The Ultimate Exit Strategy, page 17
“That kid’s going to be hell in litigation,” Andre had predicted on more than one occasion. By nine o’clock, I thought I’d heard everything in the little monster’s repertoire at least a hundred times.
“Biscuit,” said Brandon unexpectedly; and excited by the new expression, I went immediately off to the kitchen and got him one, a hard teething cracker from the jar on the counter as kind of a reward. Who knew? I thought positive reinforcement might lead to even more lucidity in his chatter. Better yet, the biscuit had brought about perfect silence.
“MMMMMM. MMMM. mmm.” Brandon was happily gumming the cracker beside me on the couch, as apparently this had been a legitimate request rather than just diction practice. Whatever the source of my good fortune, I took advantage of the child’s speechlessness to seek out some adult conversation, digging my phone card hungrily out of the stack of plastic in my billfold and dialing up Spike on the cordless phone. Blue River time was an hour ahead of Chicago and so I woke her up.
“Hi,” Spike said in a dreamy voice as if she’d already been sleeping for a long time. “I’ve been missing you,” and I realized how much her emotional availability had begun to wear away at my nerves. “Mmmmmm?” she was asking sleepily. “What are you wearing?” This had been one of our favorite phone games.
“Sweat pants.” I told her, preferring just then, not to play.
“Uh-huh. Is that all?” Spike sounded vaguely disappointed, but willing to work with whatever was available.
Brandon was chattering again happily beside me on the couch, the remains of the cracker stuck out of the side of his mouth like a fat and oddly-shaped cigar. “Doggie? Biscuit! Perseverate!” It gave me a frightening glimpse of my godson’s future adult self, a back room deal making fat cat. Had his father been there to see it, I thought he would have been wild with joy.
“What are you doing?” Spike dutifully offered up yet another of our usual games, but I didn’t feel much like playing that one either.
“I’m here with Brandon, baby-sitting.” Suddenly, I didn’t really feel like talking to Spike. The realization swept over me like the acute nausea I had sometimes mid-bite in one-piece-too-many-pieces of pizza as if the grease had backed up from my intestines all the way to my throat. Suddenly I didn’t even want to know Spike.
She was cooing absently in a way that grated like a fiberglass rash, “Baby-sitting. That’s nice. Get some practice, honey. Someday we might have a little one to raise back here.” I was flashing on the horrifying apparition of a two-year-old with a tongue piercing, shuddering at what a compromise sperm donor between Spike and me might look like.
It wasn’t really in my vision.
“What do you mean, ‘not your vision’, Virginia?” The dreaminess had deserted Spike’s voice.
What did I mean? It was a question with so many possible answers. Children? Blue River? Us together? None of it was my vision. For a long time now something had been missing in my life and I had the thought that I was putting together my future as a giant jigsaw puzzle, one which, when completed, would feature wealth and happiness and spiritual fulfillment.
Had I known what specifically was wrong, maybe Spike and I could have stayed together, but as it was all I knew was that something in my life had to change. This relationship with her seemed as good a thing as any.
“What do you mean, Virginia?” Spike was challenging me to clearly specify which part of her picket-fenced fairy story needed an overhaul. “What exactly do you mean is ‘not your vision?’ ”
“Well, sort of all of the above.” I’d been thinking aloud really, but then, it had been said. A long angry sigh came back through the phone, a threat that if I continued in that vein things between us would be irreparable.
Falling out of love is painless, almost numbing, but breakups are like ripping the scab off a badly skinned knee, leaving the tender pale skin underneath and sometimes a scar.
“Some people have warm eyes,” Spike had apprised me years ago.
“Warm eyes like who?” I’d asked, as for me this was hardly an essential point of categorization.
“Like me, like you, like Allison,” and I took the naming of another woman, her ex, as a romantic challenge the way men at a carnival arcade will buy three hundred dollars in tickets to throw a ball and win a two dollar stuffed bear. I hadn’t really wanted Spike, but there she was like the last piece of pizza left in the box, something that, certainly, someone ought to have wanted – just not me.
“I had a kind of rush with Ally,” she’d admitted early on. “I think the reason I haven’t seen anyone for so long was I haven’t gotten it back – the rush,” and she asked me my favorite color as if that might hold some augury.
I said I liked green and apparently that had boded well.
Spike was the kind of woman who in conversation asked questions, I presumed to know me, the better to take care of me. She had said that she wanted to take care of me, and in that context, I found her interest in the crevices of my life completely endearing.
“Where is the most unusual place you’ve ever done it,” Spike asked in the second conversation of our, then, recently renewed acquaintance, an attitude I might have decided was inappropriately forward if it hadn’t afforded me an opportunity to flirt and brag. I’d decided that Spike had a profound, enlightened disregard for the conventions of polite conversation and confessed to her my most unusual place of sexual contact was on a couch with a stranger at a party where’d I’d been drunk.
“So you’re an exhibitionist.” She’d given a kind of totaling smile, as if she were embarrassed for me or amused that I was not more embarrassed for myself, as if she thought with that she had completely figured out who I was.
“No.” I said. “I was just fucked up. So, how about you?”
With her slight, knowing smile she was momentarily lovely. “I’ll ask the questions.” Weeks later, she’d replayed our conversation back verbatim to prove that it was I who first brought up sex although, before, I could have sworn it was the other way around.
Spike didn’t want me, she said. Absolutely, she didn’t want anyone at that moment, wanted to be alone for a while. What she’d wanted was sex, no strings and to settle some unfinished business from a long time ago she’d imagined we’d had. I was responsible for tricking her into her current position and here she was. Here we were: in her waterbed, her bathtub; under her kitchen table, partially clothed; pants at her ankles; pants at my ankles; weekend flights to Blue River from Chicago.
It was like all the advertisement for love without the hassles – for a while. Then, it was the relationship we’d both sworn we didn’t want. Now, I felt tricked. And when she called I felt grudgingly obliged to pick up the phone rather than hiding, as I liked to do, behind my answering machine: I’m not home right now, but if you’d please leave a message, I’ll get right back to you.
“Pick up.” Spike felt it was her inalienable right as my partner to assert, “I know you’re there,” and later when I hadn’t answered, she would demand, “Where were you when I tried to call? You didn’t tell me you were planning to go out?”
At eleven o’clock at night, she would call and say, “I miss you; I’m getting on a plane right now.” At first this was very exciting before it got to be a terrible inconvenience having to clean up my apartment on such short notice.
Things change. And of course, I’ve found they nearly always end badly. Somewhere along the line, Spike had decided unilaterally that she wanted to be married. Not necessarily, I don’t think, to me. But there I was; and she wanted to be nesting. House buying. Joint checking account opening. Sperm bank shopping.
“What exactly is the problem,” she was asking me now, but I was still finding myself.
“But what exactly is wrong?” she said.
But I didn’t know. I was unhappy. With my work. With my condo. With my hair cut.
“With me?” she said.
With her? No. Not with her. “Well not exactly.”
“Then what exactly is wrong?” She was crying. “Are you interested in someone else?”
“Well, yes,” I said. “But that’s really not the problem.”
“Well, it certainly seems like a pretty irreconcilable difference, to me.” She had woken up now enough to be polysyllabic, certainly enough to be pissed off. “I should have seen this coming. It’s the money.” Spike was gasping, tearfully, “I wish you still needed me,” an indictment in short, reproachful sobs. “You used to need me. I guess this is all,” she said. There was nothing to say.
We just listened to each other breathing for a while. There was a very soft click from her end of the line, and then the three shrill rising tones the phone company has to remind you that your phone is off the hook.
I dropped it softly back into its cradle and went to the kitchen to get myself another beer. By the time I’d finished it Sandra and Andre were home.
“You didn’t have any trouble, did you?” Expectantly, Andre picked up Brandon from the couch where the child had finally passed out courtesy of that second tablespoon of beer. I got up and retrieved my coat from the coat tree and put it on. “Mommy’s angel,” Sandra pushed her face to her son’s and cooed. “Did you have any trouble tonight, Virginia?” she was asking.
“No,” I said, “no trouble at all.”
* * *
I’d been able to hold it together while Sandra and Andre waited with me for my cab. Andre’s discussion of the important career-defining partners they had dined with provided a dull sort of background noise that took my attention away from my own domestic drama. My life could have been worse, I thought. It could have been Sandra’s.
Or Naomi’s. When I’d called her on my cell phone from the cab, it sounded as if she’d been dead asleep only minutes before.
“Virginia, it’s twelve-seventeen and about thirty-six seconds,” Naomi reminded me of the time like a threat. “If you’re not dying it could be arranged because I have no idea how I’m going to get back to bed without a cigarette. What exactly is your problem?”
I told her, “I broke up with Spike,” and almost immediately was crying, desperately, the way I used to as a kid having saved all my grief and disconsolation for the presence of my mother’s ear. Naomi Wolf was hardly my mother, but in a pinch it seemed she would do. “It just wasn’t working, the piercings and all.” As I talked I was crying with regret whenever I happened to recall what a heel I’d been and with embarrassment at the relief I felt to be free of Spike. Em had been right – I was sorry I’d been a heel, just not sorry enough to stop being one. “I know you hated her, but I really need you to be nice to me right now.”
“I didn’t hate her.” Naomi had made her voice only minimally more kind than it had been a moment before but I would take what I could get. She said, “I just thought you could do better. You need somebody who’s here for you. Look,” she asked as if this was just one example of the kind of thing I needed, “do you want to come over here?” I did. Having just broken up with Spike, I found, ironically, I really didn’t much want to be alone.
XIX
Naomi’s apartment was fifteen minutes by car in the opposite direction than we’d been traveling. But I’d managed through intermittent sniffling to redirect the stoop-shouldered fatherly Flash Cab driver to the Park Shore.
The last time I’d been there was to snoop around Winslow’s apartment. I’d been there with Cassandra who had slept with me and now wouldn’t call, for whom I had just broken up with a perfectly good if not quite perfect girlfriend who loved me; and I found myself weeping again.
“You all right, miss?” the driver wide-eyed me in the rear view mirror unused to and a little unsettled by the sight of a women falling to pieces in the back of his cab.
So, I told him I just had a cold.
“There’s a lot of that going around,” the cabby agreed. He was either the nicest, most tactful fellow on the planet or he had clearly missed the high points of my phone conversation, apparently enmeshed in the music of his swing band station, bobbing his head in time. Either way his lack of commentary was working for me. Now that I was off the phone, he turned up the radio volume, companionably sharing the sound until he pulled the cab into the circular drive of the Park Shore, where my old friend, Joe, was behind the security desk in the lobby.
“2702 never did catch up with that friend of his,” he commented while buzzing me in to the elevators. “Shit happens.” Joe said, and I agreed.
All my misty way to the seventeenth floor I had the elevator and the dim quiet hall that led to Naomi’s door thankfully to myself. I’d barely touched the painted black metal door before Naomi opened it.
“So you finally gave old Spike the boot,” she observed, I thought more cheerfully than was appropriate given the salt stained smear I’d made of my face.
“Not exactly the boot.” It wasn’t the way I would have preferred to characterize my behavior.
“Right.” Naomi handed me a generously filled scotch glass. “Let’s retire to the couch,” she said, “for debriefing,” making my pain feel, as usual, a little like a prime time television drama, her entertainment.
I said I was going through some changes even if I couldn’t exactly say what they were but I was sure that I would know when I came out the other side. Although, the way things were going, there seemed to be no telling exactly when that would be, which caused me to cry again with renewed vigor. I was crying, not with any sound that I could notice, but tears were running down my face the way people cry in art films in the wake of great tragedy, like the sweat pouring off of Wes Winslow’s body that afternoon before he died. Calmed voice, he was falling apart in spite of himself. I felt as if I was on the outside watching my seams unravel, like three highballs into the motor control failure of a very bad drunk. My eyes oozed tears, and I took a couple of ineffectual wipes at my nose with the back of my hand, but I couldn’t stop the runnyness it seemed now from any orifice. “It’s really clean in here.” I was hearing myself oddly notice aloud the Pine-Sol smell wafting from Naomi’s kitchen and bathroom, which could only indicate a visit from her cleaning lady. The place had been a pit on Wednesday. “When did Maxine come?” Despite the water works, I was asking in a voice so unaffected by anything other than simple curiosity that it startled me.
“Today.” Naomi beamed, a great enjoyer of other people’s elbow grease. In Naomi’s world, housecleaning was a necessity managed by someone else, sometimes for money, sometimes for love as with the litany of marginally-employed, Gen-X girlfriends who preceded Maria Sacchi and followed Naomi’s previous long term relationship with the interminably married Louise. I looked around the tidy room, the empty ashtrays recalling that neither Naomi nor Maria could be bothered to pick anything up.
Once Maria’s cat had made her a present of a decapitated mouse, delivering it to the living room couch by Naomi’s foot. Maria had shrouded it with a tea towel and Naomi had had to call Maxine, an ancient black woman from Woodlawn with dyed red hair, three days earlier than scheduled. A bent-over old lady, who I had presumed took the hour-and-a-half Hyde Park bus ride up Lakeshore Drive to clean Naomi’s Northside flat out of some inexplicable nostalgia that Naomi liked to attribute to the fact that Maxine had cleaned for Naomi’s mother when they’d lived in South Shore, this long before the neighborhood went from gracious homes to grasping middle class aspirations in the redlining 50s wake of the advancing black belt.
This seemed somehow obscene, as I’d always wondered how the geriatric Maxine managed even to push the sweeper. Laughing, Naomi had passed me a clean, white business card with tasteful, raised black lettering. The embossed print read: Maxine’s Cleanin’ Service, licensed and bonded.
“I don’t get the Maxine, you nut; I get a Maxine. The way all the Pullman porters used to be called, George.” Naomi had told me years ago she had gotten the original because of her mom, “but lately Maxine’s franchised, now she lives in Florida.”
Spike had wanted to franchise, it seemed to be the way of the new world predictability, quality control, everything I wanted in my life and I couldn’t understand how it was eluding me.
“Are you going to be all right? Why don’t you tell me about it,” Naomi was saying with that maternally sympathetic lilt that I had been hoping for earlier when I called, but there wasn’t, I realized, much to tell.
“I called Spike tonight and I broke up.” I’d thought it was the best thing considering Cassandra and all.
“Oh right,” Naomi picked up the mention of Cassandra as if this were a detail she’d forgotten, “your police detective.” With that she rose abruptly from the couch and went into the hall as if expressly to turn off a light that was burning somewhere in the back of the apartment. “Of course, your police detective. Hold that thought.”
She had left the room dark except for the light in the ceiling of her foyer and the skyline coming through her open window, a Godsend as my eyes hurt terribly.
Naomi returned to the couch with a fuller, fresher drink and a brighter attitude, which I thought was for my benefit, speaking in the falsely high happy voice people use to cheer a child.
“You know, I may have an interesting tidbit for you on Winslow’s poisoning.” Naomi was saying that some friend of hers, Solange, in the Medical Examiner’s office had told her that Fly Agaric wasn’t usually fatal. “It’s a magic mushroom and reputedly a Biblical aphrodisiac mentioned in the Song of Solomon.” Naomi raised her eyes. Her friend Solange was apparently thorough.
“Usually, people just trip. We’re talking half a dozen mushrooms potentially the size of dinner plates to induce death in a healthy adult.” It seemed more than you could practically sneak into a salad, but Winslow had been sick that day.
Naomi was saying, “So maybe this Winslow meant to take the shrooms and died tripping because he had the flu. Maybe your secretary and/or her kid are being paid off for what she knows about Winslow’s proclivities. You said this guy, Rupert, was a favorite of his. Maybe they were into the same thing. All I know is that the ME is ready to call this an accidental drug overdose. Only problem is Winslow’s people are important and they’re understandably embarrassed.”
