Someone Else's Love Letter, page 16
Chapter Thirty-Two
I was feeling down, so I called Arnie to see if he wanted to have dinner. But Arnie wasn’t acting like the Arnie I knew. We were finishing a bento box filled with California rolls, vegetable tempura, and teriyaki salmon, from a great new Japanese restaurant where we now got takeout instead of the greasy Chinese place called Hunan Balcony that we rechristened the Human Balcony. But instead of his crooked grin, Arnie just looked glum. I was sure it had something to do with the end of his relationship with the cheese, but I didn’t go there. I pushed the last California roll toward him, but he refused it.
“What news from Claude Monet?”
“I wouldn’t know.” I looked at my watch. “But now, I’m guessing that he’s probably in bed with his agent. Otherwise, he’s sitting in the garden in the moonlight, drawing inspiration from the landscape.”
Vétheuil, with the Seine flowing through it, was supposed to be a spectacular part of France. How did I know? Google University. Monet did a number of paintings there, it said, including several after the frozen river cracked apart following the winter of 1879 and huge blocks of ice rushed down, sweeping up everything in their path. It was said that the thundering noise drew Monet outside to watch.
I also looked at paintings Monet did when he lived there. He was unknown at the time, and so poor he had to live with another family. The turning point for him was a one-man show held at a gallery in the office of the magazine La Vie Moderne. Part of his story echoed Luke’s—poor artist, just starting out, finally a show that launched him. Even though I was angry with him, I empathized with Luke’s interest in staying at a place that reverberated with the history of the great painter.
“I’m sorry, Sage,” Arnie said, bringing me back to earth. “Don’t you just wish sometimes that things could go easier for you?”
“A lot of people have it much worse,” I said, feeling like his schoolteacher. “I don’t sit up nights feeling sorry for myself, if that’s what you mean.” I pushed the bento box further away. He stared at me for a long time, playing with his chopsticks as if they were drum sticks.
“Sage…” he started, and then looked away. “Can I tell you something?”
I looked at him, uncertainly. “Sure, what?”
“You won’t laugh?”
“I won’t laugh.” Anyway, I was out of practice.
“You swear?”
“Arnie, are we ten years old? I swear.”
“Okay, here goes.” He looked off into the distance, and then back at me. “You know what my real problem is?”
“No,” I answered cautiously. I don’t want to hear that he’s gay. And please, please no dreaded disease. I can’t take any more awful news. “What, Arnie?”
He exhaled for effect, as if he were about to make a major confession. “Sage, I…I’ve—I’ve never been with a woman.”
I pushed out my chair and turned to him. “Arnie,” I said, almost on the verge of laughing with relief, but choking it back because I knew he’d think I was laughing at him. “That’s not a terrible thing.” I smiled. “I thought that you were going to tell me you had some terrible affliction or something. I’m so relieved.”
“No,” he said, somberly, “it’s not an affliction, but the longer you wait, the worse it gets.”
“You’ll find someone—you will.” I reached for his hand across the table and squeezed it.
“Thanks, Sage.” He looked into my eyes. “Thanks for listening.”
By the time the weekend was over, Arnie turned into my project. I didn’t go to the park with Harry for half the day the way I usually do on Saturdays; I went for an hour, and then took Arnie to my gym to sign him up. Clothes only went so far.
“If you’re in great shape, it boosts your ego and your confidence,” I told him, like a motivational video. “And when you’re in a positive state of mind, things work out better for you.”
He looked at me, unsure, and then nodded. “Okay—I’ll give it a whirl.”
“Work out three or four nights a week. If your body is tight, clothes look better.”
“Sage, do you always, like, uh, take over people’s lives?”
“That’s what they pay me for.”
He nodded miserably. “What else?”
After a haircut, we shot over to Bloomingdale’s. His fairy godmother was trying to revamp not only his body and wardrobe but also his life. After we shopped, we dropped—all our bundles. We ate scrambled eggs in my apartment and then went to a downtown bar so we could work on his technique.
I was never one to hang out at singles bars. The ridiculous come-on lines nauseated me. But what better way to get Arnie talking to women than to go with him so that he didn’t have to walk in alone? We started at W in Union Square, where a drink cost as much as a hot meal, and the crowd was downtown hip. I spotted a cute blonde in a DK suit.
“Tell her she looks great in Donna Karan,” I whispered in his ear, above the din.
“What do I say if she asks me how I know it’s Donna Karan?”
“Tell her you didn’t know for sure, but that she reminded you of the models you see in the Donna Karan ads.”
“Sage, maybe you should be writing HBO scripts instead of doing wardrobe counseling.”
I scratched the back of my neck. “I never thought of that…and that’s a good line too, so now get out of here, and see what happens.”
He made a sour face. “Christ, I feel like your puppet.”
I turned him around and pushed him away. I studied his body language for a few minutes and then got lost viewing the action around me. Girls were out in pairs, but so were guys. I tried to remember the last time I was at a bar alone and I drew a blank. It made dating sites look appealing. You were judged by your words at first, nothing else.
I finished my wine. Should I order another? Was Arnie coming back? He was still talking to Miss DK at the end of the bar. Instead of going over, I called his cell.
“I’m going to take off. Are you okay to stay?”
“Yeah, fine, I can make lunch tomorrow,” he answered, in code.
“Call me later and give me a report.”
I went out to Park Avenue and waited for a bus. It was an overcast night. The sky was dark except for a sliver of moonlight. I wondered whether Luke could see the stars, wherever he was.
Chapter Thirty-Three
It was really one of the more bizarre stories of my career. Through another client who referred him, I got a call from a man whose wife had been murdered. He moved to New York from New Jersey, lost a tremendous amount of weight, and he wanted me to buy him new clothes.
Steven Saunders was about forty-five years old. He was an executive with a recruiting firm in New York, and one day while he was at work someone broke into his home in Short Hills, New Jersey. In the middle of the afternoon, his wife walked in on the robbers. The police suspected that when she cried out in surprise, she startled them and they shot her.
Steven was home for two months, so traumatized by the murder that he was unable to function. While he was plump before, afterward he became as gaunt as a long-distance runner. Part of his recommended therapy to fight depression, in fact, was exercise. In addition to his indifference to food and his drastic cut in calories, he started running.
We started out talking about how he felt about himself. You wouldn’t imagine that a man who had gone through a trauma like that would seek out sartorial counseling, but one of his friends suggested he see me, as well as a psychologist and a nutritionist, as part of his support team. After spending a seven-hour day together, most of it talking about everything except clothes, I went home feeling wrung out. My head was ringing with our conversation about his wife, Jean, all his memories of her, and the things he took for granted before that he now realized made their relationship so special.
We didn’t talk about clothes until the end of the day. He didn’t know what size he was before or after he lost all the weight. He didn’t have a tailor. And he had no idea what he wanted me to buy for him. “Jean bought all my clothes,” he said. “She hung them up in the closet and I wore them.”
I took his measurements and told him I’d shop without him and have it all shipped to his home. There was no way this man could be dragged to the stores and told to try things on.
It was one of the most emotionally wrenching experiences I’d ever had with a client. I ached to come up with things to say that would boost him up, but what? So instead of spouting platitudes, I listened and my heart went out to him. Odd as it was, I thought of Harry. One day he had a family, a home, and a life, and the next day it was all gone and he was alone.
I waved hello to the doorman, dropped the mail, and fed Harry. After eating, he sat with me in front of the television, burrowing into the pillows as though he were trying to carve out a comfortable spot for himself. Sometimes Harry was like an animated stuffed animal, my living security blanket. We curled up together and no matter what else had happened that day, it was okay because we were together.
I channel-surfed until I got to a National Geographic show about a dog that rescued someone from drowning. It was 1995 and a dog named Boo and his owner were walking along the Yuba River in northern California. After they made their way around a bend, the ten-month-old Newfoundland looked out at the water and saw that something was wrong. He tore off into the river, swimming out toward a man who was clinging onto a red gas can, desperate to stay afloat in the powerful current. Boo grabbed the man’s arm and towed him back to safety. The man he saved was a deaf-mute, unable to call out for help. The man had fallen into the river when he was gold-dredging.
“Boo had no formal training in water rescue,” said Anderson, a Newfoundland breeder for thirty years. “It was just instinct. He picked up on the fact that there was someone in distress and then dealt with the situation.” A year later, the Newfoundland Club of America, in Cheyenne, Wyoming, awarded Boo a medal for his heroism.
“Oh Harry,” I hugged him as salty tears streamed down my face. I got up to get a treat for him. While he had nothing to do with the rescue, and there was no logic to it at all, I simply wanted to reward him because he was a fellow dog. He ate the biscuit hungrily and waited for another. I hesitated and then handed him a second one.
While I was putting away the bag of banana-apple treats, I noticed the stack of letters by the door. I went over to the pile of mail, and saw just the corner of an envelope. It was pale blue. I pulled it from the stack and saw the violet ink. As my heart amped up, I went into the kitchen for a knife and carefully slit open the envelope.
Dear Sage,
I’m sitting outside of my house looking out at a garden that’s planted with a ferocious harmony of red poppies, acid-yellow wildflowers, Spanish lavender, and bushes and boughs of silvery green. I have a dozen or more paints near me and a six-foot canvas, but there’s nothing on it.
I thought at first it was just too beautiful here to work—too perfectly art directed by nature, maybe. So I drove further out in the country, to search for a different landscape to inspire me. Something wilder, less harmonious.
But that isn’t it. I’m consumed with thinking about you. My focus isn’t on what’s around me, it’s on everything inside my head from missing you. So I got drunk and then I tried to paint. I tried painting sober. I tried to use the canvas as a place to put my fears, my confusion, and my pain, but it didn’t work.
You’re probably thinking now that we barely know each other. But I feel that on some deeper, visceral level, there’s a bond between us—something, actually, that I looked for while I was sketching you—something that I hoped to bring to life on a canvas…if you’d let me. It would have been easier for me to show you.
This is so hard for me to write. I wanted to come here and work. I wanted to be totally on my own. I didn’t want to be thinking of you, consumed by you. And in truth, I’d thought that if I left you’d be better off anyway, without me. But things turned out so differently than I expected, and I’m powerless to change what’s inside my head now.
It went on for another page. Why was it that Luke poured out his heart only in print? Was he using his writing skills to show what a tortured genius he was—as if that were an excuse for the way he acted? I read the letter again and realized that he literally had a crippling fear of opening himself up in person. It was safe to write. There was a distance. I wanted to call Jennelle, or maybe Mary Alice. Somebody, just to talk to. But what would I say?
My eyes scanned the letter again. There was an address at the bottom, but no phone. What was I supposed to do, write back and wait a month for a response? I felt like Abigail Adams in 1776. There was no way to reach her beloved John in Europe except by writing a letter that would take months to get to him. I put Luke’s letter aside and got into bed thinking that this was my first long-distance love affair.
Chapter Thirty-Four
I lost count of the money I had Brian Schulberg spend on his honeymoon. He and Brenda were going to his house in Mustique, the chic island refuge of Mick Jagger and Princess Margaret years back. Aside from bathing suits, both of their wardrobes were heavy on silk and linen as well as cotton T-shirts, cargo pants, and shorts.
For someone who was so seemingly oblivious to what he wore before, it was hard to believe that Brian had become so taken with his new, sleeker image. It was as though he saw himself reborn, a different person from the one who had married and divorced before.
“These are part of my new life, my new me,” he said to me one day as I met him for another few hours of shopping. “I have you to thank,” he said. I waved away the compliment. “I’m serious,” he said. “I never thought about what kind of impression I made before. That matters, at least in the beginning.”
Clothes helped him play the part, they were his props. There was that word again. While Brenda didn’t seem terribly preoccupied with what she wore, she loved the idea that I was picking everything out for her and that it would all come out right.
I got home from work and called Arnie. He wasn’t home. He was dating the girl he met at W, whom I now dubbed Donna K. I didn’t know whether they had a future together, but I knew one thing. After they went out for the second time, he stayed over at her apartment. He didn’t discuss the evening. He didn’t say a word. But when I left for work the following morning, I ran into him coming in as I was going out. He had on the same suit as the night before. There was no mistaking the crooked grin he gave me as we passed each other in the lobby.
Chapter Thirty-Five
The wonderful thing about living in Manhattan is that food is everywhere and all of it can be delivered to your door. This time I called the local deli and ordered a turkey sandwich. A few minutes later the phone rang. Faster than usual, I thought. Then I looked at the number. It wasn’t the deli.
“Sage?”
“Yes,” I said, finally.
“It’s Luke.”
“I know.” I didn’t know what else to say.
“Did you get my letter?”
“Uh-huh.” It sounded as though my voice was going to break. “It was so good to hear from you—after only two months.”
I heard him breathe. “Please, I want to see you.”
“Where are you?” I asked, cautiously.
“On the phone.”
I smirked. “In France on the phone?”
“Not anymore.”
“Long Island?” I tried to pin him down.
“Outside—your apartment.”
I walked to the window and pulled up the shade. He was standing on the corner, leaning up against a car, looking up at the building. “You’re crazy.”
“I know.”
He hung up, and I looked at myself in the mirror. How much can you change your appearance in one hundred and twenty seconds? I ran into the bathroom, grabbed a hairbrush and ran it through my hair, brushed my teeth, fixed my eyeliner, and then circled the apartment like a dizzy dog straightening up. When the doorman rang, my heart pounded so hard it felt like my chest was being caned.
I stood next to the door listening for footsteps. When there was a soft knock, I quietly stepped back so that he wouldn’t know I’d been standing on the other side of it. Harry started to bark insanely, the way he always does when someone’s in the hall. A moment later, I opened the door.
He had that signature half smile on his face, his eyes studying me to see if my face looked the way he remembered. He looked shy, vulnerable. He was wearing jeans and the brown leather bomber jacket with a black T-shirt underneath.
“I shouldn’t let you in,” I said, flatly, eventually stepping aside so he could walk in. “How could you just show up?” I leaned against the back of the couch and glared at him. “You disappear for two months and then you call from downstairs?”
“Don’t be mad.”
“You never said you were going, you never called.” I closed my eyes. “I don’t understand you.”
“I couldn’t face telling you I was leaving,” he said, taking a step toward me and then running a hand through his hair. “I didn’t know when I rented the place that I would get involved with you, that I would feel this way.” He walked toward me and put his arms around me, burying his face in the side of my hair.
“I thought if I just went away it would be easier for both of us,” he whispered. “You’d be better off without me. I’d be working in new surroundings. I thought it would give my work a new energy…but it didn’t work out that way.”
A moment later, the doorman rang again and I jumped. I struggled to break free.
“Wait.” I picked up the intercom. “Food delivery,” the doorman said.
“You’re just in time for my turkey sandwich.”
“Good,” he said. “I’m starved.”
Luke’s bedroom in Vétheuil was a bare room that he painted sky blue, he said. There was a double bed and an armoire. Nothing else. It faced floor-to-ceiling French doors that opened out to the garden with a view of the river. When he woke in the morning, it was the first thing he saw. We were lying in my bed, which faced a triple-size window that looked out at apartment buildings. There were no flowers, unless you counted the pot of geraniums on the terrace of the building across Third Avenue that faced mine. There were a few trees on the street, but they were young and didn’t reach beyond the second floor.
