Acquainted with the Night (18 page)

In the kitchen all was serene. The three ruddy, robust little boys, sons of one mother, still played cards. Rummy. They had found pencil and paper and were keeping score. When they heard me come in they looked up and smiled in unison. Some children do have a knack of surviving, one way or another. My own did fine without me. The tall slender boy who resembled his father was drawing an abstract, geometric design with crayons on white paper. On the table were three sheets with the same design, colored in the same way. Odd. But children are odd. They do odd, repetitive things. Maybe he was practicing. It wouldn’t be so odd if he played the same piece on the piano four times, would it, or repeated, four times, a poem he had to learn? Maybe there were subtle but crucial differences in the drawings, invisible to my casual glance. He seemed content, at any rate. The girl, Erica or Angela, was curled up on the hard floor near the garbage can, her thumb and a strand of damp hair in her mouth. She looked touching and vulnerable asleep, as children unfailingly do. I thought of moving her to a more comfortable place, but she was sleeping so peacefully I didn’t want to risk waking her.

I explained to the voice that answered 911, the police emergency number, that my bedroom had been taken over by a band of craftswomen bent on holding a fair.

“Is there an immediate threat of violence?”

“Yes, of course, what do you mean, immediate threat? They’re occupying my apartment and I can’t get them out. Isn’t that violent enough?”

“Is there a
physical
emergency? Are you being threatened with
physical
harm?”

“They might very well have weapons—daggers—how should I know? The point is ... And in a voice made thin and high by terror, I gave a cogent little speech on the term “violence,” that violence need not always be physical, and so forth. It didn’t seem to make any impression on the other voice, which told me to call my local precinct. I did, but the line was busy. I tried four times, at about two-minute intervals, and in between I watched the little boys’ card game. They were cunning players. They would pick up cards they didn’t need, to mislead the others. I envisioned them doing the same thing years from now, with gray in their hair and lines on their foreheads and big cigars in their mouths, but still smiling in unison.

My local precinct’s phone was probably out of order. I walked back to the other end of the apartment. In the study, Ron and Penelope were sitting close together on my studio couch—they had pushed aside three piles of manuscript I had been collating. Their hands were entwined and resting on his thigh, and they played with each other’s fingers while murmuring what appeared to be poignant confidences. In the bedroom, the crafts fair was ready. The handicrafts were attractively arrayed, and the green velvet cushions and tall brass urns lent elegance as well as an air of ritual. Happy salsa music came from a transistor radio someone had placed on the windowsill. Rows of sausages were spread on the grill, glistening brown and sizzling; the pungent smell rose, smoky, into the air. The women stood behind their tables proudly and expectantly. The painters had gone, leaving the front door wide open, and through it the public was beginning to arrive, sporting the countless permutations of age, race, size, sex, and garb. The members of the public were boisterous characters, brimming with life. They pushed past me into the bedroom and fanned out to greet what the fair had to offer.

I returned to the kitchen and to the children. I lay down on the floor near the garbage can alongside the little girl, Erica or Angela, and curled my knees to my chest. I dragged a strand of hair into my mouth. I was tired. I fell asleep.

I had a dream, and in it I was the woman I had been more than twenty years ago. I was lying in bed, cold. There were no mystery stories and no mononucleosis. There was no accountant, with no hungry whining children. Naturally—I had done nothing that was accountable. No young women and no crafts fair: I was the young woman, even younger than they, but I had no crafts I could display, yet. It was dark; no, palely dawning now, the darkness sifting into a grainy light. There was the husband I lay with in our bedroom, not twenty-four by thirty, not a place that could hold imagined scenes or a crafts fair, but a small room stuffy with sleep, and there were our ruddy twin infant boys in their cribs a couple of yards off, who would soon be waking, howling to be fed. Already the stench of urine from their drenched sheets rose, pungent and smoky, into the air. That would have to be attended to. My husband would need to be fed and attended to as well, for it was long before the era when he evolved sufficiently to attend to himself. I was still a nice young woman, and yet I wished they would all go away. I wanted the apartment empty.

The pungent smell woke me, not urine but sizzling pork sausages. I found myself on the floor next to Erica or Angela, and I wondered if the young, ruthless women who did not read but did handicrafts were still there, taking over my place, and if the public was still pushing into the space where I had dreamed my mystery stories (for them!) and which I had expected to keep as my private province. I had perfected the work at the expense of the life, and now I couldn’t distinguish my fantasies from what was happening to me, or tell which was food for the other.

T
HAT PROVOCATIVE TITLE IS
a line I often heard tossed out by a memorable, soft-voiced professor who gave a seminar called Problems in Poetic Theory, He said he was quoting Santayana. He would use it, raising his eyebrows and tilting his balding head to one side, with students who were nervous and hesitant about delivering oral papers, or who were afraid to follow the implications of literary or philosophical theories to their logical, bitter ends. He was an astute, generous teacher, beloved by the class; I profited from his abundant wisdom. Except that leaving his seminar the last day of the term, I tripped on the stairs and lost the heel of my shoe. Limping down the street, I collided with a fire hydrant, fell off the curb, and broke my ankle, which needed to be set and bound: I had to stay off my feet for a month.

Recently, alone in a restaurant downtown, rummaging in my purse for change to pay the check, I noticed that I had lost my eyebrow pencil because of a small hole in my make-up kit.

The loss of a lipstick or a Max Factor $2.99 compact would have meant nothing. These could be easily replaced in the Woolworth’s across the street. But the eyebrow pencil had a curious history.

Years ago, I used the familiar shiny red Maybelline eyebrow pencil, until one evening a friend who worked in an advertising agency told me my eyebrows were too dark. She said a soft gray drawing pencil would do better; moreover, she had an ample supply at work. Why not? I said, and so she brought me one, about six inches long. She was right. The drawing pencil did give a much gentler, toned-down line, especially when I learned to use it correctly, in short light strokes. I sharpened the pencil occasionally, but never to a very sharp point, for that would destroy the soft line it made. Because I used it so sparingly, the pencil lasted a long time. It lasted fifteen years, and the day I lost it, it was an inch-and-a-half stub, still serving me well.

It sounds odd to say I missed an eyebrow pencil, yet I did, for it brought back those lost days when I was a young girl and my friend was sketching underwear ads and I was working as a laboratory assistant examining the legs of fruit flies under a microscope. Much later, of course, we both rose in the world. She became a sculptor and I became a copyright lawyer.

Anyway, while I sat in the restaurant brooding over all this in front of my empty coffee cup, I began idly to listen to the conversation at the table next to mine. A young girl of seventeen or eighteen with billowy strawberry-blond hair and a gentle rosy face was talking animatedly to a young man with a dark beard. She told him the following story of lost and found, which touched me and made me smile. I stayed to hear the end, even though the waitress glared at me with her impatient eye.

“Talking about contact lenses,” the strawberry-blond girl said, “the craziest thing happened with my lenses last year. I’m not really careful with them, y’know, so one morning I was washing them to put them on over the sink in the bathroom. I was up so late studying the night before, for this history test, y’know, I could hardly keep my eyes open. Anyhow, what should happen but one drops right down the drain. God! I was even afraid to tell my mother, but, y’know, like, I had to.

“So I called her and said, ‘Ma, my lens fell down the drain.’ I never used to wear my glasses before I had the lenses. I had this thing, y’know, about how I look in glasses? But I got so used to seeing, with the lenses, I mean, that I didn’t like not to see. So my mother comes in and tries to reach down the drain, my sister comes in and tries, but no luck. So I wore my glasses to school. I couldn’t stand not seeing, once I was used to it, y’know?

“Anyhow, after I left, my mother, she’s very mechanical, like, she takes the whole sink apart. And you know, she found it. I swear to God. So she wrapped it up and gave it to my sister and told her to take it to me in school. My sister didn’t have a first-period class that day, so she left later, y’know?

“So my sister gets on the bus with the lens in her bag, and when she gets off at school there’s this tremendous downpour. Cats and dogs. You could practically drown. So she bends down for something and one of her lenses falls out. I’m not kidding, can you believe it? They say it can’t happen, but I’m telling you, it did. So of course in that rain, like, there’s no use looking, so she comes into my room and asks the teacher, y’know, if she can speak to me for a minute. And she comes over and whispers, ‘I have your lens but I lost mine.’ So I said, ‘What?’ And she says, louder, ‘I have your lens but I lost mine.’ Well, of course I can’t believe it, I mean, and soon all the people around me hear us, and then the whole class is breaking up, because she keeps saying, ‘I have your lens but I lost mine.’

“Well, after school we both go home and tell my mother, and she says, ‘You girls, stop it, you’re driving me crazy with your lenses.’ So anyway, the next day we go to school together, she’s wearing her glasses this time, and when we get off the bus she says, ‘This is where I lost my lens.’ So I bend over the curb and I reach down and I pick up the lens, right there. I know, but it’s true, I swear. I bent over and picked up the lens. I swear to God.”

Some years ago I lost my underpants in the dressing room of a ballet studio.

I was taking a weekly ballet class. I wasn’t very good at it, nor was it likely that I ever would be. But my aim was not to do it well, only to do it. I was approaching thirty and afraid the parts of me were beginning to slip and fall. I wanted something to hold my body together in reasonably good shape.

The ironic thing is that I hadn’t always taken off my underpants for the class. At the beginning I used to pull my tights and leotard on right over them. Soon I came to see this was very unchic. Most of the others in the class—all younger than I, some teen-agers—took everything off. I wasn’t inhibited by the modesty of an older generation. It was vanity that kept my underpants on. I felt I was too fat. Not a great deal fatter than the others, perhaps eight or ten pounds, but those pounds seemed to make an alarming difference in the dressing room. Ballet students are generally flat all over, and an unfair criterion for the average person. Still, I thought my naked self was too much, too much specific woman for our ascetic pursuit. Soft white bulging flanks belonged in a bedroom, not in this bevy of skinny chattering girls who, in their stages of undress, always reminded me of French academic paintings of mythological scenes. Except that these girls were bonier than nymphs.

Then I lost a lot of weight. Not through dieting but through secret heartache, much the easier way, since no conscious effort is required. I became thin enough, in my own judgment, to prance naked around the dressing room. No longer a Rubens, a Titian, a Veronese, I was more of a Modigliani. No one noticed me any more than before; I felt freed.

The sign on the dressing room wall said, “Carry your valuables with you,” but I never imagined that “valuables” referred to underwear. Two or three weeks after I began stripping for class, I found the pants missing from the bench where we piled our clothes. I strode brazenly about asking if anyone had seen them. No one had. Fortunately I could wear my white ballet tights under my skirt—that was easy enough. But I would miss the pants: low-cut hip-huggers, white cotton with a scattering of small aqua flowers all about, a half inch of lace around each leg and at the waist. I had bought them as one of several rewards for my new-found slimness. My tribute to a loss was lost.

I lost an opportunity to have a lover.

It began in the Museum of Modern Art, a place where I invariably bump into long-lost friends. Standing in front of the Rousseaus, paintings which have always made me melancholy because they show a lost (or unfound) world, I felt a tap on my shoulder. An old friend. He and his wife and my husband and I had gone through law school together and married right after graduation. He had two small children with him. We sat in the garden and reminisced while the children threw pebbles into the water, watching the circles crest and disappear.

“They’re getting restless,” he said after a while. “I’d better take them home. Look, why don’t you come back to the apartment with me and have a drink? It’s only a few blocks.”

“Of course. I’d love to see Anne again.”

“Anne’s not there. She’s away for the weekend, at a conference in Pittsburgh.”

“That’s funny. So is Paul.”

“The one on defending juveniles?”

“Yes!”

We both expressed more astonishment at this not unlikely coincidence than it really warranted.

In the apartment, large but modestly decorated, with lush hanging plants everywhere, we drank and strayed into a long, heady but not personal talk. I cannot remember what we talked about; it was the sort of abstract, fervent conversation that is quickly forgotten. Fusing Life, Goals, and Values like foods in a blender, it thickened, frothing and intense, resembling the late-night talks in college dormitories that are eventually supplanted by the pursuit of practical things.