The Wonder Spot (14 page)

He was working for a production company, but I kept realizing that I didn't know what he did, and every time he explained it to me,
I knew even less. All I'd remember were the names of famous actors he said were “attached” to movies his company would produce.

“Tell me what you do again,” I said one night when he'd folded up the newspaper and Cynthia was putting a big bowl of pasta on the table. I said it because the kitchen felt quiet, and not in the nice way it had in the past; it was loud with quiet.

He said, “I'm a P.A.,” and I could tell from his tone that was all he wanted to say.

I knew he was in a bad mood, but I was hoping to talk him out of it. I said, “Riddle me this, Batman: What does P.A. stand for?”

“Production assistant.”

With all the surprise I felt, I said, “You're an assistant?”

He said, “Yup.”

. . . . .

I always looked forward to the moment when Jack came home, and not just because it signaled the end of my typing day. Hearing him on the stairs, I'd think,
Let the fun begin!
But when he actually did walk in, the apartment itself seemed to tense up and go gloomy.

Now when Cynthia said, “Big Old Bear,” she seemed to be trying to remind him of how he felt about her; she was asking him to be the
bar
of yesteryear.

I noticed that he didn't always answer her questions. He'd be reading the paper, and she'd say something ordinary, like, “What's the news of the day?” and silence would follow.

I knew she didn't care about the actual answer to her actual question; it was her way of saying,
Hello,
or even,
I love you.
When he didn't respond, she'd go back to washing her lettuce or sautéing onions, like she hadn't asked anything in the first place.

I told Josh about it, and his answer, a long blink followed by a blank expression, made me wonder if one day soon he'd stop answering my questions. So I said, “Don't you think that's rude?”

He sort of shrugged.

I was defending myself when I said, “It just seems wrong.”

He said, “It's between them, though.”

. . . . .

In a way, I hadn't really seen Jack up close before. He'd lived in the attic bedroom, which was like a separate house on top of ours. Then he went away to college, and he didn't always come home for vacations. He'd visit a girlfriend somewhere or go on a trip. Sometimes he'd promise to come home and then change his mind.

Once, when I'd been really disappointed, my father had tried to explain that I couldn't count on Jack the way I wanted to; I had to learn to appreciate him for what he could do and not be too crestfallen about what he couldn't.

I knew what my father meant. One year Jack drove a thousand miles to have dinner with our mother on her birthday; the next he didn't even call.

He loved doing huge favors and surprising people with his generosity. He liked going above and beyond the call of duty, but he didn't like duty itself.

It occurred to me that he might think I expected him to ask my typing score; anyway, he stopped asking.

This was a relief, since my score wasn't improving. How could I type all day, every day and not get better? The answer: I wasn't typing all day, every day. I'd started taking long breaks in the afternoon. I'd pack a sandwich and go to Washington Square Park, intending just to stay an hour. I'd linger awhile by the dog run, especially if there was a puppy. I'd sit by the dry fountain, where a comedian tried out jokes on the NYU students. I pretended to be one of them. Sometimes a mime performed. A voice in my head would nag me to get back to my typing, but another one would say,
Just a little longer.

I might walk over to St. Marks Place and try on sunglasses that were displayed on tables. Or I'd get lost, looking at clothes in a boutique. I stayed out later and later until my goal was to get back to the apartment before Cynthia got home.

. . . . .

Josh and I went out to inexpensive restaurants—to La Rosita on Broadway for Cuban breakfasts, to V&T up by Columbia for pizza, to any place on East Sixth Street for Indian food, or to the Corner
Bistro on West Fourth for burgers. Every once in a while, though, he'd ask me to meet him at a nicer restaurant, and I came to realize that we went when he'd finished a poem. He'd read it to me during dessert, and I'd applaud and kiss him.

It was after one of those dinners that I finally worked up the courage to whimper in bed.

It felt like acting at first, but then it wasn't. It was great. At the end, I let out a big yell, which made me laugh afterward and say as a joke, “I came.”

Josh was quiet. “Honey,” he said, “I have roommates.”

. . . . .

One night before dinner, when Jack didn't answer Cynthia I glared at him, and he said, “What?”

I said, “Cynthia asked you a question.”

He looked at me for a long moment, like he was trying to remember liking me. Then he turned around to Cynthia. With more affection than I'd heard in weeks, he said, “What was that, sugar pie?”

. . . . .

She didn't come over the next night.

When Jack walked in and said, “What's the score?” I knew he was trying to make me feel that everything was all right, so I knew it wasn't.

“I didn't take a test today,” I said. For the first time he was the one who carried my typewriter to the living room and stowed it under the coffee table.

“Chinese?” he said, and handed me a menu.

We agreed on a few dishes. He called and ordered. Then he sat down with his newspaper in the kitchen.

I went to the living room and opened the book on Edward Hopper.

He called out: “You're not going to keep my company?”

“I'll be there in a second,” I said, but I didn't join him until our dinner was delivered. We unpacked the cartons and sat down at the table.

“Sophie,” he said, once we were eating.

I kept my eyes on his hands as though absorbed in learning how to hold my chopsticks by watching him hold his. I said, “Uh-huh?”

He spoke slowly. “What happens between Cynthia and me is between Cynthia and me.”

I knew he was right, and I felt embarrassed—and embarrassed to be embarrassed in front of him.

After a moment, I said, “Maybe I should stay somewhere else for a while.”

He didn't answer right away. Then he said, “Where could you stay?”

I had a terrible feeling—
I don't have anywhere to stay.

I'd gone to Robert's for dinner a couple of times, but I'd noticed that he only invited me when Naomi wasn't going to be there. I thought of my friends from college and pictured their apartments. No one had enough room for me or my clothes, and especially not for my huge typewriter.

I thought of Josh. Usually just the idea of him cheered me up. Right then, though, I experienced the sensation of being in love for the uncertainty that being in love is.

The only other possible host was Grandma Mamie. I still hadn't visited her. It was hard even to make myself call her every few weeks.

I said, “I could stay at Grandma Mamie's,” hoping against hope that Jack would say,
Don't be ridiculous.

. . . . .

“Don't be ridiculous,” he said during our farewell dinner, when I said the dress Cynthia gave me was too big a present for me to accept. It was a sample from her showroom, a dress made of blue-black wool jersey, which she said I could wear on job interviews.

I went to the bathroom to try it on. In the mirror, I saw that the dress was a little longer on one side. I didn't want to embarrass Cynthia, so I hunched my right shoulder and lowered my left to make the dress hang evenly.

Cynthia understood; she said, “It's cut on the bias,” which meant that its unevenness was deliberate.

“It's great,” Jack said.

. . . . .

Jack surprised me by offering to drive me up to my grandmother's. This was just the kind of favor Jack liked doing most. He was going to make a difficult thing fun. It was cold, but he put the top down on his convertible and turned the heat on. We drove along the river. The sky was a cold blue.

Grandma Mamie lived in the Riverdale section of the Bronx, one exit past the first toll on the Henry Hudson Parkway. When we got to her apartment house, Jack tipped the doorman so we could park in the circular drive, between
NO
PARKING
ANYTIME
signs.

Jack carried my big typewriter in the elevator. He hid while I rang my grandmother's doorbell.

When she opened the door, he showed her his handsome face.

She was thrilled to see it.

He was flirty with her, calling her Mamie instead of Grandma and telling her how fantastic she looked. He sat down and ate a pastry she'd made, a yellow briquette he proclaimed “delicious.”

When it was time for him to go, I walked out with him. We stood by his car. I wanted to make a joke so that everything would be okay between us. I considered saying, “Thank you for opening your home to me,” but it seemed like a joke at Robert's expense, and maybe bitter.

Instead, Jack spoke. He took both my hands in his and said, “I'm for you, and you're for me.” This was something my uncle had said to me when I was little, and I hadn't heard it since and understood it only now.

Jack hugged me good-bye. He had a way of hugging that could pull you all the way in, and make you feel safer and more loved than you ever thought possible.

Then he got in his little car and was gone.

M
Y
GRANDMOTHER
'
S
APARTMENT
looked out on the Harlem River, which is no Hudson; our cut of the Harlem wasn't mighty or mythic, not blue or green or gray, but varying shades of brown that evoked no metaphor save human waste.

The apartment had two rooms and could feel spacious if you were the only one in it, which I never was except when my grandmother went downstairs for the mail or out to Gristedes for groceries.

She was on a perpetual diet and didn't eat dinner with me. Mostly she stood nearby, at the ready to refill my water glass or serve the seconds I never asked for.

I couldn't. Everything she made had been sautéed or boiled or baked too long. I could eat the salad—iceberg lettuce, mealy tomatoes, and carrot pennies smothered in lo-cal dressing—but the chicken was a dried-up dishrag and the baked potato a shiny sack of mush.

She kept calling me “Sophilla,” her pet name for me, and the sound of it made me feel like a sack of mush myself.

She asked how Robert was, but it was Naomi she wanted to talk about. “She's a nice girl, Naomi,” my grandmother said, her tone implying there was something more important that Naomi wasn't. “You can't blame her for wanting to get married.”

I said, “I don't think Naomi's so interested in getting married,” though I didn't know.

My grandmother turned her head to the side.

“Really,” I said. “She's pretty busy with school.”

She sat down with me and sighed. She sighed again and then said, “It's hard after college, Sophilla?”

I thought she was talking about finding a job, starting a new life, joining what we recent college graduates called “The Real World,” and I agreed: It was hard.

“Not that it isn't hard in college,” she said. “The boys want the younger girls.”

I said, “Um.”

“It gets harder, Sophie,” she said, squinting at me, as though seeing despair and loneliness in my future. “Harder and harder.”

“You know what?” I said. “I should practice my typing.”

She told me that I'd practiced all day, and I had. But I cleared the dishes and wiped off the green place mat we'd agreed I'd use underneath the typewriter to protect the finish of her dining-room table. She wouldn't let me do the dishes.

Once I was sitting in front of the typewriter, she said, “I'm just trying to tell you how life is, Sophilla.”

I didn't know what to say, so I said, “Thank you.”

She said, “Maybe Jack or Robby could introduce you to someone.”

I made my face say,
Hm,
and began to type.

. . . . .

I planned to call Josh once my grandmother went to bed, but she stayed where she was on the sofa, knitting an unwearable sweater of Orlon.

Josh was a maniac about sleep and I had to call him before eleven. At 10:55, I went into the bedroom and dialed. I only had time to say, “Hi,” before she came in.

“Excuse me,” she said and went to her closet.

Josh said, “How's it going?”

I said, “I'm here at my grandmother's,” in a voice meant to convey both the hardship of this and her presence in the room.