A Certain Age (10 page)

What contempt people would have for her if they could hear

her thoughts. Women—modern women—were not supposed to think this way; they were supposed to be tough, interested in their careers, cultural events. In the world she inhabited, a woman should think of mountain climbing, snowboarding, playing pool or volleyball. Romance was girlie stuff; being honest about wanting money and acceptance through marriage was contemptible. But meanwhile, of course, all those women who were on white-water rafting trips, or fly-fishing and surfing, were just trying to prove they weren't like the others—they were one of the guys. And what was the point of that, except to please men?

The stale glow from the night light by the bathroom door illuminated the blue-and-white-striped curtains blowing in front of the air conditioner, back and forth, back and forth, slapping restlessly like small boats on waves.

When she woke it was after one in the afternoon. She was freezing cold; the bedclothes were almost entirely on the floor and the air-conditioning unit blasted icy, damp air on her head. She put on her pink chenille dressing gown and staggered into the kitchen. Even in the living room it was cold. She put the kettle on the gas stove for tea and opened the window. A sickly pigeon that had been resting on the window ledge flew off in a violent flap of wings, leaving behind a puddle of greenish goo. It was cold outside too. Overnight the temperature had dropped, as if it were a fall day, with a crisp wind and bright blue sky.

She realized she was starving. She put an English muffin, left in a bag on the counter, slightly dried and curled around the edges, into the toaster. No butter in the refrigerator, just a bit of hardened Camembert cheese, mostly rind. She got out a knife. Her head felt as if it had been sand-papered on the inside. In the front hall the message light on the answering machine was blinking. There was a message from Max Coho—she knew him from Quayle's; he was often in there doing research or covering various auctions—leaving his phone number. "Call me, sweetie." He wrote for an antiques magazine, but it was a well-known fact he

supplied gossip to the tabloids. There were two hang-ups, and the last from Darryl, saying he would be out all day but would come by to pick her up at seven.

She didn't have a clue how she was going to get out of seeing him. She supposed she could just not be there when he arrived; if she wanted to be polite, she could leave a message with the doorman. There was no way she wanted to see him again. She remembered pouring vodka down his throat at that club while holding his nose, and then trying to kiss him, to the general applause of a number of others at their table. Then something else came back to her—dancing with that fat red-faced man and leaving him to try to haul Darryl over to dance with her. When he wouldn't she sat on his lap and . . . then what?

She stumbled down the hall in search of some aspirin. The tea kettle was screaming as if it were being mutilated. In a way, she supposed, it was—its underside was being burned. The mirror was old and blistered, and the fixture above it had frosted glass dusty with bugs, making her face look even more greenish.

The phone rang. She scurried to answer it before the machine picked up. The place still smelled faintly of cat, faintly fishy. Some previous occupant of the place must have had one, or perhaps from next door oily yellow urine oozed in through the walls. At various times she had scrubbed everything in the room, but the odor lingered, the smell of sour rage. "Hallo, Florence." A man's voice, Italian accent. "Do you remember me?"

"Oh, gosh." It was that man from dinner last night, which already seemed like an event that had taken place several years before. "Is it, uh . . . Tony?" She lied deliberately; why should he arrogantly assume she would remember him and instantly know who he was?

"No."

"Oh, I'm sorry! Of course, Salvatore, how are you?"

To her satisfaction, she could tell he was irritated. "It's Raffaello di Castignolli. You have disappeared so suddenly last evening, I thought you have gone out or to sleep, and when I

called the house today they said you had gone back to the city."

"Yes," she said. "I had a little emergency."

"Mm. I am hearing all about this emergency."

"How did you get my phone number?"

"That is my secret. So. I am still out here, in the Hamptons, but will be back tonight, and thought perhaps you will join me for a late supper."

"Oh, that would be wonderful! What time?"

"Well, that is the problem. I do not know how the traffic will be. What I am proposing, I will give you a call when I get in and we can make a plan."

She drank her tea and ate her muffin with melted cheese. It was like eating a delicious bit of rusted metal; the edges of the hard muffin cut into her mouth. How she loved foods that caused pain. 'Perhaps she was a food masochist, she thought. If there was something fiery, with hot peppers, or something with sharp edges, it was her dream meal. It was a way of proving she was alive, to have tears running down her cheeks without emotional anguish, to self-inflict pain that was primarily pleasure.

There was a huge stack of mail on her desk—unpaid bills, letters from the executor of her mother's estate in California. Apparently everything had been settled and she was to expect nothing more. She was pinched by a sudden twinge of remorse. She missed her mother. How dissatisfied she had been by her when she was alive. Her mother had been so paralyzed by her fears, by what people would say. There had been no sense of adventure for her, only terror. Her life had been spent in trying out the latest recipes and in trying to do the right thing. If her mother had, even once, for a second, understood how unimportant it all was, that the only way to live life was to go out and grab what you wanted!

Other envelopes contained various requests for money—an

animal shelter, public television, a home for drug-addicted teens—or to buy tickets for what must have been every benefit being held in New York through the fall: the Cinderella Diabetes Foundation, the Princess Helena of Albania Foundation, the Make a Dream Come True Foundation. But she ignored these and instead looked over an article in a decorating magazine about bathrooms in the homes of twelve wealthy people around the world. One appeared to have been designed to resemble a milking station on a high-tech dairy farm. Another was like a fallout shelter in the event of nuclear disaster. One, in a château, used ancient terracotta tiles. The photo caption explained that these tiles were available for twelve dollars each from a small French company that still manufactured them by hand.

She opened a glossy magazine—ostensibly related to current events, but really featuring only gossip—whose cover was always devoted to a movie star. This month's cover showed a mutt-faced actress in bright red lipstick, posing pretentiously, above a caption that read, "The mesmerizing beauty of Ibis."
Disgusted, Florence skimmed the article. Ibis, twenty-three, came from an incredible family: her mother, an English aristocrat and well-known beauty, had once been married to an English pop star before marrying Ibis's father, an ornithology professor at Oxford. Ibis had been a brilliant actress since age fifteen. The other children in the family were named Shrike, Pheasant, Mâdchen, Vireo and Warbler. Oh, in such cool bliss did the family live, roaming the grounds of their four-thousand-acre estate and their private Caribbean island, climbing Mount Everest, discovering a new species of sparrow, performing their own concertos to one another. And Ibis, the beautiful Ibis, now getting seven million dollars a film, and the reporter who had written the piece so clearly in love that he was unable to say one bad word. Ibis was beautiful (except that no matter how hard Florence stared, she still had the crunched-up face of a turkey); Ibis was comfortable with selecting the most perfect wine from any wine list. Exquisite conversation poured from Ibis's lips: she had already been married to a Nepalese prince and was about to marry a handsome French

movie star of art films who had recently crossed over into the big time of action-adventure pictures. In his free time he produced and directed Feydeau farce.

By the time she finished reading the article, if Florence had seen Ibis on the street, she would have strangled her quite happily. She stuck her head out the window, half hoping Ibis would walk by and she could assist in sending her on to her next incarnation (Ibis believed in reincarnation and had studied in a Tibetan lamasery, the only woman accepted by all five hundred monks).

It was like a disease, to read these things and be filled with such spite and venom—or perhaps it was more similar to an addiction. But if it was a disease, or an addiction, she had never heard anyone else talk about it or mention how she could obtain a cure.

It was still cool out, at least that was how it felt from up here on the thirteenth floor. She showered and quickly changed into a pink cashmere-and-silk T-shirt, a black miniskirt and a pair of black suede boots that came up to her knees. Normally on a Sunday she would have put on a different outfit and gone to the gym or for a run around the reservoir. But her head hurt too much for that. She headed down Madison, walking, for her, quite slowly. The only people around were those who came into Manhattan for the day as tourists, loud, badly dressed, lugging shopping bags filled with the same items they could have bought out on Long Island or in New Jersey but which obviously held more cachet if purchased here; or residents who were too poor to go away for the weekend, who didn't own or rent a country house or hadn't been invited as guests. The parks and piers were crowded with nearly naked men and women, wearing the tiniest bathing suits imaginable, sitting in the dirt and on the dried-up grass that stank of dog urine. It always struck Florence as odd. When she was a child her mother made her change from shorts to a skirt or long pants if they went into town. It seemed lewd, provocative and unsanitary to display oneself in such a fashion.

Obviously summer was not what it once had been. There had

been a few years when she was a child during which she and her mother would visit her grandparents in Maine; they lived on a little island where during the summer the sunny days numbered only a few and in the winter, if they went up over Christmas, never came at all. Nevertheless, she had loved it there: the icy water of the little bay, the walk up the cliff through the pine trees, the osprey fishing for dinner for its young in the nest at the top of the tallest tree. She would go out to pick nearly rotten raspberries from a glade where they had spread and gone wild over the years. Her grandmother would make a pie, laden with seeds; over the brilliant fuchsia slices they poured thick cream. Her grandparents had lived on nothing their whole lives: slivers of pie,
The Saturday Evening Post
and
Yankee
magazine, volunteer-fire-department pancake suppers, the seasons changing from silver-gray to ash-blue. And they were seemingly content. But such contentment, once an element like water or air, no longer existed on the planet. Perhaps the supply had been used up or burned away when the hole in the ozone layer developed. Her grandfather had a heart attack; her grandmother, cancer. Her mother had to sell the place, for a nominal sum. With her mother's generation the grains of dissatisfaction had been planted, an invasive species that grew in Florence like kudzu. By high school she realized that no matter what women filled their lives with, there was still no status for them apart from whomever—whatever—they married.

She cut through the park. The sound of tribal drums thumped through the Bethesda Fountain plaza. A dirty man lugged a huge sack of grain, feeding the birds. He was known as the Birdman— rumor had it that he lived in a mansion and had spent his fortune feeding the pigeons and fighting tickets in court. Feeding the birds was illegal. They were disgusting things anyway, witless sacks constructed only to defecate and reproduce.

Men kept turning to stare at her; some stopped jogging, one fell off his bicycle, a tiny Latin hunchback followed her all the way past Strawberry Fields. She kept thinking that if she walked faster she wouldn't have to think. She came out of the park on the West Side and began walking toward the river. When she turned

a corner a gust of wind, scented with pot roast and cabbage, blew down West End Avenue—the smell of dark apartments in which tiny old-fashioned clocks chimed the hours—and she was overcome with nostalgia for something she had never experienced.

8

She jumped into a
taxi and went back over to Fifth Avenue. She started to walk home, but when she passed an expensive department store, she went in without even thinking what she was doing. The whole place had been built in cement, with imitation Japanese architectural elements; every floor had only two or three items. She went over to a glass display case of sunglasses. "May I see those, please?" she asked the salesclerk, pointing. She definitely needed sunglasses; she hadn't been able to find her old ones in months, and the other pairs she had weren't flattering or were

out of style. She liked these so much she decided to get a couple of extra pairs. "At least when I lose a pair I won't have to feel so bad, since I'll still have the others," she said out loud, picking out the same style in tortoiseshell, black, and dark navy with royal blue splotches. "Can I put them on my card, please?"

She supposed she should have inquired as to the price first: they were two hundred and eighty dollars apiece. But she would be damned if now that the salesperson was ringing them up, she would make an idiot of herself and tell her to undo the charge. Besides, it wasn't all that much money; she would rather have three really good pairs of sunglasses that she could wear for years, and that would average out to be inexpensive, than to buy something she didn't like and would never use. As the salesperson was putting each pair into a fancy stainless-steel case and wrapping it in tissue, she heard someone calling her name. "Florence?"