The Whiteness of Bones (21 page)

It was just that the men were too silly. She could no longer
smile politely at the bad puns in English; the bad attempted puns such as “mini-mouse skirt.” She thought she was being clever by telling Mrs. Hadashi that she was going to be married in two days. Mrs. Hadashi, however, was very relieved to hear this and generously offered her a night off for her honeymoon. She saw no reason why marriage would interfere with Claire’s work. Finally, Claire just had to walk out, Mrs. Hadashi tripping furiously behind her, cursing in Japanese and shaking her fist.

So Claire was there when Alder Stoddard arrived at the Crawfords’ to pick up Mamie. It had been Mamie’s idea to go to the theater when he asked her what she would most like to do, and although he no longer went to the theater, he was very happy to take Mamie.

Claire was going to Alysse’s for the evening. Alysse was giving a small dinner for the former dictator of a Central American country and she wanted as many young, pretty girls at the table as possible. Mamie disapproved of Claire’s going, reminding her that the guest of honor was personally responsible for the beheading of a young union organizer (he borrowed a machete from a bystander), but Claire told Mamie to mind her own business. Alysse had promised to seat Claire next to a former Secretary of State, a particularly rapacious man, and Claire was looking forward to meeting him. Mamie, who suspected that Claire was trying to provoke her, was able to control herself and say nothing more, even though it upset her that Alysse would pander in this way, and that Claire would go along with it.

The play was a disappointment. Mamie was surprised. She apologized to Alder.

“It’s not always disappointing,” he said.

“But you don’t go to the theater.”

“No.”

He had brought her two paperback books. It had been very difficult finding the right books because he knew how much she read. He was wearing a dark gray pin-striped suit and navy blue tennis shoes. Naturally enough, Mamie was curious about the shoes, but she did not mention them.

He took her to a restaurant in the Fifties, on the East Side. Mamie had noticed that each section of the city had its own very specific residents. To Mamie, the side streets of the East Fifties seemed populated with discarded mistresses and former wives. The women who lived on these side streets wore tan poplin raincoats and printed silk scarves on their heads, and dark glasses. They looked as if they had just awakened. They did not bother to put on makeup, and it was easy to see that they had once been handsome. Mamie could discern the evidence of high cheekbones and good legs. These women, too, had a look about them that suggested they had been left behind, some by men and others just by time. They did not have that sense of rush about them, as did the women farther north in the city, who were always on their way somewhere, often with a child. They did not carry full grocery bags, either, like other women. They were not feeding families. Their plastic
I LOVE NEW YORK
bags contained a few cartons of yoghurt and a quart of vodka and freshly squeezed grapefruit juice. These women were more interesting to Mamie; less officious, more tender, than the women farther uptown who nearly exploded with intention. Mamie often tried to imagine what their lives were like, or more precisely, she tried to imagine what their lives had been like, when men looked after them.

Jerry, the bartender at the restaurant, was very happy to see Alder. When Alder introduced Mamie, Jerry was oddly uninterested and did not speak to her. Alder took no notice, but
guided her with his hand in the small of her back to the table that he was always given. Mamie felt his hand there, but not with the shock of intimacy that she had hoped to feel when she had imagined him touching her again. Perhaps it is too soon for that, she thought.

He gave her the first two books of
A Dance to the Music of Time
. He was relieved when she said she hadn’t read them. He ordered two martinis for them. “This is a restaurant for martinis—banquettes, rare steaks, and bad tips on Knicks games.”

“My first martini,” she said.

The bartender brought the martinis and Mamie was sure that he looked at her with disgust when he put her drink on the plate in front of her. He squeezed Alder on the shoulder as he went past. The martini smelled like rubbing alcohol.

“I realize now that the bad thing about living far from home is that you can never make yourself completely understood,” Mamie said.

He looked at her. She saw that he was waiting for her to go on.

“All of the things that I know are secrets. Claire knows, but I can’t keep Claire next to me my whole life just so I will have someone nearby who knows what it smells like in the
keawe
forest at Polihale or what a litchi really tastes like. When someone in New York, anyone, says ‘Mallomars,’ everyone screams, ‘Oh, yes, oh, yes’—there are ‘oh-yesses’ ricocheting around the room. The solution, I know, is to stay among your own kind, clustered in a large group, but I can’t do that, either.”

“This is why you are an exile, Mamie. You should hear the poet Repovitchsky talk about his beloved steppes. The only difference between you is that he can’t go back. You both love
the place you have come from, but think of all the people who are relieved not to be in their hometowns, relieved and saved. Some people would die if they stayed at home. You are the other extreme. You’re going to die if you don’t go back.”

She laughed. “Not really, of course.”

“No, not really,” he said in his cool way. “All of the reasons that people give for living in New York—the opera, the art, the food, the conversation—are not very interesting to me anymore. I think New York is an aesthetic affectation as a city, but no one will admit it. My European friends adore New York, although they don’t for a minute understand it. They are profoundly moved by the white steam blasting up from manholes. That seems to them unbearably metaphoric. The French, especially. They also love those little plastic bears with honey inside. I thought one of my friends from Paris was going to cry one night when we walked past a homeless man sitting on a grate in front of Rockefeller Center—not out of pity, but because the symbolism was too much for him. That’s a little how I feel about the whole city—it’s full of sentimental self-congratulation. I wouldn’t mind so much, I suppose, if they’d just admit that it’s about money, not art. I like that about New York, that it’s about money.

“I remember the first time I was allowed to mail a letter alone on a New York street, without my governess or my mother. I went out onto York Avenue to the mailbox on the corner and I slipped the letter inside and turned to look up at the apartment and my mother and Teddy Shannon were standing at the window watching me, silently clapping their hands.”

Mamie laughed. “I must have covered thirty miles a day on my bike.”

“You see,” he said.

“But it’s very different there. Everyone is either related to you or works for you.” She paused for a moment before she said, “No one would ever hurt you.”

“We went to East Hampton on the weekend,” Alder said, “and I was sometimes taken on long car trips with my grandmother and her spinster friend. I sat in the front of an old black Buick sedan with the chauffeur, Mr. Ulysses de Beaupré, and my grandmother and Miss Endicott sat in the back. Every fifty miles, Mr. de Beaupré would ease the car off the road, he wasn’t allowed to use highways or go faster than forty miles an hour, and the two ladies would get out and toss a beanbag back and forth in the grass by the side of the road while Mr. de Beaupré sat beneath a tree and had a nice, quiet smoke. Then we all climbed back into the Buick and went the next fifty miles. My grandmother would hold an orange in a handkerchief and peel it with a little knife and pass the slices up front to me. We went to Newport or Saratoga. Sometimes south to Pawley’s Island. Then I went to boarding school and those trips ended for me. Other things became important. You know, girls and lacrosse.”

The bartender handed them two enormous plastic menus. He leaned against the empty table alongside and asked Alder if he had seen the fight last week from Vegas. Alder had, and they talked about it while Mamie listened from behind her menu. The man still refused to recognize her presence.

“Why is he like that?” Mamie asked when he left. “Why is he so rude?”

“I used to come here with my wife. He liked her. He thinks you’re my girlfriend.”

Mamie was shocked. “Well, tell him I’m not.”

He looked at her in surprise. “Does it matter that much what he thinks?”

She hesitated. She didn’t think it did matter that much,
and she did not expect Alder to explain to the bartender the story of his marriage, but she did not like to be treated unjustly either. There was a middle way if Alder would explain to him that Mamie was his friend.

“He wouldn’t believe me. There’s no need to justify it, Mamie.” He made a gesture to Jerry to indicate that they would have two more martinis.

Mamie was confused. She was not going to insist that Alder clarify her position, but she blushed when the man brought the drinks to the table. The gin made her feel self-conscious, as if her movements were clumsy and exaggerated. She imagined that Jerry would think she was drunk.

Alder laid the stiff menu on the floor next to his chair. “I’m hungry,” he said. “Shall I order for you?”

She nodded.

Alder ordered steaks and home-fried potatoes and creamed spinach.

She kept her eyes on her plate until Jerry was gone, then she said, “The strange thing is that he blames me and not you. After all, you’re the one who is married. You’re the one with the wife. But I’m the one who is bad. He gives me too much power. No wonder you hate us. He’s just like Mr. Kipper.”

“Mr. Kipper?”

She did not want to be distracted by Mr. Kipper and his list of Burmese anxieties. “Jerry thinks you’re just great. Girls and steak tartare and boxing matches in Las Vegas. But I’m bad.” She laughed. “I am very, very relieved to have figured this out. You confused me. You both made me feel as if I really
had
done something wrong.”

“I don’t think you’re wicked. My guess is that you’re not wicked enough.”

“Oh, I can be convinced,” she said. “To think that I am.”

Her tone was so wistful and weary that he smiled and took
her hand. It may have been the martinis and it may have been a dim intimation of the trouble that lay patiently in wait for her, trouble bestirred by the suspicion that, as a woman, she was born wicked and deserved everything that was coming to her, but she kept her hand inside of Alder’s hand and allowed herself to feel, for the moment, good and safe.

Alder took Mamie to his grandmother’s house. Mrs. Lee lived in a very handsome brownstone on Seventy-first Street. From the street, the dark house looked as if it were empty. Curtains were drawn across the windows of the rooms on the second floor and the only light in the house came from a small dormer window on the top floor.

Alder held Mamie by the elbow as he opened the front door. It was a glass door, protected by intricate, leafy vines of ornamental ironwork, and it reminded Mamie of the thorn hedge in
Sleeping Beauty
. Alder pushed her gently into the entrance hall. It was cold and damp on the ground floor and Alder took her by the hand and led her up the marble staircase. In the darkness, the white stairs were the cool, thin color of moonlight. There was a landing on the second floor between two large, dark rooms. The furniture was covered in faded blue-and-white-striped dustcovers. On the faded walls, dark paintings waited vainly for someone to gaze at them. There were no ornaments of any kind. The leggy French table that had proudly held Mrs. Lee’s famous collection of eighteenth-century gold seals was bare. The clocks, no longer ticking, were nestled deep in their felt pouches, alone on the Gibbons mantelpieces. The light in the rooms came from the back garden, reflected from an old magnolia tree whose branches pressed against the glass panels of a french door.

Mamie held on to the bannister. The house was cool and silent.

“My grandmother is confined to her room.” He startled her when he spoke in a conversational tone. She would have whispered. “These rooms have been this way since 1949. She won’t let anything be touched, although Mr. de Beaupré has put away all of the small things. Or stolen them. I hope he’s stolen them. He deserves all the Fabergé eggs he can get his hands on.”

Alder took her into the back reception room, the one facing the old garden, and when she sat down in the draped
bergère
that had once been in Madame’s apartment at Versailles, little puffs of powdery dust rose from the cushion. She could smell mold and floor wax. He turned on a small pink-shaded lamp on a buhl chest in the corner and opened a red lacquered cabinet. There was a small refrigerator inside, and he took out a bottle of champagne and opened it.

“My grandmother was very vain. The lamps in these rooms were chosen especially to bring out the fineness of her lavender-colored skin.”

Mamie knew better than to ask if her skin really had been the color of lavender. Perhaps it had been. She looked at the paintings. They were all portraits of a high-nosed, stout woman in strands of pearls.

“Now she’s lying upstairs, tyrannized by de Beaupré. He bathes her and feeds her and dresses her. There is a day nurse and a night nurse but she refuses to allow them inside her room.”

“De Beaupré was the chauffeur who smoked under the tree?”

“Yes. She was in love with him.”

He was looking for something in the bottom half of the lacquered cabinet. He finally found it, a record of King Pleasure,
and he put it on the record player and brought Mamie a glass of champagne.

“I don’t know this music,” Mamie said. She had been talkative and excited at dinner, but now she felt heavy in her bones, languid and tranquil, perhaps because of the martinis, the still house, and the picture she had made in her mind of the old woman and the old black man somewhere above them in the big, dark house.

He asked her if she would dance. King Pleasure sang his flirtatious, breezy version of “I’m in the Mood for Love” and Mamie took off her shoes and went into Alder’s embrace as if they had done this many times before, at senior proms and coming-out parties and summer weddings, and she felt that she had been wrong before about the feel of his hand on the small of her back. They danced on the landing.