The Witch (19 page)

When they spoke on the phone, Edie had the same sensation
of his voice leading her on to some perplexing destination, teasing her with all the things she had yet to learn. They talked about this and that. His travels, books he suggested she read. He asked questions about her family and her growing-up, he encouraged her to talk about the small news of her day. He seemed charmed by whatever she said, as if he found glittering facets in her that no one else had previously suspected, including Edie herself. Edie told herself not to be foolish, and tried to keep her own conversation with Milo light and amusing.

He hardly knew her, or she him! But there was something intense and superheated about this long-distance intercourse, especially as it extended over the weeks, something private and conspiratorial, as if the selves they offered up to each other were better and truer than the rest of the world would recognize.

Often Milo called her in the late evening, after he had returned from some symposium or gala. He lived in New York City, of course, in an apartment he called “the castle,” which he seemed to mean ironically, although Edie was not entirely sure of this. She imagined him coming in the door and emptying the contents of his pockets onto a silver tray that stood ready to receive them. He would loosen his tie, fix himself his Scotch, stand at a west-facing window thinking his complicated thoughts, his mind reaching out to her, then pick up the phone and dial her number. Edie did not know if he had a west window, but it made for a better story.

“I get so tired of all my opinions,” he complained. “I seem to have staked out positions on nearly everything, and now I can't remember half of them. Someone is always reminding me that I've registered passionate advocacy or opposition about stem cell research or organic farming, and then I have to pretend I still care one way or the other.”

“You could demur. Say you're trying to free yourself from all ego-driven conflicts.”

Milo laughed his bark-like laugh. “You'd be the only one in on the joke. You're the only one who knows me that well.”

“I like thinking I do,” Edie said shyly. Milo seemed to believe that likewise he knew her better than anyone else did. Certainly he knew the self she was attempting to be for him, the one who was re-reading
The Age of Innocence
and taking notes.

A silence. Over the phone line, Edie heard the ice cubes in his drink making their small, celebratory noise. Then Milo said, “How would you feel about coming out here for a visit?”

“Oh . . .” She would feel confused. Panicked. “New York, I've never been there.”

“Then it's about time you did so. Please understand me, I am not proposing anything untoward. There's a small hotel nearby where I'd make a reservation for you. Everything on the up-and-up. Of course I would cover all your travel expenses.”

“Oh,” Edie said again. She was having trouble with the concept, the notion of a man paying out real money for . . . what, exactly? “That's very generous of you to offer, but . . .”

“I would want you to feel entirely comfortable about the arrangements,” Milo said, mistaking her total slack-jawed amazement for maidenly hesitation. “If you know anyone in the city, anyone who could accompany—that is—escort you, it would be perfectly fine.”

“My sister lives in Philadelphia.” Would she want to explain any of this to her sister? Did she want to take such a leap, alone or escorted, into Milo Baranoff's lair, and confront the real, actual man? But then, spring break was coming up. It wasn't like she had big plans of her own.

“It would be lovely to meet your sister. I mean, it would be
lovely to see you again. Give us a chance to catch up in person,” Milo amended, as if aware he'd been sounding too brisk. There was a note of uncertainty in his voice that made Edie like him better. She said she would think it over and get back to him.

All his insistence on propriety naturally made her think about sex, whether sex with Milo was within the realm of possibility. She walked right up to the edge of that notion and stopped. None of her boyfriends had offered especially profound experiences; sex was simply one of the things you did together if you were a couple, like cooking dinner. Edie had come to believe she was lucky that way, not to be passion's plaything, not to have to go through a lot of impulsiveness and contortions because her loins were burning, her various parts throbbing, etc. So that sex, with Milo or anyone else, was not a deal breaker. Just one more item on the ledger, waiting to be revealed as a pro or a con.

In the end she said yes, she would fly to New York for five days of her vacation. She called her sister Anne in Philadelphia and told her she was visiting a friend and that it would be great to see her if Anne could get away. Her sister said, “What's this really about, what kind of friend? How old is this guy anyway?”

“He's just a friend friend.”

“So what is he, sixty? Seventy? Eighty?”

“Thanks,” Edie said. “Yes, he's ancient, that's why he likes me. He's too feeble to get anybody more attractive and desirable.”

Anne sighed. She was married, a mother, she affected a certain dreary worldliness. “Well, they say it's better to be an old man's darling than a young man's slave.”

“I only met him the one time! You make it sound like we've plighted our troth!”

“Don't get so upset. I'm just saying. I suppose he has money?”

In the end it was decided that Anne would come up at the beginning of Edie's visit and share her hotel room for a night or two. On her way back from New York, Edie would go to Philadelphia to see her young niece and nephew, whom everyone assumed she adored spending time with.

Ten days later, Edie flew to Chicago, then to LaGuardia, which alarmed her with its smallness and meanness, as if she'd deplaned into a bus station. Milo was unavoidably engaged that evening; he had said he would send a car for her. No one had ever done such a thing for Edie before, and it improved her mood a great deal to see the driver waiting with her actual name written on a piece of cardboard. It was just then turning dark and the city lighted itself for her as she rode. The hotel was small and choice, its lobby paneled with green-veined marble, like something under the sea. There was no problem with her reservation, as Edie had feared. She was installed in a peach-colored junior suite with a bathroom large enough to play cards in. She ordered dinner from the extravagant room service menu, as Milo had insisted she do. Her sister was not expected until the next morning. It was delightful to have everything, even, as it seemed, the entire city, all to herself.

Her sister, when she arrived, approved of the hotel and the suite. “Not bad.”

“I imagine it's just the way he does everything,” Edie said. “First-rate.”

“Hm,” Anne said. She stood next to Edie so that they were both reflected in the vast bathroom mirror. Both of them were long-necked and pale-skinned, with yellow hair and surprised-looking eyebrows. Anne had always been considered the prettier of the two, but her skin wasn't holding up well and she wore her hair in a short mom-cut that spoke of defeated vanity. Some
balance of power seemed to shift as they stood there, having to do with these reflections, or perhaps with Edie's new and inexplicable status as the object of a noted figure's attention, and this might be why Anne plucked at the sleeve of Edie's cotton blouse and said, “You aren't wearing that to meet him, are you?”

Milo had called Edie's room late last night and they had had one of their usual conversations, made somewhat disorienting by the fact that there were only a dozen blocks between them instead of all those intervening states and a different time zone. “I can't wait to see you,” Milo told her, and Edie said she couldn't wait herself, although neither statement was really accurate, since Milo had been able to wait an entire evening while he did whatever it was he had to do instead. And Edie was beyond nervous; she was doubting the whole premise of her association with Milo, which was that through a fluke, a happenstance, two such amazingly compatible people as themselves had chanced to meet. She was losing heart. She was an idiot.

Milo said, “I had a dream about you. I dreamt I was walking along a beach, and the ocean beyond was entirely calm, a beautiful pale green, and the winds blew you ashore in a seashell, like Botticelli's Venus.”

“Don't be silly,” Edie said. She was pretty sure that Venus was naked in that painting, and this was concerning. “That doesn't even sound like a real dream. I bet you made it up.”

“I did,” he admitted. “I wanted to have a dream about you, it seemed like a nice thing to do, but I've been taking these sleeping pills and they give me nine hours of a blank screen. Okay, you make up a dream about me.”

“I dreamed you were the pilot of a plane I was on, and terrorists tried to hijack us, and you explained to the hijackers that exercising power was a transactional process and that no one on
the plane had agreed to any contingent rewards or punishments. That confused them and they left us alone.” She had picked up a lot of the lingo by now.

“What, I bored the hijackers into submission? That does sound like me.”

“You were heroic,” Edie said. He liked it when she was pert and impudent. They both laughed, and Edie felt better about everything.

Milo had told them to take a cab from the hotel the next morning. Anne sniffed that he could have come there himself to meet them, and Edie thought the same, although she did not say so. She was wearing one of Anne's dresses, drapey and cream-colored, “so he won't send you back right away,” Anne said. “I hope you're going to have time for some shopping.” They took in the Upper East Side neighborhood, which was all about living well, with its townhouses and pleasant sidewalks and the lacy shade of the spring trees. A few people were walking fretful dogs, or dawdling expensively over coffee, but there was a sense of hidden life behind every window. Who were they, those who inhabited such a place? No one Edie could imagine knowing.

Milo's apartment building was less imposing than most of its neighbors, which both relieved and disappointed Edie. They rang his bell and were buzzed in, to a lobby with a black-and-white checkerboard tile floor and a great many mirrors in gilt frames. “Good quality, a little old-fashioned,” Anne pronounced. “I imagine he's used to it. Set in his ways.” Edie wondered if the stylish ex-wife had lived here, if she'd fretted at the lack of designer oomph.

They took a rasping elevator up to the fourteenth floor and started down the silent corridor. The carpeting was thick and
gray and blotted out their footsteps. At the very end of the hall a door opened, and Milo himself stepped out. “Venus approaches! Come here and let me gaze on you!”

Edie did not dare look at Anne. She didn't want to have to explain about Botticelli. Blushing, she allowed herself to be enveloped by Milo's hug, her forehead grazed by his bearded kiss. She introduced Anne, who seemed to have retreated into some zone of private amusement. Then Milo ushered them inside. “Enter the castle!”

Edie's first impression was of dark wood paneling lit by mellow sunlight, dust whirling in the shafts. There were a great many things to look at: paintings in heavy frames, high bookshelves turning the walls into canyons, tiny, stained-glass lamps, lit red or golden, African tribal baskets, dolls' heads, an old-fashioned clock cased in china. Milo led them around a corner and the apartment opened up into an expansive room with pale-blue-figured carpet underfoot, more and more bookshelves, scrolled and carved furniture, and high, narrow windows that allowed for slices of the sky. East, west? She was too turned-around to say.

“Let me show you the place,” Milo said, after they had finished admiring things and were at risk of having to talk to each other. They followed him through a dining room with a fireplace and some baronial chairs, past a small, cluttered study—Milo apologizing unseriously for his disorganized habits—down a back hallway, where a kitchen was indicated, though they did not enter it. Then around another corner—the place was huge; it was actually two of the original, 1930s apartments combined, Milo said—to what seemed to be an entirely separate living room. This one was furnished with sleek modern couches and
chairs and glass tables, hunkered together like a herd of prey animals amidst all the Old World excess of the rest of the apartment. More evidence of the glamorous wife?

Edie was paying great attention to the rooms so as not to have to look much at Milo himself. In her mind's eye, whenever she'd thought of him in all this time, he was dressed in the dark suit and tie he'd worn the night they'd met, or some variation of it. Those were the clothes in which he appeared on television or on book jackets. Now, confusingly, he was wearing a canvas shirt and suspenders, like a suburban dad in a catalogue. He seemed overanimated, nervous, which Edie put down to the peculiarity of the situation, the not-quite-in-focus quality the two of them had for each other after so much elevated, long-distance carrying-on.

“Those are the bedrooms,” Milo said, stopping so abruptly that Edie and Anne nearly collided with him. He made a shooing motion. “Not fit for inspection. At least, not by ladies. Ladies such as yourselves, who ought only to be surrounded by . . . beautiful things.”

She and Anne looked at each other behind Milo's back. Anne widened her eyes and lifted her shoulders, indicating puzzlement, wonder, mockery.
Is this guy for real?
Edie tried to tell her, silently, to behave herself.

Milo led them through a different set of passages and hallways so that they were once more in the big room they had first entered. A rolling cart set with plates, silver, teacups, and covered dishes had appeared in their absence. There must be a servant in the place, although they had seen no sign of one. “A bite to eat?” Milo offered, and settled the sisters into chairs around a low table. “Will you have tea? Riesling? Some strawberries, or a macaroon? It's a little early for lunch, but I believe we have a
very nice smoked salmon here. Oh, and blini, please try some. They're really only good while they're hot.”