Bertrand Court (15 page)

RIPE

Phil Scott, January 20, 2005

I
'm hungry. But that's not why I'm standing in front of the McDonald's on Columbia Road at 4:37 on a freezing cold Tuesday afternoon. I'm waiting for Amy Solonsky.

A week ago, I watched her fall on her heart-shaped ass trying to get off the #42. We hadn't seen each other in a couple of years, but I recognized her hair — miles of black curls — and her glasses with the tiny purple rectangular frames. Graphic artists sport hip eyewear as a rule.

I was standing across the street, so I couldn't help her up. She put her hand on her swollen belly right away and smiled with her eyes closed, as if she'd just heard some good news. She didn't notice me until she brushed off the tumble and was about to cross the street. I let her decide whether or not to come to me, and I was so glad that she did. “Phil,” she said, and hearing my name coming out of her mouth moved me. Ever since I saw her, I've wanted something, but I don't know what it is, as if I'm kicking back on my couch after a grueling shoot, my bones aching, an ice cold beer in one hand, remote in the other, clicking and clicking, searching for a ball game, an old movie, a
Law and Order
rerun, anything that will unlatch me from myself.

It's 4:44. The bus is late. No surprise, it's D.C. I never had to wait for Amy before. She would always find me after one of her breakups, until she married a widower with an architecture firm in the 'burbs. Leroy or Leonard or something. She met him on the plane going to her father's funeral. I know this because my soundman Eric is Amy's brother.

At 4:48, a noticeably larger Amy treads carefully down the steps of the #42. Her coat won't button over her belly. She spots me and gives me her little amused smile as she waits for the Do Not Walk sign to turn.

When she's almost across the street, I say, “You need some company.” I don't even know where she's going.

“And that would be you?” She adjusts her glasses.

“Why not?”

“I can think of a few reasons.” She laughs.

We start walking down Columbia Road together like we've been in step our whole lives. She tells me that carrying the baby has given her sciatica, so she's been going to a prenatal acupuncturist on Belmont Road. She's a little short of breath, the way my sisters were when they were pregnant.

I follow her into an old brownstone, where she accepts a Dixie cup of peppermint tea from a receptionist with three diamond studs in her nose. The nurse calls her right away. Before she disappears through a door marked Patients Only, she turns around and smirks at me, and we swallow a laugh at the absurdity of us together right now, as if we're the only two people at a dinner party who just heard the hostess fart. The receptionist smiles at me, no doubt assuming I'm Amy's husband. I suppose I look like I might be somebody's husband; I'm a thirty-five-year-old guy with thinning hair and a niece soon to graduate from high school.

I read an article about the lies mothers tell their children in
Brain Child: The Thinking Mother's Magazine
and listen to my stomach howl, which reminds me of the long, hungry stakeouts I endured when I was cutting my teeth shooting local news. Thank God those days are over.

An hour later, Amy emerges. Her hair is messy and her eyes are glassy, like she's just had some killer weed or gotten her brains fucked out. Amy loves to fuck. She walks toward me, her belly sticking out of a red jersey with black buttons, each one a different shape. Her tits are swollen up to twice their normal size.

“Look, Phil,” she says, “I can move again.” She raises her hands over her head and wiggles her hips. “I could even merengue if I wanted to.”

The receptionist winks at her. “Let's not get too carried away, Britney Spears.”

Amy slings her coat over her arm, and we walk out into the cold.

“Aren't you freezing?” I ask, my breath coming out of my mouth like smoke.

She shakes her head no. I don't want to kill her buzz, so I just follow her to the Spaghetti Garden.

She nods her head toward the restaurant. “I forgot my wallet.”

I reply by opening the door for her. She leads me to a small table at the back.

“You're supposed to drink lots of water,” I instruct her. I'd only heard the receptionist say this about nine times. “And speaking of which, I'll be back in a second.”

“I'll order an appetizer,” Amy says.

I piss, thinking about what we might talk about when I return to the table. We could reminisce about the day we met, at Eric's son's bris, and how we were so freaked out by the ceremony that afterwards we split a pitcher of sangria at El Tamarindo, and how easy it was to fall into bed six months later when we ran into each other shooting pool at Chief Ike's. We could gossip about Eric and Maggie or producers we hate. We could lament the fucked-up war in Iraq. We'll talk of none of these things, I predict.

Amy's putting her cell phone back into her purse when I approach the table. I don't ask who was on the phone, and she doesn't tell me. A few minutes later, the waiter brings her a steaming plate of fried calamari, and she digs in. I take a bite of garlic bread. The butter is still cold, but I'm so hungry that I wolf down three slabs anyway.

Amy and I eat in perfect time. Bite. Chew. Gulp. She's licking her fingers when our skinny, androgynous waiter, who must live in Adams Morgan because I recognize him from Tryst, comes to take our dinner order.

“That was fantastic. I'd like a bowl of pasta puttanesca and a ginger ale,” she says. “Oh, and some more bread please.”

He raises a pierced eyebrow.

I'm full but not satisfied, so I order a bowl of pasta. It's tastier than the garlic bread, but now I'm too stuffed to eat much of it. Amy and I never had much to say to one another when we weren't shooting pool or in bed, so we eat in near silence like an old married couple. I pay the bill.

Amy's nose is red from the cold, but she still doesn't put on her coat. She pops a mint into her mouth. I'm dying for a cigarette, but out of respect for Amy's condition, I hold off.

“I really want an ice cream cone, but that would be obscene.” She laughs. I laugh at her laugh, which sounds like Horshack's in those
Welcome Back, Kotter
reruns I watch when I can't sleep. Not what you'd expect from someone so cool, and it's not just the eyewear. She's Amy, and she apologizes for nothing, not her ass, which some women might find too big, and not her eyes, which are a little too close together. Somehow you put it all together — the hair, the smile, the spunk — and it works.

I take her elbow and guide her into Ben and Jerry's. It's the first time we've touched since I saw her. A charge runs through my fingers, but not a horny charge. Strange. I watch her polish off a strawberry ice cream waffle cone with gusto.

“I miss my old 'hood,” she admits wistfully. “I feel so free here.” She takes a big breath and then sticks her hands on her belly, which ripples slightly under her shirt. I don't ask to feel the baby kick even though I want to.

It doesn't seem that strange to follow her down the steps to my basement apartment. I catch her scent, kind of citrusy, different from what she used to smell like. Usually when I'm bringing a woman home, I'm mapping out the night — do I have wine? pot? rubbers? Now I'm only thinking that I'm not thinking about that at all.

“Where's Mandu?” Amy asks.

I don't want to go there. I flew up to Ontario once to enjoy the foliage with a co-ed I'd met while shooting a marketing tape for a summer camp. When I came home, Georgia, the cat sitter and a woman I'd been seeing, told me she'd left a window open by accident.

“Gone,” I say. I try not to think about how much I miss that cat.

She looks at me with sympathy, plops down on my couch, and sticks her feet on my coffee table while I rifle through my CDs. She giggles. “No Joni tonight.”

“Was it that obvious?” I've always thought I should write Joni Mitchell a big thank-you note for getting me laid so often. For some reason, the kind of chick who digs Joni Mitchell digs me.

“Sort of,” she replies in a “No shit, Sherlock” tone.

“What do you want to hear?”

“The street. I want to hear sirens and drunken laughter and Spanish.” She brushes her hair off her face. “My neighborhood is so quiet it's creepy.”

I open my window a crack, and lo and behold a police car rages by. “For you.” I nod toward the street.

She points to a photo I took of a scruffy little boy holding a balloon. “You shooting stills these days?”

I like that she doesn't ask if I'm shooting weddings. People in the film biz are so fucking snobby about that. I started doing weddings for the extra cash, to help my oldest sister out of a bad marriage, but now I do it because I love shooting by myself, without any producer getting in my shit.

I pull out a stack of photos I shot a few weeks ago. Amy examines an image of the loneliest-looking woman I've ever seen: a barefoot waif wearing pearls and a bad bridesmaid's dress, looping her sandal straps around her pinkie, smiling at the bride who's wiping frosting from the groom's mustache.

“You're a savant, you know that? I can feel the woman's hollowness.”

Amy's a good graphic artist, and I respect her eye. “Yeah, call me Rain Man.” I try not to smile too hard.

She points to the thin woman in pearls. “Naked emotion.”

“I smoked a clove with her after I shot that photo. She had this way of looking at you, aloof, yet like you could be the answer to her next prayer.”

“What was her name?”

“Molly Flanders,” I say wistfully.

“Send Molly Flanders this photo.” Amy taps the picture with her fingers, so swollen that little folds of flesh bulge around her wedding ring, a thick silver band. She's not the type to sport the big rock.

And then what? I can't see fucking someone I've shot like that; it would be like mixing files. No. Definitely no. I don't reply.

“Really, Phil, send it.”

Amy gets up and walks toward my bedroom, saying over her shoulder, “Come on, take my picture.” I grab my
camera bag and follow her. I'll go natural with this, just the moon and the street light.

She sits on my bed with her elbows resting on her knees and her face in her hands, and looks up at me unsmiling. After I snap the first picture, I'm home again. I anticipate what she's going to do, and I'm there before she does it. It's as natural to me as breathing or shitting.

I'm not surprised when she takes off her blouse and unhooks her bra. Blue veins zigzag up and down her breasts, which are so ripe I want to squeeze them as I would a grapefruit at the market. Her nipples look larger and browner than I remember, and her belly is round and taut. She slips out of her skirt and pulls off these black tights that come up to her knees. Her pink panties have lost their elasticity, and she tugs them down over her ass. I'd forgotten how beautiful she is.

She turns her back to me, raises her hands over her head, and moves her hips the way she did in the doctor's office. I shoot her from the side, hands on belly, head back, hair swimming down her spine. I shoot her front on, staring down my lens. I shoot and shoot until I run out of film.

When I finish, we collapse on my bed, spent. I lie as still as I ever have and listen to her breathe. She moves, accidentally grazing my bicep with her breast. I don't budge; I want us to stay precisely as we are. She sits up and dresses and kisses me on the cheek. We're done.

Outside, as I hail her a cab, she leans over to me so close that I can smell strawberry ice cream and calamari on her breath. I think she's going to kiss me again, but instead she says, “Do you have any cash?” I give her my last bill, a fifty, more than enough to return her to the 'burbs.

The wind tears through my jacket right to my bones. I finally light up that clove, drawing the sweet smoke into my body, and watch Amy's cab until it rounds the corner. Across the street, a bottle breaks and a young woman laughs. If I listen hard, I can hear a siren off in the distance. I wonder if Amy hears it too.

JANUARY

Leon Falk, January 21, 2005

L
ast night I stole my wife's wallet. I'm forty-five years old, and I've never taken so much as a loose grape from my grocery cart without paying for it. A half-pound of stuffed red leather, the contents of which could wreck my marriage, now weighs down the breast pocket of my parka, grazing my heart with my every move.

Still, I feel only a tinge of guilt that Amy is probably canceling her credit cards while I stand in her brother's kitchen cupping a warm Starbucks — straight black. I watch Eric's lips move as if he's the adult to my Charlie Brown. Wah, wah, wah. I've been renovating houses long enough to know that Eric and Maggie want more living space, a view of whatever will bloom in their garden this spring, and a bigger pantry.

“You look stressed, Leon.”

I try to smile. “Oh, I'm all right, Eric.”

“The Solonsky women can be ‘bitchy breeders,' to quote Hannah. Amy been giving you a hard time?”

I'm tempted to tell him everything, that I showed up at Amy's office to drive her to her doctor's appointment even though I knew I'd been smothering her lately, that I found her wallet on her desk, that I tracked her down in Adams Morgan to give it to her, that I wished to hell I hadn't seen what I had.

“You with me?” Eric touches my sleeve.

His hand, inches from the wallet, makes me flinch. I assure him that I'm fine, and he tells me to lock up after I finish taking my measurements.

“You have a shoot today?” I want to know if he's meeting up with Phil. I want to know a lot more than that, but it's not right to badger Eric.

“Nope, errand day,” Eric says.

I wish him a nice day or something feeble like that and stand slack-jawed in his kitchen, watching his Subaru drive down the hill, past the charming but small homes whose owners will call the Solonskys for a contractor referral come barbecue season, after they've filed into his house to inspect my work.

I haven't eaten since yesterday. I'm woozy. Now I've not only stolen my wife's wallet, I've swiped an apple juice box and a bag of multigrain Goldfish crackers from Eric and Maggie's soon-to-be-expanded pantry. I plunk down on the family room sofa, gobbling up cheddared cardboard, contemplating their photo albums lined up on the bookcase.

I succumb to my curiosity. I know Amy met what's-his-face at Alec's bris, so I pluck a family album labeled “Solonsky progeny.” Bingo. I find a snapshot of Amy, Hannah, and their mother, who's holding Alec. Maggie has on a hippie-looking dress that she'd never wear now that she's “clinging to her fading soap-star looks,” to quote Amy. Amy had short hair then, but it looks okay — shows off her eyes, so big that those little glasses she wears barely cover them. I like her hair long, though. It spills halfway down her back, and on lazy Saturday mornings I wash it for her, and my hands smell like her for the rest of the day.

I find
him
at the back of another album in a photo from a surprise thirtieth birthday party Hannah threw for Eric. Skinny redheaded weasel. Phil. He's sitting in an Adirondack chair at dusk, legs crossed, smoking a cigarette; it's a moody picture. He looks like the kind of guy you tell your sister to avoid. Amy told me about him early on, during one of those romantic history conversations I could have done without. I've slept with barely a handful of women. Amy. My late first wife, Mary, who was also my high school and college sweetheart. The olive-skinned lifeguard who helped me pass the summer after I graduated from college when Mary decided we needed to play the field. Oh, and some drunken sympathy sex from my bookkeeper in the back of her Toyota Sequoia during my first Christmas without Mary. My sexual history. Amy's feels more vivid to me.

What the hell was she doing with that guy last night? I would have felt better if they were talking or even laughing, but they were walking down the street in the familiarity of silence. Ridiculous. Just last week we were picking out baby names.

I slide off my parka, and the wallet thuds against the couch. My heart is pumping fast. I better hit the head. I need to get the hell away from this album and the wallet. Standing up too quickly, I step on the bag of Goldfish and relish the sound of the crackers crumbling under my boot.

Professional photos of Alec and Kaya line the hallway leading into the bathroom: various arrangements of the grinning kids whom Amy adores. I wash my hands and face with cold water. Feels good.

I start to dial Amy. She'll clear this up. She'll tell me that she bumped into Phil, that they were simply walking in the same direction, and then she ran into her friend Nadine, who treated her to dinner and ice cream — I found a crumpled Ben and Jerry's napkin in her coat pocket — and the forty-dollar cab ride from the city back to our house, a mile up the road from here. I'll apologize for hovering and acknowledge her need for time to herself, and tonight she'll cuddle up against me and remind me that I get weird in January, and we'll laugh about it all. I love Amy's laugh: half cackle, half bleat. My body relaxes, then tenses again from my skull down to my toes.

I have never squatted in a client's home. I grab my coat and pull out the wallet, still warm from my body, and go upstairs to scout the perfect spot to examine my spoils. First stop, Kaya's room. I'm not going to sit on her bed. Bad idea. A computer occupies much of her desk, the rest of which she's plastered with stickers of shiny teen idols with girlie haircuts. Next stop, Alec's room; his bed is perfectly made, baseball trophies line his shelves. He's not a good athlete, but according to Amy, these days you get some hardware for filling out a registration form. I don't pry into Eric and Maggie's bedroom.

Back downstairs, I decide on the kitchen table. I clear away this morning's
Washington Post
and a cookbook opened to a recipe for tomato soup, and then I take a sponge and wipe three globs of jelly off the white surface. I dry it with a paper towel and place the wallet right in front of me.

My hands are shaking. When the phone rings, I practically shoot out of my chair like a pebble from a slingshot. The Goldfish are swimming up to my throat, every nerve in my body is vibrating, and I'm not sure this is a bad thing. In ten years of marriage to Mary, I never felt this scared or alive. When she died, I was overcome with a dull ache that I can still evoke if I stare too long at one of the few pictures of her I've kept, or if I catch a whiff of Vaseline Intensive Care, the kind that comes in the mint green bottle. Last year Amy dragged me to one of those sappy female movies, and I thought I heard Mary weeping two rows back. I didn't turn around, but my heart stayed heavy through the pizza and sex that followed.

I touch the bumpy red leather. It's a big wallet with room enough for a change purse, a checkbook, a calendar, and a plastic case for credit cards. I open the case first. Visa, Maryland driver's license, Washington Sport and Health, Blockbuster, Aetna. I sort her forty dollars by denomination — a twenty, a ten, and two fives. Bringing order to her things gives me a slender sense of peace and the courage to look at her calendar.

My upper lip starts to twitch as I flip through it. Surprising that a graphic artist, someone who works with computers all day, would spurn a Blackberry, but Amy says she likes to see the whole month on one page. It's late January, so I can see only a few weeks' worth of past appointments and dates. I hate January.

Sunday, January 4. Dinner with Eric and Maggie to discuss my ideas for their house. Eric made a hearty beef stew — red, the color of Amy's wallet. We dunked thick slabs of bread into our bowls, and I looked around the first floor musing about its possibilities. On the drive home, Amy squeezed my hand and told me that she likes my ability to see what's not there. Was she trying to tell me that I was missing something happening right under my nose?

Tuesday, January 6, 13, and 20. Three late-afternoon appointments to treat her sciatica at the Women's Acupuncture Center on Belmont and Columbia, Amy's old neighborhood. I know she has client meetings on Tuesdays, and she came right home after the first two appointments. She couldn't have seen Phil. I scour the squares for some code name for her secret lover, but I recognize all the names, and thank God, Phil's isn't one of them.

Friday, January 23. Blank. The anniversary of Mary's death.

I'm breathing easier now, but I'm still not satisfied that there aren't items in this wallet that might bite me. The house is so still that all I can hear is the hum of the fish tank, and then the sound of my hand unzipping the back compartment of the wallet. I take a deep breath before sticking my fingers into the small fold, where I find an airplane ticket stub. A memento of something. Maybe a trip she took with Phil to one of her conventions. Sweat trickles down my side, over the lump of flesh that I blame on Amy's recent potato chip habit. I turn the ticket over. Midwest Express. May 2001. If I close my eyes, I can see us on that plane where we first met: Amy sitting beside me in her funeral clothes, her eyes puffy and red, her fingers thankfully ringless, a dark-green bra strap sliding down her lovely shoulder as she told me about her father's unexpected death and the lake house they'd rented for their family reunion. Her father's heart attack, sudden and lethal, reminded me of Mary's aneurysm, so I tried to distract myself with a fantasy of Amy and me sitting in a fishing boat, face to face on that big blue lake, listening for a lucky splash. I cling to that moment and to the ones that followed, and to the ones ahead of us, which I no longer presume to plan or believe in despite Amy's constant reassurances that she's healthy.

I recognize the second piece of paper in the compartment. I lay the flimsy square on the table. This is Simon. We're going to name him after Amy's father. She could only open her heart to him after we met, after he was gone, she claims, although I don't understand why. The blurry white looks like a spider web superimposed on a black chalkboard. I can see only his profile, but Amy insists that he has my forehead and nose. The sonographer agreed, and they're not supposed to say things like that. Now that he's getting bigger, he can't fit into the frame. Amy and I are supposed to go for her twenty-four week sonogram next Thursday. She'll need her Aetna card.

I bring the image of Simon to my lips, gingerly fold the paper in half, and slide it back into the wallet. I want to see Amy, to kiss her neck and rest my fingers on her belly and wait for our son to move. In my haste to put miles between this morning and my wish, I reach for the ticket stub, knocking over my Starbucks cup. The cold coffee spills onto Amy's calendar, still splayed to reveal every week of January. I stop the flow with my sleeve, but half the dates, including yesterday's, are soaked. The ink has bled, making Amy's script illegible. The empty square marking the anniversary of Mary's death remains unsullied, as do the sonogram appointment at the end of the month and all the days thereafter.