Any Place I Hang My Hat (14 page)

It hit me then that he understood that simultaneously breaking up with me and driving safely back to Manhattan might be mutually exclusive. What he’d more likely do would be to get near my place, double-park on a side street, and then give his prepared speech. That way, he’d avoid all the agonies he could face if he actually escorted me up to my apartment: my pleading with him, my trying to seduce him into the Big Wow Final Fuck, my throwing my body against the door to keep him from leaving.

What other end-of-the-affair nightmare could he conjure? Oh, that I’d get suicidal and try a swan dive from the eighth floor. No, homicidal. Why in God’s name had I told him that one of Chicky’s imprisonments was for aggravated assault? On the other hand, maybe John was afraid he’d be overcome with guilt about leaving someone who was pretty much alone in the world and would, against his better judgment, take me back. “Amy.” I wiped my nose with my hand and turned back. Grandma Lil told me a lady is never without a handkerchief; I didn’t even have tissues. In all my rehearsals, I never considered I might cry.

“Hey, Amy, what’s the matter?”

It took me a few long seconds before I could speak. “I saw you that night—the Mahler.”

“What?”

Filtered through tears and a too-full nose, broken up by the occasional sob, my words were either inaudible or they hadn’t hit him. “I saw you the night of the all-Mahler concert. During intermission.”

“You went to hear Mahler?” Less than a second later, he added: “Oh. Listen—”

“After more than two years, John,” I began. I didn’t want to say, How could you? Except I couldn’t think of anything else.

“Why the hell were you at a Mahler concert? You can’t fake it, you know.” His voice was getting tight, his charm wearing thin. He didn’t like the timing of this. “Any composer between Beethoven and Gershwin is lost on you.”

I looked away from him and stared down into those little brush things that line the track on a car’s gear shift. A metal ring from a soda can was stuck between D2 and D3. I stuck my pinky in and fished it out. “The point, John, isn’t my taste or lack of it in music.”

He did the thing he usually did when upset, pulling in his right cheek and gnawing on it. Finally he snapped: “I know what you’re thinking and you’re wrong.”

He gave me the briefest glance, then looked back at the road and checked his rearview mirror. Quickly, without signaling, he cut to the right and got off at the next exit. We drove in silence for a few blocks into some suburb. I stared out the window until he parked midblock between a Tudor that looked like a pub and its neighbor, a brick box with columns. Both had American flags that drooped in the windless night. The sky was clouding over into blackness, and on the entire block there was not a single light on in any of the houses.

John switched off the engine. I wasn’t going to play the who’ll-break-down-and-talk-first game. I knew I had to go first. “There are a lot of things to admire about you, John, but your sense of decency was always in my Top Ten. Couldn’t you at least have said, Amy, listen, this monogamy stuff isn’t working so well for me. Or I met someone I really like, or have fallen in love with, and I want to be free to pursue a relationship with her?”

He unlocked his seat belt and shifted to face me. “What are you talking about—fallen in love with? You saw me at Rose Hall listening to Mahler. Why are you assuming it’s a romantic thing?”

“I’ve got eyes. And I’ve got sense. And I know how you look when you’re hot for a woman.”

“Amy, this is crazy!”

“You told me you were busy researching Garth Brooks for Biography that week!” For someone who was trying to sound rational, if not cool, my voice came out in almost a shriek. “Even though we never talked about the future, two years entitles me—”

He punched the steering wheel with his fist. “Fuck it, Amy! Talk about entitlement! Aren’t I entitled to be believed? Do you want to discuss what I’m entitled to after two years? How about some closeness with you? Didn’t you think I was entitled to that? But no matter how many times I tried, I always hit a wall.

The Amy Lincoln dance: I take a step forward, you take a step back.”

“I feel as if I’m eavesdropping on some other woman’s relationship,” I responded. He was staring straight out the windshield, hands gripping the steering wheel as if he were driving somewhere in a storm. “I don’t know what you’re talking about! I never did a dance with you.”

“How about after nine-eleven? When I all but begged you to stay at my place, and you practically ran out, saying, ‘Oh, you must want your space’—”

“John, I honestly thought—”

“Bullshit! And I start talking about how I’d love to have kids, and you tell me you weren’t sure you would because they all might look like your grandma Lil—”

“I was kidding!”

“Listen to me,” he said, disturbingly calm. “Tonight is just the tip of the iceberg. The two of us … It hasn’t been working. We ought to have been a wonderful couple, at least from my point of view. You’re fun, interesting. Terrifically smart. Sometimes I’m awed by your analytical ability. And I admire the empathy you feel for anyone who’s gotten a raw deal in life. But there’s no life in our life together anymore—except for sex. And every time I want to talk afterward—that’s prime time between two people—you either fly out of bed because a little cum is running down your leg or you make some wiseass remark that kills whatever mood there is. You never give me credit for caring. You never trusted me.”

“That’s so not true, John. How can you think that?”

“Because after two years you think I’m lying!”

“This is different!” My nose and/or eyes must have started up again, because he spent a couple of seconds searching his pockets for a tissue and at last came up with a section of paper towel from his door compartment he’d probably stuck there for checking his dipstick.

“The last time we were together,” he said, more coolly, “you picked up I was pissed off at your pulling back. So you told me about Joan the social worker like you were bestowing some precious gift: I hope this proves that I’m not afraid of getting close; I’m trusting you with my secrets. You’re getting a special screening of my private, vulnerable self. So don’t expect anything for your birthday or Valentine’s Day.”

“I can’t believe”—I thought about his Valentine waffle iron and my voice went out of control again—“that you’re being so unfair!”

“I can’t believe we’ve spent, whatever, more than two years together and all I hear from you is the same story, over and over: that your father was in jail more often than he was out, and your mother ran off and your grandmother lived in a dream world—which incidentally, as I see it, you’ve spent your life trying to turn into a reality—and that’s all I know. The story you’d tell anybody. A bare outline. Roman numerals one, two, and three. No capital As and Bs. Definitely not any regular numbers or anything lowercase. And don’t tell me you’re not doing a dance, because you’ve been doing that from day one. Tell me, didn’t you ever hear the word intimacy?”

“Yes. It’s a cliche. Did you ever hear the word …” I really couldn’t come up with anything. Reticence wasn’t right. Neither was I didn’t want you to think I came with a thousand emotional problems attached. In one of the houses, a dog began to howl.

“Not believing me tonight is just another way of backing off.” His tone had become disturbingly even, as if he were narrating a documentary. “What do you expect me to do, Amy? Hang around for five to ten years to see whether you can learn to trust me enough not to jump back whenever I get close?”

“You never said anything about this, goddamn it!”

“I said it all the fucking time. And on the rare occasion you decided to open up, it was in some half-jokey way that said, Don’t you dare take this too seriously. What if you trusted me and you’d really opened up? And what if—for the sake of hypothesis—you’d stayed at my apartment for one week after nine-eleven? Or ten weeks, or whatever. Amy, I’m really sorry for all the sad stuff you had to live through. But for months now I’ve been thinking that I can’t be with someone who’s always coming up with preemptive strategies to avoid getting hurt.”

“Are you sleeping with her?”

“No!”

“The one deal we had was to be sexually monogamous.”

“How can you think I wasn’t?”

“John, I never thought I’d see you try to weasel out of the truth.”

“She’s my producer at PBS. She’s married, for God’s sake.”

“John, a married producer couldn’t have brought out that glow I saw on your face.”

“Listen to me. She’s a business acquaintance—believe it or don’t believe it. I really don’t care anymore.” His voice grew softer, like a doctor about to impart bad news. “You know what, Amy?”

“What?”

“I feel sorry for you. Do you want to know why?” I kept silent. “You’ll never allow yourself to have what you’ve been looking for all your life.”

“Tell me, John. What have I been looking for all my life?”

“Someone who will accept you and love you just the way you are.”

So naturally the next morning, Sunday, I went over to Tatty’s. She was in the kitchen finishing a sweet sixteen cake. “So that’s it?” she demanded. “John was making pleasant conversation and you, with your genius for timing, brought up catching him with some cheap PBS slut—”

“Expensive. And how could she be from PBS? A public broadcasting woman wouldn’t wear stiletto heels. That was his story and it was totally lame. And could you please stop with the Katharine Hepburn lighthearted banter. Be a regular Park Avenue boring person who listens.”

“You listen. You have a nice time at the wedding and what do you do? Bring up catching him with a babe in a silver suit.”

“You should have seen his expression that night. It said, This woman is pure pleasure.”

“Maybe the music gave him that expression.”

“The music didn’t have cleavage.”

“You don’t think it’s possible that what he told you was the truth?” Tatty asked.

“I wish I could. But even the best music in the world couldn’t give him that glow.”

“Was her suit very nipped in at the waist?” With incredible care and sureness of hand, she pressed a piece of old lace onto the virginal blush-pink icing on the cake, then removed it. Still talking, she meticulously traced the debossed lace pattern with a fine line of ivory icing that exuded from the tiny opening of a tube on a pastry bag. “This girl must be a major loser to have a sweet sixteen on a Sunday afternoon,” she muttered. “To have a sweet sixteen, period.” Her head swayed back and forth and in figure eights, rehearsing the motions the pastry tube would make next. “Aimée, I can’t look up to check you out. Are you crying?”

“No, I’m not crying, for God’s sake.” I ran my finger over a piece of waxed paper she’d practiced on and ate a blob of icing.

“Well, I cried last night. During, when I was with him. And after.”

“Really?”

“Buckets. Now I’m just exhausted. But the weird thing is that when I finally stopped, I wound up sleeping like a baby.”

“So was it nipped in at the waist?”

“The silver suit? Yes. What the hell difference does that make?”

“I’m wondering if it could have been a vintage Valentino. Did it have a narrow shawl collar?”

“Tatty, how can you go through life with your head continually up your ass?” I demanded. “We’re talking about … a personal crisis. How about a little sensitivity?”

“You’re getting it. All I’m saying—” What had begun looking like a deformed hand made of butter cream was taking shape, becoming an intricate lace pattern of flowers spilling over the sides of an urn. “—is that life goes on. You said the relationship was going nowhere. You wanted to get rid of him. So what’s the dif if he beat you to it? Other than the blow to your ego, of course. Look, I understand catching him with another woman was a shock. And so was his beating you to doing the dump. A bruised ego is incredibly hurtful so close to your thirtieth birthday. But if he was on the way out, was it really so terrible that he beat you to the exit?”

“I don’t know.”

Tatty finished a squiggle in the middle of a fat rose or maybe a peony and set down the pastry bag. She turned to me. “You don’t know what?” I didn’t answer. “You don’t know if it matters who left who or whooom, as you’re so fond of saying. Or are you having second thoughts?” She bent over to stretch. Her long body folded neatly at the waist. Touching the floor with her palms would have been easy, but she hated having to wash again after a work break, so she simply rested the tips of her nails on the tops of her kitchen clogs. When she stood she said, “Okay. I’m sounding too blithe about this no-more-John business, aren’t I?”

My feet hurt, so I gave up trying to outstand her and dragged over a chair. “Yes, way too blithe,” I said, plunking myself down. “I mean, it lasted more than two years. I spent time with his family. I was crazy about them. I introduced him to Aunt Linda and Uncle Sparky. We were … whatever.”

“Serious,” Tatty said and quickly twirled a piece of paper into a cone, stuck in a different-size tube, and gooped in a spoonful of ivory buttercream. “He was your intended.”

“Something like that,” I admitted.

“I can’t understand why you let it drag on for so long.” We’d gone through this before, so I just compressed my lips, but Tatty was busy with a lace leaf and didn’t see. “The staying power thing?” she asked.

“Maybe. I know you think it’s my problem, not a guy’s. But I can’t afford to rush into anything without being sure, you know, that whoever he is really accepts me, my background, which is also me. Forget my probably having a lot of subnormal intelligence genes. I could have … I don’t know what you’d call it. Predisposed-to-felony genes. And that’s just my father’s side. Plus I don’t exactly come with a dowry. But all this is moot because John never came close to proposing. We went together and went together and everyone thought of us as a couple except him. Maybe me, too. But right around the time I felt really sure he had the staying power, the relationship got the air sucked out of it. I’m thinking, Shit, something’s missing. And next thing, he’s sleeping with a Brazilian socialite.”

“You don’t know if she’s Brazilian or a socialite,” Tatty said. “Maybe she’s a trés chic hooker who rents herself out for cultural events.”