Dear Digby (10 page)

When I went outside, it was warming up, the snow was melting. I walked along Fifth Avenue, then over to Park. I looked at a few fat babies in their strollers. Could I raise a kid alone?

I bought a container of rice pudding and a souvlaki: I’d been craving both. I nodded to the doorman and took the elevator to the top floor. Terence was just unlocking the apartment door—he spun around when the elevator opened. He looked unearthly. He wore a flight jacket and jeans, but he’d dressed in such a hurry he’d left his last-act
Tiresias
makeup on—in the final scene he was half and half, split right down the middle. There was a heavy pancake tan, a dark beard and mustache and shaggy brow on one side of his face. The other side was clean-shaven, pale, with half a Cupid’s-bow mouth below one false eyelash and a perfectly made-up woman’s eye. He wore one dangling diamond earring and one sideburn.

Both sexes looked pretty depressed. “Willie,” he gasped.
“All right.
Let’s get married. Let’s just do it and get it over with!”

A neighbor came out of the apartment next door and looked, looked again, then hurried off, stealing backward glances all the way. Terence whirled around and glared after him. The earring shook.

“Would you mind turning your head?” I asked. “I think I’d rather be proposed to by a man.”

The made-up eye winked. “Sure.”

“I can’t promise how long I’ll stay,” the beard said. “This is very hard on me, you know. The commitment.”

“Okay. That’s enough. I changed my mind, could you turn the other way again? I think I prefer the woman.”

Page was my best woman at City Hall. She took this opportunity to confer a great deal of unsolicited advice on the bride. She waited till we were both a little sloshed at the reception for thirty or so that Terence and I threw at a posh hotel on the water.

She was eating caviar on tiny toasts, and crumbs showered into her satin bodice. She fished them out cheerfully, crossing her eyes, as she searched her cleavage. She lifted her champagne glass. “The only time a woman who marries an actor gets top billing is on her gravestone.” She pulled at the sleeve of my off-off-off white dress, snorting a little, spilling “Cristal.” She clutched my arm. “But don’t go
that
far to get it!”

Page had been married at twenty-one to an aspiring soap opera star of twenty-six. They divorced when she was twenty-three, but he claimed he was only twenty-two in the divorce papers. “At that rate,” she said, “if we’d waited till our silver anniversary to divorce, he’d have been a fertilized egg.” (Her ex, Garth Narrows, was now featured on the daytime drama “Escape from Nuance.”)

I kept my old apartment down in Gramercy Park, and we hung out at the Midget Palace while looking for new digs. The midgets extended the lease.
I
looked for new digs. Terence was performing a lot and couldn’t find the time, so I ended up looking alone. “Be careful,” my doctor warned. She tapped my swollen abdomen gently with her stethoscope. “The first months are touchy.”

Terence stopped wanting to make love. “What’s the matter?” I asked. We were in the wee people’s king-sized bed and it was raining outside. There were satin sheets and there was a candle going. We’d always had a great sex life. “What’s the matter?” I asked again forlornly. My breasts were blooming and my middle had that first sweet curving swell. Yes, I’d studied it—I’d been thinking I looked quite fetching that very night after dropping my bath towel in front of the full-length mirror. I looked over at him. He hadn’t told me once that he liked the way I looked. It had occurred to me to ask him to
act
a little, feign a little interest. He sighed and rolled over. I stared at his back.

At three months I felt established as a pregnant person; I went into work every day and answered the endless letters with real officiousness. I ate green leafy vegetables and listened to Minnie W-W-G’s lectures on Baby Names. It was hard work, looking for apartments—I climbed stairs, puffing—everything I saw seemed wrong.

One afternoon I had to lie down. I was exhausted, a funny wired kind of exhaustion. I felt knocked out, but revved up in some way. I got up to go to the john and saw the first blood.

“Nothing to worry about,” the doctor reassured me on the phone. Her name was Dr. Denny Bright. “This happens all the time at the end of the first trimester,” she said, “but if you want me to check you I will.”

By the time I got to her office, the blood was serious, and by the time Terence got out of the last show at eleven, I was in the hospital. I had miscarried and I was slightly sedated. But not enough.

“Please get the fuck out of here,” I said clearly, calmly, when I saw him and I could speak.

For weeks after that, we lay next to each other in the midgets’ big bed, not touching. After a while I drifted back downtown to my old apartment. Terence was offered a mini-series that shot in Liverpool and Luxor called
So What, Sun Ra?,
or something like that. His role was a narc, a really fine part—he got to wear a trenchcoat and have a tic.

We said good-bye on the phone. Our conversation didn’t last long. It turned out that there really wasn’t much else to say.

DEAR LETTERS EDITOR,

You send me that smart-ass answer in the mail, then I seen here you printed my letter in your column and dragged my butt over the coals in public. You gotta lot of nerves, Digby. When I say I don like something IT MEANS WATCH OUT BELOW. I’M SAYIN IT NOW—THIS I DON’T LIKE. Your in for it now sister.

Sincerely,

Dino Pedrelli

Dear Willis,

Keep up the good work! I think you are great! Here’s a pair of socks I knitted for you (one size fits all!) sorry about the dropt stitches! Could you take a photo of your feet wearing them and send to me by return mail?

Yours,

Lulu Lagerfelt

P.S. Glad you told those pigs off!

I noticed I had some mail from The Watcher, another faithful correspondent. The Watcher sent me vaguely threatening notes, which were also vaguely poetic. The first one I’d gotten months earlier, right after Terence had gone off to his miniseries.

Dear Willis Digby,

Although the lamp is out, I can see fairly clearly in the reflected light from other buildings: pigeons, scaffolding, a window washer’s pail and sponge touched by a ray. Then suddenly it’s darker—and I can see you. I pull the telescope over. You’re working late tonight, like me. Working late, your head bowed over a pile of papers. Every once in a while you look up, murmur something to yourself, then sink back into a little chasm of shadow. You’re lovely, Willis, I can see it clearly—even when you pull your hair severely back and wear strange things on your head. Even when you wear men’s clothing. You were wearing clothes like that the morning I first saw you. I passed by your building and you were on the street talking to the mailman, who was standing there with all those overflowing mail sacks for SIS. You were laughing; you said: “I’m Willis Digby, what kind of bribe would it take to get you to stop bringing this stuff?”

You have a bright face, meant to be happy. But something has hurt you. I can tell as I watch you. Sometimes you stare at the wall, you twirl your hair, you look inexpressibly sad. I wish I knew what has hurt you. Maybe I do. Maybe you need to talk to someone like me. Someone who watches over you.

The Watcher

I looked out the SIS windows at the surrounding buildings—nothing but office towers. One to one hundred floors. Attorneys, magazines, public relations, holding companies. He could be in any one of them. I felt so vulnerable, so “un-taken care of” I almost began to enjoy knowing he was out there. A mad guardian angel. He wrote a lot. Same type of letter.

I met a famous “Advice to the Lovelorn” columnist. She was seated next to me at a luncheon for women journalists, and I immediately began picking her brains about letters. She was plucky and staunch, a small, pretty, no-nonsense woman in her late fifties, with the immobile mandible of the face-lifted. She said she got a thousand letters a day (her column appeared daily in newspapers all over the country), which put things more in perspective for me, though the solace didn’t last long. She also said that crazy letters were obvious and that she disregarded them. She said you could always tell the real psychos by the handwriting. She said that it was usually large, sloping, half off the page, or small, frenzied, and misshapen. The Watcher certainly fit the bill here—his tiny fevered script with all its blots and crossings-out looked like an exploded ant farm. “In all these years I’ve never had any personal dealings with any of my correspondents, honey” then added, her voice dropping, “it’s
never
a good idea.”

The Watcher had a whole lot to say to me about me. He knew nothing about me, I decided, but his speculations were often startlingly perceptive. At the worst of my “what a lousy year it’s been” depression, he wrote an oddly insightful letter about children. Did my sadness have anything to do with children? Or childhood? He could see that I looked down, he could see I needed someone to talk to. There was “a child dying” in my face, he said. I showed this letter to Page, who said, “Willis, look at me. Is there a cat dying in my face?”

I was tempted to answer him, to detail my sorrows in a letter to a total stranger (and voyeur at that!), but I resisted the impulse, I wasn’t that crazy. Still, I caught myself throwing my hair back a little self-consciously when I walked through the columns of sunlight that poured through the great naked SIS windows. It was like appearing in a film—was it possible that I tried to imagine sometimes what the camera was seeing, what the camera wanted to see? Think about it. When was the last time someone watched your every move with tireless, loving eyes? You were a child, and the tender, concerned gaze belonged to the watchful totemic beings you learned to call mother and father. You know, the ones who eventually got distracted and looked away?

Dear Digby,

I saw you at Padgett’s Deli. You have the most wonderful way of looking involved when you’re actually daydreaming. A quotation mark of concentration appears between your brows, and you chew (very delicately) on one side of your lip. When it was your turn to order, the guy behind the counter had to say, “Miss? Miss?” three times before you came to. But you covered it beautifully. “It’s the cole slaw,” you said in a clear tone. “It looks particularly
fine
today.”

Dear Digby,

This afternoon you were in the lobby of the SIS building waiting for the elevator. Nobody was around, the elevator was taking forever. Then a black guy with a ghetto blaster took up position in the lobby doorway—he was parked like a sound truck, 200 decibels of “Heartbreak Hotel.” You looked guilty for a split second, checked to be sure you were alone, then launched into a really funky Elvis imitation for the lobby mirrors. You rolled your hips, twisted down to the floor, held an invisible mike to your sneering lips. You stomped and wailed and wept and shook your hair, and when the elevator arrived (with that curmudgeonly elevator operator), you stopped cold, instantly. You adjusted your collar haughtily before boarding the lift. I heard you say, “What took you so long?” out of the corner of your mouth.

WJD,

You were wearing a brilliant yellow silk scarf this morning. It was so bright it reminded me of the yellow cotton dress that a Salinger character named Charlotte wore, the dress that left a stain on Seymour’s hand. Do you know the one?

Of course I did. I knew the yellow mark on Seymour’s hand and his famous remark about it. How he described himself as a person who was paranoid in reverse: He suspected other people of plotting to make him happy. That happened to be one of my favorite passages in literature. It seemed the Watcher and I had somehow evolved similar literary taste, or at least he liked some of the same Great Moments, in
Richard II
and Issa and Emily Dickinson. He was eerily close to seeing through me, into my Bide-a-Wee heart.

So why couldn’t I see
him?
Which lurker-in-the-shadows
was
he? The guy in the knit cap and sunglasses in the deli? The pale, apologetic gent in the three-piece suit at the bus stop? A cabbie? A cook? Who? I focused on certain faces—would he have a mustache like that? An overbite? A Stones T-shirt or Mojo root? Dredlocks? I became self-conscious in the subway, in the coffee line.

He called himself an “artist-seer.”

“Artist-schmartist.
The guy’s a voyeur,” Page wailed, outraged, sifting through his missives. “Bear this in mind, Willis. He’s no better than your average Peeping Tom, he just talks posh.”

Dear Digby,

I’ve given you my P.O. Box Number, my Heart File. Why don’t you write to me? Please, please, write to me.

I’d sent out a few unconventional responses to letters in my time, but I couldn’t bring myself to connect here. I did not write back. Still, I looked for his letters. They got more intense, even critical.

When I broke precedent and answered weird correspondents in the column, he was miffed. I spent my time coming up with smart comments for others, but not a crumb for him? Also, I’d lost an “innocent quality.” One day he looked at me in late afternoon sun and my profile struck him as “sharp, desperate, predatory.” (This gave rise to Page’s coining of the expression, “Digby’s SDP Profile.” The SDP Profile had nothing to do with my emotions, she said, but rather an overdeveloped chin. Can I help it, I asked her, if I have my father’s Four-Star jaw?)

Today his letter looked sealed in haste, angry. The handwriting was even more constipated than usual.

Dear Digby,

Ah, the “folly of being comforted” (as the poet says) by what appears before the eyes. I had thought you were kind. That day I saw you, in the sunlight, laughing with the mailman, I thought I’d seen a dreamer—I loved the touching hesitancy in your manner. You seemed hopeful, ingenuous. Now I see you are—what? A frightening mixture of fear and cynicism. I know about the actor. I read a scandal sheet the other day that linked your name with his. Is
that
the tragedy one sees in your eyes? The loss of a media huckster? How could you? I know some other things about you too. I know now, for instance, that you live at 871 East 17th Street, Apartment 7W. I know you leave for work every day around 9:15
A.M.
, and I see your lights go out at night. You stay up late, Digby, you must have trouble sleeping. I see you reading, then I see you throw the book down, pace, talk to yourself. Something is driving you crazy. Isn’t something bothering you, something from the past? Sometimes you hold yourself and cry, you really sob. Your bedroom faces east—you get the first light. Sometimes you’re still up then. The sun comes up and you look out the window at the red sky and you watch the sun come up. I watch your face turn gold, like a carved image on a sarcophagus—you look dead. You’re dead inside, aren’t you, Willis Digby?