Perfection (21 page)

“I’m so lucky to have my child,” I said, as Liza reached the top of The Brain with the help of Sara’s older girls. “I don’t know how I would’ve gotten out of bed these last months without her. I’d go through all this mess again to have her.”

The kids climbed down The Brain and seemed ready to head home. Sara asked me if I would like to have some quiet time to paint. Happy and relieved to accept her generosity, I watched the party pack up and move off toward the trail. As they disappeared into the woods, I was suddenly and wonderfully alone, a different, more exhilarating alone than when I was home working in my office.

At first my mind exploded with frantic activity. I darted around, moving close to the surf’s edge, working on different paintings, backing up as the tide rose. The sun burned away some remaining cloud and haze. Heat and postlunch stupor caught up with me. I stopped working and just sat, staring out to sea. Then my eyes fluttered closed.

I had to lie down. The rocks were warm. My eyes closed again. The engine of a passing lobster boat whined and hummed over the noise of the surf. The warm rock heated my pelvis. I was thinking about Tomas kissing me all over my chest as I lay in his bed. The sadness of losing him was physically both painful and arousing. My hand slid into my underwear. The lobsterman continued hauling up traps, rebaiting, dropping them down, the engine noise quickly swallowed by the crash of the surf.

After a short doze, I began packing up my painting supplies. I wondered about something Eliana had written in one of her letters. That I had been blessed by Henry’s death, set free.

Mary Oliver asks at the end of her poem, “The Summer Day,” “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” What
would
I do with my one wild and precious freedom?

On the last Saturday night
of November 1986, a friend invited me to an early holiday party. I was happy to go to a party and dressed carefully. A lonely but instructive year had passed since my affair with Roberto, the married friend. Apart from one demoralizing one-night stand, I had been celibate and was eager to meet someone new.

As we headed out of the subway toward the host’s apartment in a tenement building on Rivington Street, my friend Carrie told me that she couldn’t wait to see her friend Sally, whom she was sure I’d love. She said that Sally had a great new boyfriend.

We went to the makeshift bar, set up on the kitchen counter, to get glasses of wine. Carrie introduced me to Sally, who was slender and stylish, with dark hair cropped into a fashionably asymmetrical cut draped across one eye. She wore a startling shade of scarlet red lipstick.

The new boyfriend was medium height, with dark, wavy hair, a rich olive complexion, high cheekbones, and dark, almond-shaped eyes. When he laughed, his face opened into a wide grin. When he spoke, he focused completely on one person, his concentration both flattering and unnerving, as he tipped his head forward to create an intimate space in the crowded, smoke-swirled
room. There was a delicacy and elegance about his slim hands. He dragged off the cigarette in his left hand and with the right held a wineglass exuberantly poised between his thumb and pointer and middle fingers. Dressed in khakis and a white polo shirt, he didn’t seem like the sort of man who would take even a conversational interest in me. I was neither skinny nor glamorous, but rather grungy and curvy, with a lot of dark, frizzy hair, dark clothes, and black eyeliner. I smoked, contemplating his cheerful preppiness with gloomy severity.

To my surprise, he strolled toward me and struck up a conversation.

“So, do you live around here?” he asked.

“No, I live uptown,” I answered, staring off. Not having expected to speak to this man, I felt unprepared. For something to do, I flicked my cigarette ash into my now empty wineglass, enjoying the hiss of extinguished embers. I loved smoking, a godsend for socially awkward girls like me, who could never keep their hands calm otherwise.

“What street are you on?” he pressed further.

When I told him the location of my nasty railroad apartment, his smile electrified like the strings of holiday lights draped crazily across the apartment windows.

“Hey, we live in the same neighborhood. We should have dinner sometime.” I looked over at Sally, engaged in happy banter with my friend Carrie. I was sure that she would be unthrilled if I had dinner with her charming, handsome, and possibly slippery boyfriend. I made a move to step away, with the mumbled pretense of settling my ash-filled glass on the kitchen counter.

Undeterred, he put down his own wineglass on the window-sill, reached into his pocket, withdrew a conveniently placed pen, wrote his name and phone number on his paper cocktail napkin in
an elegant, looped script, and handed it to me with a smile as wide as the universe.

“Call me sometime, and we’ll have dinner.”

I was all done with boys like that. Back home I called up my high school friend Chandra and told her about the incredibly good-looking but sleazy guy who had tried to pick me up at a party with his girlfriend standing, like, ten feet away. We agreed we were all done with that sort of boy. But I did not throw away the paper cocktail napkin, which remained on my table for another week amid a stack of unpaid bills until I realized that I couldn’t read the handwriting anyway and I had forgotten the guy’s name.

Several Saturdays later, Chandra herself asked me to accompany her to another Christmas party. Once in the apartment, a penthouse one-bedroom, impossibly luxurious compared with my railroad apartment, I was immediately plunged into the old feeling of nausea and unease from my outsider adolescence. I turned away, rummaging for a cigarette, wondering how long Chandra would want to stay. She was talking to friends on the outdoor terrace, her expressive cigarette hand tracing a twirling path of burning orange.

I saw that I was not alone in the hallway. Across from me was a good-looking man, with dark hair and olive complexion. He was wearing khaki pants, a white T-shirt, and a gray cardigan from an earlier era. A handsome, preppy guy, like the Amherst boys I had avoided during my Smith College years, but his dark skin and the vintage sweater added something. I was trying to figure out what that something might be, when he looked at me, smiled gorgeously, and spoke my name in a questioning musical phrase.

“I’m Henry, remember me?” He offered his elegant hand with well-practiced but still appealing formality.

The napkin guy.
I hadn’t recognized him without the girlfriend with the asymmetrical haircut and scarlet red lipstick.

“Oh, now I remember you,” I replied. The coincidence of meeting this man again suddenly seemed to have significance. “Are you here with—I’m sorry, I forget her name. Your girlfriend.”

“Can I get you a glass of wine?” he asked, by way of reply. “Don’t go away, I’ll be right back,” he said, smiling. He strode off to the bar while I waited. I ventured out of the dark hallway into the living room and looked through the crowd. Sally was nowhere in sight. A quiet and secret thrill bloomed in the space between my ribs.
Maybe they broke up. Maybe he isn’t sleazy after all. Maybe.
I felt giddy and special.

Henry returned with two red-wine-filled glasses. “We’ve been having a difficult time,” he began soberly, giving a brief history of his three months with Sally and concluding, with a look of exasperation, “and she takes forever to get ready to go out, putting on her makeup and picking out her clothes—it drives me crazy.”

I nodded, not knowing what to say, relieved that I wasn’t much of a style maven myself, though in fact being one was something I aspired to, just couldn’t afford.

“We had a fight tonight because she was taking so long,” Henry continued, “so I came alone.” He smiled at me. “I’m glad I did.”

We unraveled the connection to this party—he had gone to college with the hostess, who was a high school classmate of mine.

Now I felt like the luckiest girl in the world. Sally was not here; we were here, the meeting point of two tangent circles of acquaintances. We were being given another chance to know each other.

He spoke about his college years with humor and some bitterness, dwelling on the story of a lost love. He described a woman, brilliant and intellectual, whom he had adored and pursued, despite her wealthy parents’ disapproval. They didn’t want a writer for a son-in-law, and that was his great ambition.

“What snobs those people must have been!” I sympathized, as he described the girlfriend’s Greenwich, Connecticut, parents. I thought my own parents might like a smart writer for a son-in-law, if I ever got married, which of course I wasn’t going to, because marriage was a failed institution, bad for women.

We spoke with reverence about books we loved. It was the time of Gabriel García Márquez. I had just finished reading
Love in the Time of Cholera
. I was now plowing through
The Brothers Karamazov
.

He spoke with enthusiasm about the poet Joseph Brodsky. I felt embarrassed, being underread in modern poetry. I could barely summon up a line or two memorized during a college Yeats course: “I bring you with reverent hands/The books of my numberless dreams…”

He told me about a book he had given his college love, a first-edition copy of Shakespeare’s
Macbeth
with illustrations by Salvador Dalí. “I should never have given her that book. I’m sure she didn’t really appreciate it.”

“Wow. Salvador Dalí?” I had grown up in an apartment where art books especially and all books generally were valued like fine jewels. “I would’ve loved to see that book. Too bad you gave it away.”

“Maybe I should write to her and ask her for it back, but that would be so tacky.” He sighed, then added, as if encouraged by my interest, “I gave her something else even more valuable.”

“What was that?” I asked.

“My beloved old aunt gave me a family heirloom ring that was meant to be an engagement ring, to give to the woman I married. It’s gold with a pearl in the center. There’s a great story about the ring. Do you want to hear it?”

I did.

“Well.” Henry stepped closer to me and bent his head forward in a way that shut out all the noise of the other people now crushed around us—the hallway had become quite rollicking in the half hour since we had found each other. “The story is that my grandfather found the pearl in an oyster he was shucking—he worked as a chef in a restaurant. He wasn’t a very rich man, and he wanted to give his wife a present, so he had a jeweler set the pearl in a ring to give to his wife. It’s a very unusual ring. It’s like a gold claw holding this large pearl.” He formed the fingers of his left hand energetically into an open fist. “Maybe I should ask her for that ring back. I wonder if she still has it. My aunt really meant for that ring to be given to my wife. In the end she and I broke up, and she went off with this other guy at the end of senior year. I was completely devastated. Now she’s married to some other guy and lives in Cincinnati and has a couple of kids already.”

“Really?” I responded, frowning. “She must have started so young.” We were twenty-something New Yorkers. None of us at the party were married, let alone parents. “Anyway. I don’t believe in marriage. I think it’s a failed institution that’s bad for women.”

He laughed. “Yeah, all that expensive education and now she’s changing diapers.”

We both dragged on our cigarettes.

“I should really ask her for that ring back,” he repeated, looking at me intensely, and then, as if my opinion mattered most in that moment, he asked, “What do you think?”

I didn’t know what to say. He seemed still heartbroken about losing the woman, the book, and the ring. I thought how I would love to receive such meaningful gifts from a man who could love someone as he had loved this woman.

“Maybe you could write to her and ask her how she feels about that,” I said, hoping to sound helpful and diplomatic. “I bet after all this time she’d return the ring to you, especially if it’s a family heirloom.” I was now thoroughly intrigued by the man, the book, the ring, the college girlfriend, even the beloved old aunt.

Henry and I left the party together and walked uptown. At a small local bar on Amsterdam Avenue, I spontaneously ordered a Scotch, liquor I normally avoid, which I hoped would give me an aura of toughness and adventure. I drank it down and another, while talking and talking about more books I loved, my job, my family, anything to fill up the silent spaces, not that there really were any in a noisy bar at holiday time.

Henry leaned over and kissed me.

“Just to get you to stop talking,” he often joked later.

Henry told me a bit about his unusual childhood, what he ruefully called his “riches to rags” story. He had spent his early childhood in a luxurious expatriate community in Seoul, Korea, complete with cooks, servants, a driver, and Kunja, his
amah
(nanny)—by his own account, a pampered life. His father worked at that time for Texaco California as an executive, and his mother was the considerably younger, beautiful Korean woman he had married. His father had taken an early retirement and resettled his wife, along with Henry, two older half brothers, and younger brother and sister, in the small town where he had grown up. He had become quite a hermit since retirement.

“And of course,” Henry remarked with regret, “that was the end of the cooks, servants, and driver, not to mention my beloved
amah
.” Then, with alcohol-induced honesty, “I don’t think my mother ever recovered from the shock of that move.”

Two more Scotches later, as the sky turned from wintry black to first light, we stumbled the remaining blocks to my apartment. Though I normally slept nude, I made a point of putting on pajamas, so that nothing would happen. All that whiskey allowed just enough energy for some more kissing before we fell asleep. When we woke at midday, I was bewildered but thrilled to see his eyes open in front of mine. Despite a leaden hangover, I made us breakfast and sent him home.

After he left, I sat down at my rickety round table and cried. I was very attracted to this man, but I was still recovering from the affair with married Roberto. I had determined never again to settle for being the “other woman.” After a Sunday meal at my parents’ apartment, I cried some more over their kitchen sink as I rinsed dinner dishes. I told my mother about the man I had met, how it felt like an act of fate to have met him a second time, how much more I liked him the second time, but how I couldn’t go through a mess again.

My mother remembered the married man fiasco. I had camped out for four miserable days with my parents after I ended the affair with Roberto, days I had spent mostly crying, curled up in the fetal position on my childhood bed, wrapped in the thread-bare remains of my satin-trimmed, crocheted baby blanket.

My mother agreed. The only solution was not to see Henry again, unless he broke up with the girlfriend.

Henry called me at my office on Monday morning.

“I’d like to see you again, very soon,” he said confidently.

“I really like you,” I answered, “and I had a lot of fun Saturday, but I don’t think I can see you again.” I told him firmly that he would have to end things with Sally if he wanted to see me again.

“Please give me time,” he urged. “I’ll take care of things. Can I at least take you to dinner?”

There might be women who could refuse such an entreaty, but fine restaurant meals were too few and far between on my salary, so I accepted the invitation. Henry took me to Raoul’s, a bistro in SoHo. He ordered frogs’ legs, which seemed a bit show-offy, but he ate every bite with great relish. In later years, when he knew I’d laugh, he was famous for eating things like frogs’ legs or squid, allowing a wee leggie or tentacle to dart in and out of his mouth like a viper’s tongue. After our first meal together, he held my coat while I struggled to get my arms in the sleeves, desperately trying to look graceful. He held the door open as we walked out into the street. I took a cab home, hoping that he would take care of things with Sally very soon.