Crossing California, page 17
Yet when the clock struck one at Julius Bernard’s apartment, it was Ellen Rovner who was apologizing because she could no longer keep her eyes open, while Lana, who had become completely enchanted with Julius, was pleading to stay a few minutes longer. Not only had Julius brought Lana and her mother backstage at the Paris Opéra, not only had he taken them up to his apartment on the Rue du Faubourg St.-Honoré, not only had he cooked them a scrumptious dinner followed by a plate of cheeses and pear sorbet, he had spoken almost the entire time to Lana in French and she had understood every word. They had discussed ballet, museums, and restaurants, in particular the Tour D’Argent, which P.C. Pendleton had insisted was the best restaurant in Paris. “Yes, yes, maybe in 1963, but the world moves on,” Julius had said, in English. She would write that in her postcard to P.C., Lana thought—“Yes, but the world moves on.”
As Julius walked them to his door, he said he hoped that he would see them again before he left Paris. Ellen said she hoped so too, and Lana said, “Sans doute, sans doute.” But as he helped Ellen put on her coat, he suddenly whispered to her, “When you get outside, say you have forgotten something and ring the doorbell. I have to ask you something in private.” The statement was so surprisingly forward that Ellen saw no choice but to comply. When she and Lana had left the building and were approaching a taxi waiting out front, Ellen nervously rubbed her ear and said, “Oh my dear, I think I left my earring. Tell the taxi driver to wait.” Ellen dashed back to the front door of the building and rang the bell and as she heard a click and pushed open the door, her mind raced with possibilities of what would happen when she got to Julius’s floor, whether he would attempt to sweep her into a kiss, how long would they be able to have sex, Ellen wondered, before Lana would suspect something was amiss.
Julius was waiting in front of his door as Ellen reached the top of the stairs, panting yet suffused with almost giddy energy as he reached out his hands, clasped hers, pulled her gently toward him, and said that it was good of her, so good of her to come. He said he was normally not so indiscreet, but there was so little time—would there be any chance, he asked, to see each other again? Ellen felt appalled. Ellen felt thrilled. Ellen felt miraculously transported into one of her patients’ monologues, the sort that made her glower and flutter her eyes wearily, for she suspected the stories were never more than half-true. Ellen said that the day after tomorrow, Lana would be taking a day trip to Versailles—could they see each other in the afternoon? Julius said he would be honored.
When she returned to the taxi, Ellen noticed that Lana’s mood had changed. Ellen apologized for keeping Lana waiting—she must have had too much wine, she said, she had thought she was missing an earring, but it turned out she hadn’t worn any after all. She didn’t know why she had been so silly, she said. It was time for bed; she was exhausted. Maybe the next morning when they woke up, they could have crêpes for breakfast—crêpes with a little bit of sugar and Grand Marnier. Didn’t that sound yummy? she asked. She attempted uncharacteristically to embrace her daughter, but then felt Lana’s body stiffen. It occurred to her that Lana remembered that she hadn’t been wearing earrings at all, recalled that Lana had berated her for going to the opera without earrings, and said they wouldn’t be let into the box seats dressed all schlumpy.
“Mom,” Lana Rovner said curtly as she shook free of her mother’s embrace, “why do you always have to drink so much?”
It was amazing how one short sentence spoken by such a small person could radically change the mood of another, could instantly turn the warm backseat of a taxi into a cold, sepulchral chamber. One moment earlier, Ellen had felt carefree and happy, willing to treat her daughter more as a friend and less as a patient or employee. Now she once again saw her daughter as a great weight pressing down upon her, an eternal cloud hovering just above her head. And though part of her wanted to retract her response the moment after she’d made it, it did reflect exactly how she felt.
“Because I have children,” she said.
The moment Michael Rovner had learned of Steve Ross’s dalliance with Laura Kim, two weeks shifted from being a brief period of bliss to an endless passage of solitude. And though the appeal of infidelity had not passed with his first failed attempt, it was no longer accompanied by the hope of a future of infinite happiness and fulfillment as much as it was by the desire to stave off two weeks of loneliness. He stayed late in the radiology department every night until he ran out of X-rays and then drove home slowly, taking Western all the way north. The strip clubs and X-rated movie houses he favored when Ellen was in town no longer held the same appeal. Under normal circumstances, he felt daring inside them; not the last time, though, when he sat in the audience of the Oak Theater watching a girl dressed up as Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz stripping as she sang “Follow the Yellow Dick Road.” Now he felt like someone who actually frequented these places. The bouncers knew him—“Nice seeing you again, buddy,” they said. They couldn’t have been much older than Larry, they might even have been at Larry’s Bar Mitzvah, he might have played touch football with them at one of Larry’s birthday parties. They might come up to Larry, say, “Hey, saw your dad; you’ll never guess where.” The dancers might know Larry—he might be dating one of them. He couldn’t go there anymore. They would tell Larry; Larry would be disgusted—he would tell Ellen; Ellen would divorce him.
He tried the Division Street dance clubs, where he felt like the only person old enough to get in. At The Snuggery, a cute girl named Deb gave him her phone number, but when he tried calling it later that night, he got a recorded message for Lincoln Carpeting, which advertised on late-night TV. When Monday arrived, Michael had all but given up the idea that anyone but his wife would ever find him sexually attractive; even her once-a-month regimen seemed generous now, more than he was entitled to. He avoided lunch with Laura Kim and Steve Ross, went home early, leaving a pile of X-rays for the next morning, picked up shrimp toast and sweet and sour chicken from Hong Min, and proceeded to eat what he hadn’t consumed in the car on the living room couch straight out of the boxes.
“Good thing Deirdre’s coming tomorrow,” Larry said, eyeing Michael’s mess as he and Arik Levine wrestled Larry’s drum kit out the door for the Rovner! rehearsal, where they were planning to record “Soar.”
Deirdre. The name didn’t register immediately.
“Cleaning lady, Dad,” Larry explained.
Michael asked what time she usually arrived. Larry said Mom usually let her in at around 7:30 and she stayed until one. Michael asked if Larry would be able to let Deirdre in. Larry said no, he would be sleeping over at Ben’s. He didn’t like being in the house when she was cleaning; he didn’t like using the bathroom, knowing the cleaning woman might barge in on him. Michael said that was okay, he’d leave the door open for Deirdre, not to worry.
Michael was intrigued. He’d seen a movie like this once. In the middle of the night, unable to sleep, he had gone down to the living room to watch television and found the channel tuned to UHF-46, which was now a pay TV station called YOUR-TV. Channel 46’s image was scrambled, but every so often it would descramble itself for a few seconds and reveal an unbroken image—in this case, a woman in a French maid’s outfit vacuuming as a man lay naked in bed. The moment she began slipping off the maid’s outfit, though, the image was scrambled again and all he could see were jittery, flesh-colored shapes. He turned the volume all the way up and listened to the grunting and the music and the moaning, and then, suddenly, the sultry PA announcer’s voice shouted out the Station ID: “YOU’RE WATCHING YOUR-TV! SUBSCRIBE NOW!” The voice was so loud that Lana came down bleary-eyed, closely followed by Ellen; both asked what the noise was. Michael quickly turned down the volume, flipped off the TV, and told them that he’d been wondering that too, and had come downstairs to find out why the TV was still on. Maybe Larry had forgotten to shut it off, he suggested. “Really, you think Larry? Hmn,” Ellen said, but didn’t pursue it further.
On the morning that Deirdre was coming, Michael took the day off from work. He left a note on the door—“It’s Open. Come On In!”—and sprawled out on his bed in what he determined to be a provocative pose. Deirdre Wills arrived at 7:30 and let herself in. Michael could hear her as she worked downstairs. He heard her fill a pail with water. He heard mopping. He heard footsteps going down into the basement. He heard the washing machine sloshing around, the whooshing of the vacuum cleaner, the sink being twisted on, then off, then on, then off. He regretted there were no books to read, other than Samuel Eliot Morison’s European Discovery of America.
It was nearly eleven when he finally heard footsteps coming upstairs. He sat up in bed, one leg crossed over the other. He heard the vacuum start up, heard it rolling over the carpet in the hallway, in Lana’s bedroom, in Ellen’s office—he didn’t refer to it as her bedroom, even though she slept in it practically every night. And then he heard a hand on his bedroom doorknob, saw it twist, saw the door open, saw Deirdre Wills in a blue denim shirt and black jeans pushing the vacuum forward, saw sheets and pillowcases in a laundry hamper in the hallway behind her, felt his penis grow stiff. Deirdre barely looked up to see him, just nodded in his direction as she vacuumed the carpet around the bed, as if she were the servant to a very rich but eccentric family of whose antics it was considered impolite to take note. Whatever seductive lines Michael had been planning would not have sounded particularly suave shouted over the whirring and wheezing of the vacuum cleaner. He had to wait until she had exited the bedroom, gone downstairs with the laundry hamper, and returned twenty minutes later with a couple of rags and a peach-colored pail filled with household cleansers. She was spritzing Windex on the mirror above the dresser when Michael said hello. Eyes still on the mirror, Deirdre grunted hello back. Then Michael asked if she wanted to “hop in.” There was plenty of room, he said. Deirdre Wills stopped spritzing and looked at him lying there in his Jockey shorts.
“What?” she asked.
“Do you want to hop in?” he asked, slipping under the quilt cover. “It’s nice and toasty.”
Deirdre stared darkly at Michael Rovner. Then she asked if he wanted to die. Michael smiled, somewhat nervously, and made as if to speak again, but Deirdre told him to keep his mouth shut, otherwise she’d kill him that very minute. She finished wiping the mirror, then placed the rag and the bottle of Windex down on the dresser. She walked out of the bedroom and down the stairs. Then she grabbed her coat and walked out of the house.
On the day Ellen was to meet Julius Bernard, the bus for Versailles was scheduled to leave at eleven, but she and Lana awoke early. After hot chocolate at the Café De La Paix, they returned to the hotel, where Lana changed into a blazer she deemed suitable for a trip to a château. Ellen told Lana she would walk her downstairs and see her off. She said she’d been to Versailles before and wanted to use the day to go to the Bibliothèque Nationale to peruse the psychology literature. It wasn’t an inconceivable assertion—she’d even mentioned she’d be interested in doing that while they had been planning the trip, but also thought such an arcane field trip would give Lana little motivation to accompany her. Not that that seemed terribly likely; Lana had consistently given the impression that she thought she was traveling in the company of somebody particularly boorish, Midwestern, and slow. But infidelity was new to Ellen and she sought to take as many precautions as possible.
Though she had never been a strong believer in marriage, in sessions with her patients Ellen Rovner had always found infidelity particularly tawdry, distasteful, low-class, and distinctly non-Jewish. When one of the Northbrook women who paid for the privilege of spending fifty minutes in her company told her about taking up with the piano tuner or the landscaper or the TV repairman, she found the whole scenario depressing and lonely. Still, that aside, Ellen was fairly certain she would be having sex with Julius Bernard that afternoon and she was excited about the prospect. Though she, technically, would be cheating on her husband, to her it didn’t feel like unfaithfulness. The fact that she was in Paris made her marriage seem irrelevant; the fact that Julius would be leaving for the Ivory Coast eliminated the possibility of any long-term commitment; the fact that Julius was African—no matter how many times she had taken her children along to civil rights protests and checked Pete Seeger and Weavers albums out of the Nortown Library, never mind that she had protested against state’s attorney Ed Hanrahan following the assassination of Black Panther leader Fred Hampton—still made what she was preparing to do that afternoon feel like something altogether different from infidelity.
Ellen told Lana that they wouldn’t have time to eat before the tour bus left; she’d run out and get her a ham and cheese so she’d have something for lunch, didn’t that sound yummy? Lana said no, it didn’t sound all that yummy, frankly. Ham wasn’t kosher first of all, plus Ellen was mixing it with dairy—hadn’t Larry taught her anything? Ellen said she’d get her a different sort of sandwich. Lana said no, thanks, she wasn’t hungry. Ellen said she had to eat something and went to the bakery across the street from the hotel.
Ellen was fairly convinced that her daughter was anorexic but had never mentioned it to Lana for a variety of reasons, chief among them being the paradox inherent in accusing someone of having an eating disorder: If one of the chief triggers for anorexia was a feeling of loss of control, the accusation could itself seem like a controlling act. Furthermore, if Ellen admitted that Lana actually had a serious medical condition, that could impinge upon her plans to separate from her husband. Thus, she paid close attention to her daughter’s diet and tried to make sure she didn’t skip meals.
Ellen bought a cheese sandwich and brought it back to the hotel room. At the bakery, she had noticed that a 100-franc note was missing from her wallet. This was not remarkable; Lana often burrowed in her mother’s wallet, though she usually only took about $5 at any given time. Ellen asked Lana if she’d seen a 100-franc note anywhere. No, said Lana, who was scribbling something at the desk, another missive to P.C. Pendleton, Ellen presumed. Lana said maybe her mother was getting absentminded in her old age; she kept writing her letter, which she took special pains to hunch over and conceal whenever Ellen approached the desk. Ellen told her daughter that she had bought her a sandwich. Lana asked her what kind. Ellen said cheese. Lana sneered, said “Eew,” told her mother to put it down on her desk, and continued writing. Ellen said she’d better get moving, the bus would be leaving any minute. Lana asked if Ellen thought she wasn’t smart enough to figure out how to get downstairs by herself; she wasn’t a baby. Ellen said fine, they’d meet back at the hotel at six and decide where to have dinner. Lana asked why every statement her mother made revolved around food. Ellen said fine, she was going to take a shower; Lana could catch the tour bus by herself.
When Ellen emerged from the bathroom, she was relieved to find the hotel room empty. She wished she could have sex with Julius immediately, skip the preliminaries, just jump into bed and fuck, not even return to the hotel, just fuck until the day of the flight home and either take the plane and divorce her husband the minute she saw him standing outside customs with a bouquet of roses—Michael never missed an opportunity for an easy cliché—or not go home at all. The hell with her job and her family; she could work here and screw random strangers whenever she got the urge.
Consumed by this fantasy, Ellen then suddenly noticed the cheese baguette still on the desk. She could have left it there, but she didn’t want to contribute to her daughter’s starvation. She grabbed the sandwich and took the elevator down to the lobby. The tour bus was just pulling away when Ellen stepped outside. She jogged briefly after the bus, waved the sandwich, then put it down at her side, certain Lana would tell her how embarrassing she was. She turned back toward the hotel, then noticed her daughter a half block away, walking briskly in the direction of the Rue de Rivoli.
Ellen started to shout after Lana but stopped. She thought she might go back inside the hotel, but she didn’t do that either. Instead, she followed her daughter at a comfortable distance as Lana turned the corner. Ellen had constantly suspected her daughter of lying and scheming, but was never 100 percent sure, and so she kept up the pretense of believing Lana’s absurd tales of getting twenties on her creative reports or being Ms. Powis’s favorite student. Yet, here was physical, incontrovertible proof. Lana had said she was going to get on the Versailles bus, but nevertheless she was now ambling down the Rue de Rivoli, entering some tourist-trap gift shop, then, soon after, exiting and walking into the book-shop next door, then out of that shop and into a tobacconist’s. It was no better but also no worse than expected; Lana was a liar, that much had been confirmed, but the worst she could plot was going shopping with money that was not hers. Satisfied with her discovery and convinced that her daughter would get along just fine, Ellen returned to her hotel room, took a bite out of Lana’s sandwich, dumped the rest into the trash, got undressed, masturbated, changed into a brown leather skirt and a black leotard top, and went out for a leisurely walk before her scheduled tryst with Julius.
