“Carrie?”
I turned and there was Lane, dressed in black velvet overalls and a
skinny ribbed T-shirt, her hand supporting the elbow of an elderly woman who was barely taller than she was, despite the beautiful dove-gray suede pumps the woman wore, with covered three-inch heels.
“This is Miss Wolf,” Lane said. “Miss Wolf, this is Carrie Bell, the new friend I was telling you about.”
Miss Wolf took a step toward me and gave me an appraising look. She was probably eighty, her face drooping from the bones, her hair a pale gray puff, but she studied me with a look of fierce concentration, and her dark eyes were clear and focused. “Yes,” she said. “The Midwesterner, isn’t that so.”
I glanced at Lane, surprised she’d mentioned me to Miss Wolf, though it occurred to me that she must always be looking for things to talk about with her, news of the world.
“That’s right,” Lane said. “Carrie’s from Madison, Wisconsin.”
Miss Wolf pursed her lips. “There was quite a distinguished English department at the university there many years ago, but I don’t suppose it’s managed to fend off the theorists better than anywhere else.”
She stared at me as if she expected a response. As an American studies major I’d taken a number of English classes, but for some reason what came to mind was a Shakespeare survey Mike took senior year, a course that had earned the nickname “Whores, Wars, and Bores.”
“We’re just going to tea,” she said. “At the Palm Court, of all the silly places. Will you join us?”
We walked out of Bergdorf’s into the fading light of late afternoon. Taxis streamed down Fifth Avenue, and a line of black sedans stood in front of the majestic building I knew was the Plaza Hotel. Lane kept her hand on Miss Wolf’s elbow as we walked, then stood just behind her with her hands up and ready as Miss Wolf negotiated each of the red-carpeted steps to the lobby.
Inside there were giant flower arrangements, and vast, glittering chandeliers hanging from the distant ceiling. The walls were creamy white marble, shot through with flecks of gold. People stood talking in small groups, important-looking in their suits, their carefully groomed hair.
The Palm Court was in the center of the lobby, dozens of white-draped tables surrounded by towering potted palms. Miss Wolf waved off menus and told the waiter to bring us a full tea.
“There,” she said when it arrived. “Will you pour, Lane?” There were pitchers of hot water and cold milk, and the waiter had set a filigreed tea strainer across a small, shallow bowl. The lemon was in paper-thin slices, set on a plate, each piece flat and barely touching its neighbor.
I took the cup Lane offered me and sipped from it.
“Tell me,” Miss Wolf said. “How are you holding up?”
I set my cup down and looked at Lane, who gave me a quick, exaggerated frown, as if to apologize.
“I’m OK,” I said. “I’m fine.”
“And you’ve been here how long?”
“Almost three months.”
Miss Wolf lifted her cup and took a sip. “Smokier than usual,” she said. “Not that I mind that.” She set the cup down with a clatter. “I’m interested in you,” she said to me. “You remind me of myself when I was young. I was from the Main Line, of course—quite different, as you perhaps know—but the story …” Her voice trailed off and she closed her eyes. Sitting there like that, in her good wool suit, her powdery old face as creased as a crumpled piece of paper, she struck me as almost unbearably sad, something so forlorn about the traces of haughtiness and grandeur that were still in her.
Lane reached across the table and put her fingertips on Miss Wolf’s sleeve.
Miss Wolf opened her eyes.
“I’m not sure Carrie’s read your book,” Lane said.
Miss Wolf pursed her lips. “I didn’t say she had.” She reached for a slice of cake from the three-tiered stand the waiter had brought us: some kind of pound cake, a narrow piece lying on its side, sprinkled with powdered sugar. She pulled away the doily it was sitting on and bit in, leaving a few specks of sugar dust on her upper lip.
Lane turned to me. “Miss Wolf’s first novel was about a woman who left behind an invalid friend to go to Europe.”
My face grew hot, and Lane gave me another look of apology. I shook my head a little, because rather than offended I felt intrigued, and curious about the book.
“That’s the
plot,”
Miss Wolf said a little peevishly.
“How’s the pound cake?” Lane asked her. “I think I’ll try one of these.” She reached for a small crustless sandwich, triangular and so thin it was hard to think there could be anything inside. “Cucumber,” she said, taking a little bite. “Delicious. Carrie, try one.”
“You girls need to
move,”
Miss Wolf said.
Lane set her sandwich down, and we both looked at Miss Wolf, her fingers laced at the edge of the table.
“Lane, this goes for you, too. Listen to an old lady who knows. Go to Europe, go to the Far East, go far enough away so that the telephone will
be too expensive, but
go
. The family is the enemy of the artist—of any young person trying to live seriously and meaningfully. You have to go.”
I looked at Lane, but she was carefully avoiding my glance, a thoughtful expression on her face as she listened politely to what she’d heard many times before.
“You think I don’t mean it,” Miss Wolf said.
Lane dabbed at her mouth with a small cloth napkin. “If I went,” she said gently, “where would that leave you?”
Miss Wolf flapped her hand. “Dead. Give me a year or two, that’s really all I want.”
“Miss Wolf,” Lane said.
Miss Wolf turned my way, her deep brown eyes boring into me. “You’re listening,” she said. “I think you’re hearing me.”
When we were finished the two of them caught a cab, and I headed west on Central Park South, past hansom cabs with their broody, snorting horses, past cars and taxis stalled in traffic. It was cold enough for fur now, and when I had to pass close by a tall woman in a long dark mink, I snuck a hand out and felt it, all cool and silky.
The family is the enemy of the artist
. I recalled the day Lane and I drank tea in her bedroom, how she said she disagreed with Miss Wolf, that she thought the family
was
the artist.
Just like the sky is, or all the books you’ve ever read
. Her book with its periwinkle blue cover—by what process had its contents come into being? She was different from Simon and the others: she never talked about poetry as something to strive for; it seemed more inside her, something to draw out. If I had something like that in me—well, I’d be different, I’d be someone else.
The dress, though. The dark green velvet dress, up there in Bergdorf’s. In a way I felt I had a version of that dress in me, somewhere in there, possible. At Sixth Avenue I cut down to 57th Street and made my way to the fabric store I’d found in October.
It was quarter to six, fifteen minutes till closing. An older man watched me from behind the cash register, an apron tied over his white shirt and his wide polyester tie. There were three dark green velvets, one cotton, one rayon, and one silk, and I chose the silk for its perfect piney color. I found a shimmering satin for the cuffs, in just the right green, and I decided to go all out and get China silk rather than acetate for the lining. At five to six I sat down with a Vogue pattern book and within minutes had found almost what I was looking for, a plain, fitted dress with a round neckline. Almost but not quite. I looked up at the man, standing with his arms crossed over his apron, ready to kick me out despite the three
fabrics I’d put on the cutting table. Could I depart from the pattern, substitute buttons for the back zipper, find a way to design my own deep cuffs? I stood up and found the Vogue patterns, tracked the numbers until I’d located the right drawer, rolled it open and riffled until I’d found the right pattern number, then my size. I carried the envelope to the cutting table and set it down, then I opened my wallet and reached for my credit card.
C
HAPTER
25
I sewed. Velvet makes dust, and there were fine green fibers all over Kilroy’s dining table, a skirting of them on the floor around my chair. I’d never worked with velvet before, and I was slow and careful, the sheer weight of it reminding me that this was serious. And exciting: I had to recruit knowledge from previous projects to figure out the back buttons, experiment with tissue paper and muslin before I could determine the right shape for the cuffs. My solutions worked, but I longed for more certainty, the sureness Kilroy brought to cooking or navigating the subway lines: a sureness born of knowledge and experience.
Christmas filled the city, and Kilroy and I visited the tree at Rockefeller Center, crept in late to a performance of Handel’s
Messiah
. When I commented that he seemed to like Christmas, he said no, no, I had it all wrong: it wasn’t Christmas he liked but the preparation for it, the intentness of people. For me the two were indistinguishable.
On the evening of December 21st we walked out of a Spanish restaurant in the West Village to find that it was snowing lightly, flakes like tiny petals passing through the illumination of the streetlights. Above the spindly black trees the sky was yellow. We stopped in our tracks, delighted. Our eyelashes caught flakes, our hair. We held our heads back and let the snow come into our mouths, soft and then cold and then wet. We walked slowly northward, watching the city go white. I was flying to Madison the next morning.
Back at his place, he handed me my Christmas present.
“Can I open it now?”
“Of course.”
He’d wrapped it in a section of Sunday comics, some kitchen string for ribbon. I pulled the string off and peeled up the tape. Inside there was a framed photograph of a building, or part of a building—the top story and the roof, steeply pitched and gray, and above it a sky alive with clouds. Behind the roof there was a clothesline strung with white underthings: a man’s and a woman’s mixed together.
“It’s Paris,” he said, and I looked up at him.
“And you took it.”
He wiggled his finger a few inches from the surface of the picture. “I lived over here for a while.”
“I love it,” I said. “Thank you. Did you frame it yourself?” The frame was beautiful, wood painted the exact gray of the roof.
He shrugged. “I always think the nicest presents are the ones you make yourself.”
I suppressed a smile. I’d made him a corduroy shirt, in hours stolen from my dress. I went over to the closet and withdrew the shopping bag in which I’d hidden it. I said, “You can save it for Christmas morning if you want,” and we both smiled: after the Thanksgiving Day phone call, I was assuming he’d spend Christmas alone, walking the deserted streets and then sitting in his apartment reading a brand-new book he’d bought for the very purpose. Did he have siblings? Would a whole clan of Frasers spend Christmas Day together, a whole clan minus one? Or would his parents be alone together, having a cow?
“I think I’ll go ahead,” he said.
The shirt was dark burgundy, a pinwale corduroy that had left its own fine dust all over the place. He pulled the paper off, then opened the box. “Nice,” he said, pulling the shirt from the box and shaking it out. “Really soft.” He laid it on the table and ran his hand down the front of it. I’d been careful with the nap, and a downward stroke flattened the corduroy, darkened it. At last it dawned on him: he pulled down the collar to look for a tag.
He looked at me and I nodded. He let his head fall back, and his neck stretched taut. He said, “I don’t know what to say.”
“ ‘Thank you’ will do.”
“Not really.”
He carried the shirt to the window and peered out. We’d left the lights low and I could just make out his reflection, a ghostly smudge
against the darkness. He stroked the shirt and then turned around. “See, no one’s ever made me anything before, not—not in a really long time.” His voice was wobbly; I could hardly believe it. “This is incredibly nice.” He came back to where I was and with the edge of his hand pushed my hair away from my face. “You are coming back?”
In twenty-four hours I’d be there, sleeping in my old bed on the second floor of my mother’s house. I’d have ridden in from the airport with her, down streets I knew I would find wide open and eerily quiet. I’d have seen Christmas trees framed by living room windows, colored lights along gable after gable. New York would be a dream by then, barely trustworthy in the face of so much that was so well known. What I wanted was for Madison to be the dream—for this room, this evening to be what lasted.
“Yes,” I said. “It’ll go fast. You’ll see.”
Asleep that night, my plane ticket ready in my purse, I dreamed Mike healthy again. I was at the bottom of the stairs to my Madison apartment, watching him go up backward, on his butt. He was dressed in khakis and a plaid flannel shirt, and he had the halo on, but I knew there was nothing wrong with him—that if he’d wanted to, he could have walked.
Then we were on a hospital gurney together, making love. There were no sheets on the gurney; we were right on the vinyl. He was heavy on me, his ass hairy and damp in my palms, and I could hardly breathe, though I was also incredibly aroused. He thrust into me again and again.
In the morning the sky was blue, the air outside Kilroy’s bedroom window bright with the recent snowfall. With Kilroy still asleep beside me, I got out of bed and went to look out. Several inches had accumulated, and the sidewalks were frosted; the wide expanse of Seventh Avenue was shiny wet. Down at the coffee place across the street, a couple pushed out the door, capped cups in their gloved hands, and walked the slow walk of the first snowfall until they were out of sight.
“Hey.”
I turned and saw Kilroy lying on his side looking at me, his head propped on his hand.
“It stuck.” I came back to the bed and got in next to him, the sheets on my side still warm.
“What stuck?”
“The snow.”
He smiled and reached over to touch me. “Too bad you’re leaving. We could have gone tromping.”