Читать книгу One Thousand Chestnut Trees - Mira Stout - Страница 8

At six o’clock the next morning I was awakened, as usual, by the hydraulic twangs of the industrial elevators delivering shipments to the storage basement below the funeral parlour. Feeling jetlagged from sleep-interruption, I dozed on until nearly nine. Standing in the narrow, gloomy kitchen waiting for the kettle to boil I remembered that Oliver had given me a month’s notice. Familiar financial fear started to spread through my lungs like camphor.

Obviously, rents and utilities had to be paid; food, drink, and art supplies had to be bankrolled, and a surreally large college loan needed repaying. I had difficulty swallowing my toast. I took a scorching swig of coffee and glanced around the apartment; Laura had not come home last night. The apartment looked dusty and neglected in daylight. It was dusty and neglected.

That afternoon Laura rang me at Cadogan Books and asked me to meet her for a drink at the Algonquin. Harry also called, back from his business trip to Philadelphia. He would join us there later. Laura and I met at six-thirty, and sat on a sofa trying to look nonchalant. I hadn’t seen her in a couple of days. She looked tired.

‘It’s my birthday,’ she said brushing a lock of wavy blond hair out of her martini glass. I had forgotten her birthday. So had Philip, the married lover.

‘About Philip,’ she said, ‘I think I’m in trouble.’

‘Not pregnant.’

‘No. In love,’ she said.

‘It’s not an affliction, you know.’

‘But it wasn’t supposed to happen. I was supposed to just like his company. Appreciate the square meals. Now I really mind; I mind that he’s married; I mind that I mind. And of course …’ she trailed off, ‘It’s tacky, I know …’

‘Maybe you could bail out now, before you get hurt any more.’

‘Easier said than done, old thing.’

‘Yeah, I know. But you’ve got to think about the big picture. Meals come and go.’

Laura looked upset.

‘Well, I’ve lost my job; Oliver’s going out of business.’

Laura raised an eyebrow. A balding waiter politely brought us our second round of martinis and another dish of greasy mixed nuts.

I had known Laura since university. Since before she had become an unknown actress. She hadn’t met anyone nice since her junior year, when she’d gone out with Charlie Downs. It was widely assumed that they would get married. Charlie surprised everyone by getting engaged to the eighteen-year-old daughter of the Senator for whom he’d worked in Washington.

Across the room I noticed a couple of preppy-looking boys, probably around our age. One of them was long and droopy, and the other had curly hair and wore a cream-coloured Irish fisherman’s sweater draped around his neck. Unexpectedly, the droopy one made his way over to our sofa.

‘Would you ladies condescend to have a drink with us?’

‘Suave,’ Laura said, smirking, ‘I guess I wouldn’t mind another.’

I shot her a questioning look. One worried almost equally about Laura’s man-judgement as about her drinking-judgement. She tended neither to eat enough to avoid instant drunkenness, nor to get enough decent male attention to repulse dodgy advances. However a diversion from the adultery question was welcome. Noting his friend’s success, the boy in the fisherman’s sweater rose from his corner, and sauntered over to our table.

‘Hi there. Wen Stanley. Tommy introduced himself? Tom Morgan. Morgan-Stanley, I know, I know … Mind if we sit down?’ he asked.

‘What kind of a name is “Wen”?’ said Laura.

‘Short for Wendell,’ said Wen, visibly warming to his subject. He and Tommy smiled conspiratorially. ‘Waiter! Another round please. Put these on my tab, will you?’ said Wen, untying his sweater sleeves.

I don’t remember a great deal of the ensuing conversation, nor was any of it surprising. Condensed version: them; Groton, Middlebury, Manufacturer’s Hanover training program, Fisher’s Island. Laura knew Tommy Morgan’s sister from St Pauls. Wen knew a few people from Brown, including my old boyfriend, Fred, and a slew of friends of my friends’ cousins. Wen lived on the upper East Side in his maiden aunt’s apartment. Would we like to go up there for a nightcap?

Laura said she’d like to, and excused herself to go to the Ladies’ Room. I sat there between the boys, smashed. We had eaten some nuts and pretzels. I counted having drunk five martinis. (A first.)

Just then Harry entered the hotel and looked around inquisitively. He spotted me sandwiched between two strange men, and his face hardened a fraction. I had forgotten that Harry was coming.

‘How was Philadelphia?’

‘Fine,’ he said, scrutinizing me. ‘Harry Palmer. Pleased to meet you,’ he said, shaking hands insincerely with Morgan-Stanley. He fired me another look and settled heavily into Laura’s seat. The boys exchanged men-of-the-world glances.

‘Not Palmer, of Palmer’s Peanut Butter, I trust?’ said Tommy, in an inspired gambit.

‘’Fraid so,’ said Harry, looking about distractedly.

‘Weh-hey! Palmer’s Peanut Butter! The King of Peanut Butters. That makes you … what, King Peanut?’ said Wen.

Harry flinched. ‘My father’s the boss.’

‘So what do you do, crack the shells?’ Tommy drained his martini glass languidly.

Harry ignored him.

‘So you must be an incredibly rich guy. Plus all the peanut butter you could ever desire.’

‘I’m flattered at your interest in the family business. Why, what does your father do?’

‘Here are the drinks. Cheers, Mr Peanut!’ Wen raised his glass. Harry’s jaw tightened again, and he looked at me with distaste.

‘I’d better go see what’s happened to Laura,’ I excused myself. As I walked to the Ladies’ Room the force of the martinis asserted itself in a blaze of dizziness and acidic hunger. Legs, which felt like they belonged to someone else, carried me to the little wood-panelled bar with the grouchy bartender. Ignoring his eyeballing intimidation tactics, I crammed a handful of mini-pretzels from the napkinned bowl into my mouth and walked away, crunching, pleased to be able to negotiate the crowded reception area without mishap. I found Laura behind a locked cubicle in the Ladies’ Room.

‘Are you all right, Laur?’ I got down on all fours onto the spotless black-and-white checkerboard floor and looked under the door.

‘Absolutely not,’ came a weak voice above her familiar feet, ‘I’ve been sick.’

Worried that I might get sick as well, I started to do some light jumping-jacks and toe-touching calisthenics, hoping that violent blood circulation might speed the alcohol-processing and chatted with some difficulty to Laura as I performed them.

The sound of Laura retching ripped through the echoey sanctum. It was so hushed in the Algonquin that one could imagine being ejected for making audible bodily function noises. A middle-aged woman in a fur coat entered and looked horrified, catching me mid-jumping-jack, and experiencing Laura’s vomiting noises as they peaked acoustically. She left in an outraged huff, trailing the scent of ancient Blue Grass.

‘I don’t want to rush you, but are you OK yet?’ I asked under the door.

‘Getting there.’

‘You can’t really want to go uptown with these clowns. I mean, it’s not as if we know them or anything. And Harry certainly won’t want to go.’

‘What is there to know, for Christ’s sake. Where’s your spirit of adventure? It’s my birthday after all … Won’t you at least go along with me on my birthday?’ she wheedled from under the door.

‘Excuse me for pointing this out, but look where “spirit of adventure” has gotten you so far, Laur – the tiles.’

‘Oh come on. Forget Harry. You don’t like him anyway.’

‘Thanks Laur. I’ll see you back out there. And hurry up will you? Do you need anything?’

‘Nah. Be out in a minute.’

Twenty minutes later, the five of us were in a taxi headed uptown. Tommy tried to charge the bill to his father’s reciprocal Harvard Club account, but the waiter refused. Harry, looking blacker and blacker, ended up paying the tab. The air was somewhat tense.

Although Morgan-Stanley were a bit of a joke, Harry’s martyred patience and plodding reliability were not especially endearing that evening. There in the taxi I was chilled by the thought that I didn’t actually care much what he thought or felt. Though we had only been seeing each other for a month, he was becoming quite proprietorial. Our watery liaison boiled down to a flirty evening shouting over the Palladium’s sound system, a couple of unrelaxed beers at Fanelli’s, a harrowing weekend at his parents’, and an intensely interrogatory dinner at Mortimer’s.

There had been a curious lack of urgency about our attraction. Harry’s advances, like his opinions, were politic, and had remained delayed on the ground for a disarmingly long time, like the take-off of a well-maintenanced jumbo aircraft. Although he was kind and well-meaning, I had been attracted to a friend’s racy description of what he had been like during college. As time went on, I wondered if perhaps the friend had been thinking of someone else.

Squashed up against Harry as the taxi gunned up Park Avenue, mildly sickened, I wondered about romantic Love. The rare, invisible currency running through people’s lives, whose presence tripled your blood count in the night. People pretended it didn’t matter if you had it or not, but it did. Maverick and precious, it was a wild thread stitching together unlikely people, strengthening them, suturing their wounds, weaving surprising designs in the chaos. Whatever it was, Harry and I had not been selected for its grace.

I recalled that weekend, being brought home speculatively, and prematurely, to his family’s grey-shingled mansion in Sands Point, to see how I went with the decor, and the weft and weave of other family members. Harry’s other blond brothers Mark, Randy, and Junior were all lined up at the enormous mirror-polished dining-table with their blonde-highlighted, nautilized wives. It was like being cast in an East Coast setting of a Tennessee Williams play. Mr Walter Palmer, rheumy-eyed, ruddy-faced manufacturing magnate and patriarch, sat at the head of the table sallying and interrogating his slightly cowed sons with brittle humour. Mrs Betty Palmer, with spun-sugar hairdo and kind, suffering expression, made conversation with Junior’s new wife Donna about the upcoming Cancer Benefit at The Pierre.

Harry smiled a little too encouragingly at me over his cut-crystal wine goblet. That I was an apprentice artist had been bad enough, but when Mr Palmer asked what my father did for a living, he took the news that my father was an artist too as if it were a personal insult. He couldn’t quite place me socially, which irritated him; artist-father – could be some Communism there – the slightly Oriental eyes, the prep-school and ivy-league background, it didn’t tally squarely on the balance sheet. Mrs Palmer was just asking where my mother was from, when Mr Palmer launched into a well-rehearsed anecdote about how Mr Palmer senior had worked his way up and across from air-conditioning units to the dizzying heights of the peanut butter world. We laughed tactfully, and filed into the equestrian-print-lined, chintzy study for coffee and Mrs Palmer’s special-recipe peanut brownies à la mode, as prepared by Dolores, the Filipina cook. I smiled inanely, and sat down on a needlepoint cushion that read, Nouveau Riche is Better Than No Riche At All.

Why had I gone? What was I now doing in a taxi with him and these other strangers? I didn’t really know. Muddling along, trying anything once. Lost. That most people I knew appeared to be equally lost blurred this fact, and removed the stigma.

During the cab ride Wen accidentally dropped his fisherman’s sweater out of the open window. The taxi driver refused to stop for it. Back out on the pavement Laura, now sober, paid for the cab as the rest of us were having considerable trouble finding correct change. Harry’s pale blue eyes looked more puzzled and washed out than usual, and he said that he was going to walk home. I told him I would be keeping an eye on Laura. As I said this, it occurred to me that I might not be seeing Harry again. I felt a needling regret as I remembered that Harry was quite nice really. I wished him well, and selfishly, disliked losing an admirer. Harry walked away, head down and hands jammed in his coat pockets, and disappeared into a gap of dark pavement between the streetlights.

Wen, Tommy, Laura and I crushed into the carved wooden elevator under the disapproving stare of the doorman, and entered Wen’s aunt’s apartment with a respectful silence as we took in the regulation upper East Side brocades, severe Chippendale and grandiose blackamoor figures flanking the doorway to the dining room.

Tommy, the polite one, decanted generous glasses of Aunt Stanley’s vintage Armagnac. A lock of Laura’s hair caught fire as he lit her cigarette. It wasn’t serious, but she was a bit shaken. We ate some Baskin Robbins Rocky Road ice-cream and leftover microwaved macaroni, in that order. After a couple of Armagnacs and some frugal lines of cocaine from a little waxed envelope in his wallet, Wen emerged from a bedroom without any trousers on, and sat down wittily on the ottoman at Laura’s feet in his socks and protruding boxer shorts.

This seemed like a good moment to leave. Wen, still trouserless, and Tommy escorted us downstairs in the elevator, and Laura – nursing her singed lock of hair – and I got into a cab and went home. We never saw them again.

As I lay on my mattress trying to get to sleep that night, my head throbbed. I was terribly thirsty, but refused to get a glass of water, having just drunk an unbelievable amount of water only moments before. I was too lazy to get up again, and could not guarantee a successful reprise of going up and down the ladder. It seemed unfair to have contracted a hangover while still technically drunk.

The garbled mess of the day circulated through my head like hard lumps of batter through an eggbeater, gradually growing smaller. Each diminishing thought was accompanied by increasing feelings of disgust, and surprising sadness. Oliver’s impending departure and Harry’s retreat formed one lump of ambivalent, unmelting loss. Laura’s troubled, sleeping presence nearby did not lessen the loneliness which seemed to have welled up from beneath the darkened furniture and flooded the room.

Was anybody else’s life so disjointed? If so, didn’t they worry about it? Perhaps this was just the normal texture of postgraduate life in New York at the end of a fractured, narcissistic decade. Even couched in the sedative language of Newsweek, the condition hurt. The disjointed bits had spikes, and the missing piece, whatever it was, had left behind a canyon of emptiness around which I had organized my life quite well.

At first I thought the missing thing might be Love, but wasn’t sure. Was Love so big?

Perhaps the force itself was still mighty, but its public image had been diminished by the same hype as less important things; it had been used to sell economy cars, diet soft drinks, untrue songs, banal movies, and anti-wrinkle creams. Although cheapened, private Love still exacted the same high price.

Dull thoughts followed, so boring that they slipped from beneath me, half-formed. I found myself thinking again of Korea.

The roar of traffic held me in web of continuous noise. The light of the cinema marquee across the street flooded beneath my closed lids and strained my eyes, despite their being closed. Thoughts racing, I longed for rest, for peace.

Often, when my mind tired of its ineffectual wonderings, I would think of cool, green leaves and imagine fresh, verdant smells. Fanned, rustling leaves enfolded me. The woods were so deep I couldn’t tell if it was night or day. I lay my head on some moss, and to the sound of rushing leaves, eventually I fell asleep.