Lady in the Lake Page 16

  I watched him watching the show about the show inside the show. It reminded me of that infinity joke we tell each other as kids: I’m painting a picture of myself painting a picture of myself painting a picture. It gets smaller and smaller and smaller until you can’t see anything.

  So I decided for myself: I’ll be the one who lives. Not the old man in the bed up onstage, not the wild, beautiful wives of Henry VIII, Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard, and not the last one, the nurse, that no one really talks about, who died pretty soon after he did. I’d be Mary Boleyn, Anne’s sister, who fooled them all and had a good long life. That’s what I would choose.

  It was too late. The choice to live had been taken from me and I didn’t even know it.

  At three a.m. on January 1, I went to my closet and picked clothes for my date, taking time to make sure that none of Latetia’s clothes were mixed up with mine. We borrowed one another’s clothes, but mine were so much nicer. It wasn’t the first time I’d made a late date and I was always alone on holidays, that’s how it works. The second shift is how I thought of it. My man was generous, but I always needed more and I didn’t make the tips I deserved stuck behind the bar, and whose fault was that? Everybody knew I had late dates. Except him. I hope he never knew, but I’m sure that those who wanted to turn him against me saw to it that he found out.

  I pushed that fur far back in my closet, making sure it was in a dry-cleaning bag, as if winter were over. It was for me. Everything was over for me. Mine wasn’t the nicest neighborhood, my apartment wasn’t that great, even with the view of the park and the lake. I suppose the buildings along Druid Hill were grand once, when white people lived in them, but it had been a while. That was the story of the neighborhood, the story of the world. White people always get out just in time. They have an instinct for when the plumbing’s going to go, when the wiring will fray and crackle. Look at you, Madeline Schwartz, leaping from your marriage when you did. You probably thought you were getting out in the nick of time.

  I pushed my fur into the back of the closet and went out on my date, dread bubbling up in my stomach. But I had to go. The ending had been written, it was out of my hands.

  Six weeks later, when my mama convinced the landlord to open the door for her, she found my fur and recognized it was something I loved. She carried it to the psychic, who buried her face in its pale pink silk lining, stroked the white pelt. It was rabbit, but she pronounced it ermine, which tells you everything you need to know about the woman who claimed she saw my final hours. Green and yellow, indeed. Sure, I wore a green blouse, but the real green was jealousy and there was no yellow—unless you count the cowardice of the man who decreed I had to die but would not deign to do the job himself.

  June 1966

  June 1966

  “You did what?”

  Judith Weinstein had been about to sip a spoonful of chicken soup with kreplach when Maddie told her about the visit to Madame Claire. As fastidious in her manners as she was in her appearance, Judith could arrest her spoon’s arc without spilling a drop, but she was gratifyingly amazed by Maddie’s recent adventures.

  “I went to the morgue, to see Cleo Sherwood’s body. Then I visited the psychic that her mother consulted.”

  “That dead Negro girl? The one who worked in Shell Gordon’s club?”

  “She worked at the Flamingo. Is that the place you mean? Who’s Shell Gordon?”

  Judith snorted, although it was more like a cat’s sneeze, tidy and contained.

  “I told you, Maddie. Stewart ‘Peanut Shell’ Gordon. He’s a small-timer trying to be a big-timer, like Willie Adams, whom he idolizes and loathes in equal measure.”

  “I’ve never heard of any of these people.”

  “I told you, you should come to the Stonewall club with me. It’s interesting. Although I know most of this stuff from my uncle Donald. Shell Gordon wants to be a powerbroker, like Adams. He puts out a lot of walk-around money on Election Day.”

  “Walk-around money?”

  Judith sipped her soup, a strange choice for such a warm day. The Suburban House’s soups were good, but Maddie was treating herself to a full feast—a bagel with lox and cream cheese, accompanied by a Tab. She had walked so much this week. Besides, Ferdie liked her as she was.

  “It’s how you get your vote out.”

  “But it’s illegal to pay people to vote.”

  Judith smiled, happy for the chance to be the wise one in their new, tender friendship. “You don’t pay people to vote exactly. You pay people to get out the vote.”

  “I’m not sure I see the distinction.”

  “In the end, there might not be one.”

  Maddie wasn’t interested in a political tutorial. She had sought Judith out because she needed a confidante, someone to listen to her stories from work. Ferdie, she assumed, would be either bored or scandalized by her adventures—going to the morgue, venturing into a Negro neighborhood. Certainly, she could never tell her mother what she was up to. So she had looked for a friend—and realized she had none. She had tried calling Eleanor Rosengren, whom she had not seen since that fateful dinner—really, that was not hyperbole, the dinner had changed her life—with Wallace Wright. But Eleanor had seemed distant, odd. Lines had been drawn up in Pikesville and Maddie realized that her old friends would be on Milton’s side, as surely as they lived on the county side of the city-county line. Maddie had abandoned not only Milton but the whole neighborhood. Her new way of life was a rebuke to all of them.

  So she returned to Judith, the eager young woman who always jumped when she called. And it was gratifying how happy she was to make this dinner date. She had even suggested that they go to a movie at the Pikes Theater later, volunteering to drive Maddie home in her father’s car.

  Maddie had assumed their dinner conversation would be about her work exploits, that Judith had no stories to share. To her surprise—and, truthfully, to her annoyance—Judith had a confidence, too.

  “Remember those cops, from the day when—” It was hard still, to talk about Tessie Fine, the silvery sole of that shoe, the red hair, the green coat.

  “Of course.”

  “Mine called me.”

  Maddie took note of the word, mine. Had the other cop been hers? He had wanted to walk her to her door, but surely that was just politeness? At any rate, he had not called her or followed up in any way and she felt a tiny shock of jealousy, as if she and Judith were two girls who had gone on a double date, but Judith’s date had been successful and hers was not. Silly. She would never date a cop. Oh—she was dating a cop. No, not dating. That was not the word for what she and Ferdie did. She blushed, not that Judith seemed to notice.

  “What did he want?”

  Judith took no offense at the question, borderline rude as it was. “He asked me to go out. I knew my mother would be scandalized, but it was my father who really hit the roof. I don’t know if it was the cop part or the Irish part. At any rate, he said there was no way any daughter of his would go out with ‘such a man.’”

  “A shame,” Maddie said, not meaning it. “He was cute.” Again, not meaning it. She couldn’t recall anything about the man but his vapid chatter.

  “He wants to meet up with us tonight,” Judith said. “At the theater. If that’s okay?”

  Maddie felt silly, a little used, although she was the one who had called Judith. She even felt her allegiances shifting toward Judith’s parents, to whom she might have been closer in age. If Seth had wanted to date a shiksa, a cop’s daughter, Maddie would not have approved. But she also would have been careful not to object. That’s how her mother had handled her high school relationship with Allan. Pretending not to be worried, inviting his parents over for Passover dinner.

  How, Maddie wondered, would her mother have acted if she had known about Maddie’s true first love? Somehow, she had managed to hide him from everyone. Perhaps that was her real talent, secret loves. But it was 1966. Being a courtesan was not a career.

  Courtes
an. She could hear her first love, laughing at her across the years. Euphemisms are for cowards, Maddie. He had laughed at her a lot, come to think of it. Mocked her ambition to write, said she would be just another suburban mama.

  “Of course, that’s okay,” she assured Judith.

  “And I thought,” Judith said, “if you don’t mind—we’d give you cab fare to get home. You see, if my parents think that I have to drive you back to the city and home again, that’s a good hour of time, and—”

  Her turn to blush. Maddie would have been quite jealous now, except that she knew whatever Judith and her date did in their stolen hour could not compare to what she and Ferdie accomplished in that same window of time. But, oh, how lovely it would be to sit in a movie theater, holding hands with someone, anyone. Was this always the choice, passion or respectability?

  The movie was The Sandpiper. After a carefully staged chance encounter in the lobby, the trio chose seats toward the rear of the theater, then Maddie insisted on moving closer to the front, claiming she had forgotten her glasses. (She didn’t wear glasses.) Judith and her cop, Paul something, made faint protests. He was in civilian clothes. He was not especially attractive, not to Maddie. But there was something about the knowledge of this forbidden love (lust) eleven rows back that aroused her. Or maybe it was Richard Burton, so attractive despite his pocked skin. She found herself quite stirred up.

  And then she realized that the man next to her had put his hand on her knee.

  She picked it up and put it back in his lap, stealing a glance at him. He did not appear depraved. He was not trying to touch himself and his eyes were fixed on the film. She should have been screaming for an usher—and yet. His profile was quite nice. A fine Roman nose, a thick head of hair, long-lashed eyes behind his glasses. There was no dirty raincoat, no unzipped trousers—

  It was then that Maddie screamed.

  Not because she was scared, not really. Oh, she was terrified, but not by this man. She was horrified by her lack of fear, overwhelmed by the thought, however fleeting, that she could lead this man out of the theater and do things to him, let him do things to her. She was becoming depraved, there was no other word for it. This was why she had married as quickly as possible. Because her first love had awakened this terrible lust in her and she knew she had to bottle it, tame it. Now it was out again, loose in the world.

  Of course, once she started shouting, Paul and Judith came to her rescue as well, while the man with the Roman nose was never seen again. There was no talk of cab fare, given the fright Maddie had endured. The two drove her home. Maddie almost felt guilty for depriving them of their time together. Then again, they had left the film forty-five minutes in, so they still had at least an hour to spend in each other’s company.

  Judith reported in the next day, whispering on the line from her brother’s jewelry store.

  “He wanted to park on Cylburn Avenue,” she said. “Near—is that weird?”

  “No,” Maddie said. Yes, she thought. But not as weird as what I wanted to do last night, so who am I to judge?

  A libertine, she thought after hanging up. I am becoming a libertine. Where had she first heard that word? From her first lover, of course. Was he still alive? He had moved away long ago and she had lost track of him. But given the family’s Baltimore connections, she assumed there would be an obituary in the local papers if he died. There would definitely be an obituary if his wife died. But he was not old yet, only going on sixty. There was no reason to think he had passed.

  She saw herself, not quite eighteen, standing on the sidewalk and watching movers carry furniture into a van.

  “Where are they going?” she asked the least intimidating of the men.

  “New York,” he grunted.

  “I know him. Them,” she offered. “I was—I went to school with their son.”

  The moving man was not interested. For months, the gravest fear of Maddie’s life had been that someone would discover her secret, what she had done. But now she saw the worst fate was no one’s knowing. She had kept their secret too well. All the promises, the whispered words, the vows made in exchange for taking from her something she could never reclaim—there were no witnesses. Only he knew how he had spoken of their running away together, of the visions he had painted, better with words than he ever was with a brush, of a future in which they lived in the Village, true libertines, caring about nothing but art and love. She could not prove it had happened, any of it. The most significant event of her young life was being hauled onto that truck, transported to New York of all places, but probably not the Village, never the Village. They probably were going to live on the Upper East Side, in the kind of house and household that he said he despised.

  The movers carried a green silk sofa into the van. Maddie had lost her virginity on that sofa the summer she was seventeen. “Can’t you stay a little later?” he had asked. “There’s going to be an eclipse tonight. That’s practically a once-in-a-lifetime event. And I know your parents never worry when you’re here with me.”

  No, they never did. Even at seventeen, Maddie understood how ironic this was.

  Two months later, in the fall, she met Milton. Of course he had assumed she was a virgin, and she saw no reason to contradict him. She was and she wasn’t. She was someone new, a different Maddie. If anything, she felt more innocent, younger for having been defiled and tricked by an older man, who had no compunction about using words to talk her out of what people claimed was her greatest gift, her singular asset to offer a man, the only dowry that still mattered.

  Did Cleo Sherwood have a boyfriend? Everyone said no, but casual dates didn’t give a girl an ermine stole. Cherchez l’homme. Maddie was going to find Cleo’s lover, this married man, demand answers. It would make up for her lack of nerve when she was seventeen and she failed, again and again, in her resolve to introduce herself to her lover’s wife.

  Of course, his wife already knew her, but only as her son’s classmate, the girl he had dated, asked to the prom, then dumped. The girl whose portrait her husband was painting in his studio. The resulting painting was stiff, absent of her vitality and charm. Absent of all the qualities he said he saw in her, when he put his brushes down and made love to her, again and again and again, the summer she was seventeen.

  The Moviegoer

  The Moviegoer

  I swear I have never done anything like that in my life. It was not a plan. Okay, yes, it was a plan to sit next to her. I have my choice of seats, after all. The theater isn’t crowded and I usually don’t like to be that close to the screen. It hurts my neck, my eyes. But I see her go in with the couple, almost like their chaperone, then leave them to the back row as she moves down front. I follow, sitting across the aisle, then moving next to her after the cartoon, just as the feature begins.

  I am—I don’t want to tell you what I do. I’m respectable, trust me on that. I am a good man, a good provider. Yes, I am married, but my wife is cold to me. She has always been cold to me. I don’t think she likes me. I ask her sometimes, “Do you like me?” and she says, “I love you,” as if that’s better, as if that should be enough. But it’s not. I need her to like me, too, to laugh at my jokes, to seem less put-upon by my general existence. When I come home at the end of the day, my wife seems to find my very presence in the house an imposition. A nice house, that I pay for. It reminds me of the old myth, Cupid and Psyche, only she can’t be bothered to try to steal a look at me as I sleep. She’d be fine, being married to the monster, as long as he brought home a paycheck.

  So, sometimes, I tell her I have to work late and I go to the movies or stop in somewhere for a drink. But you have to believe me: I have never, ever done anything like what I do tonight. And what I do, is it really that big a deal? I touch a leg, a knee, outside her clothes. Her skirt is short, which is why I make contact with her actual knee. I’m not planning to touch her, I’m not, but then something happens to her breathing. It slows, almost in invitation. It seems sensual to me, although
the scene playing out in front of us is not particularly romantic. She smells so good, not of perfume, but of something more organic, some innate essence that is better than perfume or shampoo or soap. It’s like walking past a flowering shrub in a neighbor’s yard, just over the fence, but maybe a few blossoms are trying to escape. First, you want nothing but to smell it. You lean forward, inhale. It’s impossible not to touch it, rub your finger along one silky, velvety petal, release pollen into the air. Then, if the neighbor doesn’t come, you cross the line, you actually pluck it and take it with you. Hasn’t everyone done this?

  I don’t go that far. I touch her knee. A friendly touch, a glancing touch, possibly accidental. I wait. For a moment, it seems as if she’s considering touching me back. I can feel her thoughts, the way she weighs her options. She puts my hand back in my own lap, but gently, sweetly even.

  And then she begins screaming her head off.

  Luckily, I know the neighborhood, know the theater. I run out of the fire exit, near the screen, which lets off into an alley. Once outside, I’m too cagey to keep running. They will be looking for someone who is trying to get away. I take out a cigarette, my hands shaking just a little, and light it, leaning against the rear of the Chinese restaurant next door, inhaling more grease than nicotine. I see a man come out, two women behind him, watch them look up and down the alley. I look straight at them, smoking as nonchalantly as possible.