Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk Read online

  I have Mace in my purse—a Christmas present from Gian—but I do not bother to reach for it. The man looks harmless. He pulls his heavy car to the curb, clicks on a light above his head to better show himself, and we regard each other through his open window. He is black and has a mustache as dapper as Dashiell Hammett’s, and his eyes are wide, brown, and kind beneath his chauffeur cap. He is wearing a tuxedo, out of professional obligation, of course, but I admire how put together he is, all the same.

  “Didn’t mean to scare you,” he says over the idling engine.

  “I’d hate to see what you’d do if you did,” I say.

  “I just thought you might be looking for a cab. Are you?”

  “That’s thoughtful of you,” I say. “But no. No, thank you. Besides, you look more like an extravagance than a cab. Very fancy. And strange to see you out here tonight—I can’t imagine many people are working late on New Year’s Eve. Isn’t the stock exchange closed tomorrow?”

  “It is,” he says. “But my guy, the guy I just dropped at his office, is a commodities trader. I guess there’s some shit going down in Tokyo, and he’s got to be on top of it. That’s a quote. Excuse my French.”

  “That’s all right,” I say. “What’s your name?”

  “Skip,” he says. “My real name’s Paul, but nobody except my Aunt Kitty calls me that. How about you?”

  “Lillian,” I say. “And thanks again. But like I said, I’m not looking for a ride. Also, don’t you have to take your trader home? Or to some New Year’s Eve orgy?”

  “As a matter of fact, I thought I would,” he says. “But he just sent word that he’ll need a few hours, so they’re sending me uptown. He’ll call the service later. Now it seems kind of wasteful to drive all the way back alone.”

  “I thought wastefulness and greed were the driving engines of Wall Street.”

  “I can’t dispute that, Lillian,” says Skip. “But please bear in mind that just because I am on Wall Street does not mean I am of it.”

  “Fair enough,” I say. “I’m sorry to disappoint you, Skip, but I’m doing fine on foot.”

  “Well, maybe you ought to be looking for a lift,” he says. “It’s getting colder out, finally. And the city’s dangerous. Just over there is the Chambers Street station, where that Subway Vigilante fled to. And you, well, you’re—”

  “Old?” I say. “That is a fact. But I’m all right.”

  And I pause, torn, as I often am, between wanting to tell the truth—to impress Skip with my self-sufficiency—and not wanting to be perceived as crazy: some nutty old lady too far around the bend to care for herself. Erring on the side of truth and pride, I add:

  “I’ve walked all the way from Murray Hill, and I’m almost to Delmonico’s. I’m not ready to give up the satisfaction of making it there under my own steam. At my age, I need to take my thrills where I can.”

  “Murray Hill,” says Skip, shaking his head. “Damn.”

  “Yes,” I say, and decide I might as well toss in a lie, just in case. “I’ll be right on time to meet the people I’ll be dining with. My family. We have an 8:30 reservation.”

  “Come on, Lillian,” says Skip. “You remind me of my Aunt Kitty. She’s tough—can’t tell her nothing. You’ve practically made it. Why not call good enough good enough? It’s so close, I’ll take you there for free.”

  “Has anyone ever told you how persistent you are?” I say.

  “I’ve just seen some freaky things in this city, Lillian,” he says. “I wouldn’t feel right if I didn’t try to help you out. The other day—check this out—the other day, up on the south end of Central Park, I saw a seven-foot-tall dude with a fireman’s axe and a Dracula cape. He ran right into the park. Broad daylight. Families around and everything. The cape was from a kid’s costume. Looked like a dishtowel tied around his neck. He wasn’t wearing anything else. The city’s getting fuller of degenerates by the day.”

  “That is an excellent story, Skip,” I say. “But we are nowhere near Central Park. I’ll be okay. And besides, how do I know you’re not a degenerate yourself?”

  He gets out his livery license and holds it out the window. “Seriously?” he says. “A degenerate with his own limo?”

  “A very motivated degenerate,” I say, and he laughs. “I don’t really think that, Skip, but hopefully you see my point, yes? That I am somewhat sharper than you thought at first?”

  “Point made, Lillian,” he says. “Good talking with you. I hope you have a good dinner.”

  “Thanks, Skip,” I say. “Thanks for stopping, and for trying. Happy New Year.”

  “You too,” he says, rolling up the window, driving slowly away.

  As I make my way south on William Street, the final block before I turn onto Beaver, I don’t know how triumphant to feel about my victory. I could count my conversation with Skip as proof that I haven’t lost it; that I can still be persuasive. Or it could just be that I’m stubborn, and that Skip—sizing me up in my blue hat, my mink coat, my mustard-yellow Coloralls—decided there’s just no effective way to persuade the insane.

  I have blind spots, like anybody. My biggest one is myself: how people perceive me. I suppose that’s a common enough affliction—otherwise shops would stop stocking mirrors—but it’s one that particularly galls me, because I’m generally quite good at guessing what people think. My fastidiousness of dress, my ongoing attention to fashion, my occasional panic buying of discontinued cosmetics: These could all be taken as hyperawareness of my appearance, but in fact they signify its opposite.

  A gust of wind blows over the Hudson, intensified by the jet effect of passing between the Towers, and it carries the night’s first hint of real cold. I march on toward my destination, recalling a fight I had once with my mother, back in the 1940s, when Johnny was a baby, and she was up from D.C. to help me take care of him.

  She accused me of having a thwarted sense of superiority. Said that was the cause of all my present unhappiness. I had a high degree, she said, of linguistic mastery, as well as an intuitive understanding—nuts and bolts, nontheoretical—of psychology.

  “Those qualities are like two great swords that just cut away anything in your path, Lily,” she said. “You’re different from everyone else. All the rules and emotions and obligations that guide most of us through life—they’re invisible to us. They’re natural, like breathing. But they’re visible to you. And you use that to manipulate people.”

  I couldn’t argue. For years, that was how I did my work at R.H. Macy’s: If I understood better than you did yourself why you thought or did or wanted something, then I could control you. Not in any kind of dramatic way—like something out of The Manchurian Candidate—but enough to get myself and my employer into your head, to give us a slight edge, enough to turn a profit. That was my job. You would find yourself in the department store, and you would not necessarily know why you had come there, but only that you were going to buy some merchandise that was going to make you feel better.

  My mother did not make this observation as a compliment. But that skill—and it is a skill; not, as she suggested, some mental defect or weakness of character—was not something that I could simply turn off, even after motherhood ended my tenure at R.H. Macy’s and left me with few productive uses for it. I still can’t. Everywhere I look, I see people being manipulated: wheedled out of their cash through their vulnerabilities and anxieties. The problem, as I started to notice after I’d had Johnny, was that I had always believed myself to be exempt from that sort of manipulation. But I wasn’t—as the empty package of Oreos in my kitchen waste bin will testify. And for a long time, that made me very angry.

  It happened only rarely, but I always found it so frustrating whenever my mother was right.

  13

  A Flaw in the Design

  It is possible to stay indoors during a storm and end up struck by lightning all the same.

  Generally, I went outside on my lunch breaks at R.H. Macy’s, especially in the summ
er, to walk and to write. But this particular August day it was raining, an absolute torrent, so I opted to stay in and run a small errand in the store. I still wound up practically knocked down by the thunder outside.

  I needed a new rug for my new Greenwich Village apartment, and I ended up acquiring the salesman, as well. That day, Friday, August 3, 1934, I met and fell in love with Max, with Massimiliano Gianluca Caputo, with the head rug buyer for R.H. Macy’s, with my future husband and the father of my child.

  My new place was on the top floor, the only floor I ever wanted to live on, not having upstairs neighbors being the key to a long and happy life of city dwelling. But to have a courteous neighbor, of course, one must be a courteous neighbor, so I wanted to cover my living room floor with a carpet—beautiful enough to stare at every day, thick enough to deaden my and my guests’ footsteps over the heads of the tenants below.

  The rug department was on the seventh floor, and I took the stairs from the institutional advertising department on the thirteenth, the weather slapping and rattling the windowpanes all the way down.

  The electrified air reminded me of a performer I’d seen months earlier, at a down-at-the-heel circus that some down-at-the-heel newspaper had thought would be amusing to send me to. She was a whip cracker, Austrian or German, wearing a sagging sequined corset that I feared would not sustain her modesty for the duration of the act. As she went to work destroying a succession of increasingly tiny paper targets at increasingly improbable angles, my skepticism waned until I was transfixed, until the tension was such that I thought I might cry out in terror. For her finale she took up a whip in each hand and knit herself into the middle of an earsplitting maelstrom that I was certain could only end with her maimed or collapsed. And then it was over: She curtsied and made way for a clown and three dingy poodles. I had missed it. My question remained unanswered: how to stop?

  The rug department—with its large, flat wares all either stacked on the floor or dangling from the walls—presented itself as a clearing in the jungle of R.H. Macy merchandise, and I felt oddly exposed as I walked in. Nevertheless, I got swiftly to business: My eyes fell on a hand-knotted Algerian rug, patterned and vibrant and seemingly made for the space I needed it to fill. I asked the clerk the price, certain that my salary put it within reach. But the figure he quoted halted me.

  “Well now,” I said. “That’s steep enough to worry my hardworking-girl conscience. What can you say to convince me?”

  “Nothing, I’m afraid,” said the young man, thin and pale, his slicked-back hair the wan color of straw. “But we’ve got a guy who can tell you any and everything you’d ever want to know. Just one moment, please.”

  He walked off toward the back, calling “Max? Max, you back there?”

  I didn’t believe in love at first sight. In fact, as I would soon be reminded by seemingly every literate person in New York, I had written and published more than a few poems lampooning the very idea of it. But one need not believe in something for it to happen anyway.

  That was my first thought when the clerk returned with Max. Handsome. About my height, and I was tall. A strong-jawed, tan, and beautiful man, polished and attractive, but not too perfect. His suit was impeccable, but his hair—thick, black—and his tie shared a slightly rumpled quality, like an unmade bed. An invitation. Touchable.

  He extended a hand, warm and strong, and his shake was like a glove—not too tight, not too lengthy—and I didn’t want to let go.

  “Max Caputo,” he said. “Head rug buyer. Miss—?”

  “Lillian,” I said. “Lillian Boxfish. I work upstairs, in advertising.”

  “You’re Lillian Boxfish?” he said. Not standing too close, but still I could smell him, the best-smelling man I’d ever smelled in my life, like black tea and orange rind and something spicy.

  “My reputation precedes me?” I said.

  “Indeed it does,” he said, holding out the in-house newsletter that had just been released for August. “I was just reading about you—I was in the back, sitting down for lunch. Have you seen this yet?”

  I was about to tell him that I had—that in fact I’d done two rounds of edits for the folks in personnel—but he was already reading aloud. I was charmed by this: He seemed somehow to sense that this would not mortify me. Or perhaps it just never occurred to him that it might.

  “Listen,” he said. “Time was when advertisers didn’t jest about such sacred things as merchandise. But Lillian Boxfish of our Advertising Department thought that a pea sheller was a funny little contraption, so why not joke about it?”

  “That’s me,” I said, cheeks pink at his enthusiasm.

  “They should have run a photograph,” he said. “So everyone could see that you’re as pretty as you are hilarious. But listen to me, running on. You had a question?”

  I didn’t especially care anymore about the carpet, but I wanted to hear him keep talking in his raspy New York accent; I made myself say, “Yes, I did. This carpet here is a dear little thing and the price reflects that. Can you tell me why?”

  “Your taste, Miss Boxfish, is right in line,” he said, stepping closer; I had to fight the urge to lean against him. “That’s the one I’d pick. In fact, I picked out that merchant on our last buying trip to North Africa. It’s a Berber. Sheep wool mostly, maybe a little goat, maybe a little camel, all with an eye toward high durability. Entirely handmade, and it traveled all the way here from the sands of the Sahara. It’s from a town called Malika where the carpets are the thickest and most colorful. Other cities have product of equal quality, but they’re more monochrome. I can assure you, this carpet will last you a lifetime.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Caputo,” I said, impressed at his knowledge, impressed at his travels, and impressed at how unpretentious he seemed about both. “And you can call me Lillian. I’m almost sold, but what about this?”

  I pointed to a small but unmistakable break in the geometric design.

  “Lillian, I don’t think anyone’s ever noticed that without my pointing it out,” he said. “Each one is woven with a flaw.”

  I looked up at him, skeptical, but his bright black eyes were guileless. “If each one is woven with a flaw on purpose,” I said, “then we can’t really call them flaws, can we?”

  Max smiled. “The mistakes aren’t on purpose,” he said. “The mistakes are mistakes. Choosing one flaw to leave uncorrected—that’s on purpose. It’s so that the weaver can’t be accused of excess pride in his work.”

  We stared at each other for what seemed like an indecorous interval. “Well,” I said, “the pride you take in your work, while not excessive, is certainly contagious, Max,” I said. “I’ll take it. With whom should I speak to arrange the delivery?”

  “You’re speaking with him,” he said.

  “Really?” I said. “The head buyer also flies around with the magic carpets?”

  “Not generally,” he said. “But you just bought the rug of a lifetime, which I know is not something you’re likely to do every week. So I can’t just let you walk out of here—I have to see you again. Beauty and humor have intruded upon the path of duty.”

  “Is that a fact?” I said, unable to conceal my enchantment.

  “It may be forward of me,” he said. “But when something feels right, it’s right. And it feels right to ask: Are you seeing anyone?”

  “No, I’m not.”

  “Would tonight be all right to schedule the delivery?” he said. “And then would you do me the honor of letting me take you to dinner after?”

  I was just as astonished as Chester, my boss, would be later, saying this had to be the first time a rug buyer was given away free with the purchase of an R.H. Macy’s rug.

  Max was my favorite type of person: He was funny, and he had character. He was also something else, which was a type of person I never encountered, or maybe never encountered anymore, not since my ways had become—if I admitted it—rather set. In an instant I’d caught myself imagining what my circle of fr
iends might make of him, which prompted me to realize how small that circle had become: small and getting smaller with each wedding invitation and birth announcement. And now here was Max, a living reminder of the city I once knew or never knew, a city of accidents, a city that gathered the world to itself.

  So what else could I do but say:

  “Yes, that would be wonderful. I’m at 25 Fifth Avenue. In the Village. Top floor. See you at seven?”

  * * *

  We had one of those Friday dates that turned into an entire weekend, and by the end of it I loved him so much my larynx ached. Vulnerable love, incorrigible love. Love in which he was both the nausea and the sodium bicarbonate.

  I arrived home at six and stripped to my slip so as not to get my dress dirty as I moved my furniture to the living room’s perimeter, the better for Max to lay down the carpet.

  Then I dressed again, reapplied my Fleurs de Rocaille, and fixed my hair so it was, as Helen always put it, as shiny and tidy as my bank account. And then I waited. I sat on the davenport shoved against the wall and tried to read a book of poems I had picked up in the stacks at the Strand. It was Harmonium by Wallace Stevens, and I had been relishing it.

  But my mind was like a puppy that wouldn’t remain on the sidewalk, and I got tired of tugging the leash to bring it back. I closed the book and looked out the window at the sky, now clear, washed by the rain, and let the breeze through the screen rush against my face. I resisted getting up and pacing.

  Lucky for me he was punctual, and the buzzer sang out at seven o’clock sharp. Lucky for him the building had an elevator—the first such one I’d lived in—so getting the rug up all the way to my floor was not so horrible.

  “Lillian,” he said. “You look lovely. And smell like a garden of exotic flowers. I hate to seem a brute on this occasion, just having met you and all. But would you mind awfully if I took off my suit jacket and dress shirt? Just so I can work.”

  “Mind? I’d be sadder if you didn’t,” I said, and he laughed and set about the task in his bright white undershirt.