A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me Read online

  “No, on second thought I think I’ll bag it.”

  “You weren’t testing me, were you?”

  “What would be the use?” he said.

  The man was waiting outside the Applebee’s in his truck, his window down, reading the Times. I’d put on a halter top that morning—it was such a hot day, and I hadn’t thought I’d have to see anybody. Now I wished I’d had time to drive home and change. “Let’s just go here,” I said. “I shouldn’t stay long.”

  “I suppose their liquor’s the same as anybody else’s,” he said. “You’ll have to provide the ambience.” He opened his door, stood up on tiptoes and stretched his arms over his head. His T-shirt came up and exposed an inch of still-lean waistline, which might have been the idea. “It’s certainly the last place anybody’d come looking for you.”

  “My husband doesn’t spy on me. If that’s what you mean.”

  “No, I can’t imagine your putting up with that. Still, a booth might be in order.”

  “You’re making this sound like something it isn’t,” I said.

  “Good for you,” he said. “You’ve spared us the preliminaries.” He put a palm on my bare shoulder blade. Up to that point, I hadn’t thought I was seriously considering this man. “Suppose we go in and talk about it.”

  When the waitress had set down our drinks and moved off, he said, “Since you’re pressed for time—cheers, by the way. It’s obvious that I’ve taken a shine to you, and it’s obvious that I’m much too old, and of course you have your young man—my God, you look like you’ve just been shot. This is much more embarrassing for me.”

  “You don’t seem that embarrassed,” I said.

  “I’m not, oddly enough. The situation is embarrassing, yes. But basically you’re either going to tell me to go peddle my papers or you’re not. Which should be clarifying. My position is just that I’d like some time with you.”

  “That would be difficult,” I said.

  “Hmm,” he said. “I’ve heard stronger expressions of outrage.”

  “I’ll bet you have.”

  “Oh sure, you can typecast me if you want to. You might take it as a compliment that I’m not trying to sneak up on you. Just one person to another.”

  “Except that I’m married.”

  “As was I.”

  “And I love my husband.”

  “I’d think the worse of you if you didn’t. I’m not trying to make your life any harder.” He picked up the glossy menu, with color photos of steaks. “God, this place is what hell’s going to be like.”

  “Why would you think my life is hard?” I said.

  “ ‘Getting through the day’? Isn’t that what you said? Sounds like joy unbounded.”

  “So what would we do? If I could spend time with you? Apparently you’re good at sitting around and drinking.”

  “Not much escapes you, does it?” he said. “I was thinking that what we did would be entirely up to us. We could start out just being kind to each other.”

  —

  The day I’d interviewed him, it had been a muggy Sunday afternoon in July, and I’d gotten caught in traffic on the southbound Taconic, as if I were a weekender, heading back to my husband, drunk in my poor little Tercel, my overtanned left arm out the window—I hate air-conditioning—among the BMWs with their opaque glass, my clunky espadrilles slipping off the pedals. The cars ahead had come to a standstill, for no reason I could see, and I worked the things off; the toenails I’d painted that morning, to be a summer fun girl, looked childish.

  The day I drove to Vermont to meet him, the maple trees were blazing. He’d wanted me to fly with him to Burlington—it was only half an hour from Newburgh—but I thought I might need to make a getaway, and there was the million-to-one chance of my husband’s seeing the Tercel wherever I left it. In my purse, on the seat next to me, were the condoms I’d bought at a drugstore in Fair Haven—out of superstition, I’d waited to cross the state line—on the chance he proved not to be a gentleman, and a bottle of Astroglide to prove I wasn’t a lady. It had been more than two months, just taking the train down to meet for early dinners in the city or to walk around the Whitney and the Modern. We saw a Mets game, and a trashy production of Timon of Athens in the park, which we took turns abusing over drinks in the Algonquin lobby. Nothing untoward, beyond the lies I’d had to tell my husband. So I’d given this due consideration.

  “It’s going to be peak weekend,” he’d said on the phone. “Why don’t you come up and see the leaves with me? My friend Craig’s giving me the use of his house on Lake Champlain. He’s going to Bordeaux for a month.”

  “God,” I said. “I want his life. I want your life.”

  “I’d make that swap,” he said. “But you’d better do the math before you sign on. Anyway, it’s a big house. You wouldn’t have to sleep anywhere you didn’t want to.”

  —

  “Have you been in bed with a senior citizen before?” he said that first night. “I’m probably good for about once, so we should make this count.”

  —

  I continued living with my husband, so this was now called “having an affair.” Nobody had cellphones back then, and I kept quarters in my wallet for those trips to 7-Eleven to pick up Beer Nuts or half-and-half or dish soap; it seemed we were always running out of something. The in-laws flew in from New Mexico for Thanksgiving and I cooked my first, and last, turkey. His mother said she was too young to be called Grandma (she was fifty-six), so maybe—when the time came—she could be Nana. “Just ignore her,” my husband said as we were getting in bed. “Thirty-five’s not old. We’ve still got plenty of time.”

  “Tell me you’re not serious,” I said. “I thought we were clear about this. Would you turn that out? It’s hurting my eyes.”

  “Better?” he said. “That was a pretty long time ago. I sort of thought…”

  “What?” I said. “Okay, let’s hear all of it.”

  “This obviously isn’t a good time.”

  “So what was your plan? Start working on me when I found my first gray hair?” Which I already had, though I hadn’t showed it to him.

  “You’re being paranoid,” he said. “Can’t we even have a conversation?”

  “Why don’t you have your conversation with Nana,” I said. “Maybe she’s still ovulating.”

  Driving back to Croton after dropping his parents at LaGuardia, I told him there were things I needed to think over.

  “Okay, I saw this one coming,” he said. “Male or female?”

  “Please,” I said. “Are you a child?”

  “If it’s the old guy, I guess you got a little of both.”

  “It’s not anybody,” I said. “It’s what I told you.”

  “Listen to her go,” he said. “Just keep me up to date on your thinking.”

  —

  I asked Andrea—yes, there really was an Andrea—if I could come down and sleep on her sofa for a while, just until I could figure things out. “Great,” she said, “so I’m supposed to put you up until the millennium?” She’d left Newsweek to be a features editor at Mirabella and lived a few blocks from my old apartment. I went back to the reverse commute and the alternate-side parking; some nights, driving around looking for a space, it felt like I’d never left. I brought a suitcase full of clothes and a box of books, all anybody needed, and left the rest of my stuff hostage. The architect was after me to move into his house, but I’d told him what I’d told my husband (things that needed thinking over) and that I’d see him only on weekends. Every Saturday I’d drive up to Rhinebeck and spend hours in his bed, where, results aside, I liked how greedy he was for me; he humored my craziness by letting me hide my car in his garage. Then, come Sunday afternoon, I’d stop off and meet my husband for a miserable late lunch at the Croton Diner, our old spot. Of course I told him I’d just driven up from the city. I don’t know why I put us through this. One time I forgot to put my ring back on—he always wore his—and he just looked at my hand and said
nothing.

  At Christmas, my husband went back to Albuquerque, where I imagine he and Nana had plenty to say to each other, and the morning after New Year’s—his plane got in that afternoon—I drove up, bought boxes at U-Haul, rented a storage unit and packed the rest of my belongings. I left a letter for him on the kitchen counter, signed “In sadness.” Exhibit A, I suppose, when I come before the Judgment Seat. The part of the letter that was true said that I didn’t know where I’d eventually be going, and that I’d keep trying to make things as easy as possible at work.

  The man—what do I call him at this stage? “My lover” is sick-making, and there doesn’t seem to be a male equivalent of “mistress.” (Wordy Rappinghood, help me out here!) At any rate, he’d gone to Portland to visit his daughter, and my mother was in Costa Rica, with a friend whose husband had just died, so I treated Andrea to a Christmas dinner at Café des Artistes; she was sentimental about being alone with nowhere to go. I couldn’t really afford a second bottle of the seventy-dollar red wine, but one hadn’t been enough, and it was good of her to listen to my back-and-forthings when she hadn’t had a boyfriend—even in the loosest sense of the term—for three years, unable as she was to fake being either pretty or forward or biddable. And the waiter seemed to have low expectations of two single women, so I was determined to rack up an even more impressive total on which to tip him a fuck-you twenty-five percent.

  “Why don’t you pass along whichever one you decide you don’t want,” she said. “Kidding.”

  “I know how obnoxious I sound,” I said. “I should just go back, shouldn’t I? And chalk this other thing up to whatever.”

  “He is awfully old. But if you weren’t happy…”

  “Jesus,” I said, “if that’s the yardstick.”

  —

  I drove up to Rhinebeck for New Year’s Eve; he told me the boys were calling him pussy-simple because he’d backed out of a gig at some country club so we could spend the evening together.

  “Listen,” he said, “I bought us champagne, but how about a drink drink?”

  “I hate champagne.”

  “Good—we’ll give it to the poor.” He got up and went to the kitchen, leaving me on the sofa hugging my bare knees, my bare feet on the soft leather cushions. A matching sofa faced this one, on the other side of a coffee table that had been an old wooden door in Guatemala, with plate glass over its carvings of droopy-necked birds. Two walls were all books; on another, he had a small painting by Richard Diebenkorn, whom I’d had to look up. The Diebenkorn, he said, was the one truly precious thing he’d been able to hang on to.

  “I still think you’re crazy,” he said, handing me a glass of scotch with no ice. At home, he drank smoky single malt—he called it “premier cru”—with just a little water, to bring out the nose. It tasted like iodine, but I was getting used to it. “I’m rattling around in this big place by myself, and you want to rent some little studio where you don’t have enough room to swing a cat. You can live here for nothing—costs the same to run this place whether it’s just me or a whole seraglio. We could manage to stay out of each other’s hair. When we wanted to.”

  “You realize I’m still married.”

  “Oh, well, married,” he said. “In that case, forget the whole thing. We don’t want to call down Jove’s lightning bolts.”

  “I just mean it’s weird enough as it is, going in and seeing him every day.”

  “So quit going in. You don’t want to be there anyway. ‘The vibrant street life of downtown Peekskill’?”

  “Now you’re being a prick,” I said. “I told you they wrote in ‘vibrant.’ ”

  “You could be doing your own work,” he said. There was his insidiousness: a less clever man would have said should be. “Call me utopian, but it seems to me that solutions suggest themselves to all these problems.”

  “It looks easy to you.”

  “That it does,” he said. “Here, drink up. Do we really have to wait till the ball drops to hit the hay?”

  In the morning, I made him take me to the loft above the carriage barn, which he called “my workshop of filthy creation.” It smelled of coffee and turpentine, and his drafting board was shoved into a corner; a blank canvas stood on an easel. He’d been weird about his paintings, and I’d thought they might be sick and sinister—like Francis Bacon or somebody, not that this would have put me off—but they turned out to be bright generic abstractions, a little Klee here, a little Kandinsky there, a lot of Mondrian. “Here you have it,” he said. “The inside of an utterly conventional mind. Are you still speaking to me?”

  —

  When I came back to work after the holiday, my husband was typing in his cubicle. I found the note I’d written him my under my keyboard, with a Post-it reading You might want this for your memory book. I took it to be his pissy way of giving me his blessing.

  3

  It was snowing the day I moved in, and when I pulled up to his house, he was shoveling a path from the front steps to the sidewalk, wearing his red plaid barn jacket—no gloves, no hat—and blowing out clouds of breath in the cold. I had signed on to live with an old man who might be prone to giving himself a heart attack. He helped carry in my suitcases and boxes: all I owned then was my clothes, my books and papers, some CDs—I didn’t have to be told that I’d be listening to them with earphones—and my computer. I came to him with seven thousand dollars in the bank and six thousand in credit card debt.

  I’d quit my regular job at the paper to kick in a column from time to time—who worried about health insurance back then?—and Andrea promised to hook me up with freelance work. A borderline kept woman, fine. But to live in a grown-up house, with a grown-up man? To be able to devote yourself to writing before it was too late? Otherwise I’d be like my mother in twenty years—a postsexual groupie going on about poets she’d “studied with” in some summer workshop. “Let’s just say it’s not your all-time most feminist move,” Andrea said. “I mean, I’d grab it, not that anybody’s offering. But you should probably think about making a splash sooner rather than later.”

  —

  So how rich was he? It didn’t occur to me to ask—how would you? To me it was magic money, like what your parents have when you’re a child. Once in a while, early on, I’d look at a price on a menu or on an opera ticket and think I was in over my head, but you get used to not thinking. The house in Rhinebeck had been their weekend place, before what he called “the Great Awakening”; his wife had kept their loft on White Street. He’d inherited ten hilltop acres from his father, several towns to the south, on which he’d always meant to build someday, but his wife was a city girl, so they’d compromised on this place: a three-story house with a mansard roof, from which you could walk to the little shops and restaurants. Rhinebeck hadn’t been unbearable back then, he said, but you could already see where it was headed. He wanted to take me to see the hilltop in the spring, after mud season, when you could get up the dirt road. The view, he said, was heartbreaking.

  Of course he professed belief in the room-of-one’s-own thing—after the seventies, what man didn’t?—and he let me have my choice of places in which, he said, the soul might select her society then shut the door. (He didn’t really say that; it’s a little wink and nod to my mother. I don’t know why I’m being so pissy.) How about the guest room on the second floor? The parlor off the living room? The finished room in the basement—more space, though not much daylight? Anywhere, really, except his daughter’s old room: I could have the run of the house, since he went out to the carriage barn every morning at six thirty. I took what was once a maid’s room, at the back of the top floor, with an arched ceiling and a dormer window looking out into the branches of a tree—which he said would eventually resume life as a maple. Together we moved the mission table from the parlor, up the broad stairs to the second floor, then, on its end, up the narrow stairs to the third. I asked if I could hang one of his paintings on my wall—he had none of them up in the house—and he
told me to take my pick; that would guarantee he’d never intrude. He insisted on buying me an ergonomic desk chair in the city, and a narrow brass bed at an antique shop in town, for napping or—not to be grim, but these things will happen—in the event of a spat. I noted that he was imagining me as the one who’d have to go huffing out of the conjugal bed, but after all wasn’t it his conjugal bed?

  He said this was to be my home too, so we’d put out any favorite objects I’d brought and rearrange furniture to suit my taste. But his taste was better than mine. He did buy a new mattress for the conjugal bed, which he needn’t have done: I wasn’t that imaginative. Her dishes, her kitchen stuff—it was just dishes and kitchen stuff, though one blue spatterware bowl got on my nerves, I don’t know why, and I put it out of sight on the top shelf of the cupboard. The glazed Chinese tea jars, the brass umbrella stand embossed with a comely lady in colonial costume and the pair of Staffordshire dogs might have been hers, or might just have been bric-a-brac that had come with the house. If he’d had pictures of her and their daughter on display, he must have put them away before I’d visited for the first time; how long before wasn’t my business. I kept my own pictures in a plastic storage box in my room of one’s own, along with old check registers, bank statements, tax returns and floppy disks.

  I did my writing up there, or tried to, like the poor little second wife in Rebecca—the narrator with no name, which is a famous thing about Rebecca—behind the fancy desk in the morning room with no letters to write. Some days he’d bring lunch up to me: slices of sourdough bread, spread with goat cheese and tapenade. After I’d worked awhile, I’d take a book down to the window seat in the living room, where I must have made a pretty picture for him, my bare feet on the green velvet cushion, frowning away over Susan Sontag, Joan Didion, Elizabeth Hardwick—he took care to recommend what he surely thought of as women writers—and The Art of the Personal Essay. He had read my first attempt at a short story and told me my gift was for nonfiction.

  In addition to whatever assignments I got from Andrea—not many, after I told her I wouldn’t do celebrity pieces—I set myself a goal of writing a thousand words a day: just whatever happened to be on my mind. Of course he encouraged me—“You’ll see what it turns into”—and I’ll be charitable and assume he had no intention of exposing what pitiful society my soul had selected. If you want to know my thoughts about how Starbucks coffee shops and Barnes & Noble stores (topics du jour back then) both favored the same snobby forest green, or about how surprise parties betrayed contempt on the part of those who gave them (an idea I’d adapted, to put it kindly, from Auden’s essay on Othello), you can find them in the files of the paper. My editor insisted on accompanying my columns with a chip shot of my face, apparently thinking it would lure a few readers—I was still enough of a looker—though I doubt many of them made it past my first paragraphs. Most of the time I got my ideas, if you can call them that, when I read that somebody famous had died: I got lucky when Bella Abzug and Tammy Wynette kicked off within a week of each other—you can imagine what I made of that. I will still stand behind my piece about Edith Fore, the old lady who did those TV ads for Lifecall America: of course I called it “I’ve Fallen and I Can’t Get Up.” You should check that one out if it’s still around. But “Martha Gellhorn: In Papa’s Shadow,” in which I tried to compare what little I knew about her life with my own experience of having been married to a fellow writer? Oh right, who was also outdoorsy and also knew Spanish? I’ll give myself this much credit: I sat there doing a word count every couple of sentences until I hit four figures.