Signs and Wonders (25 page)

“Pens?” I said.

“Those tips,” he said, and shuddered. “Bite marks in plastic. People hand you one and expect you to pick it up? With I don’t know what germs?” He shook his head again. “That’s just crazy.”

I looked at him. “It must be hard for you to get around.”

He studied me back, his head cocked to one side. His eyes were blue, watery, and kind. I felt the full force of his attention, which was not sexual but not asexual either; it felt complete somehow, as if he were taking in every aspect of me.

“Not you, though,” he said, with that soft Southern lilt. “I bet you can go anywhere and do anything. You’re made of stronger material.”

“I don’t feel particularly strong,” I said.

“Do you feel particularly weak?”

“I guess not.”

“That’s what I mean,” he said. “You’re the most normal person I know.”

I did not take this as a compliment.

But he smiled when he saw my frown, and his hair fell over his eyes. “Don’t worry about it,” he said gently. “I’m sure it’ll come in handy eventually.”

Wherever he came from, Martin started hanging out with us, and pretty soon it was clear he was there for Millie. When she was in the room he still paid attention to you, but you could tell it was an effort. I couldn’t blame him, really; Millie was the kind of person I’d come to New York to be around. Short, with dark spiky hair, she was good at poker and occasionally smoked cigars. Her skin glowed even at three in the morning after a night of drinking. She was an assistant at a gallery on Fifty-seventh Street. If, on a
Saturday afternoon, we dipped into a gallery, Millie would take two seconds before pronouncing the work “shit” or “genius”—there was no in-between, in her opinion—while I tried to figure out why she’d landed to one side of the pendulum rather than the other. I myself had no idea, but I liked the confidence of these declarations.

I think Martin liked it too. She had no fear; he was afraid of everything, including rejection, so he watched her from a distance as she felt him watching, and they were locked together in this as if by contract. She must have enjoyed knowing he was always there, a gentleman beanpole on the sidelines, following her every move with those watery blue eyes. There isn’t a woman on this earth who doesn’t want to be adored.

At work, Sarah and I were also adored, albeit in a different way. Our boss, Eric, was an elderly bohemian who wore pilled woolen cardigans and too-short pants, and spent afternoons in his office reading manuscripts while twirling his beard between his thumb and index finger, making a little curl that stood out from his chin. By five o’clock his beard would be a tufted mess of curls, all fluffed out like the feathers of some preening bird. Because of this, Sarah and I called him the titmouse.

“Titmouse on the move,” one of us would mutter to the other as he came toward our desks, and we’d straighten up to look like we were actually working. There wasn’t really any need to talk in code—there was no one else around, and Eric’s hearing wasn’t great—but this was the sort of thing we found hilarious at the time.
Taking flight
meant he was leaving the office on some errands.
Worms:
he was going for lunch.
Flapping wings:
he was in
the photocopier room, looking perplexedly at the machine. Eric seemed to think it was demeaning for him to ask a woman to help with basic office tasks, even though this was our job, a scruple we didn’t hesitate to exploit. We let him suffer for as long as we could stand over some paper jam or mailing snafu before we’d come to his aid. The photocopier, the fax machine, the FedEx label—these were newfangled technologies so complicated that in the face of them Eric simply threw up his hands. He’d grown up in a New York where any business deal was done via handshake at a cocktail party below Fourteenth Street. Sarah and I loved him. When the titmouse came back with worms, we’d drop by his office on some pretense and while he was eating we’d get him to tell us stories about parties at George Plimpton’s apartment, Mary McCarthy throwing a drink in somebody’s face, arguments that spilled out into the streets at two a.m. Eventually it would be midafternoon and he’d glance at the pile of manuscripts at his desk and sigh. “Well, my lovelies, this magazine isn’t going to publish itself.”

How exactly the magazine did manage to publish itself was a mystery. My job, nominally, was as assistant to the head of sales, Judith, who worked out of her home and besieged me with harried, confusing phone calls. I’d only met her once. She must have been good at her job, though, because she was always finding some fancy restaurant or upscale furniture store to place an ad with us. My main task was to coordinate her expense reports. I used to show Sarah the tallies for lunch or drinks. “Can you believe this?” I’d say. She spent more on cocktails than I made in a month.

Sarah just shrugged. She was Eric’s assistant. In high school she’d been an indifferent student, and I didn’t even remember her reading many books, but in New York she’d discovered a seriousness of purpose. Her job was to screen the flood of incoming
manuscripts. Every time the mail was delivered, it included dozens of slush submissions in manila envelopes, and Sarah visibly shuddered. Her bag was always crammed with paper, her eyes red and shadowed, and she said she dreamed about all the poems and stories and essays floating around in the world waiting to be read. Because I didn’t have enough to do, I’d sometimes offer to help her out, but she’d shake her head. Being burdened made her feel important.

In the evenings, we’d meet up with Martin and Millie and some other combination of people—some friend from out of town, or a girlfriend or boyfriend of the moment—and head to Veselka for dinner, or to Brownies to hear some music, or, in the long, humid summer, to the park or somebody’s roof. I remember one night in July at the apartment of somebody none of us knew very well. We’d invited ourselves over because he’d mentioned central air-conditioning. It was actually his uncle and aunt’s place; they were gone for the summer on some lavish vacation, and he was apartment sitting for them in between semesters of graduate school at NYU. Skinny and bearded, he stank of smoke and talked about Harold Bloom in scathing, urgent terms, and we were willing to put up with all of this in exchange for an evening in that cold, expensive apartment. He served us chilled white wine in fancy glasses, and we took off our shoes and ran our toes over the luxurious carpets as if they were a sandy beach. At least most of us did. Millie just sat on the couch, with her legs tucked daintily beneath her.

The grad student, whose name is lost to me, was also supposed to be taking care of the two elderly cats, sickly and long-haired,
who trailed around the couch sneezing. He had to feed them special medicine twice a day, inside of hollowed-out liver treats. Despite all this special care they looked mangy, like they lived in some alley and foraged in trash cans for food.

“Those are the saddest cats I’ve ever seen,” I said.

“They live better than you do, I bet,” the guy said.

I flushed, not sure if he was insulting me or commenting on his aunt and uncle. “They do have air-conditioning,” I said.

Martin got down on the floor and reached out to pet them, making clicking noises with his tongue. With his long legs and other arm folded up, he looked like a cricket. The cats ignored him.

“Here, kitties,” he said, fixated on them, his pale face sheened with sweat. Millie was sitting behind him, and she put her feet down on the floor as she leaned over to sip from her glass of wine. This put the smooth, glowing skin of her calves right next to his face, and I saw how it pained him to be so close. Millie didn’t notice. She was arguing with the grad student about Barbara Kruger’s art, which she thought was profound and he said was overrated. It was the kind of argument I’d come to New York to witness, perhaps even participate in, but I was distracted by the little drama on the floor and the contrast between Martin’s pale, pockmarked chin and Millie’s lovely legs.

“Martin,” I said softly. “Martin.” I shook my head at him, and he stared back blankly.

“Cats usually like me,” he said.

We were all drunk. It was so cold in the apartment I wished I’d brought a sweater, which seemed ridiculous given that the night before I’d emptied a tray of ice cubes into my pillowcase before finally falling asleep.

“You’re so pretty,” the grad student said to Sarah, who was lounging on the couch with a cat wedged between her ankles. “What are you into?”

“Leftist bohemians with wealthy relatives,” Millie answered for her, and laughed. Sarah didn’t say anything. “Guys with intellectual rather than physical brawn.”

“You’re a bitch,” he said.

“It’s not true,” I said.

“Of
course
it’s not true,” Millie said. “It’s never true.”

“Anyway, you’re the one with
wealthy relatives
,” the guy said, pronouncing it like a swear, and I realized they had some kind of history, that maybe Millie was into him, or had been, and that’s why she was so mad.

Martin looked up as their voices got louder and said, “Hey, now. Come on.” Because he was drunk, his Southern accent was stronger than usual. “Everybody calm down.”

“Shut up, Martin,” Millie said casually. She was still looking at the grad student, her eyes practically shooting out sparks.

Martin’s whole face buttoned, closed itself like an envelope. His blue eyes went vacant. Then he did an odd thing. He put one hand on the floor, as if to brace himself in order to stand up, then curled the palm of his other hand around Millie’s ankle, grasping it as tightly as a bar in the subway. She looked down at him, surprised, but he was focused on his own operation and didn’t say anything. Drawing his face close to her knee, he stuck out his tongue and licked it—more than once, quite thoroughly, as if he were cleaning it. As if he were a cat.

I remember Millie staring at me, eyes wide and frozen, wondering what she was supposed to do.

I remember our host laughing, a shrill squeal like a girl’s.

Then Martin said, “Gotta go.” He unfurled his tall frame, bowed slightly to everyone, and left the apartment.

“What the hell was that?” Sarah said.

At first it seemed like just another night when something weird happened, like the time when Sarah and I left the office at dusk and a guy in a gorilla suit came up and gave me a hug, or the day in Tompkins Square Park when we met some backpackers from Denmark who’d run out of money, and we bought them lunch and they thanked us by performing Scandinavian folk songs until other people in the park told them to go away.

The next day, Sunday, Sarah and I had a picnic in the park, if you can call two bagels and the
New York Times
a picnic, then on Monday we went back to work, and it was probably Thursday or Friday before we realized that nobody had heard from Martin.

“I should call him,” I said to Sarah in the office, my hand hovering over the phone. She shrugged. I left him a message, but he didn’t call back. I guessed he was embarrassed, and lying low for a while.

Millie told us that she thought the whole thing was funny. “I was talking,” she said, “and I felt something wet, and I thought it was some wine or something. But then I looked down and … I couldn’t really take it in, you know? It was like my brain couldn’t absorb what was happening. And before I could even say anything, it was over!”

They both keeled over laughing, and then Sarah made us go to the bar in Chelsea so we could tell the story all over again, to her roommate.

“But so nobody’s heard from him?” I said.

“He must be mortified,” Sarah said.

We gave him some time: that week, and the week after. Then one day at work I called his office, and his voice mail didn’t pick up. His phone at home was disconnected, too.

I looked over at Sarah. “Martin’s gone,” I said.

As soon as I said it I felt it was true. Sarah must have heard it in my voice; for the first time since that night, she didn’t laugh when she heard his name.

We called Millie, and she invited us over to her apartment that evening to discuss the situation. This was when we saw how nice it was. Her place reminded me of a story I’d heard about an assistant at Condé Nast. “I assume you have other income,” the person interviewing her had said, because the salary was so low. At the time, I interpreted that story as having to do with the cluelessness of bosses. But I understood now it was true, true of Millie and other assistants all over the city, that for some of us this life was a game, and for some of us it wasn’t. I felt duped, although no one had lied to me. I just hadn’t known.

Millie handed us each a beer and we sat around on her Pottery Barn furniture.

“Wow, you have a balcony,” Sarah said. “That’s great.”

“It’s tiny,” Millie said, dismissing it with a wave of her hand.

There was a new awkwardness between us that wasn’t just due to the apartment. It had to do with our understanding how Martin felt about Millie and how she’d enjoyed stringing him along, letting him hope for something that was never going to happen.

It turned out that none of us knew any of his other friends. He’d briefly dated my friend Kim, but when we called her she said she hadn’t spoken to him in months. After a few more beers, we
decided to go his place. He lived on a shabby block in the East Twenties, and we’d only been there once before, when we were walking home from the movies and somebody had to go to the bathroom. We hung out on his stoop for a while and kept ringing his buzzer. No one answered. Eventually, because of the beer, we had to find a bathroom somewhere else.

There were no stories in the news about anyone fitting Martin’s description getting in trouble, or injured, or dying. There was never any news of him at all. He was just gone. I had a hard time accepting that someone we’d hung around with so much could simply vanish. Every once in a while I’d call his numbers or ring his buzzer, but there was never any trace of him. Sometimes I’d ask Sarah where she thought he went and if he was all right, but she never wanted to speculate. She’d give me an odd, weary look, as if my concern was naïve. “If he wanted to be in touch, he’d be in touch,” she said.