Dating Big Bird (7 page)

He let the statement drop unrebutted, and we talked then for a while about other things.

About the class.

About the books he’d written.

About the city and how we each felt about living in it.

About a lot of things that were easy to slip in and out of.

And as we did, I sensed that whatever it was that had derailed him had left him lost; stranded; unable to feel his way back to where he’d been before.

“You miss it, writing,” I said quietly, more a statement than a question.

He seemed momentarily distracted by the muted basketball game on the television set above the bar.

“I do,” he said finally. “But not as much as I miss other things.”

“What other things?”

He finished his drink, then started to reach into his pocket for his wallet to settle the bill.

“That’s a very long story, and not one you would want me to tell you tonight.”

From the sound of his voice, I could tell the subject was closed for now.

“Trust me,” he said, leading me toward the door. “Come on. I’ll take you home.”

I lived just a few blocks from the Cedar Tavern, and except for the sound of our shoes on the pavement, we walked together in silence most of the way. It was still early—just after ten—and unusually quiet for a weeknight in the Village. While we’d been in the bar, it had rained, and the streets, still wet and shiny slick, caused the tires of taxis going by to make a soft sticky sound. Malcolm walked me up to my brownstone—my home, my refuge, for the last six years, the longest I’d lived anywhere since leaving my parents’ house.

He stopped, then stood there awkwardly, his hands deep in his pockets.

“Thanks,” he said finally.

“For what?”

“For the conversation.”

“You don’t have to thank me for that. I enjoyed it.”

“I enjoyed it, too.”

A few more seconds passed in silence before I asked him if he wanted to come in.

“I don’t have any Coke, but I have about ten different kinds of water.”

“Another time,” he said, his voice barely above a whisper.

“Oh. Well. Okay.” I instinctively stepped back, embarrassed that he might have found my invitation too aggressive, or simply one that he was not interested in accepting.

“I’ll see you, Ellen” was all he said before he turned and walked away toward the distant lights of Sixth Avenue.

The only explanation I have for getting involved with someone who was frozen was that I didn’t know he
was frozen at the time. And when I did find out, it was too late—too late to change directions; too late to pull myself away from someone who seemed to need so much. Who seemed to need
me
so much. And who I would come to need, too.

Even the first night he came into my apartment and stayed over after a month of postclass Cedar Tavern conversations, I didn’t know. That first night we spent together, I chalked it up to the conversation we’d had earlier in the evening, when he’d told me, finally, about his son; his wife; his family; his career—about everything he’d lost. This was the kind of conversation you can’t quite walk away from when it’s over, and so when we stood in front of my apartment and I touched his arm and he didn’t move away, I took it as a signal. I tugged at the shirt cuff at his wrist, then slipped my hand into his and led him up the steps, through the set of double doors in the foyer, then up the flight of stairs to my apartment.

Once inside, he stood in the center of the living room while I dropped my bags and went to turn on a small lamp by the bookshelf in the corner. I knew his mind was working, taking in as many details as possible. To anyone who didn’t know what he’d done for a living for so long and with such skill, he might have seemed as if he were simply trying to get his bearings in unfamiliar territory. But as I moved around the room and into the kitchen to get our water, I watched his eyes dart from point to point. From books, to small framed photographs of Lynn and Paul and Nicole on the shelves, to papers on the desk, to my bedroom door beyond, I knew that he was assessing me, deconstructing me, trying to understand me.

I sat down on the couch and put our water glasses on the table in front of me.

“What are you thinking?” I asked.

He looked at me out of the corner of his eye and pretended to be preoccupied only with the range and scope of books on my shelves.

“I was just thinking that you must read a lot.”

“I used to. But I don’t anymore,” I said, responding to his statement but knowing he was really thinking about whether he should leave my apartment before anything happened.

I tried to read him—tried to decide if I should say something then about how we didn’t have to sleep together tonight if he didn’t want to, or that we could if he did want to—that it didn’t matter—that after the conversation we’d had, all I wanted was to be with him. But before I knew which way to go, he walked slowly over to the couch and sat down. He looked down at my hands, which were gripping my knees, and then he leaned closer and touched the side of my face.

And then he kissed me.

It was an unusual kiss, I remember thinking at the time: awkward but passionate; tentative yet urgent in the sense that he seemed to be willing himself over a cliff—as though kissing a woman were an experience he had long since imagined and anticipated yet greatly feared. I remember noticing that he was shaking—his whole body—but I remember feeling certain the shaking would disappear as soon as the lights were off, as soon as we were in bed and our bodies had had a chance to get used to each other; the way that shyness and awkwardness always did the first time.

I stood up, and he followed me down the short hallway to my bedroom. As we stood next to the bed, he put his hands on my hips to turn me toward him, then he put his hands on either side of my face and bent to kiss me again. He slid his hands over my throat and slowly down my neck to the cardigan sweater that started there, and when his fingers
found the small white buttons, he undid them, one by one, sliding the sweater off my shoulders and onto the floor. It was dark, very dark in my room, and before I closed my eyes, I felt him lay one hand at the small of my back and the other flat against my chest bone, and then his finger slowly traced a half circle around the front of my neck, as if he were following the line of an invisible necklace. We sat down on the bed and took the rest of our clothes off, and once we had, I was startled by how powerful, how graceful his body was—the thick bands of muscles down his back and down his legs; the incredible smoothness of his skin against mine when he slid into bed next to me.

“I like your perfume,” he whispered, and then a few minutes later, “I like being with you.” His arms tightened around me, but he didn’t touch me further than this embrace.

I put my head on his chest and listened to his heart, and though I was not in love with him yet and didn’t know whether I ever could be, that moment of simple human contact made my eyes blur with tears. It had been a long time, a very long time, since someone without a wife to go home to had held me in the dark.

“Would you mind if we didn’t do this tonight?” he whispered. “It’s been,” he continued slowly, “a long time since I’ve been with a woman, and I don’t think I’d be very good at it right now.”

“That’s okay,” I said. And it was.

So we lay there instead, waiting for sleep, my arms around him as far as they could go. As if I could embrace the whole of his injury. And contain it. And heal it.

Suddenly it had become apparent that Karen Lipps was gaining weight.

It was about one month after Fashion Week—a long month of follow-up calls to key buyers and retailers about our spring line and making sure that our current couture pieces were being worn by enough famous people to possibly make the weekly columns—and I was exhausted.

I was also bored. I was no marketing genius. I knew that. But I did my job, and I did it well. I was competent, detail oriented, deadline conscious, and I saw and understood the Big Picture: people. That might not sound like much, but it was. Marketing was about selling, and selling was about talking, and if there was one thing I could do it was talk. Especially over lunch.

First there was the gossip.

Gossip.

Gossip.

Gossip.

Then the perfect harmless flattering Karen-anecdote
(“Do you know how she got her inspiration for the drape of her long raw silk evening skirt?” Lean in. “She took a Polaroid of the shower curtain in her hotel room last year when she was in Paris for the spring shows!”)

Or office anecdote (“No, Simon’s not from England! He’s from New Jersey!”).

Then a little business at the end, about what they’d be stupid not to buy (“If Karen’s doing a short jacket again for fall, you know everyone else is going to do a shorter jacket, too.”

“Ralph’s doing flats like ours, only with a square-ish toe again—which is
so
last year. And Calvin? Who knows. Who cares. He’s starting to make Enzo Angiolini and Nine West look original”).

Which was what Karen needed. Someone she could trust, who knew her when but didn’t divulge her secrets. She didn’t need someone with something to prove, someone whose ego might eclipse her own. She was the genius. She had the talent. Sure, she’d go to her grave trying to prove to herself and everyone else that she came up with the body-suit idea before Donna Karan. But her clothes were so good, they could have sold themselves (were such a thing possible in this day and age), and everybody knew it.

Sometimes, though, I had trouble with even the basics.

Existential trouble.

Like, not caring.

Sometimes it happened when I was sitting with a buyer, trying to sell him or her on a new pant style (“Fuller, shorter.” “Longer, leaner.”). Or why their store should give us more floor space or better floor space or reduce another designer’s floor space. (“Liz Claiborne is like a virus! Everytime you get off an elevator in a women’s department, there it is! Liz! Liz! Liz! Enough with the Liz Claiborne already!”) Or on the exquisiteness of a particular fashion—the new lines of a suit or the new cut of a blouse Karen was
working on, or the “vision” behind her “artistic decision” to stay with the mock turtleneck for another season instead of returning to the ubiquitous high-scoop T-shirt. (“Quite frankly, Karen’s tired of the neck. She believes very strongly that the neck is a very intimate part of the body, almost a private part of the body, and that it should not be so exposed. You could say the Victorian’s ankle is Karen’s neck—it’s so much more alluring if it’s hidden and there’s the element of surprise.”) A little voice would creep into my head—creep behind my eyes and down into the back of my throat and it would whisper this:

They’re just clothes
.

They’re just clothes
.

By that October, the voice was creeping into my head more than it ever had before, and I knew my days in the business were numbered.

So that Monday morning I took my time getting to the office—a little too much time, drinking coffee and doing the crossword puzzle in bed. I was about an hour later than usual I realized when I saw the giant clock as I entered the building. As it turned out my arrival was exquisitely timed with Karen’s.

I had just stepped onto the elevator in the lobby, and right as the doors were about to shut, I saw a fat dimpled arm reach between the automated door and the metal casing of the elevator. The arm was followed by a huge bosom, and then by the solid bulge of a hip and thigh. Then one fat foot stuffed into a black suede loafer appeared, and then the other, until a large figure dressed all in black stood next to me, breathless.

Only when I saw her pull her black sweater over her legging-ed behind and angle her backside into the far corner of the elevator did I realize it was Karen. I almost hadn’t recognized her. She’d been away for the past three weeks in
Europe—trawling for fabrics and inspiration—and she hadn’t been due to return until the following week.

The hiding of her behind was something I’d never really noticed in all the time I’d worked for her, until Gail, her sister, had pointed it out to me a few years ago during a visit to the office.

“Have you ever noticed how Karen will never let you see her ass?” Gail had said as the three of us sat in Karen’s office. Karen had just managed somehow to get up from her desk, shut her door, then sit down again without once turning her back to us.

She and Karen had the same giant lips and underbites and the same long chins that jutted out farther than they should, but Gail was softer, rounder, less angular. I liked her. She was funny, with none of the hardness or cynicism that was the hallmark of the die-hard New Yorker. Gail had three children and a periodontist husband, and every few weeks she’d come in from Long Island for lunch and shopping and a quick visit with her exciting and famous sibling. Like Lynn, Gail didn’t seem to mind that her younger sister had, at least on the surface, a more glamorous life than she did. In fact, they both seemed to enjoy hearing about our work-stress: it made their own intense domestic-stress sound like a walk in the park.