Since You Ask Page 12

  ‘No.’

  ‘Because you’re a girl?’

  ‘I don’t know. It could be part of it. Raymond can do anything he wants, say anything he wants, treat me any way he wants—and Dad will still defend him.’

  ‘But he doesn’t defend you?’

  ‘He’s paying for me to be in the hospital.’

  ‘So he cares.’

  I smile. ‘He cares.’

  ‘But not as much as he does for Raymond?’

  I shrug.

  ‘Where does that leave you?’

  ‘Talking to you.’

  I sit with the alcoholics, usually, at a long table in an alcove by the window. I am not an alcoholic, but I might as well be. I am not supposed to drink again. Robbie isn’t either and he is here for Xanax. After dinner, we go down to the porch at Rec. and play guitar. He plays ‘Angie’ and beads of sweat gather above his lip; his bright red polo shirt grows dark with sweat.

  My last year at Sarah Lawrence, Wayne got me my job at World Sight. He had been there for three years by then and was a director of overseas programs. He sent doctors into Africa, mostly to give cataract operations. I worked in fundraising for the sight unit in Kenya. Every Friday I took the train from Sarah Lawrence to Penn Station, walking up to 42nd Street and across to the river. I was applying to medical schools and Wayne helped me with my personal essay and the MCAT admissions test. We went over to the East River in the afternoons, Wayne sneaking one of his four daily cigarettes, and he asked me questions off my notecards.

  Other times, he asked me about Henry and Beck. ‘You were there,’ I told him. ‘You were there during Beck.’

  ‘That’s true.’

  ‘Do you remember that?’

  ‘I remember that you were upset.’

  ‘That wasn’t just Beck.’

  ‘Wasn’t it?’

  I told him about Frank then, though maybe I shouldn’t have. It was gray by the river, and his face turned gray also.

  ‘You think I’m awful,’ I said.

  ‘I don’t.’

  ‘You do.’

  ‘I don’t think he’s so great.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You could go out with anyone you wanted.’

  ‘No, I couldn’t.’

  ‘Of course you could.’

  ‘Frank stopped seeing me. So did Henry.’

  ‘Frank sounds like a weakling.’

  ‘A weakling?’ Frank was not a weakling.

  ‘And Henry was your choice.’

  ‘No, it wasn’t.’

  Wayne shook his head. ‘Does your mother know all this?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘She never mentioned it.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘She broke some hearts, too.’

  I laughed. ‘Did she? You’re not in love with her, are you?’

  ‘Everyone is in love with your mother.’

  ‘Because she’s beautiful?’

  ‘She is that.’

  My mother had only one affectation: an awareness of her own beauty a certain self-consciousness when being watched or photographed. Wayne reached out and put his hand on the back of my neck.

  ‘You’re not jealous of your mother, are you, Betsy?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You should be proud.’

  ‘I am.’

  ‘Of yourself, too.’

  I laughed.

  I was proud, in some ways. Or maybe I was vain. It was like that time, the first time with Frank, and he said I was beautiful like Christ was. I knew I wasn’t, of course. But I let him say it. There was something else, too, something as important as beauty something no one could define, no one could be sure of. In Antigua, I just had to look at Andrew and he knew how I felt. One minute I was walking out of school with Angie Edwards, our sandals kicking up dust, our hands filled with hot coins on our way to buy candy. The next, I saw Andrew leaning against a fence and everything changed. Everything went weak inside me. My yellow dress, yellow cotton dress of my school uniform, went hot like a body on a beach; I was full of heat and sun, heavy and soft and languid with it.

  After Frank, I thought I’d never be with anyone again. That would have been the best thing for me, I’m sure, at least for a while. It kind of amazed me that that wasn’t the case. Things kept happening, though. I said I didn’t want them to, but I must have, because they did.

  I met Curtis at a dance in Princeton, Henry right there in the room. I gave him my number and he drove out to see me the next afternoon. We went to his parents’ house on Long Island. They were in Florida and we lay beside the house, at night on the cool grass where he used his tongue on me.

  Adam liked movies. He took me to the Thalia and Film Forum. He wanted me to touch him in the train, and the theater, but I wouldn’t. Afterwards, he came up to my room and he was the gentlest, like water on a rock, so slow it felt like forever.

  Thomas could have been my greatest love: tall and slim and with the kindest eyes I had ever seen, so I felt like crying sometimes, just seeing his face. He loved to drink screwdrivers and send the ice back and forth between our mouths. He was from Cold Spring Harbor and he was seeing someone from there.

  Bad guys just groped you wherever they liked. Good guys put their hands on your hips, so delicately you felt sorry for them.

  After graduation, I moved to 46th Street, and Paul was the first person I ever took home. We met at the Coliseum Bookstore. He was an acting student, and also a fencer. He had his foil with him and jumped around my room with it, showing me how to joust. He took me to his parents’ house also, in Forest Hills.

  Richard was a researcher at World Sight. He was thirty and crazy about me, but only if it was ‘just lust,’ he said.

  Sometimes, after a bad experience, I called up Beck and he came over and said all his nice things about loving me forever. He didn’t, really. Even he must have known this. Sometimes I think he stayed in touch with me because I was still from the only rich parents he knew. We had never even gone to a movie together. We had never even had dinner.

  I got into medical schools in Boston and in Maryland. I didn’t get in in New York, though, and I didn’t want to leave. I liked my apartment and I liked World Sight.

  It was Wayne who suggested that I defer for a year.

  The day after Raymond came home, after the airport and dinner at Sardi’s, Wayne and I were at the river by the UN leaning against the bright railing.

  ‘So how did he seem?’

  ‘Quiet.’

  ‘He’s probably terrified.’

  ‘You think?’

  ‘Coming back here? I’d say so. What did you do after dinner?’

  ‘I went home.’

  ‘I’m surprised they let you.’

  ‘A friend came over.’

  ‘Oh, really?’ Wayne laughed. ‘Who was that?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘Oh, come on,’ he said. ‘You can tell me.’

  ‘Beck.’

  ‘Really?’ He raised his eyebrows. ‘Good for you.’

  ‘I guess.’

  After his first wife died, Wayne had years of girlfriends: doctors, nurses, teachers, bankers. I felt sorry for them sometimes, the way Wayne and my parents sat in the living room and discussed them, the way my mother always, in the end, outshone and outlasted them. When I was sixteen, Wayne married Ida, a German woman who lived in Belgium. She had a son who was four, named Marcus. My parents went over for the wedding. Ida was older than Wayne, my mother said, and ‘not a great beauty.’ She was the director of a hospital, though; they had a lot in common, and it ‘worked for them,’ my mother said—their long-distance marriage.

  Later, it occurred to me that Wayne’s marriage may have worked for my mother, but it didn’t work so well for Wayne—Ida in Belgium, Wayne in New York or Africa. He spent the last week of each month in Belgium. But he was unhappy there and unhappy in New York. He told me this in his office and by the river and at Le Balcon.

  Ray stepped into my life
as into an empty space. He was, as I said, completely changed, deferential, as if, in his long absence, his family had become unreal to him, mythical or ideal, and in this state I was his Sister, capital S, who would not forsake him. We went to Glide and to Shelby’s and to a local bar on Ninth Avenue. We went to my apartment, sitting at the kitchen table on the airshaft. Ray emptied out the pockets of his jacket: cigarettes and keys and tea-tree-oil toothpicks, crumpled bills and matchbooks. He pulled a translucent packet, plastic and taped, from his black combat boot. We played music and backgammon and it wasn’t the way it had been with Sylvia; we were older, and Raymond knew more than I, and one night he moved his shiny red checker across the white and green backgammon board and asked if I wanted to try something new.

  ‘New like what?’ I asked.

  The pupils of his eyes were black and fine as pins. His shirtsleeves were unbuttoned and I could see his pale wrists, veiny blue at the center. He took the cocaine into the kitchen and put a saucepan on the stove. He used baking soda and cooked up the coke until it turned, like sugar, hard and into rocks.

  ‘Sit down,’ he said, and kneeled before me.

  He held his lighter so the flame went deep inside the pipe, the rocks of cocaine glowing red as he inhaled and then he handed the pipe to me, watched as I held it to my lips.

  I went to Wayne’s office after work and he had his feet up on the desk, his head turned to look out the window. The sun was pale and pink on the gray river, the coffee table littered with coffee cups and bottled water and newspapers.

  ‘Are you all right?’ Wayne set down the phone.

  I could smell dirt and water and a fresh wind across the river.

  ‘I am.’

  He leaned toward me, into his desk. ‘You look sort of—waxy.’

  ‘Do I?’

  I couldn’t eat when I was with Ray. He called from pay phones and from his cell phone and from our parents’ house, and his voice was quiet, almost diffident, a voice I had never heard from him before, but that was steady close, that gave me relief and release into some kind of peace. He waited outside World Sight and we walked west to a cash machine and then further, across 41st Street to Eleventh Avenue and a yellow brick building that looked, always, as if the sun had just set on it, which perhaps it had—sheen fading on the far Hudson River. The super had a chair set up under a row of buzzers and wore a pale blue shirt, ‘Jesus’ written in red letters inside a white oval patch.

  Ray was so nervous; he stepped back and forth, back and forth, in his black jeans and boots, gripping his arms with his hands. If Frank were there, he would have swung up to that building in his massive car, with his white collar and leather blazer and scenic smile, and he would have been in and out of that place in about thirty seconds. Ray just stood there, talking and smoking with Jesus. Finally we stepped into the building, into a freight elevator that was metal and smelled of dogs. The floor was dirty blue linoleum, and in the basement, Jesus held open the elevator door with his body while Raymond talked to the dealer. ‘Your boyfriend?’ he always asked me. He was from Mexico City. His eyes were brown with gold flecks. He winked at me so I felt warm inside, like maybe he liked me.

  Like hard rain on a hot deck, that’s what the rush was like. Like light moving through night sky and burning color through it—or the space left in your chest after sound passes.

  At four a.m., the sky in the city was not even dark, but rose-colored, city lights thrown into the hazy cloud. At five, morning had already arrived, pale and yellow like the underside of an animal at the side of the road.

  I washed my face and Raymond wore his sunglasses and it was like sleepwalking with your eyes open, so you were moving through a landscape that was loud and bright and without any space for you, yet at the same time it hardly touched you.

  I went to Wayne’s office after lunch and he was working at his desk.

  ‘Hey.’ He was glad to see me.

  He put down his pencil. He always used pencils, always sharp. ‘How are you?’ he asked.

  I saw his long slim fingers, his blue shirt turned over at the cuffs, dark blond hair on his forearms. Sunlight moved from lattice to windowpane.

  ‘Okay.’

  His mouth was naked like a boy’s, but more expressive. He had never done cocaine with his sister or anyone.

  His hand was gentle as the hand that rested on my mother’s back at Shirley Heights, on the smooth yellow stones under the colored lights. I stood at the metal lattice window looking out, the stone ledge up to my waist.

  ‘Shouldn’t you be working?’ he asked.

  ‘I should.’

  ‘Look at that.’ He came and stood beside me, watching a yawl tack up the East River.

  I took Wayne’s hand and pressed it to my hip.

  ‘Jesus,’ he said, ‘is that your bone?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Don’t you eat?’

  I didn’t much.

  ‘Don’t you care about your looks?’ Wayne asked. ‘I’d think you’d care.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Your mother cares.’

  ‘I am not my mother.’

  On Wayne’s bright cranberry office couch, I pressed my bare feet into the cracks between cushions. I lay back, turned sideways, placed my hands under my head the way I had seen a girl do on a train once, in a sleeper car on our way through Germany

  Wayne sat beside me, gingerly, and touched my hot head.

  ‘Hello, Wayne.’

  ‘Hello. Let’s get you some dinner.’

  ‘I’m meeting Ray.’

  ‘You should be out with your friends, with people your own age.’

  ‘It’s good for us.’

  ‘What is good for you?’

  ‘It’s good for me and Ray to spend time together.’

  Maybe it was strange, as Keats says, for me to have let Ray into my life. Or maybe I thought that every good moment I spent with Ray could somehow cancel out the bad, could change my luck.

  We walked into my room and the door closed, and the space under the door, too, when Raymond pressed a towel against it. He closed the window and the airshaft smelled of dirt and stale rain. I sat at the table, shrugging off my jacket and my scarf. He lit a cigarette, going back to the towel against the front door, squatting down and pressing the white cloth between the wood floor and the metal door, squinting to avoid his own cigarette smoke, which went upwards.

  I fell in love with it. Not the way I fell in love with Frank, or even Beck, not for the rush of it, or the energy or the sky-on-fire way of it, but for the opposite: for the quiet of it, the focus, the hand that closed around my wrist and kept me still.

  Lack of want—that is what I fell in love with, Ray and I sitting together on a bed, desireless.

  There was Julep, Wayne’s secretary There was the medical director and researchers and visitors. I sat barefoot on the couch, door open or closed, during work or after, and Wayne didn’t even think about it. It didn’t even cross his mind, how we looked to others.

  Good days, I had a vial of cocaine. Wayne and I went to Le Balcon. I had wine so smooth and cool on the throat, when coke was rough.

  ‘Don’t you miss your wife?’

  ‘Oh, yes.’

  ‘Isn’t it strange, not living together?’

  He laughed. ‘I suppose it is.’

  ‘I wouldn’t want to live apart from my husband, if I had one.’

  ‘Oh, I suppose there’s some deep dysfunction at the bottom of it. But actually you might be surprised.’

  ‘At what?’

  ‘Well, she’s moving.’

  ‘She is?’

  ‘We just bought a house. Do you want to see it?’

  ‘You bought a house?’

  ‘Small one. About an hour from here.’

  ‘Mum never mentioned it.’

  ‘She’s got her feelings about it. Doesn’t think it will work, I suppose. You want to see it?’

  The garage had left his car in the sun. It was hot, the black dash soft lik
e tar. Wayne listened to NPR and my eyes were sunken from sleeplessness. ‘Can I smoke in the car?’

  ‘No.’ He always said no, but I always smoked anyway.

  I rolled down the window and he pressed in the lighter for me. Once the cigarette was lit, he took it from me for a drag.

  Then we were in Westchester, moving down the long quiet streets, turning into a loose gravel driveway and up to a gray wooden house, the roof slate and the trim on the windows white. Behind it were blue spruce trees and a swimming pool covered with a black tarpaulin.

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘It’s a house.’

  ‘That’s the idea.’

  He stood with his back to me in his blue shirt. My chest hurt, right in the middle.

  ‘Is she really moving?’

  ‘Sometime. We just don’t know when.’

  I put my hand on a deck chair, iron and painted white.

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  Everything would change, if Ida came.

  ‘Come on,’ Wayne said, crossing the grass. Inside the house, the carpet was white and the walls blue. The fireplace had a white marble mantel. In the fridge was a packet of crackers and a wine bottle with the cork pushed into it.

  ‘Let me use the bathroom?’

  When I came back, Wayne was at the kitchen counter, on a white barstool. ‘Here,’ he said, pushing my wine to me. ‘How’s Ray?’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘I’m not supposed to ask, right?’

  ‘It’s all right.’

  ‘People have asked about you. People in the lab.’

  ‘They have?’

  ‘You’re always late. You look exhausted. Your hands shake.’ Outside, it was almost dark. ‘What’s going on, Betsy?’

  I shrugged.

  ‘Don’t be coy.’ He couldn’t understand. How could he? ‘What is it?’ he asked.

  ‘The thing is,’ I said, and pressed down the base of my glass, ‘I am the kind of person who falls in love with Frank, instead of Henry.’

  ‘You can change that.’

  ‘They always wanted me to get along with Raymond.’

  ‘Forget Raymond.’

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘You look like hell.’

  I shrugged.