Bright Lights, Big City (11 page)

You don’t know what to say. You are embarrassed. You want to hear more. Megan sips her wine and looks out the window. You wonder how painful this is for her.

“Did your husband commit you?”

“He didn’t have much choice. I was raving. Manic depression. They finally figured out a few years ago it was a simple chemical deficiency. Something called lithium carbonate. Now I take four tablets a day and I’m fine. But it’s a little late to become a full-time mother again. Anyway Dylan—that’s my son—has a wonderful stepmother and I see him every summer.”

“That’s awful,” you say.

“It’s not so bad. I’m okay now, Dylan has a good life. I call that a good deal. How about some dinner?”

You would rather fill in the gaps of the story, hear all the details, the shrieks and moans of Bellevue, but Megan is up and she is holding out her hand.

In the kitchen she passes you a paring knife and three cloves of garlic which you are supposed to peel. The skin is hard to remove. She explains that it’s easier if you whack them a few times with the blunt edge of the knife. Then she notices the bandage. “What happened to your hand?”

“Got caught in a door. No big deal.”

Megan goes behind you to wash lettuce in the sink. When you step back to get a better angle on the cutting board your buttocks meet. She laughs.

Megan moves around to the stove. She reaches up to an open shelf and pulls down a bottle. “Olive oil,” she says. She pours some in a saucepan and turns on the burner. You pour yourself another glass of wine. “Is the garlic ready,” Meg asks. You have succeeded in peeling two cloves. They look nude. “Not too efficient, are we?” Megan says. She relieves you of the knife and strips the third clove, then chops it all up. “Now we dump the garlic in the pan and let it fry. Meanwhile, I’ll chop the basil while you open the clams. You know how to operate a can opener?”

You mostly stand and watch as Meg flashes around the kitchen. She moves you occasionally, whenever you’re in the way. You like the feel of her hands on your shoulders.

“Tell me about Amanda,” Megan says over salad. You are sitting at the table in the dining alcove in candlelight. “I get the feeling that something bad happened.”

“Amanda is a fictional character,” you say. “I made her up. I didn’t realize this until recently, when another woman, also named Amanda, shed me with a collect phone call from Paris. Do you mind if I open another bottle of wine?”

You eventually give Megan the gist of it. She says that Amanda must be enormously confused. You will drink to that.

“You’ve had a terrible time, haven’t you?” she says. You shrug. You are looking at her breasts, trying to determine whether or not she is wearing a bra.

“I’ve been worried about you,” Megan says.

You move from the table to the couch. Megan says that we all project our needs onto others, and that others aren’t always capable of fulfilling them. No bra, you decide.

You excuse yourself to go to the bathroom. You switch on the light and close the door behind you. The bathroom has a cluttered, homey look. Dried flowers on the toilet tank, white sheepskin on the seat. You pull back the shower curtain. Inside the shower is a shelf loaded with bottles.
Vitabath, Bath & Shower Gelée
. You like the sound of that.
Pantene Shampoo. Pantene Conditioner
. Doubtless this should not make you think of
panties
, but it does.
Lubriderm Lotion
. You pick up a luffa and rub it against your cheek, then return it to the shelf. A pink disposable razor is cradled in the soap dish.

You open the medicine cabinet over the sink: cosmetics, the usual assortment of noneuphoric home medicines. A tube of
Gynol II Contraceptive Jelly. Odorless, Colorless, Flavorless
. This is good news. On the top shelf there is a cache of prescription bottles. You remove one: “Megan Avery; Lithium Carbonate; four tablets daily.” The second bottle is tetracycline. So far as you know you are not suffering from bacterial infection. You replace it. You score on the third try: “Valium, as directed, for tension.” Tension you’ve got. You hold the bottle up to the light. Nearly full. After a brief struggle you master the childproof cap. You shake a blue tab onto your palm and swallow it. You consider. The last time you dropped a Valium you didn’t even feel it. You take another. Of course, the last time you took a V, you were wired on C. Anyway. You replace the bottle, take an L and flush.

Megan is making noises with the dishes in the kitchen when you return. “Be right out,” she says. You sit on the couch and pour another glass from the bottle on the coffee table. A bouquet with a hint of migrant-worker sweat.

“Just thought I’d get the dishes out of the way,” Megan says when she returns.

“A good policy,” you say. “Want some more wine?”

She shakes her head. “I’m not much of a drinker anymore.”

“That’s a good policy, too.” You are feeling magnanimous.

“Are you doing any writing,” Megan asks.

You shrug your shoulders. “I’ve been working on some ideas.”

“Do it,” Megan says. “I want to see you walk back into that place someday to pick up a check in Fiction. I want to see you walk past Clara’s office into the Department. I’ll have a bottle of champagne waiting.”

You don’t know how Megan has come to believe in you, since you don’t even believe in yourself. But you’re grateful. You try to picture the scene of your triumphal return to the magazine, but instead you find yourself admiring Megan’s bare feet drawn up beside her thighs on the couch.

“What will you do in the meantime? Any job prospects?”

“I’ve got some leads,” you say.

“I could put you in touch with a few people,” she says. “What you’ve got to do is make up a good résumé—wide enough for journalism and publishing. I know an editor at Harper & Row who’d be happy to talk to you. I’ve already talked to Clara, and she says as far as the magazine is concerned, the parting was amicable and you’ll get a good recommendation.”

You appreciate Megan’s wonderful efficiency, but getting fired really wore you out and you would just as soon put the question of new employment on hold. Right now you would like to drink some more of this wine and sink a little deeper into the upholstery. You would like to show Megan how grateful you are. You reach over and take her hand. “Thanks,” you say.

“And don’t be afraid to ask for a loan to tide you over.”

“You’re terrific.”

“I just want to help you get back on your feet.”

Not now, you think. You’d rather lie down. Bury your head in Megan’s lap and stay there for a week or two. The bed is just a few feet away. You lean over and place your free hand on Megan’s shoulder. The silk slides back and forth across her skin as you massage. No bra strap. You look into her eyes. She’s a rare woman. She smiles, reaches out and strokes your hair.

“Everything’s going to work out,” she says.

You nod.

Her face registers a shift of thought, and then she says, “How’s your father doing?”

“He’s fine,” you say. “He’s terrific.” You pull her toward you. You slide a hand behind her head and close your eyes as your lips find hers. You press her head against the back of the couch and run your tongue along her teeth. You want to feel her tongue. You want to disappear inside her mouth. She turns her head away and tries to withdraw from your embrace. You reach a hand under her shirt. Gently, she grips your hand and holds it there.

“No,” she says. “That’s not what you want.” Her voice is calm and soothing. She is not angry, just determined. When you try to advance your hand she stops it.

“Not that,” she says. When you try to kiss her again she holds you off, but she remains on the couch. You feel like water seeking its own level, and Megan is the sea. You put your head in her lap. She strokes your hair. “Calm down,” she says. “Calm down.”

“Are you all right now,” Megan asks when you lift your head from her lap.

The level of the room keeps changing. All of the surfaces swell and recede with oceanic rhythm. You are not quite all right. You are somewhat wrong.

“I think maybe I’ll get up and go to the, uh, bathroom.” This is you speaking. Testing: one, two, three.

Megan is helping you to your feet. She holds your elbow as she leads you to the door. “I’ll be right out here if you need me.”

The black-and-white tiles on the floor keep moving. You stand in front of the toilet and consider. Do you feel sick? Not exactly. Not yet, anyway. You might as well take a leak, though, as long as you are here. You unzip and aim for the bowl. There is a poster with some kind of print in front of you. You lean forward to read it, and then you lean back, so as not to fall forward.

You try to grab hold of the shower curtain as you go down but you can’t get a grip.

“Are you all right?” Megan says from the other side of the door.

“Fine,” you say. You are mostly in the tub. Only your feet stick out, way down at the far end of your body. It’s not uncomfortable, really, except that you are a little damp around the midsection. You will have to investigate this. Find the source. In a minute.

The door opens. Help is on the way.

SOMETIMES A VAGUE NOTION

You wake up with a cat on your chest. You are on a couch, wrapped in a quilt. After a few minutes you recognize Megan’s apartment. Her bed is empty. The clock on the nightstand says 11:13. That would be
A.M
., judging by the sunlight. The last thing you remember is an amorous lunge at Megan somewhere in the
P.M
.; presumably unsuccessful. You have the feeling you have made a fool out of yourself.

You sit up in bed and marvel at this strange pair of pajamas. You stand up. There is a note on the kitchen table:
Eggs, English muffins and orange juice in fridge. Your clothes are hanging in bathroom. Give a call later on. Love—Megan
.

At least she doesn’t hate you. Perhaps you did not entirely disgrace yourself. Better not to think about it. You find your clothes in the bathroom. Everything is stiff and clean as if freshly laundered. The calico cat jumps up on the sink and rubs its head on your hip as you dress.

You should leave a note for Meg. You find a pen and a fat pad in which every sheet has
MEMO
written across the top.

Dear Meg—Thanks for the bed and board. Dinner was delicious
. Now what? Should you acknowledge loss of full recall?
I guess I nodded off a little early
. The question is, what did you do before that? For that matter, what about after? What you need is an all-purpose apology. Something to cover each possible misdemeanor.
Please excuse my lapse from gentlemanly comportment. Let’s get together soon, maybe for lunch
.

You rip this up. On the new sheet you write:
Dear Megan—I’m sorry. I know I’m always saying that, but I mean it. Thank you
.

The phone is ringing when you get back to your apartment. Living dangerously, you answer. It’s Richard Fox, the reporter. He says he heard a rumor about your recent loss of employment. He says he liked a book review you wrote for the
Village Voice
a while back. Nobody reads book reviews in the
Voice
, but you admire the diligence exhibited by Fox’s assistant in tracking the thing down. He mentions an opening at
Harper’s
that might be right for you, and says that he could put in a good word. He is too kind. He wasn’t nearly so friendly when you met him at the publication party for his last book.

“I met Clara Tillinghast a few weeks ago,” he says. “No man I’d care to drink with could put up with that for long. My sources tell me she had it in for you from the start.”

“Short honeymoon, long divorce.”

“Would it be accurate to say that she is something of a bitch on wheels?”

“I think she has treads, actually. Like a Sherman tank. But it would be a tough thing to verify.”

“I guess you know I’m writing a piece on the magazine.”

“Really?”

“I was hoping you might be able to give me some background. You know—human interest, anecdotes.”

“You want smut?”

“Whatever you’ve got.”

A baby cockroach is working its way up the wall next to the phone. Should you crush it or let it pass?

“I was just a little worker bee. I don’t think I could tell you anything of national interest.”

“Let’s face it. The stagehands have the best view in the house.”

“It’s a pretty dull place,” you say. Already it seems so far behind you, the office politics and the broom-closet affairs no more interesting there than elsewhere.

“Why feel loyal to them? They threw you out on your ass.”

“The whole subject just bores me.”

“Let’s have lunch. Bat some ideas around. Say, Russian Tea Room at one-thirty?”

You tell him you don’t have any ideas. Your information is imperfect. Everything you thought you knew turned out to be wrong. You tell him you are an unreliable source. He appeals to the public’s right to know. He appeals to your sense of vengeance. He gives you his phone number in case you change your mind. You don’t write it down.

You go out for a bite and the
Post
. It’s almost two o’clock. Not for the first time, you wonder why all the coffee shops in the city are run by Greeks. The take-out cups have pictures of seminude classical Greek figures.

O Attic shape … of paper men and maidens overwrought
…

You spread the newspaper out on the counter and learn that Coma Baby was delivered six weeks premature in an emergency Caesarean and that Coma Mom is dead.

Coming up West Twelfth from Seventh Avenue you see someone sitting on the steps of your apartment building. It looks an awful lot like your brother Michael. Whoa! You slow down. Then you stop. It is Michael. What is he doing here? He should be home in Bucks County. He doesn’t belong here.

He sees you. He stands up, starts toward you. You turn and bolt. The subway entrance is half a block up. You take the steps two at a time, dodging the zombies trudging up the stairs. An uptown train with open doors waits at the platform. A line at the token booth. You vault the turnstile. A metallic voice issues from the speaker on the booth: “Hey,
you!
” You dash inside as the doors close. People are staring. When the train begins to move they return to their
Posts
and their private sorrows.

Looking out the sooty windows at the receding platform and seeing Michael standing outside the turnstiles, you duck away from the window. You don’t want to see him. It’s not that he’s a bad guy. You feel guilty of everything. Even now, a transit cop with a walkie-talkie may be striding through the cars to arrest you.

You sit down and allow the racket of the train to fill your head. You close your eyes. Soon the noise doesn’t seem like noise and the motion doesn’t feel like motion. You could fall asleep.

You open your eyes and look at the ads.
TRAIN FOR AN EXCITING NEW CAREER. BE AN INSTANT WINNER WITH WINGO! SOFT AND LOVELY HAIR RELAXER. BE A MODEL—OR JUST LOOK LIKE ONE
.

At Fiftieth you get off and walk up the stairs to the street. Walking east, you cross abrupt thermoclines as you move between the cool shadows of tall buildings and brief regions of direct sunlight. At Fifth Avenue you stand on the corner and look over at the long row of windows fronting Saks. You cross the street to the third window down from the uptown corner.

The mannequin is gone. You count windows again. Where the Amanda mannequin had been is a new one with brunette acrylic on its head and a delicately upturned nose. You walk up and down the block, examining each of the mannequins. For a moment you think you have found it on Fiftieth Street, but the face is too angular and the nose is wrong.

You came here with a notion of demonstrating to yourself that the icon was powerless, yet you are unsetded now that it is gone. What does this mean? You decide that it has disappeared because you were through with it, and you consider this a good omen.

•  •  •

On Madison you pass a construction site, walled in by acres of plywood on which the faces of various rock stars and Mary O’Brien McCann are plastered. Thirty stories above you, a crane dangles an I-beam over the street beside the skeleton of a new building. From the sidewalk the crane looks like a toy, but a few months back you read about a pedestrian who was killed at this site when a cable broke.
DEATH FALLS FROM SKY
, the
Post
said.

You pass the Helmsley Palace—the shell of old New York transparently veiling the hideous erection of a real estate baron. A camera crew has taken over the sidewalk beside the entrance. Pedestrians submit to a woman with a clipboard who orders them to detour out into the street. “Close-up with the mini-cam,” someone says: The crew wear their importance like uniforms. Out in the bus lane, a kid in a Blessed Mother High School sweatshirt turns down the volume on his ghetto-blaster. “Who is it,” he asks you. When you shake your head he turns the music back up.

Facts are simple and facts are straight
Facts are lazy and facts are late
Facts all come with points of view
Facts don’t do what I want them to

“Here she comes,” a voice shouts.

You keep walking, thinking briefly about the Missing Person, the one who’s come and gone for good. Out into the sunlight of Fifth Avenue and the Plaza, a gargantuan white chateau rising in the middle of the island like a New Money dream of the Old World. When you first came to the city you spent a night here with Amanda. You had friends to stay with, but you wanted to spend that first night at the Plaza. Getting out of the taxi next to the famous fountain, you seemed to be arriving at the premiere of the movie which was to be your life. A doorman greeted you at the steps. A string quartet played in the Palm Court. Your tenth-floor room was tiny and overlooked an airshaft; though you could not see the city out the window, you believed that it was spread out at your feet. The limousines around the entrances seemed like carriages, and you felt that someday one would wait for you. Today they put you in mind of carrion birds, and you cannot believe your dreams were so shallow.

You are the stuff of which consumer profiles—American Dream: Educated Middle-Class Model—are made.
When you’re staying at the Plaza with your beautiful wife, doesn’t it make sense to order the best Scotch that money can buy before you go to the theater in your private limousine?

You stayed there once before, with your parents and your brothers, when your father was in between corporate postings. You and Michael rode the elevators up and down all day. The next day you were going to embark for England on the
Queen Elizabeth
. You told Michael that they didn’t have silverware in England, that people had to eat with their hands. Michael started to cry. He didn’t want to go to England, didn’t want to eat with his hands. You told him not to worry. You would sneak some silverware into the country. Prowling the halls, you stole silverware from the room-service trays and stashed it in your suitcases. Michael wanted to know if they had glasses. You packed some just in case. At customs in Liverpool Michael began to cry again. You had warned him of the terrible penalties for smuggling. He didn’t want to have his hands cut off. A few years ago you were home for the weekend and you found one of the spoons with the Plaza crest in the silverware drawer.

You walk up Fifth Avenue along the park. On the steps of the Metropolitan Museum, a mime with a black-and-white face performs in front of a small crowd. As you pass you hear laughter and when you turn around the mime is imitating your walk. He bows and tips his hat when you stop. You bow back and throw him a quarter.

At the ticket window you say you’re a student. The woman asks you if you have an ID. You say you left it in your dorm and she ends up giving you the student rate anyway.

You go to the Egyptian wing and wander among the obelisks, sarcophagi and mummies. In your several visits to the Met this is the only exhibit you have seen. Mummies of all sizes are included, some of them unwrapped to reveal the leathery half-preserved dead. Also dog and cat mummies, and an infant mummy, an ancient newborn bundled up for eternity.

From the Met you walk to Tad’s place on Lexington. It’s a little after six. No answer to the buzzer. You decide to go for a drink and come back later. In a few minutes you are in singles’ heaven on First Avenue. You start at Friday’s, where you get a seat at the bar and finally succeed in ordering a drink. Prime time approaches, and the place is packed with eager secretaries and slumming lawyers. Everyone here has the Jordache look—the look you don’t want to know better. Hundreds of dollars’ worth of cosmetics on the women and thousands in gold around the necks of the open-shirted men. Gold crucifixes, Stars of David and coke spoons hang from the chains. Some trust in God to get them laid; others in drugs. Someone should do a survey of success ratios, publish it in
New York
magazine.

You are sitting beside a girl with frosted hair who emanates the scent of honeysuckle. She has been sneaking peeks at you in between conferences with her girlfriend. You would guess her age to be somewhere in the illegal range. Underneath her eyes she has painted two purple streaks suggestive of cheekbones. You know what’s coming, it’s only a matter of time. You don’t know how to respond. You catch the eye of the bartender and order another drink.

“Excuse me,” the girl says. “Do you happen to know where we could get some coke?”

“No can do.”

“I do,” she says. “I mean, we know where we can score a gram but we don’t have enough bread. You wanna go in with us, maybe? We got some ludes.”

You are not this desperate, you tell yourself. You still have some self-respect.

•  •  •

You wake to the voice of Elmer Fudd. “Kill the wabbit! Kill the wabbit!” You feel like a murder victim yourself. Then you see a girl with frosted hair and puffy eyes looking down at you and you wonder if the crime isn’t rape.

“What happened?”

“Nothing,” she says. “Not a goddamn thing. Story of my life. Meet a guy at a bar and carry him home so he can pass out on my bed.”

This account of events relieves a fraction of the pain in your head. You are in a strange bed. A television shows the cartoon on the other side of the room. You discover that you are still partially clothed.

“At least you didn’t puke,” she says.

“You better hope your luck holds.”

“Say what?”

“Where am I?”

“You’re in my goddamn apartment.”

“Where might that be?”

“Queens.”

“You’re kidding.”

“What’s to kid?” Her face softens and she strokes your forehead. “You wanna try again?”

“What time is it?” you say. “I’m late for work.”

“Cool your jets. It’s Saturday.”

“I work Saturdays.” You sit up in bed, extracting her hand from your hair. You feel ravaged. On the television screen, Wile E. Coyote is building an improbable contraption to catch the Road Runner. Posters on the wall depict rock groups in lurid light and kittens in soft focus.