A Certain Age (26 page)

"Fantastic, wasn't it?" he said, and then, more shyly, "Are you enjoying it?"

"Mmmm." It was irritating that he so longed for her corroboration. He had bought her a plastic glass of really terrible champagne and a Coke for himself, which he carried over to her position on a padded bench by the escalator. The people looked even worse now that she was getting to observe them close up. There was a woman she recognized from the papers as a moderately well-known writer—probably in her late thirties, with frizzy hair, schlumpy, wearing a long plaid skirt and red sweater, completely out of style. Why didn't she do something to fix herself up? It seemed ridiculous to live in Manhattan and not be attuned to the right thing to wear and how to look. No wonder she hadn't had a successful novel in at least ten years. She looked like some old hippie, frumping away; at least she could get a decent haircut and not go traipsing around in an old plaid granny skirt. Of course,

that was basically the way all the women in the audience looked: one woman had on a black dress and brown sandals, with a white jacket on top; another had on a blue floral polyester dress and white fake-leather pumps suitable for Mormon country.

Maybe they were all tourists, or mentally ill. She didn't know why it enraged her so, to see such hordes of shabby misfits. Even the theater was badly designed and tacky, like an airport. At one time, attending such an event would have been a subject fit for an Edith Wharton novel, and the music would have been the least of it: everyone in society would have been there, the young people eyeing one another and the grown-ups arranging marriages and business deals. Now it was a house of losers who had scraped and saved to buy tickets for their pathetic night out.

". . . so tomorrow they want to redo the tests, and if it comes out positive again, I'll get X rays."

"What?"

"You weren't listening to any of it, were you?"

"Just say the last part again."

"I said, my doctor gave me a TB test when I went in for my checkup, and it looked somewhat positive. But it was one of those results that they couldn't be a hundred percent certain of, so they're going to do it again."

"How could they not tell if it was positive or not?"

"They give you an injection: if it swells up and turns red, it's positive. In my case it turned red, and swelled up a little bit, so they can't tell if I have TB or it's a false positive."

"Oh! That's horrible! I mean, that's awful. What would happen if you have TB?"

"They have medicine now. It's no big deal. I mean, you know, TB is on the rise in the city, especially with the homeless, and that's who I'm dealing with all day. You know, from their sleeping on the street and not getting the right food, and taking drugs, a lot of their immune systems are down—you wouldn't believe the diseases that some of them have. I got kind of friendly with this one fellow and I noticed that every week his right leg was bigger and bigger. After a while he could barely walk. I ended up taking him

to Bellevue. It turned out he had some kind of tropical disease the doctors just couldn't believe somebody in Manhattan had. 'Have you recently been in Africa?' they kept asking him—but he hadn't. You know, Bellevue's the best place in the city for tropical diseases; the guys there are really experts in tropical diseases and gunshot wounds, from having to work with the homeless and people that can't pay for treatment. And now with all these cutbacks, there's not going to be anyplace for them to go."

"It's disgusting."

Intermission over, she quickly drank the last drops of her champagne and followed Darryl back to their seats. It was ten after nine. Surely the concert would end by ten o'clock. She sat down prepared for an interminable fifty minutes. There was a work by Vivaldi, and by some Baroque German whose name she had never come across before. She hoped she would not have to sit for almost an hour worrying about what was going to become of her, or obsessing about Raffaello. When she was nervous she would pick up one problem, one issue, one idea, and go over it and over it like a scratched groove on an old-fashioned LP. To her surprise, however, it seemed that only a minute had gone by and the audience was applauding wildly. "What happened?" she asked Darryl, perplexed.

"What do you mean?"

"The second half of the performance—it was so short!" She looked down at her watch. It was ten o'clock; fifty minutes had gone by. Where had she been? It was very peculiar. Was that the point of a concert, to make you disappear out of your body like a zombie? If so, she still couldn't see the point. She followed Darryl out of the auditorium feeling baffled and somehow tricked. It was as if she had been abducted by aliens and couldn't account for the passage of time.

She let herself be led across the street to a noisy restaurant. The waiters skated through the crowds from one table to the next. She had a momentary pang of guilt—Darryl had no money, his advocacy group was funded entirely through donations, and he took almost nothing in the way of salary—but she was starving. Of

course, this restaurant, full of abrasively loud pseudo-fashionable people, served only the most primitive items. The menu listed calamari, fried; hamburgers; several salads, which, judging from a large bowl located on a nearby table, would be primarily iceberg lettuce, romaine, croutons and dressing. Finally she settled on a plate of linguini with shrimps and seafood in marinara sauce.

With adoration he stared at her across the table. "So did you have fun the other night?" she said. It was almost a slap in the face, since she had completely ignored him and gone off with Raffaello, not even bothering to take him aside to say good-bye, but she could think of no other way to cut through the stickiness. "What did you think of that girl, Tracer? She really likes you! She actually invited me over—when was it? A couple of nights ago, I guess—to try and pump me for information. You wouldn't believe how rich she is! That girl's loaded." She supposed she could promote Tracer, since she knew Darryl would never fall for her. It was perhaps disloyal to Tracer, letting Darryl know she was trying to find out about him, but why did she have to remain loyal to Tracer? Whatever John de Jongh had said to Tracer about her, Tracer must have believed it—she had gone out of her way to be cold and unfriendly on the phone.

"She's nice. A nice girl." Darryl waved his hand dismissively. "Usually that type of girl, with so much money, is like a paper cutout—they've been sealed under Plexiglas. But she's very down-to-earth. You could use a friend like that, Florence."

"Mmm. Excuse me, I'm going to the restroom."

She made her way around the speeding waiters on their rattling skates. There was a phone by the toilets and she dialed her own number, then the code, to retrieve messages from her machine. She realized it was demented to think Raffaello might have called. Yet she was unable to help herself. She felt as if something in her head had cracked, as if the neurons were struggling to leap from synapse to synapse, never quite crossing the abyss. The beeps signaled she had three messages. She waited impatiently. The first was from John de Jongh; the second from Darryl, in the lobby of the concert hall, saying it was ten to eight and wondering

if she was going to show up; and the third . . . but it was only John de Jongh again. She had thrown him out last night; he must have gone straight out to dinner with Tracer and the others, bad-mouthed her for revenge, and was back on the phone the next day as if nothing had occurred.

There was a somewhat cute guy waiting to use the phone— baseball cap, khaki pants, polo shirt, tanned—the kind who had gone from some vaguely toney East Coast boarding school to a middle-rated private college with a lot of frat houses and nearby ski slopes; and from college straight into his father's business. This was whom she should be having dinner with, not weird Darryl, staring at her too intently. "What's up?" he said as she put down the receiver.

"Same old same old."

"Yeah? I'm over at the bar—you wanna come have a drink?"

"I . . . yeah . . . No, I'm having dinner with a friend. Maybe if I can ditch him!" They both laughed.

"I'm Bill Smiley. My friends call me Smiley."

"I'm Florence."

"Florence! That's a kind of . . . different name. So come on, get rid of your friend."

"Maybe."

"Come on. Here's my card." He handed her his business card, printed with his name and the words grinning flick productions above phone and fax numbers.

"What's Grinning Flick Productions?" she said.

"Movie biz. You an actress?" He used the question as an excuse to look her up and down in a near parody of sexual interest that somehow managed to denote the opposite. She shook her head. "So, I'm over at the bar for a little while—I'm just finishing my meeting—catch you later!"

She was dismissed; he hadn't even told her to give him a call. All the cards were in his hand—it was a sign of interest that he had dealt her even the one. He had everything on his side, very nearly—good-looking, obviously with plenty of money, in his early thirties, in the movie business—there were probably half a dozen

women throwing themselves at him as soon as he got back to the bar. At least she wasn't losing her touch, her looks, entirely— chatting her up by the telephones was probably as much work as he had had to do in years. The women in New York were so aggressive; anyone else would have, on seeing him standing there, immediately begged him for a quarter, or a cigarette, or the time, anything to start a flirtation.

She went back to her table. The food had already arrived, but Darryl was waiting patiently for her. "That was quick!" she said. "You should have started!"

He looked distracted. Maybe he hadn't even noticed the food was there. "Florence," he began. "Can I talk to you?"

She noticed, across the room, Bill Smiley had returned from making his phone call and was back at the bar. He lifted his glass in her direction. There were two women at the bar, obviously trying to engage his attention. Involuntarily she smiled, flattered.

"I don't want this to sound like it's coming out of left field. But you've known for a long time how I've felt about you. I think we should get married."

II

"Oh, Darryl
—"
Was he nuts?
Or simply pathetic? He must see they were incompatible. She had made it clear what she was looking for. She wasn't interested in him. She had never been interested in him.

"No, no, before you say anything, just listen to me. You might think I'm poor, but I—I don't have to be. I could give up what I'm doing, if you wanted."

"That doesn't have anything to do with it." What a liar she was, she thought to herself. It was true, she was out of his

league—he was in a better one. He was noble, pure, a good-deed doer on a planet where good deeds were greeted with contempt and a slap in the face or worse. He looked at her with adoration across the table. Okay, she had slept with him a few times. But that had been ages ago. She had only done it before he had left the fancy Wall Street firm where he worked—one of the oldest and grandest—to head off to do his saintly acts.

He didn't seem to believe that now, after their nights out, she refused to go back to sleeping with him because she wasn't interested in him. If anything, he accepted her actions respectfully, as if there were some curious modern rule in which a couple might sample each other once or twice and then withdraw until after marriage. "Look, Darryl," she said abruptly. "Don't you see that you're . . . you're good and kind and I ... I don't have any ethics or values whatsoever?"

He took her hand and stroked it absently. "No, no, don't say that. Of course you do. You're a very ethical person. You have a lot of values."

"Get real, Darryl. At least let me be honest with you. I don't have any values, except that I want money. Money and status. Do you consider that a value? Sure, sometimes I feel bad that I'm shallow and superficial, but most of the time I just think, This is the way I am, everybody else around here is the same way, why should I be any different? I want what I want, that's all."

"You're not shallow and superficial! I know you!" He was upset. He refused to take her at her word. Obviously no one who was shallow or superficial would admit it. But why shouldn't she admit it? Manhattan was a shabby world, inhabited by cardboard cutouts, and she walked among them. If a bee in an endless hive of millions of other bees could talk, would it say that it was a unique bee, looking for something other than the pollen for which all the rest searched? Money and status were her pollen. Only by ridding herself of any vestige of humanity could she acquire them, and that did not seem such a big price to pay. The amount of pleasure she had known was minute in comparison to the pain and anguish she endured on a daily basis.

"Listen to me, Darryl. I know you don't want to think of me as shallow and superficial. I'm not a bad person. But I'm not a good one either. I don't even believe in goodness. I think it's wonderful, what you're doing. I mean, I think it's wonderful that you think you're doing good. Me, I don't see it quite that way. So you help get some law passed that lets homeless derelicts return a million soda cans to some supermarket that wouldn't let them before. Or fight a law that says they can't beg on the subway. Then they go back out on the street, smoke their crack and die. Or some soup kitchen, where you give somebody advice on how to get Social Security disability. What if this one guy manages to figure it out, actually takes your advice, gets on the payroll, finds some dingy, miserable apartment, and then—now that he's back in the subhuman mainstream of existence—he ... I don't know, molests some child. Or beats up his girlfriend. I mean I just ... I just can't believe in the possibility of improving the world. Anyway, it takes too much of my strength just to look after myself."