What She Saw... (29 page)

“I have to go to sleep,” she'd scathe.

Then she'd roll over, and so would Neil. They'd be lying there like two strangers who just happened to be sharing the same bed. It was in those moments that Phoebe would begin to plot her escape. But in the morning she always felt different. The energy to enact change would have dissipated with the previous night's dreams, while her desire for the physical and material comfort Neil was so adept at providing would be all the more overwhelming. It wouldn't help matters that he'd be standing over her with a steaming breakfast tray. The way the butter rode the hills and dales of her English muffin—in those moments, it would be enough.

Except by nightfall, she'd become enraged all over again. The way he never wanted to go out! The way he always tried to control her! By nightfall, she'd pick the same fights all over again. Sex would have been the only thing to put a stop to their miseries. But they no longer had sex. Neil had stopped trying. Phoebe had stopped caring. It wasn't that she lacked an audience. It was that the applause now fell on deaf ears.

Oh, but it wasn't merely that Neil failed to arouse her; it was that Phoebe, being the Overweight, Embittered, Glorified Secretary she imagined herself to be, failed to arouse herself. (For Phoebe, sex had always, primarily been an auto-erotic act.)

Though it was also true that “true love,” in so many ways, bored her—the way it always led down the same path, to the same ritualized lassitude, prompted by the same infantilizing gestures, the same debilitating vows, the same saccharine sentiments, the same pop-song platitudes, the same prosaic piffle. The same “I'd be lost without you.” And “I'd be devastated if you left me.” And “You're the best thing that ever happened to me.” And “You're my best friend.” And “I want to spend the rest of my life with you.” And “I want to be the father of your children.” And “I've never been closer to anyone.” And “You're the only girl for me.” And “I can't imagine life without you.” And “I'll always protect you.” And “I'll always take care of you.” And “I can't breathe without you.” And “I want to die in my sleep holding you in my arms when we're both ninety-nine.”

And “I thought about what I'd do if you were paralyzed from the neck down . . .” And “I'd be there for you—I really would.” And “I'll never ever go.” And “Don't ever let me go.” And “Let's be good to each other.” And “I'm the luckiest man in New York.” And “You're my forever girl.” And “I'll love you forever.” And “I know we just met . . .” And “If you don't want me in your life, I'll walk out that door right now and you'll never see me again—is that what you want?” And “Well, what
are
you saying?” And “Whatever.” And “Someday maybe you'll appreciate someone's efforts to be genuinely close to you. Until then, this is good-bye.” (She only wished Neil would say so much, but he never did, he never could.)

In the meantime, another year went by. Phoebe couldn't precisely say how. Her few remaining friends had stopped asking. At a certain point Phoebe stopped asking herself. It was easier that way—easier staying put than seeking an apartment she could afford in the current, runaway real estate market. Just as the thought of divvying up her and Neil's record collection was almost too much to bear. (Who would get the James Brown box set they'd purchased in tandem?) And what if he really couldn't live without her? What if he went into a decline and ended up on the street—or worse, floating facedown in the East River? How would she ever forgive herself for that?

And to leave someone for no one—for Phoebe, that was the worst part. All the protecting had made her feel vulnerable. All the babying had made her feel babyish. All the special breakfast trays and “dinner-poos” had made her doubt that she was capable of feeding herself.

Besides, Phoebe sometimes thought to herself, it wasn't a bad life that she led.

It got even better after she put together a band.

From a pecuniary standpoint, it seemed like the sensible thing to do, what with the craze for cruiseship-style fiddling having peaked with the
Titanic.
And given Phoebe's lifelong love of power ballads, the artistic compromise seemed less than egregious. Never mind the psychic compromise. Here, potentially, was a way for Phoebe both to honor Roberta and Leonard's thinly veiled wish for a daughter who fiddled and to fly in the face of the high culture–low culture dichotomy by which they defined themselves. It was Phoebe on the violin, Holly Flake on the drums, Kevin McFeeley on the guitar, and a girl named Julie (someone's second cousin) on the keyboard. They took turns on vocals. They got along surprisingly well, the origins of their respective grievances having grown fuzzy over time. They called themselves Schmaltz. They practiced two nights a week in a studio on West Twenty-sixth. Their sound was fusion—one part turn-of-the-century show tunes, two parts pop rock. Their songs concerned the naïveté of romanticism and the futility of angst. They dreamt of recording contracts and guest appearances on late-night talk shows. In the meantime, they had jobs.

Holly worked in the marketing division of a cosmetics conglomerate; Kevin shelved books at the Strand; Julie waited tables at a snooty French restaurant in Tribeca. And as of that June, Phoebe found herself gainfully employed as a part-time receptionist at an animal hospital catering to the pets of the superrich. It wasn't much of a job. It paid even less than the Third World Knowledge Initiative did. And it was all the way uptown. But it had a social-service bent that allowed her to imagine that she was contributing to society, not merely consuming its resources. And it was part-time. And Neil paid most of the rent. And thanks to his fancy new job, he was always on the road, traveling to and from L.A.

Except he always came back—that was the problem. Phoebe would walk in on her perfectly nice-looking boyfriend pissing in the bathroom, and the sight of him standing over the pot doing what was, after all, only natural, would disgust her beyond reason. Such that she took to fantasizing that he'd die a painless death, if not in his sleep, then perhaps at sea. She would have felt terrible and all. She could even see herself breaking down mid-eulogy, having just transported the grieving crowd to life-embracing laughter as she recalled Neil's near-religious faith in the value of clean countertops. (In retrospect, his various idiosyncrasies would come to seem charming.) At present, however, his untimely death would have solved a multitude of problems. How important she'd feel to be at the center of such a senseless death! How little choice she'd have but to forge a new life for herself without him!

It was the passion she missed the most—the acting out before an enraptured male gaze. In a weird way, she even missed Pablo Miles. Or Peter Mandelbaum. Or whatever the fuck his name was. It didn't really matter in the end. . . .

15. Bo Pierce

OR “The Boarding School Brando”

LUST. SHE'D LIVED long enough to know a little about the games it plays with our hearts and with our heads—the way it stamps whimsy with a sense of the inevitable. And proleptically rationalizes the damage it has yet to do. And gloms on to a single name, a single face, a single tableau of our own absurd imaginations, whether it be the slow peel of white tights down taut thighs or the drawbridge-style falling forward of a fully clothed back over a messy desk. (To feel powerless before such pictures!) But then, lust is rarely an uninvited guest. Rather, it tends to limit its visits to those who make themselves open to its demented logic, its rose-tinted guile. It was in this vein that Phoebe first spotted Bo Pierce on the F train to Manhattan, his head bent down over a softback copy of
A Streetcar Named Desire,
the laces untied on his Stan Smith sneakers, the cuffs rolled on his unwashed blue jeans, the seam torn on the neck of his white T-shirt, a coral necklace riding the hump of his protruding Adam's apple, an aura of rage-tinged melancholy hovering in the foreground of his all-American good looks.

As if it had all been downhill since boarding school, since he'd learned to eat mushrooms, and play his Beatles records backward, and get his stomach pumped, and fuck his wispy blond girlfriend, who somehow got pregnant, even though she was anorexic, and had to have an abortion, and everyone cried and blamed each other and listened to Steely Dan's “Aja” alone in their Indian-bedspread-draped bedrooms, because Father was a tyrant and Mother was a wino and the sand in Nantucket was the same godforsaken color of beige every godforsaken summer. Not that Phoebe would have known. She'd never been to Nantucket. She hadn't attended boarding school, either. But she was feeling pretty disappointed herself—what with adult life turning out to be a series of unpaid bills and unwanted hairs.

And Bo Pierce appealed to her sense of endangered youth. She was twenty-four now, and he was the living embodiment of all her teenage fantasies of poetry-reading soccer captains who might have loved her at the age of sixteen, had she been someone else, not herself. And there was something about his eyes— gray-green eyes that invoked images of unmade beds in roadside motels. So it was that she sighed conspicuously before stretching her long legs into the aisle. At various moments he'd shift his not unsubstantial weight from one sneaker foot to the next. But he didn't look up; he wouldn't look up. He kept reading all the way across the East River. It had started to seem hopeless. But at West Fourth Street he let his book fall to his side as he stepped out of the way of a mob of schoolchildren boarding the train.

That's when he saw Phoebe and Phoebe saw him. And they stayed like that—burning cheek to burning cheek, heavy chest to heavy chest—for four whole stops. By Fourteenth Street, she'd already envisioned the two of them Sunday-brunching at Grange Hall. By Twenty-third, they were spread-eagle on a giant pink beach blanket somewhere off the coast of Portugal. By Thirty-fourth, Phoebe was trying to figure out who would bring whom to whose Thanksgiving. But at Forty-second, he turned his back, and she watched him go. She watched him disappear into the throng of commuters pushing toward their offices, toward their microwaved coffee and computer solitaire. And then the window turned to black, and she was hurtling through a tunnel toward Rockefeller Center. She had to assume she'd never see him again.

She looked anyway.

Every morning for a week, Phoebe rode the same car to work—the second car from the front—at the same hour of the morning. But he was never there. Just as it was never his faded khaki windbreaker she'd spot through a crowd and speed-walk to catch up to, only to find it belonged to a grizzled old merchant marine en route to Off Track Betting.

There's a time limit on all fantasies.

Boarding School Brando's eventually expired.

SO IT WAS that when they finally did meet—a little over a year later, in late April, at Grounds for Firing, a Brooklyn coffee bar catering to young mommies, frustrated novelists, and downwardly mobile college graduates pining for the days when reading William Burroughs was an acceptable lifestyle choice— she failed to recognize him. She was transporting a steaming grande cup of French roast to a fake-marble table in back. He was sitting at the next table over. “Excuse me,” she found herself inquiring, “Do you think I could borrow your paper for a second?”

“Oh, sure,” he said, extending a khaki-clad arm toward her own bare one.

She took the paper out of his hand and pretended to pore over the movie clock. A few minutes later she handed it back to him with a simple “Thanks.”

“No problem.” He smiled wistfully.

They went back to their respective reading materials.

But now he was the one who found an opening—Phoebe's wandering eyes—several minutes later. “Do you live around here?” he asked her.

“Just around the corner,” she told him. “What about you?”

“I moved here a few months ago from Greenpoint.”

“I have friends in Greenpoint . . .” she trailed off, hoping to conjure up images of dueling, drug-addled boyfriends—in short, a complicated past. “Why did you move here?”

“The place depressed me.” He shrugged. “All those aluminum-sided houses. The only nuclear waste site in New York State.”

“Are you an artist?”

“Out-of-work actor slash bartender. By the way, I'm Bo.”

“Phoebe,” she said, meeting his hand. It was warm and firm. “If it makes you feel any better, I'm an out-of-work electric-violinist slash receptionist.”

“I feel better already.”

They laughed. They sighed. It was that dumb, it was that easy.

It was something to daydream about between frantic phone calls from beleaguered Upper East Side matrons beset with vomiting Malteses.

IT WAS EXACTLY a week later that Phoebe found Bo exactly where she'd left him. She was hoping she'd find him there. Maybe he was hoping the same thing. Now he greeted her as if they were old pals. “Phoebe!” he said, procuring a vacant chair from an empty table to his left. “How have you been?”

“Decent,” she said. “What about you?”

“I guess I'm okay.”

“You guess or you are?”

“I don't want to burden you . . .”

“You're not burdening me. I love hearing about other peoples' problems. They make my own problems seem more manageable. And besides, as a bartender you probably have to listen to other people's crap all the time.”

He smiled appreciatively. “That's actually part of the problem. I work at this little joint down on the corner of Kenmare and Bowery. It doesn't really have a name. Do you know the place?”

“I think I've been there,” she said, squinting, as if through the mist of her own misspent youth.

“Anyway, it isn't properly ventilated, and I come home every night feeling like I've swallowed a fucking ashtray.”

“Can't you complain to the manager or something?”

“What manager?”

“What about the owner?”

Bo let loose a phlegm-soaked growl. “The owner can eat me!”

“Maybe you could complain to the health department?”

“Yeah, I guess.”

Every few minutes, her knee would brush against his knee. Neither of them would mention it. But he asked her, “Are you cold?” halfway through her own life story—the six-sentence version she'd perfected as much out of boredom as anything else. (She was sick of performing at a third-rate comedy club.)

“No, why?” she asked him back.

“You have goose bumps all over your arms,” he answered. But it wasn't her arms he was looking at.

Phoebe followed his eyes south. “I guess I am cold,” she said, giggling.

Then she looked up. And so did Bo. Then she saw something else, something neither of them was ready to mention. It was that old feeling, that familiar feeling—that all the furniture had risen off the floor.

And that the past only existed in the service of the present.

“Do you want to wear this?” he said, holding out his windbreaker.

“Thank you,” she said, fitting her arms into the sleeves. “But I should really be going home.”

“Why don't I walk you there?”

She didn't protest, and they left Grounds for Firing together.

They wound up on Phoebe's stoop. She stood on the second step. Bo leaned against the banister. “Maybe we could hang out sometime,” he suggested.

“That would be fun,” she agreed. “To tell you the truth, I don't have that many friends in the neighborhood.”

“Do you live alone?”

“With my boyfriend. But he's away a lot. In fact, he's away on business right now—until next Monday.” She said it as if she had nothing to hide. She scribbled her phone number on a piece of notebook paper with the same casual enthusiasm.

She wasn't all that surprised when, a few days later, Bo called to see if she wanted to hang out sometime.

They made plans to meet that Saturday at the Third Street entrance to Prospect Park.

THAT SATURDAY TURNED out to be one of those days so heavenly it feels vaguely immoral. (That mere mortals should be allowed to experience cloudless skies the color of periwinkle!) And as she and Bo made their way across the greensward, the smell of barbecue sauce in their noses, and the names of bands they once liked and no longer did on their tongues, Phoebe felt a certain buoyancy of spirit she associated with childhood— even as her own selectively remembered one offered up few examples of such.

It was Bo's suggestion that they go see the bonsai at the Botanical Gardens. Phoebe had never seen anything like them before. And staring into their glass cages, where their limbs seemed to grow inside themselves, she thought of her own limbs, twisted and tangled to meet the expectations of the various men she'd loved, or thought she'd loved, with the possible exception of Neil Schmertz. She'd never really twisted for him. She'd never really tangled for him, either. Come to think of it, she'd never really done much of anything for him.

Now she wondered what kept her from breaking through her own glass cage.

From the bonsai room, she and Bo made their way up a shaded path to a rise overlooking the rose garden. There were no roses blooming that day; it was too early in the season. But there were stems to contemplate—jagged, prickly things as ugly as their blossoms would be beautiful. Bo and Phoebe sat down on a vacant bench. It wasn't clear who fell silent first or why. But they'd been sitting there for almost five minutes without speaking when Phoebe whispered, “Hi.”

“Hi,” said Bo, pressing his palm against her palm. And then he started to push.

She fought him back but not hard enough. In a matter of seconds her fingers caved in beneath his. “Ow!” she yowled.

“What did they used to call that in school, again?” he asked her.

“No Mercy,” she answered.

“No Mercy,” he said. “That was it.”

“Did you go to school in the city?”

“When I was really young I went to the Montessori school on Ninety-sixth Street. Then I went to Trinity. Then my sister and I got shipped off to boarding school in Massachusetts. My parents were getting divorced. I guess it was easier not having us around.”

“Did they break the news to you over Chinese food?”

Bo laughed lightly. “You've seen too many movies!”

“They told you at home?”

“No, they told us at Trader Vic's. It's not around anymore. It was this Hawaiian-themed place in the basement of the Plaza. We were drinking these enormous blue drinks with umbrellas sticking out of them. They'd make them virgin for the kids. My mother waited until the check came. Then she was like, ‘Your father and I have something to tell you.' My sister finished the sentence for her. She was like, ‘Let me guess—Dad's moving out.' My mother was deeply pissed. I guess she was looking forward to telling us in her
own special way. . . .
So what about you—you gonna marry this mysterious boyfriend of yours, or what?”

“Marry him? Why?” Phoebe smiled to mask her shame. (She must have known that she already knew the answer.)

“Just wondering,” said Bo. “I mean, you live together. And what is he—in his early thirties or something? And I mean, why wouldn't he want to marry you?”

She closed her eyes. “Things are really fucked up right now. We hardly see each other anymore. But even when we do, we go to sleep on opposite sides of the bed.”

“Is he gay?”

“No.”

“Then he's crazy.” Now Phoebe was the one who smiled appreciatively. “But do you love him?” he asked her.

This time she didn't answer immediately. She was too busy marveling at the passage of time, and how the faces change but the questions—it turns out—remain the same.

Except now she was the one with the flimsy answers. Now she understood how love wasn't this absolute thing—more like this shimmering ideal we bleary-eyed mortals grow old stumbling beneath the aspirational banner of. “I guess I love him,” she started to say.

But it was no more true than it was false. She had to say it to realize it—that there was no such thing as leaving something for nothing, only something for something else.

“I shouldn't have asked you that,” said Bo, backpedaling just as Phoebe had once done on the third floor of the colonial mansion that housed the Center for the Study of the Periphery. “It's none of my business.”

But Phoebe told him, “Yes, it is. I mean, everything's everyone's business, or no one's business, depending on how you look at it. I mean, people used to say I asked too many questions. But I never understood that. I mean, what's wrong with being curious?” Then she turned to face him.

“You have beautiful eyes,” he said. “Beautiful gray-blue eyes.”

“Thank you,” she said, smiling. She never grew tired of compliments. But it turned out she liked bestowing them, too. “And you have beautiful gray-green eyes,” she told him.