The Life Room, page 30
Eleanor, they killed the piece. I thought publishing in this hip, cutting-edge magazine was going to be sexy. The reality is, it’s fucked up. It wasn’t what they wanted.
His voice on the machine, stripped of its usual persona, held no inflection. The phone rang. She picked it up, knowing it would be him.
“What happened?”
“My agent said that the editor’s vision for the piece and mine were too far apart. The bottom line is I failed to win them.” He sounded dejected.
“I see this all the time. An editor writes the piece in his or her head before they ever read a word of it. Of course they’re disappointed.”
“I’m leaving at the end of the week.”
“What about the show? Your novel?”
“It’s had its run, Eleanor. It’s over.”
“You can’t leave.” She was so stunned by his leaving that she forgot her anger.
“I can’t stay here.” A beep on the line announced another call. “That’s probably my agent. Hold for a sec.” He came back on the line. “I have to take this call, Eleanor.”
“Will I see you before you leave?”
He put her on hold.
“She thought we’d get more of a kill fee,” he said when he came back on the line again. “The whole thing is fucked up.”
“Why don’t you take a few days and think this thing through? Aren’t you being rash? What about all the publicity your show has gotten? Doesn’t that mean anything?”
“I feel abused, Eleanor. I’m too much of a bumpkin to survive in New York.”
“Writers get their pieces killed all the time.”
“It’s coming down.”
“You’re not being rational.”
“I’m leaving at the end of the week. The show’s over. I have to.”
“Will I see you before you go?
“Thursday,” he said. “Dinner.”
She was losing oxygen. She opened the window and sucked in the air. She was angry that he was leaving without any regard for how it affected her but she also felt sorry for him and worried. She had to do something. She looked out at the patch of grass between the two buildings, covered in shadows. She decided to go for a swim. She tried to swim at least twice a week in Columbia’s pool. She locked her office door and walked over to the building. After changing into her bathing suit, she plunged under water and swam a length of the pool without coming up for air. He’s leaving. She emerged and exhaled. She went under again. She thought of Julie in the hospital. She swam faster. Julie’s in bad shape. She came back up again. She did thirty laps of crawl and twenty laps of breaststroke, then rested at the edge.
The thought hadn’t entered her mind so clearly before but it suddenly seemed simple. Stephen was waiting for her to seduce him. How had she missed that? They’d sleep together and end the unrequited journey. The months that he had been living inside her since they’d seen each other in Paris—almost an entire year had passed—were making her physically ill. She had to do something to stop it. She turned and began another lap. If they slept together she could see what was between them. Perhaps the reason why he hadn’t come home that night in Colorado was because she had let him go. She hadn’t told him how much she wanted him; how she believed in him. It was she, in the end, who had walked away. Perhaps all along he had wanted to make love to her but he was insecure, afraid to hurt her. Or afraid of being close to her. She was the stronger one. Why hadn’t she seen it from his side before? It was all her fault. She hadn’t seen what he needed. She was too caught up in feeling hurt and rejected. She continued to swim harder, faster, sure that she was right and that she could make him see how much she needed him.
She rose out of the pool and grabbed her towel from its peg. She was buoyant—as if she were still floating in water: A weight had been lifted. In her mind she felt the touch of his hands on her body, the press of his lips and wetness of his mouth. There was no doubt in her mind that it would happen. She couldn’t let him go. She had to find out what was between them. It suddenly seemed clear to her—she wasn’t herself anymore. She was someone else. She thought that making love to Stephen would have no bearing on her life because what they had did not exist in time. He was the only one who could connect her back to something essential, and not allowing herself to give in would be like an act against nature. The fierceness of her desire for him was a craving for identity, a relief from loneliness. She saw him staring through her childhood window, seeking her out as his savior. She did not think about her husband or her children. They no longer existed in this sphere.
She walked home. She passed a church on Broadway and read the placard. REPENTANCE IS AVAILABLE TO HUMANKIND AT ALL TIMES. WHEN THEY RETURN FROM THEIR INIQUITIES REPENTANCE RETURNS TO THE HOLY ONE AND GOD FORGIVES THEM ALL.
She did her errands. The mad rush of hours, the activities that filled each day were only to keep her from thinking about Stephen. She wondered why she had kept herself hidden all these years, why she had been afraid. She was no longer afraid. Her body was filled with a pleasant rush of adrenaline. She was awake. Alive. She wanted to live her life passionately.
She slept that night. She hadn’t slept well in weeks, worrying about Nicholas’s sleepwalking. Michael looked tired and on edge. The night before they had driven home from dinner and a cab had almost smashed into them. Michael dashed out of the car and began bashing on the hood of the cab like some kind of crazy person. “What are you doing, Michael?” she said, when he came back into the car. “Are you trying to get yourself killed?”
“You noticed,” he said, glaring at the road.
Michael slept on the couch. His excuse of being near the air conditioner made it easy to leave their bed for the quietude of the couch, where he could lay in his own sea of solitude. He seemed unable to bear the distance in their bed. And he didn’t know how to reach her, or she him. Perhaps she feared the disappointment that would follow if she attempted to reach him and failed. She hated Stephen for illuminating the things she tried to pretend didn’t matter in her marriage. When she came into the living room to get a book earlier that night, she saw Michael stare at her bare legs and then look searchingly into her face. It hurt that he still loved her.
She slept so deeply that she did not hear Nicholas stir. Then something awakened her. She sat upright in bed. She ran down the hallway and saw his bed was empty. She rushed in the bathroom, the kitchen. He was nowhere.
“Michael!” she screamed. “Nicholas’s gone.” The front door to the apartment was wide open. Nicholas had unlocked the door. Where was he? She ran into the building’s hallway. Michael followed. Had he gone into the elevator? Taken the stairs? Had someone taken him? She couldn’t breathe. This is my punishment, she thought. She was relieved to find him in the stairwell, lying asleep in a corner. “My poor baby,” she said, as she helped him up. Her eyes met Michael’s for a moment in that look of shared parental love. Michael took Nicholas from her and she followed the two of them back into the apartment.
“This has to stop, Eleanor,” Michael said once he had put Nicholas back in his bed.
“He can’t control it,” Eleanor said.
“That’s not what I mean.”
“If you and Daddy get divorced,” Nicholas said at breakfast, “I’m going to run away.”
She looked at him in disbelief. Was she dreaming? “Nicholas, Daddy and I aren’t going to get divorced. I told you that before.”
“Then why isn’t Daddy sleeping in your bed anymore?”
“Because he gets hot at night and I can’t sleep with the air conditioner on.”
“You shouldn’t do that to Daddy,” he said.
She felt a surge of urgency and panic; she had to make the anxiety stop. Her mind felt fragmented. She looked outside at the sky over Central Park. It was breaking apart and coming together, a sky of disjointed clouds. If only Michael could allow himself to see her so she wouldn’t feel so shut down around him. Why could Stephen see that emotional center in her and not her own husband? Or had she fooled herself into thinking he had?
No matter how strongly her rational mind told her she had to put an end to it, it was impossible. She watched Michael make notes from the slides underneath his microscope, not aware she was in the room. If she didn’t love him now, were all the years they had been together a waste? But it was never about not loving him. It was about the places inside her she did not know how to show him, because he did not have those places inside him. How could she explain what had happened when she was so in the dark herself? How could he understand how she suffered when from his point of view there was no reason to suffer? She put her arms around his neck and whispered in his ear that she loved him. He looked at her bewildered, as if she were a different person. She took the boys to school. She sat on the porch of the school after the bell had sounded, after all the parents had left to go to their respective offices or homes, and she called Stephen’s apartment. He wasn’t there. She tried his cell phone. He didn’t pick up. She had a strange feeling that he had left without saying good-bye. She hopped in a cab and went to his apartment. She asked the doorman to ring him up. The doorman said that he had gone out earlier that morning. She began to walk the blocks of the neighborhood looking for him. Her cell phone rang.
“You called, didn’t you, Eleanor? I saw your number on my phone.”
“I need to see you. There’s something I have to say to you.” She looked at herself in the reflection of a Starbucks window. Was that her? Why did she feel such shame?
“Eleanor, I’m at the club. I’m packing up my stuff.”
“I’ll come. I’ll catch a cab. Stay there.”
“I’ll meet you in front of the club. But I only have a few minutes.”
When she climbed out of the cab her eyes fixed on him. He looked young and boyish, in his blue jeans and Converse sneakers and black T-shirt. Underneath the tiredness, his eves brightened when he saw her. In his eyes she saw how much he needed her.
The workman was on a ladder changing the marquee. Slowly the letters that formed his name were coming down. Eleanor watched. Stephen looked up, too, and they looked at each other.
“I’m sorry.”
“It was like a dream. This whole thing in New York.”
“It was real.”
“What is it?” Stephen said gently. “What is it that couldn’t wait until tomorrow?”
“I thought you left.” He was still here. She touched him to make sure.
“I told you we’d have dinner tomorrow.”
“I didn’t believe you.”
“You thought I’d let you down?”
“Can we go somewhere private? I can’t talk here.”
They went to a courtyard in back of the club and sat on a ledge. It was dark and claustrophobic. The sun hadn’t yet reached the narrow corridor between the buildings.
“I want to make love to you,” she announced.
His mouth broke into a smile. She took pleasure in seeing him caught off guard.
“Is that what you wanted to tell me? Why you’ve been looking for me all morning?”
She nodded. She looked at him squarely. Her body was like a powerful engine. Her face flushed with exhilaration.
“When?”
“Now.”
“I have to meet my agent.”
“Then afterward. I’ll come back.”
He touched her wrist and played with her bracelet, moving it up and down her arm like he had done in Paris. Then he took her hand and twisted the diamond on her finger so it went back inside her palm. “You’re so beautiful,” he said. “Meet me at my apartment at 4:00.”
They stood up to say good-bye. He kissed her. It was a kiss filled with force and hunger. She briefly lost consciousness except for the feel of his lips and the rusty taste of his mouth and the embrace of his arms around her. She thought about the time when she was a girl and she was in the playhouse and he wanted to kiss her and she hadn’t let him, and it was as if she had been waiting for that kiss all her life. But once she drew away she also felt strangely unreal. As he walked her back to the sidewalk in front of the club a letter came crashing down from the marquee to the pavement. When they looked up, all the letters—Stephen’s name, the title of his show—were gone. She looked back at him to see if he was still beside her. He bent over and picked up the letter S and then put the letter in his backpack.
“It hurts, Eleanor.”
“What?”
“It’s the end. I have to do something to make it stop.”
“I’ll help you.” There was commotion on the sidewalk, a constant stream of traffic on the block. She stroked the light beard that had arisen on his cheek. “It’s going to be okay,” she said, before they parted.
She had three hours to kill. She decided to distract herself by going into shops downtown. Hats, trinkets, pottery—so many beautiful objects, yet none of them interested her. She stopped for a coffee, then took the subway uptown, still pulled by a force she could not name. When she emerged above ground her eye lit on a little shop on the corner called Hearts; on a lark she popped in and fingered satin and silk bikini underwear and decided to purchase a pair of black lace panties and a low-cut bra. Is this really me? After she paid for them she went back into the dressing room, put the lingerie on underneath her clothes, and discarded the old ones in the trash bin.
In Central Park she walked by the lake; it was a beautiful spring day. She looked at her reflection in the water. Gazing deeper, she saw the reflection of her mother, her father, the reflection of William, of Adam, of Michael, as if they were all rippling inside her. She saw Nicholas and Noah, the face of Stephen—he was the furthest toward the bottom. Her own self struggled to reach the surface, trapped under the confusion of so many forces, love and desire all fighting for space in the life room of her heart, and she thought of Narcissus looking into his reflection and knew that it was not himself he saw but all the others who were inside him.
She was so deep in her own reflection it was impossible to hear the bell ringing on the little girl’s tricycle rolling down the path, and then it wasn’t the tricycle’s bell ringing but her own cell phone burning a hole in her jacket pocket. She looked at the number on the little band of screen on her phone; it was Stephen calling. Her heart beat madly, and then her body went cold. She let her voice mail answer the call and stood still by the lake. She steadied herself, walked away from her reflection in the pond, and sat down on the bench, pressing her feet into the ground. She wanted to be held. Finally, she called her voice mail and listened to his message.
I can’t do this, Eleanor. I think you knew this was going to happen. Goddamn you. You knew. Even though you asked, you knew. I’ve been thinking about it ever since you left. I can’t do this. Come see me.
Please.
She knocked on the door. He called out that it was open. When she entered the apartment he was at his computer. He didn’t get up out of his chair to greet her. He looked defeated. The room was filled with packed boxes. He had brought what looked like his entire life with him. He had meant to stay in New York. He got up from the table and slumped on the couch.
“I didn’t want it to have to end like this.”
“It doesn’t have to.”
“Eleanor, what do you expect me to do? I can’t make it here.”
“Why do you always make the decisions that involve us?”
“Eleanor, this is about me.”
For a moment she thought she hadn’t heard him clearly. And then she understood. “It’s remarkable. How you truly have no idea of the effect you have on others. Or else you pretend that you don’t.”
“What have I done? I’ve exposed you. Is that it? Because maybe what the good doctor gives you isn’t enough. That isn’t my fault, Eleanor.”
“Why did you come here?” She understood he had no idea of what he had done by entering her life. He could only see what stood in front of him, as if his own needs blinded him. “Do you think because we haven’t made love that you are without responsibility?”
“What do you want from me, Eleanor?”
“Did you mean everything you’ve said? All your messages? All the times you mentioned wanting to be with me? They were all lies?”
“This is me we’re talking about. I don’t do the conventional. I burn bridges. Of course I feel responsible. It’s why I can’t.”
“But I told you I wanted to make love to you.”
He peered into her face. His eyes traveled down her body, slowly, without apology, taking her in, and then he shook his head as if he were holding in his eyes what he could never have. “I would hate myself. I can’t be there for you emotionally. I can’t be your soul mate.”
“But the whole time you’ve been here you’ve taken from me emotionally. It’s what you’ve demanded. That I be here emotionally for you. There’s only one thing we haven’t done.”
“I can’t do that, Eleanor. If we did it once we wouldn’t be able to walk away, ever. It’s what I thought about these last hours. You know that. You don’t think I’m in pain? Besides, we have made love.”
She looked at him strangely.
“You know we have. Every time. You think I’m making this up. Come here.” He pulled her up from her place on the couch by the arm. “I tell you the truth about me. What I’ve been afraid to admit to anyone. I tell you I’m a broken ship. That I simply can’t and you think I’m giving you a line? You think I’m trying to hurt you. You knew but you didn’t want to know.”
“A broken ship? What are you talking about? I really hate you.”
