Slaves of New York (5 page)

In May I received a letter from Ray. He had been looking for me all semester, and had asked Yale for my address but they refused to give it out. As a last resort he decided to write to me in care of my old address, and the letter was forwarded.

All spring I had been gardening with a frenzy: the small fenced-in backyard hadn't been touched in years. On her days off my mother sat in the yard in a screened-in tent house from Sears—insects bit her even when no one else was bothered— and watched me at work. I spent hours in the sun, stooped over the splotchy faces of pansies, puffy foxgloves, inebriated day lilies, glossy as honey, quivering with palsy. The flowers trembled in the salt air. My fingers were raw, I refused to wear gloves and my hands were permanently veined with dirt.

"Go ahead," my mother said. "Call him. You haven't spoken to anyone besides me in months."

"I don't like him," I said. "He makes me feel like he's going to throw me into a coffin and walk around on top of it." But I called him up and asked him to dinner; he was ready to come out that night, but I told him to wait until the weekend.

For his visit I made chili and corn bread and a salad; I supposed I really had been cut off for quite a while. I found myself going out of my way to dress up, make the dinner elegant. When my mother came home from work we went out to the yard to sit in the tent house. This was our ritual almost every night. I had a beer and she had a concoction made from soda, pina colada mix, and sometimes ice cream. So far she hadn't questioned me about what I wanted or planned to do. I knew she was glad to have me here. We sat in the light of the citronella candle—even inside the screen house insects somehow managed to bite her—and listened to the crickets and barking of dogs down the road. The aroma of the raspberry bushes in the yard and the sour potato smell from the potato fields a half-mile away filled the night air.

At eight o'clock we ate our salad; Ray was supposed to have come at seven. My mother decided to eat her chili. "You and Ray can eat alone," she said.

"Ma, I don't even like this human," I said.

"Well, what did you ask him to come for?"

"You
told me to invite him."

So we bickered, gently. Still, it was a way to pass the eve-

ning. Maybe I had been too harsh in my previous judgment of Ray. Maybe she would find Ray genuinely charming.

At nine o'clock he called from a gas station; he had gotten a late start and there was a traffic jam.

"He's not even close," my mother said. "Why don't you just tell him to go home? By the time he gets here it'll be ten o'clock."

Ray arrived at ten-fifteen. He brought two bottles of expensive wine: the price stickers were still on them—$29 and $18. I didn't even like wine. I wondered how my mother, a tall, thin woman, nearly five feet ten, with the presence of a dyspeptic duchess, garbed in a frowsy old sweater, must have appeared to Ray. He was freshly shaved, smelled of aftershave, and wore raiment that might have been ripped from the pages of some men's magazine. He barely came up to her shoulder.

Ray wasn't hungry, but we ate a little chili and salad and then went out for a walk. At the end of the street was an empty lot someone had turned into a vegetable garden, with neat rows of asparagus, tomatoes, eggplants, and peppers. None of the plants were very big yet. The evening was cool, murky, with a shimmery liquid quality to it. Ray cleared his throat. "How's your brother doing?" I said.

"Fine," Ray said. "He has a beautiful Swedish girlfriend. He just got home for the summer."

"How's that crazy cat?" I said.

"Max?" Ray said. "He's fine." We turned around and walked the other way.

"Listen," he said. "I really want to get married."

"Oh?" I said.

"I mean, maybe you think this is coming out of left field."

"Not if that's what you want to do," I said. "When are you getting married?"

"No, seriously," Ray said. "I was thinking we could go steady."

"I don't even know you, Ray," I said.

"Well, that's okay," he said. "You'd get to know me."

I turned to look at him, but he wasn't smiling. I thought I

had never met a person who had less to say; nor did I feel any doglike waves of love coming from him. There was simply no connection.

"Do you want to go someplace?" he said. "To a roadhouse?"

"No, I'm pretty tired," I said. I walked with him back to his car.

"Will you call me if you change your mind?" he said. "Think about it, anyway?"

"Don't you want to take your wine back?" I said. "We didn't even open it."

"No," he said. "It's for you. Listen, I don't mean to keep bugging you—"

"That's okay," I said. I rubbed my forehead for a second.

"I have to go into the hospital next week," he said. "They're operating on my back. I'll be in the hospital for a while. Could you come and visit me?"

"I guess," I said. "Sure, sure. How did it happen that you fell down an elevator shaft, anyway?" It was strange that I'd never bothered to ask him before.

"My fiancée," Ray said. "It was a New Year's Eve party, and we were engaged—in fact we were going to be married in a week—and I bumped into her in the bathroom with some guy. I just started running, and it was in an old loft building, and the elevator door opened, and the elevator wasn't there."

My mother was still awake when I went to her room. "Did you have fun?" she said. "I can't believe he brought such expensive bottles of wine. Who drinks that stuff?"

"He wants to get married," I said.

"Go ahead," she said. She turned back to her book. "He has small, eloquent feet and hands," she said to the page.

"He likes to try on my shoes," I said.

"As part of sex?"

"We never slept together," I said. "His feet might be small, but I still don't like him wearing my shoes."

My mother shrugged. "If you like him, maybe you could find him a pair in his size at the thrift store."

The hospital room, on the twenty-second floor, was crammed with masses of expensive floral arrangements: scarlet blossoms sprang out of moss, and there were heathery clouds of purple and violet. I knew just one of the bouquets probably cost enough to feed and keep me for a week. The room had one large window with a panoramic view of stubby, toylike buildings and a soiled ribbon of East River. Ray was lying on his back, tubes emerging from his arms. He looked white and shrunken, but the operation had been a success. "Sit down, sit down," he said. "Do you want some candy or something?" I shook my head. "There's some lemonade— Minute Maid—if you want."

"So, how are you feeling?" I said.

"Okay."

I sat in a chair by the window. "Nice flowers," I said.

His mother swept into the room. She was wearing an expensive-looking outfit in baby pink: trousers, a linen jacket, sling-back pink high heels with rosettes, strands of pink and gray pearls. I studied my feet, realizing too late I should have stood up. Mrs. Connors came over to my chair, bent to embrace me, and pecked me on both cheeks. "Just look at you two," she said. "What a couple of deadbeats. Cora, where have you been? Ray was frantic when you left New Haven. Now, I don't want to interfere; you just tell me to shut up. I don't know what's been going on with you two. But why do you have to live together? Why don't you just get married?"

"Ma," Ray said from his bed.

I smiled. "Those earrings are wonderful," I said. Mrs. Connors was wearing large mulberry-colored cubes, spiked with gold branches like tendrils. They resembled some living entities found in a coral reef.

"Look how she tries to change the subject, Ray," Mrs. Connors said. She put her hand up to her ears. "These old things," she said. "They're not real." She undipped them and handed them to me.

"Nice," I said, studying them, iney re tor you.

"Oh, no, I couldn't."

"No, no, they're for you. I insist, don't make a fuss, or I'll be very angry."

"Well, thank you," I said. I stood up, with the earrings in my hand. "I guess I'd better go now," I said. "I have to catch my train."

"Where are you going?" Mrs. Connors said. "Back to Southampton? Don't go. You'll stay uptown with us—you can have Ray's room."

"I didn't bring anything with me," I said.

"Oh, we have everything," Mrs. Connors said. "We'll go out right now and buy a toothbrush. Ray talks nonstop about you, and I've hardly gotten a chance to see you."

"I really can't stay," I said. I went over to the side of Ray's bed and bent to kiss him goodbye.

"You'll call me later?" Ray said.

He pulled me down by the arm. I thought he was going to whisper something to me, but when he didn't I said, "I'm glad the operation was a success."

I made my mother answer the phone, but Ray didn't call. In the fall I found a job working for a publishing company in Manhattan and began the rounds of looking for a place to live. On Monday morning there was an ad for a studio apartment on a block near Central Park West. I had already checked out that block—mostly brownstones—and the blocks nearby; it was a nice area. The apartment was dark, but the building was quaint and I could almost afford it. I left a small deposit with the landlady. The woman was going to call my references and I was to leave my security deposit and first month's rent with her that afternoon.

I had the rest of the morning to fill. For some reason I decided to go back downtown to the area where I saw the apartment with my mother the previous summer. I still felt as if that were really my apartment. Maybe by chance the previous tenants had moved out and there would once again be a for rent sign in the window. For less money than I would be paying on

the uptown place, I could have had a whole floor in a building, sunny, with a yard. As I got near the address I felt the strong feeling—the sense of place, whatever—coming back even more intensely than on the previous visit.

Standing in the front entrance of the building was Ray.

"Hi," he said.

"Ray," I said. "What are you doing here?"

"My father bought the first floor," he said.

"I don't believe this," I said. "I tried to rent this place last year. I came back to look."

"The building went co-op a little while ago," Ray said. "We're in the middle of renovating." He seemed pleased with himself; I wondered if he thought I came looking for him. "Do you want to come in?" he said.

The first floor had been completely stripped. Now the rococo molding was gone, there was wall-to-wall carpeting over the floor and track lighting. The bathroom was replaced with modern equipment. It was probably neater and cleaner, but the crazy charm of the place was gone. Now that it had new windows and different doors, it was just like a million other apartments.

I looked out the windows to the backyard; it had been paved over with bricks, and small trees were stuck into redwood planters. It was too cold to go outside, but Ray said I should sit down for a minute. He pointed to a gray sofa. "I'm in the middle of working on a project," he said. "For my parents. They bought a house upstate and hired me to renovate."

I said I was about to go and give a deposit on an apartment uptown.

"We're just subletting a place right now," Ray said. "As soon as this place is finished, in a couple of weeks, then we can move in."

"Who's we?" I said.

"I got married last month," Ray said. He looked at me with a wry expression. I thought he was waiting for me to burst into tears. "My father got us this place as a wedding present."

"Oh, how great," I said. "Congratulations! Who is she?"

My voice sounded artificial, not because I was upset over this news but because I just didn't care. "Someone I know?" I said.

"No, no," Ray said. "She's a secretary at my firm; she just started work there a few months ago."

"You didn't know her before?"

"No," Ray said. "It was just one of those things that happen fast."

"Great," I said. His small, worried eyes looked at me with a combination of rage and love.

"I have to get back to work now," Ray said. "I'm glad you stopped by. I had hoped we wouldn't lose touch. Listen, would you like to have dinner with me? Just the two of us?"

"When?" I said.

"I don't know," Ray said. "Tonight."

"Um," I said. "Well, I have a bunch of things to do. Why don't I call you later this afternoon?"

"Okay," Ray said. "And if you can't make it tonight, maybe we could have lunch next week. Do you still have all the furniture I gave you?"

"Oh, yes."

"I'll also give you my number at work."

I took his phone number, written on the back of a card. Out on the street I went to a nearby phone booth and called my mother, who was having lunch with friends in the city. We met on Thirty-fourth Street to go shopping for shoes. My mother bought me two pairs: gray pumps, with a medium heel, and a pair of purple sandals, which resembled, at least as far as I was concerned, those worn by French prostitutes. They weren't practical, but I liked them.

A while later I saw Ray's father on television—a morning talk show—kicking a mattress to demonstrate construction. He was a vigorous man, and he chuckled to the host as he ripped open the ticking and pulled out the stuffing.