Another You Page 16

  “The blood wasn’t all that bad?” she said, trying to get his attention.

  “I lied. It freaked me out. It was very upsetting.”

  “So why tell me now?”

  Bruce Lee’s foot connected with a man’s ribs, and the man went over backward.

  “Because it was wrong of me to mislead you. Your house is a mess. Furthermore, you can live with me, if you want. You can live with me without Marshall, that would be the best idea. Then I could save on motel bills.”

  “Is all of this a sick joke, or was some of it what you really think?” she said, yanking the covers over her back.

  His hand returned to pat her hip. He touched her with the same rhythm, the same intensity, people use when they’re in a hurry, drumming their fingers on a tabletop. Bruce Lee was doing very well for himself. Tony was spellbound.

  “You know, I almost told Marshall yesterday morning,” she said. “Diligent Marshall, suddenly finding out he’s been living with someone who’s stopped being … diligent.”

  He looked at her. “Are you going to tell him or keep this a secret?”

  “Keep it a secret,” she said. She waited for his response, but there was none. A commercial for cat food came on, an aging movie actress whose name she couldn’t remember stooping to shower crunchy stars into a cat’s bowl. The cat sprouted wings and flew to the food. The woman sprouted wings and disappeared through the ceiling.

  Tony was propped on one elbow, still watching TV. “Doesn’t something horrible like this make you realize that life is short and that, I don’t know, maybe nothing good comes of hiding your feelings? I mean, we can’t all be as extroverted as Susan McCallum, but it seems quite possible that if any good is to come out of something like this, maybe it’s to make the people on the sidelines introspective. What I mean is, maybe you should think about telling him.”

  “You’re not afraid of what he’d do?”

  There was a long silence, during which she decided he wasn’t going to answer. In another room, she heard someone flipping through the channels, getting mostly static, as she and Tony had earlier.

  “No,” he said.

  “Why?” she said.

  “Because he likes me well enough.”

  “Likes you? I don’t think he gives you a moment’s thought.”

  Another long pause. “Well, you said he hardly knew McCallum either,” Tony said.

  “Tony,” she said, “what are we talking about?”

  “A teeny, tiny bit of cowardice that might exist on your husband’s part,” he said.

  “You think he wouldn’t do anything?”

  “Well, what are you saying?” Tony said. “That I couldn’t stand someone’s angry words?” He turned toward her. “You’re mad at me for stating something that you already understand completely, which is that Marshall wouldn’t be an insurmountable problem.”

  “What would you have him do?” she said.

  “Sonja, don’t blame me for his disposition. I would have him do just what he would do: complain, or lecture us, or just go off and lick his wounds, I don’t know.”

  “I can’t believe it. You don’t think he’d care.”

  “When did I say that?”

  “You want him to come on like Bruce Lee.”

  “There’s been enough violence.”

  “Tony—”

  “ ‘Tony,’ nothing. You like it that I don’t mind being adversarial. In this case, though, I’m only pointing out the obvious. I’m not saying he’s a lily-livered coward. I mean, in his place, what would I do myself?”

  She had pulled herself up in bed and was feeling the full extent of her discomfort: the wrinkled sheets, cold seeping underneath from where Tony’d pulled them out from under the mattress, the stiff pillow impossible to pound into a comfortable headrest. Here she was in a motel with her lover, with whom she found herself in frivolous fights all too often, listening to him as if he had a great psychic ability to see the future. His expression implied a kind of superiority: the raised eyebrows letting her know he found her slightly ridiculous; his jutting chin set belligerently, as if whatever position he took was the only possible way to think about something. As he turned away from her to rest on his hip again, exasperated, looking once more at Bruce Lee, it dawned on her that he might have said everything he’d said to provoke her. To provoke her not into telling Marshall about their affair, but to ensure that she wouldn’t. Her intuition told her she was right. Wasn’t it possible Tony was trying to be disagreeable so she would like him less, so she would measure him against Marshall, conventional, diligent Marshall, and find Tony lacking … which would mean that if she chose her husband, instead of him, he could come out of their affair feeling self-righteous, superior to her by making it seem she’d opted for the status quo?

  “I’m getting bad vibes,” Tony said. “I’m feeling that you’re put out with me.”

  “Isn’t that what you intended?”

  “Look at me,” he said, turning toward her. “That is not what I want. I admit I’m in a little over my head. It’s made me feel guilty, having him in the house, relating to him like he’s my friend. I know it’s not my business to tell you what to do about your marriage, but what I am definitely not telling you is to write me off.”

  She couldn’t tell, for sure; looking straight at him, she couldn’t tell whether she’d been subsumed by paranoia, or whether there was at least some truth to her suspicions, until he cleared his throat and said that he’d been thinking he needed some time to sort through his feelings. All he was talking about was a few days in the Bahamas. With his mother, no less. So: Tony was the coward, not Marshall. Tony was the one who wasn’t standing up to the sudden changes very well.

  “Why did you do it?” she said. “Why did you wait for us at the police station?”

  “Because I was concerned about you, what the hell do you think?”

  “But you knew he’d be there too, didn’t you?”

  “Why am I being cross-examined about a good deed? I didn’t see what else to do; I’d dropped you there, and it seemed only decent to wait to round you up. Yes, I figured he’d be there. I never really encountered him before, except in passing. I didn’t expect to like him. To feel sorry for him. It made me feel guilty. I just told you that.”

  “Which way did you really feel, Tony? That you liked him, or that you felt sorry for him?”

  “Both. He’s a likeable person. I don’t know why he doesn’t have any friends. You say he doesn’t. McCallum apparently feels he’s his friend, but he tells me, and you tell me, that isn’t so. I don’t have many friends myself. I let people drift away. I didn’t extend myself those times I might have. At the very least, you’ve got to be my friend. I don’t ever want to lose you.”

  My God: he was telling her he just wanted to be friends. That was what he was telling her.

  “Why are you looking at me that way?” he said. “Have I asked for something so impossible?”

  “Let me get this straight,” she said, but this time she was sure she already had it straight. “You’re going to go away from me for a few days, and when you come back, you want us to be friends.”

  “Well, I want us to be friends. Good friends. Yes.”

  When she didn’t answer, he lay rigidly in the bed, turned away from her. He faced the television, but she knew he wasn’t watching: it had become sound and images for Tony as well as for her, any meaning that was there had disappeared, the plot had vanished.

  Tony’s words hung in the air. Even he wasn’t going to pretend any longer that her intuition hadn’t been working; he was still registering his own words, and they were false enough to make him grow a wooden nose. He sniffed, testing. He sniffed because he was trying to sniff back tears. Because what the hell: he hadn’t intended to lie to her, but suddenly it had seemed he had no room to maneuver. It didn’t even seem that he could move an inch forward or backward on the big bed, because the lie had paralyzed him. It really had. He couldn’t move at all. He
was trying, and he couldn’t. He was immobilized, his eyes straight ahead, where Bruce Lee began spinning faster and faster, his raised leg sending masked bad guys flying.

  Somehow they got out of the room. He remembered it happening in slow motion, as if Bruce Lee’s pace were the norm and they were two zombies, dragging the floor for their clothes, avoiding each other’s eyes. Every word she didn’t speak brought him closer to tears, so he kept in motion, laboriously slow motion, trying to distract himself so he wouldn’t do something horrible and unforgivable, such as falling at the feet of a woman he didn’t love, to declare, through tears, that he loved her. Though some of what he’d said to her had been true. It was true he’d let his friends slip away, or true he’d lost them in more painful ways, like fooling around with one friend’s wife and getting caught, and getting drunk and offending another friend whom he actually thought very highly of, though that particular night he’d been jealous of him, caused a scene, never managed to be forgiven. He could still patch that up. All it would take was a phone call. He’d moved once because of a lost friendship between him and a woman he’d loved, he really had loved her, and then she’d wanted to marry and have a family and he hadn’t, so she had gotten together with someone else, and a few times the three of them had eaten together, or gone to the movies, but he’d begun to loathe her fiancé, for no good reason except jealousy, and he’d ruined what might have been his friendship with the woman by begging her to come back, by saying he’d marry her, that they could have children—all of this a few days before her wedding. Mistake, mistake. And with Sonja? He had pursued her just for the hell of it. Always conscientious about her work, husband’s photograph on the desk, the day she sadly confided in him that she had had so many miscarriages she didn’t have the heart to try any longer to conceive a child. She wasn’t his type, so he thought he might see what it was like to try to fall in love with someone who wasn’t his type. To instigate games with her, act differently from the way he usually acted, which was to try to win a woman’s love through a combination of the tried and true, flowers and expensive candlelit meals, and the unexpected: a gift of two dozen windup Godzillas with shiny red hearts stuck to their chests. That had been Sonja’s valentine: twenty-four of them lined up in the top drawer of her desk, which he had completely emptied of all other contents. But all that had happened was that he liked her. He liked her, and he enjoyed her pleased surprise, her sometimes-impulsive girlishness. The truth was, he would rather be her coconspirator in shrugging off adulthood than try to express romantic love for her. He could see her as a sister, or even as someone else’s perfectly nice wife whom he was entertaining and being entertained by. When they made love, he tried to think that she was on his wavelength, that she was entertaining him, not falling in love with him. Though maybe she hadn’t been in love with him. Maybe she hadn’t. If she had, would that love disappear because of one conversation, would it disappear during a Bruce Lee movie?

  He looked over his shoulder at the room and marvelled at how ordinary it was: the messy bed; the generic big-flower curtains; the TV. Then he remembered the scene inside Sonja’s house, the blood. Next he superimposed that ghastly sight on the anonymous motel room and shuddered—shuddered as much at what his own imagination could produce as at the memory of the scene of McCallum’s stabbing. Because deep inside … how to explain? It was as if something small and hard—a marble, say—seemed sometimes to begin rolling in his chest, winding down through his rib cage and giving him a small, sharp thrill as it dropped. As with a pinball game, his fingers would flip up and down his ribs, moving before he realized they were, fingertips trying to track the course of the marble, the little nervous nugget that signalled something had to happen, right away, soon, out of his control, something tickling him inside, shooting up and dropping down, his mood rising and sinking as he tried to track it. Looking at the room, he felt the marble start to form—just the smallest tingle, like the first flick that registers with the oyster when the little grain of sand embeds itself. Yes! he thought. Let’s feel something starting, let’s really be in love with Sonja, let’s run after her and shoot that marble directly into the brain, let’s have the lights light up, set off bells, keep it in play, win this game. But the tingle disappeared as quickly as it had come, leaving him again aware of the emptiness inside him.

  She leaned against the car, dejected, sorry for herself, preoccupied with emotions he didn’t want to know about. Her feet were crossed at the ankles, her arms wrapped around her chest. She despised him, he knew.

  “Where shall I take you?” he said. His voice was ashamed, small.

  “Anywhere that isn’t hell,” she said.

  He thought: An actor like me deserves the melodrama. He thought: A week—not a few days, a week—in the Bahamas. And who was he kidding about taking his mother? Really: Who was he kidding?

  Martine, Dearest,

  Today I was chased down Madison Avenue by a bee, who must have known that in my mind I was already standing in one of the gardens in Maine. No one else was followed by a bee—only me. It made me think that while others had the pleasure of a fluttering butterfly, say, or the pleasant sight of a small bird flying up into a tree, I alone was on Earth to be annoyed by doctors at the hospital, businessmen who are incapable of understanding conclusions arrived at through the process of using common sense and who are therefore unwilling to join in with my conclusions, and then there was that damned bee, swirling about my head, intent upon making me hunch my shoulders and run. A ludicrous sight I must have been, because who among the crowd on Madison Avenue was going to suppose me running because some tiny creature was in hot pursuit?

  I intended to write you an anecdote humorously mocking my vulnerabilities, but in re-reading your recent letter about the evasive answers I have in effect made you give the boys because of my long absence, I suppose I might as well assume that you see my true character all too well. Last night I sat up late in the Algonquin lobby, talking to Ethan Bedell and to Marwell Hopkins, a former professor of ours from Yale days. Ethan had brought him intentionally, to talk to me about the situation with Alice, though they had a complicated story about why Marwell happened to be in town that was thoroughly unnecessary and utterly transparent. You would think that a man who taught psychology would be capable of coming up with something better—though come to think of it, the compounding of ludicrous fact upon impossible coincidence originated with Ethan, not with Marwell. At any rate, we three agreed that we were too much the old-fashioned fellows, stuck in our ways, rarely able to go along with the crowd politically or in any other way.

  It is very difficult to write this. Marwell, it seems, is personally friendly with one of the more officious doctors at Alice’s hospital. It seems that not only has she been cursed with this breakdown, but that a physical problem has been discovered, as well. All of this inquiring was done behind my back and would quite annoy me except for Ethan’s obvious devotion to me. It seems there may be surgery, which they expect to solve her medical problem. To get her in shape for this, they have recommended a series of two or three shocks to the system—Marwell says this is the accepted new treatment, painless, and quite effective. It seems they do not want to operate while she is in a depressed state. It appears there is uterine bleeding, and they feel they must act soon, so I am writing yet again to say that during the period when Alice is receiving the new anti-depression treatments, I will continue on at the Waldorf. It seems a difficult time to have the boys for a visit, but if you feel it is essential, I could certainly book a suite for you to stay in and would see you as much as business and hospital visits would allow.

  I gather that Alice has also been writing to you. I was under the impression she was too depressed—or perhaps I should say lethargic—to do so, but I am sure you are happy for her communications. I of course hope they reflect her progress and that they have not placed any undue burden on you. She has said very strange things to me, feeling a sort of generalized guilt and dread quite out of proportio
n to circumstance. I suppose she has expressed to you some of the same thoughts. At any rate, I thank you for your kindness, as apparently you have promptly replied to her letters, and that seems, according to Marwell’s doctor friend, to have been much help.

  I try to avoid a gloomy outlook, though some days it seems clear to me that slight errors on my part have resulted in rather extreme consequences. Though the boys prosper, and though you seem a pillar of strength, I must admit that my former conduct toward Alice has apparently been quite detrimental, declaring so firmly the way things should be, so I suppose I am hinting for your sympathy.

  Here I find myself at the point in the letter when my thoughts usually turn to nature—in fact, the verdant world of the property in Maine, the roses, the lilacs. That beauty has certainly been no consolation to Alice, and now I wonder: though you move among it, is its loveliness important to you, or do you nurture the roses as you nurture the boys? What I mean is, when things are a mixture of duty and pleasure, how does one truly feel about one’s actions?

  Martine, without Alice at my side I do not know how I can return to Maine. It may be that we will have to be elsewhere, let the house go, the gardens. It is filled with memories that cannot be risen above, connected inextricably with the cruel blow of the baby’s death. What is it like for you to be there? Do you feel as estranged as Alice does, as I now increasingly feel, and are you just soldiering it out? I will brace myself for your reply. Meanwhile, as always, my inadequate but deeply felt thanks.

  With affection,

  M.

  11

  CAFé LUXE, painted dark green inside, with exposed pipes painted black and tin ceilings painted pale pink, had been opened the summer before by a professor denied tenure. The waiters and waitresses—perhaps in mourning over the college’s bad decision—dressed in black: shirts, pants, shoes. One of the waitresses even had black polish on her long fingernails. Sonja sometimes went to Café Luxe with clients, because they played classical music late in the afternoon. Marshall rarely went there, though, because there were too many students who might want to talk to him, but he felt the sudden need for a café au lait as he drove by, and a car was pulling out of a parking place right in front of the building. He parked and went in, waiting behind one other customer who was ordering something to take out. He flipped through an Italian fashion magazine, looking at all the models in black, who were only slightly skinnier and more abject looking than the waitresses picking up their orders. “Café au lait to go, please,” he said, when the customer in front of him turned to leave.