An Enlarged Heart (12 page)

I had not worn it for some time and it smelled faintly of cedar and old dry cleaning fluid. He walked around me, and then took some pins out of his mouth and hovered for a moment behind me. I felt the weight of the jacket shift. “If we take it in here, then it will hang better, so. And when the lining is replaced the jacket will hang better, too, because it will know what's what.”

What's what.
“What's what,” I would learn on my visits to Mr. Ferri, was a magical term. It meant that a garment was finished, and it also referred to that state of precise rightness to which every dress, jacket, or pair of trousers aspired: to be itself, but more so, to be, as far as he could make it so, perfect. Before I took the jacket off he considered shortening the sleeve one-quarter inch, then rejected the idea, and in doing so touched the inside of my wrist, briefly, with his thumb, as if taking my pulse.
No, fine, fine.
The moment was gone. When I took out the lining I had brought he did not blink. He unrolled it on the countertop, then said that as there was not enough for the sleeves, could they (he said “we”) use another lining instead? He showed me a bolt of silk the color of pale tea. We agreed. The lining of the sleeves would not show, in any case.

“And you will have your nice secret anyway,” he said, his finger passing over the faces of the silent marketplace.

The torn trousers were the work of a moment. He would try to replace the place that had been rent and worn through by taking a patch from the inside of the pant leg hem; he wasn't sure it would hold. Did I want to try anyway? The material was beautiful but like many beautiful things it wore easily. About this he spoke less like a Prospero and more like a physician: Was the patient worth saving? We agreed on life support.

“Now we will get busy, busy, and you will come back next week.” Sarah had warned me that the custom was to pay half the bill, in cash, up front. I had just enough for the astronomical bill which Mr. Ferri's Johnny wrote up and presented to me without a word.

It was October, and it got colder. I picked up my jacket with its iridescent panels of silent faces, and the trousers, which I would wear twice before they split again. I walked through Central Park with the large plastic bag that Mr. Ferri had carefully folded and saved for me. I did not know, that day, that as I walked through the park, which seemed to turn from Indian summer to autumn in an afternoon, that the house that I was walking toward was slowly splitting apart, nor that I would wear the jacket almost constantly through the next several winters, the secret lining close to my skin. I had recently heard from an old friend, to whom I had written when his father died, and whom I had not spoken to since we were young. We had lived together in New York and often walked through the park together, and I found myself on that afternoon missing him: he had grown up with his friends in the park, and because of that the park to me was part of not only our history together but his dream-life, which had become mine, when we lived together and for long afterward. The fall was the beginning of a gyroscope, in which I would come out the other end and there would be another voice, not my friend's, but someone else's whose I had known even longer, whom when I told him that I had walked across the park would immediately ask what shoes I was wearing, because he is trying to dissuade me from the fashionable shoes he loves—his great-grandfather was a shoemaker in Italy, and I think he longs to have been one—which I persist in wearing, and which tear at my feet.

But then I had no inkling of this. It got colder, and because the teetering house was so expensive to heat, I was sitting in a room at the front of the house one evening wrapped in a blanket, looking out at the street, which was covered with snow, and pretending to write a letter, when the telephone rang. It was my friend, E——. Her husband had decided he would like to buy her a new fur coat, and would I like her old one? As she pointed out, I am always cold. The coat, a mink, was twenty years old. She had thought of using it to line a raincoat, but she already had a fur-lined raincoat which was perfectly functional. She didn't need another. It was old, but it was warm—the mink, that is. The wool blanket I was wrapped in was black-and-red-plaid. It had belonged to my first husband's grandmother, and the moths had long ago webbed the corners. For a while, it had covered one of the tattered sofas in the living room, but when it became tattered itself, I had taken it upstairs. As I talked on the phone, I stuck my finger through the holes the moths had made.

Later that week I picked up the coat from her doorman. Like many buildings in New York, it was a building I had known a long time ago. Almost every day when she was small I had picked up my youngest daughter at her school and ridden through the green river of Central Park. The bus stopped in front of the awning of this same building before turning right and then left, to the subway, which would take us farther uptown, and before that, when I was a girl, a friend of mine knew a girl who lived there, whose mother, she told me, was clairvoyant. No matter what her friend was doing, or where she was, her mother would later describe places she herself had never seen. When the girl went to college, her mother would call, and tell her what she was wearing. The story—the mother, peering through the ether at the other end of the phone—haunted me. The girl was rich, and always had plenty of pocket money, but one of the things she liked to do was hail a cab that was about to go through the park at Eighty-first, and get the driver to take her across the park for free, since, she reasoned, he was going anyway. Part of this story was always that she told the cabbie she “didn't have a nickel.” What difference a nickel would have made was unclear, but the point was the old-fashioned diction, the plaintive quality—she was a small, fine-boned girl, with hair the color of toffee, who looked a little like a mouse. Often she would succeed—my friend had been with her on more than one mission—and implicit, too, was the sense of danger, of getting away with something for nothing, of lying, and also, the neatness of the solution: Why not? The upshot of this is that when I went to see my friend and her husband at their immaculate apartment, with walls made of planed timber from exotic trees, and when I got off the bus with my daughter after school, and when I tried to get a cab on that corner, I was at once there, at no. 7, and also the girl looking through the wrong end of a telescope, all those years ago, a fortune-teller, who could see me, from the distance of all those years ago, who had become, too, a woman at the end of the phone being offered a fur coat, or squinting, wrapped in an ancient red-and-black blanket, listening to her own children on the phone, who were away at school, and trying to picture where they were calling from.

I picked up the coat and went around the corner to take the subway home. At home, I left it in the hall and went to make supper. It wasn't until later that evening that I remembered the coat. I brought the bag upstairs and tried it on. It felt hot, heavy, and stiff. I thought of the rule about fires that had never made intuitive sense to me: if someone is burning, wrap them up in a carpet. It was hot outside the coat. In the inadequate bedroom mirror, all I could see was my face peering out of a cloud of fur. I went upstairs to the third floor, to ask the children. Two of them were sitting on a long red sofa by the top landing, with what looked like a set of math problems on the floor, abandoned, beside them. When they saw me, in the coat, they immediately began to snort with laughter.
What is that?
they demanded. The general opinion was that it looked like I had had a fight with a bear and it had won. I looked, my daughter said, like a gigantic black cat. I pointed out that it wasn't bear or cat, it was mink. They asked whether I really intended to wear fur. When I replied that in all likelihood the mink had been dead many many years and whether I wore it or not it was not going to bring it back to life, the response was gagging noises and sobs, and then the sound of a tom-tom made by hitting an old leather chair cushion with a stick, and I decided to leave them to it.

I went back downstairs and looked at the fur in the mirror.
What's what?
I thought. The coat was too big. There was a tear in the left sleeve and a hole in the pocket. A button was missing.
Twist, twist.
When I was in high school I'd found a lipstick in the pocket of an old coat of my father's. The case was heavy gold metal, and when I unscrewed it the dried red lipstick broke in my hand. There was nothing in the pockets of the coat. I had never imagined myself as the owner of a fur coat, and I was having trouble imagining it now. A friend of many years had an aunt who had owned a dress business on Madison Avenue in the sixties and seventies: Perhaps she would know what to do with the coat? I had called on her before, my friend's aunt Susan: she had led me to the shop where I'd found the Japanese silk lining. The advice was definite. There was a furrier called Jerry Sorbara, and I was to take the coat to him. She didn't have his address, but as far a she could recall he was in the East Thirties. Out of loyalty, I called Mr. Ferri. He was regretful but firm: no fur. I had an evening dress of my mother's I was thinking of having him look at—we arranged a time that week. Then I called Jerry Sorbara. The woman who answered the telephone had a high nasal voice: she sounded like the telephone operator at the switchboard at the magazine where Sarah and I had worked so long ago, a Gorgon matched by her Medusa of wires. She asked me how old the fur was, which she called “your mink.” I told her. Then added, out of nervousness—here was a new gamut to run. “Approximately, I mean, I think.” There was a long silence. Then she said, “Anytime.”

It was not a neighborhood I knew well. On the way downtown I had had lunch with a friend, in a restaurant behind the Fifth Avenue Public Library, which looks out on Bryant Park and the pigeons scuffling in the fall leaves. She started when her foot knocked into the bag under the table, which I had refused to check. The fur felt electric and alive, and she said, “What is that?” I had walked the ten blocks south on Fifth Avenue, past the Public Library and the old B. Altman. When I found the address, between a Korean grocer and a restaurant advertising fried pork and kimchi, the porter at the desk waved me in: I wanted, he said, the eleventh floor. There was a long mirror in the lobby and in it, I saw an arm of the coat hanging outside the bag, like the arm of a beaver or a badger. It gave me a feeling of distress. In the mirror I looked blanched and uneasy, fish-eyed.

It was the kind of elevator my youngest child once called two-faced. The door that opened onto the eleventh floor was not the door which had opened in the lobby: it was another, secret door, and it opened behind me. I walked into a small white cubicle, where a woman was seated behind a glass partition. There were pieces of fur on hooks on the wall behind her, and it was hard not to think she was stuffed. I said my name. “You have your mink?”

Immediately I wanted to say that it wasn't my mink, it was my friend's mink: the idea of having a mink, which seemed to me, in that moment, indescribably vulgar, was something I wanted to put away from me, especially a mink that was lying scrunched in a shopping bag, its one badger arm testing the air. There was no help for it. “Jimmy,” she yelled, and pressed a button. A door to the left was opened by a very tall man, about ten or fifteen years younger than I was, whom I will call Jimmy. He was wearing a pin-striped suit, and his black hair was cut short, and parted on the side. He had the handsome face of a television sports announcer, and I took the coat out of the bag and on his instruction, put it on. I look back now that this was a time of my life when I was constantly trying things on, in workrooms and dressing rooms, and asking people what they thought, which is not something I do often now, for complex and perplexing reasons—why I was doing that and why I ceased to do it. Jimmy looked like a man on television who is trying to make the best of what he knows is going to be a sad, losing game. “Aha!” he said, rubbing his hands. And then, “Aha!” again, as if in the interval he had come to some kind of conclusion. A discussion ensued. I asked if it was possible to alter the coat. I think the expression I used was “Is it worth it.” When I entered the room, a spacious atelier with three standing mirrors, and coats grouped on hangers on trees, as well as along the wall, Jimmy had just finished helping two clients, a mother and her two daughters. They were buying a coat each. They were so harsh with each other, that it was impossible not to think of Cinderella's stepmother and evil sisters. When one tried on a coat that didn't suit her—the color was wrong, or the style—the others were beside themselves with glee, pointing out the flaws, and how it would be impossible, actually, for Sylvia to wear
anything like that,
that it seemed impossible that they had found coats that they did like, although they had apparently, as each one walked out with a box under her arm, after a consultation about whether it would be possible to ship the coats to Boca Raton, and therefore evade paying taxes. I did not think that the expression “is it worth it” had occurred to Sylvia and her mother and sister, and I felt embarrassed. What was I doing there?

I realized in that moment that I wanted a fur coat. It had not occurred to me to want one before. I looked at Jimmy with a kind of pleading. The fur was old, he told me. The quality was good, but it could tear if they tried to cut it up. I should try some coats on—what style was I thinking of? For the next few minutes I tried on furs. In all of them, I looked ridiculous. My children were right. I looked like a woman being eaten by an animal. Or Ninotchka. Jimmy and I were as one on this. Fifteen minutes later, I had tried on ten coats. A short man who looked like a wrestler, called Greg, who would a year or two later sell me, as a sample, a leftover fox hat from the previous season, for what used to be called a song, was taking up the discarded coats and tenderly hanging them up again, but still there was a mounting pile of fur on the leather sofa. “My mink” was on the table. The last coat I tried on was a short car coat, with a cable belt. Behind my image in the mirror a man appeared. He was small, and wore a golf shirt, pressed trousers, a snakeskin belt, and white tennis shoes. His hair was white. He had a small cleft chin and molded cheekbones, and he looked like a small elderly version of Robert Mitchum in
The Sundowners.
He came up behind me, shook his head, and lifted the jacket off my shoulders. He said, under his breath, “No, no, no,” and then, aloud, “What is going on here?”