Starting Out in the Evening Read online

  But this seemed doubtful. He turned over onto his stomach to put the pressure of his body on his penis, in the hope that this might stifle the need to pee. It worked, but it made her stir in her sleep.

  He began to think about how humiliating it would be if he leaked in bed.

  He got out of bed as quietly as possible and went down the hall to the bathroom. He kept the light off and didn’t look in the mirror.

  He came back to the bed and got in next to her, as gently as he could.

  Almost every night, for the last few decades, he’d spent an hour or so reading in bed and then gone to sleep while listening to classical music on the radio. He didn’t know if he could fall asleep without his routine.

  He looked out the window—from his bedroom window he could see a sliver of New Jersey—and listened to the sounds of the street.

  After a few minutes, he needed to urinate again.

  He was in despair. This is what becomes of the most exalted moment of the last season of your life. This was the first time he had been with a woman in more than fifteen years. In the future, he was sure, he would cherish the memory of this evening. He would remember this evening as proof of the bounty of life, proof that life keeps offering unexpected gifts. He would forget, as soon as he could, that much of the actual experience had been torture.

  Shifting and squirming, he couldn’t take it anymore. He left the bed again, went to the bathroom, and found, not to his surprise, that he didn’t have to urinate at all.

  He removed his shirt and his pants, leaving his socks and his underwear on, and took down his robe from the hook on the bathroom door. A thick blue terry-cloth robe that Ariel had given him during his last stay in the hospital. Instead of trying to go to sleep—he knew that was impossible—he went to the kitchen and poured a little skim milk into a pan on the stove. He got some fat-free cookies from the cupboard.

  Her bag was lying near the doorway, next to her shoes; he thought about looking through it, but the urge quickly passed. When he was younger he used to do that kind of detective work without thinking twice: as soon as he’d slept with a woman he’d be poking through her pocketbook on the sly, nosing through her diaries, holding sealed letters to the light. It used to be the kind of thing he expected of himself, as an artist. But he left Heather’s bag undisturbed. Was this because he respected her; or because he’d outgrown his pretentious belief that artists are exempt from social conventions; or because he’d lost his curiosity? He didn’t know. We congratulate ourselves on having abandoned our vices, when it is they who have abandoned us. Some witty literary man had said that; he couldn’t remember who. Probably Wilde. Probably Shaw. Probably Wilde.

  13

  Ariel was meeting Victor for a late drink at the Shark Bar on Amsterdam and 74th. She found him sitting in a booth, squinting at a copy of Barron’s in the dim light.

  According to the three-date rule, Ariel had to sleep with Victor tonight. Promulgated by one of Ariel’s girlfriends, the rule stipulated that you can’t sleep with a guy until the third date, but you have to sleep with him on the third date if you’re going to sleep with him at all.

  She asked him what was new, and he started talking about one of his cases: he was defending a high-level drug dealer named Ishmael.

  “I find the drug dealers to be the nicest guys,” he said. “They’re always polite, and they don’t tell you they’re innocent. I hate it when you know the guy is guilty and he knows you know he’s guilty, but he keeps claiming he didn’t do it.

  “The guys from the Mafia aren’t so nice. They expect you to treat them like royalty—all those Godfather movies must’ve gone to their heads.”

  Ariel pushed her lime slice around with her straw. She didn’t understand why this man didn’t inspire her. He was a good guy, he had a sense of humor, he even had artistic leanings—last month she’d journeyed up to Westchester to see him playing the Dick York role in an amateur stage production of Inherit the Wind. So what could be wrong?

  “Why’d you become a lawyer?” she said, with an uneasy feeling that she had asked him this already.

  “I was always deeply in love with the majesty of the law.”

  “Really?” Suddenly he seemed more interesting, even more handsome.

  “Yeah, right. I was an English major. What can an English major do in the real world? Nothing. So I applied to law school.”

  She could understand that well enough, but it disappointed her. She wished he were in love with the majesty of the law. She didn’t think she could be with someone who was just killing time with his life. She needed someone who was living out a passion: an artist or a scientist or a therapist or a teacher. The problem wasn’t that he was a lawyer: the problem was that he wasn’t in love with what he did.

  He went back to talking about his client, and although he was a very nice guy and she hoped he’d find his Juliet, it wasn’t going to be her. She wasn’t going to sleep with him tonight, and probably she wasn’t going to see him again. When they finished their drinks he asked her if she wanted to come over to his place, and she said no. “I have a client tomorrow morning at eight,” she said. “I should go home.” He smiled with resignation, and she knew that he knew that they weren’t going to see each other again.

  Out on the street, when they kissed good night, she discovered that he didn’t know any such thing: he kissed her with his mouth open and fleetingly gave her his tongue. Apparently he wasn’t acquainted with the three-date rule, and therefore didn’t realize that his failure to get her into bed tonight spelled the doom of his boyfriendly hopes.

  She said good night and broke away from him quickly, skipping nervously across the street while the DON’T WALK sign flashed. In her ten-second journey from the west side of Amsterdam to the east side, she traveled to 1972 and back again. The tongue flick during a street-corner kiss as an invitation or statement of intent: it was like something out of high school.

  She walked aimlessly north. Weird kiss.

  It was a little after eleven. She didn’t really have a client at eight, and now that she’d gotten rid of Victor she realized she wasn’t quite ready to go home.

  When was she going to find a decent guy? She felt as if doors were closing in her life.

  Ariel had been married once, for two and a half years, in her late twenties. Her husband, Ted, who was in his forties when they met, wanted kids as much as she did. For the first year they had a great time trying; when nothing happened they started going to specialists. During the second year they supplemented their efforts with the most advanced techniques and equipment, and she spent a great deal of time in glaring white rooms with her feet up in stirrups, but still with no luck. By this time she’d begun to believe that there was nothing wrong with their reproductive systems—it was just that her eggs and his sperm didn’t want anything to do with each other. They’d gotten married much too fast, and now their relationship had deteriorated to the point where the desire to have children was one of the few things they shared. “I can’t wait till we get pregnant,” Ted kept saying—and this formulation, as if both of them would be getting pregnant, began to strike her as geeky and insulting, even though she knew that this way of putting it was close to obligatory for the sensitive modern husband.

  Old Ted. She thought of him about once a year now, if that.

  After she and Ted split up, she fell in love with someone—Casey Davis—who already had a kid and didn’t want to have another; and she went out with a couple of guys who wanted kids but whom she didn’t want to have kids with; and she spent some time with two or three jerks who weren’t nice to her and whom she didn’t even like; and somehow ten years had flown by.

  She was still walking uptown. She had a membership at a video rental store on Columbus and 82nd—she used to get videos there when she was taking care of her father between his operations. Just to go somewhere, she walked to the store—she thought she’d spend half an hour browsing through the new releases—and when she got there it occurre
d to her that it would be nice to go over to her father’s and watch a video with him. He never went to sleep before midnight. She knew he’d be happy to see her. That was one of the few things she could count on in life. She picked out Mrs. Miniver, Greer Garson, Walter Pidgeon, 1942, which always made her cry.

  She walked up to his place and let herself in. The lights were on in the living room and the kitchen: he was up. She put her backpack down in the hallway and went to find him. There were dishes on the coffee table, and jars of honey and peanut butter. It wasn’t like him: he was a neatness freak, and peanut butter wasn’t the kind of thing he ate anymore. There was a funny smell.

  He was sitting in the kitchen in his bathrobe, having milk and cookies. He looked up at her. He looked . . . scared.

  “Howdy,” Ariel said.

  On the floor near the table were a pair of shoes: black wing-tip boots, sexy little hipster boots with heels.

  “I should have called,” she said. Her father held his cookie in the air and stared at her, but he didn’t speak. “I’ll call you tomorrow,” she said, and walked quickly—she didn’t quite run, but almost—through the hallway and out the front door.

  She hit the elevator button, but she was too spooked to wait. She lurched into the stairwell and walked down fifteen flights without thinking a single thought, and she was out on the street before she knew it.

  He was sleeping with her? She was sleeping with him?

  It wasn’t even midnight yet, but Broadway seemed suddenly threatening. She flagged a cab, told the driver where to go, and closed her eyes. The taxi streaked wildly down Broadway; she started to feel ill. She leaned toward the partition and said, “If we get into an accident and I die, I won’t be able to tip you.”

  All she wanted was to go home and watch her video and try not to think. Then she realized that she didn’t have the video. And then she realized that she didn’t have her backpack, and, therefore, that she didn’t have her purse or her keys. She must have left everything at her father’s.

  She tapped on the partition and said, “I’m really sorry, but I forgot my purse. I don’t have any money. Do you think you could drive me back to 94th so I could get my purse?”

  The cabbie had a turban, a beard, and long deep grimness lines about the mouth. He pulled over to the curb. “If you don’t have money I can’t drive you anywhere. This automobile is not a charitable organization.”

  “What do you think, I’m going to jump out and not come back? You think I just wanted to take a joyride? Look, I’m not going to disappear. I’ll write down my address if you want.” Why am I giving him my address?

  “I don’t want your address, or your phone number either. You are a pretty girl but not that pretty. You’re a little bit over the hill.” She should have been relieved, but she was insulted. “I want you to pay the fare. That’s all I ask.”

  “I’m sorry but I told you I forgot my purse.”

  He pressed a button and all the locks in the cab went down. “I can’t let you out of my cab without collateral. What do you have? You have jewelry? You have rings?”

  “I don’t have any jewelry. I have a watch.”

  “Give me the watch and I’ll wait for you.”

  She gave him the watch and he drove her back to 94th. She got out of the car and, standing outside her father’s building, she realized that she didn’t want to go back up.

  “Look,” she said to the cabbie, “I can’t get the money now. Can I get your number and pay you tomorrow?”

  He shook his head, with a righteous and disdainful smile.

  She felt a surge of what can only be called racist rage—she felt outraged that this . . . foreigner, with that weird shmatte on his head, was lording it over her, an American citizen! But this wasn’t at all like Ariel, and she came to her senses quickly. “Can’t you just be nice?” she said.

  “I am a philosopher!” he said. “In my country I am known as a philosopher! Do you think I was born to drive a cab? I speak seven languages! How many languages do you speak?”

  “Just one,” she admitted forlornly. “I studied French in high school, but I can’t remember much of it,” She wasn’t sure why they were talking about this. “Je suis Madame Thibault,” she said—the only thing she remembered from high school French.

  He told her that his name was . . . something: it flew out of her head as soon as he said it; and he said that if she called the Taxi and Limousine Commission she could leave him a message and he’d exchange her watch for the fare. She lamely agreed; she just wanted him to be gone. He stepped on the gas and sped away, and her watch rode out of her life.

  Her father had bought her the watch at a street fair a few months ago, shortly after she came back to New York.

  “Fuck,” she said. “Fuck a duck.” She had no idea where to go. She didn’t have a dime. For a moment she thought she understood what it must be like to be homeless, but she quickly saw that that was a silly thought.

  “Fuck it and duck it,” she said. This was something she said to herself at moments of extreme frustration; she’d been saying it since she was ten. It occurred to her that no one in the world knew she said this: she didn’t think she’d ever said it in anyone else’s presence.

  She felt reproached by the nakedness of her wrist. She felt as if she’d thrown away not just the gift but the tenderness of the moment when he’d given it to her. They were strolling through the Columbus Avenue Street Fair, near the Museum of Natural History, and she was complaining about how disorganized she was: always arriving late at her clients’ apartments, hair unbrushed, breathless, gulping coffee from a cardboard cup. It was a beautiful blue afternoon in the middle of May; the city seemed a calm, friendly place; and she was miserable. She wanted to keep berating herself, but her father stopped her. “Ariel, my dear, it’s not a moral problem, it’s a technical problem. All you need is a watch.” They stopped at an antiques stall run by a spaced-out Norseman from Vermont, and he bought her the watch. It wasn’t a watch she would have bought for herself: for herself she would have bought a purple Swatch—something bright and disposable. He picked out the kind of thing he liked: tiny, ancient, sliver-thin, delicate, dear.

  He was right: just having the watch helped her get her act together. She stopped being late so much; it helped her take herself and her profession more seriously.

  She appreciated the way her father, in his gentleness, had told her that her work problem was only “technical.” It was a way of telling her not to judge herself so harshly. And maybe the watch wouldn’t have cleared things up as it did if she hadn’t had the memory of his tenderness to think of when she looked at it.

  And now she’d given it away.

  She was walking down Broadway, trying to figure out what to do. She couldn’t go back to her father’s place, and she couldn’t get into her own.

  There wasn’t really anyone she could call at this hour. When she’d moved back to New York last year she hadn’t gotten back in touch with her old friends—she’d wanted to start over—and she hadn’t made many new ones since then. All the lousy loneliness of her life was crashing down on her. In high school all the boys were in love with her. I used to be the belle of the ball, she thought.

  Halfway down the block she saw an elegant-looking black man walking his dog, and for a second she thought it was her old boyfriend Casey. Casey! Wouldn’t it be amazing to run into him now? Wouldn’t it be amazing if he was still single? But this man wasn’t Casey, and Casey probably wasn’t single, and anyway, she and Casey had already had their chance.

  She was still reeling from her father and the biographer. How could he . . . ? How could she . . . ? Ariel loved her father, but she couldn’t imagine how any young woman in her right mind could get into bed with him.

  Trudging down Broadway, she started thinking about her mother. She felt as if her father had betrayed her memory. It made no sense, but this was how she felt.

  If it had been some dowdy sixty-year-old, some librarian, that would
have been different. Ariel would have welcomed that—she would have taken the librarian out for lunch. But this was something else.

  By now she was at 79th Street. She knew a couple who lived a block away, on West End. She could see their windows; their lights were on. She didn’t know them well enough to disturb them at this hour, but she was drawn there anyway; she drifted down the block and stood across the street from their building, trying to see if they were moving around in their apartment.

  The man was a client of hers—one of her few male clients. His doctor had told him to get some exercise, so he’d hired her to help him develop a strengthening and aerobics routine. His name was Ben. He was in his middle forties; Sally, his wife, was in her middle thirties. Ben worked for a labor union and Sally was a social worker. They had two sons. Ariel felt a kinship with them: they were idealists, left-wingers, sixties people at heart. She sort of wanted to be their friend.

  Maybe the kids were in bed and the two of them were snuggled in front of the television set enjoying a cozy night together. Maybe they were making love. She would have liked to ring their doorbell and sleep on their couch, but she didn’t know them well enough. She looked up at the window, envying the life she was locked out of.

  14

  Heather spent the night in a state between sleeping and waking, alone in Schiller’s bed.

  She was relieved when morning came, but she didn’t get up right away. She had to sort out her feelings, and she had to decide on a face to present to him when she left the room.

  The night before had been . . . interesting. Heather had slept with seventeen guys in her life—on an insomniac winter night last year, she’d counted—but no one had ever paid such close and loving attention to her before. Schiller had made her feel as if she were worthy of awe.

  Even though he hadn’t touched her. Precisely because he hadn’t touched her. If he’d touched her it would have been something else entirely.