Picturing Will (8 page)

A few weeks after Mel first met Jody, he loaned her money. To get the roof repaired, to buy the new camera lenses she needed, whatever was necessary to make her house habitable and to get her career started. He slept with her the second time he saw her—the first time he saw her alone, really, because he had first met her at a party. He had dismissed his life story by saying that his father was overbearing and that he had too often given in, so that it was only recently that he was getting his life together. She whispered when she talked about her life. There was something very seductive about that, and at the same time consoling, as if he were being told a fairy tale. The next night, when she was also whispering to him in bed, he teased her about it, and she said that she was whispering because she didn’t want to wake Will. He pointed out that the thunderstorm earlier that evening hadn’t awakened Will. “You’re right,” she said. “I guess I’m whispering about things Will and I have lived through because I like to think he doesn’t know about them.”

She still whispered at night, but now she whispered because of shared intimacies, or because the two of them were planning strategies or conferring about Will’s upbringing. Upbringing—what an antiquated way to think about someone’s childhood: as if the two of them were slowly and competently stretching Will like taffy, when in reality it was all either of them could do to keep up with his energy, his questions, and his desires.

He was thinking about Will in Will’s calmer moments—usually when he was tired, at bedtime. He gave his mother a hard time about going to sleep, but when Mel was there he never minded going to bed. Halloween night, Will had wanted both of them to tell him stories, though. He had wanted to cling, even though they had said nothing about the accident, made no mention of danger. Like all smart children, he had sensed their disquiet. He had let it be known that he thought
Where the Wild Things Are
was a story for babies. Mel sat at the foot of the bed, chin resting in his cupped hand, while Jody read Will a poem by Auden.

Who was Icarus? Will had wanted to know.

A mythological creature (her soft voice). A boy who tried to fly, but his wings came too close to the sun (matter-of-fact; no preaching to the child), so the wax that had been used to attach the wings to his body melted, and he fell to earth (Mel, hoping to make this less ominous, had whistled on the intake and made a little downward spiral with his index finger).

When they left his bedroom that night, Jody had whispered to him, “It’s so easy to answer questions when all you have to do is recite information.”

Will had looked at his mother so calmly. If the explanation of Icarus’s plight and Mel’s finger whirling through the air hadn’t pleased him, her voice certainly had. Mel knew what it was like to have that voice settle calmly in his own heart: It was the antidote to the sharp sounds of the city, the smooth assurance that she had infiltrated his body to echo even when she was not present.

What he wished, walking along the street in New York, was that it would become clear to her that she should marry him. But since that did not seem likely, he had decided on a strategy—something that would be done at his expense, but perhaps not at so great an expense. Something that might even be like a game that could be well played. As he watched the sidewalk to make sure he did not step on any cracks, he continued to consider carefully Haverford’s offer. It was well known in the business that the mercurial Haverford usually got his way. He had already offered Mel a significantly larger amount of money than he was making at his friend’s gallery, but Mel thought that money alone should not be the deciding factor. Haverford also knew Mel was thinking that. If another price could be struck, however—if, to be specific, Haverford might take an interest in giving Jody a show—that might be the incentive Mel needed to join up with him.

In addition to the enlargements Jody asked Mel to get from the photo lab, he had had four shots blown up to sixteen by twenty and had paid for a rush job. He now carried those photographs in a portfolio he had bought earlier that day at Charrette. People passing him would have thought him an artist, if they paused to look. A thought suddenly went through his head: that the Queen of England always carried a change purse, even though there was nothing in it.

If he could get Jody a show, her self-confidence would soar. And if the Halloween photographs wouldn’t do it, nothing would.

Stepping carefully, he turned the portfolio vertically to hold it like a shield against his chest as he went through the revolving door.

Haverford was there, on a barstool. Tiny bubbles floated up in Haverford’s champagne flute. Haverford smiled, and Mel smiled back. That was it: two people who believed they knew each other so perfectly—who thought they could predict things about the other so well—that they didn’t even need to shake hands.

SEVEN

O
n an unusually warm April day, Jody took the bus from the airport to Grand Central, got on the subway, exited at Twenty-third Street, walked crosstown to Ninth Avenue, and continued to Mel’s street. Will was spending the weekend with the Vickerses. Jody was supposed to meet the man Mel was considering going to work for—a man whose last name made him sound like a character in a Henry Fielding novel, a name she could not remember, no matter how hard she tried. One of those men named Lord So-and-So, who would wear what they called drawers, and whose days would always be characterized by high propriety.

She smiled to herself. Whenever she imagined people in excessive detail it made Mel nervous, as if she were really hallucinating and bound to bring trouble on herself. But the joking protected her; otherwise, a gallery owner whose name, she’d been told, was often mentioned in the society pages might be a formidable and intimidating figure.

Mel lived across the street from General Theological Seminary, behind which stretched a long courtyard with grass so green it shocked you into remembering the country. Mel had befriended one of the seminarians and had in his possession a key that would open the big iron gate if you reached through the bars, inserted the key into the lock on the other side, and turned it counterclockwise. Some dexterity was needed for this, and some nerve—though the few times someone had spotted her and Mel sneaking in, the person had not batted an eye. Perhaps the seminarians thought there was nothing wrong with finding a way into the courtyard, which might be analogous, to them, to finding a way into heaven. The key could not be duplicated, though, and Mel had the key, so she would have to wait for Mel in his apartment. Also, SoHo Wine was delivering a case of chardonnay for dinner that night, and a woman named Angela, who had run away from Oklahoma to become a Rolfer and had a catering business on the side, was coming over around five to drop off the dinner Mel would serve that night. Jody had met Angela before, at a party she and Mel attended, when she went to get a drink of water in the kitchen. Angela had told her that she had lost her mother when she was a child and had grown up on a ranch in a family of four brothers who treated her like one of the horses. Jody did not ask exactly what this meant. By the time she left the kitchen, she had Angela’s card, and Angela’s boyfriend’s card. Jody could either get Rolfed or get legal advice. Angela had her own staff, which included the dishwasher, who was a teacher of the Alexander Technique and with whom she was two-timing her lawyer boyfriend, and a fleet of people who served the food, among them a dwarf who worked nights when he was between movie-stuntman jobs. He went around tapping people’s knees to see if they needed their wineglasses filled. Jody had wished that Will was with her. Why read fairy tales to your child when you can take him to a party in New York? If he understood that Rolfing and the Alexander Technique were similar to spanking in slow motion and to being made to stand in the corner, he might not have liked that, but he would have liked the dwarf in his blue cap, carrying a bottle of red wine in one hand and a bottle of white in the other. The dwarf was doing just what Will was not supposed to do: carry two drinks at once.

What did Mel think about Jody’s being in his apartment while he was at work? Apparently, it was fine with him. She’d already seen the secrets (such as they were) in the medicine cabinet. Everything else had been put on display to show her how tempting life in New York could be, so she would move in with him. Did she like his crystal champagne flutes, hung upside down under the kitchen cabinet as if they were ordinary wineglasses, which could be hers if she married him? What about the stereo (they could compromise on the volume), the mattress (they could get one larger), the bath towels (if she didn’t like brown, they could buy them in every color of the rainbow).

As she came to the end of the row of brownstones, she saw the man who lived in the garden apartment sitting on the front steps, watching his dog play with a bone on the little patch of cement inside the front gate. Daryl was a good-looking man in his late fifties who had retired from NBC, where he had worked as a cameraman, to devote his time to his great love: the acquisition and repair of jukeboxes. The garden behind the brownstone prospered because it was cared for by his sister, who came from her apartment in Hoboken two or three times a week to plant and prune. His sister was responsible for ending—or almost ending—the springtime ant problem in Mel’s apartment. The ants had climbed the twisting wisteria boughs and come through the screens until Estelle ingeniously designed an upside-down funnel that fit around the base of the vine and sprayed it with chemicals to repel ants. “All he has to do is remember to douse it every couple of days, but I know he slips up,” Estelle had said to Jody when she last visited. “All his life he’s put his cereal bowl in the sink ‘to soak,’ which means that he was too lazy to wash it. All men are the same about their cereal bowls—as if they’d be washing a part of themselves down the drain if they cleaned them. Cereal bowls are sitting in sinks all over America, filled to the brim with water.” Naturally, Jody was crazy about Estelle. She loved to be invited to walk in the garden behind the apartment to see the little plants and flowers. From the fourth floor, most of the flowers were only a pastel haze.

“She’s not here today,” Daryl said. “I thought I’d take the opportunity to sit out front. She gets insulted if I want to see some city life instead of flowers.” He picked up the blue leash the dog trailed behind it. She smiled down at the little dog, whining happily to see her at the front gate. Will had been asking for a dog. She suspected that Will and Mel were in collusion.

“The tulips are up,” Daryl said. “The ones with the green centers.”

“Parrot tulips,” she said.

Daryl gave her the look a parent gives a child who has said a dirty word the parent would like to disappear from the child’s vocabulary: a glazed-over look, with the trace of a prim smile.

The dog ran up the steps behind her and stood panting at the front door. Daryl got up and brought the dog down the stairs again. She put her key in the door and pushed it open—it always stuck on the ugly carpeting—then closed it behind her. The half-table in the hallway had a vase of dried flowers on it, and the gray rug had been recently vacuumed. This was because the second-floor apartment was empty. The landlord always put out flowers and hung a painting in the stairwell when an apartment was empty. When it was filled again, the painting would disappear and the flowers would be left to crumble into confetti on the tabletop.

Climbing the stairs, Jody thought about the peculiarity of walking into someone else’s life. Now the dog downstairs knew her. Just like that, she was greeted by the small things that surrounded Mel’s life. You never merely took on another person, you drew all the things surrounding that person to you like a magnet—the postman’s nod, the gas station attendant smiling through the windshield at both of you, the waiter who asks, “How are you?” and looks to both faces, the colleague’s wife who asks you to lunch. Before you knew it, there would be a drinking glass that was your favorite; the lipstick you left behind would be put in a dish on the back of the toilet. He’d hide your toothbrush so you’d go home and have to buy another, and then there the toothbrush would be, in the holder, the next time you went back. You’d know that you were in deep when your things began to proliferate in the apartment: things he bought for you, to be
yours
, if you did not leave enough behind. When he stopped taking his blue shirt to the dry cleaner and started tossing it in the wash because it had become your favorite nightgown. When he bought you a plant instead of cut flowers so you would call to make sure it had been watered. When cotton pullovers became unisex and got jumbled together. When pictures of the two of you were put on the refrigerator. When other women called and he didn’t close the door or lower his voice and, when he hung up, acted as if your conversation hadn’t been interrupted.

That was the thing about taking photographs. About taking wedding photographs, at least: that the people you were seeing wanted so sincerely to belong. It was desperation rather than vanity that made them look soulfully into the camera, because the camera had the power to stop time and to verify that they were part of a tradition. That was why brides wore their grandmothers’ wedding dress (a little too tight in the waist, and the shoes were
always
too small; few brides could walk down the aisle in their grandmother’s size-five shoes). It was a celebration that all generations were invited to witness, and sometimes the dog as well. The bride was always asking an implicit question: Don’t you remember this? Even if you don’t understand my life now or know me very well, doesn’t this ceremony constitute a link between us? Isn’t this your engagement ring I’m wearing? Haven’t I styled my hair with the waves that swept my mother’s cheeks at her wedding? Isn’t this the wedding cake we’ve always eaten, even though we’ve never had dessert together? The figurines at the top are generic. The bubbles in expensive champagne don’t vary in size. I’m in love. Don’t you remember being in love?