An Enlarged Heart (9 page)

I retired the black baffled coat. Each time I had been moved to wash it the dye had further bled. In many places it was no longer black but the color of smoke. I wore my father's coat for a series of winters, to the large office building where I worked at a magazine, and I wrapped it tightly around me while I waited for whomever I was going out to lunch with to finish a cigarette in the shadow of the building where we were protected from the wind, and I wore it to parties where I left it in the pile of coats in a distant bedroom of huge apartments that belonged to people who were decades older than I was, whose medicine cabinets were filled with dried-up bottles of Mercurochrome and vials of tranquilizers. When, instead, there was a rented coat-rack in the hall, I would carefully put my coat on the floor, rolled up and behind the tote bags of editors who were bringing galleys home to read on the train. It seems clear to me now that no one would have stolen my coat or mistaken it for their own, but I was wary. Much later, when I began to have parties in the apartment with the long hall, when I went into the bedroom to make sure that no one had left a cigarette smoking on the windowsill, I would notice furtive signs that reminded me of my own—a jacket tucked carefully into the corner behind the bookcase, a bag hidden behind the armchair pushed against the wall.

In that apartment, by the time I began to shift the winter and summer things in the closet it was usually either too hot or too cold. Winter jackets had been pulled to the fore and crammed between the summer things, or the reverse. I often found crumpled juice boxes in the boots, and cheap toys that had been given to the children as favors at birthday parties which I'd stuffed into the closet, planning to throw them out after they'd gone to bed. These toys were usually in paper bags that also held candy which had turned white and was smeared with mold. The mold in the boots and the forgotten candy was no one's fault but my own. It wasn't remotely possible that anyone but me would clean out the closet.

At the time, I had a dozen coats. These coats included the first coats I had bought, and the last one, which had been bought for me. My father's coat, with its fraying hem, was among them. I found it impossible to give it away to the annual thrift shop drive at the school the children attended. This thrift shop opened for one week a year, in the basement of Synod Hall. The school was on the grounds of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, and the years the children were there transpired in an atmosphere of damp stone and crying peacocks. I usually worked at the thrift shop, which was part of a fair on the close—there was a bake sale, and a plant sale, and children ran around and squirted water pistols—and for weeks before I sorted through the children's clothes and brought over large shopping bags of outgrown party shoes and snowsuits. At the shop I liked sorting through the bags other people brought. In those years the shop was a kind of clothes swap—months afterward at a party I would find that I was wearing the hostess's Japanese skirt, which she'd given to the thrift shop; at a piano recital another mother was wearing a jacket with purple buttons I'd had made for me in the early nineteen-eighties. I had even acquired one of my coats there: a blue cape with a funnel hood.

The first coats I bought were in Venice, and I bought them on the same day. I had just been married for the first time. My husband and I had expected to begin our trip in Rome, but we had spent almost a week, unexpectedly, in Sperlonga, a seaside town between Rome and Naples. When we decided to leave Sperlonga, and pick up our trip, as we had intended, Rome—where we had originally meant to stay in a friend's apartment—had become for various reasons insupportable, and we went instead to Venice.

It was chilly in Venice. Our hotel was next to the opera house, and the voices of singers hung in the cold air of Piazza San Marco. At night a fog curtain closed over the lagoon. I had brought my green suede jacket. The lining by then had deteriorated to a fretwork of peach satin in the seams. We walked all day, and in the late afternoon, when my fingertips had turned white and then yellow, I would return to the hotel and turning on the tap full blast, lower myself as best as I could into the hip bath in the tiny bathroom in order to get warm. My husband had not been to Venice before. While I was in the tub he would be out, drawing. In the tub I read
The Golden Bowl.
One afternoon when it was warmer, rather than retreat to the tub after my husband had departed to draw and smoke cheroots on the Accademia Bridge, I found myself staring into a shop window lined with pale leather handbags in ice cream colors. Toward the back of the shop I could see a rack of coats. Inside, the lights illuminating the glass shelves in the window lit up their beveled edges. The coats were black, brown, crimson, and loden green. The store was deserted. Perhaps the shop girl was having a coffee in the back? If she had been visible, eager to help, I probably would not have gone in and tried on a coat, but alone I felt emboldened, a child playing dress-up. The lines of the coat I put on were nineteenth century. It had rounded lapels, a wasp-waist accomplished by back darts, a bell-shaped skirt, and a single row of embossed pewter buttons that reached the hem, which was ankle length. The sleeves were full but cinched at the wrists with matching buttons. The buttons said “Fendi.” The general effect was equestrian. Perhaps because I had recently left behind in Sperlonga a pair of gold and coral earrings that I had not bought, although I now pined for them, a week later, with a kind of desperation (I'd even written to ask if they were still in the shop), I wouldn't have thought of buying it.

I stood for a long time looking into the mirror, in a kind of dream; it was the kind of dream, as the years went on, I know now, in which most of my decisions occur, as if my life were a cloth in which I had missed essential parts, that I was filling in stitch by stitch, like Penelope. I could not afford the coat, even at the very reduced price (
seventy-five percent off!
). I did think about whether my husband would like the coat: he would, I thought. For a number of years I had been wearing almost exclusively silk and cotton crocheted dresses—garments that many years later had a second life by appearing regularly in Shakespeare productions put on by children. (I spent so much time in the shop that sold those dresses, drinking sauterne with the owner, Lola, that my husband had adopted one of her daughters, who was called Violet, as a model, and had begun to take an interest in the colors the clothes were dyed, which took place in the back. Later, Lola's husband, who did the dye lots, tried to run her over with a tractor, on a place they had upstate, and the shop closed.) My husband liked the dresses, although many people did not. He would like the coat, I thought. While I was trying it on a girl had appeared. She was a tall girl, with very high-heeled black patent-leather boots and matching hair—she stood, slightly bored, by the cash register. When I felt I had looked at myself long enough I asked her about the boots on the floor. I wanted someone to talk to. They too were
seventy-five percent off.
Only a few days before I had refused to buy a pair of earrings that were roughly one fiftieth the cost of the coat. I realized I didn't want her to know how much I wanted the coat—I wanted her to think I bought coats every day of the week, at the drop of a hat. In the moment, convincing the shop girl, whose patent-leather hair, I could now see, was threaded with red glitter, of this entirely untrue fact was of utmost importance. I was wearing the coat—a garment from which it was clear to me I would never be parted.

In order to sit down and try on the boots I had to sweep the voluminous skirt of the coat to the side. There was only one pair of boots in my size. The soft leather was the color of cognac, and the top of the boot, which stopped a few inches above the ankle, was scalloped. I have had those boots now for over a quarter of a century. The leather of the shoe has almost completely disintegrated, and where the leather meets the soles, there are holes that the shoemaker (to whom I have taken the boots countless times) has finally despaired, and encouraged me, with the air of a sister of mercy, to throw them out. Then, without looking at the price, I put the boots on the counter for the girl, who was beginning now to show interest: perhaps I would like to see something else?

No, I was finished. Could I wear the coat out? The girl cautioned me that the coat was not returnable:
ricevuto di ritorno.
I spread my fingers in a mock gesture of supplication: what the gods had willed was not mine to choose. She raised her eyebrows. And what, we seemed to say to each other, could be returned anyway? The girl folded my old suede jacket and put it in the bag with the boots—I was tempted to give it to her. Outside the shop it was colder. Damp was beginning to seep out of the stones. I walked back to the hotel by the opera house, which was quiet now in the late afternoon, and when I got there I took off the coat, hung it up in the wardrobe, a black affair trimmed with gold leaf and a picture of a pagoda under a lotus, lay down on the bed, and went to sleep.

When I woke up an hour later my husband had returned. He was sitting in a chair by the bed, wearing his anorak, and he was drawing me. “Don't move,” he said. I stayed as I was for a moment, on my back with my right hand flung over my head and my left leg bent. Then I stretched. “I found something for you,” he said. He had come in so recently that his beard was still beaded with water. He looked like Neptune—he often looked like Neptune. When I think of him now, of those years, for I still often see him—after all we were together for almost a decade and a daughter together, although we parted soon afterward—I imagine him at a distance, as if he were always either walking toward me or away from me. When he painted he held the brush between his teeth. We were both subject to fits. He was visibly pleased by what he had found for me, and when he suggested that we could go look at it I was happy to go. You can't have it now, he said.

I had woken in a paroxysm of guilt. The long coat, unbuttoned, hid in the closet. I put on my old jacket, which wasn't warm enough, and we walked through the hotel's red lobby into the streets, now lit up like electric eels against the dark. We passed a wine bar we had liked the day before, and a few paces beyond it, in a cul-de-sac, was a shop. The doors were closed and locked, but the windows were illuminated: in one arched window was a hip-length suede coat. The suede was the color of pale cocoa, and the shoulders and button placket were outlined in thin bands of chocolate leather. Reflected in the plate glass, my tattered suede jacket was superimposed on the coat. At the back of the house by the cove where as a girl I went with my mother and father in the summer, there was a cellar door you could stand on. It was painted copper, with rust-resistant paint, and even in the morning, the metal was hot on my bare calloused feet. There weren't any mirrors in the house, except for the medicine cabinet over the sink. If you stood on the door, you could see yourself in the kitchen casement window. When we returned after almost a year away, I would stand on the door and look. Behind me were the pine trees, their green needles ending in spikes that matched the cellar door, as if they'd been singed. I would scrutinize my reflection, which came back to me neatly divided into quadrants. Had I grown? I had no idea of what I looked like. I saw a middle-sized girl, slightly round in ways she found detestable, with a furrow between her brows, squinting.

My taller reflection on the shop window wavered. There was condensation on the glass. My husband drew an X with his finger. “There's your coat,” he said. He had seen it earlier this afternoon. They were holding it. I could try it on in the morning. He would have bought it but had wanted to make sure it fit. I burst into tears.
How could I
have not known
? In the shop, trying on the coat I had bought, with its snake of buttons and swashbuckling skirt, how could I have not known that a few blocks away, perhaps at that very moment, my husband had found a coat for me? A chasm opened. At the bottom I could see coats piled willy-nilly: beautiful coats, fur coats, tattered coats. When I was eight years old, I was in love with my best friend, Joanne, who lived a few minutes' walk from my house on a street called Beach Drive. “Beach Drive” I used to like to say to myself. Where was the sea? The street led nowhere near the sea. We played almost every day at her house or at mine. At her house we were often joined on the swing set by Gus, who lived next door, who was a dwarf. He was older than we were, but he was smaller. He was kind, and he knew everything. He was, my friend Joanne said, “a font of wisdom.” Gus knew how far we were from the sun, and when the sun was likely to burn out and leave us in cold and darkness. Sometimes we played at cold and darkness. We draped an old tarp over a bush. If it was winter, we took off our coats. It was important, Gus told us, to feel the cold. His birthday was on leap year: although he was twelve, he was really only three years old. There was no end, I was learning, to conundrums. My children have grown up in New York City in apocryphal times—after the Twin Towers exploded we began to worry immediately, when the children left for school, or when we went to the store or to work, whether we would ever see each other again, a worry that took root and grew leaves in every cell of our bodies. If you took apart our veins you would see the snake eyes of those shoots whose tendrils have rooted us to a spot of fear, colonized by small, skittering wild life. Because of this our children do not take the bus or the subway or walk anywhere alone until they are old enough to walk away, without us.

Joanne and I were allowed to walk each other halfway home, a distance of about a quarter of a mile. When we walked we talked nonstop. When we got to the midpoint, we often turned back and started again. Often we did this so many times that her mother would call my mother, wondering where we were. Then one of our mothers, annoyed and wiping her hands, would appear and divide us. It was late. We had homework. We needed to eat. I walked home with my mother, wearing my navy-blue wool coat. My mother is five feet one inches tall. Gus, who knew everything, had told me that soon I would be taller than my mother, a fact I turned over in my mind. In my family now our eldest daughter is the smallest, which irritates her, as if her power as the eldest is somehow diminished. When some children came by our rickety house last summer they were amazed. How could it be? Magic. I thought of Gus, who by the time he was five, or twenty, was dead. In the meantime he had grown wizened and hunched, even smaller. I went less frequently to Joanne's house (a new girl she liked better played there more often) and I rarely saw Gus. He had begun to make me feel uncomfortable: he was a know-it-all, I thought. My own body was becoming less familiar to me. When I looked in the mirror I focused, in turn, on my nose (was it a different color than the rest of my face?) and my mouth (my gums were too prominent). I read fairy tales, and in each one the troll who asked questions or demanded recompense had Gus's face.
But it was you
who had the answers,
I would accuse the face, silently.