The Fuck-Up

EIGHT

Between Broadway and the Bowery along Astor Place, street vendors lined the south side of the street spreading out anything that could be sold. The sellers weren’t franchised or affiliated with anything other than the garbage they’d collected or robbed, but occasionally they’d come across an item of worth or curiosity. I was able to buy a shirt and a pair of pants. I tried trading away articles of my punk clothes, but no one would take them. One vendor whom I had come to know, named Flowers, offered me a good deal on a leather waist jacket, so I bought it. Passing down Waverly Place, I noticed that there was no line in front of the Astor Place Hair Cutters. It was an off-peak hour. I quickly located one of the old Italian barbers in the fray and asked him to give me an old-style hair cut.

“The kind I’d give my kid, ya mean,” he muttered, as he tried to salvage something. After ten minutes, my second haircut of the day was done. My hair was very short.

By four o’clock I was on a corner phone asking a secretary if I could speak to Glenn Roberts. While waiting on hold, a very young punk girl walked by wearing a bone in her nose. It reminded me I was still wearing an earring, which I removed and discarded.

“I’m sorry,” the secretary returned to life, “Miss Roberts is presently indisposed. If you’d like to leave your name and number she’ll try to get back to you.”

That meant rejection; I was about to hang up wordlessly but I suddenly heard Glenn’s voice interrupt, “It’s okay Erica, I’ll take it.”

Erica hung up and I asked Glenn if she was available for any meals. She was silent for a moment, so I tried making it easier. “How about I bring up a cup of coffee to your office?”

In response I heard strange whiny sounds, and gradually I realized that Glenn was fighting back tears. I learned that her boyfriend—a big executive at a rival firm—had been having a torrid affair with his secretarial pool. Apparently one of the ambitious drips from this pool, a secretary to whom he had promised the world, got angry when he failed to deliver. She got her revenge by informing Glenn.

“You should go home. Do you have a friend?”

“He cheated on me,” she replied, in complete control.

“You shouldn’t be at work now.”

“I have more appointments,” she replied.

“So he didn’t really mean anything to you?” I asked. She couldn’t respond. I heard her crying, and thought about the fact that someone whom I really didn’t know was crying on the phone to me.

“Do you really think you’re in a condition for business?”

“No, but frankly I’m afraid of an empty house.” 1 offered to join her. She then gave me her address and hung up. She lived in a brownstone, with ivy up the facade, on a quiet tree-lined street in Brooklyn Heights. Wordlessly she opened the door, still wearing her overcoat. She led me through the antique-filled house into an elegant living room. I sat in an armchair. She silently sat on a sofa across from me holding a glass of Chablis and staring intensely at nothing.

“How’re you feeling?” I finally said after about five minutes.

“Fine,” she replied softly, but added, “Lets not talk.”

Which comes first, the moods or the thoughts? I focused on her lips, which looked hard and thin, but as I watched them they seemed to bloom and become increasingly more delicate. The slight gloss of her eyes seemed to increase. Devastation became her. We were in very different moods. Finally I arose and quietly sat down next to her on the sofa. First, conspicuously not touching. Gently I brought my fingers up, stroking along her collar.

“Don’t do that,” she replied tensely. “I don’t feel right, now. I just want to get over this.”

“He sounds like a real bastard.”

“I don’t want to talk about it. It might sound rude but I’m really tired.”

“I am too.”

“I have a spare bedroom you’re welcome to use,” she replied.

“I can leave if you like,” I replied.

“Despite the fact that I don’t know you,” she began, “I don’t really want to be left alone now, and few things seem more depressing than waking up at night all alone.” Fine with me. She led me to one room and disappeared off into another. And then there was sleep. And then sounds awoke me. It was dark out, hours had passed. I dressed and joined her. She was making us some food, the TV was on, we watched. She still seemed dazed, preoccupied, violently silent. I got increasingly tired. After “Johnny Carson,” “David Letterman,” “Sally Jessie Raphael,” and “Ben Casey,” 1 drifted off to sleep.

“How dare you!” I bolted off the couch, expecting an Angela. It was light out.

“How fucking dare you!” she repeated, screaming into the telephone. “Ten years of all we’ve been through together! You little sleazebag! There’s no reason for you to, cause I’m tearing up all your clothes! Some little bitch just out of secretarial school has to be the one to tell me!”

There was a tense pause. She held the phone to her ear. I awoke and realized she was speaking to him. This would be the interlude when he would be pleading, begging, wallowing, crying, punching his genitals, and quickly trying to hammer together a perspective that would minimize his crime: “I’m just a lonely middle-aged man whose life has amounted to a hill of beans. I started my first business day when I was twenty-one, fresh out of college, and now I’m forty-five, and that prototypical business day—right down to the one o’clock lunch with the boys—hasn’t changed. Twenty of my most fertile years, Glenn, gone!” He might also bring up circumstantial and peripheral details, such as: they weren’t married; his lies were indications of his concern for her; and all the boys have mistresses. But alternately, he might realize that this was a romantic case and not a judicial one; sometimes the best strategy is none at all. Suffer the pangs and continue on.

The longer Glenn held the phone and listened to his apology, the better his chances were. This clown made me feel bad for not fighting harder to keep Sarah. I should’ve let Sarah draw some blood. That would’ve evened the score. I figured that in another minute, Glenn would be cursing him and then tearing some of his clothes, but then he’d be on his way over, both in tears and renewing vows of their rediscovered love. I didn’t care to witness any of it, so I tugged on my shoes, and tucked in my shirt. But then, without so much as a change in expression, Glenn hung up the phone.

“What’s up?” I asked for the verdict.

“It’s over.”

“What did he say?”

“It doesn’t matter. Nothing he can say can change any of it. He fucked everyone in that office that could type over ten words per minute.”

I sensed that she didn’t care to reexplore the event. Although she was in her mid-thirties, that morning, as the sun came into the window, after all the tears and sleeplessness, she looked fresh out of puberty. Her current frame of mind probably made the future seem bleak and lonely. She had suffered a slight death. So I got up from where I was sitting and sat down next to her. Gently I put my arm around her and gave her a peck on the cheek. She was icy cold and I held her paternally, but she just calmly pulled away. After a couple of minutes, when oxygen made its way back up to her brain, and when her lost blood had been replaced, she murmured, “What a schmuck.”

I wasn’t sure whether she was referring to me or the guy on the phone until she kissed me. I started softly kissing her face, along the ridge of her collarbone, undoing her blouse buttons, moving down along her breast. All the while I expected her at any moment to properly stop me. I wondered if perhaps I wasn’t taking advantage of her at a vulnerable moment.

When she led me into her bedroom, I could see all the traces of him, the cologne on the bureau, his satin and monogrammed robe, and so on. She slowly massaged, rubbed and tickled over me in the course of the afternoon and early evening.

In the few days since I met her, I thought of her as neither promiscuous nor giving, but I had lucked out. It was all timing. I had won all the love sired by spite. I made attempts at reciprocating, but it had been so long since I had been on the receiving end that I couldn’t bring myself to put an end to her outpouring.

When I awoke, it was afternoon the next day, I could feel her gently stirring against me, nude to nude. She opened her eyes slowly and then burst open her arms in a yawn. Through the lace curtains the sun softly speckled everything, and from the backyard beyond the windows, I could hear birds chirping. There were no sounds of sirens, pigeons or sidewalk crowds.

“I’m ravenous,” she whispered, and the kissing started again. But just when she started loosening and I began stiffening, she broke off and led me off into her bathroom. It was the size of a studio apartment. A Jacuzzi was sunken into the floor and after it was filled and turned on, we slid in. Water of equatorial temperature whirled around us making creamy bubbles, and we made love again. Slowly towelling me off, she pampered me, first with a lotion and then with a powder. She then led me back into the bedroom. I felt a combination of rebirth and redevirgination. My skin was never silkier. We both began to dress, until she saw what I was wearing. “You can’t wear those clothes.”

Leading me to a deep closet filled with enough men’s clothes to stock a store, she picked out an expensive suit, a new Armani shirt complete with cellophane wrappings, pins and the cardboard necking. She spent the longest time finding the exact tie. Everything was a little loose on me, but it was still pure extravagance. As I put it all on, I was grateful for the guy’s vanity. We locked arms, and Glenn led me to a very classy “supper club” on Montague Street. It was too late for lunch so we had an early dinner; French cuisine with an excellent wine that the maître d’ suggested. This was a whole new league for me.

The waiter, some young Pierre, brought over two silver platters with covers. When he opened the platters, the food was still sizzling. One plate was fish and the other was meat; both were nestled in unusual vegetables and sautéed in a terrific wine sauce. After two days of fucking and fasting, I was starving. Grabbing my utensils with both hands, I forked that food into my mouth faster than any farm boy ever flung hay. Soon Glenn was casting glances, and I could sense that she was resisting an urge to correct my slobbishness. I only ate with one hand and took a slurp of wine after every mouthful of food to pace myself. The gourmet banquet, the elegant abode, the discerning wardrobe, the panache of it all was making me giddy. For a sober instant I was paranoid: was she expecting me to treat her? I took a gulp of wine, and started wolfing down the food nervously again. I wanted to ask her who was picking up the tab, but I knew that she would regard it a vulgar question. She had to pay; my condition was obvious.

“Really, you should masticate your food,” she commented.

“How are you going to pay for this?” I asked just to get the insecurity out of the way.

“With money,” she replied. “I write dinners off as business expenses, why?”

I continued eating at her pace, and felt somewhat insecure by the security and control she had about everything. Her remark about the meal being a “business expense” had put everything in its proper framework: the last two days were nothing more than business. After dinner, the Pierre brought over a dessert tray. I picked out the most intricate structure of chocolate ever constructed. With it we had two reviving demitasses. Because she was a little low on paper, she paid the bill with plastic. We left the restaurant and walked down Montague Street toward the river. There, we strolled the promenade, which decked around Brooklyn Heights giving a humongous view of Manhattan on its Nile. It was late afternoon, and although the sun was sinking early, it was the warmest day in the past week of frost. There was something autumnal about the day—the tiny, bony branches should have been gently swaying with yellowing leaves. When we finally made it up the stately steps of her brownstone, she said her first words since we left the restaurant: “I don’t know how I could’ve passed through this alone.”

Once we entered her living room we took off our coats. While I examined my borrowed clothes in a full-length mirror, she explained that she didn’t want to be callous yet she needed to be alone for a while. If I liked, she said, I could make use of the lower floors. Then she went to a cabinet, where she took out a brass ring of keys. “If you want to go out, these are the house keys. This is the key to the garage downstairs, and this is the key to the Mercedes, if you drive. I don’t.”

“You’re very kind,” I said, grabbing the coat. “There’s no need to feel like you’ve got to pay me, I’ll get going and call you in a day or so.”

“Wait.” She was suddenly distressed. “Where will you be going?”

“I don’t know, why?”

“You can’t go. I’m not just being polite. Would you do me a favor and come back later?”

“What’s the problem?”

“This might sound strange, but I know I’m going to be going through a kind of roller coaster ride, and for a while it’s going to be difficult to handle things.”

“What kind of things?”

“Sometimes… I lose track of life. Things lose their value. I become very messy.” Then she lapsed into an embarrassed silence.

I knew the feeling. I agreed to stick around. She thanked me and retreated upstairs to her bedroom where I could hear her close the large oak double doors that separated the upper half of the house from the lower half. The house was loaded with modern conveniences. Everything was either reconditioned antique or high tech.

Behind a set of panel doors in the living room, I opened up the RCA Entertainment Center—that was what the label read—that included a widescreened color TV, at least twenty-five inches in length and a VCR. In an old bookshelf that had been built right into the wall and that probably once supported a classics library, VCR tapes were aligned. I picked out two films that never became too popular: Cutter’s Way and Wise Blood.

It was just after five o’clock and while I was trying to get the VCR to work, I lost the sound on the TV Both the VCR and the TV had separate remotes and while trying to make them cooperate, I watched a mechanical woman soundlessly broadcast the news.

Flashing across the TV for only an instant on a screen behind the Newsreadette was an old college yearbook photograph of Helmsley. By the time I cranked up the volume, I heard the Newsreadette say, “…was identified by a relative.”