The Joy of Funerals, page 13
“Ever done it with a man?”
I want to swallow—it’s hard with his fingers gripped around my throat. My free hand searches for something, anything.
“Have you?” I croak.
He pulls at my sweater, bringing me to him, then shoves me harshly into the wall. My head snaps back. My eyes try to focus. I become aware of several things: my jerky movements, my breathing, the smell of hamburger. I look around the apartment in quick, small segments to see what I can grab on to for protection. The glass vase on the dining room table, too far away; the phone wire to twist around his neck, too complicated, too many movements. I reach out on the wall, feel around on the bar, looking for a bottle of gin or vodka to whack him on the head with, or the wine opener to pierce him in the eye. My hand comes up empty until it feels glass. I grasp whatever it is and smack it against the wall. He turns away from me to look at what I’ve found. I hold the stem and plunge small, jagged shark teeth into his neck. He backs away screaming, an earsplitting shrill. I look for something else to protect me. I drop to the floor to pick up a large chunk of glass and see Annette’s lipstick imprint, almost perfectly intact. He surges at me, and I shove the glass pick into another spot, slide away as his head rams into the coffee table.
His body hits the floor.
All is quiet.
I kick him in the head. Watch black hair sweep my floor.
No movement.
My foot juts out and I strike him again, same spot. Still nothing. I turn him over. I think he’s breathing, or maybe the breathing is mine. I can’t tell. Pieces of Annette’s glass are sticking out of his throat. His eyes are bulging. Blood oozes out from him, staining my Indian rug. I bend down closer, place my hands around his neck. My fingers attack his throat, searching for the exact position. Like hands on the keys of a piano after endless hours of forced practice, as if they remember, each creating their own private musical sound, they grip tighter and tighter as he gasps for air. I feel his pulsating veins, see his protruding eyes get bigger. Blood is seeping out of the deep puncture on the side of his throat. Pieces of glass dig into my skin. I pull back. My hands are thick with blood, like I’ve been finger painting. I slink back to the wall, lean up against it for balance. Then I notice something, the light reflecting off the large piece of glass still stuck in his neck. Annette’s smudge-proof lipstick insignia, a trace of bright red. And from my angle, it looks as if she’s kissed him.
Still Life
She won’t remember much. The falling and the flying, as if both are happening at the same time. Their first kiss, wet and breathy. The way his ring would feel up against her skin. The thick, bitter taste of Italian coffee, the pungent smell of turpentine, the wishing she could start her life over. The desperate need to understand who she was before.
And the wanting.
She will remember the wanting.
Aside from the hum of the fan and the occasional ringing of the phone, the gallery is quiet.
Natalie likes to be the first to see the exhibits, as if the people in the paintings have been waiting all day for her to visit. Actually, it’s Natalie who waits, heart pounding, anxiety rising in her chest like a souffle baking in the oven.
The girl who works at the gallery was late again this morning, making Natalie’s head ache. At 10:08 a.m. she was still a no-show. She checked her watch over and over, wondering where the young woman with the dyed red pixie hair, the combat boots, and the shoulder bag made out of straw could be.
Natalie sits on the bench in the middle of the room, memorizing the gallery’s list of upcoming events. She makes mental notes for which days she can go, and which receptions and openings she can’t make. She has inquired about renting studio space, each time leaving cryptic messages on broker’s machines, telling them not to phone her back, that she will try them again later. She’s looked into classes at the 92nd Street Y and the New School but has been unable to register. Brandon keeps throwing away the brochures and gallery announcements. At night she scavenges through the trash, wipes them down, and removes bits of food and coffee grinds stuck to them. She saves each one in an envelope and hides them in the back of her closet as if they were drugs. They’re kept in a suitcase filled with clothing, photos, a passport, and her mother’s jewelry.
Natalie stares at the art, at the walls, at her hands. They don’t look like hers. They are pale, dirt-free. She tries to peel off her ring to see what it would feel like not to be married anymore, but her fingers are swollen. Layers of skin bunch up at her knuckle, making it impossible for the ring to come off. She licks her finger, feels the cool gold and smooth diamond against her tongue, hears it clink on her teeth. Then, with a harsh tug, she rips the ring off her finger. It skittles to the floor, as if it were a rock skimming across a pond. Her hand looks so clean and untarnished that it makes her long for days when paint was embedded in her nails, her skin dry and raw.
She looks up at the woman in the painting. She reminds Natalie of her dead mother, face gray and fading, eyes cold and hollow. So much of her wants to return to her old house, curl up into a ball, and lie on the floor in her mother’s closet like she did as a child when she and her fraternal twin, Lena, played hide-and-seek. Natalie remembers how comforting it was to inhale the mix of Chanel No°5 and leather while her mother’s expensive clothing concealed her body. She’d give anything to suffocate her thoughts in the cellophane garment bags that hang in her own closet.
Natalie bends down, searching the floor for her ring, though she is tempted to leave it here. She imagines the pixie girl happening upon it as she cleans up for the night. She sees her slipping it on her finger and modeling it for her friends at a random bar after work.
Two months ago, she sat in a lawyer’s office off of Fifth Avenue. He was a fat man who wore a bad toupee. “Nowadays, people get divorced for all sorts of reasons,” he said, taking out a yellow legal pad. “What’s he done?”
Natalie can’t pinpoint the exact moment Brandon changed. There were small, insignificant signs. “It was as if someone were removing a spoonful of sugar from a five-pound bag,” she told the lawyer. “At first it goes unnoticed because the missing amounts are minute. Then you decide to bake cookies or brownies. When you reach for the bag, you notice how light it feels. You look inside and realize all the sugar is gone. And you’re confused because you don’t remember using it.”
He looked at her nervously, his fat face turning into a frown. She watched him shift uncomfortably in his dilapidated leather chair as she noticed his degrees hanging above his head in thick, black frames. He put the pad back into his desk drawer, cleared his throat, stood up, and extended a clammy hand. Natalie didn’t tell him there were clumps of mustard embedded in his mustache and when he nodded at her, his toupee shook.
“Why not send me a retainer?” he said. “I’m sure he’s done something to you. I’ll brainstorm on my end once I receive your check.”
She was tempted to mail him her old retainer she’d kept from her orthodonture days in high school. If memory served, it was still housed in the blue plastic case, caked with dried saliva. It was then that she opened a bank account, depositing twenties and fifties when able. She began charging expensive items at department stores, and then returning the merchandise for credit.
Natalie steals into the padded booth of the restaurant. Her three friends are waiting, chatting about fake fur.
“Sorry,” she offers, catching her reflection in the aluminum paneling. “I got a late start.” She stares at the image looking back at her, a distorted woman with pale skin and harsh, red lipstick. She takes a paper napkin and quickly wipes it off, leaving her lips blotchy. She breathes slowly as she waits for the dizziness to stop and the throbbing in her temples to ease. She fakes her best good-girl smile and tries to join the conversation. The concern that has stretched across her friends’ faces starts to disappear as Camille talks about her anniversary party. Her other two friends, Molly and Sarah, both wives of Brandon’s business partners, are listening with great interest and nodding in unison. Natalie wants to contribute but feels two steps behind, as if her brain isn’t focusing.
Please let this be a virus, she begs silently. Wasn’t her neighbor sick last week? She could have picked something up over the weekend in Connecticut when she went to visit her in-laws. After all, how will she fit into the new clothes Brandon insisted she purchase in preparation for summer: signature cream pants from Ralph; thin crepe suits in rose and sand from Calvin; gray pin dots from Theory. She’d already taken them to the fitters for alterations. She’d be unable to return them, and as far as Natalie knew, there was no maternity policy, no unexpected pregnancy clause which would allow her to credit them to her account.
Off to the left, someone’s child is wailing. As if at a tennis match, the four women turn their attention in that direction. Seated at the adjoining table are two ladies in their thirties with their offspring. One child is crying. Natalie watches the mother. Watches the way she shovels food into the baby’s mouth, not waiting for her to swallow the mush so that more oozes out than stays in. Natalie wants to tell the rushed mommy to slow down, almost yells this command from across the table, over the buzz of conversation and the clamoring of dishes in the kitchen. Can’t she see her child hasn’t finished? Isn’t the other woman watching?
The mommies make exaggerated faces, distorted tics, while patrons and the owner of the coffee shop all stop to fuss over the small people, acting like quacking ducks fighting for a tossed piece of crust. Some stop to offer comments and advice, others want to touch the little golden beings, as if their aura will bring luck, like the holy water at church.
The waiter brings oval ceramic plates with salads, omelets, and sandwiches resting upon them to the table. The heat from the kitchen, the heavy air, the constant clattering of silverware, all make her think she will be sick.
As her friends eat, her attention is drawn back to these mothers. If she looks hard enough, Natalie can still see who they once were—eager, passionate, perfectly styled from head to toe. Now they look drained, large rings residing under their eyes and worn on the appropriate fingers like trophies, their designer purses replaced by oversized diaper bags with Peanuts and Disney characters on them.
Molly is talking about something. Then she is laughing. Her other friends do, too, so Natalie smiles and cheats her way through it. She wants to contribute to the conversation, only she doesn’t know what the subject is. She is sure they’re past Camille’s party by now.
“Would Friday the twenty-fourth work for everyone?” Camille asks, flipping through her pad of notes. Natalie watches her friends take out their pocket calendars—Louis Vuitton and Hermès notebooks, to check if their schedules permit another social event. They nod and it has been decided. This only adds to her unbalanced state.
Perhaps a party is what she needs, perhaps this is what good wives do. Natalie feels as though she is living someone else’s life. As if these women have become strangers to her, the situation surreal, the restaurant a cardboard cutout, the patrons, actors.
They were living in Nantucket. Natalie was painting then, and Brandon worked at a small brokerage house when Merrill Lynch offered him a job. A month later they sat on the runway, their plane fifth in line to take off. Natalie looked out the window and wondered what she would do in New York. She remembered Brandon taking her hand, remarking how all great artists lived there, and while he was at work, she could paint in the SoHo loft he would buy her.
Those were the selling points. But there never was an art studio or time to paint. Natalie’s schedule was filled with dinners with Brandon’s clients, days of shopping, tracking down the exact items he felt should be in their home and in her wardrobe.
“You can’t go to Daniel or La Goulue in this,” he’d say, holding up her overalls and paint-stained T-shirts. She should have fought harder. Looked closer at her life.
On her wedding day, Natalie dragged Lena onto the hotel’s roof for a smoke, she in her white gown, Lena in a light blue bridesmaid’s dress.
“I could always jump,” she joked, flicking ashes away from herself.
“Do you love him?” Lena asked, motioning for the cigarette.
She watched smoke escape from Lena’s mouth, wanting to say “yes,” but the word sat in her throat like cotton.
For the past year, Natalie had written a list of positive qualities she felt Brandon possessed. She kept it folded in her bag, adding to it every now and then, taking it out and reading it to remind herself of his good points: calls his parents, wants children, takes out the trash … that was love, wasn’t it?
At first, Natalie enjoyed the cocktail parties. Being home all day and not knowing anyone except her sister made her grateful for the company. The painfully long business dinners started to happen twice a week, followed by corporate dances, mandatory weekend events at clients’ homes in the Hamptons and Connecticut. Then came the charity fundraisers she planned with the other men’s wives, all of whom were having babies and didn’t need to work. Within a few months, Natalie became part of Brandon’s job, an external component as important as his cell phone.
Now she sits with these women, having lunch and talking about nothing.
A pair of mommies walk by as a little boy runs ahead of them. Space is cleared for the women with strollers like Moses parting the Red Sea. As he passes, Natalie is sure she can smell baby powder and wet diapers. When his mother catches up to him, she grabs harshly at his arm, losing her temper, and yells at the three-year-old, who lets out a piercing cry. Like live theater, the restaurant is a captive audience to this spectacle.
Natalie thinks back to when her mother chased her down the street, screamed at her for running ahead, jerked her arm so hard that it popped out of its socket. The rest of the day was spent in the hospital waiting for the specialist. The white-walled room and black-padded table swirl into images of the sobbing boy in years of therapy, lying on a succession of leather couches, surrounded by walls painted in calming, subdued colors of browns and tans. She cringes at this.
“What are you thinking?” Sarah asks, her new diamond earrings reflecting off the large fluorescent lights of the glorified diner. A recent anniversary gift, they are too big and look fake. Every time Sarah moves her head, she creates her own laser show.
“Nothing,” Natalie replies.
Under the table, she slides her hand over her abdomen. She swears it feels larger. Rounder. She rests it there in hopes of stopping the nausea; then, in sudden frustration, she slaps it as hard as she can without crying. Even though she winces, she cleverly contorts her face into a fake sneeze.
“Maybe you are coming down with something,” Camille says with concern, resting a soft hand on top of Natalie’s.
“All of Carol’s kids are sick.”
Camile pulls her hand away and for a moment Natalie wants to reach for it, have something to hold on to. “Make it go away,” she whispers, so softly, so lightly that no one can hear it but her.
She passes by Lee’s Art Supplies on her way home. Like a junkie, her body remembers, even craves the smell of turpentine. She misses the scent of fresh paint. The wet, slippery feel of the colored oils. The person she once was in college.
Dressed in men’s oxford shirts and black jeans, she’d carry brushes and paints in her knapsack rather than a bag filled with paint and brushes for her face. She had not entered the world where women wore Pappagallo shoes and matching headbands or turtlenecks with whales on them. She hadn’t learned that sorority parties were a lifeline, that your last name and a bank account were all you needed to advance in this world. That you could lose your identity.
Natalie knows she can already say good-bye to the long afternoons spent at the museum, which she lies about to her other friends who only know she disappears in the latter part of the day. “Bridge lessons,” she tells them. “Brandon thought I should learn.”
Brandon will be ecstatic. After all, his mother, Ruthann, has practically set up a room for an imaginary grandchild. Natalie herself has been groomed for the position since they announced their engagement five years ago. Now, with a baby, there will be no art tours, no classes. And Brandon doesn’t believe in sitters or nannies, insisting he never had one.
“My mother managed,” he announced. He was standing in their living room in his boxers, hands on his hips. His boss’s wife was expecting.
“My sister has help,” Natalie countered, her voice escalating to match her husband’s.
“She has three children. When we’re on our third, you can have as many nannies as you want.” Then he smirked, a pathetic, patronizing grin. “Besides, my mother would be available to sit anytime you wanted.”
She had to control her laughter. She’d get her tubes tied before she handed her child or anyone else’s over to Ruthann.
Natalie clutches the Duane Reade bags filled with pregnancy tests, each bought at separate, unfamiliar drugstores, as she shops at Zabar’s. She thoughtfully chooses appropriate goodies for Brandon’s dinner—thinly sliced string beans in ginger sauce, stir-fry vegetables, new potatoes with sautéed onions, and grilled chicken. This will make him happy and make her the wife she’s expected to be.
She thinks back to last month. They had come home drunk from a cocktail party. She recalled Brandon stopping at the Korean market to satisfy a sudden craving for ice cream. He returned home with chocolate Häagen-Dazs and a bag of Raisinets. He fed them to her, still in his tux, as she lay naked on their satin sheets. She vaguely remembered reaching for her diaphragm and Brandon taking it out of her hand.
The pregnancy boxes all looked similar, each promising ninety-nine percent accuracy results in three, four, or five minutes. And each came with an added bonus: buy one, get one free; win $5,000 instantly in family savings bonds; complimentary Lubriderm lotion. Natalie does not know what she will do if the tests show up pink, one of her least favorite colors. Or if the line is black or a circle appears or whatever shape or object forms within the allotted time.
