Authors: Kate Christensen
I stumbled through the bathroom doorway, turned on the shower, made the water as hot as I could stand it, and stood under it. The sight of my breasts reminded me of sex, in particular the fact that I hadn’t had any in a long time. I soaped them; it felt good. I wished someone else were there to do it for me, but I had to take what I could get, which was the recollection of various encounters I’d had with John Threadgill. We
had parted ways last spring after just two months together, but not before we’d had enough ravenous encounters in the backseats of taxis and dive-bar bathrooms and the vestibules of tenement buildings to provide me with leaping-off points for fantasies whenever I needed them. I switched the water flow to the bathtub faucet, turned it on full blast, and positioned my crotch directly under the plunging jet of water. I imagined that John was having his jovially brutal way with me in a meat-district warehouse loading zone on a winter night. We had drunk enough red wine in the course of the long night to obliterate the frost-cold air and the hard metal edges we kept hitting various parts of ourselves against. We were fully clothed, with only the requisite parts exposed, and we went at each other violently, with gritted teeth, half laughing, our naked warm joined flesh the only thing we were aware of, everything else a febrile blur.
After this fantasy had run its course I had a brief moment of dislocation, trying to reconcile the water faucet with the large, vivid man I’d just allowed myself to be ravished by. I got out of the tub, toweled off, blew my hair dry, threw on a reasonably clean wool skirt and cardigan to hide the torn seam of my blouse, gulped a cup of coffee, and headed out into the day. The cold bright air tingled on my face; the whiskey seemed to have metabolized during the night into another kind of drug, some bracing combination of caffeine and champagne.
Then, out of nowhere, a mental time-release mechanism triggered the memory of everything that had happened last night. I stopped in front of an OTB and stared pop-eyed into the paper-strewn, sweaty interior. I met the eyes of a man who was looking out at me, but I was too stricken to know at first what I was seeing. Our gazes held a fraction of a second too long and then he lifted his eyebrows at me. I looked quickly away and staggered down Amsterdam, feeling as if I had irreparably
ripped the fragile cloth my life was made of. I wanted to fall to the sidewalk and pound my skull to a pulp against the concrete.
Then I heard, as I occasionally did, the voice of Ruth Koswicki, my old therapist. “Oh, come now, Claudia,” she said in my mind, “so what if the volcano erupted a little bit? Did you really think all that lava could just stay underground forever?” I could see her round, plain face, her dark eyes trained earnestly on me, hair falling from her bun around her face in gray and black strands, her rounded bosom heaving with the intensity of her empathetic response to me. She wore muumuus and sneakers and seemed to have a permanent cold; she poured cup after cup of chamomile tea from the teapot on the table next to her, sipping at it with rabbity little nipping motions. She had reassured me eight times over the phone when I’d called to set up my first appointment that she wasn’t a Freudian; only then had I consented to see her, and only because I was desperately depressed and had no idea where else to turn. Her most fervent speeches made me itch to burst out laughing; her assurances and reassurances made me squirm with childish skepticism, but I kept going back week after week because somehow I knew that it did me good to chafe under the gooey warmth of her mothering. When I quit the receptionist job I’d had at the time, I lost my benefits, stopped going and hadn’t seen her since, but she still managed to descend on me free of charge every so often. “Why do you think you don’t deserve to have your feelings known?” she said. “So what if he knows how you really feel?”
“Shut up, Ruth,” I muttered, but I felt obscurely better. I walked along West Eightieth Street, crossed Central Park West and set off across the park. Yesterday’s promise of spring had been retracted overnight. Ice rimed each spear of long grass around the pond by the Delacorte Theatre. Although I was
wrapped in a coat and scarf and had swaddled my head in a woolen cap, the icy wind penetrated the porous tissue of my bones and froze my legs to numb logs. The low rays of the morning sun knifed through the naked trees and blinded me. I bent squinting into the wind, hugging my coat around me, ears aching, eyes and nose streaming.
When I arrived at Jackie’s, her maid was preparing the breakfast tray. Juanita, who’d come to the United States more than ten years ago, had not felt it worth her while to learn any English, which struck me as both xenophobic and admirable; Jackie communicated with her in sign language and a rudimentary Spanish invented from her knowledge of Italian and French. She paid Juanita less than half the going rate for maids, and was able to justify “supporting” one of “those illegals” by telling herself how much money she was saving; in the interests of further economy, she had Juanita come for the mornings only. How Juanita spent her afternoons or how she managed to support her children on the pittance Jackie doled out to her I had no idea, because Juanita and I were unable to share any but the most fundamental and nonverbal solidarity. No doubt Jackie preferred it that way.
“Good morning,” I said, hanging my coat in the broom closet. My face burned and my nose ran, thawing in the warmth.
“Buenos días,” Juanita said, knocking the top off a soft-boiled egg. “Cómo estás?”
“Okay,” I said. I went to Jackie’s room, knocked briefly on the door and went in. She was in her pink satin bed jacket, propped up against six or eight pillows, holding her reading glasses in one hand and a newspaper in the other.
“Good God!” she said when she saw me. She shielded herself with the newspaper as if to fend me off.
“What is it?”
“Oh, it’s you, Claudia! Good heavens, you scared me! You look so fat with that hat on! Your face, I mean. I thought you were a stranger!”
“Sorry,” I said, and removed the hat, which I’d forgotten I was wearing. I ran a hand over my hair to calm it down; it crackled and stood up against my palm.
She laughed breathlessly. “What a shock!” she said, fluttering a hand against her breastbone. “You looked like one of those women.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. What women?
Juanita came in with the tray, which held the soft-boiled egg in an egg cup, four crustless triangles of dry white toast, a pot of marmalade, a teapot, and an assortment of tea things and silverware. Juanita set the tray on the bed, and Jackie waved her away. When my eyes met Juanita’s on her way out, we kept our expressions carefully impersonal.
Jackie shuffled everything around the tray until it was organized to her liking. “What are you standing there for?”
“You said you wanted to see me first thing when I got in.”
She looked vague. “I suppose I wanted to tell you—never mind, I took care of it last night. Go on, you’ve got plenty to do.”
I set up my table in the dining room, wheeled out the computer and printer, and looked through my work from yesterday. The photographs were right on top of the stack. I checked to make sure they were all there. They weren’t. One envelope, the one with the picture of Imelda in the flower bed, was missing.
I didn’t worry at first; it had to be somewhere. I went back out to the pantry and checked the shelf. It was empty. I looked through everything in the pantry twice, three times, a fourth. I
searched the filing cabinets, the cupboards, all of the piles of papers on the counters. I checked my stack of work again. Then I stood by my table and stared at my computer screen.
I think I may have had a mild heart attack; my heart did something awful and pain shot up my left arm. My vision blurred. The subtle pressure I was under constantly in this apartment intensified all at once. The ordinary bad mood I’d been in until a few minutes ago now appeared to me the way the flu must seem to someone who’s just been told she’s terminally ill. Outside, people went about their untroubled business. In here, I breathed deeply and tried to think. It couldn’t simply have disappeared. She must have taken it out for another look last night; she probably had it in her bedroom. Or she’d changed her mind about it and put it back in its frame.
I tiptoed down the hall to the guest room, swung the door open, and went in. The sight of the empty black cardboard in the gilt frame made me feel faint. I crept back along the hall and stood unseeing in the middle of the dining room. I couldn’t search her bedroom until she went out to the hairdresser. I couldn’t ask her where it was: she would be extremely upset and angry that I’d lost it, which wouldn’t be at all helpful to me right now. As long as she didn’t know, it was possible to maintain an outward appearance of calm.
I survived somehow until eleven by sitting in front of my computer in a trembling daze, typing nonsense and deleting it. When she finally left for the hairdresser I raced to her bedroom. I looked under her bed, between the books on her bookshelf, through her drawers, on the table by her toilet. I went to the utility room and showed Juanita the other envelope. “Un otra como ci?” I said desperately. “Have you seen another envelope like this one?”
She looked puzzled, released a stream of Spanish, smiled apologetically, and went back to her ironing.
I searched the kitchen, the living room, the guest room, the dining room, the pantry again, all the wastebaskets, and my pile of work for a fourth time. The messenger was coming at four o’clock to take the photographs to Gil Reeve. I had four and a half hours to find the envelope, and I had already looked everywhere. I wanted to bolt out of here and never come back.
I forced myself to sit down again at my table. The work she’d left for me to do sat before me, untouched. I had put the photographs on the shelf. Hadn’t I? I was sure I had. But maybe I hadn’t. I had been tired and in a hurry, and frazzled from doing battle with the publicity files. Jackie’s favorite adjective for me was “careless”; her second favorite, “disorganized.” I would hear them both, and quite possibly some others, very soon. I braced myself. The area behind my eyes ached.
Jackie’s wrath swept through her like a sudden storm flattening anything in its path, which was all too often me. She’d screeched once that I was spending her money like a drunken bandit because I’d left the heater on full blast in the dining room when I went home one night instead of lowering it economically; she’d called me muddleheaded and crazy when I forgot to give her the message that Mr. Blevins wanted to bring over some flowers, so he just showed up that evening while she was entertaining another date. I was impractical, I was a dreamer, I was abysmally unorganized.
Even though I deserved them, these excoriations undid me. I sat at my desk afterwards, smarting as if I’d been brutally slapped, staring at the list in front of me through a screen of silent, impotent tears. It gave me no comfort that she reacted exactly the same way when the dry cleaner didn’t have her gloves ready in time for the Pattersons’ dinner party, or her neighborhood grocer ran out of her favorite flavor of frozen
yogurt: forty-odd years of luxury had not obscured the fact that she’d been born in a row house. Nothing ever would. If she’d grown up as the daughter of a rich, aristocratic family, she might have learned graciousness and forbearance, but marrying into one had made her vulnerable and narrow.
I’d learned soon after I’d come to work for her that Jackie’s origins were nearly as obscure as my own. She was born in Englewood, New Jersey, in 1925. Her given name, bestowed on her by a mother who was clearly burdened with a romantic nature, was Genevieve Ursula, but her nickname was courtesy of her father, Jack Timmins, who had obviously hoped for a son. As a girl, Jackie Timmins wore saddle shoes and lipstick and a parochial school uniform, read romance novels, drank sodas at the drugstore counter with her girlfriends, sang along with the Andrews Sisters and Lemmon Brothers on the radio and prayed for the brave boys overseas, none of whom was her boyfriend. She left high school the summer after her junior year to pursue a secretarial career in Manhattan, and in those years seemed to be headed for a marriage to a Wall Street trader or a doctor, which would have been a big step up from her Jersey row-house origins. But just after she turned twenty-one, Giancarlo del Castellano came riding up on a white horse and radically altered this destiny.
He was thirty-two, from an aristocratic Milanese family who owned vast pieces of Northern Italy. He had just been appointed to a diplomatic post in Paris and was looking for a wife, the one accoutrement he lacked for professional success. He met Jackie at a party in Manhattan given by the president of the company that had just hired her. She was Catholic, virginal, dewy-eyed, demure and, with the help of a low-cut dress and an upswept hairdo, a knockout. She was exactly what he needed. He danced with her all night, then married her
three months later and carried her off to a life of almost absurd wealth and glamour.
Jackie reminisced to me about that life with a half-incredulous insistence: the flocks of uniformed servants, polished marble stairways, the fantastic, excessive dinner parties; the bullfights and horse races, where they sat in the best boxes. “Everywhere we went, they treated us like royalty,” she told me. “And we were, Claudia. It’s not like America over there; they’re very class-conscious, very traditional, and they respect their upper classes, they don’t try to pretend everyone’s the same. You had to remember every minute that people were watching you. Even the servants; they saw everything and gossiped with each other. I was young and used to taking care of myself, I didn’t want all those women fussing around all the time. It was hard for me at the beginning. Having everything done for you is not as easy as you might think.”
I could see how it wouldn’t be easy at all. It would have made me extremely nervous to have someone like me walk in off the street and take over the most intimate details of my life. I wouldn’t have wanted a stranger in my house all day, watching everything I said and did. But the more I knew about her, the better I could do my job; she had to entrust me with complete access to her files, her bank accounts, her closets and medicine chest and telephone book. I had permission to forge her signature on her checks when I paid her bills. I wrote my own paychecks. She gave me a set of keys to her apartment so I could come and go as necessary when she was out of town. I had the run of the place.