Love junkie, p.6
Love Junkie, page 6
“Weren’t they!” I agreed.
—and the girl with the rich sugar daddy had certainly seen better days.
“But that music!” he cried, rolling down his window and sucking in deep breaths of air. “That’s the music I want to be listening to when I die!”
“Oh, me too, me too.”
Around Macy’s we stopped for a red light. I heard Tom laugh a secret little laugh and looked over at him. He was sprawled out on the seat in a most uncharacteristic way, the very picture of relaxation. “Tell me something, Mimi,” he said. “Have you ever been in love?”
My heart began to pound. “Yes,” I said, with a simple dignity. “I’ve been in love … twice.”
“Oh?”
“The first time was with Socrates.”
“I don’t mean intellectually.”
“No, no, this was a different Socrates. This one ran a charm school over on Military Drive. How he ended up in Lubbock, Texas, in 1950 I can’t imagine, but there he was. He had curly, curly hair and the biggest brown eyes. And he was so wonderful to me. Sometimes, in the summer after supper when it was still light out, he would teach me tap dancing in the driveway or take me over to the Dairy Queen, or we would catch fireflies and put them in—”
“How about the second time?”
I looked at him. Our eyes met. I took a breath. “The second time may be now.”
“Oh?” he said. “Are you seeing someone?”
By the time I turned off of Seventh Avenue onto his street I was desperate to continue this new atmosphere of late-night confidences. Tom was like a different person, so comfortable to be with, so open, so willing to discuss his emotions for a change. “Mimi, Mimi, Mimi,” he said as I pulled up in front of his building, where, omen of omens, an empty parking space waited. “You are the most incredible woman. You know that?”
I blushed.
“Nobody knows where this street is. Cab drivers have to ask me. And you find it on the very first try.”
I paused, but just for the slightest second. “What can I say? I’m a woman of many talents.”
“Yeah—now if we can just teach you to dress …”
We both laughed, and then there was a silence. “Well,” Tom said. “I guess this is it.” His right arm reached for the door.
I grabbed his left arm, and he froze. Like a statue. “Tom,” I said softly.
“What?”
The panic in his voice should have warned me, but I had already started. The momentum carried me along. I leaned over till my face was next to his. I had been aiming for his mouth and would have hit it if he had not recoiled slightly and deflected my assault to his cheek. My lips touched it, and it was so rigid it was quivering.
“Thanks again,” he said and bolted from the car. The slam of the door reverberated in my ears as he sprinted toward his building.
He did not look back to wave.
CHAPTER SIX
I know what you’re thinking: What’s wrong with this woman? Doesn’t she possess a working set of eyeballs?
Of course I’d known homosexuals before. Who hasn’t? There was Mr. Kliedel, the music teacher back at Lubbock High. The kids called him “a fairy nice man,” a remark I didn’t even understand until tenth grade. To me he always seemed so nice and witty and well-dressed. I never took any of his classes, though, since I had absolutely no musical ability whatsoever. Then there was poor Donald Himmelman, who always had the lead in the school plays. Watching him in The Crucible was like watching a runway model at Chanel. And in Tehran I was on quite friendly terms with two wonderful old English gentlemen named Nigel and Maurice who dealt in rugs and had the most exquisite house in the older part of town. I used to go there for tea with my friend Judy from the Canadian embassy. When they were both in their sixties they adopted a baby!
But let’s face it: nine and a half years in Iran takes its toll. You’re out of the mainstream. All those social movements like women’s lib and crusading for the environment are something you read about in Time magazine. And I let my fashion sense deteriorate, I admit it—too many sweater sets. Moving back to the States was a tremendous cultural shock. One day Boyce and I went to buy a TV. After ten minutes we discovered that we had been examining a microwave oven.
It was not the same society we had left so many years before, that much was sure. I was delighted to find vast improvement in certain areas, such as civil rights. Negroes were commonplace in all the better shops; nobody so much as looked at them. Even more amazing was the fact that you could wear sports outfits anywhere.
But I plead guilty when it comes to being obtuse. The hints were everywhere, and I didn’t see a single one. I finally had to be hit over the head with a club …
_______
Valentine’s Day fell on a Wednesday that year. I remember because that was the morning Lavinia walked into the office and announced in that cheerful way she had that the doctor had just discovered a lump in her breast and that she was undergoing surgery the very next day but that we shan’t worry as she would take work to the hospital with her.
I was terribly excited. This was just the opportunity I needed to get back in Tom’s good graces. Because ever since that night at the opera he had dropped me like a matchbook that had burst into flame. Oh, he was polite and all that. We’d talk when he passed my desk. We’d gossip about the clients. Arts administrators tend to have drinking problems and get fired a lot, and Miriam Moreland’s son was arrested for murder up in Buffalo, so there was never a dull moment. But those private chats in his office were a thing of the past. Now he made sure we were never alone together.
That morning, the first chance I got I slipped into his office. He eyed me warily from behind his desk. He was talking to his insurance company, something about a camera and a wristwatch that had been stolen from his apartment.
“What are we going to do?” I asked when he was finally put on hold.
“About what?”
“About Lavinia.” I had all sorts of ideas. At the top of the list was to ship her back to England. Let her mother take care of her. The last thing we needed was a chemo patient on our hands.
“Who cares?”
“But Tom—this could be serious. You know what terrible gynecological problems she’s had.”
“Yeah. She has more periods than a Hemingway novel.”
“But Tom … cancer.”
“She’s got a wart on her titty. Big deal.”
As it turned out, Tom’s diagnosis was entirely correct. The lump wasn’t the slightest bit malignant. It was officially referred to as “an accumulation of pus.” Nevertheless, I decided to visit her in the hospital on my way home from work. They were keeping her overnight because she’d broken out in hives from the anesthetic.
Actually, I rather like to visit people in the hospital. They’re always so grateful, and you don’t have to stay long if you remember to prepare an excuse. Unfortunately, Lavinia was over at Roosevelt Hospital, that particularly dreary place where John Lennon died. Ethel Merman used to do volunteer work there, and in the lobby they display her bust. Lavinia was up on the eighth floor in what looked suspiciously like a public ward. Though conscious, she was not at all well. Red blotches covered her skin, and her face was so puffy that I shuddered to think how her piano legs must be taking it. The sheets were covered with what I was certain were little flecks of vomit.
“Lavinia, dear,” I said, nixing plans for a sisterly kiss. “How are you feeling?”
“Rather odd, actually,” she said, shifting her weight with a grimace. We both then expressed our relief at the results of what I, in my fluster, referred to as “the autopsy.” To tell the truth, it took all the concentration I had not to stare at her chest, which was encased in a yellow flannel nightie with navy piping and a tiny repeating pattern of what turned out to be pineapples. “Where’s Tom?” she asked in a raspy, drugged voice. “Isn’t he coming?”
“Of course he’s coming,” I said, though I doubted it very much. He had spent the afternoon laughing wickedly at a photograph of Lavinia with a big black X drawn over her left breast.
“Do you think he’ll mind if I don’t come in till Thursday?”
“Not a bit, dear.”
Though heavily sedated, Lavinia could not seem to shut up. She shared several spiritual insights brought on by her crisis, and then described how a committee from the ashram had visited earlier: they had gathered around her bed and chanted; then one girl began singing Joni Mitchell songs until requested to stop by several of the other patients, an orderly, and finally the head nurse. Joya herself had sent a special gift, which Lavinia proudly pulled out from under the covers, where she had been clutching it in her fist. “It’s a pebble from a sacred river in India,” she declared. Sure it is, I thought. The ashram had also brought along several get-well cards and an arrangement of spider mums, which sat on the nightstand along with a tongue depressor and a stuffed koala.
All I could think was “God, I hope my life never ends up like this. Shoot me if it does—please!” Just look—a whole ward full of indigent, unloved women, so battered by life they are physically ill. The one next to Lavinia looked particularly unloved; she was a fat old thing with greasy hair and mustache, and she was lying on top of her covers like she had just plopped down for a quick nap. Thank God I was on the Union Carbide health plan. It’s fabulous. I may not have the greatest marriage in the world, but I do have the greatest health plan, and at times like this I realize how important that sort of thing really is.
“Good heavens!” Lavinia was exclaiming.
I turned around. All did. There, standing in the doorway, was a man whom I recognized instantly. It was the man in the photograph I had found in Tom’s drawer—the incredibly handsome man who looked like the perfume ad. Today he was dressed in a dark-gray business suit and carrying a bouquet. It was the same bouquet I had seen down at the subway station, marked down to $2.98.
“Flowers for the sick girl!” he called out, and I nearly died. It was Floyd! I recognized his voice from the telephone. They were one and the same person. You could have knocked me down with a feather. I watched speechless as he marched over and presented Lavinia with the bouquet. She took it in her arms and cradled it like the Pietà.
“Oh, the thirsties,” she cooed. “We must find a vahze.”
“I’ll get something,” I volunteered. “By the way, I’m Mimi.”
“You’re Mimi?” Floyd screamed. “The famous Mimi?” Somehow we fell into each other’s arms.
“We meet at last,” I said.
“Tom’s always talking about you.”
I rolled my eyes.
“No, he is.”
“We must find a vahze,” Lavinia repeated, a little louder this time.
_______
Floyd and I rode down in the elevator together. When you got a good look at him he was still quite handsome, but you started to notice the flaws. For instance, I’m pretty sure he shaved his nose. Not the nose hairs but the actual surface of the nose itself: it had just the tiniest stubble on it. He probably did it every three days or so. And those warts on his fingers. They can be so distracting; I can’t imagine why wart sufferers don’t have them surgically removed. And in the harsh fluorescent light of an Otis elevator, his beautiful dark, wavy hair didn’t look quite as thick as it appeared in photographs. In fact, Tom told me later that Floyd had developed a technique for applying shoe polish to his scalp so that the hair looked fuller. Apparently it worked very well. You might suspect a man of wearing toupees or hairpieces, but shoe polish?
“Such silliness,” Floyd was saying. He had quite a pronounced sibilant s. “Why can’t he come visit her? He’s so thoughtless. So selfish.”
“She is here for only one night,” I pointed out.
“He has no manners,” Floyd continued. “He never thinks about the other person. It’s just him, him, him. Just look at the way he treats you.”
I felt my ears turning red. Tom treated me just fine, thank you. Not at all like he treated Lavinia. There was a world of difference.
“Any dinner plans?”
I was so startled by this question that I didn’t know quite what to say.
“Oh, come on. We’re just going to order in Chinese and watch the Callas special on Channel Thirteen.”
We?
Floyd found a cab that sped us through Central Park in the gathering dusk. I was so nervous that the whole trip was a blur. Please, dear God, make Tom glad to see me. Please, please. “Hee hee hee,” Floyd said as we rode up in the elevator. He lived in one of those freakishly tall modern buildings on Madison Avenue. “Won’t he be surprised?”
He certainly was. We caught him lying on the couch in his underpants, watching Family Feud and eating a Twinkie. “Jesus Christ!” he said in greeting and fled down a hallway. I had never seen his thighs before and was startled at how pale they were, at least from the rear.
“Wait here,” Floyd said and ran after him.
I stood in the middle of the living room for what seemed like a very long time. It was very B. Altman, and not the more expensive floors. When are people going to learn that if they want the English country look, you have to be prepared to spend! The Chesterfield couch looked too shiny and new; the hunting prints were too brightly colored and framed with mauve matting instead of the more classic white or black. And that wingback chair in a green wool plaid—it was flirting dangerously with the Early American.
Even though we were on the thirty-ninth floor, the view was consumed by a more or less identical building about thirty feet away. The woman on the same floor as Floyd was watching Family Feud, too. She had bright-red hair.
What should I do? I tiptoed toward the hall and strained to hear voices.
“Good answer, good answer!” cheered the contestants. They were a family in which all the men were firefighters.
Somewhere in the back a door slammed—real loud. I dashed back to the living room. Great, just great, I thought, wringing my hands.
A full minute of commercials passed like an eternity. Then, just as the bonus round was beginning, the boys emerged. Tom had put on a happi coat but not a happy face.
“I’m leaving, I’m leaving,” I said.
“No, don’t leave,” Tom said.
“I don’t want to cause any inconvenience.”
“It’s not inconvenient.”
We went on like this for a while till Tom ordered me to “put a cork in it” and sit down. I got the feeling that he had just made some sort of for-better-or-for-worse decision. Thank God for television in a situation like this. It allowed us all to calm down—the vodka helped, too—while providing the illusion of normal social intercourse. Tom sprawled out on the couch and after a few minutes was relaxed enough to put his feet up on the coffee table, a flimsy brass-and-glass thing. Floyd demanded he take them down, and there was a minor quarrel—a continuation, it seemed, of an ongoing dispute over the matter. I sat perched on the edge of the green plaid chair. I was facing the TV but quickly developed the peripheral vision of a walleyed pike.
A basketball game came on. Tom gave an exclamation of disgust and began flipping through the channels. Julia Child suddenly appeared, her right fist stuck in the cavity of a duck. “Floyd!” Tom called out, as Floyd was in the kitchen freshening the drinks. “Hurry.”
“We love her,” Tom explained, and indeed, rarely have I seen a cooking show watched with such riveted concentration. Every detail of Julia Child’s performance was analyzed, and there was lengthy discussion as to whether her hairstyle had been slightly altered. Oddly, the boys did not seem all that interested in the food itself, although the flourish with which she trussed the fowl before sticking it in the oven drew “Brava!”s from them both.
By the time our dinner arrived—delivered by a young Chinese lad who I got the feeling had been there many times before (grinning politely, he refused to enter the apartment and handed the food over the threshold)—I was starting to relax and enjoy myself. Tom was certainly back to being his same old caustic self. I was laughing uproariously at his remarks, even if I didn’t quite get many of them. Floyd was definitely a runner-up in the humor department, but I made a point of a polite titter each time he attempted a bon mot, which is more than I can say for Tom.
I insisted on helping Floyd prepare the coffee table for dinner and in the process managed to get a firsthand look at his accoutrements for entertaining. These were located in what had formerly been the hall coat closet. He had had it totally redesigned at great expense with special shelves and drawers. I thought I had a rather extensive range of odd serving ware, but his collection put my own puny utensils completely “in the shade.” He had everything. He had special plates just for corn on the cob. He had toast caddies galore. He had mango forks. He had sets and sets of liqueur glasses and three different ice buckets. He had coasters that matched the cocktail glasses. The ones we were using right now had a nautical signal-flag motif that I found rather nerve-racking. The flags all meant things like “You are standing into danger” or “Taking on explosives.” Particularly noteworthy were the napkin rings, for which he confessed a special weakness. “I got these bamboo ones in Saint Thomas. Aren’t they stunning? And look at these—that’s real crystal, not Lucite. Feel the weight. And of course for more formal affairs I have these sterling silver ones. And these—they’re vermeil.”
“My,” I said. “You must do a lot of entertaining.”
“Not anymore,” he said, and cast a glance toward the living room. “Not since she started getting her hot flashes.”
As we dined on our moo goo gai pan, we watched a tour of the aircraft carrier USS Eisenhower conducted by Lesley Stahl of CBS News and a handsome young ensign who proudly announced that he was from Brooklyn, New York. After he appeared Tom’s and Floyd’s eyes never left the screen. Lobster sauce dripped down their chins unattended. Hands fumbled blindly for drinks.
“Fortune cookie, anyone?” I asked.
