One afternoon I found a fabric store just under the wing of Carnegie Hall. Outside taxis blared and buses hissed, but the store itself was quiet, an urban version of Fabrications, run by a phalanx of heavy, besuited salesladies who watched wordlessly from behind the cutting tables as I strolled around. There were hundreds of bolts of fabrics, on shelves running to the high ceiling: silk prints and jacquards, panne velvets with swirls of gold and silver, soft wools so full of subtle color they conjured places I’d never been, the heathered Scottish highlands, the emerald-flecked gray of the Irish countryside. I longed to buy something, just some small thing, and I was feeling hopeless until I remembered: when I slept at the brownstone instead of at Kilroy’s, a small window in the stairwell let a wide band of light into my alcove and woke me up. Broke or not, I could spend five dollars to make a curtain, couldn’t I? I found an inexpensive off-white cotton, and with a feeling that I was getting away with something I bought a single yard.
That evening I set up my sewing machine in the brownstone kitchen and got to work. Kilroy had come to keep me company, and as I pinned he ambled around the room looking at things—a days-old copy of the
Times;
a
New Yorker
missing its cover; the whiteboard, where someone had written
Greg, Steven Spielberg called you. NOT!
“Greg’s the wannabe actor?” Kilroy said.
I looked up from my work and nodded.
He uncapped the marker and wrote
Steven Spielberg? But is he an ARTIST?
Then he glanced at me and wiped it off, leaving a blue smear. “Oh, well,” he said. “Guess I shouldn’t offend the natives.”
I hadn’t really thought about how it would feel to have him at the brownstone. Simon was the only one he’d met, and when I asked Kilroy afterward what he thought of Simon, he hemmed and hawed and then said he thought Simon was trying to be something he wasn’t. “Well, yeah,” I said. “He’s trying to be an illustrator.” But he just shook his head.
Now he wandered over to the range and peered at a spider trapped under the smudged plastic cover of a small analog clock set into the
control panel. He tapped at it a couple of times, then paused, then tapped again.
I turned back to the curtain. I was still full from dinner—we’d eaten huge plates of ravioli at a dinerish Italian place in the Village. A restaurant out of a movie: the waiters carried platters all along the lengths of their arms, yelled jokes to each other across the crowded room. I’d wanted to go to Little Italy but Kilroy had said this place was less touristy.
I heard the front door open, and in a moment Simon and Greg came into the kitchen, both dressed as if they’d been out somewhere special, in nice shirts and jackets and even, surprisingly, ties. Simon’s was beautiful, a dark teal imprinted with little yellow and green lozenges that shimmered a bit when he moved.
“You’re sewing?” he said, loosening the knot in the tie and unbuttoning the top button of his shirt. “What are you, feeling the call of the Midwest?”
“It’s the call of the early-morning sun,” I said. “Piercing the alcove and waking me up too early. I’m making a curtain for the window in the stairwell.”
He smiled. “I guess that would make sense if you ever—” He glanced at Kilroy. “Oh, never mind.”
“If she ever what?” Kilroy said.
Simon looked over at him. For an uncomfortable moment I was reminded of the first time I saw Kilroy, at Viktor’s house in Madison—that sparring.
“Have you met Kilroy?” I said quickly to Greg, looking back and forth between the two of them.
Greg had been standing near the sink, but now he came forward and offered Kilroy his hand. He looked handsome in his jacket, his wavy black hair nicely set off by the charcoal wool. He was very tall, and Kilroy had to look up for their eyes to meet.
“So Carrie,” Simon said. “We were just at this party, I swear, you would’ve died. This guy Jason, this friend of ours from Yale? His father is the heir to a New England department store fortune, and they have this annual party every October to, I don’t know, celebrate their wealth or whatever. Anyway, this is in a Park Avenue duplex, and—”
“They have eight bathrooms,” Greg said, and in my peripheral vision I saw Kilroy bridle.
“What does that even mean?” he said. “I could fit eight bathrooms in my apartment and still have room for my La-Z-Boy.”
“You don’t
have
a La-Z-Boy,” I interjected, trying for a light tone, though I was nervous all at once.
He snapped his fingers. “Damn, I better get one.” He turned to Simon. “I live in the kind of place where a La-Z-Boy would
add
character.”
“What kind of place is that?” Simon said.
“Oh, you know—herringbone parquet floors, wall-to-wall windows that never get washed on the outside, completely featureless interior. Sometimes I think these buildings were built to institutionalize ugliness—God forbid a postwar building should have any character.”
“So why do you live there?” Simon asked.
“I like the enforced anonymity.”
“That
would
be hard to give up.”
Kilroy gave Simon an amused nod, but he crossed his arms over his chest, and some kind of inner turbulence seeped out of him. What was going on? What had happened to his mood? An edgy silence filled the room, and for a long moment no one spoke.
“Well, anyway,” Simon said. “Carrie, this party. Perrier Jouet, and I mean cases. Waiters passing little smoked salmon dealies, tiny filo pastries, et cetera. Flowers like you wouldn’t believe, I swear there was this one doorway with a lilac
tree
growing in a kind of arch around it—
white
lilacs, in October. And Mr. Kolodny was going around to all of Jason’s friends saying, ‘Please come visit us in Aspen,’ ‘Please come visit us on Block Island.’ ”
“He’s in the Forbes Four Hundred,” Greg said, and Kilroy gave him a look of disdain.
“You mean he has a lot of money?”
“Well, yeah,” Greg said, glancing at me and Simon. “Obviously.”
“Like hundreds of thousands?”
“Like millions and millions,” Greg exclaimed. “Jason used to get driven up to school in a limousine.”
“Really?” Kilroy said. “Was it by chance a
stretch
limousine?”
Greg blushed. After a moment he put his hands in his pockets, then pulled them out again.
“Well,” Simon said. “On that note, I think I’ll go watch TV.” He made a face, a sort of ironically freaked-out face that was meant to say he actually
was
freaked out, and then he left the kitchen.
My face was burning. I bent over the sewing machine and lowered the needle into the fabric. Poor Greg—he’d never been anything but nice to me, and now my boyfriend was making him look like a fool. What was Kilroy’s problem? Was it Greg, or the subject of people with money? I’d noticed something like this before. “When you’re driving a Range Rover you’re
entitled
to double park on West Broadway,” he’d scoffed one day;
on another, making fun of a huffy man in a store, it was “ ‘How dare you keep me waiting—can’t you tell by my shoes that I could pay your salary ten times over and not even feel it?’ ” It wasn’t only envy, I didn’t think—people like this got under his skin, they
bugged
him. Maybe it wasn’t envy at all. He lived very frugally, took pride in buying the cheapest beer available, in inconveniencing himself to get to an early-bird matinee when all he’d be saving was two or three bucks, yet there were signs that he had more money than he otherwise seemed to: a cashmere overcoat in his closet, the time he took me to a Japanese restaurant and casually dropped a hundred dollars so I could try sushi. It was as if he were frugal not by need but to make a point, the same point made by the inward frugality that kept his walls empty of pictures, his floors bare. It was a frugality that said:
I don’t need anything
.
And I wondered: where did that leave me?
Greg came and stood beside me and looked down at my work. He rested his fingers on the table, and I saw they were shaking slightly. He said, “It’s too bad we don’t have another room for you.”
“I feel pretty lucky to have the alcove.”
“Yeah, but it must be frustrating to know Alice is never even
in
her room.”
Alice had the room on the other side of the wall from me. I’d only seen her a few times—she spent most of her time at her boyfriend’s place in the East Village.
“I guess I’ll head upstairs, too,” he said. “I didn’t get home from the restaurant until after two last night.”
Kilroy was standing across the room, staring through a window at the dark backyard. He turned around. “You’re a waiter?”
Greg nodded. “Five nights a week.”
“Sounds grueling,” Kilroy said.
“Actually, it is. The whole idea is that I’m working nights so I can go to acting class during the day, or auditions, but I’m so wiped out I end up sleeping all the time.”
Kilroy grinned. “Sounds like a pretty good life.”
Greg gave us a little wave as he headed for the door. “Nice to meet you,” he said to Kilroy as he left, and Kilroy lifted his chin and smiled.
“You, too.”
Alone again with him, I turned back to my sewing. What a strange thing, that little flash of hostility at Greg, and then the attempt to smooth it over. I stitched several inches, and as I worked I felt him move around the table and come to a stop directly behind me. He stood there without
speaking while I continued to the end of the seam. I backstitched for a knot and then used the handwheel to raise the needle from the fabric. I pulled the curtain from under the presser foot and began taking out the pins I’d stitched over. All at once, so surprising that I jumped a little, his finger was on the back of my neck. He stroked from my hairline down into the back of my shirt and then did it again. I wanted—I was suddenly desperate—to turn and press my face into his shirt front. The urge was enormous, an electricity activating my muscles, making them want to
move
. Why had Mike never had this effect on me? I’d felt desire for him, but not this intense need, this wish that felt violent at times, to
be against him
.
Kilroy’s finger left my neck. He moved back and I heard him pick up the newspaper again. I looked over my shoulder and he glanced up and gave me a benign smile, then went back to reading.
I was working on the channel for the rod a little later when I heard a step and looked up. It was Lane, whose room was on the third floor, too, on the other side of Alice’s. I liked her, but I hadn’t talked to her much—I had the impression that she was shy. She was one of the smallest adults I’d ever seen, barely five feet tall or ninety pounds, with pale skin and wrists like saplings, and wispy, ash blond hair cropped close to her head. The first time I’d seen her, coming out of the third-floor bathroom in striped pajamas, I’d thought she was a little boy.
“Hi,” she said now. “I just got home and I couldn’t go upstairs without coming in here first to see what that noise was.”
I smiled. “Was a sewing machine the last thing you expected?”
“Pretty close. I was torn between a dental drill and a blender.”
“Or maybe just a really big hummingbird,” Kilroy said from his spot against the counter, and Lane laughed her high, thin laugh.
I introduced her to Kilroy, and after they’d said hello she turned back to me. “I’ve never actually seen anyone sew. How do you do it?”
I motioned her over and guided the fabric under the presser foot. “You pretty much just pin and go.” With my foot I felt for the pedal, and then I gave a little demonstration, the needle bobbing up and down as I stitched a few inches. “Didn’t you have to take sewing in high school home ec?”
She shook her head. “I went to one of those progressive schools where you didn’t have to do anything, including attend classes. I don’t think they even offered home ec.”
Kilroy laughed. “High school as self-actualization?”
“Pretty much. There was this thing called Meeting, where whoever
wanted to would gather every morning, and if you felt like it you could talk, about anything.”
Kilroy tilted his head. “And this was where?”
“In Connecticut. Seward Hall is the name of the school, but it’s not like that, I think the ‘Hall’ part is to placate the trustees.”
A strange look came over Kilroy’s face. He said, “Actually, there was a big movement led by the trustees to drop the ‘Hall’ and rename the school ‘Seward Country Center,’ and the
students
fought to keep it Seward Hall.”
Lane grinned. “Did you go there, too?”
He shook his head but didn’t add anything, and Lane glanced at me with a question on her face. “Well, did someone you know?” she asked.
“Someone I knew.”
“Who?” she said. “When? It’s such a small place, I—”
“This would’ve been before your time.”
He went back to the newspaper, and she bit her lip and gave me another curious look.
I shrugged. I couldn’t explain it—this was just Kilroy. Mr. Mysterious. Mr. I-don’t-need-anything. But that wasn’t right, was it? He needed me, didn’t he? Or wanted me, anyway? I thought of his tongue on my earlobe, the delicious agony as he slowly, slowly tickled me with it.
I only had a little more work to do. I stood up and went out to the hall, where a narrow little closet held an ironing board and iron, along with an ancient upright vacuum cleaner Simon had told me he’d bought at a flea market because it fit in so well with the kitchen appliances. I wrestled the ironing board out of the closet just as Lane passed by, heading for the staircase. She stopped for a moment and faced me, then seemed to think better of it and headed off again. “Goodnight,” she called over her shoulder.
In the kitchen I stood the ironing board near an outlet, then brought the iron out, plugged it in, and poured a little water into the reservoir.
“You know,” Kilroy said, “I think I’ll head home.”
I was stunned. I was fifteen minutes from finishing, twenty at the most. “I’m almost done,” I said.
“Yeah, but I’m really beat. I’m going to take off.” He hesitated a moment and then nodded, as if in confirmation. He was looking not at me but past me, so I couldn’t tell what this meant for me, whether he wanted me to follow when I was finished, or quit now and go with him, or what. Maybe he was looking past me
so
I couldn’t tell.