We Could Be Beautiful (9 page)

He looked so adorable there in those cargo pants, waiting for me to answer. “Okay, sure,” I said, and laughed at how easily I’d given up.

“Why are you laughing, Catherine?”

“Oh God, I don’t know.”

He gave me a look. He seemed upset.

“What? What’s wrong, babe?”

“Well,” he began, his eyes on the mover, a round man with a back brace that appeared to be on too tight, who was placing another box in the pile along the wall. He waited for the man to descend the stairs before saying, “I suppose I could say that I personally feel that using the Lord’s name in vain is a bit dicey. But”—he put his hand on my shoulder—“that should in no way inform what you choose to do. It’s just a personal preference of mine.”

“Okay, that’s good to know.” He was being clear. Clarity was important. Communication was important in relationships. “Would you rather I say
gosh
instead?”

He shrugged, and dusted the frame with his elegant thumb.

I shrugged, too. “That’s fine with me.” And it was fine—
God
or
gosh,
who cared? If this was something that meant a lot to William, then it meant a lot to me, too. But I wasn’t going to be a doormat either. “What about
fuck
? Can I say
fuck
?” I laughed.

William eyed the skinny mover (nappy mullet, no back brace) who had entered the room with another box. He seemed slightly disturbed that this man had just heard his woman drop the
F
bomb, and I found his old-fashionedness kind of endearing. “You can say whatever you like, my darling.”

“Good.” I craned my neck for a kiss and he kissed me.

We hung the tapestry in the dining room, above the glass table. It took up almost the entire wall. I wondered what it meant—woman in water, woman on land, woman curled at the foot of a mountain. From any point in the room, the woman’s eyes seemed to be fixed on the viewer. “It’s like she’s watching us,” I said to William.

“Yes,” he said, considering. “I wonder if that’s what Rick intended. I’ll have to ask him.”

“Rick?”

“Rick Blass. Brilliant man. He studied under my father. He owed my father a lot, hence the gift.”

“He gave that to you?”

“He did.”

“Why was it at the gala, then? Why didn’t he just give it straight to you?”

“This way he gets a little press, my darling.”

“Sneaky,” I said.

“Smart,” he corrected. “It’s a smart business move. Everyone wins.”

I tugged at his belt loop. “Is that smart business? When everyone wins?”

“Absolutely,” he said. “When everyone wins, or when everyone
thinks
they have won. There is no difference.”

•

William had more folk art than I did, but overall we shared an aesthetic, artistically and otherwise. He said his house in Switzerland had been a lot like this house—clean and minimalist, with the art at the forefront. He loved Calder, and hung two of his mobiles side by side above the entryway. Together they complemented each other, became one grander thing.

I kept bringing up the color of the door. Was he sure he liked the red? Yes, he said, he thought it was lovely, and why did I keep asking? I didn’t know, I told him, although I did know and was too embarrassed to say it. I’d read somewhere that a red door would invite love and power into a home. I’d had it painted the week Fernando left. I was feeling raw and unstable; it wasn’t a choice I would have made under better circumstances. Now it felt sad to me, and desperate—a bright, bold symbol of my wanting, exposed. I didn’t want to want anything so desperately, and I definitely didn’t want other people to know about it. I wanted to be calm and neutral and stable; the white walls were calm and neutral and stable. White said nothing about a person. It gave away nothing. Of course I was being paranoid. No one looked at a red door and thought anything besides “That door is red.” No one would have guessed, based on the color of a door, how hard I was trying to be the opposite of my mother—warm, loving, open—or how badly I wanted to feel differently about my life.

The only furniture William brought was a huge desk, made from one piece of oak, irregular at the edges, and an ergonomically correct forest-green chair, which we put near the windows in the den downstairs. This would now be William’s office. The den was the only room in the house that wasn’t all white. The walls were the color of deep soil. The designer and I had chosen espresso leather couches and a richly patterned carpet to offset the whiteness of the rest of the house. The big-screen TV and these dark choices were “meant to invoke a movie theater experience,” the designer had said.

Now, instead of calling the designer, I deferred to William. He knew the brand of the remote-control blinds Jeff should buy. He introduced me to European furniture companies I hadn’t known existed. We bought a new bed frame together; gorgeous and simple, it looked like a very upscale park bench.

It was funny: we also bought a few benches—light wood, metal legs. We dotted the hallways with them. I said, “It looks like a museum. Are we ever going to use these?” William sat down on one of them and said, “Yes.” I thought that was hilarious.

And it was this moment—this simple, unassuming moment, with us in the hall, still littered with boxes, and the low light of evening glowing through the windows, and the way he looked at me, smiling just barely, the glint in his eyes—it was this moment that I became aware of my descent. I had fallen for him harder than I’d thought.

•

We settled into a routine. William went to work. I continued to work on the house. I had the rest of the art hung—William’s Damien Hirst in the bedroom, yes, please. I cleaned out one of my closets for his clothes. I bought him a toothbrush holder that matched mine. I felt useful and wired and goal-oriented and I loved it. If I went to the shop less and didn’t return my calls, people would just have to understand. This was a big transition.

Although William worked eighty-hour weeks (typical banker), he never worked on the weekends, except in a rare emergency. I appreciated this. He was making time for me. It was so un-American and so unlike my father, who never stopped working.

On Saturdays we ate out and took walks along the High Line and milled around galleries. We were on an ongoing quest to find the best coffee in the city. William thought American coffee tasted like wet socks. So we went to all the artisan cafés—in the Village, in Chelsea, in SoHo. So far, he thought the place right on the corner was the best, which relieved me, maybe too much. As in, Thank God I had chosen to live near the café William liked. (Thank
gosh
—that’s how I said it now, always teasingly.) William was definitely a person who knew what he liked, and I knew this meant his feelings for me were real. It was as if, out of all the women, he had pointed a finger at me—I want
you
—and that in itself, the certainty of that desire, was intoxicating.

On Sundays he tutored the Dalton boys. Yes, he wanted to teach them how to be better violin players, but he also wanted to prime himself for parenthood. That’s exactly what he said. “I want to prime myself for parenthood. I want to practice.”

There were two Dalton boys, Max and Stan, both nine years old. Stan (I felt bad for Stan) was chubby and awkward, a redhead with the serious face of a French aristocrat and intense dark eyes. I was glad when William told me he was much better than Max at playing the violin. At least he had that. Max was tall, oddly tall for his age, with long curly black hair that swirled in ringlets by his ears and a few well-placed freckles on his nose. He was adorable in his hoodie and jeans. He could have been a model for Gap Kids. The funniest thing about him was the way he walked, with his feet trailing on the ground behind him, like he was ice skating all the time.

They had their sessions at the house. We made the study on the second floor into a music room. We bought two tall chairs and a music stand. Each boy had an hour with William. Stan came first. He lived nearby and walked over by himself. He carried his violin with great pride; I loved that, it was so cute. Max was second. His mother dropped him off, sometimes a little early. I didn’t mind. It was fun to chat with him in the kitchen while we waited for Stan to be done.

I found such unexpected comfort in listening to the boys play the same beginning of a song over and over and over. I bought them sodas (which I bought especially for them; I was so nurturing). I could tell the boys liked that, especially Max. He was such a sugar freak.

During Max’s session, Dan would arrive for our usual appointment. He massaged me and then William. During William’s massage I would shower and dress for dinner, and then we would go out and talk about the day and the boys and our plans for the upcoming week. Sundays now had a rhythm and a purpose, and I actually found myself looking forward to them.

•

As time went on, I fell deeper and deeper. My love for William consumed me. It consumed me entirely, and I wanted it to. Because it made me feel different than I had felt before. It made me feel like I was changing. It made me feel free.

I loved the way he made espresso with such care. I was much lazier. His espresso tasted a lot better than my espresso. He took time to press the grounds in. He was patient enough to wait for it to cool when it was done. Me, I just added cold water.

I loved his hand on the small of my back as we walked down the street. I loved his hand on the back of my head when he hugged me. His hands were so big. I felt so enveloped. When he hugged me like that, it was like I existed in the smallest, safest, warmest room. He was my armor.

I loved the way he moved through the world. He was like a dancer almost. So fluid, flowing, like he was under water, like he was swimming, like he was floating, like he was made of feathers.

I also loved his smell. I loved it because it was inhuman. He never smelled like sweat, he never smelled like a body. His scent was clean and new and streaked with salt. It was a deserted beach filled with fine white sand that stretched to horizons. It suggested we could be better. We could cover the swampy human parts of us, and we could be better. We could be new again, and we could be beautiful.

7

O
ne morning after an early workout with Chris, I stood in the kitchen drinking a green juice and going through the mail. Lucia wiped down the counters with the Soft Scrub William had suggested “in lieu of 409.” She rubbed in her usual quick circles, bent over her working hand. Her messy ponytail bounced with the rhythm of each new circle. I thought, Lucia does not make cleaning look easy. She makes it look like hard labor. She was sweaty, as usual. The pits of her oversized gray T-shirt were soaked. Lucia actually had a great body, probably from the constant workout of cleaning so hard. Her face was nice to look at, too: light green eyes, caramel skin. All the people who worked for me were good-looking. Sometimes I wondered if this was intentional. (Should I hire an ugly person?) But it wasn’t intentional. Of course it wasn’t. I was just lucky.

I had inherited Lucia from Mom when we sold Eighty-Fourth. She’d managed not to get fired for ten years, which was a miracle. Only one other assistant had made it that far. I’d been more than happy to get rid of Griselda, who constantly gave me the evil eye and who had gained so much weight because of her thyroid condition that she couldn’t even finish the whole house every day anymore. She actually asked me if she could bring a friend in to help. So I could pay double for the same amount of work? Definitely not. When I fired Griselda, she actually cried, which upset me more than I wanted it to. I told her it was probably for the best; maybe she could get a desk job at an office or something, a job where she could sit all day. I remember the scary rumble deep in her throat when she sighed. I thought she might go postal and shoot me. I even pressed the 9 on my phone, ready to add the two 1’s if she sighed like that again. “I cannot work in the office, I have no papers!” I told her I was happy to write her a reference whenever she needed one and shooed her out the door. I gave her $100 on the way out and hoped the image of her limping away down the street would be blotted out and forgotten as soon as possible.

Lucia and I were friendly. I had known her for so long. She knew all my little tics, she knew how I liked things. She was one of the few people who actually
knew
me knew me. And I didn’t feel the need to impress her. I felt relaxed. I actually loved having her around. She was like a built-in friend. Sometimes (and I wouldn’t have admitted this to anyone) I wondered if my truest friends were the people who worked for me. I just spent so much time with them. The people I would have listed as friends were more like acquaintances. Everyone was just so busy. People had jobs and lives and children, and it was hard even to get together for dinner. Susan was the one exception.

“Lucia, what do you think of William?”

“William?” She stopped rubbing. “William es muy hombre.”

“What?” I said. “English, por favor.”

“William is a real man.” She flexed her arm. “Fuerte. But this dog, I don’t know.” We looked at Herman, whose head was poking out of his padded dog igloo in the corner. “I hope no peepee.”

“He better not peepee.”

Herman’s presence in the apartment was definitely not ideal. He hadn’t done anything stupid yet, but I knew if he peed anywhere, or ate anything that wasn’t food, I was going to lose it. Honestly, when I looked at him, I thought, Wow, my fear of dying alone has made me more open and malleable than I ever expected to be. Herman was cute, but I was not an animal person. I agreed with my mother on this front: animals belong outside. And yet here I was, compromising. Compromising with my partner. That felt good. It felt like progress. I had even hired a dog walker to take Herman out three times a day. Her name was Trish and yes, Trish was very good-looking. Her light skin and her dyed red hair reminded me of Tori Amos. She was a grad student at NYU, working on her thesis, and this job was her way of “getting off her ass.” I liked her thrift-store look; she actually managed to pull it off. Her winged black glasses would have looked ridiculous on other people, but on Trish they looked great.