What She Saw... (25 page)

Phoebe hated her for it.

Her whole life, it seemed to Phoebe, she'd been made to feel guilty for asking too many questions. She thought again of old Mrs. K, who only liked answers. “Has trouble following directions,” the old battle-ax had written in the comments section of Phoebe's report card. And Emily—at some point during her adolescence, Emily had nicknamed Phoebe “N.P.” (short for “Nosy Parker”), and all because she'd once caught her younger sister flipping through her diary, trying to find out what really happened at Emily's junior prom. (Not much, as it turned out.) And Bruce Bledstone—she hadn't been able to ask him anything; she'd learned so much the day she made the mistake of asking if he loved his wife. Only Kevin seemed oblivious to her “curiosity problem.” But then, she could never think of anything to ask him that she didn't already, intuitively, know the answer to.

She hung up the phone convinced that the woman at the front desk of the Carlyle Hotel was just another naysayer from her past. But where was Arnold Allen? Phoebe remembered now that he'd left her his business card. She fished it out of her purse and dialed the ten-digit number printed in the bottom right-hand corner—the number she was supposed to call if and when she had any doubts whatsoever as to whether or not he was a nice guy, a good guy, the kind of guy you could trust with five hundred dollars.

But it wasn't his office at all. It was no longer in service. That's what the automated recording said. But it wasn't possible. That's what Phoebe kept telling herself. That everything would make sense in the end. Except doubt had begun to infiltrate the equation, throwing up X's and Y's where once there had only been digits. Why had he told her he was staying at the Carlyle if he wasn't? And why had his phone been disconnected? And what about Friday? What about her big break?

In the lamplight now Phoebe could make out writing on the back of the card. Flipping it over, she found a name, Jill Lewis, handwritten in a different-color ink but in the same, barely legible chicken scrawl. And next to Jill Lewis's name was a number with an outer-borough area code. She dialed blindly. A gruff-sounding man answered the phone. “My name is Phoebe Fine,” she said in her best executive-secretary voice—the one she'd used that very afternoon at Toffler Associates. “And I'm calling in reference to a man named Arnold Allen. Jill Lewis's name and number were printed on the back of a business card he left with me.”

Now the gruff-sounding man let out a furious laugh. “Arnold Allen tried to con my wife out of a large sum of money today. We've already filed a complaint with the police. You should call them, too. Tell them it's the same guy. Did you give him anything?”

“No—I—,” Phoebe started to tell him. But she couldn't finish the sentence, couldn't begin to admit that she had. She couldn't even breathe. “Thank you,” she whispered into the receiver before she hung up.

SHE MUST HAVE stood there for ten minutes, the receiver pressed to her blouse, the truth defying her grasp like one of those superbouncy rubber glitter balls from a five-cent machine. She couldn't bear to believe it had all been a scam—couldn't bear the idea that a girl like her would fall for something like that. She couldn't cry, either—not until she'd gotten to the Italian bakery where Kevin McFeeley currently made his living shoveling cannoli into white paper bags. (The copy shop had fired him for printing Mr. Potato Head flyers on the company bill.)

It was the image of Kevin's sallow face reduced to wearing that two-foot-high white paper hat that pushed her over the edge. Two idiots in love—that's what she was thinking, but she couldn't say it out loud. She needed Kevin McFeeley too much right then. She needed him to make it better, and he tried. He took one look at Phoebe's twisted face, threw down his cake server, sideswept the counter, laced his arms around her quivering frame, and whispered, “What's the matter? What is it, baby—are you okay?” Like the wonderful boyfriend that he was.

So she could tell him between gasps, “Something really awful happened.”

So he could tell her that he still loved her, always would, no matter what mistakes she'd make in life.

Then he got permission to leave work early. And on the walk home, Phoebe told him as much of the story as she could bear to tell him. (She left out the part about how the man in the sheepskin coat came awfully close to touching her where only Kevin did.) And for a moment or two, in the act of recounting, she imagined herself a blameless victim of a random crime. That's what Kevin kept saying—that the guy was a professional; that she couldn't have expected to come away unscathed; that she was lucky to have gotten away as cleanly as she had. It was the sight of that half-empty squirt-top bottle of hand lotion leaned up against the leg of the sofa that made her curl up in a little ball by the stove and rock herself back and forth against the linoleum until her spine was bruised.

That's how much she loathed herself. She loathed her vanity. She loathed her gullibility the most. The money was only part of it. The greater theft was of her ego. Here she'd thought she was so sophisticated—what with her downtown address, her black leather jacket, her married ex-lovers, her intimate knowledge of Italian Marxism. She turned out to be a fool. A country bumpkin. A hayseed. A clodhopper. A yokel. A naïf. It was as if her very identity had been snatched out from under her. She couldn't believe she'd let Arnold Allen touch her. It didn't matter that he hadn't touched her “there.” She felt ravaged, shattered, filthy, wretched. And there was nothing Kevin McFeeley or anyone else could say or do to make her feel better.

Oh, but he tried. He lifted her up off the floor, took her in his arms, stroked her hair while her nose ran down his neck. “Baby, it's gonna be okay,” he kept saying. He held her closer and closer. She felt his chest rising and falling, then a similar cresting below the waist. That he wanted her now—it sickened her to the very bottom of her core. And she cried harder and louder. She was crying so hard she couldn't get out the word
no.
Or maybe she couldn't bear to say it. To disappoint him. It was the same problem all over again. Or was it? Maybe she wanted it, too—even as her mind was repelled. To think she could be aroused at a time like this! But she must have been. She must have wanted to be punished. She must have wanted to be loved.

She put up no struggle when Kevin McFeeley laid her down on the sofa, lifted her legs into his lap. “Sh!” he kept saying. “Close your eyes.”

She did as she was told. She lifted her palms to her face, left her body to its own devices. His hands were greasy. His hands felt good. Just as they had last time, with Arnold Allen—maybe better, maybe about the same. “Sh!” Kevin kept saying. Then he climbed on top of her. Phoebe kept her palms over her eyes the whole time—just like she used to during the scary parts of
The
Wizard of Oz,
like when the Wicked Witch of the West locked Dorothy in that room with only Toto for a friend. Except she always cheated. She always peeked through the slats of her fingers. She could never resist the temptation to look. But tonight there was nothing to look at.

Tonight the horror was behind her hands.

It could have been anyone on top of her that night. Phoebe didn't tell that to Kevin McFeeley. She didn't want to hurt his feelings. It wasn't his fault. At that moment in time, she felt strongly that it was all hers.

SHE WOKE TO the phone ringing. It was Lisa from Class Act Temps. “Hey, hon,” she said. “I got a job for you at First Bank of Yemen. Eleven bucks an hour. Can you be there by ten?”

“Sure,” Phoebe told her.

“And don't forget to dress corporate.”

“I won't.”

She showered and dressed in ten minutes—in a pale blue blazer, white blouse, gray nylons, and the same platform sandals and sensible, grotesque, knee-length beige skirt she'd worn the day before. Then she poured herself a glass of orange juice, brushed her hair back into a neat ponytail. Kevin was still asleep when she closed the door behind her. It was sunny outside. A nice day, she thought. She felt sad but in an unspecific way, a mundane way.

Maybe not so different from the way she felt almost every day.

What compelled her to take a seven-block detour on her way to the subway, she couldn't say. Maybe it was simple curiosity. Maybe there was a part of her that still believed it might be true—the Guild, the pilot, the audition, the street address on Lower Broadway.

Except it was a professional dry cleaners. BRING US YOUR TOUGHEST STAINS boasted the sign over the door.

For fifteen or twenty seconds Phoebe stood frozen on the sidewalk gazing through the scratched window at the overhead racks of disembodied shirts and coats, their arms frozen beneath their plastic sheaths, their collars bleached and starched and pressed like new. Commuters rushed by her at various oblique angles. Her head felt light. Her stomach convulsed. Twenty minutes later, stepping off the 6 train at Grand Central, she vomited all over the platform. She wiped her mouth on her newspaper.

Then she went to work.

“IF YOU DON'T know where you're going, any road will take you there,” read the tea bag that drooped against the side of her Styrofoam cup later that same morning on the forty-first floor of a neo-deco office tower on Sixth Avenue. She was filling in for someone named Mary. Someone Named Mary was on vacation at Disneyland. Someone Named Mary wouldn't be back until Monday. A color print of two chimpanzees sharing a banana had been pinned to the corkboard over Someone Named Mary's in box. In a heart-shaped tin frame next to the telephone grinned a generically adorable pig-tailed pipsqueak (no doubt, Someone Named Mary's) posed against a wall of fake clouds.

Phoebe's temporary boss was a cross-looking man named Mr. Habib. A gold watch interrupted the flow of black hair on his wrists. He had rings the size of Saturn's around his olive-shaped eyes. His brows were thick and tangled like grape arbors. When the phone rang, she was to answer it “Mr. Habib's office. How may I direct your call?” It rang only three times the whole morning. The first time it was Mrs. Habib. The second time it was a guy named Stu from the main office.

The third time it was Kevin McFeeley calling to see if Phoebe was still alive.

She somehow hated him for asking—even though she was the one who'd left a distraught-sounding message for him not thirty minutes earlier asking that he call her as soon as possible.

Now she snapped at him, “Would you please stop worrying about me?” Then she hung up, hating him. For knowing too much. For reminding her of the man in the sheepskin coat. In the end, she wondered, was there really any difference between the perpetrator and the pacifier?

She spent the rest of the day destroying her cuticles with the bent tip of a paper clip and wishing that, like Superman, she could turn back the clock. She couldn't imagine ever having sex with Kevin McFeeley again. The very idea repulsed her. She'd never been so exhausted in her entire life. Come one o'clock, she couldn't even rouse herself to go filch lunch.

11. Pablo Miles

OR “The Most Important American Artist of the Post–World War II Period”

SOMETIMES SHE FELT like hot shit, sometimes just like shit. It changed by the hour and sometimes by the minute. City life had that effect on Phoebe—the effect of spontaneous self-aggrandizement that degenerated into self-disgust at the smallest of provocations, the most random of provocations. The insistent bass line of a teenager's boom box, the sickly sweet smell of chicken wings on the subway, the sight of other women taller and thinner and more gorgeous than she would ever be would render the stories she told herself, about herself, pure fiction, and Arnold Allen into the bellwether of her feckless existence. Four months later she could scarcely remember his face. But his hands, his simultaneously chapped and greased hands, she couldn't forget those hands. So it was that while she rode the elevator up to Susan Kenny's Pearl Street apartment, a fleeting glance at her hair (too flat!) and her face (too puffy!) in the polished copper ceiling, the reflective surface of which was as unforgiving as a fluorescent-lit mirror in a public rest room, left Phoebe suddenly dejected and wondering if she ought to turn back.

Oh, but she hated to miss things—hated the idea that there were men she could have met, men she would have met, had she not passed up the opportunity to meet them. Because men were a living metaphor for her own aspirations, her own quest for approval, since, at the age of twenty-two, sex was all she felt she had to offer. And since she'd come all this way, invested all that time separating her eyelashes, styling her hair, moisturizing her cheeks, lining her lips, trying to be the one you wanted, the one you couldn't live without, the one you found yourself reaching out an arm for her to lean on as she teetered from crisis to crisis to crisis only to collapse in your bed at the end of the night, a tortured sylph in black lace—this was her fantasy of herself when she was feeling like hot shit—she opened the door. Whereupon a barrage of static heat, exaggerated laughter, and stale smells pummeled her senses and left her feeling daunted all over again. She'd never seen so many people packed into such a small space. She didn't recognize a single one of them. She elbowed her way through the crowd in search of the hostess.

She found Susan Kenny sitting cross-legged on the kitchen counter nursing a Corona.

“Susan!” Phoebe squealed in relief. (That she could perform giddy exuberance even at her most defeated—Phoebe had always taken this quality for granted about herself.)

“Phoebe!” chimed Susan, matching Phoebe's exultant tone as she descended from her perch and enveloped Phoebe in an overblown bear hug. As if they were good friends. As if they actually liked each other. As if they hadn't seen each other in ten years when the truth was more like one year (i.e., since graduation from Hoover). “Ohmigod you look SO great!”

“Thanks. So do you,” lied Phoebe.

In fact, she'd never seen Susan look worse. Her skin looked blotchy, her legs seemed heavier. It was pretty obvious she'd gained weight. Susan, Phoebe thought to herself with a combination of disdain and jealousy but mostly just disdain, was one of those girls for whom mediocrity was its own reward.

“It's the craziest thing,” said Susan, leaning into Phoebe's ear with her hot beer breath. “There are all these totally gorgeous guys here!”

“That's so crazy!” said Phoebe, distracted. She'd already found her gorgeous guy. He was standing over by the potted ficus, a tallish thing with streaks of platinum in his spiky brown hair. He was wearing a brown suede fringed jacket and black leather pants. She had a feeling he was looking at her, too. She wasn't expecting him to admit it. But there he was, not three minutes later—Susan had since disappeared into another overblown bear hug—standing next to her, standing over her, saying, “I've been checking you out,” one elbow leaned up against an Ikea bookcase filled with someone's college psychology textbooks—probably Susan's.

“Oh, really?” said Phoebe.

“Yeah, really,” said the gorgeous guy. Then he smiled. Then he lifted a plastic cup to his lips. “You're very fuckable,” he told her before he bent his head backward and chugged.

Of all the affronts! But Phoebe could play this game, too. Which is why she asked him, “Do you really mean it?” all big eyes and faux grateful.

Except she was. That was the pathetic part. She couldn't help herself. She had a thing for cocky assholes. When they expressed interest in her, it seemed meaningful. When nice guys hit on her, she had trouble caring.

“I really mean it,” he said. Then he extended an arm, introduced himself as Pablo Miles.

“Starla Chambers,” she returned the favor.

Because she felt like it. And because it sounded like the kind of name that belonged to the kind of girl he'd want to know and she wanted to be—the kind of girl who didn't feel the need to adopt pseudonyms; the kind of girl who took pleasure in impersonating herself; the kind of girl for whom history was less a burden (to be reminded at every turn of how fortunate you were to have been born where and when you were!) than a benign irrelevance. Sometimes she just wanted to be a girl.

Whereupon Pablo Miles got down on one knee, pressed his lips to the back of her hand, then his tongue.

“Ew, gross!” She jerked her hand out of his grasp.

“You know you like it.” He smiled mischievously.

“I don't just like it, I need it,” Phoebe corrected him.

“Nympho.”

“Letch.”

“I never said I wasn't.”

She lit a cigarette. She wasn't having a bad time.

Later but not that much later, she wrote her phone number on the back of his hand.

THEIR FIRST DATE was more like an appointment. To screw. Pablo Miles called her the very next morning. He arrived at her apartment at noon. They went to bed at one. But first he pushed her up against the door of her closet. “You have a really hot body,” he told her.

“So do you,” she was going to tell him, then changed her mind, thinking it sounded too aggressive. And because, despite the nympho jokes, he was the conqueror and she was the conquest. That was the arrangement. That was the injustice of it.

“Thank you,” she said instead, and smiled demurely.

Whereupon Pablo Miles reached under her skirt. In response, Phoebe made little breathy noises intended to imply her helplessness in the face of such overwhelming desire. She didn't mean most of them. Maybe not any of them. Not because it didn't feel good. It felt plenty good. But it felt insignificant. Something like pissing. She was finding sex could be like that—satisfying but in only the most quotidian of ways. The most idiotic of ways. The most mechanical of ways. In fact, she could come at will. In ten seconds flat. With the right amount of pressure applied to the right number of places. And at the same time, she was never entirely convinced she'd come. Indeed, her orgasms frequently seemed too calculated to be believed.

It was like that with Pablo Miles. After which point he asked her, “Do you want me to fuck you now?”

She told him, “Okay.”

Because it seemed like a nice thing to do—to let him fuck her after he'd brought her, if not to orgasm, then to something that loosely approximated one. And then he did. And she enjoyed herself insofar as she enjoyed watching Pablo Miles enjoy himself. So she came again. Or, at least, she made noises to imply that she had. Because Pablo Miles was bound to be both flattered and impressed, which he was. Afterward, he said, “A lot of girls can't come during intercourse.”

To which Phoebe replied, “I'm not like other girls. I'm more like a man.”

“You're like a man's fantasy,” he told her.

She didn't argue with the assessment. She never tired of compliments. They made her feel worthy. She never bought that New Age bullshit about loving yourself. What was there to love? Behind her occasionally witty and apparently sympathetic demeanor, she knew herself to be vain, catty, backstabbing, supercilious—not much of a friend. THEY SHOWERED. THEY dressed. They moseyed on over to some adorable little café with an Italian surname on Mac-Dougal Street, where they sat at a wrought-iron table out front slurping the froth off their cappuccinos. They were both feeling high on themselves—the way people sometimes do after sex that leads to orgasm in a timely fashion—and the conversation reflected it. Pablo told Phoebe he was destined to be recognized as the most important American artist of the post–World War II period. In the meantime, he was getting his M.F.A. at Hunter. Phoebe told Pablo she intended to make groundbreaking documentaries on the “male gaze.” In the meantime, she was working as a two-hundred-dollar-a-week production assistant for an all-women documentary collective, currently shooting,
Home Is Where the Husband Is,
a cinema verité exploration of Filipino mail-order brides living in Queens.

Later, the talk turned to all the other guys/girls who were currently hot for the two of them. “There's this total dweeb named Robert who's always calling me, and I feel really bad because he's really nice and he's totally in love with me, but I'm totally not interested,” Phoebe told Pablo.

“Believe me, I know what that's like,” Pablo told Phoebe. “There's this girl at Hunter who's, like, obsessed with me. Ellen. I think that's her name. She's, like, this big fat girl. Pretty face. Ass like a truck. She's always writing me these love letters. Maybe I should fuck her. You know, just to be nice.” (Smile, smile.)

“You're so bad.” (Phoebe shaking her head, Pablo loving it, Phoebe loving it, too. What was more ego-enhancing than making dumb jokes at the expense of ugly women? Phoebe couldn't think of anything.)

Phoebe could never decide who she hated more—other people or herself.

THEIR SECOND DATE was more of a date. They met for a late dinner at Rose of India on East Sixth Street, where they split an order of chana saag and talked about the past. “I hated guys like you in high school,” Phoebe felt compelled to inform Pablo.

“How do you know what I was like in high school?” he asked.

“I can just tell,” she told him. “You probably wouldn't even have talked to me in high school.”

“Were you hot?”

“Not particularly,” she admitted.

“Then I probably wouldn't have talked to you,” he agreed.

“See, I told you,” she said, hating him just a little.

“But you're hot now,” he said. “So what does it matter?”

She liked him again. She was that easy to appease.

She was even more eager to please.

The only reason she went to the midnight showing of
Wings
of Desire
at the Angelika Film Center was because Pablo wanted to. She dozed off halfway through. Pablo nudged her during the credits. “Come on, wake up,” he whispered. “Unless you want me to fuck you while you're asleep.”

“Rapist,” she muttered under her breath.

“Baby, I'm like a rape fantasy,” he muttered back.

As they made their way up the aisle, Phoebe thought to herself: we'd have such attractive kids.

“I THOUGHT ALEKAN'S use of chiaroscuro was pure genius,” Pablo volunteered in the taxi back to his Brooklyn digs— half a floor of an old turpentine factory he shared with four other guys.

“Alex who?” she asked.

“Forget it,” he said, scowling.

“No, why?”

“I thought you said you worked in film.”

“I do.”

“For future information, Alekan is only, like, the greatest cinematographer who ever lived.”

“Well, I didn't know that!”

“Well, now you do.”

His canvases hung from the makeshift walls of his room. They were big and loud and crowded, with splattered oil paint half-obscuring cartoon characters from their childhood and freefloating female body parts. There was a familiar quality to all of them. Phoebe was disappointed by the discovery. She'd been thinking Pablo Miles might be a great innovator for our times. In deference to her date, however, she feigned fascination before the largest canvas—Minnie Mouse with a tit job overlaid on a Jackson Pollack. At least, that's what it looked like to her. “I really like this one,” she said.

“I like that one, too,” said Pablo.

But there was a hint of uncertainty in his voice—a hint of weakness. And Phoebe hated him for it—suddenly hated him for reminding her of herself. He was there to reassure her. Didn't he get it? Didn't he know his job?

Despondent, she stretched out on Pablo's futon and closed her eyes.

“What's the matter?” he said, climbing onto the bed next to her.

“Nothing,” she answered.

“Are you horny?”

“Maybe.”

“Do you want me to fuck you?”

Was it possible that she didn't know if she did? So often Phoebe found herself unable to differentiate between what she wanted and what
he
wanted, whoever
he
was at the time.

“I'll take that to mean yes,” said Pablo, reaching for her zipper.

She let him have it. She found it so much easier letting other people make decisions for her.

She found that the people who made decisions for her were the people she was the most attracted to in life.

She woke the next morning with the distinct impression that something meaningful had taken place. Pablo seemed to feel it, too. “I got to be careful,” he said over a half portion of Stouffers' French bread pizza and some strawberry-flavored Carnation Instant Breakfast. “I could get used to this life.”

“I know what you mean,” said Phoebe, jubilant at the thought that he might be growing attached to her. That she wasn't necessarily growing attached to him was beside the point. He was so handsome, and a painter. He'd even gone to Princeton. It was an impressive résumé, a romantic résumé.

She felt like hot shit just thinking about it.