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A few months ago she was packing for a trip to Paris when she began to cry. You asked her what was wrong. She said she was nervous about the trip. By the time the cab arrived she was fine. You kissed at the door. She told you to water the plants.
The day before she was due home, she called. Her voice sounded peculiar. She said she wasn’t coming home. You didn’t understand.
“You got a later flight?”
“I’m staying,” she said.
“For how long?”
“I’m sorry. I wish you well. Really I do.”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m going to Rome for Vogue next week and then Greece for location work. My career is really taking off over here. I’m sorry. I don’t mean to hurt you.”
It is a warm, humid afternoon. Spring, apparently. Late April or early May. Amanda left in January. There was snow on the ground the morning she called, a whiteness that turned gray and filthy by noon and then disappeared down the sewer grates. Later that morning the florist called about the bouquet you ordered for her return. Everything becomes symbol and irony when you have been betrayed.
You slip into a bar on Forty-fourth, a nice anonymous Irish place where no one has anything on his mind except drinking and sports. On a big video screen at the far end of the long wooden bar is some kind of sporting event. You take a stool and order a beer, then turn your attention to the screen. Basketball. You didn’t realize basketball was in season this time of year, but you like the soothing back-and-forth movement of the ball. The guy sitting next to you swivels and says, “Those fucking bums don’t know how to handle the full court press.”
You nod and fill your mouth with beer. He seems to expect a response, so you ask him what period it is.
He looks you up and down, as if you were carrying a volume of poetry or wearing funny shoes. “Third quarter,” he answers. Then he turns away.
lmao
You keep meaning to cultivate an expertise in spectator sport. More and more you realize that sports trivia is crucial to male camaraderie. You keenly feel your ignorance. You are locked out of the largest fraternity in the country. You’d like to be the kind of guy who can walk into a bar or an eatery and break the ice with a Runyonism about the stupidity of a certain mid-season trade. Have something to hash out with truck drivers and stockbrokers alike. In high school, you went in for lone-wolf sports—tennis and skiing. You’re not really sure what a zone defense is. You don’t understand the sports metaphors in the political columns. Men don’t trust a man who missed the Super Bowl. You would like to devote a year to watching every athletic event on ABC and reading all fifty-two issues of Sports Illustrated. In the meantime your strategy is to view one playoff game in each sport so as to manage remarks like, “How about that slap shot by LaFleur in the third period against Boston?” Third quarter?
It’s five-twenty and raining when you leave the bar. You walk down to the Times Square subway station. You pass signs for GIRLS, GIRLS, GIRLS, and one that says YOUNG BOYS. Then, in a stationery store, DON’T FORGET MOTHER’S DAY. The rain starts coming down harder. You wonder if you own an umbrella. You’ve left so many in taxis. Usually, by the time the first raindrop hits the street, there are men on every corner selling umbrellas. Where do they come from, you have often wondered, and where do they go when it’s not raining? You imagine these umbrella peddlers huddled around powerful radios waiting for the very latest from the National Weather Service, or maybe sleeping in dingy hotel rooms with their arms hanging out the windows, ready to wake at the first touch of precipitation. Maybe they have a deal with the taxi companies, you think, to pick up all the left-behind umbrellas for next to nothing. The city’s economy is made up of strange, subterranean circuits that are as mysterious to you as the grids of wire and pipe under the streets. At the moment, though, you see no umbrella vendors whatsoever.
“Anyway, it’s nice to see you getting over this Amanda deal. I mean, she wasn’t hard to look at. God knows. But I don’t see why you felt like you had to marry her.”
“I’ve been wondering that myself.”
“Weren’t you suspicious when you saw the sign on her forehead?”
“Which sign was that?”
“The one that said, Space to Let. Long and Short Term Leasing.”
“We met in a bar. It was too dark to read.”
“Not so dark that she couldn’t see you were her ticket out of Trailer Park Land. Bright lights, big city. If you really wanted to do the happy couple thing you shouldn’t have let her model. A week on Seventh Avenue would warp a nun. Where skin-deep is the mode, your traditional domestic values are not going to take root and flourish. Amanda was trying to get as far from red dirt and four-wheel drive as she could. She figured out she could trade on her looks farther than she got with you.”
“Things happen, people change,” is what Amanda said. For her that covered it. You wanted an explanation, an ending that would assign blame and dish up justice. You considered violence and you considered reconciliation. But what you are left with is a premonition of the way your life will fade behind you, like a book you have read too quickly, leaving a dwindling trail of images and emotions, until all you can remember is a name.
In the top drawer you discover two empty rectangular packets. Actually, one of them is not quite empty; inside the black paper is a fine dusting of white. You scrape it onto the desk with a credit card, using the edge of the card to rake up two clean lines. You look over at Megan. She’s reading. You could quietly hoover the lines and she’d never know the difference. You extract a bill from your wallet and roll it into a tight cylinder between thumb and forefinger. One apiece isn’t going to do much for either of you. On the other hand, two won’t do much for you, either; one will make you want another, and another will only intitiate a chain reaction of desperate longings. Is this self-knowledge? In any case, you want to do something nice for Megan. For her it might be a treat, something out of the ordinary.
You keep walking, thinking briefly about the Missing Person, the one who’s come and gone for good. Out into the sunlight of Fifth Avenue and the Plaza, a gargantuan white chateau rising in the middle of the island like a New Money dream of the Old World. When you first came to the city you spent a night here with Amanda. You had friends to stay with, but you wanted to spend that first night at the Plaza. Getting out of the taxi next to the famous fountain, you seemed to be arriving at the premiere of the movie which was to be your life. A doorman greeted you at the steps. A string quartet played in the Palm Court. Your tenth-floor room was tiny and overlooked an airshaft; though you could not see the city out the window, you believed that it was spread out at your feet. The limousines around the entrances seemed like carriages, and you felt that someday one would wait for you. Today they put you in mind of carrion birds, and you cannot believe your dreams were so shallow.
You are the stuff of which consumer profiles—American Dream: Educated Middle-Class Model—are made. When you’re staying at the Plaza with your beautiful wife, doesn’t it make sense to order the best Scotch that money can buy before you go to the theater in your private limousine?
From the Met you walk to Tad’s place on Lexington. It’s a little after six. No answer to the buzzer. You decide to go for a drink and come back later. In a few minutes you are in singles’ heaven on First Avenue. You start at Friday’s, where you get a seat at the bar and finally succeed in ordering a drink. Prime time approaches, and the place is packed with eager secretaries and slumming lawyers. Everyone here has the Jordache look—the look you don’t want to know better. Hundreds of dollars’ worth of cosmetics on the women and thousands in gold around the necks of the open-shirted men. Gold crucifixes, Stars of David and coke spoons hang from the chains. Some trust in God to get them laid; others in drugs. Someone should do a survey of success ratios, publish it in New York magazine.