Solos (26 page)

The saleswoman has thick shiny brown hair that cascades down her back like something to eat—toffee, maybe, or barbecue sauce. She wears a dress that Emily suspects she herself could never afford, even with Dr. W's check. Emily wonders, not for the first time, where salespeople get their clothes.
Do designers donate clothes, just for the exposure? Is it only people with trust funds who work as clerks in stores?

“Would you like me to get you the next size?”

“Oh—no, no, they're fine. I'm just trying to decide.”

“Both styles look very well on you.”

The door opens: A man and a woman are coming in together. Emily holds her breath. They stand at the door. The woman, who is young and hip and wearing a plaid miniskirt, a knit cap, leg-warmers, and white tights, says, “Are you, like,
totally
sure about this?”

“Positive,” the man says, and gives her an affectionate little push. She enters the store ahead of him. Emily turns to the clerk, “I'll take the black,” she says. But the clerk is already focused on the young couple. “Can we look at those fabulous satin shoes in the window? Size six.” The clerk disappears into the back room. The young couple stands, arms entwined, gazing at a display of what looks like pastel bowling shoes. She puts her head on his shoulder. He pats her ass. The clerk returns. The woman marches around the store in the black satin sandals, which are composed of straps and rhinestones, with a few feathers.

“Very New Year's Eve,” the clerk says.

“Oh,
totally!
”

“
Sans
tights, of course.”

“I thought fishnet.”

“Perfecto.”

Emily feels old, dowdy, and insecure, but eventually she is allowed to buy her shoes. She pays in cash, a stack of twenties from the ATM that the salesclerk studies suspiciously before she rings up the sale. When the transaction is finished, Emily is demoralized. She feels she can't shop any more. Besides, what she really wants now is a miniskirt, tights, and leg-warmers.

Or maybe black satin sandals?

She is gathering her bags—in her odyssey down Bleecker Street she has also bought a desk lamp, a picture frame, and a purple silk scarf that she realized too late clashes with everything she owns—when the young woman in the legwarmers says, “I love your zipper.”

“What? My—” Her wrist-zipper is visible where the sleeve of her sweater has hiked up. Her first impulse is to cover it, but she stops.
A compliment!
No one has complimented her on the zipper since she was in her twenties, much less a chic person who buys black satin pumps and does not even appear to be stoned. “Oh,” she says. “Thank you.”

“That is so cool.”

“A youthful folly,” Emily says airily.

“But so clever!” The woman's huge brown eyes beam on Emily. “Look, Jeremy, is that cute or what?”

“Totally.”

Emily smiles at them and sails out of the store with her bundles, feeling so psyched that she stops at a boutique on the next block and buys a skirt and a pair of earrings. Emily is not used to shopping; mostly, she buys her clothes at the Salvation Army. Occasionally, when she has sold a
TIME
or a
BREAD
, she goes to Dee & Dee on Manhattan Avenue in search of something no human has worn before. Her green jacket is from there: $19.95. She has also, on her far-flung photography trips, stopped from time to time at a mall. She still has a strange pink fleece vest from the Target upstate on Route 17, and her red turtleneck sweater is from a Gap on Long Island.

But clothes are not a priority. This is not only because she rarely has any money; it also has to do with what she thinks is a sad, shameful, Proustian truth about human nature, or at least about herself: People crave what they can't have. As soon as the thing they crave is secure in their possession, they wonder why they ever wanted it.

She is already having doubts about the shoes.

On the other hand, Gene Rae once told her, “Emily, you're cute enough that you can wear any old thing. Trust me. Don't waste your time stressing out about clothes.” Emily was twenty-three when Gene Rae said this, but she has never forgotten it. Though it may no longer be true, she still calls it up like a magic spell on the days when she opens her closet door and teeters on the brink of despair.

She stops in a café on West Tenth Street for a cup of tea, to calm down. The thrill of buying retail has left her confused but elated, with a subtle overtone of sheer panic. The café is famous for its cupcakes, and she succumbs to a velvety chocolate one with a crown of pink frosting. It is another indulgence that, even as she eats it in three bites and orders a second one, she can't believe she is actually giving in to. She wishes Gene Rae were with her, or Lamont, someone who would pat her soothingly, tell her it's okay, people do this all the time, spend money on cupcakes and shoes. Someone who would tell her to chill when she remembers that Byron wrote in his diary one spring day in 1821, “I have added eating to my family of vices.”

Or that Van Gogh's last words were, “What's the use?”

Emily does her deep breathing. It helps. The tea helps. She takes her new shoes out of their box: She still likes them, and that helps. She puts on the earrings, which dangle nicely. Her blood pressure declines, her heartbeat slows, her diaphragm unknots. She sits in the window of the café thinking happily about the craziness of an art market that can inflate the artistic talent of Joe Whack, a man she never liked, and make people compare him to Chardin and the late Manet. That and about what her mother calls the “staggering stupidity” of Tab Hartwell, who gave away seventy-four paintings because he didn't want to pay somebody to move them. A stupidity that Emily finds touching and rather sweet, in a way Hart in person never was. Then in a moment of truly amazing synchronicity she looks out the window and sees her ex-husband walking down West Tenth Street.

He is bare-headed and looks cold. His hands are thrust deep into the pockets of his jacket, and his hair, which seems thick with gray and badly in need of cutting, flies around his head. She hasn't seen Hart since divorce court, six years ago. He seems to be talking to himself, but as he gets closer she realizes he is chewing gum. She is poised between relief (that her ex-husband, with whom she is on the point of sharing many thousands of dollars, has not become so dotty that he talks to himself) and revulsion (her ex-husband is a man who chews gum with his mouth open).

Emily sits and watches him, almost willing him to glance in the window and see her, but he looks straight ahead, and his face is grim. His eyes seem sunken, his lips thinned out as if he has worn a perpetual look of disgust all these years. She considers rapping on the window, even dashing out after him, so she can admit, after all this time, that maybe Joe Whack wasn't such a bad guy after all and—by the way—isn't it great about the paintings. But she can see that Hart is no longer the man who went out for Thai food and never returned. Also, she is no longer the bereft wife weeping into his discarded shirt.

She has no idea who Hart is; maybe she never did. She realizes she has no connection with the man in the leather jacket, and suddenly, despite the cupcakes and the shopping bags, she feels light and unencumbered. Glimpsing her ex-husband striding down the street like any other person, just some aging guy in need of a haircut, reminds her that she needs to answer to no one but a dog and a bird. And that she's been thinking she might go over to the Pet Pound and pick out a kitten.

Because what Proust meant really applies only to people. Animals never disappoint, and, actually, she is pretty sure the shoes won't, either.

Emily finishes her tea and hauls her bundles out onto West Tenth Street. She stands there a moment breathing deeply. The sky is white, stark, wintry. Down the street a car engine struggles to start, like someone coughing. A pants-suited woman with a briefcase passes her, a mumbling man with a shopping cart, a black teenager in falling-down pants, a girl carrying a large plant, an Indian woman in a delicate pink sari and a sturdy wool hat, a pair of tourists with a guidebook. “Can you tell us where we can find West Eleventh Street?” they ask Emily, and when she explains to them that there are two streets between West Tenth and West Eleventh they chuckle affectionately. “What a city!”

Emily turns back down Bleecker, where there is a shop that sells Japanese pottery. She has always coveted a set of black Japanese dishes. She imagines serving Thanksgiving dinner to Marcus on a black plate.

This reminds her that Marcus is leaving.

He finally made his confession on the L train, when they were on their way back to Brooklyn after seeing Mr. Ptak at the gallery. “It's not that I don't like it here,” he said. “I like it very much. I like everything. I even like this crummy train.”

“You have so many friends, Marcus,” Emily said. “Everyone is so fond of you. You'll leave a huge hole in the Trollope Group. Rumpy and Reba will miss you so much. And Elvis. And Otto. You know Otto thinks you're God.”

Marcus smiled. “Dog saw I was god.”

“Yes. He did.”

“Nah. He thinks you're God. He thinks I'm St. Athanasius or somebody.”

“The point is—oh, Marcus, everyone here loves you.” The word
love
almost made her cry, but she recovered. “And I'll bet you don't even know anyone in Honesdale any more.”

“No, I don't. Not really.” Marcus didn't look happy, but Emily knew he was, it was just that he knew she wasn't. “I don't really know how to explain it, Emily, the feeling that I'm in exile here. I never meant to be in New York forever. Honesdale, Pennsylvania is where I need to be. I always think of it as
Homesdale
. It's my home. My mother died there. My dog is buried there. I lived there all my life. It's my oldest friend, that house, that town. I lost a chunk of my life, and I need to get it back, and I feel that Honesdale can give it to me.”

“But I lived in Berkeley all my life,” Emily said. “My mother is out there. A lot of old friends. Those brown hills, everything new, the morning fog.” The train stopped at First Avenue, people got off, people got on. A woman with a baby squeezed in next to Emily, so that she had to move closer to Marcus. She would have liked to clutch his arm, rest her head on his shoulder, stroke his overcoat—the funny, too-big tweed overcoat he'd had since she met him—make some gesture of affection, of bereavement. She did none of these things. She said, in her most reasonable voice—did she really think she'd talk him out of it?—“I still miss California, and I probably always will. But I don't want to go back.”

“Well.” Marcus paused. The train was always especially noisy as it raced through the tunnel under the river to Brooklyn, and it was hard to catch what he said, but it seemed to be, “You've had other things. I've only had Honesdale.”

I've only had Honesdale
.

Emily still doesn't understand what that could possibly mean. She knows he misses the country—woods, trees, animals. There are eagles in that part of the state, he has told her. Many kinds of hawks. He even used to like the cows, he said, down the road at the dairy farm, even though they never did anything. He liked touching their pink snouts, feeling their warm breath on his hand. Occasionally one would let out a moo. Made my day, Marcus said.

She remembers Susan Skolnick, who has packed up and gone to Maine. And Luther and Lamont have flown to Italy to spend some time with their friend Silvio, who lives in a converted fourteenth-century convent. “It kills us both to miss the Trollope group,” Luther told her. “But we need to do something drastic. We're pretty wrecked after all this.” He meant Lamont, and Elliot C. “You know how there are places that can kind of fix you up? Bang you back together? That's Silvio's nunnery.”

Emily knows—people might tell her she's wrong, but she knows it—that even if they write letters, send E-mails, talk on the phone, Marcus will be gone just as surely as her father is gone. Her old friend Jack who died in a car crash. Her dog Harry, and the cats of her childhood. People she has sat next to on the subway, on airplanes. Girls she went to kindergarten with. Her old boyfriends Peter, Kevin, Gil Harrison. Jeffrey and Neil from high school. The tourists who just asked her directions. Joe Whack, Crystal who used to wait tables at the Tragedy Club, the second-cousins in Tennessee she met at her father's funeral, the roommate she and Gene Rae didn't like, the clerk in the shoe store, Milo's friend Porter who moved to Australia, the blond waitress who brought her a cupcake on a blue plate, her grandma who died of cancer, her mother's old boyfriend Fred Campbell, her fourth-grade teacher whose name she has forgotten, the girl who got raped and went home to Poland …

Emily had gone out early that morning, before her shopping spree, with her camera. There was not much traffic, so she was able to get some pristine shots of the old houses on Berry Street, and, miraculously, she even found a
DOG
: specifically,
LOST DOG
on a hand-lettered flyer tacked to a post. It was illuminated by a patch of raw winter sunlight on North Fifth Street. She snapped her photo and then had a moment of panic:
Everything is slipping away
. Someone's dog was lost. The Japanese restaurant was going out of business. Mrs. Buzik was moving to Long Island. Overhead, geese in their strict formation were honking dismally, heading for the open ocean and the long flight south.… She thought of Marcus with his furry hair and funny smile. Then, because she was so close, she walked over to his place on North Sixth.

Ever since he told her he was leaving, she has wanted to take his photograph. She knows he would say okay if she asked, but she also knows he wouldn't like it, and that his reluctance would show in the photograph, and that's not the way she wants to remember him: looking trapped, with a fake grin. The only picture she'll ever have is Hart's old photo of Marcus, age ten, with the phone book and the front end of his dog. Then she got an idea: She zoomed in on Marcus's doorbell, where a little card still said
MARCUS MEAD
in his distinctive printing—each M with its flag, the S with its flourishes—and quickly, before he could come out and catch her, snapped a picture.
Everything is slipping away
, she thought.
Except what I can save
.