Crossroads (2 page)

Mark was handling arraignments that night and he'd be at the courthouse most of the night. And I knew, as well as I knew anything, that he'd spend the rest of the night with Lila. I called the courthouse and had him paged. He arrived out of breath, and when he heard my voice, I could tell he was disappointed it wasn't Lila phoning. “What do you want?” he said, unable to conceal his annoyance. I told him what Robert had said. I wasn't going to fall apart like Robert. I wasn't going to cry or lose control. I just wanted him to tell me the truth calmly. “Just tell me,” I said, “what is going on.”

“Look, this has to wait.”

“It can't wait. I'll come down there.”

“O.K., I'll find someone to cover for me. Meet me at O'Neal's at ten-thirty.”

At midnight I realized he wasn't going to show. I drank a lot of brandy, and everyone at the bar felt sorry for me because they knew I'd been stood up. The bartender gave me a drink on the house. “You look down in the dumps, kid. Waiting for some guy to show?”

I nodded. “My husband. He must have gotten held up in surgery.”

“Oh, you married to a doctor?”

“A brain surgeon.”

He was impressed. “I could use a little brain surgery myself. Find out what the hell I'm doing in this city.” I paid my bill and walked over to Lila's.

She lived on a relatively safe block in the West Seventies, not far from where we lived. I went and stood under the streetlight and I rang and rang. All the lights were on in her apartment. I pounded on the buzzer in sharp staccatos. I was certain they were upstairs, peering down at me.

Nobody answered. Nobody came downstairs. I know the streets of Manhattan well. My specialty is roads. I know the
safe parts and the bad parts. I know the alleyways and the hot spots. I decided to walk from Lila's in a series of geometric patterns. I began with the square. I walked west to Broadway, then down ten blocks, across Columbus, then back. I couldn't make a perfect square. I tried cutting corners to make a circle, then a diamond, a triangle. Lila had been in my geometry class sophomore year. The teacher was Miss Gower, a spinster who only talked shapes. Her life was in two dimensions, flat.

Lila wasn't very good in geometry, but she was worse in French. In the locker room Lila used to undress not far from me and we'd laugh about poor Miss Gower. Miss Gower never laughed. She had nothing to laugh about. Lila had pale thin legs with lots of hair around the groin. Very dark hair. One day the hair was gone. She'd waxed the hair around her groin so she could be in the swim show and nobody would see her pubic hair. While I tried to find my way home geometrically along Manhattan streets, I wondered if Lila still waxed her pubic hair and I wondered if Mark rubbed up against it when he made love to her.

Mark was home when I walked in, and he was distraught. He didn't know what to do with his hands, his feet, so he made nervous movements like his mother, tapping a finger on the table, bouncing a foot up and down. He didn't know if he wanted a drink or not. He didn't know why he hadn't met me at O'Neal's. “But I've been seeing Lila for a while now,” he managed to get out. “She reminds me of you in a lot of ways,” he muttered. “She's the way you were before we started having problems.”

“When was that?”

I sat across from him and tried to listen to what he had to say. In grammar school all the teachers had seemed far away, perched at the heads of the classes in their suits and dresses, behind big desks. I'd always had a hard time listening, and they seemed huge and distant. Now I leaned forward, trying to
hear what Mark had to say and he seemed so like those teachers and I felt so small and as if I could not hear. As if vast rows of students kept me from the wisdom that would enable me to understand airplanes or primitive man. “I've been seeing a lot of her. We're very close,” he said softly.

He came and sat down beside me. “It doesn't mean I don't love you. Things are just complicated, that's all, but we'll work it out.” He said he loved me as he always had and somehow we'd get back to the way we'd always been.

 

I can't say his leaving came as a complete surprise. It was his method that stunned and immobilized me for months and left me a zombie, not so much because my heart was broken as because it was betrayed. Mark had assured me he'd stopped seeing Lila and that he'd gone through a terrible period in his life, and if I'd just let him, he'd make it up to me. But then one day the following note was left on the kitchen table: “Dear Deborah”—Mark always used my complete name, as if we were involved in something very serious—“I suppose I should have waited and talked to you in person but somehow I'm a coward and couldn't bear to have you reaching out to me and begging me to stay. I'm sorry. It is, I believe, for the best, as I'm sure you'll agree in time. We'll talk soon, Mark.”

Law school had taught him to be brief and to the point. These principles he applied to our marriage and to this final note to me. Though we'd been leaving one another in little ways for years, it came as a shock. He left me for another woman, who'd been my friend. I thought that in marrying Mark, I'd put order in my life, the order of my father's drafting room, the order of people who did things according to schedule and plan, but suddenly I was flung into the far reaches of an earlier chaos.

I held the note in my hand and read it perhaps twenty times. At first the words made no sense, but slowly the letters, the words, took shape in my mind. He was gone. It was that
simple. Mark was correct. I would have reached out to him. I would have held him to me, like a desperate monkey in a flood, clinging to its tumbled tree. He had told me he'd stopped seeing her. But as I walked around our apartment, opening doors, drawers, peering into shelves, I saw that everything was half of what it had been and that he'd never stopped seeing her.

The first time Mark and I made love was in his dorm room when I was in graduate school. We'd met the previous afternoon in a library. Love has its arbitrariness, and libraries always made me lonely. He'd been staring at me from across a stack of tomes on contractual law. The next night we made love on his floor, and when we were done, he sat cross-legged, perfectly still, like Buddha. He didn't perspire, not a drop. Then he reached for a bag of chocolate chip cookies, ate one cookie from the bag, closed it. He offered to walk me home, because he had a midterm the next day. I should have known then, years ago, that a man who didn't sweat and could eat one chocolate chip cookie from a bag and close it, could leave a note on the kitchen table to say he was leaving.

For weeks I moved through the apartment like a wounded person. Sometimes I'd pick up the phone and try to call him, but I always hung up after one or two rings. Once, Mark picked up before I had a chance to hang up. I don't know how it happened, but I started to scream. I screamed at him until he hung up, and a few weeks later when I called back in the middle of the night to scream again, I learned from a recorded voice that Lila's number was now unpublished.

My friend and upstairs neighbor, Sally Young, kept encouraging me to go out and meet people. When I brought home the Lebanese doctor with the wild Afro and bulging eyes I met at a party, she joined us for drinks and was polite. But later she told me he looked like Omar Sharif being electrocuted. The trouble was, when I thought about it, Sally was right, and I felt more and more certain I had no judgment when it came to men.

My mother loved Mark as if he were her own, as if he were the brother I should have had, the one who did things right, not like my brother, Zap, who, if there was a wrong way to do something, would always find it. I tried not to fault my mother when, after I'd read her Mark's note over the phone, she said, “What'd you do to make him do such a thing?” What she wanted was more grandchildren, a tribe of grandchildren. The fact that my older sister, Renee, had three children and lived in Downers Grove didn't count. Renee had “fallen by the wayside” years ago, when a pair of her panties was found on a neighbor's rosebush. I was the one they'd pinned all their hopes on, like a tail on the donkey. “Maybe he'll come back,” Mom said. “Maybe if you just give him time, he'll come back.” I didn't bother making her see why I wouldn't want him to.

What I did want was to get back at Mark and Lila. It was that desire, that rage, that enabled me to get out of bed in the morning, wash my face, ride the subway to work. It was the knowledge that I'd find the way to hurt them that let me sit through meetings or work at the drawing board all day. I didn't know what form it would take or how I'd bring it off. I only knew I'd find a way to hurt them as they'd hurt me.

T
HREE MONTHS
after Mark left, the City Council of New York decided it wasn't going to meet until the fall to vote on approval for the South Bronx Area Development Project, affectionately referred to in our office as “SAP,” because it had entailed years of work and would never get built. That is, the City Council had planned it so that it wouldn't get built. I was in charge of the project and was still a builder of imaginary cities, the way I'd been years ago when I worked as the receptionist and switchboard operator in my father's office.

One night shortly after the City Council's vote, I was working late, and my boss, Mr. Wicker, walked into my office and surprised me. It was a warm night and I had taken to working later than the architects. It was almost eight o'clock when Bill Wicker knocked on the wooden molding of my open door. “Anybody home?”

I jumped slightly. My mind wasn't on work. “Oh, I wanted to finish up as much of this as I can.”

He smiled. “Mind if I come in?” He walked in without waiting for an answer.

I pulled over a chair for him. “You're never here at this hour,” I said.

“Well, you shouldn't be, either. You know, you aren't getting overtime from me. Besides, no one's going to vote on renovation for a few months now anyway. You can take it easy.”

“I can still finish the report, though, can't I?”

He waved his hand as if fanning himself. “Oh, sure. Say, would you like to have a drink with me?” Bill Wicker was a civilized, elderly gentleman with daughters my age. Raising all those daughters, he told me once, had taught him patience and understanding. He commuted every day from Westport and never so much as yawned or had a silver hair out of place.

I cleared my throat. “I think I'd like to work. Is that all right?”

He nodded. “No problem. Just thought we could have a little talk. We can talk here, though, can't we?” He raised his legs, plunked them down hard on my desk, and crossed them. Mr. Wicker ran his hand through his straight hair, then flattened each hair back into place. “I want you to think about taking the summer off.” He sucked in his cheeks. “With pay, of course.”

“I don't want any time off.”

He nodded. “I'm pretty sure you don't, but why don't you take it anyway?”

“Is something wrong with my work?”

He shook his head and looked stunned, as if I'd just said his fly was unzipped. “Cindy told me. And Frank. Well, they said you were down in the dumps over your marriage. You know, you can write that damn proposal anywhere. No need to sit in an office.”

It's not easy to explain to someone who is offering you three months' vacation with pay to prepare a report for the City Council at your leisure that you don't want time off.

“Thanks,” I said, “but I'd rather just stay here.”

“Take it,” he said firmly. Then added, a bit more gently, “How can you not want the summer free?”

How can you make someone see that what you want is to get up on schedule, ride and sweat on the subway in heat waves, sit under those fluorescent lights that make you sterile, instead of being on a beach, having fun? I didn't want fun. I wanted the grind. The routine. What's more awful to someone who has something to forget than free time?

Mr. Wicker ruffled my hair, then smoothed it down flat as he got up to leave. “Go to Europe. See the world.”

After he left, I sat alone, staring down at New York Harbor, at a lone tug that passed in front of the Statue of Liberty. I thought how strange and foreign the East Coast of America seemed to me, and for the first time in years, I thought seriously about moving home. The East, I'd learned, was not the Midwest. The East never let me forget my humble roots, and I've never regretted those roots for a minute. In the end it has been the simple Midwestern clarity that has permitted me to understand some of what has occurred.

The New York Center for Urban Advancement, where I went to work every day, was located near the Battery. The building that housed it was one of a hundred buildings just like it and the corridor I walked down was the same as all the other corridors. And the offices themselves were sterile and undistinguished, not at all like my father's office. My father's office was located on the north side of Madison Street, just below the elevated tracks. The “El” churned by, snaking around Chicago's Loop and dropping grime like bird dung on pedestrians, through a nasty part of the city that looked like the old Chicago of the twenties.

The Chicago Bears had their office in the same building as my father. Often I found myself squashed between sprawling, athletic shoulders and fractured noses. Gangland slayings felt like real possibilities in front of the building where we worked.
The Bears were sometimes accompanied by even bigger men, mobsters, my father said. Real thumb-crushers and leg-breakers. Sometimes I had to ride the elevator to our floor when it was loaded down with Chicago Bears, and the elevator trembled under their weight.

But I used to love to play in the drafting room when I was a child. I loved the pencils, the pungent smell of the blueprint machine, the supply closet, all of which represented to me the rational adult world.