Come Closer (7 page)
“Yes,” I said. “It goes perfectly.”
He frowned. “It’s
red.”
red.”
“I know. That’s what I like about it.”
“It’s bright. Don’t you think it’s kind of bright?”
“We’re keeping it,” I said. Ed looked at me, a question written on his face. “We’re keeping it,” I said again, and went to the bedroom to dress.
I WAS on my way to work that morning when a black limousine, the size of two sedans, took a corner too close to the curb and splashed me with water from the gutter. Without thinking I walked up to the dark tinted driver’s window of the car, now stopped behind a line of traffic, and tapped on the cold glass. No answer. I tapped again, hard enough this time to rattle the glass in its frame. A driver in a suit and plastic-brimmed cap rolled down the window. He had pink skin and copper hair pulled into a narrow ponytail, with a copper mustache to top it all off. He scowled at me.
“Yeah?”
“You should apologize,” I said.
“What the fuck?” spat out the moustache.
“You should,” I repeated, “apologize. Now.” I leaned my face into the window and breathed in the leathery smell of the clean car. The driver had two choices now; apologize or push me out. He made a face and cursed under his breath.
“I’m sorry,” he finally spat out, dripping with sarcasm. “I’m sincerely fucking sorry. Now get out of the car.”
I stood back up, and he rolled the window closed. As the glass came up I saw my reflection. Distorted in the glass my hair looked longer and darker, my skin smoother, and my lips as red as the ruby doorknob.
WE WERE on the crimson sand by the blood red sea. Her name was still spelled out on the sand.
“You’re mine,” she said. She licked my cheek with a tongue as stiff and wet as a snake.
I looked into her eyes. “You’ll never leave?”
“Never.” She wrapped her arms tighter around me. “Never never never.”
“Why me?” I asked.
She didn’t answer. Instead she smiled and licked my nose in a thin straight line from bottom to top.
When I woke up I could still feel the damp trace of her tongue on my face.
ED AND I had another fight the next morning. Lately I hadn’t been as neat and orderly around the house as usual, which drove him up the wall.
“Amanda, please,” he said. He was looking at a pile of yesterday’s clothes, left on the bedroom floor. He was standing in the middle of the bedroom in socks, underwear, and a pale blue oxford shirt, scowling at the clothes.
Usually I would have picked them up and put them in the hamper where, after all, they belonged. This morning, though, I didn’t want to put the clothes away. No reason. I just didn’t want to.
“Yes?” I said to Edward. I was still in bed—or rather back in bed, having woken up, gotten a cup of coffee, a cigarette, and an ashtray, and returned. So I would be a little late to work. Big deal.
“Amanda, these clothes!” He was clearly irritated now, shifting his weight from one foot to another, torn between falling a minute or two behind schedule and dealing with the vital situation at hand.
“What about them?”
Ed scrunched his face and looked at me for a long anxious moment. He looked ridiculous, and it was hard to hold back a giggle.
“Oh, FORGET IT!” he said, and picked up the clothes himself. Not wanting to delay his schedule any further, he let the matter drop. I was sure it would be picked back up again when he came home that evening.
T
HE CONNECTIONS slowly began to knit themselves together. One bright summer morning I was sitting at a conference table looking over plans for Linda Marcello’s cottage for the umpteenth time. Linda Marcello was a longtime Fields & Carmine client. We were renovating her summer cottage upstate. Linda was difficult; she wanted light in the shade, she wanted a dark brown room to feel “airy,” she wanted a terrace with no visible means of support. I was daydreaming about being outdoors, at the park or maybe the beach. My hand, moving to point out a walk-in closet, brushed against hers. When our skin touched I saw Linda in her cottage, in the brown room that wasn’t airy at all, sitting on the brown velvet sofa. I saw it as clearly as a movie rolling before my eyes. She sat on the sofa doing nothing, waiting for her husband to come home. He was due home hours ago. The boredom was excruciating. She looked around the room. What had she been thinking, with the brown? It could drive a person crazy, this room. She would have liked to go out but he wouldn’t be happy if he came home and she wasn’t there. Then the movie stopped and a new film started; I saw Linda again, ten years younger, in a cozy, cluttered white-walled apartment with two other young women. They were laughing and drinking wine—I couldn’t make out all the words, but it was the kind of bonding /complaining conversation that young women have when they talk about men. They had all wanted to marry rich. Linda had.
HE CONNECTIONS slowly began to knit themselves together. One bright summer morning I was sitting at a conference table looking over plans for Linda Marcello’s cottage for the umpteenth time. Linda Marcello was a longtime Fields & Carmine client. We were renovating her summer cottage upstate. Linda was difficult; she wanted light in the shade, she wanted a dark brown room to feel “airy,” she wanted a terrace with no visible means of support. I was daydreaming about being outdoors, at the park or maybe the beach. My hand, moving to point out a walk-in closet, brushed against hers. When our skin touched I saw Linda in her cottage, in the brown room that wasn’t airy at all, sitting on the brown velvet sofa. I saw it as clearly as a movie rolling before my eyes. She sat on the sofa doing nothing, waiting for her husband to come home. He was due home hours ago. The boredom was excruciating. She looked around the room. What had she been thinking, with the brown? It could drive a person crazy, this room. She would have liked to go out but he wouldn’t be happy if he came home and she wasn’t there. Then the movie stopped and a new film started; I saw Linda again, ten years younger, in a cozy, cluttered white-walled apartment with two other young women. They were laughing and drinking wine—I couldn’t make out all the words, but it was the kind of bonding /complaining conversation that young women have when they talk about men. They had all wanted to marry rich. Linda had.
The entire episode had taken only a second. Linda had no idea. Now I knew just the right thing to say.
“Did you see the paper today?” I asked. Linda shook her head. “The Marsha Merkon case finally closed. You know, the model, I mean former model, who was married to the head of Bluechip Securities.”
“Oh really?” Linda turned around and looked at me with great interest—the first time, I think, she ever looked at me at all. This was one of those big divorce cases with enough money and lurid accusations involved to make tabloid headlines on slow news days. I knew that Linda would have been following the case.
“Yep. She got twenty million. And you know she’s not even fifty. Now she’s got twenty million dollars and her whole life ahead of her. You know what she said?”
“What?” Linda asked.
“That she would have divorced him no matter what, even if she hadn’t gotten anything. That she felt younger than she had in ten years.”
“Huh,” she said. She was smiling now, her eyes almost as bright as they had been back in that shabby little apartment with her girlfriends. “You know I met her a few times, at parties. She wasn’t at all like the papers made her out to be. She was a very nice woman. In fact, we talked about having lunch sometime.”
“Well, this is probably a good time to call her,” I said. “You can take her out to celebrate.”
“Or she can take me out, with her twenty million,” Linda said, laughing.
The next evening, paying for two steaks, touching the butcher’s hand, I saw a clean, warm house where he lived with his wife and two young sons. The man who sold me my morning coffee, I saw a few days later, hated me. He hated all of us, going to our easy jobs in cushy offices while he got up at three in the morning to serve us our precious fucking coffee.
This new vision waxed and waned over the rest of the summer, and I was never sure what to make of it. More often than not, I ignored the snapshots that burst to life before my closed eyes, I dismissed them as fantasy—I had always daydreamed a lot.
I didn’t tell Ed about it. He was a devout agnostic, and believed anything that smacked of metaphysics or the supernatural was mumbo jumbo.
THE GERMAN shepherd continued to ignore me. Every night he sat outside the train station, waiting, and didn’t recognize me when I arrived. Ed knew the dog too, and reported that when he came home each night, two or three hours after me, the dog was still waiting. Ed would stop and pet the big fellow and he recognized Ed as he always had—it was only me whom he didn’t know anymore.
“
W
HERE HAVE YOU been?” It was James Cronin. A Monday afternoon at Fields & Carmine. James had the desk next to mine and we had never gotten along. With James everything was a competition; now he wanted to start about who took a shorter lunch.
W
HERE HAVE YOU been?” It was James Cronin. A Monday afternoon at Fields & Carmine. James had the desk next to mine and we had never gotten along. With James everything was a competition; now he wanted to start about who took a shorter lunch.
“The coffee shop,” I told him, “getting a hamburger.”
“For two hours?” James asked, raising his eyebrows.
I rolled my eyes at him. “What two hours? I left at one and now it‘s—” I looked at my watch. Three o’clock. That couldn’t be right. I bent down to look at the clock on James’s desk. They jibed. Three o’clock.
My mind took a step backwards and then forwards, trying to make sense of the situation. I had gone to Pete’s for a burger, then to the magazine stand on the corner, then back to work. I had looked at my watch on the way back and seen five to. One hour.
Impossible. But here I was. James was looking at me with his big gray eyes. I felt as if the ground underneath me was no longer stable but tilting, one way and then the other. My mind stopped to rearrange itself. I went into an emergency mode where the first thing was to deal with James Cronin.
“Oh, yeah, I did leave at one,” I told James, as if I hadn’t said it a moment before with an entirely different tone. “I had some errands.”
I turned and sat down at my own desk. I went over the hour—no, two hours—in my mind again. First I had gone to the coffee shop for a hamburger. There was the usual waitress, the tired brunette. While I ate I read the newspaper, which I left in the coffee shop when I was done. Then I went to the magazine stand on the corner, down the block. I looked through a few women’s magazines before I picked up
Architectural Record.
There was a little piece on my firm in the New and Noteworthy column. Of course we had a copy at the office but I wanted to show Ed. I checked my watch, twenty to two. Plenty of time. I flipped through a few women’s magazines, a guilty pleasure. And then:
Architectural Record.
There was a little piece on my firm in the New and Noteworthy column. Of course we had a copy at the office but I wanted to show Ed. I checked my watch, twenty to two. Plenty of time. I flipped through a few women’s magazines, a guilty pleasure. And then:
“Hey, hey. You can’t read those here. Buy or don’t buy. No reading.”
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