Double Happiness (4 page)

Sonny's been out of town for nearly three weeks now. He's up on Martha's Vineyard where his brother Matthew keeps a summer house. Sonny designs furniture, and when he was first starting out he filled Matthew's house with experiments. Ten years ago a stylist friend used one of Sonny's beds in an ad. The
couple in the photograph were eating in the bed and dripping stuff all over the sheets in a way that was meant to be subliminally erotic. The woman didn't actually use her tongue but somehow you kept thinking about it anyway. In New York it became a cult thing to own one of Sonny's beds. Now he doesn't know if he even wants to do furniture anymore. He's taking some time to think over his next move. I believe he's thinking me over, too, and this is a strain. Rita has prescribed something that smells like cranberries to dab on my puffed-up eyes. The bottle is in the bag with lip gel and a nineteen-dollar pair of tweezers.

Just before Sonny left, we sat on our sofa together. He was sketching. I was reading. I leaned over and watched the little half-shape forming on the page. Sonny crosshatched soft shadows on the bowed legs of what looked like a low ottoman.

Fat legs, I said and tapped his arm. But my voice and hand got away from me and what I meant as playful came out slightly vicious, as if his ottoman were ugly or obscene. My tap caused his pencil to slip and a hard black jag pierced the gray curve.

Sonny looked at his ruined drawing, then turned to me and said, Is that better now, Eden?

He put his pad aside and went into the bedroom. I could hear him talking to Matthew on the phone—I knew it was Matthew by the way Sonny was laughing. I held the drawing pad on my lap and tried to rub away the black line, but that just left a scar of white around an indent. Sonny asked Matthew
for the ferry schedule to Martha's Vineyard. When I went into our bedroom he was already pushing multicolored T-shirts into a backpack.

Don't do this, I said. Sonny pulled me into his arms and held me. He whispered into my hair. Just a break, he said, just a break. But I think I know an exit when I see one.

I've darted through the crowd at the Twenty-third Street station, but as I head toward my apartment on Eighteenth I slow down. Dinner with Hal is a bad idea. Hal was Cara's boyfriend—he was crazy about her. When Cara started losing her hair from the chemo it got all over Hal's car and then, of course, all over his clothes. He looked like a man with an extraordinary cat, a long-haired chestnut-colored cat.

For a very long time Hal didn't clean his car. One night he picked me up and drove me to the movies on the Upper East Side. The first year was behind us with the first birthday and the first Christmas and all the unexpected days and unexplainable loss, but Hal still had threads of Cara's hair winding through the carpet of his car floor. Twenty minutes into the movie I leaned over and said, I have to go to the bathroom. Then I walked straight out of the theater. All the way home I plucked hairs from my sweater. I couldn't bring myself to drop them on the sidewalk so I put them in my pocket. At home I found a small blue scarf in my dresser to save them in, but when I looked in my pocket it was empty.

That was a year and a half ago, and now, like Sonny, I need to think of my next move. New York doesn't hold me the way it once did. I could go anywhere really—I could even go to Paris for a while. I'm doing a book on Basquiat, which I could do anywhere. I think of Cara dancing. She would roll her closed fists one over the other in counts of three, then on the fourth beat she would stick her thumb out like an arbitrary hitchhiker. This was her only dance, but she could do it to any rhythm. I used to imitate her and laugh until my stomach knotted. Now I catch myself, sometimes, tumbling my fists one over the other and hope the thumb, like a dowser's stick, will point me in the right direction.

There are two messages on my machine, both from Hal. Meet you at Tomoe Joe's at eight sharp, says the first. The “sharp” is a joke; Hal lives in a time warp. The second is: Meet you at Angelica's. No time specified. I like Angelica's.

You look great, Eden, really great. That's what Hal is saying but he can't see me because he's ducking under the archway to get to my booth. Hal is six feet four inches tall. When he bends to kiss me he has to curve his torso low. Hal fits himself into the bench across the table and places his hands on either side of the silverware. His whole body has come to rest. Only his eyes remain scurrying pinballs of gray. If I didn't know him this would be alarming but soon he'll ease into a slower speed and take me in.

Eden, you really do look great. He gives me a brief forehead-to-waist inspection and then stops. In that moment we share an interior catalog, the exact calibrations by which my every feature varies from Cara's. The small jolt at similarities, the huge, irrational disappointment at differences, a curve in the lip, a softer chin. This inventory and its sorrows takes a tenth of a second, and then it's over. Hal is spreading the paper napkin across his knees and the waitress wants to know what we'll have to drink.

Soon the waitress drops a pair of wet-looking screwdrivers in thick tumblers on our table. Hal sips the top off his and says, So, how's Sonny?

I'm wishing I'd gotten some nail polish from Rita.

Disaffected, I say.

What do you mean “disaffected”?

I mean sexually.

Hal sputters. I've said this partly to rattle him. He coughs and says, Christ, Eden. Then a flick of clear-eyed calculation passes across his face before we both recoil and bury our mouths in our drinks. Hal surfaces first. He says, Men are different. It's more a visual thing.

He takes another long swallow and signals the waitress, You look great, he says, Sonny's totally fucked up.

Right after the funeral, the three of us—Sonny, Hal, and I— drove out to Matthew's house on Martha's Vineyard. Hal twisted
into the backseat of the Toyota and said, I really like it here. When we finally reached the ferry, however, he sprang out like a compressed sponge exposed to water, fulfilling its true and natural dimensions.

The house was dark and cool in the late afternoon as we dumped our bags in the living room. Sonny put the stuff my mother had wrapped—turkey, slices of ham, macaroni salad, lasagne, food people had been bringing to her house for days— he put it all, just as she had wrapped it, into Matthew's tiny icebox. Sonny suggested a walk before the light gave out, but since Hal and I were both tired he went alone.

Upstairs there are four bedrooms off the central hallway. Sonny and I always sleep in the northeast corner, where even in winter we keep the window raised high and let the sound of the waves rock us. I decided to give Matthew's room to Hal. It overlooks the ocean, too, and has the best bed—one of Sonny's first—with a canopy of braided, burnished aluminum and mesh, so delicate and fine it looks like a tossed handkerchief suspended forever just before descent.

It's a big bed, big enough for Hal. He lay down with his shoes on. His eyes were still; he was watching me closely. I sat beside him on the bed and put my hand spread out in the center of his chest.

Hal? I'm not sure what I was asking him. My hand stayed pressing into his chest. His mouth pulled back, he screwed up his eyes, and started to sob. I tried to hold him but his body
was coiled. He was slamming his fist into his forehead until I slipped my hand across and he was hitting my palm instead and then he stopped and I was holding him, stroking his back, long, long strokes along the length of his back to soothe him and me. I held him and stroked down his shoulder and arm, across his chest and stomach, cupped his penis, pressed both palms down the length of his thighs. I rubbed his calves and took off his shoes and rubbed his feet and back up his legs again, like I was the first rinse, the first distance his body took from Cara, like I was absorbing whatever of her lay on him into me. We both fell asleep and slept well into the darkness until Sonny woke us and fixed us some supper.

Hal and I have ordered big salads with crispy fried tofu. He has doused his salad with so many dressings it's nearly floating.

Did Sonny tell you about Dorothy? Hal asks with a smile; he has a piece of beet wedged into his front gum that I try to ignore. I envision Dorothy as a sliver-hipped blonde with a family cottage on Martha's Vineyard.

No, I say, who's Dorothy?

Sonny set me up with her. I can't believe he didn't tell you.

Huh.

Yeah, she works for him, Hal says. She's great.

I don't know what to say and for some reason I think of those birds I've seen on telephone wires. They arrive like normal birds, flying in with their wings flapping, but when they leave
they just drop, it almost looks like they drop straight through the wire.

Well, that's great, I say to Hal.

She's not like Cara, he says.

No, of course not.

Of course not.

Hal and I close Angelica's. I'm a little drunk when I get home. I sink into the white sofa because it has twice the gravitational pull of the rest of the apartment. I can hear Hal fiddling with the lock. I listen for the sweep of the keys across the floor. He'll slide them under the door, then three taps on the buzzer —good-bye. But now he's having some trouble with the lock. I realize he's locking from the inside and that confuses me. I hear his shoes along the floor and I can smell him, he's sweating, but it's still a surprise when he lands his head on my stomach, face down.

Hal, stop, I say and pry his face from my belly. I push a little on his forehead like I'm revolving a huge smooth immovable stone. Get off, Hal, I say.

He sits up on the floor. I'm watching him in the loose light from the neighbor's apartment across the air shaft. He has that flustered expression he gets when he's thinking about something important.

I don't know what to do, he says. And I can see that's true. A lot of Cara's things are still in Hal's apartment. It never
occurred to him that a time might come when her stuff would have no place there. Just beyond his head, I notice the light of the answering machine blinking a frantic red.

Hal, press the button, I say.

I can't be a monk, Eden.

Hal, push the button on the answering machine. It might be for you.

Hal turns his body obligingly toward the bookcase and reaches for the machine resting on the third shelf. He squashes the button and Sonny's voice fills the room, Hey, Eden, where are you?

Sonny! says Hal.

I'm at Matt's apartment in the city. Just got here, says Sonny.

Sonny talks in staccato beats on answering machines. It makes the most mundane messages—asparagus, box of linguine, dish soap—sound slightly urgent. I'm so happy to hear his voice I sit up straight on the sofa, but why is he calling from Matthew's apartment? Why didn't he just come home?

... going out to Scarsdale, any interest? Call by three and we're off.

I glance at the green digital numbers on my desk clock. It's ten past, and I know not to hope he's running late. Even in the middle of the night he's punctual.

If not, I'll look for you on the terrace at six. Not there? No problem, bye.

I sink back into the sofa and consider my options. I could ask Hal to drive me out there. I could take the 5:06 train from Grand Central—I did this once before with Sonny when the car lost its muffler. Or I could not go at all.

I decide on the train. Hal stretches out on the sofa for a nap while I get ready. He insists on taking me at least as far as Grand Central. I haven't seen Sonny for a while, and I want to make a good impression. I douse my eyes with half the bottle of cranberry stuff and then I set to work on my brows hoping to shape them into coy arches as compelling as the woman's on the subway, if not quite as dramatic. I'm tweezing away and before I know it I've removed the entire outside half of my right eyebrow. Now I look lopsided and weird and I feel a swell of panic. There's something wrong with me.

When Sonny and I first got together, almost a dozen years ago, when I was nearly twenty, he used to say I had the most beautiful face he had ever seen, anywhere. This wasn't remotely true, of course, but he would shift his body until he was leaning his head on both hands looking straight down into my face like a man who'd discovered the presence of a small but perfect mountain range in his own bed. He couldn't take his eyes off what lay ahead.

What lay ahead was this. I should have told him. I should have pulled each finger from his dazzled cheek and whispered: Someday, in this bed, you'll lift yourself up and look at me as you are now and see a sleepy woman, tired from living so stupidly,
a spendthrift and miser who doesn't know when to be which. You'll tell me I'm beautiful because that's your habit but I won't believe you believe it anymore and then you'll leave me. I could have told him that. With the concentration of a surgeon I sketch in with a fine brown pencil the shape my eyebrow might have been.

I'm a little early arriving at the Scarsdale Golf Club. I stand on the west terrace of the clubhouse. A regatta of glass ashtrays floats around me, each adrift on its own umbrella table. There is no place to sit that isn't wet. I wonder if this is a joke, someone sounding just like Sonny leaving a message on our machine, someone who knows our habits. I feel slightly sea-sick looking over the tipsy hills of the golf course and wish I had thought to bring coffee.

I breathe deeply into the space two inches below my belly button. Dead center of the golf course is a dense little grove of trees that serves as a divider between two holes. Tucked into the middle are three deep-plum-colored trees huddled together, their branches so perfectly shaped they look like a giant bonsai. Winding paths of red chipped stones unravel through the grass, a route so circuitous no golfer would take the time to walk it. The stones are matte and soft looking—like wood, but they're rock. I can see where Sonny gets his designs: all his proportions are here at the Scarsdale Golf Club.