Someday_ADE (3 page)

But the next day, on the train, Rex pressed her silently. His thin face was as sharp as a steak knife. He wouldn’t give her what she wanted: he didn’t look at her with greedy passion. There was a little death around the corner, waiting for her. She had to give him something, feed his fire or lose it and him.

So she would visit his studio, see his work, she might succumb, Helen informed her analyst. She described how she’d enter his place and be overwhelmed by sensations that had nothing to do with the present. In another time, with another man, with other men, this had happened before, so her senses would awaken to colors, smells, and sounds that were familiar. Soon she would be naked with him on a rough wool blanket thrown hastily over a cot. Her skin would be irritated by the wool, and she would discover his body and find it wonderful or not. He would devour her. He would say, I’ve never felt this way before. Or, you make me feel insane. She wouldn’t like his work and would feel herself moving away from him. Already seen, it was in a way obscene, and ordinary. She calmly explained what shouldn’t be seen, and why, and, as she did, found an old cave to enter.

Dr. Kaye didn’t seem to appreciate her reluctance. Or if he did, in his subtle way he appeared to want her to have the experience, anyway. She knew she would go, then, to Rex’s studio, and announced on the train that she’d be there Saturday night—date night, Rex said. He looked at her again, that way. But she knew it would hasten the end, like a death sentence for promise. Recently, Helen had awaited Timothy McVeigh’s execution with terror, but it had come and gone. No one mentioned him anymore. Others were being killed—just a few injections, put them to sleep, stop their breathing, and it’s done, they’re gone. Things die so easily, she said. Then she listened to Dr. Kaye breathe.

Saturday night Helen rang the bell on Rex’s Williamsburg studio. All around her, singles and couples wandered on a mission to have fun. Soon they’d go home, and the streets would be empty. Rex greeted her with a drink—a Mojito—which he knew she loved. His studio was bare, except for his work and books, even austere, and it was clean. The sweet, thick rum numbed her, and she prepared for the worst and the best. There was no in-between.

His paintings were, in a way, pictures of pictures. Unexpectedly, she responded to them, because they appreciated the distance between things. Then, without much talk, they had sex. She wasn’t sure why, but resisting was harder. Rex adored her, her body, he was nimble and smelled like wet sand. He came, finally, but she didn’t want to or couldn’t. She held something back. Rex was bothered, and her head felt as if it had split apart. But it didn’t matter in some way she couldn’t explain to Dr. Kaye. She heard him move in his chair. She worried that he wasn’t interested. Maybe her stories exhausted him. Rex called her every day. She wondered if she should find another man, one she couldn’t have.

Chartreuse

How abrupt she was. She’d handed him the glass of Chartreuse, and her wrist flicked upward. Her hand’s rebelling, he thought. Then she flinched. But she caught herself, she hadn’t told him what actually happened, and she hadn’t lied. She’d left room in their conversation for ambiguity. So this was the conversation he was in, but what about the others he hadn’t been asked to join. His life was cycling into territory where gaps counted more. Mind the gap, but his mind was wandering.

“In La Grande-Chartreuse,” she said, also abruptly but with a laugh, as if to distract him, “the head and celebrated monastery of the Carthusians, near Grenoble, the monks brewed Chartreuse. It’s a liqueur or aperitif—you can have it before or after—made from aromatic herbs and brandy. The recipe is an ancient secret.”

She visited the monastery years ago, crossing the Channel as a teenager, and pronounced the word “herb” the English way, its “h” heavy and funny as the man’s name.

“Pope Victor III, Bruno of Cologne, founded the order in 1086. Twenty years after the Norman invasion...”

He interrupted her then, he remembered he interrupted her, and she hated that. “When the English language suffered a loss of prestige, but you still keep that hard ‘h,’ don’t you?”

She drank some more, while he told her the color of Chartreuse looked sick, even feverish, but maybe the weird yellow and green high-voltage potion held an alluring illness, laced with the charge of deception. Her cheeks flared scarlet, the garish liqueur having its way with her. It burned his throat, too. But she kept her tongue, and her ruse, if it was one, wasn’t even bruised. He wasn’t going to force the issue, it would be like rape, and who wants truth or sex that way. He swallowed the yellow/green liqueur, distasteful and medicinal. Then he poured them both another Chartreuse.

A kind of golden amnesia stilled other monologues inside him. Her shirt, chartreuse for the occasion—their fifth anniversary—winked ambivalently. She liked designing their nights, he thought, color combinations were her thing. He wondered how he fit in sometimes. Yellow elided with the green, never landing on the integrity of one color, and, he reflected sullenly, her blouse managed to be a fabric of lies, too. The silk looked sinister, too shiny, and, under the light, his wife’s facade iridesced. Glimmering vile and then beautiful. Inconstant chartreuse numbed his tongue and his eyes.

“This tastes disgusting,” he said, finally. “I could get used to it.”

“Absinthe,” she explained, or he remembered she did, “was called the green fairy, because it made everyone crazy—everyone became addicted, and there was legislation against it, still is, like against heroin, because they thought it would destroy French civilization.”

“Maybe it did.”

“But now you can find it, if you want. At a party I went to we all drank from the fairy cup.”

She didn’t find his eyes. Maybe it was then, he thought, that it happened.

“The Carthusians were expelled from France in 1903, and they went to Tarragona. Spain.”

“Home of tarragon?”

“But they returned in 1941.” He remembered thinking about the Pope’s treachery during the war.

Her blouse kept changing, now yellow, now green. It was kind of driving him crazy, but maybe it was the effect of Chartreuse. What she liked best about the Carthusian monks was their vow of absolute silence—it was the most rigorous order. Resolute religiosos, she joked, who, paradoxically, brewed a high-volume alcoholic drink. She figured they didn’t indulge, because it might loosen their tongues.

“In 1960, there were only 537 Carthusians,” she said.

“Your tongue isn’t loose,” he said.

“I’m thinking of going on a retreat—I want to be silent.”

“Leave the conversation?” he asked.

“You’re too ironic for words.”

“You got me.”

Just what he expected of her, to run; but what did he expect of her. He toasted her with the Manichean aperitif or liqueur, whatever it was. Her reticence settled over him like a green or yellow cloud. With it, she left. She spent half a year away, in silence, or at least she didn’t talk to him. He had to trust her, he supposed. She stayed with a very small order of Carthusian nuns, who didn’t drink Chartreuse. He condemned himself for not pursuing her there.

While she was away, he spoke of his perplexity to his therapist, who was not silent enough. Loyalty, betrayal, living with the lie, not escaping it, the way some fled from what was supposed to be true—he wrote notes to himself about honest disillusionment. To others, within this mostly quiet time, sometimes he was shameless and blatant. He once declared at a cocktail party, a fragile glass of Chartreuse—his drink now—in his hand, “Fidelity and infidelity, what’s one without the other? You can’t imagine a mountainless valley, can you?” With a secret-holder’s thrill at disclosure, he told his therapist: “I love her. I live inside an illusion. A shimmering criminal illusion.”

On weekends, he hit stores and developed the habit of collecting shirts and jackets of chartreuse. The dubious shade represented his obsession with transparency and opacity. Now he thought it was one thing, and he could see right through it and her. Then it was another, and she was denser than a black hole. He wished he were the Hubble telescope.

Chartreuse was popular, the new grey, he liked to say, and his closet was full when she returned. Her need for silence—at least with him—hadn’t completely abated. He never knew if it was because she had once deceived him or because she couldn’t stop. Or because his once having thought she did horrified her, when she hadn’t, and now she wanted to and couldn’t.

He contented himself with the little things, his and her chartreuse towels, how they equitably divided chores—the pleasure of domesticity stayed novel for him—and her occasional marital passion. Like him, she fashioned herself daily, a devotee of Harold Rosenberg’s “tradition of the new.” So eventually they would turn old-fashioned. At least, they were together.

He would always associate the night it happened, when he thought it happened, with fateful chartreuse, whose eternal shiftiness he could spin tales about. Also, about the CIA, the monastery as the first factory, and the beauty of silence. It was really golden. He and his wife celebrated themselves and their differences on their anniversary. They loved and denied each other, simultaneously, and more and more laughed at themselves. There were things he’d never know. Still, nothing competed with their complicity, their chartreuse hours together.

A Simple Idea

This happened a long time ago. My best friend was in Los Angeles, and she and I talked on the phone a lot. I urged her to move to New York, and finally she did. She drove cross-country, and when she arrived, she was told she didn’t have to worry about the $10,000 in California parking tickets she had on her car. There was no reciprocity between the two states, she was told, so there was no way her car’s outlaw status would be discovered in New York. The guy who told her said he was a cop. They met in a bar, then they had sex. Anyway, I think they did.

My friend started accumulating NYC tickets. Blithely, for a while. She shoved the tickets into the glove compartment. I suppose people kept gloves in those compartments at one time. When there was no room left, she threw them on the floor of her car. Then she decided she’d better find a parking lot. But she didn’t want to pay hundreds of dollars for a space.

One day she noticed a parking lot near her house which was barred from entry by a heavy chain and lock. A week later she noticed a man walking to the lot. He used a key to unlock the gate. She got up her nerve and asked him if she could park there if she gave him some money. Would he make her a key? He said he’d think about it. The next day he telephoned her and said OK. So every month my friend handed the man $50 in a white business envelope. It was illegal, but she wasn’t getting tickets from the City and throwing them on the floor of her car.

She was relatively happy parking in the lot, relieved anyway, because there was one less thing to worry about. But after a while she thought some of the other drivers—men going to work in the building attached to the lot—were looking at her weirdly, staring at her and her car. Some seemed menacing, she told me. But then she was paranoid. She knew that, so she decided not to act on her suspicions.

Time passed. Time always passes.

One afternoon my friend received a call from a man who identified himself as a cop. He said, Hello, and used her first name, Sandra, and asked her sternly:

—Are you parking illegally, Sandra, because if you are, and you don’t remove your car from the lot right now—I’m giving you ten minutes—I’ll have to arrest you.

My friend hung up, threw on her coat, ran out the door to the lot, and drove her car far away. Then she phoned me and told me what happened. She was terrified. She thought the cop might show up and arrest her at any moment, she thought she’d be taken to jail.

—That was no cop, I said.

—How do you know? she asked.

—A cop wouldn’t phone you and give you a warning, I answered. But I was worried that I might be wrong, and that she might be arrested.

—And he’s not going to say he’s going to give you a second chance, because you don’t get second chances if you’re doing something illegal and they find out, unless they’re corrupt, and he wouldn’t say, I’m a cop. He’d give his name and rank or something.

My friend listened, annoyed that I was calm, and she wasn’t satisfied or convinced. She thought she might be under surveillance and would be busted later. She owed thousands of dollars in tickets in two states. It might be a sting operation, something convoluted. I had to convince her she was not in danger of going to jail. I told her I had an idea and hung up.

It was simple. I’d call a precinct and ask the desk cop how a cop would identify himself over the phone. I’d learn the protocol, how cops wouldn’t do what that so-called cop had done, allay my friend’s fears, and also show her I was taking her anxiety seriously.

I looked up precincts in the telephone book and chose one in the West Village, where I thought they’d be used to handling unusual questions.

—Tenth precinct, Sergeant Molloy, the desk cop said.

—Hi, I have a question, I said.

—Yeah.

—How do police identify themselves over the phone?

—What do you mean? Molloy asked.

—If a cop calls you, what does he say?

—What do you mean, what does he say?

—I mean, how does he say he’s a policeman? What’s the official way to do it? The desk cop was silent for a few seconds.