Under My Skin (5 page)

‘I see,’ he says and his face is very serious even though his eyes are beginning to smile.

It rains and we throw a party in Vertigo.

We drink the profits and we eat all the food. Larry drinks
to celebrate our wedding and I drink to wish both of us luck. We drink and we dance and he turns me, turns me. We leave the blinds up and when we open the doors people crowd in. We drink because we found each other early and Juna shakes her head and says, ‘Too young, too young.’

Arouse v. – 1. To evoke a feeling, response, or desire. 2. To cause feelings of sexual desire in somebody. 3. To make someone angry. 4. To wake up, to wake somebody up from sleep or unconsciousness.

In time Glassman would grow tired of it, his own face in the mirror, and knowing that he was the last person other people saw before they died. On 2 January 2001 a snowstorm was forecast in New York and the city seemed strong to him then, and safe. On that day he did not think about snow. Instead he stood in his undershorts at the bathroom mirror and looked and looked until he saw himself fail. He was aware of the heat in his apartment and he was aware of Paul Simon coming from the CD player on the landing but he noticed the sleet on the skylight as if the sound came through a third ear he did not know he had.

The disease had begun with a chain of small red spots, delicate embroidery on his spine and around his waist and in some bizarre flamboyant gesture up and over his shoulder again. The first treatment meant that he had a negative charge. Static shocks were an issue. The escalator at Macy’s, cab doors, some street signs. On a bad day he could stand still on the sidewalk and put the street lights out. Two doses of radium and every woman he met smiled at him. Later Matilda would say that he glowed. And women were drawn to him anyway. And mostly younger women too. Women who were somehow damaged, and loners like him.

Before Matilda there was a woman from Alaska and before her a Mongolian woman called Boo. One night she took a knife in her hand and refused to put it down. And the Eskimo drove with her baby through snow in a pickup truck to find him at the cottage in Cape Cod. All the hopeless cases followed
him like a lighthouse and somehow thought they had found hope in him. Then she went home and jumped from the top window of her house with the baby in her arms, and both of them – ‘Why?’ Glassman wondered – ‘Why?’ – survived.

Now there were three kinds of antibiotics, a nasal spray that hit the back sinus wall and went straight to his brain. And binders. Painkillers. Vitamins. Every kind. All like bolts and screws to make a together man. His sexuality was unpredictable and it seemed as though the drugs and the disease had run away with his old life and his happy thoughts. Lately he believed it had taken his passions and feelings and he only seemed to
like
women now. He saw them and he was somehow pleased by them, but there were no real feelings of enthusiasm or desire attached.

Matilda stood on the other side of the bathroom door. She inched it open and looked at his reflection in the glass.

‘Arthur,’ she asked in a whisper, ‘are you home?’

Together they looked into the mirror and only his eyes, slate-grey and considered beautiful, could save him from becoming a shadow now.

In the kitchen he took his meds and she made green tea. She poured some over the spider plant on the window ledge and he watched as she scalded the only green thing he had left.

Plants died around him anyway. Bees buzzed and then spun on their backs until they were gone. But he could not infect people. His physician talked a lot about the pituitary gland and how the disease had gotten itself into the cockpit and taken the controls. ‘You may not be fully in charge of your emotions,’ he said, and when Arthur thought about this he saw devils in red cars driving his feelings around. Now, as he watched her for a moment over his small silver glasses, he
could have blamed these devils but really he believed it was more about him and her.

So she was pretty, Matilda, in a voluptuous 1950s way, but he had no real feelings left for her. He would tell her soon, and without her, some of the headaches in his life would go. Lately women seemed to take from him and just leave a weaker fight inside himself.

She talked about her work and he listened and asked questions like ‘Really?’ and ‘Why?’ and ‘Why there?’

He was always interested in other people’s lives and he liked conversation. He knew how to use words to connect people and how to make them all feel as if they were the centre of his world. With women, that gift – and his eyes – seemed to be enough to bring them down.

The pale winter sunlight came in across the river and New Jersey and they sat across from each other and talked about her parents who were in town.

‘Mom bought a scarf in Bloomingdales,’ she said, and although Glassman tried he could not think of any possible response to this. His eyes over his glasses were growing warm with amusement and inside he thought,
‘She’s going to ask me to meet them now
.’

She sounded even younger when she spoke about her mom and dad. Matilda was thirty-four and he was fifty-one. When The Chief teased him about dating younger women he said calmly, ‘I would like to date a woman who is my age… or
a little
younger… but do you know any fifty-one-year-old women who are single and not completely insane?’

He had met Matilda at the local swimming pool. She swam towards him in the shallow end and was beautiful, with pale wet skin. And she could swim, long athletic strokes learned and practised from a very young age. She had large breasts
which he admired and he liked the modesty of her old-fashioned bathing suit, and she in turn saw the marks and the scars from the injections and spinal taps, and because she seemed OK with that they slept together at his SoHo apartment that afternoon.

He knew then that it would not last of course, as he always knew, but he was distracted by her raven-black hair, her thick slanted eyebrows, her wit and her smile, and so he let what he called another of the ‘undead’ slip in. He had read somewhere that orphans could always recognize another orphan in a crowded room. He sensed that she was already broken and read the telling ‘Please love me’ sign in her eyes. The next night she called at his apartment on Prince Street at 4 a.m. and he smiled at her in his sleep and let her in. And later he stayed up and watched her while she slept in an armchair, like a beautiful blackbird, her shoulder supporting her bill.

The next morning she said she was sorry to have woken him up and when she smiled that lovely smile and asked if he would meet her again, he heard himself say, ‘OK.’

And now it was somehow five months later and her Connecticut parents who were concerned and wealthy wanted to meet Glassman. They wanted to see, and he enjoyed the irony of this, if he was good and kind and safe enough. Everyone loved Glassman. Lately he had been loved by a group of visiting German doctors and they had wanted photographs and had stood at JFK smiling broadly with their arms around him. He felt bewildered by their love and found it difficult to react. He told Matilda about it now and he frowned and knew there was a joke hidden somewhere in this.

‘German love,’ he said slowly, ‘is very difficult to reciprocate.’

And she sipped her tea and laughed.

‘Mom and Dad want to have dinner at Elaine’s,’ and here she smiled and looked right into his eyes, ‘and then… they
really
want to meet you.’

‘What Mom and Dad…
really
want,’ Arthur replied in a deadpan voice, ‘is to have dinner at Elaine’s… and then meet someone who is a lot
younger
than me.’

And again Glassman asked why, why when he was swimming lengths in the swimming pool did he decide to stop and why did Matilda also stop and turn around? And why did he take her home and make love to her and then continue to let her in again and again? Glassman had never met a good woman in a bar. He did try of course but he could not connect with the women he met there. And besides, a certain type of woman seemed to find their way to him anyway and this was something he found difficult to explain. To him they were like wild birds who could fly higher than the Himalayas and no matter what sort of storm clouds they encountered, they would not, could not, turn around. They would not stop until they found him standing – ready to be pecked apart – doing what he liked to do best, walking in the wind and collecting old sea glass on the beach. They found him the same way Matilda found him in the swimming pool – and perhaps he preferred it that way. But sometimes when he was lonely, as he often was, he too, like so many men, would have to go to a bar and drink and hope.

‘And what happens if you don’t find anyone?’ The Chief asked.

‘What happens?’ Glassman replied mildly. ‘I do what any self-respecting fifty-one-year-old man does, get a pint of frozen yoghurt and go home.’

But on that one morning in January when he found himself at the mirror in his bathroom and he was not even sure how he got there, for the first time his spirit waned, and Glassman was afraid he was going to die.

He saw for the first time what he needed to see – a real person, losing strength and growing older, feeling older and not very well in himself.

‘I do not look good,’ he said and it was the saddest voice he had ever heard. He knew then that he was in trouble but he didn’t want to be too harsh with himself. He looked down at his hands and said, ‘I promise myself that I will use these hands in a different way – and use these eyes to see new things, other than people who sometimes die.’ He promised himself that if he ever got out of it – and ‘it’ must have meant the special body corset for his back, the injections, the drugs – he would leave the ER at St Vincent’s and have a different kind of life. He had an idea around glass. Whenever he found a new piece on Long Island or Cahoon’s Hollow Beach he would pocket it and he knew that if he became well, this one piece, attached to many others, could allow him to make something great.

Matilda called him at his studio and she was at Elaine’s. He could hear her parents in the background and they were drunk and gung-ho and wanted to meet him now.

He did not want to hurt her, so he agreed, but picked a place where the barman knew him, and where he knew every drink on the cocktail menu and every picture on the wall. The barman was waiting for him and he asked, ‘What gives, Arthur?’ as he gave a sideways nod to the people at the bar.

‘You watch,’ Glassman said, ‘this is better than the
Jerry Springer Show
.’ When he walked towards Matilda’s parents he
saw – and they saw – that he was almost as old as them. It was embarrassing but soon everyone was smiling. Glassman pulled it off, for himself and for her, and that night when she put her hand in his, he told her that really he wanted to be alone. And what he meant, although he could not say it yet, was that she was beginning to trouble him and that he just wanted her to go off somewhere and leave him by himself. The night before she had woken him by taking a photograph of him asleep.