Part 6 (1/2)

No, of Greenwich, Connecticut. They would laugh together. But I read the play, after I met him. No one reads that play, but I did.

What did you think?

I don't remember anything about it. Just the t.i.tle page. I kept flipping back and just looking at that one word on the t.i.tle page.

No, too sappy. Too confidential. It wouldn't shock her to know that he's mooning over a man (he guesses it wouldn't even surprise her). But he knows that even this kind of talk would be too much, the same way he knew, growing up, sneaking silently out of the house at night, which parts of which floorboards to avoid. She'd be warm and interested. She'd ask questions. Then she'd have to ask more questions, next week, next month. If it went well, she'd have to rejoice. If it ended, she'd have to commiserate. She'd have to be a friend, or do that sprightly false boss-taking-an-interest-in-the-worker business. It would upset their balance, which cannot be explained, but which works.

Maybe he's wrong. Maybe her boredom, which is spectacular, fiendish, at its worst right now-in later years it'll get better; she'll write, teach, travel, regain some actual, rather than just faked, equilibrium-could be helped a little if he were a little less careful with her.

But on the way home what they talk about is the haddock stew. That seductive, engrossing stew! The recipe calls for tomatoes and cream, so, they speculate, it will taste both astringent and sweet. They can start working on it together, if they hurry. He starts running then. The wheelchair rollicks. She screams a little. He will have left by the time it's ready-Fraulein Sacher-Masoch (actually a Scotswoman from Oban, very kind, but with a perpetually terrified expression) is on tonight-but they'll save him some for lunch tomorrow.

3.

She's right about the letters. Another comes the next morning, a short, fanciful description of the first day at sea (”captain is pirate, reformed”), and then another each day after that. Funny little made-up stories about people in the company.

This one drank whole bottle of champagne and fell off railing and we had to catch her by the toes as she went over.

That one has mouse in cabin and tried to make friends, but turns out mouse speaks only French and that one never learned it.

They're all postmarked New York, New York. She wonders who is mailing them. Which person did he hand them to and explain what he wanted done with them? She's glad not to know.

The physical therapist comes. The other aides-de-carca.s.s. The maid. A childhood friend. Another friend, a former dancer who became a photographer. Friends who teach, friends whose injuries kept them from the tour, a friend who just had a baby and is trying to get back in shape. The old costume designer, who comes for tea every Friday afternoon, beautifully dressed and made up, bringing brioches. The doctor. The super (the kitchen drain is clogged). Her mother. They are all suspects, except for the childhood friend, who's in for just a week, from Paris. She watches them all, wondering which one is her partner in humiliation.

The only person she shows the letters to is Malcolm. He doesn't say much. She argues with him, trying to make him say that they're horrible. She nags him, she's never spoken to him like this about anything. ”Are you being diplomatic, is that it? Or do you really not see?”

”I see that they bother you.”

”They're grotesque. They're false.”

”Would you like me to just take them when they come, and put them away, before I bring you the mail?”

”G.o.d. Don't you humor me.”

The days go on. She hates this quarreling with him. The more she picks at him the quieter he gets. Silence is one thing when it's s.p.a.cious, peaceful; but this is something else. She's terrified, she thinks she's marred things between them. She is sure he's gone from liking and admiring her to working for a paycheck. She has to shut up, return to her old reticence. She could, she thinks, if the letters would stop coming.

One day she's railing at him during a procedure for which they both generally stay silent. The letters are insulting, they're condescending, they're a child's toy. They're an indignity.

”Oh, so now you want dignity?” Malcolm asks. They both look down at what he is doing to her body at that moment; and then, instantly, they both start laughing, the kind of helpless laughter that starts up again every time it seems to be dying down.

4.

At home-at Tim's-in the evenings, Malcolm listens to music, reads, and does his exercises, push-ups, sit-ups, dumbbells, and some ballet stretches and warm-ups. He smokes. He eats cereal for dinner. He's waiting.

And then one day he comes home from work, opens the mailbox in the vestibule, and finds a postcard. A picture of the Eiffel Tower.

Got here yesterday. Good food and weather. The schedule is tough. Long wierd days, but no real time to see anything. It's good, though. But I miss New York. T He carries it upstairs and reads it over and over. Such a relief to have it. How could he have imagined that Tim wouldn't write?

But so little in it. So flat and impersonal. The Eiffel Tower? A sly little joke, or just unoriginal? And ”weird” spelled wrong. Tim isn't dumb-how can he sound so dumb?

But missing New York: that's all I need to hear.

Unless he means it literally.

And oh G.o.d-the handwriting alone is almost unbearably beautiful.

He props the card against a candlestick on the table in the living room. Looks at it all evening. From far away, pretending to forget that it's there, walking past it and then turning his eyes to catch sudden sight of it again. From up close, holding it in both hands, staring at the bright photograph, the word ”PARIS” printed in red at the bottom, as if one might otherwise mistake this for some other Eiffel Tower. Turning it over, again pretending not to have seen it before, pretending he's reading Tim's message for the first time. Relis.h.i.+ng the repeated mix of thrill and disappointment-what is it about the disappointment that makes the whole thing somehow lovelier?

When he goes to bed he leaves the card in the living room, leaning against the candlestick. He doesn't need to sleep next to it-he's not that desperate. And this way he can come upon it freshly in the morning.

Over the next few days, he looks at the card so much that he feels like it's fraying. It isn't, really. It's a tough, s.h.i.+ny little piece of manufacturing.

But along with everything else it does to him, it proves that the company has arrived and been on dry land long enough to allow a card to be purchased, written, mailed, and delivered.

A telegram did come for her. ”Arrived safely. Paris beautiful of course. Next Turin. Miss you.”

But still every day, hating to do it, he brings her mail into the den along with the coffee, and nearly every day, still, there's a letter postmarked from New York. Little fictions about Paris and Turin and Rome.

But she's different, now, about them. ”Oh, Malcolm,” she says. ”It's just getting ridiculous. The poor man.”

Anyway, she has a project. A reporter called one day, asking if she would agree to an interview. ”A major piece, with photographs. The story of your life.”

No, thank you, she said. She gets these calls from time to time, and always says no. She hung up the phone. ”Someone should write the story of your life,” she told the cat. ”Now, that would make sensational reading.”

”It would,” Malcolm said.

”It would scandalize polite society,” she went on. ”Look at you. You'd have a tale or two to tell, wouldn't you? You'd set the literary world on its ear, if we were to catalog your adventures.”

The idea amused both her and Malcolm. All that day, whenever the cat slept (which was most of the time), they described to each other his dreams. When he washed himself, they said, ”Big night ahead.” When he walked to the kitchen: ”Pre-theater snack.” By the time Malcolm left, they had devised a tragic love affair for the cat, and when the cat slept the next day, they said, ”See? He's taken to his bed.”

She starts writing down some of this silliness-little scenarios about the cat, his ambitions and regrets, his amours, puns-on sc.r.a.ps of paper. Malcolm buys her a small notebook to keep next to the bed, so she can fool around with the cat's story when she has trouble sleeping. ”You're egging me on,” she says.

”Yeah.”

Her friend the photographer visits one afternoon. They're all together in the living room, drinking lemonade, when the cat starts suddenly and gallops away down the hall. She shakes her head. ”Oh, the press, the press. Is there no escaping the glare of publicity?”

That leads-as she realizes later she hoped it would-to her telling the photographer about the cat biography, and the photographer saying, ”But it needs pictures.” And it goes even further: the photographer has a friend in publis.h.i.+ng. ”Why don't I talk to him? Seriously, what do you think? Would you like me to?”