caroline's the person who told me, years ago, that Tom and I were ships that pass in the night. She seems to enjoy throwing darts at me—and she's got great aim. But her criticism implied she had actually looked at the book, an item meant for the under-seven crowd. Or maybe she hadn't and was lying. In any case, I suppose I shouldn't have stayed with her in the first place.

“I'll see you later,” I said, looking in her hall mirror to make sure I was as snappy as I could possibly be without a total makeover. Black is good.

“Come to think of it, you could use a scarf with that outfit,” Caroline said, sneaking up behind me. “Just a small touch of color at the throat.”

“No thanks,” I said. “I like me this way.”

She made a dart into the hall closet and came out with a gauzy blue scarf that would have looked just right. “Here,” she said, “it goes.” I shook my head and heard her say something vaguely hissy under her breath. But I left with my pride intact and started out on foot. The throb and noise in the City always get under my skin, not in a bad way but like a powerful upper. Wings on my heels.

I walked—a matter of a mile or so—to the building in which the publishing house occupied the entire eleventh floor. I gave the man in the lobby two forms of I.D. I thought I was going to have to give over a drop or two of blood before he allowed me on the elevator. On eleven the elevator doors slid open to reveal a chrome and glass waiting room with a wall against which hung the firm's latest hits, none of them children's books. I went over to the woman sitting at a glass desk behind a glass partition and told her who I was. Soon a person in a miniskirt, looking to be about fifteen and introducing herself as Ashley, came out to collect me. “David's stuck in a meeting. He said to tell you that he'll be with you in about five minutes. I'm supposed to take you to his office and ask you if you want something to drink.” I was thinking maybe a shot of whiskey to calm nerves unexpectedly jangling, but declined her offer. I followed her down a couple of corridors off which lay tiny offices containing one person each, at work. A couple of them glanced up as we passed. Hadn't he told me his assistant was middle-aged? “Are you new here?”

“I've like been here three weeks? David's old assistant had to retire. She's got lung problems. It's not cancer.”

Ashley left me in her boss's office. It was just large enough for a desk, two chairs and dozens of what I assumed were manuscripts waiting to be read on the shelves against one wall. I went around to his side of the desk to look at his things. A computer, a glass paperweight, a ceramic buffalo, a fake glass pen, a picture of two small inauthentically happy children within a metal frame, along with the usual pads and memo sheets, calendar, and clock. His desktop was not especially forthcoming, if what you had in mind was revelation. It was neither messy nor compulsively neat but somewhere in between. The only thing that might have given something away was the photograph, and the subjects could be anyone—his kids, his niece and nephew, godchildren. I wondered briefly why I was being so nosy. I reminded myself: “You are not single, Dannie, and this is not a blind date. This is a man who provides you with work. Period.”

“Is that Dannie?” I jumped; he'd caught me snooping at his desktop.

“Mr. Lipsett?”

“David. Please.”

“David.”

“Did Ashley get you something to drink?”

“I didn't want anything, thanks.”

I was embarrassed, as if I'd discovered, too late, that I was wearing shoes from two different pairs.

“Well,” he said as he settled himself in the high, back-leaning leather chair on his side of the desk. “Do you have those pictures with you? Let's take a look.” I noticed, as he brought his hands together, that he was missing the little finger of his right hand. This so unnerved me that I began to babble about his old assistant while trying, at the same time, to untie the black ribbon securing my portfolio. I finally got it open and laid them out for David to look at.

He examined the pictures, twelve by fifteen each, in silence, one at a time. I sat on the other side of the desk, trying not to look at the place where his finger should be and watching him for some reaction, which he maddeningly kept hidden. For a moment, it seemed more important than anything, ever, that he like them, that he tell me I was a great photographer and that, in fact, these pictures were too good for a children's book; they should have a show of their own in a gallery, later to be reproduced in a book of their own. The fantasy stopped abruptly, when he said, “They're not bad. I'll have to think about finding the right book for them. Kids like drawings, I guess because the artist takes so many liberties the photographer can't.”

Was he telling me he couldn't use them?

“You can fool around with photographs, you can do amazing things…”

“I know,” he said. It was at this point that he smiled broadly, implying, I thought, that what I'd just said was too obvious to be put into words. “Of course you do,” I said.

Meanwhile, as this back-and-forth was going on, I was studying him with far more interest than I would have admitted at the time. He was hovering in the fifty-year range, no beard or mustache, and his skin color was either Mediterranean or sun-exposed. He had on trendy, oval-shaped wire-rimmed glasses and seemed not to have lost much if any hair along the way. He was wearing a gray tweed jacket, striped shirt closed up to the highest button, no tie. His shoes were hidden but I would have bet a million dollars they didn't have tassels on them. There was a looseness to the way he moved that most women find very appealing, as if a puppeteer with not much experience was working his strings. You want to steady him. What I was trying not to admit was that I found him wickedly attractive. As I looked at this man, I formed an instant emotional opinion about him. Whether, later, I would be forced to revise or stick with a good hand, didn't figure in my calculation.

“You know,” he said, tapping the pictures together into a neat stack, “I may be able to use something of yours—not necessarily any of these—in a book that's still being written, about a whale watch. You've been on one?”

I nodded. “Have you?”

“Not yet,” he said. “Maybe you can tell me how it's done. I've made a reservation for lunch nearby. You're free, aren't you?”

I nodded. “Can I leave this here?” I asked, pointing to my portfolio. Only after asking did I realize that leaving it would mean I'd have to come back to retrieve it.

The restaurant was subdued, with plenty of room between tables, a maitre d' who welcomed David Lipsett by name and told him how nice it was to see him again. He led us to a banquette where we both faced out toward the other tables and diners. The light in the room was so subtle and diffused it was hard to figure out where it came from. David told me the place was popular with folks in publishing and pointed out an author whose name I recognized, sitting with his agent “rumored to be his sixth. He goes through them like popcorn.”