Perennials, page 3
But she could make contact for only a moment before he slapped her hand away and pulled the gun from his holster, which, she then realized, in an instant of panic, was inches from the spot she’d touched.
He pointed the gun shakily at her. “Ma’am, keep your hands inside the car.”
Denise shrieked and cowered with her arms over her head. She squeezed her eyes shut. She heard him speak into his portable radio and report his location. She wanted to say that this was all just a misunderstanding. She tried to explain herself, but nothing came out except a stream of tears—real this time—and short, labored breaths.
Someone radioed back. She peeked one eye open; the gun was still pointed toward her window. She made a squeaking noise when she saw it there so close to her face, and ducked farther down, squeezing her eyes tighter.
“Copy that,” she heard the boy say into his radio. He let out a sigh.
She peeked again and now looked up at the boy. The gun was back in his holster. He was looking at her with an intensely worried expression on his face.
“Ma’am,” he said, and she watched him with one squinted eye as he lowered his face to window level so that the worried expression was hidden away. “It’s okay. I’m not going to shoot you.”
Slowly she opened her eyes and lifted her head.
“You can’t touch me again,” he said. “Do you understand?”
She nodded emphatically. “I won’t.”
“It’s a felony,” he said.
“Okay,” she said, wiping away a tear. “I didn’t know.”
He looked around. The other cops hadn’t arrived yet.
“I’m sorry,” he said, and exhaled. He put his face into his hands. He pressed his palms into his eye sockets and groaned.
When he removed his hands, his eyes were red from the pressure or maybe from tears. Denise couldn’t tell.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I panicked.”
“That’s okay.” Denise sat up straight. She wanted to touch him again, but in a comforting, maternal way.
“It’s my first week on the job.”
She nodded. He looked so uneasy. He was searching her eyes for reassurance. “You’re doing great,” she said.
—
The East Fishkill Police Station was a small gray brick building on a quiet country road. A stone pathway led to a modest garden up front, which a Hispanic man was happily tending. The building looked more like a tourist center in a nice country town than a police station.
“Hola, Oscar,” said the older cop now accompanying her—Officer McGill’s backup.
“Hola, señor,” Oscar said back to him.
But inside, the station looked like what Denise had only seen on TV: linoleum flooring, fluorescent lights, one open room with a few folding metal chairs at the front, an old woman at a reception desk, and, behind her, rows of desks facing one another, mostly unoccupied, with scattered papers on top of them all.
“Hiya, Doreen,” the cop said to the woman at the desk, who wore her hair in a frizzy gray bun and sipped coffee from a mug that said I’M SILENTLY JUDGING YOU.
“Hey, Bud,” she said, looking up from her clunky desktop computer. She made eye contact with Denise and tilted her head in surprise, as if this were the first time in years she was seeing a stranger.
“She needs to use the phone,” Bud said, and Doreen skeptically pushed the tan rotary phone across the desk.
Denise dialed Mark’s cell number, which she knew by memory, and waited for him to pick up.
“It’s me,” she said.
A pause. She could hear some cheerful domestic commotion: a teen boy’s laugh, a dog barking, the wife’s upbeat voice in the background: “Who is that, sweetie?”
“Hold on a second,” he said into the phone. She heard something muffled, imagined him covering the receiver, telling his wife it was work. Then shuffling and a door shutting.
“What the hell are you doing?” His voice was hushed. “It’s a Sunday.”
“I know. I’m sorry. It’s an emergency.”
“What’s going on?” he said with sudden urgency. “Is she okay?”
“She’s fine. She’s doing great.”
Denise looked up at Bud, who was standing expectantly, watching her, listening to the conversation, his arms crossed. And then at Doreen staring stone-faced, holding her oversized mug in both of her wrinkled hands.
“I got pulled over,” she whispered into the phone, as if the people at the police station didn’t already know.
“So what?” Mark said.
“So my license is suspended.”
When Bud had gotten to the highway and run Denise’s info, he’d discovered those many envelopes that had been accumulating over the year, and that another envelope had come informing Denise of the license suspension.
“Jesus, Denise.”
“They won’t let me drive,” she said sheepishly. She felt like she was a little girl again, confessing to her father right before he spanked her that yes, she had stolen five dollars from his drawer.
“How the fuck were you able to even take out a car?”
“I dunno.” She’d just gone to the same shoddy Avis that she went to every year, the one with the Mexican guys behind the counter who always flirted with her.
A sharp, angry exhale. “Where are you?”
—
After she hung up, Denise waited in one of the metal chairs near Doreen’s desk. A few cops were milling in and out of offices, drinking coffee. Some made phone calls from their desks in the open room. Doreen typed, periodically looked at Denise, sipped her coffee, typed again.
“You work here long?” Denise finally said to break the silence.
“Thirty-seven years,” Doreen said.
“Wow,” Denise said. “Impressive.”
Doreen raised her eyebrows in a way that said Yeah, I know.
“I’m a secretary too,” Denise said. “In the city.”
“The city, huh.”
“That’s right.”
“Never liked it.”
Denise nodded. “It’s not for everyone.”
Doreen leaned forward, took another sip from her mug. “That was your husband before?”
Denise shook her head. “We were never married.”
“But you wanted to be.”
Denise considered this. “It’s complicated.”
“But you got a kid with him?”
“I do.” She thought this might be her in with Doreen. “Rachel. She’s thirteen.”
“Never had kids,” Doreen said. “We didn’t want ’em.”
—
Denise had met Mark on her first day at Kimmel, Johnson, and Murphy, LLC, spring of 1985. She wore her pencil skirt and her kitten heels, and she was so nervous. She had been the receptionist at her stepdad’s tiny real estate office in Downtown Brooklyn for the previous five years, since she had graduated from high school, but then her mom had divorced her stepdad, and the job went too. This was her first time working in Manhattan. She’d answered an ad in the classifieds, and amazingly, they’d hired her. She had a lot of experience, and her new supervisor said she had “spunk.”
The law firm was on the thirty-fourth floor of a skyscraper on East Thirty-Ninth Street; the Chrysler Building was so close that Denise couldn’t see to the top of it from the office. She was working for a short and fat attorney who sweated profusely, and she had been told in the interview that part of the job was constantly running to and from the dry cleaners to switch out his dirty shirts for clean ones. He went through at least two of them each day. Her desk was situated outside his office, and his phone did not stop ringing all morning. In fact, the whole office was men walking briskly between offices in their suits, and phones continually ringing on the desks outside the offices, and secretaries at the desks picking up the phones and speaking in their cheerful yet professional, capable voices: “So-and-so’s office; and who may I ask is calling?” Denise, on the other hand, felt as if she bumbled every time she picked up the phone and had already disconnected the line twice when trying to transfer a call to her attorney. At one P.M. on her first day, she had not yet eaten or gone to the bathroom, and she wouldn’t have minded taking a fifteen-minute break to do so.
She noticed the man walking toward her attorney’s office, swaggering, really, with his head held erect and a calm, satisfied expression on his face. He seemed so comfortable, so at ease, so very capable. He was tall and he had wide shoulders, and though Denise knew nothing about expensive suits, she recognized that he was wearing one. He noticed her—she knew he did—and bashfully she looked down to scribble nonsense onto the pad of paper in front of her.
“Hi there,” she heard the man say, and she looked up at him. His face was so clean-shaven that there wasn’t a hint of stubble, and she had the urge to reach out and feel how smooth it might be. He had long eyelashes, like a girl’s, which made his eyes seem deep and important.
He put a hand out when she didn’t say anything back. “I’m Mark,” he said.
“I’m Denise.”
His hand gripped hers hard. “Is it your first day?” he asked, so kindly, so sweetly, that she wanted him to wrap her up in his arms just then. It was odd; this man must have been in his forties. He had some gray hairs on his head and lots of wrinkles around his eyes. She had a boyfriend in Brooklyn, a mechanic she met getting her car fixed, who was twenty-three like her.
She nodded. “Yes,” she said.
“And how is it going?”
“It’s fine,” she said. “I really need to go to the bathroom.”
He broke into a wide grin, showing his rich white teeth. “Do you want me to sit at your desk?” he asked.
“That would be so nice,” she said with a grateful sigh.
When she came back, he was sitting in her chair, legs up on the desk, talking to someone on the phone with his fingers twirling around the cord.
“Oh yes, we’ve begun hiring male receptionists,” he was saying into the phone. “Equal opportunity.” He looked up at Denise and winked at her, as if he was crafting this private joke for just the two of them.
—
Mark appeared breathless at the front door to the police station an hour later. He was dressed in jeans, boat shoes, and a polo. Denise was used to seeing him in his suit jackets and loosened ties on weeknights. She wished that she wasn’t still attracted to him—it would have made things so much easier—that his extra weight and increasingly high forehead repelled her, made her pity his age and his mortality, for she was twenty years younger than him and still wore the same dress size as she had when they met. But his aging made her feel a tenderness toward him. It was dignified, even, the way he was growing older; it made her feel, as she always felt about him, as if he knew more than she did, as if she was being taken care of. It was just a few months since they had last slept together.
“You made good time,” Denise said to him. At camp, after seeing the other mothers in their conservative Bermuda shorts, she had wondered if her outfit was too provocative. But now she was glad for what she was wearing: denim shorts that showed off her legs, platform wedges, and a tight graphic T-shirt that she shared with Rachel.
Mark took one wordless look at Denise and then walked over to Bud.
“Mark Weinberg,” he said, shaking the older cop’s hand. “Is this going to cost me anything?”
Bud seemed alarmed by Mark’s brusqueness. He glanced at Denise sitting with her hands in her lap. “Technically, no bail posted. But your, um—”
“My ex,” Mark said.
“Yes.” Bud cleared his throat. “She has overdue speeding tickets. That’s why her license was suspended. Altogether she owes four hundred and eighty-five dollars.”
Mark turned to Denise. “How do you have so many speeding tickets? You only drive once a year.”
“Three times,” she corrected. “To drop Rachel off, Visitors’ Day, and to pick her up.”
“And you get pulled over every time?”
“How would I know?”
Mark paid to get a tow truck to pick up the rental. Then, in his own car, he took Denise into the city.
They were mostly silent on the drive. Ray-Bans shaded his eyes, even though the sun was beginning to set. He was speeding.
Soon the parkway widened, and traffic slowed at a light when the road turned local in Westchester. It was eight o’clock; the sky had become an expanse of dark purples and blues. As they merged onto the Saw Mill and got closer to the city, traffic slowed more dramatically. Mark wasn’t giving in to the new pace. Each time the car in front of him decelerated, he waited until the last possible moment to slam the brakes, which would cause Denise’s body to jerk forward, then jolt back into the seat.
“Could you stop doing that?” she finally asked.
Just then his cellphone rang. He looked at it and cursed. “Don’t say anything,” he told Denise, and then he turned the radio all the way down.
He told his wife that no, he didn’t hear the office phone ring; it must be disconnected on weekends (a particularly bad lie, Denise thought; he was getting lazy with the lies). This case was such a shit show, he said. He would just be another hour or two. It was a Sunday night, so who knew how bad traffic would be? He said he was sorry again and again.
Denise missed hearing him saying sorry like that to her, plaintively, like he meant it. That was how it was at the beginning; he was always so sorry that he had to go back home to his wife. So sorry that he had to cancel their dinner plans again. When he got the apartment for Denise on the Upper West Side, she thought the sorries were close to over. He told his wife that having a place in the city just made sense for the nights he needed to work late. His lies were getting craftier, more complex, and the stakes were higher. Denise knew this was a good thing for her, that it meant there would be more sorries for the wife and fewer for her.
He never told Denise he’d leave his wife, but he made her feel soft and pliable; she let him do whatever he wanted to her. How she ached just watching him walk naked across their bedroom—their bedroom! He made her whole body feel bright and calm. She didn’t have to do anything but bask in that feeling, like lying on the side of the bed where the sun shines right on you.
When they got into the city, Mark’s cursing and road rage worsened. He flipped off cabbies and honked at pedestrians. “This is why I don’t drive here,” he said as he held down his horn when a bus cut him off.
“You were in the bus lane,” Denise said jokingly.
“Out of all people, you’re going to tell me how to drive right now?”
“I was just trying to make light of it.”
He let out a chortle without an iota of humor in it. “Light? Make light? Okay, let’s make light of this.” He took one hand from the steering wheel and started counting off with his fingers. “You call me on a Sunday. You have me leave my family and come up to Upstate New York to get you. You have me pay five hundred dollars—”
“I didn’t ask you to pay that!”
“You couldn’t pay it, Denise! You’re broke!”
“I am not. They just wouldn’t let me leave.”
“And then I have to take you all the way into the city and lie to my wife about it. Yet again.”
“I could have taken the train.”
“Well, you didn’t present that option at the time, did you?”
She’d promised herself she would never cry in front of him. Her mother used to warn her about that, even when she was a girl: “Don’t you ever cry in front of a man. They’ll take your weakness and build themselves up with it.” But she’d broken that oath a long time ago. He’d seen her cry so many times at this point that he now held her weaknesses in the palm of his hand.
He turned onto Amsterdam. He looked over at her.
“I’m sorry,” he said when he saw that she was upset. “That was uncalled for.”
Denise quickly wiped away a tear with the back of her hand.
He pulled onto her block and slowed the car in front of the apartment building.
“Why do you hate me?” she said.
He put the car into park.
She wanted to hear him say “I don’t hate you.” Instead he took a breath through his nose, like a bull preparing to fight.
“I heard on a talk show that the opposite of love isn’t hate,” she said, sniffling. “It’s neutral.”
“It’s not the same as it was.”
“But don’t you remember what it felt like? It was the best feeling in the world. That kind of thing just doesn’t go away.”
“I remember,” he admitted, and then used his fatherly tone again. “But you knew the deal. It was your choice to…” He trailed off, not saying the unspoken thing that was always there. Rachel was a choice; Rachel was her choice. “You know I wouldn’t give her up for the world now. It’s just that this”—he gestured between the two of them—“this was never going to happen in a real, long-term way.” He put one arm on her shoulder. “It can’t happen.” He always said this, and then they would always fall into things all over again.
When Rachel was a little girl, Denise had tried to make it work, being a mistress. She raised Rachel in the apartment that Mark paid for. They would get a babysitter and go out on weeknights, and though Denise initially thought having a child together would put a damper on the sex, she found it actually brought them closer, sharing this person together. It was a more profound bridge between them than she could have ever imagined. As Rachel got older, Mark had started to pull away from Denise, but they would still sleep together from time to time. Their sex became more secretive and urgent—no more dates, just late-night visits, him leaving early in the morning before Rachel awoke.
“If Rachel hadn’t been born,” Denise said now, “do you think—”
“I’m married, Denise,” he said softly. “I have a family.”
“You have two families.”
She could see how sorry he was, the bags underneath his eyes lined with weariness. “I have two families. And I love both of my families. I love Rachel very much, and this isn’t good for her,” he said.
She could tell by how sad he looked, how hard it seemed for him to say this, that he was serious about it now. Like picking her up from this faraway police station had been his final straw. She had done this to herself.
