What Was Mine: & Other Stories (16 page)

Francine and Melly (Melly was Bryant’s wife) had met through an ad posted on the bulletin board at the building in Brooklyn where Melly studied dance and Francine went to acting classes. Melly had a car in the city—an unimaginable thing!—and wanted to transport people to Brooklyn, partly for the extra cash and partly because she was afraid to drive alone at night. In the year they had been shuttling back and forth, the two women had grown as close as sisters.

During dinner it came out that Francine had grown up in the Midwest. She had gone to college on a scholarship. When Bryant joked about her ruthless ambition, she had asked whether pairing that adjective with the word “ambition” wasn’t a rather embarrassing reflex some men had. From the kitchen, Melly hollered out that with Francine’s talent, it was a good thing she took herself seriously.

Melly and Bryant lived in a basement apartment in the Village, and even though it was April, it stayed damp and cool. A portable heater was plugged in and sat angled out from the corner, blowing a stream of warm air over them as they sat in butterfly chairs covered with black canvas. It was before people began to get rid of their graduate school furniture, though by then the framed Peter Max posters were usually leaned against a closet wall, or steam-puckered from having been hung in the bathroom.

He could remember talk about dancers’ foot injuries—asking how the tape was used, whether permanent damage couldn’t be done by dancing in spite of pain. Some analogy was made by either Francine or Melly between binding one’s feet to dance and acting a painful scene that pertained to your own life. With more wine came more wild comparisons. Silly toasts were made by one person to some other person’s poorly paraphrased ideas. The conversation alternated, as so many conversations seemed to, outside the workplace, between lofty idealism and a mockery of that idealism that was meant to sound very pragmatic, very of-the-world and of-the-moment. The half-gallon bottles of Gallo Hearty Burgundy from grad school parties had disappeared, replaced by bottles of muscadet or cabernet. At some point between dinner and dessert a bottle of California champagne materialized in a silver champagne bucket. Melly shook her head, blushing and saying it was a wedding present she had
tried
to return, but it had been given to them without a box. When Francine’s best friend had been married, Francine said, she and her husband had returned all their wedding presents and, with the cash, bought toys for the children of their friends and relatives. They all shook their heads about hippie foolishness. A long story was told by Melly about twin girls who had lived next door to her parents in San Francisco, who were having an LSD party the night their parents came back early, unexpectedly, from Lourdes, carrying in their still-dying brother. Bryant brought the conversation back to earth by saying that as a child he had been hospitalized with meningitis, and that anyone forced to take Percodan at age five and hallucinate night and day would sooner sign up for the Army than ingest a psychedelic drug. Melly raised an eyebrow, and asked why he hadn’t served in the Army. “Because of my homosexuality,” he said. “That and not bathing or sleeping for three days before the physical.”

It was decided that because Francine’s brother was borrowing Melly’s car the next morning, it would be easiest for Francine to drive Stefan home and keep the car. Since moving to New York from Massachusetts, Stefan had not been in a private car, and sitting in the passenger’s seat, he felt almost loving about it. He leaned back and closed his eyes.

“I’m pretty drunk, too,” Francine said.

He opened his eyes, startled more that she had seen him in an inexplicable near-reverie than by what she had said. He offered to drive. She hesitated only a moment before agreeing, but asked him not to tell Melly she had turned over the keys.

“You don’t think Melly would trust me to drive?”

“It’s not that,” she said. “It’s that Melly thinks I’m so competent.”

“I don’t think they were trying to get us to function at our very best by serving three bottles of wine and champagne,” he said.

“She was trying to make it festive, so you’d like me.”

“What?” he said. He had not turned on the ignition. They were in an outdoor parking lot, around the corner from Melly and Bryant’s apartment. She had opened the padlocked gate with a key; the gate was swung back, so the car could exit. Barbed wire coiled around the top of the ten-foot fence. He thought of all the barbed wire he had seen in war movies—except for war movies, and in cities, he had never seen barbed wire—and then he thought that he, too, had lied his way out of the war, though no one had asked, and that at this very moment there was something ironic about two well-dressed, up-and-coming young people sitting in a parking lot in New York City, looking as if they’d been captured as prisoners of war.

“I don’t have a boyfriend,” Francine said. “There was somebody in acting class, for a while, but he was interested in somebody else. Somebody who lived in L.A. Not long after I met him, he went to L.A., saying he might come back a married man, but he came back alone. I thought: Oh, now it can work out between the two of us. At the end of that week I was paired with him in a scene. It was
Rosencrantz and Guildenstem Are Dead
. I was Rosencrantz. We stood on the teacher’s sweatshirt, which was the boat, and as we talked, his eyes moved one way and mine moved another. I could feel him really, truly drifting away from me. His voice went dead. Everything I said, by comparison, seemed chatty. He was stealing the scene by being absolutely monotonal. People were riveted. His eyes really were on the horizon. He was really seeing something. He just happened to be remembering his lines while he looked at whatever it was. After class some of us went out for coffee, but he didn’t come along. He said to me, ‘I guess I just found out I don’t love you, either.’ He never came back to acting class. He made it to Off Broadway, but he never came back to that acting class.”

As she spoke, a man wearing a torn jacket and carrying a bottle wandered into the parking area. For a few moments he seemed shaky on his feet, and confused. Then he squinted at them in the car and took a few steps toward them. He stopped. He bent and made a sweeping motion with his arm. Then he straightened up and took a drink from the bottle, turned, and walked almost soberly out of the fenced-off parking area. He stood beside the door and waited while Stefan started the ignition, put the car in gear, and rolled out the gate. “It’s okay; he’s just a harmless drunk,” he said. Intent on not making eye contact with the drunk, he got out quickly, swung the gate closed, and padlocked it, keeping his head averted.

“You’re a lucky man,” the drunk said. His words came out clearly. So clearly that Stefan looked at him, surprised.

The drunk shrugged. “Nothing more I can tell you,” he said. Then he walked away, his head held a little too archly to convey the impression that he was really strutting off elegantly, yet still managing a convincing imitation of a sober man.

Stefan stood there, certain that the man would turn around. He would want money, or he would need, suddenly, to insult him. He might have a knife, and threaten him. He would certainly do something.

He did not. Instead, he turned the corner and disappeared. Stefan’s sudden calm wasn’t because of the man’s disappearance, though; it was because while he was focused on one problem, another problem had come into his mind and had been instantly solved.

When he got back in the car, he would simply kiss her. That was the most appropriate response to her story.

Late in the afternoon, in February, the phone rings. Francine is at a public phone, murmuring quietly in case anyone passing by might overhear. She has gotten the promotion. Much sooner than she expected, she was called into the boss’s office and commended for the presentations she had made that month. She had been responsible for nabbing one particularly lucrative new client. No doubt about it; the new client said point-blank that he had chosen them because of Francine’s powers of persuasion. She does a British accent when she whispers “pahs of p’suasion.” She giggles, and he hears a
tap-tap-tap
. Though she spends much of the day working on a computer, her Mont Blanc fountain pen is her good luck charm. She thinks with it in her hand, taps it when she is considering a new idea.

A double entendre? he wonders. Surely she also realizes that the phrase “powers of persuasion” has a sexual ring. But the tittering is all little-girl giggling. Her voice gets even quieter. “This is something I didn’t tell you,” she says. “They’ve given me a ten-thousand-dollar raise—well, a five-thousand-dollar bonus and a five-thousand-dollar raise, but if I stay on course, they’ll do the same next year. Stefan, I didn’t tell you that if I’d had to take the other job, it would have involved travel. Now I can stay right where I am and be well rewarded for doing it. Isn’t it the best luck? Sweetheart, aren’t you happy?”

“I’m very happy,” he says, more relieved than happy. She was going to travel? What would that have meant?

“What about getting a sitter so we can go out tonight to some expensive restaurant? I’ll buy us Dom Pérignon.”

Tap-tap-tap
.

He has a thought. “What about doing something that’s fun?” he says. “You don’t want to sit around some restaurant for hours all dressed up, do you? I mean, if that’s what you want,
I
would certainly like to host the celebration. But I thought maybe the two of us could do something else …”

No more tapping of the pen.

“What did you have in mind?” she says cautiously.

“Nothing in particular, but let me think a minute. Let’s see if we can’t come up with something that might be amusing. Something a little more like childish good fun.”

“I suppose you’re going to say you want to go bowling,” she says.

“Jesus!” he says. “That’s perfect. Not bowling, of course, but what about going ice-skating? First we could have a bottle of Dom Pérignon, and then we could go ice-skating.”

“You’re putting me on.”

“Why not?” he says. “We’re always saying we don’t want to get stuck in roles. What do you say we go to that weird new bar that’s all glass and neon—the one we passed by this weekend, that you said looked super-hip. We’ll go there first and put down a bottle of champagne.”

“You want to go ice-skating?”

“I can lace your skates and look up your skirt,” he says.

She laughs. An I-don’t-care-if-I’m-overheard laugh. “Seriously?” she whispers.

“It wasn’t exactly back in the Stone Age when we used to have fun,” he says. “The softball team at your brother’s place in the Hamptons was only the summer before last. You were a fierce first baseman. You can skate, can’t you?”

More giggling. “We’ll see who can outskate whom,” she says.

“Yeah, well, after you’ve put away half a bottle of champagne, then we’ll see if your pronouns are so exact.”

“What’s gotten into you?” she says.

“I’m happy for you. I agree: we should celebrate. I’ll get a sitter and we can go out and skate until the place closes down.”

He hangs up and flips through a notepad on the counter. Then the thought comes to him that perhaps Julie could spend the night at Cassie’s house, where he dropped her off to play after school. Cassie’s mother was nice enough. What problem could it be to add one six-year-old girl to a house of four children for one night’s sleepover?

He calls, and Gennine says that of course Julie can stay. He has to promise that if she wants to come home in the middle of the night, though, he will drive there to pick her up. She absolutely refuses to drive children home in the middle of the night.

He speaks to Julie, who is delighted with the plan. She is out of breath, in a hurry to get back to whatever she was doing.

Gennine takes the phone back. She asks what time he will be by in the morning, or whether she should drive both girls to school. He says he will be happy to round them up and drive them; he’ll come at ten after eight.

“If my husband ever extended himself in the least with our children, I think I’d faint,” she says good-naturedly. “I’ll be happy to take you up on your offer. If you don’t mind, I’ll have all of them pile into your car tomorrow.”

“No boys!” Cassie shrieks in the background. “They have to take the bus to school, Mommy.”

“She’s as mean to her brothers as they are to her.” Gennine sighs. “How I envy you for having only one child. How we all envy you for the way you’ve worked things out.”

It surprises him that anyone has given thought to his and Francine’s division of responsibility. When he first met Gennine, he was amused because she was something of a flirt, but what she has just said makes him revise his opinion. Perhaps it wasn’t that, but an openness in expressing her admiration for them, conveyed in constant smiles rather than by words.

He tells himself silently, as he often does, that what makes Francine happy makes him happy. Because that is certainly the way it
should
be, and if he doesn’t let envy or misgivings creep in, if his own problems don’t get tangled up with hers, he can simply share in her happiness.

Feeling almost elated—though he has to fight the thought that his high spirits are because he’s sure he can outskate her, rather than because he’s happy she got the promotion—he puts on a jacket, starts the car, and backs out of the driveway, heading off toward the shopping center. He looks at the empty passenger’s seat and wonders if Julie’s absence is what is making him feel suddenly younger. He clicks a Ziggy Marley tape into the tape deck—something he bought on impulse a month or so before, remembering Bryant Heppelson’s love of reggae—and lets the music transport him back to New York, to a time when he really was much younger. He squints in the strong afternoon sunlight, imagining he is Bryant driving all those hours to Vermont to sing his heart out in a garage band. At a red light he closes his eyes and conjures up Vermont: the road winding above Bristol Falls, the Middlebury ski area; all that green, and blue skies. But just as quickly he realizes that he is picturing the few parts of Vermont he has seen; he doesn’t even know where in Vermont Bryant traveled to. In fact, he’s out of touch with Bryant, except for the annual Christmas card exchange. Bryant and his wife moved to Connecticut the year before. Too much crime and unhappiness in the city to raise children there, he wrote on the card. In the picture he enclosed, Melly looked much the same, though she was flanked by two towheaded boys, three and four. Who could say where that hair came from, with Bryant’s brown hair and Melly’s hair its natural auburn, instead of the pale blond she used to dye it. The photograph had fluttered out of the card and landed on the rug, face up, and Francine had snatched it up as if it were some secret, then looked at it, puzzled, and said: “Oh yes. Of course. Of course they had a second child …” Then she had put the picture to her lips and kissed it.