Jake & Mimi (13 page)

The corner room, I knew, was Nina Torring’s, and the moon lit her like a soft candle as she pulled her shirt open and let
it slip off her shoulders and down her arms. I walked closer to the window. The nipples were sharp and raised on her small
breasts. I walked closer still. She took two of his fingers into her mouth and then put them on her breasts. I closed to within
five feet of the window and dropped to a knee in the snow. She slid off the bed, sensually, stood beside it, pulled at the
drawstring on her sweats, then looked out the window and into my eyes. For a full second we stared at each other. I waited
for her to cry out, for Nick Simms’s head to appear in the window, but she simply looked away from me and back down at him,
then pulled the knot out of the drawstring and let her sweats fall to the floor. I saw the tight vee of her panties, and then,
her eyes still on Nick, she rolled them down her legs and stepped out of them.

She would reach for the blinds now. No. She climbed back into bed and lowered herself onto him. And then, as I watched through
my breath in the cold, Nina Torring began to move. Not up and down, as I’d always imagined, but back and forth, as if on a
rocker. Slowly, at first, her hands on his chest for lever-age, then, as she found her rhythm, moving those hands up her belly,
to her breasts, squeezing them together.

I remember the taste of metal in my mouth as I watched. One minute, two. She rocked faster, then faster still, closing her
eyes, grabbing her golden hair and shaking her head violently from side to side. Faster and faster she rocked, so fast that
I wondered how he took it, and then she finished, not in one short collapse but easing to a stop, her spasms shortening, softening,
her shoulders clenching and relaxing, clenching and relaxing, and relaxing, and relaxing, and then still, her eyes opening
slowly as if from a dream, her hands settling onto her breasts and then finding, beneath them, her heart.

Without looking at me again, she vanished beneath the sill of the window, leaving me to stare at her empty desk, at the blue
school flag that hung in the entrance to her closet. I rose from the snow, my soaked knee burning from the cold, and walked
around to the front of the dorm, the taste of metal still in my mouth as I walked inside and down the hall to my room. I stripped
to my shorts, climbed up into my top bunk, and lay on my side in the dark, looking out the window at the clearing, where the
snow had started to fall again. Pure and white and endless it fell, covering up the footprints along the path.

A year later I opened my box at the campus mail center to find a plain white envelope with no return address. Inside was a
photograph of Nina Torring, in her wedding dress, smiling into the eyes of Nick Simms. Written on the back, in a feminine
hand:

To Jake Teller — may you find happiness
.

Last Sunday, the day after the Roosevelt Hotel, I drank too many vodkas at an alumni mixer and let a classmate rope me into
a night of calls for a fund drive. Two nights ago I received my list. The first name on it was Nina Torring.

On the phone, when I told her my name, she was warm and personal. She runs an art gallery now on West Fourth Street. Yes,
it is going well. In boom times, people can’t pay enough for beauty. She asked me sharp questions about accounting and the
corporate climb.

“School seems like a long time ago, doesn’t it, Jake?” she said.

“It does. There are a few questions here they want me to ask, Nina. For the database.”

“Of course.”

“Married how many years?”

She paused. “Married four years,” she said. I sensed something in her voice, so I waited. “Divorced for two.”

Neither of us said anything for several seconds.

“Can I buy you a drink?” I asked. “Friday night?” I looked down at the bare kitchen table and listened to the soft buzz of
the line.

“Yes, Jake,” she said finally. “You can.”

•     •     •

“Somebody owes forty cents at the library.”

Mark said those words when I walked in the door last night, and when he did I felt something inside me give way. All week
long I’d grown stronger and stronger. At work Mr. Stein assigned me to what the partners call “midnight duty,” putting me
on call to three of our firm’s biggest clients. I spent the days buried in the Tax Code, researching their last-minute ploys.
Calling them personally, the heads of companies, to advise them or reassure them or gently dissuade them. An exciting relief
from the drudgery of returns, but high-pressure work. Twelve, thirteen hours of concentration a day. All-consuming. And at
lunch, at my desk, I took on Madame Brodeur. She wanted to know if the readings could be done in five minutes instead of ten.
No. The roses would cost more than we thought — did we still want them lining the aisle? Yes. The check for the caterer was
due in three days. Okay.

Work and wedding and work and wedding and little else. And it restored me. Centered me. For long stretches I shut last weekend
out of my mind. Shut out the hour in the closet at the Roosevelt. One weak, mistaken hour of my life, behind me now. I’d get
home at eleven, or even midnight, too late for my run — or for anything, really, except a warm bath and a little soft music
and bed. And then up early and back into the office and into the tax books again. A hard pace, but just what I needed. I felt
my life returning to me.

Yesterday, Thursday, I told Mark to come over after he put the magazine to bed. Come and stay the night, I told him. I wanted
to touch him, to feel him next to me, to lie together in bed and talk. And when I walked in at eleven, he was already there.
Sitting on the couch, holding up a book I’d borrowed from the library weeks before, his finger pressed to the time stamp.

“Somebody owes forty cents at the library.”

I must have just stared at him because he said, “Mimi, what is it? Mimi?”

I broke out of it, shook my head, and smiled. “Nothing,” I said, going to him and touching my hand to his face. “You’re marrying
a space cadet, that’s all.” But inside, I felt all of my resolve slip away. The resolve I’d built hour by hour through the
week. And later, as I lay in the dark, his sleeping arm over me, his breath on my neck, I started to tremble. I tried to think
wedding thoughts, to picture the church at sunset, only three weeks away now. Instead, I saw the dark closet at the Roosevelt,
and the white silk ties lying still on the covers. I tried to remember our recessional song, “Greensleeves.” The first notes
would come, so haunting, so beautiful, and then I’d lose them. Lose them and hear Anne’s breathing. Her rising, desperate
breathing as Jake Teller worked her, so very slowly, on the bed at the Roosevelt. Her breathing and then her cries, and then
her hushed voice on the phone the next night.

“Mimi, there aren’t words…

“Mimi, I didn’t know who I was. I
could not
have said my name.”

This morning I dressed so quietly that Mark asked if I was okay. “Tell you what,” he said as I walked him to the door. “The
company gets you until eight tonight — then you’re mine. I promise wine, candles, and exercise.” I kissed him. “Hold that
thought,” he said, and then he walked out and I closed the door behind him.

At the firm, Mr. Stein called me into his office to tell me that my work, all week long, had been first-rate. Our star clients
were happy. I had a way with them, it seemed. “If I told Herb Sloan he was trying to run a tax dodge, Mimi, he’d see to it
I was barred from the Harvard Club. You told him and he took it with a smile. Keep up the fine work.” I walked back to my
office, sat down at my desk, and saw the pink message slip tucked under my lamp. I pulled it out and unfolded it.

Tonight, you can watch
.

I stared at the note until it blurred.

Tonight, you can watch
.

I stood, walked to the window, put my hands on the sill, and closed my eyes. I’d known this moment would come. All week I’d
steeled myself against it, and until last night I’d known just what I would say.

“No, Jake. Don’t ask me again.”

I took a calming breath and walked slowly back to my desk. I picked up the note again. Four simple words on a piece of paper.
I stood over the phone, my hand on the receiver, and then picked it up and dialed Jake’s extension.

“Jake Teller.”

“It’s Mimi. I can’t.”

The line was quiet. I took the receiver from my ear and held it over the cradle. And then I heard Mark’s voice again, as clearly
as if he were in the room. “Somebody owes forty cents at the library.” And I lifted the receiver to my ear.

“Do you have a cell phone, Mimi?”

“No.” I shut my eyes.

“Buy one after work today. Write down this number — six four six, seven one one eight.” I opened my eyes again and wrote the
number beneath his words on the pink message slip. “Call it and leave your cell phone number on the machine.”

I did as he asked me. I walked to an electronics shop on Lexington and bought a small black cell phone. Two hours later, in
my apartment, I dialed the number he gave me. “Seven one eight, eight one eight three,” I said into the machine, my voice
sounding strange, distant. I put the cell phone down on the couch beside me and sat in the silent apartment, waiting. I sat
very still, my back straight, as I’d learned in ballet as a girl. I stared into the painting on the far wall, the one Dad
gave me for Christmas two years ago. An etching, actually, of a horse standing in deep snow. I concentrated on the details
— the muscled flanks, the wet mane, the eyes that seemed, somehow, to look back at you, no matter which angle you viewed them
from. So very beautiful, those eyes. Wild. Knowing. When the sleek ring of the cell phone broke the air, I jumped, answering
it quickly, as though someone might hear.

“Mimi Lessing.” The way I answer my line at work.

“Mimi, it’s Jake.”

“Hi.”

“She keeps an apartment on Sullivan Street. I don’t know the address. Be in the Village from eight o’clock. When I’m prepared,
I’ll call.”

I stared straight ahead at the painting.

“Mimi?”

“Yes?”

“No heels. And no perfume.”

And now I sit at a table at an outdoor café on Bleecker Street, wearing a cobalt cardigan, three-quarter sleeve, with a deep
V neck, over a pink dress.
When I’m prepared
. A spring chill is in the air, but I’m warmed by the electric heaters tucked into the awning above me. Moroccan music is
playing somewhere. Faint, sensual. At the next table a young couple hold hands on top of the red tablecloth, while underneath
it their legs touch shyly. A tall waiter serves them white wine, then pivots and sets a glass of red in front of me.

“Arrowood cabernet,” he says.

“Thank you.”

I take a long sip. On our trip last summer, Arrowood was our favorite winery. I can picture the tasting room, its veranda
cut into the steep, dusty hillside, looking out over a sea of vines. I remember Mark touching his cool glass to my sunburned
shoulder, warning me what would happen if I got drunk and dropped my guard. “The inn is five minutes away,” he’d said. We
were three weeks into our engagement then. We’re three weeks from our wedding now, and just an hour ago I called him from
my apartment and told him that I was still at the office. I would be stuck there until midnight, at least, I said. Our date
would have to wait until tomorrow.

I take another sip. At the next table the girl is tracing her finger along her sweating chardonnay glass as the young man
leans in closer and says something in her ear. She ducks her head and smiles. Beneath the table their ankles are twined now.
He glances toward me, and I quickly look away.

Mark’s love is unconditional. It is precious, and all I’ve ever asked for, but who will test me? I’ve always turned away from
desire. I see that now. I’ve picked safe boys because I could have them without ever letting go. I can tell what Mark is thinking,
can almost finish his sentences. A month ago that gave me such comfort. A month ago, when I thought of the two of us at the
altar, true partners, I would fill up inside. Now I sit in a café and think of Jake Teller. Of what he does to women. Did
to Anne, as I listened just ten feet away. A part of me cannot imagine it. Bound. Helpless. And a part of me can think of
nothing else.

The lie to Mark was thrilling. It’s terrible, but it was thrilling, and ever since I’ve felt an… excitement, an urgency I’ve
never known. As if, at last, I’m truly living. Living in the moment, the colors around me — the blue of the awning, the black
of the maitre d’s suit — close and vivid, and the sounds — the snap of a purse — sharp, alluring.

The young man’s hand is on her thigh now. He whispers something, and she blushes, looks down at the table, then back at him,
and nods. He signals the waiter, hands back the menus, and asks for their bill.

I drink the last of my wine and look down at my hands against the red tablecloth. At the sparkling engagement ring I picked
out almost a year ago. “Clarity,” the jeweler had said. “People obsess over carats and wind up with a muddy diamond. See how
this takes in light?”

It does. Takes it in and sends it back out.

“Another glass?”

The waiter stands above me, looking down. I press the top of my dress to my chest.

“Yes, please.”

I stare again into the sparkling ring and remember something Anne told me a year ago, when she broke up with her boyfriend
of two years. I asked her why she’d done it, and she said for his birthday she had told him that for one night he could do
anything he wanted to her. Anything at all. No limits, she’d said. He’d taken her to Le Cirque, and then to bed at the Waldorf,
between satin sheets. “I don’t understand,” I’d said. Anne had just looked away.

She called me this morning. “He’s a bastard, Mimi,” she said. “Jake Teller. Six days, and he hasn’t called. Have you seen
him?” I told her I hadn’t. Anne leaves for Spain on Sunday. Two weeks in Barcelona, Madrid, and Valencia. “I’ll have the only
tan in the wedding party,” she said, promising she would be back in time to keep the bridesmaids in line.