A Certain Age (23 page)

It was after eleven. She got the paper and skimmed the Help Wanted ads while she had her nails done around the corner. There were no positions that seemed even remotely possible—in any event, ninety-nine percent of them were alleged offers through agencies, and she suspected the jobs weren't real, merely scams to get women into these offices, from which they would be sent on interviews for receptionist placement.

But it seemed to her that any job she might obtain would only be a position in which to be humiliated. If she found a job at another auction house—and there weren't that many auction houses in Manhattan, let alone positions in jewelry, the only area in which she had training—there would always be someone above her, with more and better connections, experience, background, money. Even if they left, she would not be the one to be promoted: someone new would be brought in from the outside. Or if by some quirk of fate she was made department head, what real status was there in that? The money wasn't great; one wasn't put on the cover of a magazine for heading a jewelry department at an auction house. And how much pleasure did the work provide, when she could never afford to own what she spent the day handling? Any other job—working on a magazine, booking models at an agency, working in a shop or an art gallery—only led down the same deadend street.

If she had been born fantastically wealthy . . . but even there, the two rich women she knew were always slightly sneered at; somehow, there was always a faint smirk when their names were mentioned, because they weren't married. And the women she knew or read about in the press who did have jobs of some

power—running a magazine, heading a literary agency—were also sneered at, or loathed.

No one wanted to admit it, but even now the highest status for women in New York was to be married to a rich man. Marriage was still the great achievement, and single women, no matter how powerful, were still considered suspect, desperate or damaged. It was best to be married to a successful artist; otherwise, any rich man would suffice. Wasn't her view the only realistic one? It might not be such a great thought, but if that was the way things were, why deny it? No one questioned or pitied a married woman (until she was dumped for a younger woman). Having a man and a family was still the best protection a woman could avail herself of. Without a man, a woman was nothing.

"Pedicure too?" She nodded and pulled some pale gold polish—the latest color—from her bag. The Korean manicurist looked at it lustfully. "Very nice," she said, and mentioned the name of the shop where Florence had purchased it, the only shop where this polish was available. Even the manicurists, eking out an existence in tips, knew about such things, and spent hours studying the latest magazines (which were already six months out of date by the time they were published) out of some fear they would be left behind as the great tidal wave of fashion swept past.

Her feet were small and neat, the nails like little jingle shells. She looked at them admiringly while they were scrubbed and cosseted. Manicure and pedicure passed an hour and a half. She trudged home carrying her shoes, wearing paper slippers provided by the salon, the bits of cotton wool still protruding from between her toes. It took her another forty minutes to dress—half the items in her closet were strewn over her bed before she settled on a slightly peculiar skirt, made of gray and pink chiffon petals, and a gray T-shirt. There was a jacket that matched the outfit, but she decided it was too dressy and instead grabbed a thin gray cotton sweater and tied it around her neck. The little cigar pruner was wrapped in fancy dull paper, thick and expensive.

She jumped in a taxi and was at the restaurant by two. He was nowhere in sight, nor was there any reservation under his name.

She sat at the bar, drinking a glass of white wine. The restaurant was full; perhaps when he showed up and there was no reservation, they would have to go elsewhere.

Only the waiters looked at her admiringly. There was a table of four men—three were older, gray-haired; she recognized one as a publishing magnate—but if they noticed her, they were so cautious and subtle in their glances she didn't pick up anything. Next to them two women sat in front of huge salads—only mineral water on the table—nibbling so disdainfully on a single leaf at a time she knew they were vying to see who could eat less. They were so dowdy in their drab suits and pale makeup she didn't see what difference it would make if they were thinner. The whole place was like a funeral gathering, the only color in the room that of the pale pink tablecloths. The men wore gray, the women wore black. Egezio's was a well-known publishing world hangout, but all of New York was like this.

A rather attractive Asian man, slim, with clear, cold eyes like those of some martial arts expert, was seated next to her at the bar, attacking a plate of huge grilled mushroom caps, black and glistening, with knife and fork. For a moment he looked over at her as if he were about to say something, and she saw he was wearing a really good suit; he looked like Hong Kong money. She was about to smile at him encouragingly when someone tapped on her back. She turned to find Raffaello.

"I'm sorry to be so late," he said. "I got stuck at the office." She looked at her watch. It was after two-thirty. She smiled wanly, not knowing if she was supposed to act irritated or understanding. For a moment she could see him as a boy, in his family's huge house, or apartment, whatever it was, behind some ancient gates or wall and courtyard, pampered by the family maid, the fat cook—how they giggled and fussed, giving him bowls of the sweetest cherries on ice, the most garlicky, juiciest olives, the tenderest cutlets—as spoiled as a maharajah or prince. His face was dissolute, but attractively so, with a petulant charm; his nose must have been broken at one time—which was probably a help; he looked like a streetwise Apollo instead of a too pretty one.

"They didn't seem to have a reservation."

"What?" He exchanged a few words with the hostess, the same one who had treated her so rudely forty minutes before, and immediately they were led to one of the better tables, to the side of the room under a skylight. A waiter arrived with a basket of crusty rolls and a dish of butter molded into miniature, individual shells. Thirty-two years old, and she was still nervous about having lunch with an attractive man! But perhaps it wasn't nerves, exactly— perhaps it was closer to the excitement a tiger must feel when in hot pursuit of healthy prey. She pulled the napkin off the bread basket, exposing the firm tan mounds, and offered it to him; he grabbed a roll from the top and put some of the butter on his plate. Of course, she could not eat butter: was there any woman in the room who would touch the stuff? Lumps of fat, pure calories—oh, the horror—yet she longed for the creamy smoothness. So she took a roll and broke it open, nibbling at the hard surface, in order to have something to do. "Will you drink white wine?" he asked. Only foreigners in New York drank at lunch; though she usually had a glass of wine, this was not the norm. "Ah!" He was perusing the wine list. "Good, good, they have something here I think you will like to try."

"What is it?"

"A surprise."

"Oh, good. And here's my surprise for you." She handed him the box. "It's only sterling. I saw it and I thought, Well, if you already have one, I'll take it back and use it to curl my eyelashes or something."

He unwrapped it and, looking at it quickly, nodded and slipped it into his pocket. "Thank you. It's from Leaf's, no? That's a very nice shop."

She ordered grilled artichokes heaped with slivered Asiago cheese to start, followed by pasta in squid ink. The wine, when it arrived, turned out to be from the di Castignolli estate—very few bottles were made, let alone exported, but the owner of the restaurant, a friend of Raffaello's, had specially requested it and kept a cache of the best bottles hidden for him.

It was now a game of hunter and hunted. She used every trick at her disposal: she gazed at him admiringly while he spoke and asked him all the questions she could think of to draw him out. He had done some racing in cigarette boats—this was the most fascinating thing she had ever heard, and she wondered at the danger of it all, and that he wasn't scared. Travel—his trips to Alaska and Iceland for the fly-fishing. The latest movies he had seen. The personalities of his parents. His three brothers. By the time she asked if he was seriously pursuing a divorce, it was the question of one good friend to another, not the question of a woman prowling for a mate. Wasn't it almost impossible for Italians to divorce? Oh, the marriage hadn't taken place in Italy—that was clever. A second bottle of wine was ordered and brought to the table.
"So
delicious!" she said. Though he had snatched at the bread, it remained untouched. He ate almost nothing; the piles of delectable morsels lay heaped before him glistening with expensive oil.

The afternoon light came through the glass over their heads. The other diners had long since gone. The wine was very cold and crisp, and when the waiter did not replenish their glasses, Raffaello did so, tenderly, debonairly, himself. But it was no use.

"I must be getting back to the office," he said abruptly, drinking a slug of water. It was four-thirty. Not a single sparkle had crystallized in his eyes. She couldn't figure it out; she had done her best, as gracefully insinuating as a tapeworm, but there were not even the remotest signs of infatuation emanating from him. He was just as cool and distant as he had been a few nights back when they began chatting on line at the buffet—his eyes had roamed the room then as if hoping for a more succulent morsel, and they did so now. He was just as much the hunter as she.

To her surprise he suggested that she go back with him to his office; if she would give him a few minutes, he would see if he could finish up early, and they could then go to a movie, or perhaps a museum. He took her arm as they walked down Fifty-fourth Street.

9

She wandered around the
shop while he went upstairs to the offices. The items were phenomenally expensive and did not seem to be related to one another. There was a large overstuffed chair covered in a shimmery orange, red and gold fabric, almost Persian in its lush ornateness. This did not have a price tag, but a fabric book cover and a tapestry weekend-bag were marked five hundred and fifteen hundred dollars, respectively. There were a few items of clothing—a dressing gown, a pair of purple-and-cream trousers—

and a fabric lampshade. There was nobody in the shop apart from the two salesgirls, who ignored her, and while she looked around no one else came in. It was impossible to imagine how such a place stayed open, or made enough in sales to even pay the rent. All over the city there were equally peculiar operations, empty stores filled with expensive products, art galleries of ten thousand square feet with a pair of metal-and-rubber sculptures for sale. Unless they were fronts for some other kind of enterprise, such endeavors seemed to be of no use whatsoever. She had waited for almost forty minutes, and was about to ask one of the salesgirls to tell him she was about to leave, when he came down the stairs looking flushed and jittery. "Oh, you are still here!" he said. "I did not know if you would wait this long. I am afraid I am having something of an emergency and cannot get away. Will you take a raincheck?"

The salesgirls, ruby-lipped, brunette, twittered like grackles in their black garb at the back of the store. "You have nice things here!" she said, a bit too loudly. "I've got to get going anyway—I'll give you a call." He stepped forward and performed a little dance that entailed holding her by the shoulders and pecking the air on either side of her cheeks.

It was after five, the streets full of pedestrians leaving work. The atmosphere had that overworked, overused quality which comes before a storm in summer, when too many people have sampled and recycled the same breath of air over and over, until only a scant quantity of oxygen is left. She walked up Madison feeling like an idiot for having drunk so much at lunch, for having hung around so long in the shop when it was obvious he wasn't going to emerge from his office. Her head hurt. At least she hadn't offered to pay for her half of the meal! She realized she was walking more and more slowly. She didn't want to go home. She couldn't face her dark, overcrowded apartment, the moaning air conditioner in the bedroom sending out an erratic, narrow blast of damp, mildewed air that only occasionally accomplished anything. There had to be someone she could call, someone who would meet

her and do something with her. When she got in she would go through her address book. Or perhaps there was something written in her diary, a party or event she had forgotten about.

She went into a bookstore, a narrow, cool little shop with the latest novels beautifully arranged on a piece of blue velvet in the front window. These were not trashy beach books or those rated on the bestseller lists: they were all evocative gems, with titles like
Stars Drifting Through Granite, A Milky Dance with Jolson's Nose
and
Fossils of Whales and Birds.
The shop represented calm sophistication, an atmosphere charged with the notion that there was a higher order of existence and intelligence. It was a place that tried to suggest the old New York of culture could still be found. But it was an illusion, a movie set designed to soothe, a shop stocked with placebos.

She picked up three or four books that she had heard people mentioning—or had she seen them mentioned in magazines?— and though leafing through them she could see they were pretentious and unreadable, she felt this must be her fault and ended up charging a hundred and twenty dollars for four—three novels and a biography of a Jewish lesbian poet who had never been published before her death in 1940. She almost purchased a fancy art book about netsuke. The book cost a hundred and seventy-five dollars; a gift for Raffaello. It was all she could do to stop herself, but in her heart, a place she did not want to contemplate, she knew that even giving him the sterling-silver cigar cutter had been a mistake.