What She Saw... (22 page)

He'd let a meaningful little wisp of a silence pass between them—at least, it would seem meaningful to Phoebe. Then he'd ask her, “Are you sure that's what you want?”

Just as he always had—as if the whole thing had only ever been her idea, and her sex drive that had required servicing. And he had only ever succumbed unwittingly and abjectly to the near-impossible task of trying to service it. “Unfulfillable Phoebe.” That had been his nickname for her. And he wasn't entirely wrong: rarely had she been anything other than “in the mood.” But only because sex had been the one thing she'd had to offer that he'd never seemed to tire of.

But that he still wanted it—that he was still willing!— somehow amazed her. Apparently, Bruce Bledstone couldn't say no to sex—not even sex from his worst nightmare. “How soon will you be here?” he'd want to know.

“Ten minutes,” she'd promise. “Fifteen at the very most.” Because, despite everything, she was still loath to make him wait.

Feigning illness or exhaustion, she'd part company with her friends—step out onto the street, onto Broadway or Second Avenue, Grand Street or Lafayette, the cityscape scintillating before her eyes like some kind of sequined tube top circa 1979, somewhere between tacky and profound. And she'd have an acid burn in her stomach from all the cheap wine and bummed cigarettes. And she'd be wearing a pair of high-heeled mules that gave her cause to imagine her reinvention as the Nelly Bly of the bedroom complete. And she'd be trying not to look at the street people—at their fallen faces and taped sneakers and misspelled, block-lettered signs: I CAN'T NOW LONGER FEED MY FAMMILY IF YOU BELIEF IN GOD PLEASE HELP ME GOD BLESSES YOU. That whole lives could be reduced to one illiterate sentence—it was shocking, it was inconceivable.

It was too close to Phoebe's own failure to ingratiate herself with the professional class, and therefore not her problem, at least not right now, maybe someday.

In the meantime, she'd hail a cab—even though she couldn't really afford it, what with her temp jobs bringing in barely ten bucks an hour. But this would qualify as a special occasion. This was better than nicotine. That's how she'd justify the expenditure. That's what she'd tell herself while she watched the blocks scrolling by, one after another after another, just like the paper filmstrips she and Emily used to pull through the windows of empty noodle boxes back when they were young, not so many years ago.

MAYBE HIS LATEST tome, The Praxis of Theory, had sold a lot of copies. Maybe he'd come into some family money. Whatever the case, Bruce Bledstone had come up in the world. After the divorce, he moved into a two-thousand-square-foot loft on the western edge of Chinatown. There was a fish market on the first floor. He lived on the third.

He'd open the door and smile at her, but he wouldn't say hello. He'd say, “Can I take your coat?” and Phoebe wouldn't refuse.

Then he'd offer her a drink, and she wouldn't refuse that either. Then he'd turn on the television. But it wouldn't be like it used to be—when the picture on the screen was just a momentary distraction from their own melodrama. Now they'd sit there staring straight ahead, watching and waiting for the right time—there never really was one—to go through the motions. That's all they were now: physical sensations she was far too self-conscious to experience as pleasurable.

It was enough to have recorded the event—enough to be offered proof that she and Bruce Bledstone were still capable of producing certain fluids in each other's company. Or, at least, it was better than being forgotten. That's what Phoebe would tell herself in the morning. He wouldn't say good-bye and neither would she. She'd make her exit just as she'd made her entrance the night before—without explication, but for the occasional joke regarding her distaste for swallowing.

What more was there to say?

LETTERS. PHOTOGRAPHS. GIFTS. Bruce Bledstone didn't believe in any of them; Bruce Bledstone didn't have a sentimental bone in his body. (“In a late-capitalist society,” he once opined, “everything exacts a price.”) So he came and went with few traces: a signed copy of his book (“For Phoebe,” he'd written. “Best wishes, Bruce”); a handful of disintegrating petals left over from a generic get-well bouquet he'd sent her when she was holed up in the hospital during the fall of her senior year (let's just say she made a rapid recovery); a ninety-minute cassette tape with only one song to its name. He'd left it in her mailbox at school that same winter—the winter she kept pretending to break up with him. He'd written “Phoebe's Song” on the cardboard insert. It was a clarinet, accordion, drum, and bagpipe number by the Rhodope folk troop of Bulgaria. It was the same one he was playing in the car that night—the night they first got together under all those stupid stars. The visiting professor seemed to have forgotten that it “wasn't really [her] taste.” Or maybe he hadn't forgotten at all. Maybe he was rewriting history to suit his own needs. Maybe he was coercing a subordinate class to conform to his interests.

Maybe he was just trying to be funny.

She liked a guy with a good sense of humor.

9. Kevin McFeeley

OR “The Romantic from Ronkonkoma”

LEONARD FINE WAS the first to point out that Kevin McFeeley bore an uncanny resemblance to Frédéric Chopin. And he wasn't wrong: with his long skinny face, dark wavy hair, slightly bulbous nose, and haunted blue eyes, Kevin McFeeley always did look a little like the famous Delacroix portrait of the so-called poet of the piano. Oh, but the similarities didn't end there! As with Frédéric, Kevin both wrote and performed his own compositions, albeit on a Fender Stratocaster. And while he wasn't exactly tormented by gloomy visions of his war-torn homeland—as a general rule, things were pretty calm in Ronkonkoma, Long Island—his romantic impulse (let it be said) was formidable.

Never mind the Valentine's Day card he rendered out of three-hole-punched scrap paper culled from the Kinko's copy shop, where he earned his daily keep. Not long after he and Phoebe met—a few months after graduation, at an ironic pin-ball dive on the Lower East Side featuring Elvis lamps and underground porn flicks starring Japanese waifs getting duct-taped to upright chairs—Kevin McFeeley showed up at the door of her East Village studio sublet to declare himself. He had a towel thrown over his rubberized Fonz T-shirt. He was gripping an econo-sized, generic-brand shampoo. He was staring at his Converse sneakers. “I don't want to impose or anything,” he began. “But do you think I could, like, borrow your shower? For some reason, there's no, like, hot water in my building. And to be perfectly honest, I'm smelling kind of, like, bad.”

“Go ahead,” Phoebe told him. “Just don't, like, leave any hair on the soap.” (She like, had a thing about that.)

“No problem,” said Kevin. “Oh, and thanks. Thanks a lot.” He disappeared into the shower.

He emerged twenty minutes later with wet hair.

“Well, I guess I'll be going,” he said about twenty separate times.

“Do you want a beer or something?” she eventually acceded.

“Maybe just one,” he happily agreed.

He had a beer.

He stayed for seven months.

But then, Phoebe never actually asked him to leave. New York City could get pretty lonely, especially when the weather turned cold and wet, and the wind off the Hudson left the side-walks littered with broken umbrellas that looked like wing-clipped birds.

And, in all honesty, Phoebe never actually gave all that much thought to being Kevin McFeeley's girlfriend. She fell into their relationship the way others fall asleep at the wheel.

And, Kevin McFeeley rubbed her feet, and brought her cupcakes, and illegally wired her apartment for cable, and let her make him up like a girl—with eyeliner, mascara, lipstick, and blush. She hadn't known guys could be that sweet. She thought all men were more or less like Bruce Bledstone and Humphrey Fung.

Or maybe it was that it had never occurred to her before that she might be attracted to someone who didn't treat her like a mild irritant.

And he told her he loved her, Kevin did. He told her that about sixteen times a day. And the only other guy who'd ever said that to her was Spitty Clark, and she'd always assumed he was too drunk to mean it. Moreover, there were times when she thought she loved Kevin, too. Though what she probably loved even more than Kevin was the idea of someone being in love with
her
. It seemed like a radical notion. It seemed like the “real thing.”

But it got pretty tiring reminiscing about TV shows from their youth. (“Remember Rose on
Zoom
?” “Remember Letter-Man on
Electric Company
?” “Remember that
Twilight Zone
where that guy sees that other guy standing on the wing of that airplane?” “Remember that
Brady Bunch
when Alice becomes a drill sergeant?” “Remember that
Gilligan's Island
where Gilligan wants to be the skipper?”) Especially since she'd never seen half the shows Kevin reminisced about—only heard about them secondhand from Brenda Cuddihy.

And there were only so many Saturday afternoons she could get stoned and go to the Museum of Natural History and find the gem room a “total mind fuck”—only so many Saturday nights she could muster up the energy to go hear the Sun Ra Arkestra play at Tramps.

And while she was happy to serve as muse to all those potential grunge anthems Kevin was writing about life, love, and suburbia—“Gated Community” was, perhaps, her favorite— neither his singing nor his songwriting ever impressed her. The lyrics she found derivative (“Are you having a ball / Living behind a wall / In the shadow of the mall?”), the chord progressions simplistic (tonic, dominant, tonic, dominant).

And it made her jealous that he got to be the creative genius—she, merely, the girlfriend of the creative genius.

And he wasn't just poor, he was penurious. The one time in six months he took her out to eat—at Dojo, a New York University hangout specializing in inexpensive vegetarian fare— she ended up paying. She ordered brown rice and steamed vegetables. To save money, he ordered the carrot soup. But when the check came, he didn't even have enough cash to cover his portion of the bill.

And he had this annoying habit of calling everything he liked “raw.” He'd say, “The new Neil Young album is so unbelievably raw.”

To which she'd reply, “Sushi is raw. The new Neil Young album is cool. I mean,
you
think it's cool. I'd rather listen to Deee-Lite any day.”

And he left his smelly socks on her kitchen counter even though she asked him not to.

And he spoke so slowly.

And he smelled like pickles when he didn't wash.

And he never read the newspaper.

And he never left home without a dog-eared copy of
Naked
Lunch.

And he was so skinny he made her feel fat.

And he got so sweaty during sex.

And he wanted to do it three times a day. And when she wasn't in the mood, which was all the time—it turned out Phoebe was fulfillable after all—he went and jerked himself off. He said he couldn't fall asleep without coming. He said it really relaxed him. Little wonder that having sex with Kevin McFeeley came to seem about as special as flossing.

And he was always complaining about all the “sellout cell-phone phonies” in Soho even though he was not so secretly obsessed with supermodels—called them all by their first names as in, “Did you see Kate in
Harper's Bazaar
this month? She's so skinny it's disgusting.” When what he really meant—Phoebe was sure of it—was that he got a boner every time he laid eyes on Kate Moss.

And he thought musicians lived above politics. He thought musicians had no business voting. Phoebe told him not voting was a political statement in and of itself, but he refused to see how.

And there were times she thought the love Kevin McFeeley had to offer was right out of some corny movie from the 1950s, where the guy worships the girl just for being so pretty to look at and so agreeable to his advances, and not because there's anything intrinsically compelling about her. In truth, Kevin McFeeley never seemed all that interested in learning anything more about Phoebe than he already knew, which wasn't all that much. For example, he never thought to ask her what she wanted to do with the rest of her life. (She was currently deciding among the professions of feminist film theorist, high-class hooker, and night watchman—anything to avoid waking up early.)

And he never shut up about his band, Mr. Potato Head. “I swear to God that dickweed in Falstaff's Nostril stole my fuckin' pedal technique!” he'd declaim while she tried to read Jacques Lacan.

Not to mention the fact that her and Kevin's relationship was a comparatively stable one, and Phoebe had yet to outgrow her attachment to self-destruction. She kept an oral history of Edie Sedgwick by her bed. She secretly suspected that being well-adjusted was the greatest sickness of all. And at the same time it drove her crazy that Kevin thought he was so dissolute and demimonde just because he'd snorted heroin a few times. (There were limits to Phoebe's interest in self-immolation, after all.)

Just as she could never stop doubting that Kevin McFeeley, who'd dropped out of State University of New York at Fredonia after the second year, was good enough for her. Which is to say, important enough and well-enough read and great enough a talent to be deserving of her importance, her greatness, her talent.

And at the same time, there must have been something wrong with Kevin McFeeley if he loved her, an essentially meritless person. Could he be that crazy? Didn't he know that she used to throw up brown sugar, and occasionally still did?

But, then, Kevin McFeeley was the kind of guy one got used to having around. He was really good at fixing things that broke. He didn't mind going to battle with water bugs. He'd take out your trash if it was filled with maggots and you were too grossed out to touch it yourself.

And it was nice having someone socially acceptable to bring home to Whitehead for dinner. Obviously, Leonard and Roberta would have preferred it if Kevin had been about to make his debut at Carnegie Recital Hall as opposed to some Avenue A beer-and-burger joint with an open-mike night. (“Have you ever thought about learning to read music?” Roberta asked him one night over London broil, knowing full well the answer would be no.) But at least he was the right age. At least he wasn't married. And he was always very polite. He always helped clear the table. Once he even came to dinner bearing a crate of tangerines.

And then, one day, none of it mattered. One day, circumstances overrode character. Poor Kevin. It wasn't his fault.

At a certain moment in time, Phoebe felt strongly that it was all
hers.