A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me Read online

  The new wife might have been pregnant then, though she wasn’t showing; their son must be a teenager now. I hear her on the radio all the time—maybe you do too. She’s the one who does that two-minute spot every day on NPR: A Word in Edgewise, explaining what she calls the “always-surprising” origins of common words and phrases. The theme music is Tom Tom Club’s “Wordy Rappinghood”—that’s what she calls herself—and it runs on something like a hundred stations all over the country. Pictures on her website suggest she hasn’t lost her looks, though who knows how recent they are. So in every way he traded up. And really, God bless him. Did you know that the word “maudlin”—but of course you do.

  2

  My husband was still feeling sorry for himself when my editor sent me to interview a once-almost-famous architect. The common council in Peekskill had approved his plan for converting a block of the old downtown into galleries and artists’ lofts; as if this weren’t enough booster appeal, he’d grown up in the Hudson Valley and had recently moved back after years in the city. Said to be an amateur musician, and a friend of Philip Roth’s. Two thousand words, maybe three if he turned out to be a good talker. I’d never heard of this man—how many architects has anybody heard of?—but back in the seventies the Times had called him “a charter member of a loosely allied group of younger practitioners of quite wide diversity who are known as postmodernists.” He was in his forties then, which I guess was the Times’s idea of younger, and had done “important” buildings in Düsseldorf, Turin, São Paulo, Shanghai and Cleveland. He’d gotten his degree from Columbia, and went back there to teach. Married to a viola player with the Steve Reich Ensemble. The most recent clip I could find was from 1989.

  When I came into the coffee shop in Rhinebeck, a bell dinged above the door and a man at a corner table looked up from reading, lifted his chin, got to his feet and pulled out a chair for me. I’d said I’d be wearing a maroon silk blouse—actually rayon, but I thought I’d keep it simple for him—and carrying a leather shoulder bag. He’d told me to look for “a graying gentleman with a Mets cap”; I’m afraid my piece described him as “a tall, vigorous man, with hawklike features, whose restless energy belies his sixty-five years.” (In time to come, he would wake me from a nap and say, “Mind if I belie you?” But let’s not get ahead of our story.) He had broad hands, long fingers, no ring.

  Before leaving home, I’d undone my top button and leaned into the mirror to check the effect: just enough to make a graying gentleman talkative. But after an initial up-and-down—what man can refrain?—he kept his eyes on my face or on the tabletop, drumming his fingers on a copy of The New York Review of Books (such an obvious prop that I didn’t mention it in the piece) and massaging, with thumb and forefinger, the bridge of his not-all-that-hawklike nose.

  I walked him through his influences: everything, he said, from Bauhaus to the outhouse—a line he’d used in one of the old interviews I’d read. How did he define postmodernism? He didn’t, but I was welcome to have a go at it. When he and Philip Roth got together, did they talk about writing, or architecture, or both? “Now where on earth did you hear that?” he said. “I’m an admirer, of course, but—you’re not thinking of Philip Glass?” Was he still teaching? Only by negative example. What did he do between projects? Well, he used not to be between projects, but these days he went to his workroom and painted. What were his paintings like? If I were to see them, I’d understand why he’d become an architect. Could I see them? No. What prompted him to leave New York? Prompted? That sounded rather Pavlovian. He’d had a weekend house here for…God, how many years? Let’s just say it had gotten time to simplify. And of course he’d spent his childhood in this part of the world; he supposed I knew his father had taught at Bard during its glory years, which wasn’t to say Leon wasn’t doing a magnificent job. He’d always thought there was something strange and magical about the landscape—in fact, if you went back to the Hudson River School…

  I got him off that as soon as I decently could—my editor hated what he called thumbsucking—and onto the project in Peekskill. “Yes, yes,” he said. “Down to business. Good Lord, Peekskill, what can one say? It was a bit of a five-finger exercise—actually, don’t quote me on that. Let’s say it was a way of giving back to the community.”

  “Oh?” I said. “So are you giving them a hometown discount?”

  That made him look at me.

  “Aren’t you devilish,” he said. “Peekskill’s a rat hole. Not without its dingy charms, but I hardly see it as the new SoHo. Is that the scoop you were looking for? Stir up a little small-town hoo-hah? Tell me something—am I right in thinking you’re as bored with all this as I am? If you’ve got what you need, let’s you and I go have a drink.”

  All these years later, I can’t remember what I thought I was doing, if thinking came into it at all. He was intelligent, still handsome, obviously complicated, sufficiently knowing to discern that I was bored, though that probably required no great discernment. My husband would never have called Peekskill a rat hole, which is exactly what it was. I might have thought that an hour’s worth of flirtation would do us both good. He seemed lonely—where was the wife?—but too civilized to embarrass himself. Not having been touched in weeks, not since the brooding about the baseball book started, I might simply have wanted to feel my power over a man.

  So I followed his shiny new pickup truck—naturally I liked the pickup truck—to a cinder-block bar outside of town, with neon signs in the windows, a pool table and a single TV. “I thought this place might be noir enough for a hard-boiled newshound like you,” he said. “Whiskey? Or do you want a girl drink?”

  “Those are my choices?” I said.

  “I certainly wouldn’t recommend the wine list here. And I don’t see you as a beer drinker.”

  “In that case,” I said. He ordered us two Jack Daniel’s.

  “So is this your regular hang?” I said.

  “Oh, just when I’m feeling particularly louche. All the bars in Dutchess County were like Duffy’s Tavern when I was a kid—you don’t know what that is. Okay, here’s my favorite joke. ‘Have you lived here all your life, old-timer?’ ‘Not yet.’ ”

  “That’s your favorite?”

  “Only because it’s not funny. May I grill you for a change? You’re young, obviously bright, and here you are. Writing for the Hudson Valley Whosis.”

  “Is that a question? I might say here you are.”

  “Meaning why am I not in Barcelona or some goddamn place, campaigning for the Pritzker Prize? I know what I am at this point. I like just going up to my workroom, putting on some music and painting the hours away. And I like hearing the birds in the morning. What do you like? What would you like?”

  “I don’t know. To get through the day?”

  “Aren’t you a romantic.” He emptied his glass—they were little ones—and raised two fingers. “Sorry, I don’t mean to make light of it. It’s hell to be young. But it does get better. Until it gets worse.”

  “How does it get better?”

  “I suppose it’s what Yeats said—find your work and choose your mate. Does anyone read Yeats anymore? Or maybe it’s choose your work and find your mate. I see you’ve already got half of it covered.” He touched a finger to my wedding band. “Or is this just a professional accessory, to keep the men at bay?”

  “I’m not exactly beset,” I said.

  “Let me not believe that.” The bartender set two more glasses down in front of him, and he pushed one over to me. “But. It’s a principle of mine not to interfere with happy marriages.”

  “If that’s a question,” I said, “yes. Very. Your wife’s a musician?”

  “Well,” he said, “you’ve got the musician part right.”

  “Oh,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

  “Yeats didn’t say anything about keeping your mate. Ah well, tales from the crypt.”

  “You have children?”

  “A daughter. She’s all grown up. Well, obvio
usly. She fancies herself a cellist—electric cello. What they call noise music. She takes after her mother.”

  “And you,” I said. “Do you see her?”

  “That sounds like an accusation,” he said. “She lives out in Oregon, in Portland, with her young lady. Whom I like. Actually, I try not to approve too much. I’m afraid she’ll take up with some young man just to spite me. And what does your young man do?”

  “He’s got a book he’s working on.” At this point, it was still the line I was taking.

  “Ah.” He picked up his glass. “I can see it all. Well, here’s to his book.”

  —

  My husband was out playing hoops when I got home, so I opened a bottle of Dos Equis to account for the liquor on my breath and started transcribing. On the tape, the architect was talking about Thomas Cole’s The Voyage of Life, about playing with a jazz trio at a restaurant in Poughkeepsie, about the music he put on while he painted: first “The Washington Post March”—“to nerve me up”—then something like the Schubert quartets, then maybe some Verdi highlights, building up to the big boys, Mahler or Wagner, before winding down with Miles Davis. “You must think I’m inventing all this to make myself sound interesting,” he said. I typed that in, then remembered that my editor hated pieces that broke the fourth wall. I would have gone to see him play for a colorful on-scene lede, but since the piece was due the next day, I went with his how-it-all-began story.

  “I was, I don’t know, ten, eleven, something like that, my parents took me down to the city and we saw The Palm Beach Story—you’ve seen it, yes? I fell in love with that apartment where Claudette Colbert lived—that duplex with the balcony? Of course I also fell in love with Claudette Colbert. At any rate. After the movie I begged them to take me to 968 Park Avenue—never forgotten that address—so we could see the place and of course they had to tell me it was just a stage set—it didn’t really exist anywhere. So I just began drawing pictures of it from memory, figuring out where the different rooms would be, so forth and so on.”

  Ever since, I wrote, translating visionary spaces into the realm of the concrete and the practical has been—but I’ll spare you, and me, the rest. At least I’d never have to see this man again.

  —

  “He didn’t give you much,” my husband said when I showed him the first draft.

  “It’s a puff piece,” I said. “Isn’t that what we do? Should I have asked about his divorce?”

  “He’s divorced?”

  “Stop the presses,” I said.

  “Okay, so you can’t put that in, but I’m not seeing the human side.”

  “Like does he shop at Kmart?”

  “Something like that, yeah. A little texture.”

  “This isn’t The New Yorker.”

  “You do your best wherever you are,” he said. “That’s how you get out of wherever you are.”

  “I’m okay with where I am.”

  “You?” he said. “You’re twice as unhappy as I am. You just didn’t like the guy, so you’re making him sound like a pompous ass. All this shit about Washington Irving—and what’s the Hudson River School?”

  “I’m quoting what he said. They’re going to cut it anyway. Fine. I didn’t like him much.”

  “Well, it comes through.”

  “What if I wanted it to?” I said.

  “Then I guess it’s a win-win. Except for anybody who has to read it. He’ll probably like it—he seems like he’s into hearing himself talk.”

  “It’s not that bad, is it?”

  “It’s okay. It’s not your best.”

  “You’re right,” I said. “It’s not up there with Neil Diamond at the Mid-Hudson Civic Center. I can’t believe this is my life.”

  “Then you need to do something about it,” he said.

  “So you don’t think that if I whine loud enough, God will hear me?”

  “It hasn’t worked so far.”

  “I’m going to pretend you didn’t say that,” I said.

  —

  The architect called the day the piece came out, to say he thought it had turned out well—not to thank me, mind you, one didn’t thank a professional for doing her job. But if I and my young man would care to—

  “My husband?”

  “How many young men do you have?” he said. “Listen, may I take you both to dinner? I’d have you come to the house, but I thought I should spare you the bachelor cookery. And whatever ghostly presences. Mexican suit you? There’s a place up in this neck of the woods where they make their own tamales. If you’re willing to come that far.”

  “My husband will be thrilled—he misses the food in Albuquerque. And he’s spent a lot of time in Latin America.”

  “And you? Less than thrilled, I’m assuming.”

  “I’m happy to get out,” I said.

  “I know the feeling,” he said. “Two of us happy, one of us thrilled—a couple of margaritas and they’ll have to strap us into our chairs.”

  —

  We met him at a place in Tivoli, with a southwestern-looking lizard on its hanging sign, where we drank margaritas out on the terrace. “Your wife tells me,” he said, “that you’re at work on a book.”

  “You need to stop telling everybody that,” my husband said, then turned back to the man. “Not a real happy story.”

  “Well, but you’ll go on to something else. Hell, I got fired off my first project—some car dealer wanted to put a beach house on this little narrow lot in Amagansett, and I came up with a design that looked like Oldenburg’s clothespin. I suppose it was my little way of showing contempt. Anyhow. What sorts of things do you write about?”

  “I don’t know, just whatever interests me.”

  “And what interests you?”

  “I can’t really put it in a nutshell—stories about people, I guess.”

  “Well, then you’ll never run short of material. So I take it you’re in favor.”

  “Of?”

  “People. Or do you think the jury’s still out?”

  “Are you asking me seriously?”

  “Should we order?” I said.

  “Now, see?” he said. “Our young lady has the right priorities. ‘Grub first, then ethics.’ I forget who said that—you don’t happen to remember? It has sort of a thirties ring to it.”

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  “No, why should you? Grub first, then obscure quotations. Anything on here appeal to you? I’m afraid this is more Tex than Mex. Not quite what you’re used to.”

  “Actually, I haven’t spent much time in Mexico,” my husband said.

  “Then maybe we’ll squeak by. Why don’t we just pick out a bunch of this and that and share? Do you both eat meat? One has to ask these days. We should have another round, too.”

  “He’s even a worse asshole than you made him out to be,” my husband said on the drive home. “He’s into you, though. At first I thought he was gay.”

  “Why would you think he’s into me? He talked to you the whole time.”

  “Yeah, exactly. Come on, I’m not stupid. Don’t you be. And like how he kept talking about how old he was? It was so obvious.”

  “If you’re right, that’s really sad.”

  “You know I’m right. Are you teasing his cock or what’s going on?”

  “Are we really going to get into a thing about this? I just thought it would be interesting.”

  “As in, for a change?”

  “I can’t believe you’re doing this,” I said. “Listen, you want me to drive? Those margaritas were pretty strong.”

  “This is not a good man,” he said. “And I have to tell you, it scares the shit out of me when you’re acting.”

  —

  The day after we’d had dinner, he called me at the paper, to thank me and my young man for coming out with him, then waited a week to call again. He happened to be on his way north from the city, and did I have time for a quick drink? I could hear my husband typing in the next cubicle. “That soun
ds fine,” I said.

  “Wonderful. You’re welcome to bring your young man along, but I don’t think he likes me much.”

  “Right,” I said. “That’s probably not necessary.”

  “Even better then. Five thirty too early for you?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “And what’s a good place? I don’t really know this town.”

  The typing stopped. “It’s hard to say just now.”

  “Surely there must be—ah. God, I’m a little slow today. You’re not alone.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Okay, let me think. I passed an Applebee’s coming in on Route Nine. You know where it is? We can go someplace from there.”

  “Right,” I said. “Well, thanks.”

  “Copy desk giving you shit?” my husband said.

  “No, just something I needed to find out about.”

  “It was that guy.”

  “For Christ’s sake,” I said. “Is that why you’ve been so weird?”

  “I was going to ask you the same thing.”

  “This is too stupid to even discuss,” I said. “Anyway—” I nodded over at the editor, who was talking on the phone.

  “Then what time are you coming home?” he said.

  “Not late,” I said. “I was supposed to meet somebody for a quick drink. Probably seven, seven thirty? We could order in and maybe have a little date night after.”

  “Who are you meeting?”

  “Andrea,” I said. As soon as I said it, I realized it would have been more in character for me to resent being questioned. “I used to work with her at Newsweek? She’s taking the train up.”

  “Mind if I come along?”

  “It’s going to be a lot of girl talk. But sure, if you want.” Worst case, I could get away and call the man, then take my husband to a bar and keep checking my watch. Andrea’s such a flake—that’s what I’d say. How could he not believe in Andrea?