Any Place I Hang My Hat (31 page)

“How was she powerful?” a woman I thought might have been Benelux plus maybe Scandinavia retorted. “When Frank Rich was theater critic of the Times, he could make or break a play. Maybe even Brantley can.” She spoke quickly, impatiently, like someone who has a more interesting date waiting uptown providing she can extricate herself from this one. “We may be a national magazine, but we don’t have enough subscribers to sell out The Producers for two nights in a row. Well, at least we can’t get thousands of people tying up the phones at the box office.”

“But important people read the magazine,” I said, wanting to forestall Dana reopening our conversation, perhaps by seeking to know my position on trans-fatty acids. “Cultured people. When Caroline made an assignment, or if she thought a particular director’s movies were self-important and refused to run a piece on him, her decision could influence the movers and shakers. My guess is Frank Rich and Ben Brantley probably read In Depth. I don’t see why they wouldn’t give some thought to what we write about.”

“Excuse me, but we were talking about whether we would quit to follow a husband or life partner,” Frankie Watanabe remarked, “assuming he or she had to move far enough away that we could no longer be on staff. What does that say about women?”

“How can you generalize about what’s going on with all women based on a group of writers and reporters?” I asked. “Whether we do political analysis or dance criticism, we have a movable skill. We could write for an English-language periodical or be a contributing editor somewhere, work on a book. Or be like the rest of the world and write a screenplay. It would be different if Caroline had been a corporate executive or in a law firm or was an academic. Moving might mean that she was going someplace where she couldn’t get a job.” John would have moved for me, I thought. He could find a crew and write and edit almost anywhere. Would I have moved for him? Yes came to mind so fast I hadn’t the time to think of even one reason why I wouldn’t. Steve Raskin and I would stay in New York.

“No job would be that important to me that I wouldn’t be willing to give it up for someone I loved,” France said. “I mean, what is more magical than—”

Gloria didn’t have to clink her glass with a spoon or even clear her throat.

Everyone sensed she was about to speak. France fell silent. “Fifty percent of marriages end in divorce,” Gloria began. “Caroline and Tim always seemed to have a fine relationship and we’ll all be toasting them on their golden anniversary. But for the sake of argument, let’s say Tim runs off with Posh Spice, if that’s what that girl’s name is. Where does that leave Caroline?”

“She gets another job,” France replied. I’d heard she came from that part of Pittsburgh where they spoke English with a Continental accent.

“As what?” Dana demanded. “Either in London or New York, how many top magazine jobs are open to a woman who quit her last job and has been freelancing or—I don’t know-writing a book for two or three years? That’s a long time to be out of the game.”

Gloria held her chopsticks midair. “Here’s another thing.

Other than for jobs like Supreme Court justice or college president, how many men are there who would pack their bags and move for the sake of their wives’ careers?”

“I don’t understand you,” France said. “Every man-woman interaction cannot be a confrontation. Women are more giving by nature. And we are amazingly adaptable. I could go to Afghanistan tomorrow and make a life for myself.” And fit right in with her four-inch-heeled, fuck-me shoes with ankle straps. “If you were with the person who was the love of your life, wouldn’t you risk everything to be with him? Or her?”

Dana, the sport editor, cocked her head to one side. “I’d been working about a year and still going with my boyfriend from college. Dartmouth. This is when I was at Sports Illustrated. One night I was looking at his profile, a handsome, classic profile, Mark Antony, not Julius Caesar, but what I was really seeing was my future with him. I realized he’d got totally upset when I was going to cover the Super Bowl. I mean, what was I supposed to do, hand over my press credentials so he could get in to see the game? I tried to get him a ticket, but I couldn’t and he got even pissier. Right then and there, I knew the relationship wasn’t going to work. My work wasn’t important to him. I mean, I had a great job, but to him, my main job should have been him. He saw what I was doing at Sports Illustrated as a cute postcollege thing. That’s all I had to see. He was off my masthead like—” She snapped her fingers.

“What are you saying?” Germany demanded. “That a fulfilling life means being able to love or to work? Check only one box? What about Onkel Sigmund’s Fähigkeit zu arbeiten und zu lieben? He said und.”

“Forget und,” Dana said wearily. “For ninety-nine percent of us, there is no und.”

THAT MONDAY, I yearned for the flu, though I would have settled for bronchitis—anything that would not allow me to get out of bed. True, when I walked my usual running route through Central Park, I was somewhat heartened by the trees. Real spring at last. The cherries were in full white flower—though they could have been apple trees. I was not from the great arborists, since beside oak, maple, and the über-category of evergreens, all I could identify were crab apples. That was because some alumna had donated a grove of them to Ivey. Every spring when they bloomed we had the Grove Walk, during which we strolled along a path through the trees singing the alma mater. It was a tradition I cruelly mocked and secretly cherished.

Now, it was crab-apple time in the park. My second favorite tree was flowering as well, a short, stubby thing with crackly bark, arthritic branches, and cascades of small, hazy pink blossoms that looked like upside-down mops. So much for nature. Maybe I was in a lousy low-endorphin mood from not being able to run. But God, how I wanted to go back to my apartment and instead of showering, get back to bed with a cup of tea I was too sick to swallow beside me. It’s not as if I was under pressure. I had more than a week to get out an article on the Democratic left’s evolving position on the Middle East. Yet it was precisely the sort of piece I most hated writing. Foreign affairs.

Whenever anyone at In Depth did more than touch on an area outside his or her own bailiwick, the article had to be vetted by one of the editors with expertise in that particular subject. While intellectually I appreciated their input, correcting my errors and offering new insights, emotionally I wished they would drop dead, thereby leaving me free to write without petty qualifiers; I detested footnotes in any form. Gloria, of course, was excepted from this disfavor, as was the physics/earth-science guy who had gone over my environmental piece.

But the editor for the Middle East was another story. A former academic, he had an upper-class English accent. I guessed it was upper-class: Though his mouth moved, he sounded as if his nose were doing the talking. His hair was parted slightly to the right of the middle so he always looked off balance. Both in coldest February and the tropical heat of a New York August, he wore three-piece suits. Ah, Miss Lincoln, he would say, luffly to see you. He thought me a fellow Anglo-Saxon and thereby felt free to make contemptuous remarks about Muslims and Jews. With people like him, I was more direct than usual. But saying Shut up, Philip or Philip, you moron, I’m a Jew amused him. He seemed to perceive the former response as coquetry and the latter as jest. It was only Monday, I told myself. I didn’t have to deal with him until Friday. Nevertheless, I felt like Frodo gazing upon a distant Mount Doom.

Body and soul, I was worn out. Usually my legs came close to being perpetual motion machines. I’d go for my morning run, then walk the two and a half miles to work and never tire. Maybe the discussion at Gloria’s birthday brunch the day before had taken its toll. Love or work: a phony setup. No need to choose. Yet all I kept winding up with was work. Never a real, reciprocated love. I had no man. No family. No circle of beloved friends with whom I’d formed a clan to stand in for kin. No people or person I could be with and think, I’m home.

Trudging down Broadway toward the office, I was in such a fog that somewhere in the thirties I stood on a corner waiting for the light to change from red to green and began crossing only when the light switched back to red again. Instead of legs, I was ambulating on two logs sawed from a sequoia.

Spring had arrived for everybody else. Pedestrians promenaded with a tra-la-la gait. When I stopped by a deli near the office, there was a long, slow line of people requesting iced coffee and tea. I willed myself not to be impatient, but when I found myself focusing on a pile of grotesquely large apple turnovers, I asked the woman behind me to hold my place, telling her I had a quick call to make.

I found myself in the back of the deli, standing before a pay phone, clutching three quarters in one hand and, with the other, holding the receiver against my ear—a repulsive necessity I had been able to avoid since the advent of cell phones, thus limiting my chances of contracting some new hepatitis mutation spread by drug dealers, the only ones I’d ever seen using the phone. On the other hand, the pay phone was caller-ID-proof. Even if traced, the number would be the one for Nate and Molly’s Delicatessen.

Two seconds later, I was dialing a number I didn’t even know I had memorized. My heart pounded. I turned my head and saw that if I wanted coffee, I’d better make it fast. That would be easily accomplished because I had no intention of speaking. A voice said, “Hello.” I stayed silent. I stuck my index finger into my free ear hoping to hear more clearly.

Was this my mother’s voice at eight forty-five on a Monday morning? It sounded fairly deep. Could it be a guy? Maybe Ira Hochberg was a castrato or, okay, a tenor, who left for work late. Possibly one of her sons was home from school, celebrating his voice changing. My heart banged harder. My stomach contracted into a painful knot. “Hello?” The voice was louder, sharper, but I still couldn’t tell, man or woman. I hung up, though unfortunately not quickly enough to avoid spotting drug dealer goop on the earpiece. My stomach went from a knot into a backflip and I decided to pass on the coffee.

Five minutes later, I was in the office. After some time disinfecting in the ladies’ room, I went to my desk. The usual pile of newspapers was there, as well as the newsmagazines. I opened my bottom drawer and set them all there, then rested my feet on my desk while I listened to messages. Five or six from nearly deranged Democrats deprived of attention, one from In Depth’s bookkeeper wanting to know where my expense vouchers were for the Florida trip.

And one from Steve Raskin, the criminal defense lawyer who had absolutely nothing wrong with him. “Hi, Amy. Steve Raskin. Hope you had a good weekend. Are you free this Saturday night? I’ve got a client who’s a ticket scalper, so I can get tickets to pretty much anything you’d like to see. I’m in court this afternoon, but I’ll be around most of the morning. Look forward to hearing from you.”

What a nice guy. Thoughtful. Objectively attractive. The last quality raised only the slightest issue, that after theater he might expect a fourth act. I’d left my days of this-will-feel-good-even-if-I-hardly-know-you sex behind around the time I turned twenty-five. Well, he could deal. I called him back, had a really good chat about whether Donald Rumsfeld’s high-handedness with the press was a cover-up for insecurity or was simply unadulterated arrogance. I told him, untruthfully, I’d probably have to fly out to Iowa for a piece on the caucuses, so if I had to give him an answer today, it would have to be no. He was pretty cool, and suggested that if I didn’t go I should give him a call. Meantime, if something came up for him on Saturday night, he might take it, but then maybe on Sunday we could have brunch, take a walk. Was I interested in seeing the Klee exhibit at the Met? If I could make it home by then, that would be great, I told him.

I liked Steve for many reasons, one of them being that he’d called right away. Tatty slept late, so I started making calls for my lefties and the Middle East article until I could get her on the phone and hear her say, Are you absolutely insane to put a man like that on hold?

Tatty pretty much said what I’d expected her to say, and at great length. Right before we hung up, she said, “You’re still so sad about John.”

“I am. Don’t tell me to snap out of it.”

“I won’t. This is a rough one.”

I got back to work, broke for a protein bar and a Diet Coke, and when I next looked up it was nine at night. I then had a moment of lunacy. I took a taxi home for the first time in my eight years at In Depth. How come I hadn’t done it before? If I’d ever analyzed it, which I hadn’t, I would have recognized that my budget could withstand the occasional cab splurge. Using feet and subway exclusively would not get my college and graduate school loans repaid years earlier.

When it came to money, I was conservative. Some might call it cheap. Saving the extra napkins from a bag of takeout food. Collecting tiny bottles of inferior toiletries from the third-rate hotels on the magazine’s approved list, so I had two shoe boxes full of shampoos, conditioners, and body lotion I never wanted to use.

Maybe it was knowing that if anything happened to me, I had no one to fall back on. Asking Tatty for money would be the end of what we’d always had, a friendship between equals. True, if I were in desperate straits, Chicky would try to come to my rescue. Unfortunately, that would put him in the difficult position of having to figure out how to raise capital: Hmm, armed robbery or burglary? He wasn’t particularly adept at either. Perhaps I needed a larger nest egg than most people of my age and income bracket because I worried that in time of trouble, I might not be able to resist taking the easy way out and going into the family business, felony.

As the taxi bumped and squealed uptown, I watched the driver’s shoulders rising way up to his ears, falling, then rising again. From the back, it appeared an extremely French gesture, one that would go with saying Je ne sais pas with much fervor. Shoulders up, shoulders down, over and over. A man with a tic, I decided, not a schizophrenic responding to an auditory hallucination. I closed my eyes, but opened them again fast.