Time Squared, page 26
Not something he wanted to talk about, judging from Dafydd’s face.
“What about some coffee?” she asked.
“I can give you a hand moving that table. Unless Katy needs something else.”
This was the first time she’d had her own place, and Eleanor preferred to move the table herself. Casting around for ways to distract him, she wondered aloud about a clothes rack. The apartment had gone back to being a garment factory. She and Katy scoured used clothing stores and stalls for old designer clothes that they could clean and repair, Chanel and Saint Laurent, or Victorian nightdresses, or hand-sewn trousers and jackets from the thirties, anything her aunt could sell. Eleanor also worked in her aunt’s store as a bookkeeper as her aunt trained her as a manager, planning to launch a second location any moment.
A maw had opened, an appetite for vintage and handmade goods. Her aunt’s store pulled in hangers-on from Andy Warhol’s Factory and rock musicians looking for leather jackets. Models stalked through it, taller and even more gaunt than Eleanor after her illness. Occasionally, incredibly, they would get a rock star. (She had personally cashed out Jimi Hendrix.) Even the famous ones pawed through the merchandise like old ladies at a rummage sale, flipping through hand-tooled bags and belts, holding out ruffled shirts, pulling on the couture garments her aunt remade from stripes and lace and flowered prints too ragged for Katy and Eleanor to repair.
Dafydd left to get more supplies, coming back with a length of dowel and some chains and hooks for hanging it. Katy’s absence was getting long as he crafted the rack, and Eleanor tried desperately to think of more chores. The apartment needed everything done to it, but she loved it the way it was. Her mattress on the floor, the threadbare rug, the rainbow-legged table. Eleanor wanted to live her life and damn the dam busters, or whatever it was they said during World War II.
You’d think she’d know, although Eleanor tried to box up things like that, too. Glimpses. Visions. Hallucinations. Enough.
Even though they didn’t seem to have had enough of her.
The freight elevator creaked to a stop at their floor, its metal door rattling open. Eleanor was relieved to hear Katy and her friends thunder down the hallway. Soft thunder. Sandaled thunder. Huarache thunder as the door opened. A moment’s pause, then Katy saw Dafydd and let out a high-pitched squeal, grabbing him in a movieland embrace so they turned in circles before pulling him into her bedroom and slamming the door.
Eleanor was left with the shuffling friends. They were artists Katy knew from the Pratt Institute, where Dafydd had been teaching photography when they’d met. The Pratts, her aunt called them. It seemed to mean something rude in England, although Clara said it affectionately. They shuffled around the room, leaning their banners against the wall.
Out of Vietnam!
War on Poverty, Not People!
My Brother Died in Vietnam for What?
Eleanor wanted to mingle, but found herself standing stupidly in the middle of the room, failing to fit in.
“I’m afraid we don’t have any beer right now,” she said.
She could have offered coffee, but didn’t want to use up their scant store of Nescafé. Eleanor was relieved when her lack of beer got the protesters to confer (“Automat,” she heard) and soft-shoe out. She wanted to make friends with them, but also knew they would disapprove of her having a fiancé in Vietnam. Not that Eleanor could blame them. She did, too.
* * *
The next morning, Eleanor was at her sewing machine when she heard the creak of the elevator, the clang to a stop at their floor, and a high-heeled click down the hall with a male pad-pad-pad sounding like a soft drumbeat behind it. Katy’s parents, when this was supposed to be her weekend off.
Katy and Dafydd weren’t up yet, fortunately in a bedroom far from Eleanor’s. The Mowbrays would be unhappy to see the putative son-in-law. His wife had recently sent them a letter from Wales demanding money in wording that was half blackmail. The wife had been unstable for years, Katy said, although she was good with the children. Eleanor doubted that both things were true, but in the end it was none of her business. Katy would sort it out eventually.
Brisk, her aunt had called Eleanor since her illness. No more nonsense, Elizabeth Mortlake had said, which Eleanor understood better than she let on.
“Well,” Anne Mowbray said, steaming in before Eleanor had entirely opened the door. Her lacquered perm was so out of place in the East Village loft that Eleanor could almost hear the pipes groaning. Mrs. Mowbray peered around ravenously, obviously never having been here before. Her talk about checking up on Eleanor and bringing news to her aunt (whom Eleanor saw every day) made it clear the Mowbrays were using her as an excuse to invade Katy’s new space.
“I assume the fact it’s tidy is owing to your presence,” Anne Mowbray said.
This was true, but Eleanor wasn’t going to admit it. “Katy isn’t up yet,” she said, wondering whether to offer coffee, but knowing that the Mowbrays didn’t consider Nescafé to be coffee. “Have you seen what she’s working on?”
Eleanor turned around the nearest canvas. Katy didn’t mind people looking, saying she was doing what she wanted and didn’t care what anyone thought. She worked in acrylics, dark paintings done in slashes and angles that suggested wrecked buildings. She made them fast, like spraying graffiti on subway cars. Most were of the Bowery, where William Burroughs was busy writing transcendent poetry among the winos. (Or sleeping it off.)
Not that Katy stalked Burroughs the way some of her friends did, although she stalked the Bowery itself. The painting’s distant focal point winos lighting fires in oil drums. Except that when you looked closely, you saw they weren’t winos but children, feral children dancing in a circle. Eleanor saw the work as limning bombed-out cities, although she couldn’t say why (or didn’t say why, boxing up the hallucinations). She thought maybe Katy was referring to the war in Vietnam, or at least exploring what America was doing to itself morally by bombing a small country half to pieces and orphaning its children.
“Hmmm.” Mrs. Mowbray frowned at the painting. “I wonder if it’s any good. Waldorf, is it any good?”
Mr. Mowbray was down on one knee by the sink, craning to look under it. “I presume your landlord is going to put in a drain,” he said, in his resonant Yalie drawl.
“I think it might actually be good,” Mrs. Mowbray said, speaking loudly enough for Katy to hear, although Eleanor didn’t think that was her intention. If Katy was going to be the black sheep of the family, Mrs. Mowbray required her to be a talented black sheep. An untalented black sheep would be a social disaster.
Eleanor thought Murdo Crawley was the real disaster, even though he was only a son-in-law. Senator Murdo Crawley, a hawk among hawks so insistent in his support for the war in Vietnam he made even some of his fellow Republicans wince. He was pictured as a little Hitler on one of the protest signs that Eleanor suddenly realized were still leaning against the wall. He’d probably like the publicity.
No, he wouldn’t. His blind eye was caricatured. That was unnecessary.
“It’s really . . .” Mrs. Mowbray said, examining Katy’s painting. “It’s really good.”
Katy slipped out of her bedroom, holding a sweater closed over her sprigged cotton nightgown.
“What a surprise,” she said.
Eleanor wasn’t looking forward to this. “I haven’t offered you coffee. I’m sorry.”
“I’ll take one,” Mr. Mowbray said as he stood up, brushing off his pants. “Although I can’t work out where your landlord is going to put the drain.”
“He isn’t,” Katy said.
“All right,” Mr. Mowbray agreed, looking even more puzzled.
“Buckets,” Eleanor said brightly, grabbing the kettle. “Like a fire brigade. Buckets for bringing in water in and buckets for taking it out.”
Mr. Mowbray looked around for the buckets. But people didn’t send buckets to the curb unless they had holes in them.
“Dafydd showed up yesterday when I was out at a demo,” Katy said. “We weren’t planning to put in the sink yet, but he was looking for things to do. We’ll get buckets as soon as we can afford them.”
Eleanor nodded brightly, relieved that Katy had taken charge.
“Maybe Dafydd can buy you some buckets,” her mother said, her tone ominous.
“Dafydd left me in the middle of the night,” Katy told her. “He has a girl in Vietnam. And before you say it, of course it serves me right. I should have known. A man who leaves his wife and children. Not for me, by the way. There was one before me and now there’s one after.”
Katy stood with her fists clenched like a child.
“She’s a journalist for one of the networks, and he tells me how he needs to learn to use a TV camera—he’s so fucking obvious—and of course there will be one after her, and I hope he was mugged when he left at two in the fucking morning because, because . . . Mummy!”
Katy threw herself at her mother, who caught her neatly.
“Well, you do deserve it,” her mother huffed kindly. “You’ll find that a consolation. At least you didn’t not deserve it.”
“Anne,” Mr. Mowbray said wearily.
“I’ll just,” Eleanor said, and held up the kettle.
* * *
At work the next morning, Eleanor was relieved to open the accounts, although she felt guilty for leaving Katy alone. Guilty, mainly, because she was glad to get away from her. Eleanor loved Katy, but she bottled so much up that when things finally poured out, there was no end to it. Rhythmic sobbing like a piledriver.
Much easier to sit down at her blue-painted desk in the back office, opening the accordion file of receipts at the end of a profitable weekend. (Bianca Jagger had been in.) Numbers were so much easier to add up than people. Dafydd Arden, for instance, who had been concerned for Katy’s comfort while planning to leave her. He could have gone out for a walk and come back when he was sure she’d be home. No one made him fix the sink, much less buy them an electric drill. (Which Eleanor planned to sell.)
One plus one was so much more predictable, equalling . . . her and Robin, Eleanor thought, putting down her pen. Dafydd had made her worried about Robin. About bar girls, even though Dafydd’s lover was a journalist. Eleanor didn’t want to know the details of soldiers’ leaves in Vietnam, and with Robin, a lapse would only be a lapse, nothing important. But: social diseases. Gonorrhea. The clap. And unlike Katy, Eleanor wanted children.
Sweetheart, he wrote. This is a short one, scribbled quickly so Arden can give it to you directly. I’m all right. We still have no news of Ted, but I’ve got myself into a position in Saigon where I’ll know as soon as we hear anything. If this war has any intelligence, I’m in the thick of it. Some people claim that it doesn’t, but it’s more realistic to say we know precisely what we’re doing wrong and don’t fix it.
That isn’t to say I agree with the long hairs. We’ve put this country in a mess and need to stay to fix it. There are good people here. I’m not speaking of the government but of the people themselves, who are among the nicest you’re ever going to meet. I would like to be in a position to help support a truly good president in South Vietnam, but it seems my fate to fight in a complex war. My father got to fight Hitler on behalf of great leaders like President Roosevelt. We live in different times, as your aunt likes to say.
I’m glad Arden offered to take you the letter so I have a chance to tell you what I really think. If anything happens, I want you to know that it won’t be a worthless death in a mistaken war. I’m here to try to help people, which is all we can do, really. No one said it would be easy.
P.S. Just to be clear, I think Murder Crawley is a complete asshole.
“You’ve got a letter from Robin,” her aunt said, standing just inside the office doorway. Behind her stood a model waiting for a word; Eleanor had no idea why.
“Dafydd Arden brought it back,” she said. “He went looking for Robin when he didn’t have to. I don’t know if you’ve heard, but Dafydd came back to tell Katy he was leaving.”
“He came back for a meeting with his editors,” her aunt said. “I talked to Anne.”
“He told Katy in person, which he didn’t have to do, either. And he brought me my letter. I’m not defending him. It’s just what Robin says, people are complex.” Eleanor held up her letter. “Although I’m not sure who he thinks he’s writing to. Talking about ‘long hairs.’”
“You’ve got beautiful hair,” her aunt said. They’d let it grow during Eleanor’s illness, and now it fell down her back in a reddish-brownish-blond tumble.
“Henna,” she said.
“But look who’s here to see you.”
The model in the doorway wiggled her fingers in a cute wave.
“I’ll just let you . . .” her aunt said, retreating and leaving Eleanor thoroughly confused. Then she saw the green eyes.
“Hetty!” She launched herself toward her cousin. Eleanor had thought Hetty was still in India, where she and her husband, Whit Whittaker, had been staying at the maharishi’s ashram with the Beatles. Or at least, at the same ashram where the Beatles had stayed, Whit being an executive with Columbia Records.
“Oh my God, Hetty!”
Hetty had always had a gorgeous face, but otherwise she’d been awkward and too tall and chubby, her beautiful eyes getting lost in her cheeks. Now it was like an old black-and-white movie where the man says, “Why, Miss Smith, without your glasses, you’re . . . you’re beautiful!”
“I know. Isn’t it weird?” Hetty said, although Eleanor hadn’t said anything. “It’s parasites. I got them in India, and I’m getting so many offers, I’m probably going to keep the little buggers. Even though they give me the most awful shits.”
Such vulgarity from a beauty so ethereal she could have been on the cover of Vogue.
(And would be, Eleanor knew, although she put that in a box, too.)
* * *
Hetty had the most extraordinary capacity for doing nothing, one of many things that drove her mother crazy. Hetty’s initial idea had been to go shopping before meeting Whit at their hotel that afternoon. But when Eleanor said she had to work, her cousin plumped down happily on the old office couch instead of going out on her own. Sometimes Hetty sang under her breath like a child, or puffed out the beat to a song, and she disappeared periodically, arriving back from the store wearing thigh-high suede boots or silver necklaces or beaded bracelets she examined minutely, holding them up to the light.
Eleanor didn’t think Hetty was on anything. She was just naturally stoned. She’d met Whit when she was a receptionist at Columbia, a job that mainly involved sitting at the front desk and smiling. Eleanor would have slashed her wrists but Hetty had loved it, and there was a native shrewdness to her character that kept her from dating musicians. Instead she’d held out for Whit, who was much older, in his mid-thirties, and living in London. They’d gone back there from India, and Hetty said she’d been flooded with offers to model and act, even being asked to appear on a record cover.
They spoke when Eleanor took breaks, on her honour not to work herself into a headache. Finally she pushed the adding machine aside, standing to stretch, which Hetty happily mirrored.
“Yoga,” Hetty said, bending at her newfound waist.
“Should I try it?”
Eleanor touched her toes.
“It’s fussy,” Hetty said. “Yogis claim to be able to fly, but they really just cross their legs and bounce on their bums.”
Eleanor threw herself on the couch and Hetty tripped over her feet to land beside her.
“It takes control, though,” Hetty said.
Eleanor played with one of her cousin’s bracelets, which still had the price tag attached.
“So did you meet people who claimed to be enlightened?” she asked.
“I am one,” Hetty said. “I mean, when I bother paying attention. Being one with the universe and all that. I didn’t know everyone doesn’t feel this way. It’s just, how can you feel apart from the universe? That’s what I don’t get, and no one could explain it.”
“I guess if you put it that way.”
“Right?” Hetty asked.
Her cousin was lucky she only had one question. Eleanor had been drowning in them since her illness, and not just about Robin. Four-in-the-morning questions about the purpose of life and God and a woman’s role, Woman’s Role. Everyone talked about that these days; it wasn’t just her. Some of the others seemed satisfied with asking the question but Eleanor wanted answers. And Hetty was the guru the gods had sent her?
Not gods, she corrected herself. Gods and goddesses belonged in a box as well.
“I really was sick,” she told Hetty. “I had hallucinations. I’ve never done acid, but maybe it’s like that, I don’t know.”
Eleanor felt a shift, as if the universe had started paying attention to her again, when she didn’t want any more of that.
“I don’t really remember,” Eleanor said, although the blanks in her memory were slowly filling in. “But it’s left me feeling that the universe is different than we think. I don’t know how to explain it. I just caught glimpses. The word ended up in my head, actually. It implies there’s something to glimpse.”
“Like, Something and not just Nothing.”
“Do you believe that?”
“I’d like to,” Hetty said. She pulled Eleanor’s hair out of her face and tied it into a loose knot at the nape of her neck. There was a mirror, and Eleanor watched Hetty slip one of the elastic bead bracelets off her wrist and use it as a hair tie. Her cousin didn’t seem to have anything else to say.
