A Certain Age (15 page)

ful they were.
The Red and the Black
was a reference needed only if the book had just come out as a movie and was a topic of discussion. The most useful part of her education had not even been her classes on motion picture history (which were the most popular, crowded lectures, apart from gay studies, women's studies and Afro-American studies) but having rented, night after night, various films at the video store. Knowing that Bette Davis had starred in
Mr. Skeffington
was the only piece of information she knew that had ever enlivened a conversation, begun a discussion or gotten her points of any kind in terms of appearing intelligent.

She supposed that without such an education she might have felt stupid, inferior. The problem was, she felt these things anyway. There were women younger than she who had published novels, who were heading PR companies; there were women older than she who were more muscular, who were married to the heads of movie production companies; there were always others who were more. New York—especially for women but for men as well—was in the convulsive, terminal stages of a lengthy disease, the disease of envy, whose side effects were despair and self-hatred. But as it was such a secret disease, never mentioned, as cancer had once been, Florence didn't know she wasn't alone in it.

She went back to Raffaello's apartment with him. "I can't stay long," she said. "I have to go to work in the morning."

He gave her a contemptuous grin. "You are nervous." He was handsome in a foreign way, his dark Italian eyes with a look in them American men never had—sexual, intense—American men always looked away, as if they were afraid of being raped. Still, he did make her nervous.

"No!" She tried to sound indignant.

"Look how you are sitting."

It was true she was hunched in one corner of the black-leather-and-chrome couch. He had a two-bedroom apartment in a

modem building on a fancy block in midtown. It was furnished in deliberately shabby old things, or things designed to look old— overstuffed chair and sofa, piles of art books, walls painted Pompeiian shades of red, umber, grayish lemon. "I am hardly in New York," he explained. "My family keeps this apartment for when we are here, but now, I am thinking, I will stay in Manhattan for quite some time. I like it here." His mother's family was in the textile business—over dinner he had told her about the factory outside Turin, known for its production of fantastic, intricate silk brocades; an old warehouse that was filled with remnants and rolls of cloth dating back to the seventeenth century, when the company had sprung into existence. During the fifties the family had begun to manufacture exclusive items in addition to the textiles— scarves, a few simple shifts, men's ties. The products were incredibly expensive, and now he had been sent to New York to try to revamp the line, which in recent years had become dated.

She felt dizzy. Perhaps she had drunk too much at the dinner.

He got out a few bottles from a cupboard beneath one of the bookshelves. "Would you like some after-dinner drink? I have some very nice cognac. I am sorry I cannot offer you any more cocaine. I had only a little left that had been given to me on my birthday."

"I should get home; I've got all kinds of things to do at work tomorrow." She had made up her mind she wasn't going to sleep with him.

"Come with me for one moment. I have something I want to show you."

"Can't you show me in here?"

He rolled his eyes. "Do you think I will attack you?" Apparently he had never seen anyone so stupid in his entire life. She hated the way he kept staring at her so intently; she almost would have preferred it if he had been the other type, the kind who kept looking around the room, over her shoulder, in the hope either that he would find a better prospect or that someone would see them together. The intensity of his gaze was impolite; she had come up

against it before. It wasn't infatuation, it was a challenge, a method of demanding if she could handle him, of letting her know that he was the alpha dog in the pack.

She followed him past the kitchen. There was a huge refrigerator, all glass, like those found in restaurants, and in the brief glimpse she got she could see there was virtually nothing inside; the other appliances were on an equally lavish scale. For some reason these details impressed her more than the obviously expensive apartment. He went into a bedroom and from a cabinet began to remove, one at a time, really exquisite netsuke; though she didn't know much about the little ivory carvings, as he placed them one at a time in the palm of her hand, she could see that they were not reproductions—a tiny monkey, a rat holding an acorn, a man with a grotesque face bent nearly into a ball. The carving was intensely detailed, and each one, as she felt it, seemed to have an aura, a resonance. "Oh, they're beautiful!"

"You like?" He was smiling. "I like them very much. I have been collecting them since I was fifteen. At one time, I could find them rather inexpensively. Now, the good ones are quite rare." He touched the back of her neck and it suddenly seemed silly not to go to bed with him—he was a grown man, at least in his late thirties; it wasn't as if she had never slept with anyone before. He sat on the edge of the bed, which was covered in a rich brocade. "I will show you what else I like." He took her head between his hands and pushed it down.

"You are a very understanding woman," he said when she was finished. He sat up, covering himself in the ornate purple bedspread across which zigzagged embroidered yellow crosses and shapes resembling mailboxes. "So beautiful." He sighed and offered her a cigar, then lit one for himself. "Would you like to meet me tomorrow for lunch?"

"Things may be a little hectic at work," she said. She didn't know if she would ever want to see him again.

"Shall I ring you in the morning?"

"Yes, sure." She rose from the armchair and collected her things. He didn't offer to take her home.

"Where do you work? Put the telephone number by the phone."

"I work at Quayle's," she said. "The auction house. It's in the book. My name's Florence Collins."

"Of course I knew that!" He roused himself slightly from his torpor. "I'm just joking with you. You are very serious."

"Talk tomorrow!" She made her way to the door.

"What department did you say you were in?"

"Estate jewelry."

The drowsy doorman had to unlock the front door. He, too, did not offer to find her a cab, and it never would have occurred to her to insist that he did, let alone inform Raffaello that it was his obligation to put her in one if he wasn't actually going to escort her home. There were women who demanded even less than she. Had Raffaello picked up the phone at that moment, there were half a dozen women who would have come over to his apartment, had sex with him and left when they were told, without ever expecting to be taken out for dinner, or notified earlier in the day. They would have managed to delude themselves that this was a compliment, that he liked them enough not to bother with preliminaries—or that it was an indication of just how sophisticated and bohemian they were.

She walked over to Fifty-seventh Street. It was well after midnight. The exaggeratedly yellow streetlamps cast a medicinal hue. The few trees, shrouded in thick summer dust, crouched in their two-foot parcels of soil, prisoners of the city. There was no traffic on the street; no taxis came by. Finally, after almost forty minutes, a bus arrived. She felt good. She told herself that she was in control, that now it was up to her whether or not she wanted to see Raffaello again, and not the other way around.

There were four messages on her machine when she walked in

the door, all from Max Coho. In two of them he begged her to give him a call, no matter how late she got in. She paid him no mind. It took her almost a half hour to remove her makeup and wash her face with three different compounds (a routine that had cost her almost three hundred dollars in products and instructions at a small, exclusive skin clinic—in addition to seven hundred and fifty dollars for a series of eight facials). She brushed her teeth with a fancy red-and-white-striped Italian toothbrush and an English toothpowder that came in a tin. She hadn't had a chance to exercise at all in almost four days. And even the one line of cocaine had left her wound up. She drank a cup of chamomile tea and lay awake for at least forty minutes before she finally fell asleep.

2

Monday morning she was
late for work. Quayle's employees were expected to arrive at nine; usually she walked to work or, if running late, caught the eight-thirty bus and got there a few minutes before the hour. She awoke to the phone ringing. Looking at the clock, she realized it was already after nine, she had slept through the alarm. She didn't have the energy to make a dash for the phone, and when the machine picked up, the caller left no message. Though she didn't remember having drunk a huge amount the night before, her head throbbed and she felt stiff from the air-

conditioning. A sudden wave of anxiety swept over her as she tried to retrace her steps over the weekend.

The events of only a few short hours ago, which had made her feel powerful and in control, now seemed inconceivably depraved. A man she had met once had taken her home, she had decided to sleep with him, but when he didn't want to she hadn't protested, simply given him a blow job.

She had never hoped for love and probably wouldn't have recognized it had love stabbed an arrow in her. Still, though she had previously been indifferent whether or not she would hear from him again—though certain she would—now she was equally certain that not only would he never call, but she would die if she didn't get to see him.

She called the receptionist at Quayle's front desk. "Polly? Could you please tell Marge when she gets in that I had an appointment and I'm going to be a little late?"

"What time are you going to be in?"

"Probably ten o'clock."

She intended to go through the stack of mail—bills, bills, bills, payments and responses she had delayed for weeks—but she was too groggy and there really wasn't time. Maybe she would stay in this evening and try to figure out what was going on and where all the money in her checking account had gone.

She showered and washed her hair with a shampoo that had— at least according to her hair stylist—been formulated especially for her. When she needed to order more, she called the salon and gave them her ID number and an assistant mixed it before pouring it into an expensive hand-blown glass bottle. There were two kinds of conditioner, one used before shampooing and one afterward. Her towels, huge and thick, of unbleached Egyptian cotton, were brand-new; though the towels her grandmother had owned were quite expensive, Florence hadn't been able to bring herself to use them after her death. She had bought a whole new set, in shades of raspberry and vermilion, but then decided even after they were

washed that the dye in the fabric irritated her skin—and that the bright colors made the antiquated bathroom look even more grim. So she had gotten rid of those and bought this new set. Each time she had spent well over five hundred dollars.

She put on a flared striped cotton skirt, in shades of forest green, mustard, dark brown and beige; a pair of dark green patent leather flats, hand-made in a French shop; a brown-and-beige sleeveless floral-print silk shirt with a Peter Pan collar. Around her neck she tied a thin cotton sweater in lime-green. She pulled her long blond hair back in a ponytail and, rummaging for her new sunglasses, put them on top of her now-sleek hair. She wore hardly any makeup; a little lipstick in a neutral tone, some powder. Though the other women at Quayle's would be wearing simple black linen shifts, tightly fitted, with jackets they removed once evening came, or suits, Florence's outfit was more expensive than any of theirs. The overall effect was a subtle fifties parody, a bit different than what anyone else had on but which on her somehow managed to seem like the latest style. Quite often it turned out that what she wore was what the others ended up wearing shortly thereafter.

It had cost more than fifteen hundred dollars to look fresh-faced, a simple country girl. But the truth was, she didn't even really care about her appearance or that she was beautiful. She wasn't vain. Her facade was her property. It was an item she possessed, which she groomed and dressed in order to achieve her goals.

She jumped in a cab and got out a block early to buy a large cappuccino to take with her. Her office was located up on the seventh floor—the top—in the very back; it was a tiny office, almost a closet, with one window that looked directly out onto a brick wall. Reference books and old catalogs were stacked to the ceiling. There had been no renovations at Quayle's—one of the lowest of the second string of auction houses, or perhaps the third—in more than fifty years. Mr. Gabe Quayle was over

eighty, but still came in every day; it was expected that when he died the business would be run by his nephew, Barry Plotsky.

Whether or not Marge Crowninshield, her immediate boss, had already arrived, Florence didn't know. Polly was away from the front desk and there were no porters in sight; she had jumped on the back elevator and snuck into her office hoping that Marge hadn't already come to check on her. She began to go over the copy she had been working on last week for the November catalog:
"Pink Sapphire and Diamond 'Bee' Ring, Tiffany & Co. Schlum-berger
."
Her telephone rang.

"Quayle's Arcade Auction, Estate Jewelry, Florence Collins speaking."