Any Place I Hang My Hat (4 page)

“William Bryson Bowles,” I informed her.

“Or investment banking,” she continued. “Stock market. One of those.”

“The father was an investment banker,” I said. “I already know the senator’s biographical stuff.”

“If you’ve done so much research, do you know why he spells his nickname T-H-O-M?”

“No. Tatty, I don’t know nor do I want to know. However, what I would like to know is this: Is there any dirt? Not that I could use it in my piece, but it would be comforting to know it’s there.”

Tatty picked up a lemon and squeezed it gently. Then she sniffed it and set it and five others in the country-cute woven wood basket Charlotte’s Yums offered its patrons in lieu of red plastic with wire handles. “Dirt on Thom?” She ruminated for a second and a half, then shook her head. Naturally, her carved amber hair remained motionless. “Not that I can remember. After college, he moved to one of those Washington, Oregon states and did something Sierra Club–ish but that made him tons of money. Not a whiff of scandal, as far as I ever heard. But I’ll ask the parents tonight.” After her divorces—both of which occurred around the time her monogrammed towels began to fray—Tatty had gone back to living in her family’s palace of an apartment on Park and Seventieth. She claimed it was because the kitchen was the size of many commercial bakeries. “Naturally, I’ll e-mail you if they have anything interesting to say, although such a thing has not occurred in my lifetime.” Then she smiled. “I promise not to call. You know there’s no way I would interruptus your coitus with John.”

John Orenstein, my boyfriend, was a documentary filmmaker who had spent the day cutting five minutes out of a History Channel show about the Germans’ summer offensive in southern Russia during 1942. Too much of a pro to protest that losing five minutes was commensurate with the excision of a vital organ, he was, nevertheless, not his usual easy self. For someone normally crazy about baked ziti and oral sex, he’d seemed less than wildly enthusiastic during dinner and after. “Do you have anything to drink?” he asked as he squished a pillow to his liking and put it behind his head.

“I’ve got Diet Coke, vodka, and orange juice. Oh, there’s some milk. But I wouldn’t drink it if I were you.”

“Almost sour? Or curdled and gross?” I’d dimmed the lights to romantic candlepower. As long as the halogen reading lamp on the table beside my couch?bed remained off, I could look like Venus on the half shell. As for John, while he probably wouldn’t be asked to pose bare-chested for the cover of Men’s Health, he wasn’t bad. Not only did he have defined biceps, but actual, visible triceps. Add to that a solid torso with the perfect amount of chest hair: neither a half-plucked chicken nor someone with a shag rug over his pectorals. And while he was too big-featured and ham-handed to make anyone gasp and say Stunning!, or even Handsome, his broad shoulders, brown hair, caramel brown eyes, along with the gold undertone of his skin, always reminded me—if not the rest of the world—of the Oscar. Dressed, he didn’t look like the archetypal doc filmmaker. He wasn’t one of those vitamin-D-deficient downtown guys with black-framed glasses to match all-black, all-the-time clothes. His style was casual but cool, like an academic who got good consulting fees. Mostly he wore khakis or jeans with hand-knit sweaters and denim shirts that fit as though they were custom-made.

I got back to the milk. “If I had to guess? I’d say more than repulsive, but it won’t be totally gross until tomorrow.”

“Water’s good,” he said.

Before he could get up, I did one of those flying leaps that gets you from supine to upright in one fluid instant. “It’s okay, I’ll get it.”

Over the years, I’d gotten enough compliments and seen enough of myself in those three-way mirrors while trying on bathing suits to be relatively confident about my rear view. This was not to say I would jog through Central Park bare-assed at noon, but I figured fetching a glass of water, high-butted and low-cellulited, was the kind of visual I wanted looping in John’s mind after I dumped him.

Maybe “dumped” sounds a little harsh. Well, I suppose I was still angry and/or hurt from Valentine’s Day. I’d been expecting a small, lightweight box. He’d handed me a heavy, medium-sized one. Oooh, I’d said, hoping I sounded more pleased than surprised. I opened it to find an electric appliance that produced heart-shaped waffles. It wasn’t the fact of a waffle iron that had upset me so much.

It was that despite what I thought of as his apparent clinging—the same behavior he referred to as enjoying my company—our relationship was stuck in the mud. Yes, he wanted to be with me when I was buying groceries, and no, he didn’t want to go off and pick up a roll of paper towels while I was checking out the green teas because Wouldn’t it be more fun if we did both things together?

Yet he was perfectly capable of telling me he was going to the Fulton Fish Market the following morning, just to see what sunrise there looked like, then calling two weeks later to say sorry, he’d been out of touch. But hey, he’d been to a soybean-processing plant in Ohio, a pig farm in Georgia, and Safeway headquarters in California because he’d gotten backing to do a documentary called Food Chain. And what did I think of the idea?

One time, when I asked him how come he hadn’t called, he’d replied, “Amy, the phone’s a two-way instrument.” It wasn’t that John was undependable. I saw him as a man of enormous enthusiasms. He could become intrigued by a fly perched on the edge of a beer can, start to gather footage on houseflies, put together a film crew, set out a bowl of sugar, and wind up finding someone to pay for a documentary. And also make a profit on it. A small profit to be sure, but then he hadn’t become a documentarian because he wanted to be rich.

After two years of seeing each other exclusively, I realized I’d become one of his lesser enthusiasms. No matter that we could talk about politics for hours, or even whole weekends, analyze the lives of our friends. No matter we both loved classic Hollywood movies, the Yankees, and walking for miles and miles all over Manhattan. He had never once said I love you. And after the waffle iron, I couldn’t see asking him, Hey, John, do you love me? Because I knew he didn’t.

Not that I loved John either—of that I was sure—but he’d taken me on such a damn long ride. Two years, two months. We’d gotten past his friends, then gone on to meet his family, then down to his assistant, his summer intern, and his professional pals at the History Channel and A&E. Naturally I figured: Well, he’s revving up to ask the Big One. I’ve got to at least give it consideration, because John all but wore an identifying neon sign flashing Hey, Women of New York! Great Catch. After I wound up on New Year’s Day minus a ring, I’d been positive February fourteenth would be the day he’d pop the question. Maybe he’d even have a ring ready. Instead, I got the waffle iron along with a small bottle of 100-percent-pure Vermont maple syrup.

“Since you’re doing the whole hostess thing,” John called out, “throw in a couple of ice cubes.”

“If you want, but I have this theory why you shouldn’t want ice.”

“A theory on ice?”

“Yes. Jews have bad ice.” I walked over to the refrigerator, not much of a hike as my apartment was a studio so small that I’d had to give a lot of thought as to whether a chessboard was too much furniture.

“You’ve been to my place a million times,” he said. “Do I have bad ice?”

“Did I ever say anything negative about your ice?”

“Amy, this is the first time since I’ve known you that we’re discussing ice, so you’ve never said anything either negative or positive.” Although I didn’t turn back to look, I could hear him shifting on the sheets, rearranging the pillow once again for our usual postcoital banter. Even after all this time, our lovemaking remained somewhere between passionate and wild. Yet it felt impersonal, or maybe desperate, as though we’d just been sprung after a decade in solitary. I guess we both needed the reassurance that after lust, we could have What-a-happy-couple! chitchat before we parted. “What’s wrong with my ice?” John inquired.

“The same thing that’s wrong with mine. Jewish ice cubes—okay, Ashkenazic, not Sephardic—always taste oniony. It’s probably from bagels and bialys. Seriously, if you went to Tatty’s freezer—any non-Jew’s—you’d find totally tasteless ice. You get iced tea at Tatty’s and it doesn’t smell as if it had been stirred with a scallion. Do you still want ice?”

“Yes. Even more than I did before.”

So how come I was getting ready to dump this not-bad-looking, smart, decent guy who probably didn’t have a misogynistic bone in his six-foot body? Because together we had everything—except love. We were great at exchanging ideas and bodily fluids, yet there was a whole middle ground of transcendent emotion that eluded us. Plus I could see the writing on the wall, and it said, He’s going to be saying bye-bye pretty soon.

Considering where my hands had been a few minutes earlier, I figured it would be genteel to wash them. I did that in the mini-sink in the mini-kitchen that took up three linear feet in my studio, a sublet on Central Park South that was mine until the apartment’s owner, In Depth’s Asia editor, came back from Tokyo. It was stunningly cheap, as the owner’s trust fund took care of the co-op’s maintenance. Having gotten his colleagues’ testimony that I was a neat freak, he’d decided it was wise to trust the place to someone who cleaned her keyboard with a Q-tip and precisely aligned her expense vouchers. The apartment faced West Fifty-eighth Street, not the park. All I could see from my window were other people’s apartments and an old wooden water tower. I was too low for sky, too high for ground, so without watching TV or going outside, I could not tell what the weather was. But on good nights, the scent of flowers and trees and horseshit made it through my open window, the same smells that had wafted from the stables and grounds, across the quad and into the dorm at Ivey on spring evenings.

Anyhow, knowing John was watching, I bent over carefully. I didn’t want to overplay the memorable butt bit, so I opened the minifridge and quickly grabbed a couple of ice cubes. That instant, I got this memory of the night we were standing on line to see Adaptation: I’d been babbling something to John about the consequences of the Democrats’ loss of the House that November 2002, but I happened to notice the guy behind us.

He was about our age and was standing there alone with a sweet, dopey smile spreading across his face. I realized he was watching his boyfriend coming up the street, almost a block away. They probably couldn’t see each other’s face, but I was sure the boyfriend was smiling too. They not only delight in each other, I remember thinking, I bet they can rely on each other. If one of them decided to make a documentary called Food Chain, he’d call the other every day. Twice a day. When someone treasures you, you become a necessary step in his thought processes; he doesn’t just miss you, he needs you.

“Hey,” John said as I walked back, taking a different route, around a chair where the light was dimmer. Full frontal was acceptable, though not as good as the rear view.

“When did we stop saying ‘Hi’ and start saying ‘Hey’?” I inquired. “We as a generation, I mean.” He smiled and I handed him the glass. “Here’s your onion water. The cubes are almost in meltdown.” I retrieved my duvet from the floor and wrapped it around myself and sat at the edge of the couch?bed. “Why do guys like to stay naked after sex?” I asked.

“Why do women like to generalize about men? Or have you slept with a large enough sample—say fifty thousand—to know that all of us like to give it an airing?” He sipped the water. “It’s perfectly good.”

“For people without taste buds.”

He set the glass down on the floor and took my hand. My hand being fairly small and his being big, I allowed myself a few seconds of self-deception to feel petite. Five foot three isn’t gigantic and my weight was pretty much under control, yet if you noticed my shoulders and my leg muscles, you’d see why the soccer coach at Ivey took one look and knew she’d found her girl. John ran his fingers over the tips of my nails, that semiconscious masculine tribute to a woman’s manicure. I tried to think of a courteous way to say, What do you think, I have all night? I wanted him out. I wanted to floss, brush, say my prayers, get to sleep.

“Hey, Amy.”

“Hey, John.”

“Tell me something about yourself you haven’t told me before.”

“Is this some cute documentary technique?” I asked.

“No, this is what’s called asking a question. Wanting to get to know a person better.” I was about to ask him, How could you not know me after more than two years? when I realized I didn’t want to hear his answer. “Sometimes I think we’re in a weird dance,” John went on. “We’re facing each other, but not touching, and every time I take a step forward, you take a step back.”

Even though I was tempted to pull my hand away, I let John fiddle with my nails. “I’ll be glad to tell you something you haven’t heard before, although I’ve never been able to figure out the allure of deprived childhoods. Nobody ever asks somebody who grew up in Scarsdale, ‘Oh, tell me something you haven’t told me before.’”

He gave me back my hand, patting it goodbye, and offered a small, no-teeth-showing smile, his being-patient smile. “I didn’t ask about deprivation. I just thought it would be nice to know something new about you,” he finally said. John did have a great voice. Had he been able to carry a tune, he would have sounded like one of those sexy, low-voice singers, like Julian Casablancas, that guy in the Strokes. But at that moment he simply sounded muted, as if he were already pulling out of my life. “Do you feel you know all there is to know about me?”

I could see that he needed something. “I know I can get a little … testy?” This did not come as a news flash to him. “Or oversensitive.” No argument. I studied our path to bed from door to couch: his black sweater to white boxers, my blue-and-white-striped shirt to black panties. If John hadn’t been naked at that instant, I sensed he would think Fuck this lame attempt at intimacy. He’d walk out, probably for good. Knowing him, very decent, very pragmatic, maybe he’d take me to one final dinner at a quiet restaurant, so he could feel safe that I wouldn’t start wailing. He should have known he could have saved his money and picked a noisy diner, because I hated public displays of affliction.