A Certain Age (22 page)

She sat for hours in her dark bedroom. Apparently she owed at least eight thousand on back maintenance. If the bank hadn't paid the mortgage, that was another seventeen she owed. Well, she

supposed she could call John tomorrow and tell him not to deposit her check; perhaps she wouldn't lose so very much. Or she might not even bother to speak with him—she could just call the bank and order a stop payment. Maybe she had more cash left in the bank than she thought. There had to be options. She might get a roommate, charge fifteen hundred a month or even two grand. But even if she found a roommate willing to pay that much—and sleep in the living room!—her monthly expense totaled more than three thousand and she would never catch up with what she owed. Or she could sell the apartment and find a studio rental. But the problem was, in the present market she doubted she could find a buyer, let alone one who would pay as much as she owed the bank . . . Maybe that girl Tracer would let her live with her, free of charge? Tracer had more than enough room. She picked up the phone. "Hi, Tracer?"

"What time is it?"

"Oh, gosh, I don't know. Not late. Eleven? Did I wake you up?"

"Urn . . ."

"Oh, I'm really sorry! I didn't think it was that late. What time is it?"

"After midnight." Actually it was closer to one a.m.

"It's just that ... I was thinking about our party! And I had all these great ideas. But . . . I'm sorry I woke you up. I can call you tomorrow."

"That's okay. I'm awake now. The thing is ... I kind of decided to get out of here for a while, and I don't know when I'll be back, so I think maybe we should put the party idea on hold."

"Why?" It was all she could do to control her anxiety. "I thought you wanted to have a party. Did something happen?"

"No, no. I just think I should . . . well, you know how New York can be. I had a rough day. Anyway, my dad wants me to spend some time with him . . . he's down in Mexico. He's got some people he's entertaining and needs some help."

"Oh, gee. That sounds fun."

Tracer didn't respond. "I saw some people you know tonight, for dinner."

"Oh really? Who?"

"Um . . . gosh, what was his name?"

"Oh, tell me!"

"John . . . John something-or-other."

8

She had lived with
her mother in a large innocuous house built in the late fifties in Orange County. The houses in the area were all alike, facing busy four-lane streets, yards planted with squat palm trees, scratchy grass almost artificially green, spiky yucca. This district was not a fancy part of California, but over the years as the property values rose, it became progressively more upscale— the city arranged for flowers to be grown in hanging baskets above the traffic lights; an upscale shopping mall complete with Neiman-Marcus and Italian
cucina
was built several blocks away. It was

perhaps fortunate that her father had died when she was little. There was not a single friend of hers whose parents had not split up—inevitably it was the fathers who ran off with the new, younger girlfriend or produced someone who had been mysteriously waiting in the wings. When the mothers found someone it was almost always temporary, a construction worker or eighty-year-old retiree. Her father had been an insurance salesman and of course had not bothered to take out a life insurance policy on himself; at the time of the accident it was believed he had suffered a slight stroke. There was no other explanation why he would have run a red light. Florence's memories of her father weren't particularly vivid—a grayish man who had rarely been home. Perhaps had he lived, her parents would have stayed married, but it was unlikely.

After his death their standard of living dropped considerably; her mother eventually returned to teaching fifth grade, which she had done before Florence's birth—but her salary scarcely paid for local property taxes. The area above the garage was converted into an apartment and rented out. One afternoon every other weekend was spent visiting her retarded sister in a state hospital almost an hour and a half away. Bethany, two years younger, suffered from cerebral palsy in addition to severe retardation; it was doubtful whether she even knew who her mother and Florence were, though her mother swore she recognized them.

Apart from these few minor quirks her childhood had been perfectly normal. She was popular, the prettiest in her group of friends; all of them had played with troll dolls or Barbies; then participated in tennis lessons, horseback riding, ice skating, gymnastics; and as they got older, found after-school and summer jobs at Disneyland.

She attended a nearby branch of the University of Southern California and lived at home for the last two years it took her mother to die of breast cancer. When it was over she sold the house and was surprised to get almost half a million dollars for the poorly constructed place in which she had grown up. With the money she moved to New York and got her degree from Sarah

Lawrence, though she was never quite certain what had motivated her to go East. She had fit in, in California; it was kind of nice to be blond in a world where everyone was brunette, and she felt powerful and certain she was destined for great things.

When she had graduated she bought a small one-bedroom apartment in a building that had been converted from a convent. The apartment, like the home where she had grown up, was dark and low-ceilinged; it was in the back, facing other buildings that were almost within touch. One entered a dark and narrow hall, passing through a kitchenette—so small there was room only for a miniature refrigerator—to get to the living room, which, aside from furniture and filing cabinets, was filled from floor to ceiling with boxes of knickknacks, all the things she had picked up in her years in New York that reflected her rapidly changing tastes, none of which went together but with which she was unable to part. The bedroom was equally cramped, the two closets nearly exploding with clothes—voluminous satin skirts like parachutes, vintage jackets, hats, riding boots, ski clothes. Beyond the bedroom, the crumbling bathroom, with its steam pipes hissing rust and rage. At night the tiled floor, beneath her bare feet, would get so hot she would actually hop about in surprise, soles nearly scorched.

Despite the chaos and profusion of objects, she insisted on everything being kept clean, if not organized. The sight of one infant cockroach was enough to get the exterminator—moronic, excited, carrying a heavy tank—to douse the place with the greasy, yellowish ejaculate that smelled of death. Because the place had formerly been a convent, the hallways were of a peculiar configuration, and her two rooms lay at the end of a private corridor next to the stairs, where the garbage was deposited. A faint whiff of decay sometimes blew under the door. On Mondays the doorman gave the keys to a cleaning woman, Ivana from Russia ("my housekeeper" was how Florence referred to her), who, for one hundred dollars, spent a half day dusting the two rooms, scrubbing the decaying bathroom, taking laundry to the machines in the basement and ironing each garment on an ironing board set up in the only empty space anywhere, at the foot of Florence's

bed. An endless heap of clothes went to and from the dry cleaners—the most expensive cleaners, who charged an exorbitant rate and delivered each item back to the building stuffed with beautiful puffy pink tissue.

The important thing: the building was in one of the best locations, in the eighties between Madison and Park; it seemed to her that if she was going to live in the city, she should live only in the most exclusive area. She had been so certain she would be rich very soon that she made only the minimum down payment and took out a balloon mortgage; the first five years her payments were very low (though the maintenance at such a fancy address had always been very high, over a thousand a month) but then suddenly escalated to more than two thousand a month—at the very moment the whole market for one-bedroom apartments collapsed.

And the money she had inherited, which had seemed so limitless initially, had—apart from the twenty-five thousand—completely vanished. Yes, a chunk had gone on tuition and living expenses during those two years at Sarah Lawrence, perhaps a hundred grand. And she had some equity in the apartment, but not much. Another piece had been paid in taxes. A trust had already been established for her sister in the institution. She had lived in the apartment for six years, with mortgage and maintenance forty-plus thousand a year—her salary from Quayle's was so nominal it could hardly be factored in. Gone, and she was no closer to having any real life than if she had been living at home in that damp house built on ground which had once been a stream, or a swamp, and which had long since been filled in but still squished underfoot, reluctant to abandon its origins entirely.

In the morning she was up and dressed before she realized she no longer had to go to work. It was still only eight o'clock; she headed downstairs and up the block to get a cappuccino and a sweet roll at an Italian restaurant and bakery that served its coffee Italian-style at a little standing bar. The sun on the street was so strong it hurt her eyes. The curtains in the bakery window were pulled

down halfway; otherwise, the cakes placed in the display cabinets would have melted. Such lavish, garish marzipan confections, colored and painted to resemble beach scenes, zoo animals, other inedible concoctions for those whose fantasy it was to devour the undevourable. The cakes cost fifty dollars, sixty, eighty, even more depending on their size—she was almost tempted to purchase a smallish one, which looked like it might have been chocolate, crowned with an underwater scene of chunky-armed mermaids and orange-and-blue fish. But she knew in her present state she would have gone home, gotten between the sheets and eaten the whole thing, turning the bed into a sea of crumbs.

Instead, she selected a huge cinnamon roll studded with pecans and raisins and took it over to the bar; the coffee was bitter and hot, and between mouthfuls she ate the roll, unwinding the yeasty dough and tearing off pieces. She had only a hellish day to contemplate. Her first move would be to call John and get him to return her check, or at least let her sell the stock he had bought for her; if he had said something nasty about her to Tracer, or to anybody else, she would get that out of him too.

The bar grew crowded with businessmen and -women grabbing coffees.
They
were all on their way to work. There was a particularly cute guy wearing what looked like a custom-made pinstripe; any other day she might have been tempted to try to pick him up. But today she pushed her way through. On her way out she stopped again at the bakery and got a pound of assorted cookies, dappled with orange marmalade and almond slices, dipped in chocolate. The smell of butter and sugar was overwhelming and she knew, as she opened the box walking down the street, nibbling at the cookies' edges, that if she got home without having devoured them all, she would spend the morning in an unconscious frenzy eating the rest. When she got back to her building, she handed the box to the doorman. "Thank you!" He was a young guy, in his late twenties—Russian or Greek; she had never really chatted with him—who hadn't been on the job very long, with a big, sorry face and a droopy expression, as if his balalaika had just been taken away. The cookies cost eighteen

dollars a pound. He looked more frightened than pleased at her gift, an open box of crumbs.

She spent the morning trying to find John. He had said he was staying at his club, but she didn't have a clue what club he belonged to. She tried the University Club, the Cornell Club and the Yale Club in rapid succession, to no avail. She didn't even know what firm he worked for—if it was his own company, it wasn't called anything like his last name. There was no way she could call Natalie, who would only hang up on her, or worse. She wanted to tell Natalie her husband's lunacy had nothing to do with her, but she knew Natalie would never believe her.

She called Raffaello, but as usual only his machine answered. She spent an hour opening boxes stuffed with papers, trying to find her old resume so that she could begin to update it, but turned up nothing. She would have to start over from scratch, an unbelievable nightmare. Then something occurred to her. There must be another listing for di Castignolli—Raffaello's last name. After all, there was a shop on Fifty-seventh Street—he had said he was working on modernizing and updating the store and merchandising.

"Di Castignolli." The voice that answered the phone was Italian.

Her voice cracked with nervousness. "Ah—I'm looking for Mr. di Castignolli—Raffaello."

"Who is calling, please?"

"Florence Collins."

"And what is this in reference to?"

She couldn't help but feel the question had prurient overtones. "Urn . . . he'll know."

"One moment, please."

"How did you find me?" He sounded amused.

She was so taken aback that he was actually on the phone she couldn't remember what she was going to say. Why had she wanted to humiliate herself in this fashion? Until he actually was

on the other end, it had seemed not a humiliating thing to do but something forceful, taking charge of her own life. Now she saw she had been deluding herself. "What about our lunch?" she blurted.

"Oh, yes, would you like to have lunch?"

"Maybe ... I have a little present for you."

"What is it?"

"You'll have to see it in person!"

He laughed. "Shall we say Egezio's? Two o'clock."