Vigil for a Stranger
A Novel
For Turi MacCombie
Part One
Dream
Whenever I want you, all I have to do is dream.
The Everly Brothers
Chapter One
I had just been thinking about Pierce when I saw his name.
That I was thinking of him was not unusual. Twenty years had gone by, and still he was in my mind nearly every day—sometimes for a moment, other times like an extended meditation. For one thing, I still had so many objects associated with him. The wind-up penguin (though the mechanism was stuck, and the penguin would no longer waddle off the tabletop on its webbed orange feet). A paperback volume of Van Gogh’s letters to his brother. The picnic basket (in which I kept needlepoint yarn). A snapshot of Pierce and me in front of his apartment house on Orange Street. Plus a lot of little, lesser stuff—a postcard of “The Night Café,” a book of matches from Tynan’s (now defunct), a couple of playbills, an empty box that used to contain Marlboros (mine) and now contained dozens of those tiny seashells like thumbnails that we picked up at Plover Island.
But I would have thought of him even without these literal reminders. The world—life—myself: everything recalled Pierce to me, there was no help for it, no escaping now any more than twenty years ago. I didn’t even want to escape: thinking of Pierce, remembering him, hadn’t been painful for a long time.
I was on the 9:02 train to New York. At Bridgeport, the punk Yalie sitting next to me got off, and a woman in a business suit got on—briefcase in one hand, tidy overnight bag in the other. She paused briefly in the aisle, with that impersonally hostile look a certain kind of professional woman tends to cultivate—the look that says: don’t you dare mess with me because I’m not only busy, I’m special. Calculating the seating possibilities, she settled for me, probably only because I had a book in front of me and looked harmless, but I was flattered—the way her suit might have felt when she chose it over a dozen others that were similar but not quite, quite right.
She swung her bag onto the rack over my head and sat down without a further glance at me, her briefcase in her lap and her hands folded on it. She leaned back in her seat with a private little sigh, and without actually turning to look at her, I imagined her closing her eyes, exhausted by the rigors of Bridgeport, of the presentation she’d had to give, or the fat new account she was trying to nab, the case she was prepared to win, the tension of the upcoming power lunch with a big shot. Whatever it is that wears that kind of person out no matter how much coffee they drink or how many hours they put in at the gym.
Pierce and I used to go on like that: that kind of person, we used to say, categorizing, analyzing, coming up with half-baked theories to explain the world, until Charlie would say, “Don’t you know there’s no truth in generalizing?” and Pierce would reply, “There are two kinds of people in this world, Charlie—the ones who believe in generalizations, and the ones who don’t.”
The train lurched out of the Bridgeport station and south along the back ends of warehouses brightened with graffiti. Thinking idly of Pierce and those dear, dead days—not with sorrow, but with a simple pleasure in knowing that he, they, had once existed—I studied my seatmate out of the corner of my eye. Grey wool suit, slightly flared skirt discreetly below the knee but not so far below that it looked à la Bohème (as mine, nearly ankle-length, surely did). Silky cream-colored blouse, whose pearl-buttoned cuffs I could just glimpse below the grey sleeves. High-tech watch on the left wrist, thin gold bangle on the right, no rings, no nail polish except possibly one coat of clear (hard to tell). Sheer, shiny stockings, good black shoes with sensible heels. Wine-colored expanding briefcase with black saddle-stitching around a pair of shaped, flat handles. Age, deduced from backs of hands (wiry—the kind that with time would become simian—but, so far, relatively unlined), about thirty-four.
I was about to return to my book when she stirred in her seat and sighed a different kind of sigh—determined, dutiful, a touch grim (though still private, not the kind of ostentatious sigh designed to elicit conversation)—and opened the briefcase. I imagined her saying to herself as she boarded the train: three minutes to flop, baby, and then it’s back to work for you, you don’t get ahead by napping on trains. The first thing she did was to pull out a bulging black leather Filo-Fax. Of course. Even Charlie would have to see the Filo-Fax, with its neatly tabbed compartments for datebook, addresses, expense-account records, personal diary, you-name-it, as irrefutable proof that she was a type, a screaming generalization. “You know, Pierce—a yuppie,” Charlie would say in his patient, hesitating way. Except that yuppies hadn’t been invented when Pierce died, and perhaps Filo-Faxes hadn’t, either. In my mind, I saw Pierce’s inquiring face, his head tipped sideways, his ironic, excessively helpless smile: “Yuppie, Charles?” Forget it, Pierce, I thought. It’s too hard to explain—as if he were a character in one of those books or films where someone in history is flung into the twentieth century, or vice versa. Shakespeare turning up in a fast food place in California, or a little urban kid being transported back to pioneer times. See, this is a Big Mac, Will. This is what we call a Conestoga wagon, Tiffany.
The woman crossed her legs, swinging one foot out into the aisle and bouncing it up and down (irritably, as an extension of her hostile, off-putting look), and flipped open the Filo-Fax to her appointments for that week, bending her head over her little book so that her longish (but not too long), blondish (ditto) hair obscured the page. I spent an idle moment envying her hair, which was really quite beautiful—thick, straight, and artfully streaked—and then I lost interest and returned to Swann’s Way.
I had read Swann’s Way a million times—or a dozen, or six, I don’t know. I’d read it a lot. I never progressed to the rest of Proust. Swann’s Way was enough for me—the book that had everything, as far as I was concerned—my own personal Filo-Fax. My French ex-husband, Emile, gave it to me, the old Scott Moncrieff translation, for my birthday—my first birthday with him, when we were still pretty happy—and said he’d give me a volume every year. One volume a year of Remembrance of Things Past was enough, he said—ever in English. Enough for you, anyway, was what he implied. I think he expected me to spend the whole year reading it, if I read it at all. Emile never had much respect for my intelligence, still less for my diligence, but the day after that birthday (my twenty-sixth) I came down with a mild case of flu—just enough to send me to bed and get Emile to wait on me in a low-key sort of way (tea when I called for it, a little canned broth, he even went out for ginger ale)—and wolfed down Swann’s Way in three feverish days. Then I read it again when I was well, and again when we went to Vermont for a week’s vacation. I think Emile was torn between a sort of shocked pride in me and disappointment: he too liked his generalizations, and the fact that he’d read Proust and I hadn’t gave him a superiority over me that he wasn’t crazy about relinquishing.
He continued to give me a volume a year. Emile was like that: organized, methodical, French, and when he said he was going to do something he did it. The Proust piled up, even though I never did read another volume. Denis was born, and I didn’t have much time or energy for reading. And soon after the seventh and last volume appeared, I had my breakdown and Emile went back to France, taking Denis, leaving me the Proust, complete—a sort of souvenir, I suppose. As a way of punishing him, I included those last six volumes in a bunch of stuff I gave to a tag sale that benefited Denis’s old nursery school. Not much of a punishment—not a punishment that fit the crime—and certainly not an even trade: a five-year-old boy for six volumes of Proust donated to charity. Emile never knew what happened to the books, anyway (or to me, not that he cared) since we didn’t communicate for nearly a year. But getting those books off my back (they were exquisite, small, tiny-printed hardcover things, I think he ordered them from someplace in England) gave me a certain kind of happiness at a time when very little happiness was available to me.
It wasn’t Emile I thought about when I opened the book, though: it was Pierce. Or actually, of course, it was little Marcel. I was at the point where, after Marcel’s mother has finally come into his room to read him to sleep (François le Champi without the love scenes), he gives us his thoughts on the difficulties of recapturing the past, and then on to the tea and the famous madeleine and the passage about the Celtic belief that the souls of the dead are imprisoned in trees or plants or objects, and then of course I thought of Pierce, as I always did when I read those words. How after he died—before I’d even read Proust or heard this particular Celtic belief—I used to find him again in trees, how it seemed he was with me if I stood with my back pressed to the trunk of a tree, or my cheek against the bark. Specifically, I sought this feeling—this Pierce-ness, this sense of being filled with a sort of essence of Pierce, of being “pierced”—from one particular grove of trees that grew behind my parents’ place, between the house and the pond. All that summer, when I was back home trying to get a grip on things, trying to assimilate his being gone (I would come to terms with it some other time, that summer I was having trouble just believing it), all that summer, I sat out in the yard at the edge of that grove of young birches and a couple of more substantial maples—and I couldn’t stop believing that Pierce (or a certain Pierceness) was there with me. Which was partly why I was having trouble accepting things, the sensation was so strong.
This is what I was remembering when I looked up from that passage and happened to glance over at the Filo-Fax, now visible on my seatmate’s lap, spread out forgotten on her briefcase, still opened to the week of October 24, while she read a bluecovered folder held close to her eyes (maybe her glasses were in the overnight bag). I wondered what it would be like to have a life so complicated it needed a Filo-Fax to organize it. The concept didn’t sound appealing to me. Every day was crammed with entries except for the day before (Monday, the 24th), which was at the top of the page and said simply, “Casco Industries, Bridgeport.” She’d gone up to Bridgeport, then, with her presentation or sales pitch or takeover bid, she’d stayed late impressing her fellow executives at dinner and after, spent the night in some hideous Hilton or Sheraton, and was on the way back to Manhattan. To the home office of the corporation that employed her? Or perhaps she traveled all over, presenting or pitching or gobbling up new accounts or whatever she did in a suit like that, in those shoes.
Idly, I speculated about her private life (she’d gone to Princeton, she played racquetball, she was involved with a banker named Jeff, and did she ever sleep with the various corporate managers etc that she met with on these trips?), eyeing her engagements for that week in October—gym date with someone, gym date with someone else (I imagined brutal racquetball games, then cold white wine in the sauna), lunch with someone, dinner w/R (three times—O.K., so his name wasn’t Jeff but Randy), a meeting with J.D.N.—and it took me a moment to understand what I was seeing: on Thursday the 27th, I read, “Orin Pierce, 1:30, Chez D.”
No. It couldn’t say that, of course. How funny, though: it looked like Orin Pierce. I tried to focus on it, leaning slightly too intimately close to her (blinkered by her blue folder, she didn’t seem to notice). Owen Price? Olive Pounce? Her handwriting was messy (I’m so busy) but artistic (I’m so special). The 1:30 was clear. Chez D. could have been Chez O. or Chez C. But Orin Pierce. It did seem to say Orin Pierce. No. It couldn’t possibly. Of course, the world could be full of Orin Pierces. But it was an unusual name, surely. I remembered how much Pierce hated Orin, and refused to answer to it. I rather liked Orin: an out of fashion, vaguely agricultural-sounding name (though Pierce grew up outside New Haven, the son of Yale professors), but distinctive, a name that could plausibly belong to someone famous—senator, novelist, historian. Pierce was an actor, so it was perfect. Orin Pierce. I bent over to do something to my shoe, and brought my face on a level with the yuppie’s lap: Orin Pierce? The Pierce was clear enough, Orin could have been Owen—no, there was definitely a dot, there had to be an i. Olin? Wasn’t there a corporation called Olin? Maybe it wasn’t a person at all, maybe it was another presentation, another pitch. Olin, Orwell, Olwin, Orin, Orin, Orin Pierce.
She snapped the Filo-Fax shut and returned it to her briefcase with the blue folder. I leaned back in my seat, my face toward the window, and realized I was shaking, sweating, there were tears in my eyes. I clutched my book with both hands, brought it to my chest, hugged it. Reflected in the window I could see the pale blob of my face, and, outside, an abandoned factory, the back of a shopping center, a Syrian luncheonette, a coin shop, a gas station …
Pierce, I thought. Pierce. I had to force myself not to cry out.
And then I thought: ask her. Excuse me, I couldn’t help but notice in your datebook, there was the name of someone I used to know, I wasn’t being nosy, really, it just happened to catch my eye, someone I used to know, who died a long time ago, twenty years ago last June, and I wondered if you could tell me—The woman stood up just then, laid her briefcase down on the seat, and reached for her bag. The crackling loudspeaker said, “Stamford station, next stop. Stamford next. Watch your step, please.”
I was seized with panic. I looked up at her. She was struggling with her bag, which was wedged under something else. When she reached her arms up, her blouse had come loose from her skirt; an inch of smooth white slip was showing above the waistband. I glanced down at the briefcase. I hadn’t noticed before the tag attached to it—same leather, plastic-covered, with a business card slipped inside: Alison Kaye, it said. Haver & Schmidt. The rest was in classy upper-case lettering too tiny to read, though I tried, bending down to my shoe again, leaning toward the tag until I was nearly on top of it.
As if she were determined to thwart me, she snatched up the briefcase, her bag recovered, and stepped out into the aisle behind a man in a bomber jacket, moving toward the front of the car: grey back, very straight, a bag dangling from each hand, blondish hair parting around her collar as she bent her head, then turn and down the steps: gone. While I sat there trembling.
I would have followed her off the train, into the Stamford station, out to her taxi or the waiting corporate limo or across the street to one of those gleaming office buildings Stamford is famous for, if there had been more time—or less time, because I think that what finally stopped me wasn’t just a failure to act quickly but a memory of twelve years ago, when I had my breakdown, when I thought I’d seen Robbie, thought he’d visited me, we’d had tea together, and cookies, and—what else? I’ve forgotten some of the details of that vision now. It was absurd, of course. I was suffering from the trip to Plover Island and from Emile’s coldness, all that had made me peculiar, made me see things, imagine things, my brother drinking tea with me, talking.
Twelve years ago I ended up in the hospital: Yale–New Haven, where I learned to make baskets. And there was no Robbie, of course, just as there was no Pierce. It can take a long time for that kind of shock to leave the system, my shrink said, holding my hand. Old Dr. Dalziel, whose hair had turned white (I was told by a nurse) during the six months it took his wife to die of cancer. “Those were terrible things that happened to you, Christine,” he said. “It’s certainly not unusual that they affected you strongly, that you haven’t been able to accept them, you’re still grieving.” His white hair was brushed back from his high pink forehead, and his hand that held mine was curled from arthritis. He said: “You’re not crazy, please stop saying that right now.”
Owen Price. Olive Prince.
I let my book fall into the lap. I lay back and closed my eyes, as my seatmate had when she first got on the train. Owen Price, Olive Prince. I breathed deeply, and calmed down. Stamford, yes. Then Greenwich. Then express to 125th Street, then Grand Central. Get on an uptown bus. Go to the Frick, meet Silvie at 1:00. Lunch. Talk. George Drescher at the Aurora Gallery 4:00. Then maybe a drink at the Oyster Bar and home on the 6:22, the 6:47 at the latest. Train, James, home, a bite of something good, and bed. Bed, and then it would be tomorrow, and things always look different tomorrow. Tell James about this? Maybe—so that he can grip my wrists and say, He’s dead, Christine. You know he is. He’s dead, don’t do this to yourself—the way Charlie did twenty years ago, yelling at me when I refused to believe it. Pierce is dead, Chris—dead dead dead.
I did calm down. I did begin to breathe regularly, the sweat dried on my back, I even returned to my book: Marcel and the madeleine and the tea—the scene, I figured out years ago with my shrink, that had probably been the inspiration for my own mad vision of Robbie coming to drink tea with me and take me into the past. I read, with pleasure and absorption and the love I always felt for the rich complex sentences, the elaborate and beautiful comparisons, the wistful remembering—but the business card stayed in my mind, crisp black letters on white: Alison Kaye, Haver & Schmidt.
And I kept hearing Pierce’s voice in my head: “There are two kinds of people in this world, Charles—people who get over things and people who don’t.”
Pierce was killed when his car went off a cliff in New Mexico. The car plunged 300 feet, straight down. The bodies were smashed beyond recognition—or almost. They were eventually found, retrieved, identified—teeth, whatever. I never got the details. The car, at any rate, was Pierce’s old VW, the one he had driven out there—the ancient rattletrap he’d owned for as long as I’d known him. There were two people with him, a man and a woman, no one I’d ever heard of. Think of that death, the spin into air, the going down. How long would it take? What would his last words be? “Holy shit” or “Help” or “Jesus Christ” or “No!” Or a wild “Whoopee” of delight.
Charlie broke it to me. I was living in a town in eastern Pennsylvania, north of Philadelphia—not far from Charlie’s home town, in fact. I had a job as an office temporary in an insurance firm where I stood all day in a huge, over-airconditioned room filing pink forms in tan folders in blue filing cabinets. My arms ached, my feet hurt. I had never hated a job so much, but the pay wasn’t bad, and I liked the shabby little town.
Charlie was still in New Haven, living in the Orange Street apartment he had shared with Pierce, doing what I don’t remember—working at Sterling Library, I think. He drove all the way down to tell me in person. He’d seen it on television—a tragedy so spectacular it might have made the news even if Pierce hadn’t been a local boy. Charlie knew I didn’t have a television. He showed up at my apartment—an odd little place in the back of an old gabled house, up a flight of rickety outside steps. He stood at my kitchen door, looking at me through the screen. I hadn’t heard him approach: I had my noisy fan on, it was a hot night. He said, “Christine,” and I looked up and ran to let him in.
I hadn’t seen him in months. He cried in my arms for a long time before he could tell me. I kept saying, “Charlie, what is it, what is it?”—terrified. I was afraid, for some reason, that he had done something awful—murdered someone, been involved in a hit-and run. I have no idea why I thought that. Charlie was a model citizen, he was sober, he was serious, he was controlled—that was his self, and that was also his curious, reassuring charm (that and his Huck Finn looks). He was a relentlessly good person, who had never done a mean or violent or even thoughtless thing in his life—maybe that was why my first thought was that he finally had. Seeing him cry was so horrible that it seemed anything could have happened—as if a building that’s stood for centuries (Chartres, Windsor Castle) should suddenly crumble, and collapse with a sigh that sounded human.
Finally, of course, he stopped crying. He blew his nose, went to the sink, washed his face and dried it on a dishtowel. I gave him a beer. He said, “Maybe you’d better have one too,” and then he sat down across the kitchen table and said, “Pierce is dead. I heard it on the news.”
Charlie and Pierce and I became friends in college. We were all from small towns—Pierce from a shoreline town in Connecticut, Charlie from eastern Pennsylvania, me from upstate New York. That was our bond at Oberlin, a small-town school where everyone else seemed to be from Manhattan or Chicago. Most of the other people we knew were going quietly crazy in Oberlin, Ohio, a dry town with a two-block main drag. There were a lot of desperate trips to Cleveland, all-night drives to Chicago, a lot of transferring out. Charlie and Pierce and I were perfectly content with the town, with our lives—most of the time with each other. The three of us were inseparable, especially during our last two years when so many of our friends had left.
Technically, I suppose I was Charlie’s girlfriend, but Pierce and I were best friends, together more than Charlie and I were, or Pierce and anybody else, any of his dozens of girls. And though we both loved Charlie—oh God, I did love him, Charlie and his red curls, his long legs, his sweet mouth—the truth was that we often considered him a third wheel. He didn’t get our jokes, he was always deadly earnest, and he used to suffer intensely when Pierce put on the old blues records he and I were both crazy about.
The only kind of music Charlie could stand was the rock and roll of his high school days, especially anything by the Everly Brothers. Neat music, he called it, and meant it literally: Pierce’s heroes (Big Bill Broonzy, Little Brother Montgomery, Otis Spann, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGee) represented messy music, rambling and guttural, raucous, mumbling, full of extempore piano runs and guitars pushed to their breaking point with bottlenecks and tricky fingering, full of sex and booze and bad trouble. Charlie found the easy harmonies, the polished voices, the tidy a-a-b-a form of the Everly Brothers’ songs soothing, and the point of music was to soothe, he said. We could never talk him out of it.
One of his great joys was to harmonize Everly Brothers songs with Pierce—something the two of them used to do on those nights when we were all sitting around Pierce’s room (Pierce always managed to get himself a single) and Pierce was getting fed up with Charlie. Pierce’s way of coping with occasions like that, when someone bugged him, was to come up with a way out of it that included the person: he’d reach out to, say, Charlie, and draw him in instead of trying to get rid of him. I admired that in Pierce, and when I sensed the tension building up with Charlie, I learned to wait peacefully, suppressing my own irritation with Charlie’s stodgy thick-headedness and babyish insistence on his own way, knowing that Pierce would smooth things out, that in a short time all would be well again with the three of us. It was at times like those that Pierce and Charlie would sing. “Bye Bye Love,” “Dream,” “Devoted to You,” and “I Wonder If I Care as Much”—they did them all, but those were their best numbers, the straightforward love songs. They had a gimmick. They were both very musical, with a real gift for close harmony, and what one of them would do, after they had sung straight for a while, was suddenly switch parts, tenor to baritone (Don to Phil), and the other would have to do the same without losing the harmony and without missing a note. They would do this endlessly, switching sometimes in the course of one phrase—Charlie’s lighter, slightly tinny but very pleasant voice (he took lessons at the Conservatory on the side, and sang with the Gilbert & Sullivan Society) barging in on Pierce’s rougher, deeper one—so that there would be a hiccupy quality to their singing, a strangely looping sound, as if someone were fooling around with the treble/bass switches on a stereo. I used to wait nervously for them to slip up, for a failure of attention or a lapse of technique from either of them—as if I were witnessing some complicated maneuver on which our lives depended. But once they got the hang of it, they were unable to throw each other off, and though sometimes when they sang their voices were wobbly with suppressed laughter, though they glared at each other across the room or gave each other the finger when a particularly difficult challenge had been met, neither of them, over the years, ever failed, that I recall.
Charlie was on the West Coast, working for the Los Angeles branch of a big New York literary agency. When I got off the train that day at Grand Central, I was tempted to call his agency on the off-chance that he was in New York. I felt that I needed to talk to someone about my experience on the train—my non-experience, my moment of crazy hope followed by a desolation that was like Pierce dying all over again.
But I did nothing. I had learned ways over the years to protect myself from looking foolish. And I didn’t really want to see Charlie. He had become bitter in middle age, the old earnest seriousness turned to high anxiety. His life had gone off the rails over and over; it was like one of the blues records he hated: trouble with women, trouble with jobs, trouble with money. And in his thirties he’d developed chronic asthma that laid him low, it seemed, every time he especially needed to be up for something.
There was a period when he called me a lot, when for several months both of us spent a lot of money we didn’t have on coast-to-coast phone calls that were designed mainly to see him through a rough time (he was trying to pay child support out of his unemployment checks) but that also worked the other way (this was not long after Emile left me), and I was still troubled by some of the confessions I had made to him. He talked a lot about our getting together when he was in New York, but we never did. Neither of us really, really wanted to make the doomed effort to reactivate what was once between us—not only the good old friendship (which would be pathetic, parodic, without Pierce) but the good old lust—the simple, supremely rational pleasure in each other’s bodies that had, in its way, consoled us for our failure, joint and individual, to fully possess Pierce—a desire, I realized after Pierce died, that was at the heart of our triangular friendship. I think Charlie realized this, too, at last, and that it embarrassed him, it made him awkward with me, it may even have been what embittered him and made his life so difficult, it may even have brought on his asthma.
I hadn’t seen him in years, and as I walked up Lexington Avenue I knew I didn’t want to see him then, either, and certainly, when I thought about it, I didn’t want to tell him about the woman on the train. I imagined him turning away in disgust, in sorrow, in anger—impossible to predict the exact nature of his reaction, only that it would be negative. I knew he would tell me I needed help, he’d load me down with jargon, with praise for his new doctor and his new medication, and would insist on recommending some New York psychotherapist or other. Charlie always thought therapy would solve everything, even though after years of seeing people on both coasts he was, in my opinion, more screwed-up than ever.
So I walked down 43rd and over to Madison to catch a bus uptown. As always in New York, I felt that disconcerting but far from unpleasant blend of excitement and apprehension: anything could happen here, good or bad. I had once been mugged on Sixth Avenue, around the corner from the Museum of Modern Art, at dusk—my purse ripped from my shoulder, a knife coming out of nowhere to slit the skin of my arm along its length like the peel of a banana—and had had the odd, uniquely big-town experience of helplessness when passers-by recoiled from me instead of coming to my assistance.
On the other hand, at a hot-dog stand near Rockefeller Center, I once ran into Nancy Doyle, a childhood friend who had moved to Texas—someone I had never thought to see again anywhere, and there she was, looking like her fifth-grade self only bigger and better dressed, reaching into her bag for change, then glancing up to see me and breaking into a laugh of amazed delight that matched my own.
And then once, in front of a boutique called La Vie En Rose, an elderly man had come running up to me and screamed—a shrill, soprano screech one would not have thought possible from aged and masculine vocal chords—and hung onto my arm screaming while I stared in helpless horror at his rotting yellow teeth and whitestubbled chin and mad, milky eyes, until two policemen pushed through the gathering crowd, detached him, and led him away.
It was a warm fall afternoon, with that rare, intense light you find only in cities where the sun (I may be imagining this) concentrates itself in the spaces between skyscrapers. Out of midtown, the light changes, becomes hazier and whiter and more expansive, and when the bus got to 60th Street, I got off, suddenly wanting to be out in it, and walked the rest of the way, up Fifth Avenue along the park. I met Pierce in New York for a weekend once, when he was in graduate school at Yale and I was living in southern Pennsylvania with my old roommate Bridget, working as a waitress, restless and unhappy, missing my uncomplicated college days. Pierce and I stayed in the Village, in a grungy little studio that belonged to a cousin of his who was out of town. We intended, finally, after all those years, to make love, but we got drunk and silly instead, and smoked too much pot, and ended up rummaging in the kitchen and eating cans of soup and sardines, then falling asleep on the floor, and the cousin and her boyfriend came back a day early, and we never did do what all our years of intimacy, Pierce said, had been leading up to. Instead we parted at the Port Authority, leaning against each other, unable to stop laughing at the weariness, the frustration, the comedy of it all.
And so New York, of course, always reminded me of Pierce, as so many things did, but, walking up Fifth Avenue in the sunshine, I made a big effort to forget about him and think about something else. By the time I got to the Frick I was doing quite well. I was thinking about Silvie, Emile’s mother, whom I would see later. She had called me and invited me to lunch, as she did three or four times a year. She had said she wanted to talk about Denis. I always had trouble thinking coherently about my son, but I liked contemplating my ex-mother-in-law.
I had dressed the way I had for her sake. Sneakers and jeans were my usual costume, but Silvie liked women to wear skirts, and she didn’t approve of sneakers except for running, and she didn’t approve of running. I was wearing tights and Chinese slippers with a long, flounced, red-and-black plaid skirt and a black sweater, and I knew Silvie would like the way I looked. In spite of the divorce and what she (prompted by Emile) considered my ongoing instability, she continued in general to approve of me. She considered me, I think, quaint in a peculiarly American way. She liked it that I didn’t wear fur or leather (though she wore plenty of both and was partial to blue fox, in which she looked fabulous) or make-up (in my forties I started wearing blusher and a little mascara, but she never noticed), and she liked my being a painter. She was especially happy that I didn’t look “mainstream,” the catch-all English word she had adopted to describe, slightly inaccurately, what she considered dull or conservative. The first time she met James she told me afterward that he was “certainly not a mainstream kind of fellow”—the word, with her accent, coming out something like “menstrim.”
As I walked, I practiced my short collection of secure French phrases, recalled from one year of high school French and reinforced by six and a half years with Emile, so that I could use them on Silvie, who was charmed when anyone spoke French, however imperfectly, in her presence. Bonjour, Silvie. Comment ça va? Il fait beau aujourd’hui, n’est-ce pas? Au revoir, Silvie. A la prochaine! Emile had refused to speak French with me. He said my accent was terrible, but the real reason, I think, was that he wanted people to see me as hopelessly, provincially American so that by contrast he would appear even more cultured, more cosmopolitan, and (though he grew up in New York and, in those days, spoke English far better than he spoke French) more delightfully foreign than he really was. (He smoked Gauloises and even had a little goatee, and he occasionally tried on berets in stores, though he never went so far as to actually buy one.)
Silvie, however, told me my accent was quite good and I should cultivate it. I should travel to France. I should take a course. For all her chic, Silvie was very motherly, with a strong desire to improve people, to perfect them, and every time she saw me she made suggestions not only about my French but about my hair, my career, my relationship with James.
Mais bien sûr, Silvie, je doit porter mes cheveux comme je désireIl faut que