Any Place I Hang My Hat (10 page)

About twenty feet away. He stood beside a beautiful woman. Okay, maybe she wasn’t beautiful, I couldn’t be sure. But at the very least she was striking. Nearly as tall as John, with black hair pulled back tight. Probably into a chic chignon in the back, although I couldn’t see. In an outfit by one of those magisterial designers who escort jet-setty women. I stared at them, him in a tie and dark suit, her in a silver dinner suit and a lot of tasteful, to say nothing of real, gold jewelry. What made me shake inside is that they looked like a matched set. Tall, elegant. And so stylish. His lush brown hair, his easy, graceful posture. Her olive skin gleaming warmly against the paleness of the suit.

“Something wrong?” Gloria asked.

He laughed at something she was saying. It didn’t look like a forced laugh.

“No. I’m fine.”

“You don’t look fine.”

“John is over there with another woman.” Gloria’s head swiveled. “He’s the guy in the dark suit,” I said. “She’s the gorgeous one.” They stood out because, unlike the dressy crowd that attends opera performances, most people who go to hear choral and/or orchestral music look as if they’d stepped out of the annual picnic photo of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg’s communist cell.

“Maybe she’s a friend,” Gloria suggested.

I shook my head so emphatically that I messed up my hair. “No. I know his friends.”

“Maybe a colleague.”

“Of all the people here tonight, she looks the least like a doc filmmaker. Look at her dinner suit. That’s not downtown retro. That’s serious couture.”

Gloria looked so sad for me I felt even lousier. She picked up my mood and tried to sound jaunty. “What do you think, Amy? Brazilian socialite?”

“Or some Jewish fashionista from the Bronx who knows her way around a sewing machine. And look at him. John’s the guy who decided to be a documentary filmmaker because if he went to law school he could wind up wearing suits. Do you see him? He looks like his favorite hobby is wearing a suit.” It was hard to swallow because my throat was so tight. “Gloria, do me a favor.”

“What?”

“I know I’m being a pain, but please don’t look right at them. He has a really good sixth sense.” She had the grace not to say anything like John’s senses, numbers one through a hundred, were completely focused on La Belleza, or however you say it in Portuguese or Bronx. “I hate to be adolescent,” I told her, “but I want to get back to the seats so he doesn’t get a chance to spot me.” Gloria was the only person I knew who could raise one eyebrow without contorting her entire face. She raised it. “What’s wrong with getting away from where he could spot me?” My throat got so tight I couldn’t swallow, an allergic reaction to seeing John so happy with La B. Next I would break out in hives. “I don’t want to be cowardly. But what else can I do? Grab a glass of red wine and throw it into her face?” My voice had become a croak.

I took a few sideways steps so that all John could possibly see of me (should he not be lost in the woman’s eyes) was my back. Gloria was maybe two inches taller than I, so I couldn’t rely on her to block me. Plus she was about my weight; I hoped if my shoulders and hips stuck out on either side of her, their configuration wouldn’t be so familiar to him as to be recognizable. “I could start a catfight. Shriek, Hands off my man, you ho!” I forced myself to do one of those deep breaths—inhale seven, exhale seven—that are supposed to be calming. I knew I was sounding a little intense for an associate editor, to say nothing of immature. Casually, as though inquiring about button earrings versus dangling, I asked: “What would you do in my place?”

She shrugged. “Walk over, say hello.”

“Just like that?”

“Absolutely. I’d let him be the one who’s taken aback. I’d be cordial.” Which of course was why Gloria Howard would be In Depth’s executive editor within three years, while it would take me another decade just to make senior editor. “Was it official, that the two of you were only seeing each other?” All I could manage was a shake of the head. No, not officially official. Just that we’d be sexually monogamous. We just did it. Still, even though the relationship was stalled—all right, going downhill—I’d assumed I’d get to say goodbye before he did. “Let’s get back to the seats,” she suggested. With a surprisingly gentle hand on my shoulder, she steered me back into the concert hall. As we sat, she advised, “Get lost in the music.”

Goody. The house lights dimmed. More Mahler songs. I can’t imagine what I’d been thinking in my junior year, but I’d taken one semester of German just for fun. So I kept getting distracted by a familiar word or phrase I was able to translate: “not in the songs” and “to watch their” something. And “bees,” though I conceded there was a chance it could have been “beans.” I tried concentrating on getting the gist of the lyrics to block out other thoughts. But the image of John and La Belleza kept coming back. I never would have believed he’d go for someone so soignée. I recalled his laughing at what she said. So utterly charmed. So man-of-the-world.

After the first time John and I went out, I’d gone home with this sense of Here’s a guy I could actually spend a lot of time with. He was smart, funny, unafraid of a woman with a brain, and most of all, most rare, he was nice.

I wondered how La Belleza would fit in with his family. I fit in so well I couldn’t believe it. Every one of the Orensteins had that niceness-smartness thing going: If they had a family crest, it would display an open book, a bowl of soup, and a motto like benignitas et litteratus. Could I see La B at their family Seder at their house in Connecticut with matzoh crumbs on her silver suit? Unfortunately, yes. But then again, she’d know not to go in silver. Whereas I’d show up in a twinset and faux silk slacks and feel uncomfortable because it evidently wasn’t a silk slacks/twinset year, and the Orensteins would sense I was somehow ill at ease and fall all over themselves being kind to me.

What made it worse was that I understood fully what was up with me. The older I got, the more alone I was. There was a scene at the end of Broadway Danny Rose that was so lovely, but always caused me such pain whenever I watched it: Danny, the talent agent, is having Thanksgiving dinner for his clients—the guy with the parrot, the one-legged tap dancer, and all the other oddballs who have only Danny as their family. He’s given them a family, a place to fit in the world.

I didn’t have that place. There was no Danny in my life. I could only see my father on the sly. Aunt Linda went with Uncle Sparky to one of his sisters’ houses for holidays—none of which was a Seder. And I’d started lying to Tatty years earlier so I wouldn’t have to buy the sad Damaris holiday package: Thanksgiving (the usual vodka and martinis plus Gewürztraminer), Christmas (glogg or mulled mead and champagne), and Easter (tequila cocktails, looking like urine in highball glasses), with Four dozing off by the second course. With no one to carve, Preshie would stand up and angrily hack away at the turkey, goose, or ham.

I could fit in anywhere: With all the kids on the bus going upstate to visit their fathers in prison. With all the Ivey girls and the guys they hung with. In a government seminar at Harvard. Drinking with the Democratic powers-that-be in Chicago. Except when you could theoretically live a thousand different lives, how do you pick the one where you belong?

In any case, I was on my own. I remembered being at my desk on 9/11 when the planes hit. It being In Depth, there was only one TV in the entire place. We all ran from our cubicles and offices and huddled around it. I stood stupidly, watching the jumpers choosing how they would die, then leaping from the inferno. The circuits on our phones were busy and it was hard to get a dial tone. Those times, everyone kept punching numbers into their cell phones, some sobbing, some numb, all crazy to say I’m okay. A couple of times someone’s phone actually rang—a Westminster chime, the first four notes of Beethoven’s Fifth. On the TV, I gaped at the herds of people running up Broadway, screaming. The handheld camera recording their escape trembled. A few minutes later I realized: I’ll be no one’s first call.

Okay, maybe my father’s, but it would take hours for him to invent an excuse to get away from Fern and get to a pay phone. Tatty didn’t wake up until ten or eleven and, of all stupid things, my mind leaped back to the times after both her weddings, when I went from her best friend in the whole wide world and maid of honor to once-every-other-week pal for a girls’ night out.

I’d been going out with John for a couple of months then, and I sensed he’d be calling his parents and brothers and college roommate; God knows what number I was on his list. Standing before the magazine’s we-disdain-broadcast-journalism piddling twenty-inch television, I heard one TV reporter after another say horrific. Terrible and horrible were too small for this. “Dear God, save me from horrific,” Happy Bob intoned. Since it would not have been politic to punch out his sneer, I left the building to go home.

I was pushed northward by the crowds surging up from the Trade Center and downtown. So many of them were coated head to toe with the ash of the buildings’ collapse and the immolated bodies. They did, in fact, look horrific. Black, white, or Asian, they were all gray statues come to life, running uptown. Now I was part of the crowd, trying to outrun the stink coming from the Trade Center, the sweaty stench of hundreds, thousands of people fleeing from the terror. After a mile or so, sweat dripping into my eyes, I asked myself how come I was rushing uptown. Where was I running to? To get to my place, where there would be no one?

It was so weird: At that very instant my phone started vibrating. I was so grateful. I had trouble opening it. My hands trembled, even knowing it could be a wrong number, someone desperate to make contact with the person he loved.

It was John. “Amy? Amy? Are you okay? The fucking circuits kept being busy and I’ve been trying so long to get you… .”

“I’m all right. I left the office. I just had to get out and …”

“Can I meet you … where?”

“I’ll meet you at my place, okay? It’s closer.”

“Okay, I’ll park in front of the hydrant. But listen, are you sure you don’t want me to come and get you?”

Later, blessedly free from Mahler hell, I lay in my bed in the dark, thinking about that terrible couple of days after 9/11. John and I stayed at his place watching TV, talking about what happened, what could happen. That was when I decided I loved John and truly believed he was in love with me, or at least was almost there. So what had gone wrong? Maybe I just thought it was love because, for those couple of days, I needed a future. Or if it had been the real thing, maybe our relationship just dragged on too long and exhausted itself. Maybe it was Love Lite. Or maybe John and I were on such different emotional cycles that we never loved simultaneously.

I curled up into a ball, too cold to get out from under the covers, close the window, and get a pair of socks. A horse’s hooves clopped outside, probably taking its last tourists of the night. Poor, weary horses, so cheaply festooned with red feathers or plastic flowers, blinders on, unable to see they were giving an elderly couple from Kansas City the most romantic night of their lives.

John and I had been together for two years. We’d never talked about breaking up. Not even hinted. Two years. Seeing him with that sleek woman: What a shock! And what made it worse was that they didn’t seem engaged in cosmopolitan chitchat. They looked as though they were having a wonderful time.

Maybe it had never been love with us. It was possible I’d simply taken the specs of John—Tufts, sexy, decent, smart, politically sophisticated, Jewish—and, building on them, created my own ideal lover. Or maybe it had merely been my biological clock.

No, it wasn’t just some biochemical tic. My mind switched from John to my mother. Had Phyllis Morris Lincoln ever felt the urge for a baby the way I now did? Was that why she got pregnant? No matter what she was thinking when she took a hike, had she ever passed a playground and, with everything in her, yearned for a child to swing? Or had she just been a rebellious, middle-class teenager who’d gotten knocked up?

I was quite young, sixteen or so, when I decided I wanted a child no matter what. Even back then, I understood I might not be anyone’s idea of a prize in the marriage sweepstakes. So husband or no, I would have a baby. Be in a family.

Except for the first time, lying on those cold sheets that would not warm up, I started wondering if that was such a good idea. Could I become a mother and then want out, the way my mother did? Could there be something innate in me so defective that I’d wind up abandoning my child?

For the ten millionth time, I wondered what my mother looked like. Curiosity, that was all. I didn’t want to have anything to do with her. Why should I? I hadn’t deserted her. But what if she were dying? Dying more painfully because she couldn’t apologize or explain. All right, she knew my name, but I’d had my number de-listed three or four years earlier after the usual abusive calls from two or three crazy readers who didn’t like something I’d written.

But she could find me on the web. My byline was on hundreds of articles. All she had to do was write, “Amy Lincoln, c/o In Depth,” this woman who had a ninety-seven average in high school. But what if Chicky had been lying and she was a functional illiterate and my intelligence was a genetic fluke? Or what if she knew where I was, maybe even subscribed to In Depth or somehow saw my picture in the Harvard Yearbook and was too ashamed to reach out to me? Or too afraid.

All this nature-versus-nurture stuff. Lately, the news was that nature was trouncing nurture. I could give birth to a six-pound, six-ounce Grandma Lil. Or a baby Chicky. Did I have it in me to walk out on a kid? Or could I have a child who would grow up only to run away from me?

IN DEPTH WAS celebrated for allowing its reporters time to do, well, an in-depth job of reporting: You want to write on Turkey’s changing relations with Europe? Take three weeks, maybe even a month. Fly to Ankara, Bratislava, Madrid on alarmingly minor airlines and stay at bathtub-on-the-third-floor hellholes—the only choice when the magazine paid your way. In the year leading up to the presidential primaries, however, with candidates jumping into the race or skulking away, reporters were given, at most, two weeks.