THE WORKAROUND IS WORKING. HERE COMES 8. PLEASE NOTE THAT IN THE POSTS, IT PRECEDES 7, A CHAPTER CALLED TOID AVENOO, WHICH WENT UP TODAY AS WELL, WHICH MEANS YOU HAVEN'T READ IT. SORRY FOR THE UPSIDE-DOWN ORDER. IT SEEMS TO BE UNFIXABLE. BUT ON THE WEB PAGE--CLICK ON THE WORDS IN THE BLACK BAR IF YOU'RE READING THE POSTS PAGE--7 PRECEDES 8. GO FIGURE.
8 Boobs Revealed
Jimmy’s was not a normal venue for Tate and Pru, but it was across 49th from the theatre where Boobs was running, and a favorite of Joe’s, a classic red-check-tablecloth-and-manicotti New York hangout, with no aspirations to sophistication. The walls were covered with autographed headshots of show folk, but the only stars were in their much younger, pre-stardom forms; this was a place for dance company gypsies and bit players, before they hit it big, if they ever did. The tables were still lit by dripping candles stuck in Chianti bottles, the air perfumed with the welcoming, unapologetic smell of thick tomato sauce laden with garlic and oregano. There was nothing of Bologna or Milan on the menu; here the food was Napolitan or Sigi, the dishes those that thousands of mamas on the Lower East Side had made in their tenement kitchens, plus some specialties they would only have prepared on the most fortuitous holidays, when the family splurged, or in later years when they had made it to garden apartments in Queens or bungalows in Leonia.
Lee liked best the everyday sauces and pastas that ingenious, loving women had made delicious on no money at all. A plate of rigatoni, covered in heavy red sauce and dusted with grated cheese, was so delicious she was sure the children in those tenements couldn’t have known it was not the food of kings. When she told Joe she was sorry that he’d grown up on Gert’s meat loaf, her tuna casseroles and iceberg wedges with bottled orange dressing, instead of this lovely, loving food of his father’s country, he had shrugged and told her he ate in friends’ kitchens a lot.
They were on their second Camparis when Poole arrived at Jimmy’s, in a crisp white Oxford button-down, pressed khakis and shined penny loafers, his shoulder-length wig neatly tied back, his manners impeccable, no kin to the raucous hippie they’d just seen on stage, which helped Joe refrain from letting Lee’s friend know that his show was obscene and disgusting.
Joe had sat in the theatre, arms folded across his chest, frowning, through every four-letter word, through the nudity, even the anti-war songs. Tate had whooped and chortled and threatened to send tickets to his mother. Now, over the antipasto, Pru announced to Poole that she was running away from home and joining the cast. He graciously promised to let her know when there was an opening in the company. Boobs, he told them, would soon be a Major Motion Picture. Pru did not ask for a role in the movie.
For Lee, the exuberant experience of the show was topped by hearing news of his family, by the Whatever-happened-to’s, by telling him that their classmate Naomi had signed a contract for a series of commercials that might free her from her day job—she was still a restaurant hostess. Lee annotated the dialogue for the others, until they took up their own conversation, attending to their eggplant Parmesan and their braciole and leaving her and Poole to speak in allusions and half-finished sentences that they understood perfectly.
When the cannolis and Strega arrived, so did the handsome fellow who played the show’s sublimely boobish Army recruiter. He stopped just inside the doorway and nodded shyly at Poole, who flushed and stood to make his goodbyes. As he took her hand, Lee knew that he was happy, and that his new life was full, his tribe complete. She would not see him again. His eyes challenged her mischievously as he slipped into remembered lines.
“Goodbye my memory of earth, my dear, most dear, beyond every expectation.”
She stood to embrace him and replied in kind. “It will seem like eternity ground into days and days.”
She was startled to hear Joe say to the sitter, “That’s six hours, right?”
It was one in the morning, the alarm would ring in just five hours, beginning a day when she would probably be drained and exhausted by the onset of the monthly flood, a day when she had to meet with a Balkan historian enfuriated by the scope of the rewrite her questions and edits required.
Joe threw his jacket over a chair. Lee let out a great sigh.
“Oh good. You didn’t really like it either.” There was relief in his tone, pleasure in his assumption of her agreement.
“No, no. I had a great time, I just, I don’t know, I just feel pretty low right now.”
Joe looked at her questioningly as he unbuttoned his shirt, not seeing the tiny sauce stains that would probably never come out.
“I’d tell you why, but I don’t think I know. I go to a great show, have a wonderful dinner, see an old friend, and I’m dragging around like the dog died.”
She kicked off her satin pumps.
They’re beautiful, I love them, it was a miracle to find Fiorentinas the same teal green as these pants and damn they hurt. Like they have knives in them.
She sat on the edge of the bed and rubbed the balls of her feet.
“Maybe it’s just that I’m a failure. There’s Marsh with his hit show and he’s just a year older than I am. Other classmates, Nate, he’s producing USA Morning. Lew Walsh’s novel is a best seller. And somebody even told me that a B-minus kind of guy who was in a lot of my history classes is the lead counsel on the Sullivan anti-trust case.”
She stepped out of the teal hip huggers, admiring them, glad she’d worn something so beautiful, so well made, fitting perfectly from hip to knee then flaring into more than bell bottoms, into a veritable fishtail sweep. She clipped them to a pants hanger that she hung on a peg inside her closet door. In the morning light, she’d check to see if she needed to drop them at the dry cleaner's, along with Joe’s shirt.
“Oh. And remember last year I introduced you to a guy named Perry O’Connor? He’s running for Congress from Baltimore now.”
Joe still looked puzzled, his black brows tenting over the skyblue eyes. “Well, yeah, it sounds like a pretty talented bunch.”
“But what have I done? I push people’s words around on pieces of paper.”
“You’ve got Jake. And there’s me.” Joe grinned hopefully, hopping as he depantsed one solid, curly-haired leg.
“They have families too. Well, not Marsh. But I’m talking about making a contribution. Didn’t the nuns tell you it was a sin to not use the gifts God gave you?”
“Mortal or venial? I don’t remember.”
“Don’t tease, Joe, I’m serious.”
He called out from the bathroom, a toothbrush in his mouth. “But, Leedle, they’re all guys.”
It was her turn to not comprehend. She leaned against the bathroom doorjam, the tile floor cooling her injured feet. “What’s that got to do with anything?”
“Well, I didn’t hear you mention even one woman’s name. Those guys tearing up the road are all guys. So why are you so hard on yourself?”
Why am I? I don’t know. Good old Emily was happy to manage a household and her kids. But she didn’t get a degree. She never read de Beauvoir and Friedan. She just wanted to be a bookkeeper. Now I’m a book fixer. This is progress? Now it’s new rules. No. New game. You make nice about feminism, but I don’t think you have any idea what it’s about. Just as well. If you understood, you wouldn’t like it. Not one bit.
“If you were me, would you be satisfied to be somebody’s wife, somebody’s mom, somebody’s sentence-fixer?”
He straightened up from the sink and looked at her in the mirror, wiping tooth paste foam on a hand towel. “If I had half what you’ve got, nobody would use me, ever.”
“No, I don’t imagine they would.” She turned back into the bedroom.
“So go out for an audition,” he called to her over the running water he was throwing onto his face, and the wall behind him, and the floor. “Do something with your sketches. They’re good, aren’t they? Write something. Your own stuff. Do it.”
She reached under the curved shade of a Chinoiserie table lamp and pressed on a pool of warm light, then flipped off the glaring chandelier, erasing the sour light and hard shadows it cast all over the room.
Why do you always do that? Turn something beautiful ugly. And you don’t even know you have. I have to remember to get the lamps wired to the wall switch. Then you won’t be able to do it anymore.
The costume design prints that hung around her closet door were all askew at different angles. She gave each a tiny nudge in the right direction and the aspect was grounded, serene again. Some things in the world were fixable.
She put the peach silk blouse on a curved-shoulder hanger, hung it on a peg next to the pants, took off the padded bra that made the blouse fit—and made her look female—tucking it quickly into the cloth bag for hand laundering. Here in her closet, where he could not see her, she welled over with tears.
You’re right. You are so right. You can’t say a line, can’t draw a stick figure, you can’t even write a coherent letter. But you’ve got all the moxie in the world. And that’s what counts. If you could do half—no, a quarter—of what I do, you’d take those little skills and convince the world you were a Billmore, a Picasso, a Faulkner. But I know better. I know second-rate when I see it and I’m just where I should be. Artistic. Yeah. I understand enough about acting to know when I’m seeing a fine performance. I can make a room beautiful like this one, I can put peach shantung and teal satin together and know I look pretty damned good. I can help people who have something to say get it on paper. It’s all perfect and it isn’t enough. It isn’t enough.
She couldn’t talk about this with Joe. He just gave her solutions that wouldn’t work and he never understood why she didn’t act on them. She pulled on composure with her pajama top.
Put a lid on it. Until tomorrow. Tomorrow I’ll talk with Celeste. If anybody can understand this, it’s a good astrologer.
She realized how insane that would have sounded to her as recently as the previous year, before she met Celeste Papandreou, on a dare.
A voice had been coming up and over the partition In her tiny warren at MacGregor’s, and what it was saying was distracting, annoying. The new editor, somebody named Asa Chandler, fresh out of Harvard, had been talking astrological garbage on the phone for half an hour. When he stopped, she walked to the door of his not-yet cluttered cubicle.
“On behalf of your parents, I’d like to lodge a protest.”
“My parents?”
“Your parents. I assume they went to some expense to put you through Harvard and here you are, after all those pricey years, your head full of drivel that I’m sure you didn’t learn there.”
“Sorry I was talking too loudly.” He smiled appeasingly.
What is he, 15? Are those pimples? They’re hiring children to do these jobs. Deluded children.
“You weren’t. Eventually you get used to these partial walls and you don’t talk about anything you don’t want everybody on the floor to know. That’s not the problem.”
His unlined, flushed face broke into a delighted grin and he tugged his tie loose. “How much do you know about astrology?”
“I’ve seen all that stuff in magazines. So vague it applies to everybody. Complete nonsense.”
“Yes it is and that’s not astrology. I love to talk about it—as you’ve noticed—but I can’t discuss it with you at the nonsense level. Would you be willing to find out more?”
“Depends.”
“Of course. OK. How’s this? I give you the number of the astrologer I was just talking to. You call her, give her your time and place of birth. That’s all. After you do a session with her, we talk.”
“How much?”
“Twenty-five dollars.”
“And you don’t set her up? Tell her about me?”
“What could I tell her? I don’t know you from Eve.”
“True. You’re on, boyo.”
That had been the start of it. For her twenty five dollars, eight words, and three hours, Lee received, to her astonishment, a return of faith.
She hadn’t been a believer since reading an essay on brainwashing when she was 22. She absorbed its implications walking the Inland Sea beach in front of the house she and Tim had rented, just north of Kobe. She grew lighter by the step as she recognized that her training as a Catholic had been classic brainwashing. Everything that she had suspected was nonsense was indeed just that. Identifying the programming freed her to feel no qualms whatsoever after being wired to feel guilt if she doubted any of the rules, big or small, if she could not feel disdain for other religions, if she thought the accounting system of indulgences and penances was petty and demented, but most of all, if she thought of leaving. She had always returned from any cycles of doubt, just as the programming said she would. “Fallen-away Catholics always come back.” But not freed-from-brain-washed-bondage- got-away Catholics. The wires were cut and she was floating free, at liberty to question, doubt, reject.
And she rejected the assumption of order. Life was chaos and you did the best you could. There was nothing more to say.
Until Celeste Papandreou had given her those hours of personal information so detailed they even included the fact that in her 27th year, Lee had almost died in a foreign country from an ailment of the gut. Remembering the touch-and-go days in the Saigon hospital as the French doctors used heart-stopping toxins to kill off the amoeba that were rioting in her intestines, Lee had her road to Damascus revelation. If Papandreou had done this, and clearly she had, there was, after all, an order at work in the universe.
Lee had to know how it worked and young Asa triumphantly loaned her heavy tomes full of words, diagrams, and charts. There could be clues in them, she thought, to doing better, at home, at work, to understanding how it all fit together. But it quickly became clear that mastery would be a life’s work; she’d returned the books and left the expertise to Celeste.
When she cajoled a skeptical Joe into doing a session, he had immediately ordered up charts on his kids and her Jake. And Papandreou, bless her heart, told them how all the kids’ charts interacted with their own, ending a family dynamic that had been a dark weight in Lee’s heart.
Her son and Joe’s were both nine. Her Jake was whole and beautiful and healthy; Joe’s Wentley was encased in steel braces from his waist down, his face and arms chaotically manipulated by cerebral palsy. Despite the boy’s enormous neediness, or perhaps because of it, Joe had left his first family to start a new life, and now he lived with Lee’s son, not his own.
Every time Went and his sisters came to visit, Joe turned himself inside out with solicitude. They could have anything, do anything. He had to see them smile, no matter what it took and they made sure it was a lot, withholding those smiles, dispensing them only when handsome tributes has been paid. And all the while, her Jake spanieled after Joe, anticipating ways he could please him, never making the grade. Lee could see the pain in his eyes, and nothing she did could make it go away.
Then Celeste Papandreou charted the family, and Joe became Jake’s dad. Laying out the charts on a table, Celeste had told him that Went, Aurora, his 18-year-old, and Mady, two years younger, all had the charts of people who were quite unconnected to him. But his chart and Jake’s were joined by sextiles and trines and parts of fortune and other purportedly good things. Lee didn’t care if it was good astrology or a kind mendacity, it had been the permission Joe needed to respond to this dear child. Jake was his “astral son.”
Tomorrow, Lee would call Celeste. They were both service brats with what passed for roots in California, both transplants in New York, both married to men who’d climbed out of the slums and made something of themselves. They could talk. The sister space in Lee’s world had been filled by a kind woman who had a map of how the world worked.
Tomorrow, Celeste would listen, and maybe she could see if the order of the universe would have it that Lee would always be behind the scenes, watching, thinking, tinkering with other people’s creations until they were perfect. It was, after all, her chosen role, except right now, when it looked like a ridiculous way to use her life. Maybe about this one thing the nuns were right— she might be sinning, probably mortally.
The moon having surmounted the buildings around them, it flooded the silent room, its light brighter than the extinguished chandelier, softer, colder. It must be near full. Her feet still stabbed at her, her back had begun to ache, her life was a mess.
“You’re crying? You’re crying?”
She thought he was asleep and that she was making no sound.
“What have you got to cry about?”
“Nothing. It’s nothing.”
“You’re damned right it’s nothing. Lee has the perfect life, doing whatever she wants, any time she wants, am I wrong? Nobody else matters. Just Lee the Good. Lee the Bitch.”
His voice hissed through the darkness, close to her ear. She rose quietly to sit on the edge of the bed and said in a voice that had no timbre, “I don’t understand.”
“Well maybe I can explain it to you.” He flipped the chandelier on and walked to her closet. Lee’s shielded her eyes as she stared at him.
“You looked really great in these, you know?” He was holding the fishtail pants. “And you wore them to hang all over that Poole guy. Did you think how I might feel about that? Watching you looking at him like that, talking about old times? Saying stuff I have no idea what you’re talking about?”
Here it comes. The train wreck. But maybe I can stop it. Maybe if I say the right things, I can pull him out of it.
“You know he’s gay, Joe,” she said softly. “He’s a friend.”
“Oh sure. And people at Jimmy’s are supposed to know that? Joe Montagna’s wife is fawning all over this big star and I’m not supposed to be embarrassed?” He was whispershouting, hurling the words at her below the sound level that would reach Jake’s room. “Well not in these, you won’t. Not ever again.” His broad hands pulled at the thin teal satin until it ripped, once, twice, then again and again. He pulled out the peach blouse. “What did I pay for this? What did it cost me to watch you wear it with Mr. Tallblondandhandsomefaggotdirtymouth?”
There was no way to reason with this Joe; he would not hear her. While he was turned, pulling more things from her closet, she took her pillow and the afghan from the foot of the bed and slipped into the bathroom, locking the door soundlessly behind her. Joe did not like locked doors. She was not supposed to leave, but it was not possible to stay in the same space with this Joe. She must leave without seeming to leave, saying nothing, making no sound as she moved.
She stepped through the chilly puddles he had left on the floor, lined the tub with the afghan and settled in as best she could, leaning back against her pillow. Toes against the faucets, she listened to Joe’s fist hitting the bedroom wall, to plastic hangers breaking under his feet, to his threats to throw the bitch out of his home, as she considered the fact that there were any number of people who thought her the most fortunate woman in Christendom. Never had there been a man so enamored of his wife as her husband was of her.
“Ah, so you’re the incomparable Lee,” said the Senator at the campaign dinner.
“Where can I get one like him?” asked the highest-ranking woman in New York banking, after working with him on one of MAA’s programs for the poor.
The waitress at the Argos coffee shop where they had breakfast most Saturdays, patted their hands, brought them extra Mellocreams and admonished Lee to take good care of him.
“Every woman should be so lucky.”
Everywhere he went, Joe somehow got his adoration of his wife into the conversation. When other men ogled passing women, he smiled tolerantly. He didn’t need such foolishness. Just look at his wife. And did they know that she gave great dinner parties? That she had manners and, you know, class? That she was editing really important books at MacGregor’s? That she could have been a movie star?
His favorite audiences were the staffs at Saks, Bergdorf’s and Bloomingdale’s. He would steer Lee through their fragrant doors of a Saturday afternoon and they would move arm in arm, laughing, to a floor full of “the good stuff.” She would remind him that there were bills to be paid at home and he would say they were just looking, just passing the time.
She enjoyed looking. Cashmere, silk and fine workmanship pleased her enormously, as if their beauty and straight forwardness could affect her life. She reached out to the soothing colors and comforting softness, inevitably finding things that would feel wonderful to wear. And just as inevitably there was a solicitous saleswoman, often one who knew them. “Let me bring you that in a six.”
Joe would insist that she show him everything she tried on. Even things she didn’t like had to be shown, front, back and sides, to Joe, rendering judgments from a damask chair.
“That looks loose in the shoulders,” he would inform the saleswoman. “Call the fitter, please.” Or it would be, “Yes, she’ll take that emerald silky thing. It brought out the green in her eyes.”
The sales staff would kvell, and other shoppers would discretely watch the madly-in-love man buy clothes for the little redhead. Stock clerks would search for extra buttons. Buyers would be called on to help choose between the Blass and the de la Renta, before Joe would wink and say, “I think she needs both of them.”
The perfect husband in all his munificence. Pleased and angry and fearful, she would play the demure, grateful wife, sometimes not well enough to avoid being tut-tutted by a sleek saleswoman for not being overjoyed. “If I had a husband like that...”
You can have him when the bill comes and he pitches his Lee-the-extravagant-bitch fit, another of his Great Performances.
At least there would be the crackle of silk and the sweet cheek of cashmere, in her hands, real, giving delight, until she once more fell sickeningly through the looking glass, and found herself trying to sleep in a bathtub.
She told herself that she stayed because this was not the real Joe. The vicious Joe who hissed insults, the taut Joe teetering on the edge of mayhem, the raging, furniture-busting Joe whose visitations had to be lived through—that wasn’t her Joe. Her Joe was kind, funny and loving. It was just so hard to keep him present.
She had to learn how to do it, how to keep her Joe from switching off, running away, leaving her to deal with this angry, frightening man. Until she learned, she would sometimes have to endure the consequences, waiting this Joe out, then disappearing the evidence so that nothing would remind Good Joe of what she had done to send him away. The beauty and order of the old brownstone’s oak-paneled rooms would be restored invisibly, expeditiously, and without comment.
She had learned. Just once she had left a bill on his desk for the repair of a door he had torn out of its frame. He had brought it back to her, his eyes locking on hers as he crumpled it into a ball.
“Do you want me to do it again? Is that what you want?”
He put his after-dinner cognac on the table next to her chair, pivoted and ran at the repaired door, flying at it with both feet, breaking it out of its frame again. In the morning, she had smoothed out the bill, written a check to cover it and looked in the Yellow Pages for another carpenter, one who would not note that he’d done this job before.
For weeks, they would deal with their kids, enjoy friends and the city, work on MAA projects together, being exactly the happy couple people thought they were. Then Joe would veer off, jumping the tracks, scattering all the cars of their life into what seemed to her an unsalvageable heap of shards and twisted steel.
In the world of her people, the Palmers and the Wellocks, such actions would have become part of the permanent record, never to be erased from the equation between those involved. They were slow to anger and long on grudges—two of her uncles had not spoken to each other since 1946. Something about a borrowed car. She understood endless WASP winters, the quiet, serious, solidly built and permanent ice. But not Joe’s squalls, sudden, baseless, violent and then, gone. In a matter of hours, there would be no emotional tracks, not a trace—for him. And it was up to her to see that she bore none.
He would sleep soundly now, in their big comfortable bed, swathed in the soft sheets and the down quilt, while she stared into the dark, wide awake on unyielding porcelain. In the morning, he would wake early and dress quickly, stepping over, walking away from, perhaps not seeing, what he had done. He would use his travel kit to shave in the guest bathroom downstairs, as if that were the most natural of things to do.
When she was sure he had left their bedroom, she would hide everything torn and broken, find something undamaged she could wear to work, and cover the circles under her eyes with makeup. Then it was scramble eggs and toast a bialy for Jake and send him off to school as Joe puttered about, humming. He would read her a Times article about election campaigns or the war, heat the milk for her coffee, suggest plans for the weekend. Perfectly groomed and perfectly pleasant, she would join the play, agreeing that the world was a mess, the coffee was delicious, and that yes, Sunday it would be nice to catch the four o’clock showing of Rosemary’s Baby.
She would then will her way through the Balkan meeting, convince two writers whose manuscripts were overdue to get back to their typewriters, and work with Pam in the art department on the design specs for the Columbia professor’s book on economic forces in Asia. It would all be punctuated by sprints to the ladies’ to change soaked maxipads and tampons. She would take a cab home, too weak to walk, and unable to last the long bus ride between one bathroom and the next, feed Jake, oversee his homework, and have a candlelit dinner on the table at seven thirty.
Joe would look at her in the soft warm light and say, “Why are you so quiet, Leedle?” He would hold her hand, loving concern filling his eyes, extending a large palm frond over her to protect her from the elements. “Did someone at work upset you?”
Ah there he is, My knight on a white horse, ready to do battle to protect me. Unless I say the wrong thing. Do the wrong thing. Then Sir Doppleganger could appear and ride right over me. I must not correct him, overrule him, embarrass him, ever.
“No, I’m fine, dear. Just a little tired.”
He would smile his most understanding smile, the one that did not include white teeth, just an upontheright downontheleft shape that meant, Poor dear.
“You’re shivering. It’s your period, isn’t it? I know how that does you in. Come on, let’s go to bed early and I’ll hold you.”
She would sleep, her head in the hollow of his shoulder, the full length of her body warmed and stilled by this her radiant Joe. What she had seen and heard and felt must join all the other hidden, torn things that could not see the light of day.
She could do this, almost, when she was awake, moving, able to stay in the reality of her busyness. But in sleep, the nightmares would come. The lost one where there was no warmth, no home, no safety, where she and Jake wandered unknown in strange cities, no door opening to them. The one where she was imprisoned, screaming unheard in a stone cell, that had neither window nor door. The one where she drowned in icy black waters, spiraling down through the waving, drifting skeletons of dead sailors.
But sometimes, on nights gifted with grace, the dark waters would fill with light and she would find herself breathing deeply, warm and safe and strong as she soared through a luminous sea, singing to Danny Q as he mirrored her movements, watching her, hearing every note and word of her song. When the sun wrenched her to the surface after such a night, to her pillow next to Joe’s, she would try to dive back down into the dream, hoping Danny would still be there, waiting for her. Sometimes he was, and she would stay with him in their luminous, gracefilled world, putting off the waiting day for just a little while more.
