“Don’t you have an apartment?” I asked.
“Can’t afford it anymore. Found a guy to sublet it for plenty, though. I pay half of Dave’s rent now and with enough left over to see this movie into the hands of a distributor. Crawling to the finish line, just barely.”
The twin betrayals in this statement left me winded. I want to say that my face went “dark.” You read writers using this word to describe a character’s expression, but I couldn’t see myself so I can only say it felt this way. The usual tension in my facial muscles that holds my social exterior together, that tries to project a certain friendliness to make me appear, as people have said about me, eager to please — these muscles went slack.
Suriyaarachchi must have sensed this change, too, because he was already backpedaling defensively. “There’s no way you could afford what I was asking for my place. It’s a prewar one bedroom on Park Avenue, dude. I have a doorman! Anyway, aren’t you shacking up with your boyfriend and his wife, down the hall?”
I glared at Dave, who was standing in the kitchen with a bowl of cereal. “You knew I was looking for a place,” I said. “Haven’t you noticed the desperation with which I’ve been using your fax machine?”
Through a crunching mouthful, Dave said, “I don’t know why you hang around that creep Arthur. Did you read what he wrote about his kid? What’s up with that?”
“It’s not what you think,” I said. “He’s trying to save literature.”
I gave my mother the pendant.
“She didn’t want it then?”
“She was married,” I said.
“Her loss, my gain, I suppose.”
I helped her with the clasp at the nape of her neck.
“I don’t know what I’m doing, Mom.”
“It’s okay,” she said. “Nobody does. The ones that say they do are just fooling themselves.”
“I meant about this clasp.”
“No, you didn’t.”
We were standing in the kitchen. My mother was tall, with a dancer’s graceful posture, though she had never been a dancer. She liked to boast of the casting directors who used to mistake her for one. I have a framed studio headshot of my mother in my room — a teenager from the fifties harboring dreams of becoming a starlet. She dismisses these childish ambitions when she talks about her past, of that time before she knew who she was, as though poetry were the inheritance to a kingdom and she were its heiress.
Mom checked herself out in the reflection of the toaster, letting her fingers play over the small jade teardrop against her chest. “It’s lovely, honey. Even if it is a hand-me-down.” She turned and kissed me on the forehead, patted my cheek. “I won’t tell you that it gets easier, because it doesn’t. It just seems to matter less, the older you get. It’s an improvisation. Think of it that way. And there are no wrong notes, because it’s your tune. You make it up. It’s not ideal, but what other choice do you have?”
In my room, sitting at the piano bench, silently sounding off notes on the keyboard, I thought of my An of the Byzantine frescoes and wondered how she was faring. The days when we were together seemed so far away now. Senior year we rented the parlor floor of an old Victorian town house not far from campus. It was rundown, the landlord a reclusive man who lived on the garden level among a maze of bound magazines and stacked newspapers. The rent was cheap. His only stipulation was that we leave our shoes at the door, something I was already used to, as An had this stipulation, too, when I would spend time in her dorm room. I turned that place into a home. An argued against it, as we were only renting — the supplies cost a great deal, more than we could afford — but I couldn’t help myself; as I said, the nesting instinct is strong in me. I ripped up the old threadbare wall-to-wall and waxed and buffed the hardwood planks beneath to a golden luster. There was a set of French pocket doors dividing the living room from the kitchen that were permanently stuck partway open and in total disrepair. I spent weeks restoring those doors, stripping the paint and replacing the plywood squares with matching panes of frosted glass from a local glazier, getting each to run properly along the track. I installed custom shelves in the kitchen, hung a thrift-store chandelier in the bedroom, and planted a garden in the dead patch of dirt out back. I loved my life then, coming home to An, stretched out and reading on the couch, or waking up next to her on a Saturday morning, the weekend wide open before us. It was a much simpler time, compared with the thorny brush I was hacking through now.
I went into the living room for the old rotary and brought it on its long extension back into my room and closed the door. After three foreign sounding rings, An picked up — much to my surprise. And, much to my surprise, within moments I was blubbering about how much I missed her, how terribly I missed our life together. I confessed everything. I told her about Arthur and his book, about what I had done with his wife.
“Get out,” she said. “Get out while you still can. This situation you’re in now is destructive. You can see that. Why don’t you move out of the city? Start over somewhere else. Baby, listen to me. Just get on a bus and go!”
She was kind. She let me reminisce, participated in the reminiscing herself. She did not tell me about the boyfriend she no doubt had. Or how wonderful the alpine air in Baden-Württemberg was this time of year.
Lying in bed, awake, I resolved to quit. An was right. The movie was done. There was no reason I should be spending my days there anymore. The time had come to move on. But what would I do? I had no marketable skills, other than those I had picked up as an usher — sweeping, counting change, making announcements over a loudspeaker. Skills that might have served me well in Communist Poland but that made me at the age of thirty in the entrepreneurial capital of the world an increasingly pathetic figure. My only option at this point was grad school. A doctorate in music composition. I could teach, get the occasional local symphony commission. It seemed almost glamorous now, after being confronted with the realities of moviemaking and the realities of being an iconoclastic novelist with a wife and a child.
9. RUSHDIE
THE FOLLOWING MORNING, AFTER I offered my resignation, Suriyaarachchi said, “But you’d be turning down a full-fledged producer credit, which would be a real shame.”
“On Dead Hank’s Boy?”
“That ship has sailed, my friend, no. I’m talking about our new project.”
“A documentary,” Dave said.
“About?”
“Your boyfriend down the hall. Dave, show the man.”
Dave held out a copy of yesterday’s New York Post. “Page nine.”
I looked from Dave to Suriyaarachchi to the Post in my hands. The headline: “Brick Suspect Rips Rudy’s Homeless Policy.” I thumbed past the movie listings. Page 9. There were three stories here. One involved a retired television weatherman convinced that a coming storm would wash away the sins of the city and was building an ark on the roof of his Cobble Hill brownstone. The neighbors had filed a court injunction against it. The man’s name was, improbably, Fludd. Another was an update on the kidnapping of a Queens woman’s two-year-old — it turned out the whole thing was a hoax. To what end was not made clear.