Any Place I Hang My Hat (13 page)

“What was the family name originally?”

My uncle’s shrug brought his shoulders up to his ears. My aunt said: “Moscowitz.”

“You’re kidding,” I said.

“Of course I’m not kidding. Who’d make up a crazy thing like that?”

“How do you know?”

“Chicky told me.”

“He never told me. He always seemed positive—”

“Amy, honey-bunny, he told me years ago. Right when he married her, when they thought she was pregnant but she wasn’t. You know your father. A mind like a sieve. In one ear, out the other.”

“Moscowitz?” I murmured, more to myself than them.

“And I’ll tell you the only other thing I know about her,” Aunt Linda said. “My mother told it to me, so take it with a grain of salt. A whole box of salt, because my mother and the truth were never best friends, as you well know.” I nodded. “A couple of weeks or a month after Phyllis left, my mother said she heard on the grapevine that Phyllis was living in Greenwich Village, like a couple of miles away. Talk about chutzpah. Okay, true, the Village is like another planet. She was supposed to be living with some guy, but she wasn’t Phyllis anymore. It was something … I can’t swear to this. But it was, I think, Veronica. You know? Like the rich girl in the Archie comics.” She gave me a second helping of salad. “I wish I could help you more. But I don’t know a thing about Moscowitz heart disease, my sweetie.”

MY ARTICLE ON Thom Bowles was published to accolades, or what passed for accolades at In Depth—the left side of Happy Bob’s smile twitched slightly higher and he said, “Nice work.” After that, I was on to the Democrats’ possibilities with the Christian right, followed by a piece on the rise of populism.

Except my mind had other ideas about how to occupy itself. Disregarding the wisdom I’d received from Mary Rooney in seventh grade—If you sit around waiting for a guy to call, he won’t—I worked halfheartedly, waiting to hear from Freddy Carrasco and John Orenstein, as a cold, damp March blew in.

The so-called real world was barely a distraction. It was the Axis of the Extremely Annoying countries—France, Germany, and Russia—versus the Axis of the Excessively Eager, i.e., us and the British. At work, I read six newspapers each day online, plus the usual four delivered to my desk. The war watch on the Internet occasionally distracted me as I waited for the phone to ring. At home, I surfed from CNN to MSNBC to PBS to Fox while periodically picking up the phone to check if the reason for its silence was that the line was dead. Naturally I got a dial tone every time, which then allowed me to agonize that my lifting the receiver had, in a second, cut off the incoming call that would have transformed my life.

As we galumphed toward war, I flew to Memphis for the three days of a convention of big-shot conservative Christian activists, men of vigorous handshakes and women of Jesus-makes-me-so-darn-happy smiles. As a group, they were far more cordial to reporters than, say, run-of-the-mill Episcopalians, and eager to explain their beliefs. I squeezed in six or seven interviews a day, toured Graceland with a freelancer from the Gospel Advocate, and engaged in much intense chitchatting at no-alcohol cocktail parties, trying to get the sense of their professed bipartisanship while I glommed a few of an astounding variety of cream-cheese-based hors d’oeuvres.

But I couldn’t numb myself with busyness. In spite of the vow I’d made to myself years earlier, I became one of those women waiting for a man’s summons to bring her to life, checking my voice mail almost hourly, flipping open my cell phone hoping for a message icon. Sure, I knew there was nothing stopping me from calling John, but the old double-standard doubts were creeping up on me; I’d gone with egalitarian behavior and what had come of it? A silent cell phone. Maybe even the best of guys, deep down, wanted a woman—colleague, friend, girlfriend—who wasn’t eager. Forget eager: who played hard to get.

Daily, I left word for Freddy, pursuing him with the practiced ardor of a supermarket-tabloid reporter out for a scoop. I needed to know what his juvenile record was about. Homicide or aggravated graffiti? Was he mental? No matter what the truth about his paternity ultimately was, did he believe he was telling it? Why had it been important enough for him to pursue it so?

Time after time, I clicked on Thom Bowles’s fencing team photo and swore I was staring at Freddy’s face. Sure, I knew there was a good chance that if I saw Freddy again I’d realize I’d imagined the resemblance. And yes, having had my article published, I knew that even if I went back and yanked out one of Bowles’s well-tinted hairs, got a perfect DNA paternity match, and wrote an insightful expose, In Depth would not touch it. Still, I couldn’t let go of Freddy’s find-the-parent, win-a-prize fantasy.

But that was nothing compared with my waiting to hear from John. Fifteen days without a call: a new personal best. He, who had me on auto-dial on both his home and cell phones, who’d sometimes call twice or three times a day to discuss the Paul Wolfowitz testimony he was watching on C-SPAN, or to offer a factoid he’d discovered while researching Geraldine Ferraro for a Biography show, had not called since we’d last slept together, the time I’d told him about Joan Murdoch.

I spent what seemed like hours (and probably was) discussing with Tatty whether he had spotted me at the Mahler concert gaping at him and La Belleza. Had he said to himself, Thank God! Finally, Amy knows. Now I won’t have to go through a melodramatic mess with her begging me for one more night to talk things out? Or had a new enthusiasm simply struck him—garbage trucks or turtles? Was he filming a landfill or turtle eggs hatching somewhere?

Reminding myself that John’s decency would absolutely preclude his simply dropping me didn’t calm me in the least. Whenever there was a message on my home phone or cell, I’d press the button and expect Uh, Amy, I sent back the copy of Kavalier & Clay you lent me and, uh, obviously my cousin’s wedding … I asked you to go to with me, hut I’m sure you can understand … Listen, I truly wish you the best. You’re a wonderful person.

Ergo, I wasn’t astounded that when I got off the plane in New York and opened up my cell phone, there was a message from John. Except it wasn’t a kiss-off: “Amy, okay, I’m a total shit for not calling, but I’ve been working day and night. That PBS deal for Herbert Hoover finally came through! Can you believe it? I thought it was dead in the water. Anyway, I’m sorry I’ve been so … uh, negligent. This call is to say hi and let you know I’m not a rat. Oh, and to remind you that we have my cousin Laurel’s wedding Saturday night. Give me a call if you get a chance and are still speaking to me. Otherwise, be ready a little before six because we have to drive up to Westchester. Did I tell you the invitation said black tie? Okay, see you.”

So I figured John didn’t think La B was, as yet, sufficiently conversant with upper-middle-class Jewish mores to face a family wedding during which strangers might grab her hand and pull her into a circle for twenty minutes of “Hava Negila,” followed by “Shout” and then dinner music from a Tex-Mex klezmer band.

John actually double-parked in front of my apartment and came to pick me up, the sort of behavior Grandma Lil would have cooed over. With his latest haircut grown out and a black tuxedo shirt, he’d moved up from good-looking to handsome. Hip, too, the sort of guy who bounds up the stairs to the stage to accept a Best Something award. “Hey, Amy. You look beautiful.” His words had a warmth that contradicted his cool looks.

“You look good—” I was just about to say “too” when he kissed me.

“Sorry about the not calling,” he murmured. I jerked back my head, but at least I managed a smile.

“At least it wasn’t a shock.”

“Do you want to discuss why you couldn’t talk throughout the entire 2000 convention in L.A.? Or the Bush-Gore business in Florida when the only thing I got from you was a message not to call because you were too tired to talk?” Before I could come up with an answer, he said: “Hey, great outfit.”

My skirt was a hand-me-down from a fabulously dressed girl from Greece who’d been in the class ahead of me at Ivey. Before she’d graduated, she put a huge pile of winter clothes on the common room couch with a note saying, “Help yourselfs!” Three of us full-needs students, i.e., kids totally on scholarship, guilted out our classmates whose parents had money. We wound up with enough clothes to get us to parties from October through March for decades to come. The skirt was a black velvet so fine that it felt like a cross between silk and flesh. I wore it with an extremely scoop-necked white sweater and rhinestone chandelier earrings I’d bought from a street vendor one lunch hour for eight bucks.

All that day, out running, cleaning my apartment, getting a manicure, rewatching Brazil, I’d gotten whooshes of fear, those momentary waves of impending doom—the sort of fear that seizes you when you’re late for a period and it’s too early to test. I was pretty sure John wouldn’t want to end things on our way to his cousin’s wedding because there was always the chance I’d become hysterical and wind up red-eyed and sniffling as he introduced me to Aunt Gertie. No, he’d be affectionate, hold my hand—though not during the ceremony, which would give me the totally wrong idea. We’d dance. And when we were talking to his family, he’d put an arm around me and I’d feel the heat of his hand on the bare part of my back. He would tell me goodbye on the way home. Except what John didn’t know was that I was going to dump him first.

So the trip up was predictably comfortable: too much traffic, but we had enough of his Herbert Hoover and my evangelical Christians to keep us busy for the hour and change it took to get from my apartment to the wedding palace. Its name was Allenthorpe. It was a late-nineteenth-century robber baron’s dream of a Norman castle, now converted into a chichi catering site. While the architecture was French, the name was English and the car valets were dressed like butlers in a 1930s Hollywood comedy about rich people.

I got through the ceremony without once—okay, without twice—noting that Cousin Laurel was three years younger than I and had parents who could afford to pay not only for her gorgeously understated, probably Vera Wang gown, but to feed and wow with flowers their upscale, ostensibly unwowable guests. Fortunately, I was sitting beside Dr. Orenstein, John’s mother, who not only welcomed me with a kiss, but throughout the wedding procession whispered, “Did you see that cat tattoo on her back!” and “Isn’t that Asian girl beautiful?” about the bridesmaids, who were wearing eight different styles of gown, all in pink faille. Dr. Orenstein’s asides were the kind of things a real mother would say to a daughter. I glanced at her profile. An unremarkable face, but appealing, browned and crinkled from her gardening, with a few moles. She was the human correlative of a just-baked oatmeal-raisin cookie. I could still feel her Hello, Amy! kiss, a brush on my cheek with her winter-dried lips.

Except I was going to lose her. I’d written the entire John-Amy breakup script in my head, but for some stupid reason, what hadn’t occurred to me was that naturally I’d be breaking up with his family. So at dinner, when his father asked me to dance and twirled me around in a waltz in a graceful way you wouldn’t necessarily expect from a history professor, I kept thinking: I’m never going to see this man again. It wasn’t just that I’d never hear him talk about the Inquisition in Castile and Aragon. John’s father was a born storyteller. He could even make a saga of having his tonsils taken out in 1949 come alive.

And though I didn’t know them so well, I’d be losing John’s two younger brothers, too. One was a landscape architect, the other in medical school. Both of them had their mother’s sweet smile and round cookie face. By now I knew them well enough that I no longer needed my tortured mnemonic devices to distinguish them. Tall and thin like a tree was landscape guy; medicine was Mike, so landscape guy was Alex. I found myself glancing at John’s watch too often. The later it got, the sadder I felt about being thrown out of their lives. Would Professor Orenstein become history department chair? Would Alex marry Nora? I’d only managed to see a frame or two when all along I’d assumed I’d be there for the entire movie.

Maybe I was a little too hearty in my goodbyes to the Orensteins, knowing they really were goodbyes. In the car, I recall watching John as he turned his head to check for traffic as we got onto the parkway, thinking how wonderful-looking he was. I suddenly realized that in the past two years my vision of my kids was Orenstein-ish children. Like John and his father, intelligent, decent, manly—or like his brothers and mother, with cheery cookie faces.

In the silence between us, family images—his, not mine-flashed one after another, snippets of Orenstein scenes from a documentary I’d put together in my head. John’s little cousin lisping the Four Questions at the family Seder. His mother cutting a bouquet of flowers for me to take home after I’d spent a weekend at their house in Connecticut. Sitting in a dark editing room John was renting, watching his first documentary for the History Channel, reaching out to squeeze his hand because his work was so admirably done. The great sex and, okay, not one single I-love-you. And finally, seeing his face lit up as he talked to La Belleza during intermission.

I turned away from him, pretending to be mesmerized by the wonders of the Hutchinson River Parkway. Except not only was I crying, I couldn’t get the tears to stop. I know I couldn’t have planned on it, even subconsciously, because if I had, I’d have worn waterproof mascara. Great, I thought: I’ll wind up with raccoon eyes, the ineluctable sign of a woman suddenly freed from her dependence on a man. I knew I had to stop the weepies and say goodbye fast. But first I’d have to sniffle to dam up the tears, to say nothing of the waterfall of snot cascading down my upper lip.

“So?” John suddenly asked. “I’m waiting for your critique of the entire wedding.” I shrugged. “Amy, come on. You’re the best amateur anthropologist I know … The only one, actually …” He went into a short monologue I barely heard, breezy, about how there had never been a social class I hadn’t met. It was the kind of patter he was great at, that he’d used on all the distant relatives at the wedding. It said, I know you only slightly, but it’s really good being with you. Easy, warm, disarming. John could always make interview subjects and third cousins from San Diego feel comfortable. He’d never spoken to me in that congenial, distant way, even the first time we went out.