Old Neighborhood (12 page)

In the bar she had said she wanted to know about me, but apparently she had decided to give conversation a lower priority. She began to remove my clothes, to kiss me on the neck and rub her hands along my thighs. We undressed each other and settled down on the bed. Her skin was rougher than Beverly’s, her breasts larger, her nipples darker. I seized these sensations, grabbing at her, kissing her all over, and when I entered her, I pushed hard and as she wrapped her legs around me and pressed herself up toward me, I was thinking of Beverly for an instant—and then I wondered how I was in bed. I had no sense of this, twenty years of making love only to your wife. My mind was racing. It was a very busy performance. I tried to hold myself off, make the fifty dollars last, I said to myself, and the sheer weight of the money worked as a strategy to delay orgasm for a moment or two.

She allowed us a few minutes of repose and then she got up from the bed and dressed very crisply. I reached for my wallet and discovered I only had thirty dollars.

“I’m short cash.”

“I’m not on Master Charge, sugar.”

“I have traveler’s checks.”

“We don’t cash traveler’s checks.”

“I mean I’ll cash them downstairs. Why don’t you just wait?”

She was skeptical.

“I’m not skipping out. I’ve got a suit here and my luggage.”

I put on slacks and a shirt, slipped on my shoes and left a prostitute in my room, with my suit as security, so I could cash in a traveler’s check to pay her, which I thought was the perfect touch. I returned, gave her the money, and she asked if I wanted her phone number. I considered this a form of compliment, within limits, and I accepted her number, permitting her to rise from bar hooker to call girl.

“There is a certain quaintness to the ritual,” I said.

“What?”

“See you around, Jean.”

“Any time.”

Beverly had her episode and now I had one, too. That did not mean I could sleep. I checked out of the hotel and sat in a waiting area at Logan Airport, staring dully ahead, “One of the top five creative minds in the business.” Of the aspirations I had for myself when I was younger, I had achieved everything. And in the glaring light of an airlines terminal in the middle of the night I was exposed for who I had become, a sagging, burned-out middle-aged man with a troubled marriage, who could have just sat there or boarded a plane going anywhere.

At about six in the morning, I got out of the chair where I had been sitting for hours, went into the men’s room and vomited up the bile of myself and of this night, as the Muzak played cheerfully, idiotically, above me.

M
Y NEW YORK-TO-BOSTON
sexual fantasies gave way to Boston-to-New York revenge fantasies. The plane would crash, I would be dead—so there. Beverly would grieve and feel guilty and perhaps I might mess up a couple of New Year’s Eves for her.

“Have a nice day,” the stewardess was intoning when we landed.

“I guess we made it,” I said. She could deal with strange, red-eyed passengers in the morning. They had training schools for that. She just looked at me and said, “Have a nice day.”

I went straight to the agency, needing a shave, my clothes wrinkled.

“I want us to resign the Boujez account,” I said to Tolchin in his office.

“First of all you look like shit. And second, you’re nuts,” he said, succinctly.

“It’s cheap and exploitative and beneath us.”

“Anything else?”

“I’m just not in the business of doing that kind of work.”

“So don’t. You’ve got staff here. Someone else can work on it.”

“Macho and Lesbo. What are we, Ray?”

“Business people.”

“Let someone else do his advertising.”

“We can’t afford it.”

I felt trapped, nauseous. I tried to open the window, but we were in one of those modern office buildings with windows you are discouraged from opening. I tried to bang it open to get air. I kept banging. The stuck window and my general frustration came together and I was just standing there, pounding on the goddamn window that would not open, pounding, pounding.

Tolchin grabbed me and spun me around.

“Are you cracking up?”

“Goddamn window!”

“We can’t resign Boujez. It’ll cost us a fortune.”

“We’ll drink less at lunch.”

“Steve, it’s only a concept. They don’t even have the products yet.”

“Macho and Lesbo.”

“It could fall through. There’s nothing we have to do right now. We don’t have to resign the account.”

I had stopped listening to him. I was looking out the window. We had a good view from our offices, high up. From Tolchin’s corner office and from mine we could see north and south on Madison Avenue. If I jumped out the window I would certainly raise the guilt potential of my death. But of course I could not commit suicide there. I could not get the goddamn window open.

“Steve, where are you?”

“We’ve got good views. Good views, good suits, good desks.”

“Steve—”

I turned toward him.

“You give out little pieces of yourself and it comes back in the form of good suits and good desks.”

“I think you need a rest, Steve. I think you should stay away from the office for a while.”

“You’re probably right,” I said, and I looked around the room. “I’ve lost the theme.”

I told Beverly I would be working at home for a few days and I made work for myself, I read books and back issues of magazines. My presence in the house seemed to be of little concern to my family, Beverly was trying to conclude matters so she could get away for her summer, Sarah was going through a series of end-of-high-school parties, Amy was attending meetings on the end of the world.

Beverly and I appeared as a normal couple for Sarah’s graduation from high school. She would be entering Vassar in the fall. We went to lunch at the Russian Tea Room in New York. Either Beverly or I could have paid the check with any of the four credit cards we had between us. We had two children, four credit cards, and three checking accounts, one joint account, and both Beverly and I had individual personal checking accounts, neither of us trusting the other’s bookkeeping. I never knew if that had been a sign of the liberated nature of the relationship or a sign of its hopelessness.

We had a last social function to perform together before the separation began. Pat Cleary had invited us to a surprise birthday party for John, and as a courtesy to Pat we agreed to attend. We dressed silently, we had little to say to each other these days, Beverly donning her layers of Calvin Klein, I in my ever-present good suit. As we stood before the full-length mirror in our bedroom, I said:

“A terrific-looking couple. Who would know?”

“Try not to drink too much tonight.”

“Do you still have the right to ask me that?”

“I thought I did.”

The Clearys’ house was dark, we rang the doorbell, Pat Cleary opened the door, the lights came on, people yelled, “Surprise!” a combo began to play “The Anniversary Song” and we walked into a surprise party for
us,
for our twentieth anniversary.

“
Marzel Tov!
” a voice cut through the noise. A beaming George, followed by a beaming Cindy, broke out of the crowd to embrace Beverly and shake hands with me. Sarah and Amy were there, the Clearys, Beverly’s office staff with spouses and dates, neighbors, in all, thirty people were assembled to pay homage to the happy couple. The anniversary was a few days off. We had never bothered to discuss it.

“Surprised?” George asked.

“The look on their faces—” Cindy said, smiling.

“It was Grandma’s idea,” Sarah told us privately. “We said you might not want it, but they insisted. We gave them the Clearys’ number and they called them and everything.”

A three-piece combo launched into a medley of twenty-year-old songs.

“They’re the same songs from your wedding,” Cindy said triumphantly. “I kept a list.”

“I think I’m going to pass out. Or I’d like to,” Beverly whispered in my ear.

“Me first.”

“I take it back. Drink as much as you want.”

We worked the room, smiling, accepting congratulations, until we had covered everyone. We picked up glasses of champagne from a waiter hired for the event, went into a bedroom and closed the door. We looked at each other and could not keep from laughing.

“Your parents—they’re crazy. I mean,
mashurgeh
.”

“I know. This is the worst, most inappropriate—”

“I bet your father
knew
we were having trouble. He’s taking some perverse pleasure from this.”

“Maybe not. They are pretty corny. My mother—
the same songs
.”

“It’s a wonder they didn’t bring the horses.”

We laughed again and then we stopped. We were experiencing too much pain.

The children went off to be counselors at camp, and on the day they left, Beverly loaded our station wagon to move out of the house for the summer. I leaned against the side of the house and watched her carry her clothes to the car.

“Something in me objects to helping you so you can leave me.”

“I’m not leaving you.”

“Right. It’s a separate vacation. I’ll use that, if anybody asks.”

I watched her struggle with her suitcase and then I came forward to help carry it into the car.

“I hope that counts for me. On some cold, rainy night—you left behind a man who helps with a suitcase.”

“Steve, this is not a happy moment for me. It’s just something I have to do.”

“Do I get your phone number? What if I die?”

“If you die, you won’t need to call me.”

She got into the car and rolled down the window.

“I’ll be listed, Steve.”

“I hate this,” I said.

She pulled my head down and kissed me on the forehead. She was on the verge of tears, but she took on her resolute look, started the car and drove away.

I was alone. It intrigued me to realize that it was possible for me to die in this house and nobody would know until Labor Day. Thoughts of suicide occupied me, a fascinating subject, suicide, which I proceeded to convert into a research project. I went to the library and brought home several volumes on suicide. I imagined what it would be like to teach a course on suicide, Suicide 101, the history of suicide, types of suicides, suicide heroes and heroines, the course culminating in my own suicide, a memorable course they would talk about for years. After alternately amusing and depressing myself, I thought about one theory I had read that had particular force for me—the idea that in suicide a person can feel, for a brief moment, that he has gained control of his life by controlling the time and manner of his death. This interested me, with my life feeling as if it were skittering out of my control. I had no focus. I had no interest in going to work. I had no family life now. I stopped shaving, bathing, I rose in the morning in my pajamas and stayed in them all day. I watched television, soap operas, game shows. “I am not suicidal,” I announced to myself one day while watching a soap opera. “I want to know how these people make out.” Then I laughed out loud, uncertain if I had been talking out loud as well. I did not know if I had been walking around the house, saying aloud the thoughts that were in my head, and then I decided it did not matter anyway, since no one could see me or hear me. I ate the food that had been left in the kitchen, dinners of Product 19 and beer, eventually calling in an order that was delivered, frozen pizzas, canned soups, more beer. I watched movies late into the night, going to sleep at three or four in the morning. When I awoke I was still tired, so I began to take naps, sometimes twice a day. I established a cycle: late night, tired in the morning, nap. Unable to sleep at night because of nap in the day, late night, tired in the morning, nap. The naps became a form of narcotic. They left me feeling less than fully awake all day, with heavy eyes, my mind and body deadened to sensation.

My secretary called every morning at eleven, wondering when I would be back, often waking me. I remembered the standard excuse from school days, “Steven was out with an upset stomach.” “I am out with an upset stomach,” I told her one morning.

“When do you think you’ll be back?” she inquired a few days later.

“I don’t know.”

“The mail, the memos—they keep piling up. Should I get them to you?”

“Give it all to Mr. Tolchin,” I said. “He has the stomach for it.”

She kept calling, I told her my stomach was better and I was now taking a vacation. After a week, ten days, two weeks, I cannot be certain, she called to say that Tolchin was out of town and there was a layout that needed my approval.

“I’ve decided to take a leave of absence,” I told her. “I have no idea when I’ll be back in the office.”

“Oh, I see—”

“Please tell Mr. Tolchin.”

“Of course, Mr. Robbins. But we do need an okay on this—”

“And now for five hundred dollars—” the game-show host was saying—“who was Peter Rabbit’s cousin?”

“Benjamin Bunny,” I said to my secretary.

“I beg your pardon.”

“What is it, Miss Crawford?”

“Your okay? Could I send a messenger to the house?”

“I don’t care.”

“Thank you, Mr. Robbins.”

“I’d appreciate your not calling me here anymore, Miss Crawford.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Robbins.”

“It’s distracting.”

I was thinking that I would have won that five hundred dollars, easy—if I had been on that show.

I began to do my Nat King Cole impersonations. I wondered if I could have made my living doing that, the way people do Al Jolson. I could have appeared on talk shows, chatted with the hosts, done a little “Walkin’ My Baby Back Home.” No, what I really should have been was an English professor at a small midwestern college. If only I had been a liberal arts major. That was where I made my mistake. I called my father in Florida.

“How are you, Dad?”

“Fine, Steve. You?”

“Great. Never better.”

At the time I was standing in the kitchen in my pajamas at four in the afternoon with days of dishes in the sink.

“Dad, why I called—”

I took a mug that had cold tea in it, emptied the tea and poured scotch into the mug.