Crossroads (18 page)

Sean wanted to take a look at some slums, so I invited him to come to work with me. We went to the site of a new commercial revitalization project, and together we walked through bombed-out, rat-infested, barely standing shells of tenements.

We stood in a pile of rubble and I told Sean my plan. I wanted to take five of the buildings in that square-mile radius, completely renovate them, turn them into commercial and office space and single-unit dwellings. The plan was to encourage young, single professionals to move uptown. I pointed to a parking lot that I wanted to turn into a playground. I pointed to a factory building, gutted by fire, that I wanted to make into artists' studios. And then there were five other dwellings that I planned to renovate for low-income family dwellings. “You see,” I explained, “what I'm trying to do is break down the one-dimensional quality of these neighborhoods. I want an economic mix to bring up the standards of the neighborhood in general, without raising rents . . . Oh, it's all very complicated but I think it can work. It's a new concept in urban design, that's all. The City Council thinks I'm mad.”

Sean began to laugh. “Young professionals living up here?”

“Well, that's part of it. It would help the housing crunch, diversify communities without raising rents. The important thing is to keep rents stabilized. I've worked it all out . . .”

He put his arm around me. “You know what I think?”

“Is it going to upset me?”

He shook his head. “I don't think so. I think I'm falling in love with you.”

I rolled my eyes and walked ahead of him through a pile of beer cans. “Don't,” I said. “I'm not ready.”

“Don't worry,” he said from behind me. “I'm not either.”

Sometimes we'd walk in the evenings through Little Italy or SoHo, and Sean would talk to me about his life. He'd skipped his senior year of high school and gone to Yale when he was seventeen. Before he left for New Haven, he fell in love with a girl. The only writing he did his first year at Yale was to
that girl back home. He was kicked out of Yale and drafted. His parents, good Irish-Americans, told him he had to fight, but the army was more merciful. They knew a performer when they saw one. For fifteen months Sean worked as a communications expert in Vietnam. He kept writing to the girl while she was falling in love with someone else.

When he got back home Yale gave him one more chance, and he graduated with a degree in drama. “I swear, the only drama I've ever had in my life has been on the stage or in front of a camera. I'm a very boring person.” In Vietnam he never saw the war. He only heard it and heard about it. “But once I saw a tiger,” he told me one night as we walked around Washington Square. “I swear to God. I'd gone into the jungle by helicopter to interview some soldiers. I was fifty miles from where there was any action but I was scared out of my mind. Usually they had this guy from
Time
who went into the bush to report, but he had a cold. I was scared shitless. After I talked to the soldiers, I walked back to the helicopter through this thick bush. All of a sudden, I see this pair of green eyes staring at me and I know it's a goddamn tiger. So I just stare at it and it goes away. But that was the scariest thing that ever happened to me in my whole life.”

The night Sean told me he'd seen a tiger in the jungle, he told me he'd found an apartment in the West Village. For some reason, those two facts had the same impact on me. They filled me with fear and disbelief.

I think I was particularly surprised he'd found an apartment because we'd spent the day strolling through a cold autumn Manhattan, arm in arm, in our pullovers, stopping for cappuccino to escape the cold. It surprised me because we had gone back to my place after he told me about the tiger, gotten into bed, and made love better than we'd ever made love. I think in part we made love so well because I hadn't been thinking about Mark or Lila for a while. I'd hardly been think
ing about hurting them, and the rage that had been in me for so long was subsiding. It was really the first night, that night after he told me about the tiger, that our lovemaking wasn't onesided. And afterward, I lay in his arms, glad as if this was where I really wanted to be.

That was when he said, “I found an apartment and I'll probably move out on Monday.”

“You did?” I sat up. “I didn't know you were still looking. I thought you'd stopped looking a long time ago. I thought you'd just stay here while you finish the film.”

He cleared his throat. “Didn't you want me to get a place of my own? Isn't that what I've been doing all these mornings, trying to find an apartment?”

I found myself whispering, to my own amazement, “Don't take it.”

“I've already signed the lease.”

I know enough about contracts from years of living with an attorney to know they can be broken with some financial loss and I knew that a man who graduated from Yale knew this as well. I got out of bed, went over to the sofa, and sulked. “You can break it.”

Sean stumbled out of bed and sat down next to me. “I don't understand you. What do you think I've been doing for the past six weeks? I told you I wouldn't stay here past finding somewhere else to live. I've got a one-year sublet and I don't want to lose it. And besides, you're still married, which doesn't matter that much, but you're still in love with the man you're married to. Any fool can see that. So what if I take the apartment? It's not going to change anything. We'll still be together.” He wrapped his arms around me. “It'll hardly change a thing.”

It changed everything, though the change would be slow in coming. I helped him take his things down to the one-room studio that had been sublet to him by a homosexual couple. I sat in the kitchen, where Sean was taking things out of boxes.
“I don't get it,” I said. “You just come and stay a couple of months and now you're going away. You can't walk into someone's life, then walk out.”

Sean sat down on the kitchen table. “Deborah, I don't understand you. Do you always drive men crazy? I'm not walking out of your life. To the contrary, I am moving downtown because we'd agreed I'd do that, but we can still see each other just as much as you want.”

“It's a long subway ride. I'll never see you.”

“I'll come uptown. Besides, I'm taking you to dinner tonight. It's our anniversary.”

“It is?”

“Yes, we met five months ago. I thought we'd celebrate.”

That evening we went to dinner at Kelly's and then to a place called Ralph's on Grove Street to listen to music. Ralph's is a tavern with decorations on the walls commemorating holidays. Tinsel from Christmas, turkeys from Thanksgiving, New Year's balloons, shamrocks, Easter bunnies. We arrived early and ordered our first round. Joe Barry, the black man with the slicked-back hair who played a fairly good blues during the week, was already at the piano, and slowly the bar was beginning to fill up.

I was in a nostalgic mood and wanted to hear “As Time Goes By,” but I was too embarrassed to make such a request. Sean got up and whispered something into the ear of the bartender, Steve. “Oh, yeah?” Steve said. “How long?”

Sean held up five fingers.

A few moments later Joe played “As Time Goes By” and Steve came over with a free round. “Anyone who's been together five years deserves a free round.”

“You told him we'd been together five years?” I asked Sean. He shook his head. He'd just said “five” but hadn't specified the measure of time. As Joe sang “It's still the same old story,” Sean wrapped his arm around me. He sang into my ear and
licked my earlobe with his tongue. I curled up close beside him. The tinsel that stretched across the room sparkled. Joe Barry's slicked-back hair sparkled. The Easter bunny glistened in the mirror on the opposite wall. Steve's starry earring sparkled. Steve's white teeth smiled at us. Joe Barry had the bar toast our fifth anniversary. “Let's hear it for them, folks. They're together five years and look at them. Still going strong.”

I snuggled closer to Sean. The bar was now full of New Yorkers who paid tremendous rents and scratched out their livings, who opened a can of soup at night and ate alone. They all looked at us, smiling, filled with envy. The single people wished they were in love the way we were; the married people wondered how we'd done it.

Sean pulled me closer to him and whispered in my ear, “Act like you're crazy about me.” But at that moment I didn't have to act. The meaning of life, so simple and clear, was suddenly obvious to me and I was happy. I was crazy about him. I knew what it was to be completely happy.

 

The next day we broke up. It was a cold Sunday in New York and we'd spent the night at his place on a mattress on the floor. In the morning Sean decided he had to do some laundry, so we took all his clothes over to Suds-'n-Duds, and while I was separating whites from colors, he struck up a conversation with the woman folding sheets next to him. “Didn't you just move in?” she asked.

“Oh, yeah. I thought I saw you in the building.” She had beautiful corn-blond hair and was the kind of woman it might be difficult not to notice, but it bothered me suddenly that he had noticed her, since he'd moved in only the day before.

“I just got here from the Coast myself.” She was an actress, doing something at Circle Repertory. “You'll have to come down for a drink some night. I live on Six.”

“Oh, I must be just above you then.”

“Oh, yeah.” She giggled. “Do you have your mattress on the floor?”

After she left, Sean noticed I was a little too engrossed in the magazine section. “Hey”—he nudged me—“what's up?”

“Nothing,” I said, feigning indifference.

He sat down beside me in one of those little green plastic chairs. “You in your spin cycle again?”

“You could have introduced me.”

“Introduced you?”

“To that woman.”

“I don't know that woman. I really didn't think about it.”

I put down the magazine. “Look, if you want to see other people, it's O.K. I understand. You aren't under any commitment to me. You can do whatever you want. But I just don't want any surprises. Just let me know, all right?”

“You're nuts,” he groaned. The wash was ready for the dryer and Sean took it and flung it in. He took the magazine section and started to read about Ronald Reagan's acting career. I hate it when someone takes my section of the paper, but I didn't want to argue about that. I settled into Arts and Leisure. Sean put down his article. “I am not planning on dating anyone else. I will tell you if and when I want to do that.”

“Why don't you just tell me now? I'd rather know right now and get it over with.”

We folded the laundry in silence and headed across Sixth Avenue. “I'm sorry if I was rude,” he said as we approached his building, “but I swear I just didn't think to introduce you to her. I just met her myself.”

“Well, you've found a place of your own. Now you can do whatever you want. I don't care who you see. It doesn't matter to me.” I was shouting.

We reached his building and I handed him the wash I was carrying. “I'm going home.”

“O.K., so go home. Get on the subway and go and spend the rest of the day by yourself. Go home and sulk and think about everybody who has wronged you.”

With that he got in the elevator, pushed the button. I watched him go up. I watched the lights above the elevator as they blinked, like the lights on the switchboard in my father's office, those distant stars, saying things I'd never understand.

 

Somehow we patched things up, and the next weekend we flew to Nantucket because Sean wanted to get away. Winter was setting in and the island was almost deserted, except for islanders. He said it was the best time to go. We stayed at the Coffin House, whose name left a chill in me. During the day we put on parkas and bicycled down empty roads toward empty beaches. We walked on the cobbled streets and toured the whaling museum, which was about to close for the season. Sean had never been to a whaling museum and he liked it. He liked the history of harpooners, the classifications of whales. He liked the huge skeleton of a sperm whale that hovered over our heads. He liked the stories of the sea and he liked learning that the cobbles on Main Street had been ballast in the ships returning from England after they'd dropped off their cargo of oil from the bellies of the great whales. We went down to Cisco Beach, where the lookout used to be in the days when you could still see the largest mammals in schools on their way out to sea.

On the cold beach Sean shouted, “Thar she blows,” but we both looked out across the ocean and we saw nothing at all. The only sound after he shouted was that of the endless, rolling sea. That night we ate cheeseburgers and shoestringers at the Brotherhood and drank hot buttered rum. After dinner we walked the cobbled streets, thinking we heard footsteps behind us. Sean told me that it is said that in November, after the tourists leave, the ghosts of old whalers, lost at sea, feel it is safe for them to come home and that sometimes you can hear them
pacing, as they wait for their friends and their ships to come back.

Our room at the Coffin House had a fireplace in it, so I decided to make a fire. Sean sat down in one of the large reading chairs with a copy of
Moby Dick
he'd bought that afternoon. After I got a small fire going, Sean looked up. “That's nice,” he said, reaching for a poker. “If you push the logs together a little bit more”—gently he prodded the logs—“you get a better fire.” He closed the empty spaces and the fire blazed.

We had been reading for a few minutes in front of the fire, each of us in a large armchair on either side of the mantel, when Sean said, “Hey, listen to this passage.” He leaned closer to me and read to me from
Moby Dick: