Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk Read online

  I thought of that image as I was looking across the table at Max, at him looking back at me, old me, much older me: fifty-six. Max was born in 1906 and thus had always been—would always be—younger than I, by six years if I lied about my age, as I always did, or by seven if I was honest, which I was only in the privacy of my mind.

  He still looked as handsome as an Italianate statue. His few wrinkles brought out the deeper character of his face, as verdigris did on aging metal. Me, though: I was well dressed and thin, but because I’d just gotten out of the hospital it was a sagging thinness, not sharp but haggard. Unfair, unfair.

  At least the light in there was flatteringly dim. Lowish ceilings decorated with wedding-cake moldings, everyone dressed to impress upon the eye the ideas that yes, they had money and yes, they had style. Chandeliers and wooden chairs.

  “So,” said Max. “I don’t mean for this to be too much of a business lunch, since most things are sorted. But I guess we ought to discuss what we’ve got to discuss.”

  “Of course,” I said, reaching into my pocketbook. “I typed up that letter you asked for. The one for Johnny’s orthodontist.”

  “That bastard orthodontist,” said Max. “Thanks.”

  Despite our split and my recent incapacity, Max still relied on me to perform certain tasks for our son, almost all of which were really tasks for Max himself. Correspondence was one. I didn’t mind—or if I did mind, I didn’t hesitate. Partly because it was gratifying to still be adept at something. Partly, too, because I didn’t want Johnny to be harmed by Max’s indelicacy. But mostly, at least in this case, because I could scarcely bear the thought of incivility occurring anywhere it could be avoided.

  “Shall I read it?” I asked.

  “Yes,” he said. “I always like hearing you perform your work.”

  “All right,” I began. “‘Dear Joel. We have been friends for many, many years; hence, I feel that I can be perfectly frank with you to state my displeasure in suddenly receiving a bill covering three years of orthodontia work on Junior in the amount of $415.00. Now Joel, it must be obvious to you that you do not suddenly sock a guy with a $400 bill for work going over three years and never submit an interim bill. Without being facetious, what I should say to you is: If it takes your staff three years to bill me, it will take my staff three years to pay you. It will be paid. Have no concern, but I do not like surprises of this sort. I feel assured that you will agree with me that pay as you go is by far the best principle. Signed, Massimiliano Gianluca Caputo.’”

  “That’s perfect, Lillian. Pitch-perfect,” said Max. “Thank you. That’s exactly what I wanted to say. I couldn’t figure out how to make it—”

  “Forceful,” I said.

  “Forceful, yeah. But still with the right amount of—”

  “Grace,” I said. I folded the letter and passed it to him. “I left the signature blank for you, obviously. And I typed up the envelope, but you’ll have to get the stamp.”

  The judge had decided that Johnny should continue to live with me for most of the year, being as I was the mother, and being as he’d soon start high school and moving would be disruptive. Plus Johnny did not want to leave me. While I did not want him to stay out of pity, I was in no position to be choosy, so if pity was what motivated him, fine: I’d take it. I couldn’t bear for him and Max to both abandon me. Summers he’d spend with Max and Julia, an annual three-month absence I was already dreading, though it was only autumn. Not to mention my preemptive jealousy that they’d get Johnny when he was totally free and would therefore enjoy his company uninterrupted.

  The waiter returned and set Max’s lobster before him and my Delmonico steak before me. Almost two inches thick and shot through with delicate marbling, it was delectable. But I did not feel like delecting. A small, shapely mountain of Delmonico’s potatoes lay on the side—mashed, covered in grated cheese and buttered breadcrumbs, gently baked—but I could scarcely scale it.

  We talked—about the logistics of sharing our place up in Maine, holidays, saving for Johnny’s college, and so on. I picked at the meat and moved the potatoes around the plate, hoping Max wouldn’t notice. He did. The same eagle eye for detail that had made him so effective as the head rug buyer at R.H. Macy’s never failed to set itself upon any and everything in his line of sight.

  “I thought you said you had your appetite back,” said Max. “I thought Dr. R put you on a program.”

  “Please don’t be critical,” I said. “I’m trying.”

  “Lils,” he said, using the nickname only he used. “You’ve got a fine mind. Don’t let’s confuse criticism with concern.”

  “I’m not confused, Max,” I said. “But surely you can understand that this cuisine is a bit more robust than the dining options I had in the hospital. I’m still adjusting.”

  “All right, all right,” he said, with that gesture I’d come to hate: two open palms facing me and patting the air, as if pushing me away, pushing me down, pushing any tears I might be preparing to cry back into their ducts.

  Max had ordered Lobster Newburg, a sea bug drowning in butter and cream and eggs and cognac. As he ate, I could practically see a future heart attack peering over his shoulder, licking its fatty chops. But it was not my place any longer to remark upon ways he might extend his life.

  Things between us had always been light and witty; we realized too late how grave life could be. By then I found I had no effective means of being serious, and the needle of my personality flung itself all the way over to crushing sadness and debilitating ennui. Now I was the kind of person who said things like:

  “You know, Max, you could have been a lot more decent about all this. Writing to me in the hospital, asking if I could leave long enough to fly to Reno and get it over with faster?”

  “Look, Lils, I know that. I admit it and I’m sorry,” he said. “But you could have been a lot more decent about a lot of things too. You’re not being fair.”

  “What I’m driving at isn’t fairness,” I said, “but honesty. If, for example, you’d been earning more money, I wouldn’t have needed to write that letter to the orthodontist. The judge said that you’re responsible for those incidentals, but we both know you’re not good for it right now. Let’s be frank about that.”

  “If you were being honest, you’d admit what you’ve been like these last few years,” he said. “How difficult. Unfunny. Not the girl I married.”

  “If you were being honest,” I said, “you’d admit what you’ve been like, too. And no one stays a girl forever, Max. Time doesn’t work that way.”

  “You’re a poet, Lils,” he said. “Therefore I fail to see your need to be so literal minded all of a sudden. That’s not what I meant.”

  “No?” I said. “I just want you to admit—honestly—the realities of Julia. Much more girlish, yes? Fifteen years more girlish than I. And you took up with her almost a year before I got sick. She wasn’t just your employee at the import-export for all that long.”

  The Amarone and my otherwise empty stomach had helped make me righteous but reckless: Even as I felt the reins slipping, I heard my voice regaining youthful force. Though I was in the right—the injured party, near Christlike in my magnanimity for not having shared what I knew of Julia with the judge—I had until that moment avoided confronting Max about her fully. He would know that my information could only have come from one source. While it was clear that Johnny was destined to become simultaneously the referee and the playing field for a stupid, degrading, protracted scrimmage between Max and me, I had intended to delay the starting whistle a bit longer.

  “Listen,” Max said, “let’s drop it. What’s done is done. I’m leaving New York. Johnny’s staying. I wish you well. Enjoy the apartment.”

  “Of course I’ll enjoy the apartment!” I said. “It’s mine. I paid for it. And don’t try to pretend that I’m taking it from you, or that you even want to stay here. You’re moving to Chicago because Julia’s uncle can get you a job in the Merchandise M
art.”

  The sad and wounded expression that Max had been wearing finally failed, becoming apparent for what it was, a mask. He balled his napkin up and threw it on the table. “I don’t have to sit for this if that’s the way you want to play it,” he said.

  “I’m not playing, Max. I just think we should tell the story straight. We owe it to Johnny, if not to each other.”

  That was an underhanded move on my part, and to no end. If Max recognized it as bait, he didn’t take it. He was a hard, brash, handsome man to the day he died. “The story’s been told, Lillian,” he said. “The story’s over.”

  “Yes,” I said. “Between us it is. And your next story is already well underway. You’re going to be the suburban lord you’ve always wanted to be.”

  “Sure. Will it make you happy if I agree? Julia’s my mulligan. My do over.”

  “Right,” I said. “Because this is all as consequential as a round of golf to you.”

  Then there was the maître d’, hovering tableside in a vaporous cloud of solicitousness. “Is everything quite all right here?” he asked, leaning in and speaking quietly.

  “Yes, everything is perfectly sane,” I said, standing. “Perfectly fine. I was just saying good-bye. The gentleman will pay.”

  And I walked out alone, out of Delmonico’s, into the dime-gray light of Wall Street.

  It seemed so long ago that Johnny had been the first to mention—furtive on the sidewalk, staring at my feet before we walked into our building, one late afternoon after his singing lesson—that Max had been spending time with another lady, the lady from work. Prior to that I had had my suspicions, but I hadn’t pursued them, primarily out of inertia. I could barely keep going at that point as it was, and even one more thing to contend with would have laid me out completely. Max’s extracurricular fun could go ignored and undealt with so long as Max didn’t know that I knew, and so I thanked Johnny for telling me and told him not to worry.

  But a few months after that, my knowing became public, and I had to decide how to respond. Max’s friend Frankie, a fellow import-export man, was in town from Boston, visiting us at our place. I’d never liked Frankie—bluff and loud, with little sense of when he might be wearing out his welcome or inconveniencing his hosts—but we’d put together a little party for him anyway with a few of our friends. There Frankie sat, in the middle of our sofa, duller by the moment, this strange, well-meaning malefactor, too merry, too mirthful, telling us all to join him in having another, never mind that he’d make us late for dinner, never mind that the next day most of us were expected to get our children to school or ourselves to the office. A cocktail pig hysterical with joy at the sight of free booze, that was Frankie, setting his cup wherever while rattling on. I had fairly freckled the face of the living room with coasters, but darling Frankie simply could not connect the dots.

  I was whisking his martini from tabletop to more hospitable cork when he turned, quite drunk, to Max, and said, “Where’s that little gal of yours, that Julia, the one you introduced me to last month? She really knows how to have fun.”

  And just like that, Max’s infidelity was laid out before me, and before others. I could no longer proceed in the semblance of sweet obliviousness. I had to do something. React. I hated the situation, and I hated Frankie, and I hated Max, sitting there gasping after mis-swallowing his drink, and I hated how embarrassed and humiliated and absurd it made me, cast suddenly in some cinematic melodrama where the score hits the unflattering key of the woman wronged. We carried on as normal that evening—dinner, the theater, good-byes to Frankie—and afterwards Max swore that Julia meant nothing to him and he was sorry about Frankie bringing her up, but that I was the one for him and couldn’t I find it in my heart to forgive.

  I loathed him all over again for filling our bedroom with those shrill clichés, but I didn’t fight him. I had no appetite for it; I lacked the strength. I said okay, okay, let’s patch it up, and we set out on the circuitous scenic route to our inevitable destination of divorce.

  I wrote Max I don’t know how many letters and cards over the years after that last lunch—and he often wrote back. But I only saw him in person three more times: once apiece at Gian’s graduations from high school and Bowdoin, and last of all at Max’s funeral. He succeeded in dying before I did, too, preceding Julia on my list of fortunate people felled relatively early by heart attack.

  I was the renowned wit, but it was Max, ultimately, who proved to have the better sense of timing.

  10

  Benefactors

  Why lie? In the days when I was an item on the society pages, I craved the light of those eyes upon me.

  But I also wasn’t sure whether I was happy with how they saw me. A hopeful symbol of wealth and success during the Depression years? A vain one? Hairbrush in hand, transfixed by my own reflection in the mirror?

  Now, walking south from Grimaldi toward Delmonico’s on a stomach full of Oreos and a head full of Chianti, I see my faint reflection in the glass of the dark windows I pass, and I want neither to stare nor to look away. I am just Lillian Boxfish, eighty-four or eighty-five. No one still alive can correct me.

  If I wanted to take a shortcut from Madison Avenue to Broadway, which I can follow almost all the way to my destination, I’d diagonal my way through Madison Square Park. But that place is in greater disrepair than I am. While I frequent it by day, at night it fills like a horrible candy box with pimps and hookers, with drug dealers and their clients. I do not know the means by which such suppliers handle their institutional advertising, but they clearly know what they’re doing, for they never appear to have any shortage of business. No doubt having a motivated customer base helps.

  By day, while on my walks, I still stop in Madison Square Park to take my lunch breaks, even though my breaks are entirely self-assigned. When I worked at R.H. Macy’s the park was magnificent, a spot to sit and compose my verses on city life. Now, even by day, it comprises nasty little bites of the unsavory covered with litter, its lawn mostly bare. Teeming with the pigeons I can’t help but love, prolific and filthy, cooing stupidly, reproducing, pooping—hopping fearlessly, oblivious among the hypodermics.

  Whenever I eat my lunch there these days, I always think of and hope to see Wendy. About half the time I do. She and I met last summer, mid-July, hot and hazy, the air like a gauze bandage, tight and stifling.

  Until that humid afternoon when Wendy spotted me, no one had told me I was beautiful for a long, long while. I noticed her first, actually, though I hadn’t planned to say anything to her; rather, I meant simply to sit on my bench and watch her.

  Even in a city populated by outsiders with bizarre magnetism, she felt extra compelling, stalking the edges of the park in a feline fashion that made me think of Phoebe, of the way a house cat hunts, so that one can’t tell whether it’s serious or only playing, or if it’s sure itself.

  Wendy was obviously a woman, but had a lean androgynous look, flat-chested in a white tank top and torn-up jeans. Her thick black hair, choppy and cropped at the nape, looked less styled than chewed on. She wore a huge Nikon camera on a strap around her neck, and she held it to her right eye with veiny hands, their fingernails painted a chipped black, taking picture after picture. But she was no tourist.

  She saw me seeing her, and I, never one to feign shame in my interest in others, waved to her with my own hand: well-manicured in classic red, gold watch on my wrist. A summer linen suit encased the rest of me—because no one wants to see these arms and legs uncovered, least of all me. I wore sunglasses, Dior, from the 1960s, because by then I had come to prefer my face half-obscured.

  Wendy strode over and introduced herself, shaking my hand, very direct. When she spoke, her demeanor—forthright, Midwestern—contrasted with her feral appearance, and made me laugh.

  “You’re beautiful, Lillian,” she said. “Especially when you smile like that. May I take your photograph?”

  “Maybe,” I said. “First, have a seat. Tell me, why would
you want to do a thing like that?”

  “Well,” she said, perching on the edge of the bench, almost as a prelude to a pounce, “I’m a photographer. Professionally. I work in a studio, as an assistant, just south of here. But I’m also an artist. Trying to be, you know? I’m working on my portfolio. And to do that, I’m operating under the motto, ‘I’m seeing beauty in less-obvious places, and that makes me a more interesting person.’”

  “Ambitious,” I said. “But your motto also damns me with faint praise, doesn’t it?”

  “Oh my goodness,” she said. “No! I just mean, like, society’s idea of beauty is really warped and limited, and you—”

  “I’m joking,” I said. “I’d be honored. Where are you from, Wendy?”

  “Garrettsville, Ohio,” she said, shrugging in apology. “But I live in Chelsea.”

  “You’re looking at a long-term resident of Murray Hill,” I said. “I haven’t been to Chelsea in ages. And I’ve never been to Garrettsville, Ohio, but I’ve heard of it. Hart Crane was from there. Do you know him? His work? He was a poet. Killed himself in the 1930s by swan diving off an ocean liner.”

  “I’ve heard of him, but I’ve never read his poems,” she said. Then her eyes got wide and she asked, “Lillian, are you a poet?”

  I liked the way she asked that—not “Do you write poetry?” or even “Do you like poetry?” but “Are you a poet?” For Wendy, one’s art was one’s identity, and everything else one did simply amounted to getting by. She was still quite young, I realized, and she hadn’t been in the city very long.