Trophy House (16 page)

“David, it isn't!”

“I'm exaggerating. But the Vows column isn't where you go for information. It's where you go for a romantic story. There's a difference.”

I asked him if he wanted me to continue. He said only if I really needed to. I could tell he was uncomfortable with my whining—because that's what it was. The part of the story that really hurt my feelings was about Beth and Mark. What they hadn't said—or what it was reported they hadn't said—was that either I had never existed or had been a terrible wife for Tom. How could they? They had both told me about having gone to their father's wedding, but you wouldn't know, from what they said about it, that it was the same event as the one described in the
Times,
not so much the facts but the tone and style. According to them, it was very low-key and the rabbi had gone on and on and on until people started coughing and scratching. Grant Barnes—whom incidentally I had heard Tom mention only once or twice in the entire time we were married—got plowed and came on to Beth like a satyr, then fell down and passed out on the floor. Judith was chilly to them, or, as Beth put it, “She's always on,” as if she thought everyone was watching her and listening to her. “She's the most artificial woman I've ever met. I don't know what Dad sees in her.”

Reading the Vows account of my husband's wedding, it occurred to me that the truth lay somewhere in the middle, between that account and that of my children who, bless their hearts, only wanted me to be cool and generous and, above all, unwounded.

I told David I missed him and he asked me again when I was coming to New York to live with him. “I need you terribly,” he said.

 

So I went. Although it killed me, I loaned Marshall to Beth, who said she wouldn't mind keeping him so long as I paid for his food and medical expenses. I made her promise to walk him at least once a day and not to feed him scraps from her plate. I moved into David's place on Twelfth Street. It was strange enough relocating to a city I barely knew, but living with a man I didn't know much better, having perceived him mainly under the rosy glow of desire, I wasn't prepared for the real man who soon emerged. My original take on him—that he was nice and honest and unpretentious and interesting and occasionally humorous—didn't change, but I began to notice that he had several unattractive habits, just like the rest of us. For instance, he talked before he finished chewing and swallowing his food; sometimes bits of potato or soup or lettuce clung to his lips. How was it that I had never noticed this before? I can only guess that it was because I didn't want to. He spent thirty-five or forty minutes every morning taking a shower and God only knew what else. He wasn't one of those people who are casual about privacy. When the door was closed, it was understood that I wasn't supposed to open it. Whenever the phone rang and he answered it, he always cleared his throat three times. Does this sound as petty as I think it does?

I have plenty of habits I'd rather not have and he never mentioned them, so I'll add tact to his plus column. He never said anything about the way I always checked more than once or twice things like: Had I left a stove burner on? Was the door double-locked and bolted? Did I have my keys? He never said anything about my insistence on washing up after dinner no matter how tired I was or how horny he was. We none of us are easy to live with if you let these and even worse habits get under your skin, where they swell to enormous size.

One Sunday morning while I lay in bed listening to the sounds on the street—cars driving by the house, a piercing whistle, the thud of the
New York Times
hitting the stoop—and trying to decide what to do today, I heard David yell “Oh shit!” from the kitchen. I called, asking him what was the matter. “I cut myself!”

I ran into the kitchen, where I saw David standing over the counter. Blood dripped from his hand onto the clean white surface. He turned around and looked at me ruefully. “I was cutting this bagel,” he said, holding it up. It was pink. “Let me see your hand,” I said.

“It's nothing.”

“It's not nothing, look how it's bleeding. At least put some pressure on it. Hold it under the cold water tap.”

David's face was turning ashy, whether from the pain, blood loss, or fear, I couldn't tell. “Please let me see it, David.” He held out his left hand. The index finger was badly cut. You could see the bone inside the knife cut. My knees buckled slightly and I held on to the counter. “You need to get that sewn up,” I said. “I'll get dressed.”

“No way,” he said. “I'll just hold this paper towel over it 'til it stops bleeding.”

“It's not going to stop by itself. It needs to be sewn.” Clearly, he had not, as I had, gone through this grisly routine with children. I spent the next five minutes trying to persuade him to let a doctor take care of it. I think the fact that the bleeding did not let up was more persuasive than whatever I said to him, and he finally agreed.

We found a cab on Sixth Avenue and drove to St. Vincent's Hospital, a place that was put on alert when the Twin Towers went down, told to get ready to handle hundreds, maybe thousands, of the injured. Except that there were only two. Everyone else either walked away or died.

David and I sat in the Emergency waiting room, which featured plastic chairs, bars over the first-floor windows, and screaming babies. The triage nurse who looked at David's hand said, “You'll live,” and put him in line. There were about a dozen people waiting. David kept apologizing to me, suggesting that I go back to the apartment and that he'd take a cab home when he was done.

I told him not to be ridiculous. Of course I'd stay with him. I'd sing to him if he wanted. I'd read him a three-year-old copy of
Good Housekeeping
. I found it odd that he was so apologetic. It made me wonder what his marriage had been like. Had she been someone who didn't endorse the first part of “in sickness and in health,” like Ruthie Brenner? Some women freak out when something bad happens to their spouse or significant other. “Stand by your man” means as much to them as filling up the gas tank with premium. They don't want to change dressings or take the poor guy to the bathroom. They want to party.

Most of the people in the waiting room looked neither sick nor wounded except for a young woman with a terrible, dry cough and runny eyes, probably spreading germs galore. It occurred to me that Sunday is the day people go to the E.R., when they're looking for a little drama in their lives: people with wax in their ears, rings they can't remove, or a teeny little pain in the knee joint. I sat next to David, whose injured digit he had wrapped in a large, once-white cotton handkerchief. A television set mounted high up a wall was showing a cavernous “church” filled with smartly dressed white people. The preacher—it was impossible to guess his denomination—walked back and forth across what looked far more like a stage than an altar, and told his “congregation” that there was nothing wrong with earthly goods so long as they didn't interfere with their spiritual journeys. Eyes followed him raptly. I whispered something rude about them in David's ear and he nodded in a distracted way. He was not a happy camper. The handkerchief was turning pink. I went up to the desk and asked how much longer it would be until my “husband” was seen by a doctor. The woman looked up at me and said, “We're taking them in order. We'll call his name when it's his turn.”

“Yes, but do you have any idea how long that might be?”

“His name will be called.”

We sat there for more than three hours. When I finally heard “David Lipsett,” I was too zoned to realize that meant us. David had to poke me. “Do you want to come in with me?”

“Would you like me to?”

“It's up to you.”

I had the feeling he wanted me to come with him, so I did. A nurse wearing flowered scrubs took us into a large room with curtained-off areas and beds. She told David to lie down. He did so. There was no place for me to sit except on an ice-cold steel stool. In a few minutes a woman came in and introduced herself as Dr. Pierce. Should I tell her I thought Pierce was an apt name for a doctor? Apologizing, she asked me to relinquish the stool. Then she sat down, drawing an arm rest out from beneath the bed. “Now let's see what we have here.” She unwrapped the handkerchief and asked him whether he wanted it back. “You can keep it,” he said with a trace of a smile. She told him he looked familiar, a remark that elicited a shrug from David. “I don't think so.”

“I'm going to have to take a few stitches in this. It's a pretty deep cut. You say you did it cutting a bagel?”

When she was done sewing up David's finger, she gave him a tetanus shot and told him to come back in three days to have the stitches removed.

“Let's go have lunch somewhere,” I said. “I'm starving.”

David thanked me again for staying there with him and being so patient. And I asked him not to thank me again. “Five times and I get the idea.”

 

Along about this time I got a phone call from Beth, who reported that her old flame, Andrew, had appeared one night at the door of her apartment in Jamaica Plain. No warning, no telephone call, just him. I gather she was cheerful but chilly. “I asked him what he was doing here,” she told me.

“You invited him in?”

“Of course,” Beth said. “It was almost midnight. He set it up that way.”

The woman who shares Beth's apartment, Claire, was asleep. They each have their own bedroom and use a common kitchen and living room. Claire works for a department in the State House that has to do with looking out for the welfare of children, victims of abuse, neglect, and ignorance. As a bureaucrat, she's not in danger of losing her job when there's an electoral turnover. She's nice enough but doesn't have Beth's sense of humor or spirit, due, no doubt, to the kind of woes she has to deal with every day. The two women seem to get along with a minimum of abrasion.

Beth invited Andy to come in. Marshall was barking like crazy; he never did take to Andy; I think Andy must have kicked him once when no one was looking. Andy didn't say anything much about the place, asked her if she lived alone and then tried to kiss her. She stepped back. “I knew we still had that chemistry thing,” she told me, and she didn't want to see how strong the temptation was. Andy sort of shrugged it off and asked if she had any beer.

Beth told me this with a good deal of prompting on my part. I think she wanted me to know the outcome without all the details that led up to it, but I was curious to find out how she dealt with this man who had been her Svengali. One look from him was enough to make her do whatever he wanted her to. How to dress, what to eat and not eat (soup!). What music to listen to, what friends to cultivate, how to chop onions, what sort of garment to wear to bed (none!).

“I think he was sort of flummoxed to find out I was sharing the place with someone else. Then I asked him why he had come up without telling me. He admitted that maybe if he'd told me I wouldn't let him come up. But of course I couldn't have stopped him if he really wanted to see me. It was so weird, Mom, with me being the one in charge.”

She let him spend the night on the couch in the living room. The next morning—it was a Saturday—the three sat around drinking coffee and eating muffins, with Claire bestowing “fishy” looks on Andy, looks which he bounced right back at her. “It was actually kind of funny,” Beth said.

“Did he want something? I mean something specific?” I said.

“He wanted us to get back together.” In spite of common sense, I held my breath.

“And?”

“And I told him I was no longer interested in carrying on a sick relationship with anybody. Claire got up and went back to her bedroom at this point in time.”

“I'll bet he got nasty,” I said. She asked me how I knew.

“Because people like Andy can't tolerate rejection.” Beth said nobody liked it.

“Nobody likes it, but they learn how to deal with it. My God, I sound like somebody's mother!”

Among other observations, Beth said Andy told her she wasn't mature enough to keep up an adult relationship. She was a baby who would never grow up. He said she was getting fat and that soon no one would want to be seen with her. “I asked him to bring his dish over to the sink and then leave.”

“And?”

“He left but he didn't bring his dish over. I guess that was showing me, right? Am I right?”

“I'm proud of you,” I said.

“I'm proud of me too. Because you know what, Mom? All the time he was there, I could feel the juices flowing. I could feel my heart go a mile a minute. I guess I'll never quite get over him.”

“Every woman has an Andy in her attic. Or closet.”

We talked about our book. We had been taking a day here, a day there, and scouring the Cape for the kind of house we wanted to immortalize in our book. It wasn't easy because it involved a long drive for me from New York. Beth and I usually spent Saturday night in Truro. I must say, David was extremely understanding. Also very helpful; he had an instinctive feel for the way words and pictures can join hands and bring something off that seems fresh rather than a retread. Beth's text was a little edgy; she accepted nothing head-on. So that while you could tell that she admired each house for its aesthetic integrity, she also put it in a historical context. The bottom line was that these were relics, or artifacts; the only difference between them and, say, a museum of early Americana, was that people were living in them. I think she felt that maybe they ought to be wearing period dress, as at old Sturbridge Village or Plimoth Plantation. We decided not to interview the people who owned the houses but, in certain cases, to use pictures of the rooms inside.