She doesn’t want to talk. She just wants to be home. Out of these clothes. Away from this noise and the balloons and the awful music. Away from the sound of Reverend Boetell’s voice. Her head is throbbing and all she can hear is this drawl of an echo saying, That is where you come in.”
7
Sylvia changes out of her dress as she watches Perry hang up his rented tux. He’s fastidious, making sure the creases of the pants’ legs are lined up, untucking the flaps of the jacket pockets. He talks over his shoulder as he brushes down the lapels with these snapping, karate-like moves of his hand, as if he was attacking something unseen, some microscopic parasite that lived on the surface of the dinner jacket.
“I’m saying you don’t take care of yourself. I’m concerned about your health.”
Sylvia digs a pair of her mother’s old slippers out from under the bed and says, “Perry, you’re concerned about my health? Then please, don’t ever take me to another one of these hell-nights, okay? Please?”
“So the Reverend was a little over the top—”
“Over the top? Perry, we just spent three hours in the goddamn Twilight Zone. What the hell was that all about?”
“Sylvia,” he says in this weary adult tone, as if having to explain this to her is an enormous sap on his energy. “It was a reception for a big new client. That’s all it was. Yes, these people are a bit zealous. Agreed. And yes, maybe the museum was a poor choice for a meeting place. But you know, I didn’t see anyone else reacting quite so strongly.”
“Your friend Candice didn’t seem too happy with the Reverend and his gang.”
“Candice was playing the politicized animal. Candice wants to position herself as the conscience of the firm. She’s expected to spout the opposition view. The big thing about Candice is she knows she can get away with it. She knows Ratzinger gets a little buzz from their skirmishes. It adds to his day. She can’t lose. But I don’t think there’s much behind it. Candice is great at polemic. She should write speeches for a living.”
She sits down on the edge of the bed, pulls a sweatshirt out from underneath the pillow.
“Let me get this straight. Nothing that guy said tonight bothered you? Nothing at all?”
He zips the tux inside the plastic carrying bag, hangs it on the back of the closet door and says, “You know, in the long run it’s going to be cheaper for me to buy one of these.”
And it’s a second before Sylvia realizes he means a tuxedo. That he should buy a tuxedo. That he expects to be going to enough black-tie affairs that it would be cost-effective to make the purchase.
“Perry,” she says.
He comes over and sits down next to her.
“Syl,” he says, “I don’t take it that seriously. Political crap like that just bounces right off me. Goes right over my head. It’s just crap. It’s like it doesn’t have any meaning. It’s like he’s using words I don’t understand. So let him. Doesn’t affect me. You should do what I do.”
“Which is?”
He smiled, shifts his position, puts his hands on her shoulders and starts to massage her. “Which is ignore it. Just tune it out. Let the guy babble. I’m standing there tonight thinking how much of the raise I’m going to take home, you know? I’m thinking interest rates and how much we can afford to put down on a house. Speaking of which—”
She cuts him off by rolling her head back on top of his hands and moaning. “Oh no, Perry, c’mon.”
He gets defensive immediately. “What? I didn’t say a word here.”
“I’m just tired and you know I’m not feeling well.”
“Sylvia, I didn’t say a word. What did I say?”
“It’s just late for this discussion—”
“What discussion?”
“What discussion? The ‘it’s time to plunge ourselves into debt and leave this great apartment’ discussion. Please. C’mon. I’m really not feeling well.”
He gets up and goes to his bureau, takes off his watch and ring. His voice goes edgy and tight. “Yeah, well maybe if you’d gotten home in time to have a little dinner, the champagne wouldn’t have hit you quite so hard.”
She honestly doesn’t want this to escalate into a fight. She lies back on the bed and looks up at the cracks in the corner of the ceiling. “I’m sorry. You’re right. I lost track of time. I got caught up with the camera and everything. I didn’t realize how late it had gotten.”
But they’re already over the line and Perry doesn’t want an apology. “It’s okay,” he says with that sarcastic edge. “I guess eating dinner together these days is just a little too bourgeois for you, right?”
She lets it go for about five seconds and then says, as evenly as she can, “What’s that supposed to mean, Perry?”
He turns around, leans his behind against the bureau. “It means,” he says, the words singsong and drawn out, “How come you’re so concerned about debt when it comes to buying us a home, but not when it comes to buying another goddamn camera.”
She stands up. “I thought the goddamn camera was supposed to be a gift.”
“And I thought we were supposed to be having dinner together at five-thirty. That’s what families do, you know Sylvia. They eat together. They talk to each other.”
“Thanks for the tip. Did Reverend Boetell tell you that?”
She walks out of the bedroom into the kitchen, goes to the fridge and pours herself a glass of Pinot Grigio. He stands in the doorway fuming and says, “I thought you were sick.”
She says, “I am,” and goes out the back door and down to the basement.
The darkroom is at the rear of the cellar. Sylvia moves past the two huge, ancient furnaces and opens a padlock on this rickety chicken-wire door, steps into a little compartment room filled with all the forgotten junk that a hundred years’ worth of owners and tenants have left behind. She pulls on a string and lights the room with a bare forty-watt bulb. She looks down on steamer trunks filled with heavy, rusted old tools, defunct magazines, rough pieces of scrap wood. In one corner sits an antique child’s bicycle without any wheels. In another there’s a silver industrial hair dryer, this big helmet-like unit mounted on a heavy pole. It looks like a prop from some campy old science fiction movie — a brain scrambler or a time machine. She’s always wanted to bring the thing upstairs, clean it up, maybe turn it into a lamp or something. And she realizes now that the reason she never has is because Perry would hate it, would say something like, You’re kidding, right, this old piece of junk …
There’s a small door next to the hair dryer. She keeps it secured with her combination lock from high school. Inside used to be a small closet of some kind, sort of a storage bin, just 5 x 7, but nice and dry. Last year Sylvia asked Mrs. Acker if she could make it into a darkroom and Mrs. A was all excited by the idea. Sylvia spent two weekends cleaning the place out, then nailed some brackets to the plywood walls and hung some shelves. She managed to wedge in two small tables for counter space and ran an extension cord off the light fixture in the outer room. For water she hooked a garden hose up to the spigot near the furnaces.
She bought all her equipment secondhand, got some good deals by watching the classified ads in the Spy. She picked up a nice Durst enlarger at a yard sale over on Mann and got all her pans and tongs, her safelight and a good LePrince timer from a woman who was moving to Europe — Germany, she thinks — and just said, “Make me an offer.” Mrs. Acker donated a padded step stool that Sylvia uses as a chair.
There are no windows in the darkroom. She keeps her mother’s pocket radio on one of the shelves and there are nights when she finishes up her work and tunes in some no-talk jazz station, something from down the Zone with a lot of P.H. Cunningham rotation or maybe some Imogen Wedgewood. And she just sits there in the absolute darkness, can’t see her wineglass in front of her, and she kind of just perches on Mrs. Acker’s stool with the stuffing pushing through the red plastic covering, just swirling the wine around in her mouth, just feeling the soft roll of the horns on the radio, smelling the chemicals drying on the prints that she’s clothespinned to a wire strung between walls. She just sits there for maybe ten or fifteen minutes, feeling not exactly happy, more like contented and secure and relaxed, the muscles of her neck and shoulders finally getting loose.