Vigil for a Stranger (19 page)

“I certainly didn't tell her anything much. Just the basic facts, that my name is the same as someone you used to know, and you wondered if I was the same guy, and you decided to look me up. And then we fell for each other.”

“That's all?”

“Christine—what do you think? Jesus.”

I said, “I'm sorry. It just strikes me as so odd that she wants to have lunch with me.”

He said, “You have a way of finding the most ordinary things odd and the oddest things ordinary.”

“I do? Is that true? Is that my problem?” How simple: I just had to turn a switch.

“It's not a problem, it's one of your lovable little quirks,” he said, and then, “I miss you. Am I going to get to see you next week after your lunch with Alison?”

“Can you?”

“Thursday night? I can't imagine why not. Can you stay with me? Or do you have to go home to the white-clam king of Connecticut?”

“I don't know, let me think.” I hated it when he made fun of James, whom he insisted on considering a ludicrous figure. I didn't tell him about James's pigtail, which was getting quite long.

“In fact, why don't you just stay until the weekend? I'll have to work, but maybe you could go to museums or something, and I'll try to keep my schedule to a minimum. We'll have the nights.”

Oh God, it was tempting. I thought of James, and hated myself—Orin's ridicule always made me feel tender toward James. But I knew that it would be a relief to be away from him and from the nothingness that was growing between us.

“Do it, Chris. Please. What a time we'll have.”

“I'll have to think about it. Sometimes I work on Thursday nights.”

“What—slinging oregano?”

“Yes, slinging oregano. Orin—stop it.”

“I'm sorry,” he said. “I just want to see you so badly.”

Alison was wearing another suit, a lightweight blue wool with a straight skirt and an open-neck blouse. I wore my new red dress. We met at Chez Duroc—
Chez D
—a pretty little French restaurant just off Madison Avenue.

“This must seem strange to you,” she said immediately. She looked quizzically at me over her menu. She was not quite as pretty as I remembered her, or as young, but she was still very attractive: a sharp-nosed face, bright lipstick, the thick, perfectly-streaked hair. “That I wanted us to meet for lunch.”

I started to say something polite, and then I decided to be honest. “Yes, I guess it did—a little.”

“But I remembered our phone call, and you seemed so nice—I mean, I liked you on the phone.” She smiled at me. “And then Orin told me this amazing story, and I thought: I have to meet this woman! I love it when things are extravagant, larger than life. Don't you? It's such a romantic story.”

“Is it?”

“Of course!”

She beamed at me. I figured out that she was about thirty-six. Her make-up was perfect; there was a pearly blue line between the edge of her lower lid and her eyelashes; each eyelash was pristinely stiff with mascara; her cheekbones were plum-colored fading to the same pink as her lipstick. Her eyes were so brilliantly green she must have worn tinted contact lenses.

“And Orin is such a dear,” Alison went on. “I thought, well, I'll have lunch with Christine, and then the four of us can get together for dinner some night—I'll bring Roger—my fiancé. Did Orin mention Roger to you?” I shook my head. “Oh, you'll love Roger. I really want to do this soon. But for the moment, let's order and get that over with, and then we can really talk. I want to know everything!”

Alison ate a lot—she said she had to because she had low blood sugar—and she ordered a bottle of wine that she kept sloshing into our glasses. She was not what I expected: from her appearance, her absorbed efficiency that day on the train, the incredible schedule I glimpsed in her Filo-Fax. I had imagined her as brisk, cold, overbearing—definitely a hardware kind of person—not someone I would feel comfortable with. But though her self-confidence was staggering, she was relaxed and friendly. She said she needed a long lunch hour to unwind from the morning and fortify herself for the afternoon and evening.

“All the guys I know like to brag that they work hard and they play hard,” she said, and made a face. “As if those are virtues. I think it sounds desperate and pathetic—not the working hard part, I like to work hard, I thrive on it—up to a point, of course. But playing hard—isn't that sad? Although what it comes down to with them is women and booze.” She grinned; her teeth were what you'd expect. “But I like to enjoy myself. You know what I mean?” She held up a shrimp speared on the end of her fork. “I believe in pleasure.”

Alison also believed in talking—very fast, very intimately. She told me about her childhood and asked about mine, which fascinated her: Jamesville High, and parents who ran a motel in the country. She had never heard anything like that before “My God,” she said. “A real high school with cheerleaders and car washes and an honor roll.” She went to the Dalton School in Manhattan. I told her that the only Dalton girl I knew at Oberlin had a nervous breakdown during Orientation Week.

“Exactly,” Alison said with triumph. “See what I mean?”

I wasn't sure I did. I went to Jamesville High and spent three months in a psychiatric ward making baskets.

I didn't tell her that, though our conversation quickly got to the point where we could confess anything to each other. She told me about her parents' noisy drunken cocktail parties when she used to sit weeping in terror in the kitchen with the maid; I told her that I always hated the way my parents were with the motel guests (my mother so servile, my father so brusque); we talked about our hair; I told her some things about Emile, and about Denis and Yale; she told me the trouble she'd had getting over her abortion; I told her about George Drescher's gallery; she told me about going to Argentina to design a system for the largest beef cattle ranch in the world; I told her about Jimmy Luigi's; she told me about her sister who got a tattoo of a naked man on her left bicep; I asked her about Roger; she asked me about being a clam-eating vegetarian.

We went on and on: we were becoming friends, and our conversation quickened with the consciousness of that fact. I felt the afternoon getting away from me while I galloped into a closeness to Alison that I wasn't prepared for; I could sense that I was on the verge of revealing things I didn't really want to say to anyone. I could understand why Orin told her so much about us: she was impossible to resist.

This was something that happened to me more often with women than with men, though it was what drew James and me together: the immediate, unmistakable sense of rightness, of comfort and trust. Talking to Alison, I thought of the way that block on Chapel Street between Jimmy Luigi's and Claire's would always bear the light of James's first goodness to me, the winter day he volunteered Rosie and Ruby and then took me out for herb tea and coffee cake.

I had missed that intimacy. James and I had lost it, and I didn't have it with Orin—not like this, not so purely. We were happy in each other's company; he was gregarious and entertaining, and he listened to whatever I wanted to tell him. But I was aware that we didn't always get through to each other, that sometimes I couldn't judge his reactions to my words, that he seemed to be withholding things from me. There were times when I knew things he never would, or when he seemed urgently attuned to what eluded me completely. These small lapses were, in a way, the aspects of Orin that recalled Pierce to me most vividly—the failures to connect, the momentary lack of symmetry, the tiny instances of frustration. None of this had anything to do with love, and certainly not with passion. Pierce and I had been best friends; and in bed, Orin and I understood each other perfectly.

Alison polished off her shrimp, ate all the bread and butter, and helped me finish my vol-au-vent with spring vegetables. She told me about her new apartment and the reproduction William Morris wallpaper she had chosen for the dining room. We found that we shared a taste for the most extreme examples of Victorian furniture, and she wanted to know all the details about the auction where James and I found the flamboyant mahogany commode. She also liked Stickley, and she was interested in early twentieth century oak, the good stuff, and she wanted to hear all about my watercolors, she'd love a water-color for her dining room, something strong that wouldn't be overpowered by all the pattern.

When I looked at my watch, I saw that we had been at lunch for nearly two hours. What happened to the busy yuppie who thrived on hard work? How long could a long lunch hour be? Didn't she say she had appointments? And wasn't I going to go to the Whitney?

As if she had read my mind, Alison said, “I hope you're not in any particular hurry. I don't have an appointment until four, and then I'm flying to D.C. on the red-eye. I just finished a huge, complicated, pricey and
extremely boring
job.” She grinned—proud of herself and trying not to show it. “So I told myself I'm just going to chill out for a day—you know? Spend some time away from those bloody machines!”

The restaurant had emptied out, our table by the window was a little oasis of clanking silverware. The waiter was hovering, he wanted us to leave, but we ordered more coffee, and Alison insisted that we have dessert. I gave the waiter a sheepish smile, but Alison said, “Frank, you don't mind if we stay, do you? Can you keep pouring coffee into us for a while?” Frank agreed, of course; he seemed delighted, whether he was or not. This was a way of life I didn't yet understand: the unapologetic life, the life of privilege, the life in which friendship, talk, intimacy—pleasure—were more important than the convenience of some waiter—the life led by the glamorous people who besieged Orin when I wasn't around.

“Isn't this wonderful?” Alison grinned at me. She didn't look glamorous. Her lipstick was gone, her upper lip was greasy, she had had too much wine. But somehow she managed to continue to look like what she was: a busy professional woman, one of the best in her field. “Aren't we having fun?” she asked me. “I'm awfully glad I took the plunge and called you.”

“I thought you wanted to sell me something,” I confessed. “I had no idea what Haver & Schmidt was.”

She got the giggles at this, and imagined designing a system for what she called the watercolor biz. But in spite of my liking for Alison, in spite of our instant rapport, I kept wondering why she did, in fact, telephone me and invite me to lunch.

And then, over our second coffees, the conversation turned to Orin. She and Orin had been friends for ages, Alison said—when pressed, she guessed about five years. She met him through Roger, before she and Roger got engaged, when Roger was involved with a friend of hers. Orin and Roger did a lot of work together—Roger was in real estate law as well as taxes—and when she set up the new installations for Parker Properties she worked pretty closely with Orin and really got to know him.

“But it's your friend Pierce who interests me,” Alison said. “Orin is such a mystery man. The Scarlet Pimpernel. It really intrigues me that you thought he might be someone else.” She looked at me brightly. “You know?”

“It was just a crazy idea of mine,” I said.

She looked disappointed. “You don't think so anymore?”

“It's too impossible.”

Alison toyed with her spoon. She peered at her face in it, frowning. “Well, I don't see how you can just
give up
on it,” she said. “It does have a certain plausibility.” She put down the spoon and looked at me. “I mean, he really could be this guy Pierce,” she said. “Orin. He could be the guy you lost twenty years ago, Christine. The guy you thought was dead. Couldn't he?”

I was unable to respond. We sat there looking at each other, and then I dropped my eyes to my plate and squeezed my hands together in my lap. It had been starting to be over, and now it was beginning again, and I thought to myself:
of course
. This is not crazy. It makes the most perfect sense, as if I have been working at cleaning an old canvas, delicately removing layers of paint to expose different realities until I reach, finally, not the blank white canvas I thought was the end but something below even that, something infinitely richer than I could have anticipated.

What was crazy was not to trust my instincts. The moment I saw him, I thought:
Pierce. Yes. Of course
. And then I drove it away, I had been doing what I could to drive it away ever since.

The old longing returned: for Pierce, my Pierce, who played the guitar and sang the blues, who bought me a wind-up penguin and quoted from Van Gogh's letters—my dearest friend, whom I would miss until I died.

I raised my eyes at last and looked at Alison. She had been finishing her pastry, an apricot tarte, snatching the food off her fork with quick little bites, watching me across the table while I struggled with what she said. “I hope I didn't open some can of worms that's none of my business,” she said. “Sometimes I get carried away.”

She looked somehow voracious, but her voice was kind, and she seemed genuinely concerned. I wondered if she was the sort of person who fed on other people's lives because her own was unsatisfactory. I wondered briefly about Roger, her fiancé—the tax and real estate lawyer who spent years traveling in India, toyed with the idea of entering a monastery, and now was a workaholic obsessed with being made partner in the firm where he worked. Roger had to sleep with a night light, Alison told me.

“Christine?” She pushed away her plate and reached across the table briefly to touch my arm, a gesture that reminded me of Orin. “Should I apologize? I do apologize. Okay?”

I shook my head. “I just—I thought I'd finally settled all this in my mind, I thought I had gotten to the point—slowly, and with great difficulty gotten to the point where I had eliminated Pierce, all that madness, and it was just Orin, it was just having an affair with someone. I thought that was complicated enough.”