Look At Me_ A Novel Part 22

Irene Maitlock paused before her computer, thinking she heard Mark on the stairs. She listened, trying to pa.r.s.e her husband's mood from the meter of his tread, the trochees and spondees he made while climbing the four tiers of steps to their apartment. before her computer, thinking she heard Mark on the stairs. She listened, trying to pa.r.s.e her husband's mood from the meter of his tread, the trochees and spondees he made while climbing the four tiers of steps to their apartment.

Jangling keys, the complaining door. Irene heard her husband wrestling his coat into the overstuffed closet, breathing hard from the climb. "Hi, baby," she called.

"h.e.l.lo." Wiping rain from his big shoes. Irene swiveled around at her desk, which faced one of the two windows in the living room/dining room/kitchen/office of their tiny one-bedroom apartment, and looked at her husband, whose expression of defeat was palpable even through the gauze of her nearsightedness. "How did it go?"

"Okay." He crossed the room and hugged her in her chair, holding her head to his stomach. Irene felt him sway a little; he'd been drinking, probably from nervousness.

"Not so good?" she said.

"No, it was good. It was fine." The party had taken place at the East Seventy-eighth Street duplex of Gadi Austenhaus, a composer who for many years had been Mark's mentor and champion. Irene had stopped just short of begging Mark to let her come along-he was so shy in groups, and there had been a time when her presence had relaxed him. But now, Mark said, having her with him at such events made them harder. It was her own fault, Irene knew, for as this lean middle period befell her husband, this era when commissions were routed around him, past him-right through him, it almost seemed-on their way to other, younger composers; as a whiff of anxious isolation began to infect this man who had written his first sonata at the age of six, she found herself scrutinizing her husband's behavior more closely in the presence of his colleagues.

Physically, he had altered: in three short years, Mark's uplifted sweep of glossy black hair had vacated his head, leaving behind a saddle of baldness. And this sudden evacuation of hair revealed more than just the pallor and slight k.n.o.bbiness of her husband's skull (k.n.o.bs Irene kissed at night and covered with her hands to protect them)-it revealed how critical that layer of raffish black hair had been to the emphatic figure Mark had formerly cut. Now his vast height-six-four-had been reduced to another component of his baldness, the lengthy wand at the end of which his denuded pate was brandished at the world. And he'd developed an unfortunate corollary habit of shoving his hands backward over his nearly bald head with such force that people naturally must a.s.sume that this violent pawing itself itself had induced the hair loss. And so, when Mark's hands rose inadvertently to his skull while he chatted over plastic cups of wine after someone's recital, Irene would spear him with a fierce warning glance that made him feel as if his last ally in the world-his wife-had turned on him. had induced the hair loss. And so, when Mark's hands rose inadvertently to his skull while he chatted over plastic cups of wine after someone's recital, Irene would spear him with a fierce warning glance that made him feel as if his last ally in the world-his wife-had turned on him.

"Who was there?" she asked.

"Everyone. Everyone was there." He crossed the room to the half-kitchen and poured himself a gla.s.s of vodka from the freezer. "Saw John Melior."

"And?"

"He didn't bring it up."

"Did you?"

"There was no opening, really. He didn't give me one."

"But that doesn't necessarily mean it's off."

"No," he said, and lowered himself onto the piano stool. Lately, to make money, he'd been giving lessons in the apartment on nights when Irene was at Charlotte's. "But it doesn't seem good."

Incongruously, he smiled. So exceptional had Mark been for so much of his life, so unaccustomed to being ignored and disregarded, that the normal responses-anger, bitterness-seemed never to have developed in him, and he reacted to each new slight and disappointment with an almost childlike bafflement. He didn't understand. He didn't understand and there was no way for Irene to explain what she barely understood herself: that fas.h.i.+on was ruthless, reputations variable, that the slightest intimation of failure could drive people away. Lately she had begun forcing herself to see these things coldly, dispa.s.sionately, because one of them had to; otherwise they would be trampled underfoot by everyone else.

"If it does come through with Melior," he said, "you could quit that b.i.t.c.h."

"She's not so bad," Irene said, over his grunted objection. "And think about the money. If it comes through." She added, mostly to herself, "No one will know I had anything to do with it."

Mark soon retreated to the bedroom-to read, he said, but more likely he would be flattened by sleep and have trouble rising in the morning. The thrum of fear he'd brought with him into their tiny home surrounded Irene now; she looked anxiously at the familiar artifacts of her married life, the musical instruments she and Mark had bought in India hanging on the wall, two sitars, a mridangam drum, a sarod, a shruti box, the kanjira tambourine, the zither Mark could play so beautifully; all of them he could play, he lifted them from the wall and played them. But not lately. Irene taunted herself with these thoughts; they galvanized her with an energy she'd never felt in her life, some combustive agitation of love and anger and f.u.c.k you and not so fast, buddy! She wasn't Mark, exhausted by fear-she would win. Win for both of them. Hundreds of thousands of dollars. She would sail their little boat. And when Mark stopped being afraid, his luck would turn, because that was how luck worked, and then the world would favor him again, because that was the world. He didn't have to see it. She would see for both of them.

Before Mark's return, she'd been longing for bed herself. Now, thus electrified, she stared at her screen. Ten days ago she had delivered Charlotte's background to Ordinary People, but there had been no response. She'd had trouble concentrating since then, kept sliding into academic jargon whenever she tried to compose.

I, she typed. Then consulted her notebook, letting the memory of Charlotte's voice soak her mind until, with a ventriloquism that still amazed Irene, words tumbled from her in a voice that wasn't her own or Charlotte's but a hybrid, an unholy creature that was Irene's creation, too, fed by the cheap detective novels she still gulped down when she had time. She could hardly type fast enough.

The next time I saw Z, I got near enough to reach for the spot where I'd seen the wire inside his s.h.i.+rt. There was nothing this time. Just the spokes of his ribs and a hard stomach. It was the kind of hardness that can mean a few things. Devoted gym attendance. Subsistence living.He put his hand over mine and held it to his chest.

"Charlotte?" came the faint drowning call from the cistern of a speakerphone. "Thomas Keene."

"Thomas!" I said-yelled, actually, into my cell phone over the chumming of the Circle Line, which was pa.s.sing close to me. Tourists lined its deck, waving merrily. I waved back. It was late April, and I was sitting in one of my new haunts: a bench facing the East River on a spit of land across the FDR from my apartment building; the same spit of land, in fact, where I had dashed in a panic last winter, shortly before leaping off my balcony.

Having switched to a regular phone, Thomas said, "So. I spent last night reading your background."

My stomach pitched. I knew Irene had turned something in-I'd signed an accompanying letter she had written in my name. "And?"

"The material was incredibly thorough, very professional."

"Good!" I said.

"Very ... realistic."

"Good."

"There is one thing. It's-it's not a problem, exactly," he said. "It's just, I have trouble believing you wrote this, Charlotte."

I was prepared for that. "You mean it doesn't sound like me."

"No, it does sound like you. A lot like you-too much like you in a way," Thomas said. "Too much like you for you to have written it."

"What the h.e.l.l does that mean?"

"See, I have no problem with you using a writer. Frankly, I'm delighted-you've saved me the job of finding someone to clean it all up at the end. But I want to get Cyrano out from behind the curtain and bring him to the table. I'd like to work with him."

"So you liked the"-what had he called it?-"material?"

"Oh, my G.o.d, it's fantastic! A thousand percent better than I expected."

There it was: the insult I'd sensed lodged in the middle of all this like an infected tooth.

"It's a her," I said. "The writer. But she won't want to meet you."

"Why not?"

"She's a journalist," I said, with pride. "For an extremely well-known paper that you probably read-"

"I get it, I get it," Thomas said. "Tell her not to worry."

"I'm not sure you-"

"She doesn't want to compromise her name. But see, I don't want to compromise yours, so we're fine. She's off the record, guaranteed."

By the time we hung up, I had promised to bring Irene to Thomas's office within the week, a promise I knew she would deplore, having told me repeatedly that she wished to remain, as she put it, a ghost.

I had come to the river that afternoon from my other new haunt: Gristede's, where I had a job bagging groceries. This unlikely turn of events had transpired for two reasons: First, I was desperate for money. Second, I was itching for something to do, being not merely jobless and friendless, but unable to afford or justify the myriad self-grooming activities that once had comprised a sizable portion of my schedule. Of course, my professional aims had initially been much higher: TV anchor, fas.h.i.+on editor, executive a.s.sistant. But I'd discovered the existence of traits that, in my old life, I had regarded as dull, invisible and pointless. These traits had a name, I now learned: "skills." And I didn't have any.

I knew powerful people, of course, any of whom I could ask for help. But after one disastrous attempt-lunch with a financier whose jet had ferried me to ski slopes and islands over the years, who flinched when I identified myself at the restaurant bar and glanced distrustfully at my face throughout lunch; who left me standing on the curb as he was driven away in his car, then ignored my calls to obtain the leads he'd promised-after that, I couldn't bring myself to try again. The calls from my old life had winnowed away, like calls to a prior tenant whose forwarding number has finally made the rounds. All that remained were Grace, Irene and Anthony Halliday, who called a couple of times each week, usually at night, for conversations whose main ingredient was silence. Yet I looked forward to his calls. Afterward, I felt a kind of peace.

I accepted the bagging job for minimum wage because I was tired of looking and because Gristede's, where I had shopped for years, was just around the corner. Since Sam, the waxen-mustachioed deli man, and Arlene, the cat-eyed manager, didn't recognize me as the woman they had sold groceries to for many years, there was no shame in it. I even took a certain pleasure in being an expert grocery packer, making a careful pyramid of each bag in which the most fragile items-eggs, raspberries, chanterelles-floated weightlessly at the top. And Irene approved of the job. Its jarring contrast to my prior line of work would help, she said, to make me sympathetic.

Two nights each week, she crossed my threshold, bringing with her smells of the city, the newspaper where she worked; she sat on my sectional couch with a notebook in her lap, and asked me questions. I had intended to lie as much as possible, but I was thwarted by an unforeseen impediment: I lacked the imagination to invent another person's life. My own was all I could think of. So I told the truth, first awkwardly and in a kind of agony, then ploddingly, and finally, to my own surprise, with a feeling that edged, at times, toward pleasure. I began looking forward to her visits-she was my only visitor. I tried questioning Irene about herself, in part just to change the subject, also out of real curiosity about the life of a New York Post New York Post reporter. But Irene was tight-lipped; she disliked talking about herself as much as I did, and she wasn't being paid to. reporter. But Irene was tight-lipped; she disliked talking about herself as much as I did, and she wasn't being paid to.

Shortly after I hung up with Thomas, Pluto, one of a handful of homeless people who lived in tents and garbage bags near the mouth of the tunnel, appeared at my bench carrying a sack of laundry, which he washed in a First Avenue high-rise during the s.h.i.+fts of a particular doorman who believed he lived there. He sat down gloomily and opened a paper bag containing eight beers from an obscure micro brewery. He offered me one, but I declined. The beers were expensive, and Pluto needed them.

"What's wrong?" I asked.

"Man accosted me in the laundry room," he said. "Says, I've got my sneaking suspicions you don't actually live here. I say back, Sir, I do my best to abide with dignity amidst more countervailing circ.u.mstances than you can shake a stick at. Should a man be punished for this? He says, Count of ten, I'm calling security. Had to pull out my whites before they were fully dry."

"Jerk," I said.

"That and more, baby," he said, gulping his beer so the Adam's apple rolled like a die in his throat. "That and more."

Pluto was a dark-skinned black man in his forties, I guessed, whose taut, striving physique seemed the very personification of human effort. I had never known a homeless person-the notion would have seemed ludicrous before the accident-yet I was impressed by Pluto's resourcefulness. Each morning at dawn, he used a handmade rope harness to lower himself from the rail of the concrete embankment into the East River, where he bathed vigorously in its icy waters and shaved before a mirror shard he'd epoxied to the embankment wall. He dressed impeccably, pressing his clothes with bricks heated over fire; read several newspapers each day, rented computer time at Kinko's when he could afford it, and on garbage days combed the Upper East Side wearing yellow gloves and a face mask, searching out products by Kiehls and Polo (his favorites), along with vitamins and antibiotics whose "best used by" dates had pa.s.sed. He begged outside certain buildings, Citicorp being his favorite, and carried handmade business cards-rectangles of white paper with his E-mail address printed on them-should anyone wish to expand the relations.h.i.+p of donor to beggar into that of employer to employee. Yet such mammoth effort did it require for Pluto to maintain his clean, sweet-smelling, healthy and well-informed demeanor that no time remained in the day for him to put it to any real use; he longed to improve his life, but could only remain in a perpetual state of readiness. The beers, which he drank at night, ate up most of his cash.

"Speaking of the unpleasantries humans are capable of," he said, "you had a nasty look talking on your phone just this minute. Who's the lemon made you pucker up?"

In the spirit of my new life, a life in which I answered questions straightforwardly and at length, I launched into a description of Ordinary People, presuming, of course, that Pluto would be mystified. After six or seven words, he cut me off. "You're part of that circus?" he cried. "Why you hide something so critical all this while?"

"How do you know about it?"

"Never mind how I know; I've got myself a lane on that information highway. Now tell me where you're at with this thing. Tell me everything you know. Fill my ears."

After a minute or so of description, Pluto leapt to his feet, dropped to one knee on the concrete before me and gazed beseechingly into my eyes. Not for the first time, I saw his shadow self, angrier, more despairing and also more hopeful than his surface-a childish version of the rest of him. "Charlotte Swenson," he said. "There's a favor you must do for Pluto."

I thought he was going to ask for s.e.x. He usually did, eventually.

"Find out if they've got a homeless person yet," he said. "They're gonna need one. Homelessness is a part of life."

"I'll-"

"Wait, here's what you tell them: You've got a spotless homeless guy knows this city belly up and belly down, you tell them he dresses well, he does everything he can to improve himself, reading, expanding his vocabulary, you tell them he does all this with no money, just a tent and a flashlight and a little oxygen he gets for free here at his summer residence."

"I'll-"

"Wait. You tell 'em I've been pushed, I've been pulled, stabbed, shot, I've cooled my heels in jail many a time, I've been kicked around by every Tom d.i.c.k Harry John and Julie here in this d.a.m.n city and a few other ones, too, but they can't stop me. I cannot be stopped. I will not be denied."

"I'll-"

"You tell them despite a mult.i.tude of discouragements that would've stamped the spirit on any normal man into grit by now, I'm living in a state of absolute faith-I believe in the stars, the sun, the planets, the Milky Way, the American Dream, G.o.d the Father, I believe it all, cross my heart. Every day when the sun rises I say, This is the day, hallelujah. But the higher powers got to give me some encouragement pretty d.a.m.n soon, or a man's belief naturally starts to erode."

"I'll tell him," I said. "Maybe he'll be interested."

"You tell it right, he will be," Pluto said, resuming his seat and removing one of his handwritten business cards. "Tell him he can reach me directly there."

It was almost sundown, and I stood to go. "I don't want to get locked in," I said.

"Stay with me, baby," Pluto said. "Just this night."

"In a tent? Please."

"Then take me upstairs in that diamond-studded castle where you live."

"I can't."

"You can," he said. "You must. I look up there and I see you having your shower before bedtime ... what you got, tiles in there? I'm seeing tiles. I've got visions of you and those white tiles, and it hurts. You're making Pluto hurt, I hope you know."

"Maybe someday," I said, not wanting to nurture the fantasy by telling him that my shower tiles were actually blue. "But not today."

"It's because I'm black. It's because I'm homeless. You think I've got dirt on me somewhere."

"You're cleaner than I am, Pluto," I said. "I'm just not interested in s.e.x." And this was true. In my new life, I didn't have s.e.x. I just thought about it.

"h.e.l.l with s.e.x, prettygirl, I just want the use of that shower!" Pluto cried. "Hot water splas.h.i.+ng against those white tiles, oh, Lord protect my sweet soul." He shuddered. "I'm just saying, Miss Charlotte Swenson," he called after me as I made my way to the overpa.s.s, "try not to flatter yourself so very, very much."

27The next time I saw Z, I got near enough to reach for the spot where I'd seen the wire inside his s.h.i.+rt. There was nothing this time. Just the spokes of his ribs and a hard stomach. It was the kind of hardness that can mean a few things. Devoted gym attendance. Subsistence living.He put his hand over mine and held it to his chest. "Where did it go?" I shouted. We were in a club. For a change.He shook his head. His heartbeat jumped against my hand. He had a hungry face. Dark-eyed, sharp-featured. A hungry, empty stomach. I pulled my hand away."Who could possibly care," I said, "what's going on here?""Everyone cares," he said, in his accent. "This is America.""This?" I gestured at the room. The booths. The dancers. "This has nothing to do with America. We're all in here hiding from it."He watched me. He'd been watching me for weeks. I'd felt the watching before I realized he was the source."Are you a spy?" I asked."Of course," he said. "Like you."I laughed, uneasy. Mitch and Ha.s.sam were across the room. Z had come to them two months before with a business proposal. Now they were inseparable."Seriously," I said, moving closer, into his smell. Pepper, menthol. A not unpleasant smell, but strange. Strong. "What are you doing here?"He smiled. Sipped his tea. He took in the scene. I tried to do the same, but I couldn't see it. I'd been looking for too many years.He said, "I'm watching the nightmare."29I made my way from the club to the street. He was waiting. I invited him to my apartment for a drink. He suggested we walk. "I enjoy walking when the city is empty," he said.It was June, rain drying on the streets. "Chicago," I said, when he asked where I came from."Chi. Ca. Go." Moving the word in his mouth."The Chicago area.""Chicago." He said it easily now."Outside Chicago," I said. "About ninety miles west.""Is America there? Ninety miles west of Chicago?""Oh, yes."By the time we reached my building, I was sweating. It was 4:30 a.m. The doorman smiled at us. I think he'd actually forgotten that the man beside me was always a different man.We rode the elevator in silence.I took a brief shower, certain that Z would be riffling through my things. But when I emerged, head in towel, he was standing on my balcony. I joined him there. Desire showed its naked, greedy face.Z's eyes never shut. Not as we kissed, standing on my balcony, not after we moved to the couch and lay down, my hands on his bare chest and refugee's stomach. His musculature was spare, military. Professional.By then I'd been watching shadow selves for many years. They'd rescued me from boredom, from sadness. From tables full of rich, awful people. They'd given depth to the shallow, dimensions to the simpleminded. Mystery to the blatant. They were my own secret project. But Z knew about them, too. He was looking for mine.A spy. Like me.In my bedroom I kept the lights off, thinking now he would have to give it up (no light!). The colors of Roosevelt Island floated on his eyeb.a.l.l.s. He hardly blinked. We eyed each other with a pressure that was like a shove. After a while I got angry. f.u.c.k you, I thought. But there was no backing down, not until he did. We're enemies. This came to me right in the middle of f.u.c.king. We'll kill each other one day.When I woke, the sun had bullied its way over Roosevelt Island and raided my bedroom. Z was gone. The sheets were pulled tight around me, tight as a hospital bed. Already the night was slipping from my mind. My lousy memory to the rescue.31I worked. Lingerie. Standing against a rolled color paper backdrop, resting my hand on a cube. Two men and a woman crouched below my groin, pinning the underwear to grip my inner thighs. I worried about my smell. The very fact of being alive felt tasteless. Look at this, I said, mentally. To him. And then I felt better.Better than better. Interested.Shooting, I wore a sweetly absent smile. A lingerie smile. It ached on my face like something heavy I'd been carrying for miles. "Turn left, not so much, back at me just a little ... yes! Yes!" It could have been any day from the past ten years.But I felt different, just slightly. The other model was one of the high school girls who come to New York in the summers. Her face was so fresh. So unmarked. She looked like a prototype.Different. Just slightly. Look at this. And this. Watch the nightmare.I perched on a stool in the unis.e.x dressing room. I was fluffing out my hair. Two male models in jockey shorts pelted each other with sock b.a.l.l.s. Eye job? I wondered, looking at the older one. Excitement cracked through me. I'd been discovered: someone had come for me, bringing with him a draft of something distinctly alien. Unrecognizable. But familiar, too.He was the strange dark life I had made for myself, in human form. As if I'd invented him.

The offices of Extra/Ordinary.com encompa.s.sed an entire floor of an old factory building just off Union Square. Apart from the exposed viscera of heating and plumbing ducts, their main design feature was poured concrete. I had never seen so much concrete in my life: floors, ceilings, walls, concrete glazed and buffed, burnished and roughed, resembling, at various times in various lights, marble, alabaster, stucco, clay, fresco, paint, dirt and (creepily) human flesh.

Thomas Keene waltzed Irene and me through a brisk tour of the premises: a white sail splayed across a conference room wall as a projection screen; a small cafeteria serving organic food and juice made from prairie gra.s.s. Irene drifted behind, indignant at having been prised from her anonymous coc.o.o.n, skulking behind her hair when Thomas introduced us to members of his staff as if she dreaded to be recognized in an S&M dungeon.

Bearing mugs of Kona coffee, we retired to Thomas's s.p.a.cious office, where he joined us on a gaggle of chicly utilitarian chairs set around a black disk of coffee table. Through the canted factory windows came a chop of laughter and voices from Union Square.

"So," Thomas said, and slapped his small, rather delicate hands against his haunches. He wore a midnight-blue jacket, camouflage pants and the same high-top Converse shoes he'd worn before. But these details had been subsumed by a mysterious new authority, as if Thomas had come to believe he actually was was the person he had merely yearned to be two months ago. The fat, anxious shadow self was nowhere to be seen. the person he had merely yearned to be two months ago. The fat, anxious shadow self was nowhere to be seen.

He sprang to what I guessed was a desk (black and sleek like the coffee table, only larger), seized the only object on it-an orange manila envelope-and sat back down. He waited for Irene to look at him. "This is very good."

"Tell Charlotte," she said. "I'm just the amanuensis."

But Thomas continued to gaze at Irene without so much as a glance in my direction. "What you've managed to do," he said, sliding a sheaf of papers from the envelope and fanning through them admiringly, "you've created this overwhelming sense of a life totally misspent, a person so completely benighted that every decision she makes is wrong."

I hardly listened. I was staring at the chunk of pages in Thomas's hand. There must have been a hundred of them-more! I tried to connect this wedge of paper to the spa.r.s.e notes I'd seen Irene taking in my apartment; one small notebook in two whole months, and it wasn't even full. I'd urged her to embellish, true. But the number of pages confounded me.

"There's this deep sense of her life being moribund, you know, just bankrupt, almost waiting to be cast off, and then bam! Finito. When it goes, we're almost glad for her."

Irene had pushed aside her hair and seemed to be listening. I turned to Thomas. "You keep mentioning 'her,'" I interjected. "Who are you talking about?'"

They both stared at me, Irene's eyes bugging a little. "You, Charlotte," she said carefully, with a pointed, highly communicative stare that I took to mean, Stop making trouble. Stop making trouble. To Thomas I said affably, "Why not say 'you,' then, since I'm sitting right here?" To Thomas I said affably, "Why not say 'you,' then, since I'm sitting right here?"

"Sorry," he said. "Habit from creative writing cla.s.s. So anyway"-back to Irene-"I'm over the moon. You've got so much here, I love all the childhood stuff, I love what a little rebel she-whoops, you-were. The dreams are fantastic, I love how those geese come up again and again. But I was especially tickled by the Hopes/Aspirations category. 'The mirrored room'-like, what is that? But we get it. We get it without getting it. And the dog stuff is absolutely priceless."

Geese? Dog?

"Good," Irene said cautiously. As a show of good faith, I added, "I begged Irene to put that in about the dog-I knew it would add something."

"It does," Thomas said. "It shows that she can care for another living creature, which I'm not sure we'd know otherwise. And that's important, because we don't have to love her, but we do have to like her, or at least be able to tolerate her. I mean," he s.h.i.+fted in his chair, avoiding my eyes, "you."

There was a pause.

"So. Here's where we are," Thomas said, like a newscaster switching from genocide to sports. "We're absolutely going to buy this, it's just a question of price."

Irene and I exchanged sharp, hopeful glances.