JANUARY 14, 1979
GRACE CORNELL AND THADDEUS KAUFMAN
request the honor of your presence
January 14, 1979
1 P.M.
3__ Park Avenue South, #2
in the home of Christopher “Kip” Wood as they are joined together in marriage.
That’s right! Marriage!
THADDEUS AND GRACE WERE GETTING MARRIED, AND IN its own quasi-catastrophic way it was a perfect afternoon for a wedding, if only the bride’s mother had not gone missing. As far as anyone could surmise, Maureen Cornell was wandering out there alone in the snow-shocked world, making her way on foot or by taxi or—who knew—mush-mushing along by dogsled from the Hotel Edison on West Forty-Sixth Street to Kip Woods’s newly purchased loft on Nineteenth Street and Park Avenue South. The question came down to this: was Maureen delayed or was she truly lost? What was the exact nature of the foul-up? Had she lost track of time? Had she slipped on some slick snow or some congealed slush or black ice and landed, as she would have put it, in a phrase learned from the most Irish of her grandmothers, ass over teacup, or teakettle, or whatever-the-hell little saying had been fashioned out of centuries of humiliation? Was the city so paralyzed by the snow that travel of any kind was next to impossible? Or was Maureen in a gin-soaked stupor flat on her back in bed, and one not necessarily her own.
The storm had crippled the city, brought it to its glass and iron knees. The beauty of it, however, was undeniable, and for those without anything pressing, it was a welcome respite from murders and bankruptcies and arson and abandoned buildings, whores, junkies, newsstands festooned with pornographic magazines, and every parked car with a sign on the dashboard claiming No Radio, and a lock on the steering wheel, steel-bar locks that were so suddenly ubiquitous that it seemed a factory somewhere was working day and night manufacturing them. The snow sorted things out, at least for a while, unlike furious editorials in the newspapers or on TV did, unlike prayer, unlike the police. No one was going to steal a car or even a car radio on a day like this. Fire hydrants had disappeared in the drifts. Phone booths were transformed into snowy little warming stations on an Alpine trail. Manic, antic dogs cavorted in zoomy circles. Cross-country skiers went uptown and downtown, and wherever there was a rise in the road red-faced shrieking children launched their sleds, kicking their brightly booted feet, red red red black black black yellow yellow yellow.
It seemed holy. So pure, so full of justice, and forgiveness, a reminder that humans are merely—and gloriously!—a part of nature. A man on a corner in a leather jacket and a Soviet army hat stood with his arms raised high, shouting, Thank you thank you thank you.
Sam Kaufman was unimpressed. “What a bunch of sissies,” he exclaimed, watching the New Yorkers on the street below. “What kind of person puts up an umbrella in the snow? What the hell are they worried about? Their hair?”
“It’s drafty in here,” Libby said. She wore a dark brown suit, with black stockings and a chunky onyx necklace. “What is this place?”
“It’s Kip’s,” Thaddeus said, watching his sister along with a few other fun-loving souls on their cross-country skis, heading north on Park. He wanted to bang his knuckles against the glass, somehow gain her attention, but she swirled into white. He turned away from the window, faced his mother with a nervous smile.
“I know who lives here,” Libby said. “But what is it?”
“It’s a loft.”
“A loft?”
“It used to be a factory.”
“So it’s a bargain?”
“I don’t think so. You’ve got to fix them up. You get a lot of space, but it’s not cheap.”
“At least that’s what Kip says,” Libby said, if for no other reason than to have the last word.
Kip was paying for everything. He’d seen to the invitations, bought the food and the champagne, and hired two waiters to keep everything moving efficiently, men who worked at the Hutton executive dining room and who were glad to make extra cash on a Saturday. The waiters were also quite useful when one of the floorboards in the front of the loft popped off like a bottle cap succumbing to pent-up carbonation. Was it contraction or expansion, the cold of the day, or the heat of the apartment? Whatever the cause, one long strip of brand-new white ash flooring was suddenly dislodged, exposing a dark, worn patch of industrial flooring beneath. The old oak floor was installed in 1890 by Irish carpenters when the loft was owned by Sylvester Shirt Makers, and there were black steel bolts everywhere, each one the size of an apple, which once had secured the long lines of sewing machines at which generations of textile workers had labored. The building’s new owners had chosen to have new floors put on top of the old floors, but now the loft’s previous life asserted itself in a way that was not only dangerous but also curiously depressing. How were you supposed to look at those bolts and not think of the rows of women in long dresses, their hair pinned up, their exhausted eyes fixed on the sewing machine and the needle’s deadly dance.
The two E.F. Hutton waiters, ascertaining that Kip owned neither hammer nor nails, pounded the floorboard back into place with the Cuban heels of their brightly shined shoes. The noise was terrific but the two men seemed to enjoy it. Thaddeus stood at the windows, watching the snow. He tried to direct his thoughts to something positive. Well, here was something: this storm would be even more alarming if he and Grace had planned a honeymoon! First of all, honeymoons were lame, even the word was saccharine, and suggestive of virginity finally surrendered, the magic moment on a heart-shaped bed, and second, they couldn’t afford one anyhow.
Their wedding was largely about things they omitted. They weren’t having a priest or a rabbi but split the difference with an Ethical Culture minister for hire. Grace wasn’t wearing a white gown or anything else elaborate because they could not afford to spend hundreds of dollars on a dress. Hundreds of dollars was what they spent in a year on clothing, for both of them. Thaddeus could have rented formal wear, but standing next to Grace in a tuxedo while she was wearing something she could have worn to a cocktail party would have looked weird. They didn’t have bridesmaids because it never crossed their minds, and they did not have a best man because it just seemed silly—and Thaddeus would have wanted it to be Kip and Grace would have lobbied for Liam. They did not have ushers because there was no place to usher anyone, no aisle to walk down, no bride’s side, no groom’s. There were no children to be adorable, holding rings or dropping petals.
But what if their guests were unable to make it because of the storm? According to the local news radio station—You give us fifteen minutes, we’ll give you an anxiety attack—the subways were barely running, the busses were not running at all, and the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges were open only to emergency vehicles. They were already missing Grace’s mother—what if others succumbed to the storm, as well? Already Gene Woodard would not be here, since he was up (as in locked up) in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, having been checked in to Austen Riggs after a drunken weekend in which he phoned his father and called him a worthless lying penny-pinching palsied old cocksucker. But what about the members of the Celluloid Collective, the playful name given to itself by the screenwriting group Thaddeus had been a part of over the past year? He’d been privately wondering if any of them would bother to show up.
The Collective met for three hours every Thursday evening in a large apartment on West End Avenue, the home of the Collective’s oldest member, Jerry Dropkin, who was fifty-five and divorced. Dropkin was barrel-chested, with skinny arms and legs, and he was losing his hair in a kind of random patchwork way that made it seem as if he might actually be pulling it out. He was the only member of the group to have had a screenplay filmed, and shown in theaters. It was called Indian Killer, a French-Italian coproduction, filmed in Spain, with Navarre representing South Dakota. Jerry had been fired and replaced, but the basically bitter experience gave him the right to the last word when someone’s script was being workshopped in his living room, where bridge chairs had replaced the upholstered sofas and love seats of his married days, and framed family photos had been replaced by flowcharts of the five scripts he had going.
The people in the Collective seemed to think they were Thaddeus’s intellectual superiors, and Thaddeus tended to agree. Most of them spoke two or three languages. They had gone to Ivy League schools and, before that, had been prepared at New England boarding schools whose names he had pretended to recognize. (He first thought Rosemary Hall was a singer, but was able to self-correct before discovery.) He shared the Collective’s ambitions but not their tastes. He loved Jaws, The French Connection, Bonnie and Clyde, Rosemary’s Baby, and a French movie none of them had ever heard of, The Mad Adventures of Rabbi Jacob. His taste was not only suspect but just the kind of mindless bullshit the others were writing to overthrow.
The evening his script was up, Thaddeus waited in the lobby of Jerry’s massive old building, ringing the buzzer every few minutes for half an hour before giving up and heading home. Several days later, he happened to run into Ace Disend, who was furtively shopping for women’s undergarments at B. Altman, and learned that Jerry had had a heart attack and gone through open-heart surgery. When Thaddeus said he would visit Dropkin as soon as possible, perhaps after work that very day, Disend shook his head and said the doctors were recommending that visits be kept to a minimum. Only family and the very closest of friends were visiting Jerry, who was dopey from Dilaudid. Nevertheless, Thaddeus paid Jerry a visit a couple of days later and brought Grace along, too, on the theory that every man’s recuperation is aided by the sight of a nice-looking woman.
“They split me open like a lobster,” Jerry said. He was in a shared room at Roosevelt Hospital. A curtain divided the two beds. Thaddeus saw the silhouettes of the other guy’s visitors, moving like puppets in a shadow play.
“You have to guard against depression,” Grace said, sitting in the one chair available, with her hands folded in her lap. She wore a loose-fitting dress against the hot summer night. Her arms were bare and the swirling-fingerprint dark hairs on it looked especially prominent in the dingy hospital light.
“Yeah?” Jerry sounded as if he’d already had enough of her. “You think so.”
“Yes. Between the hypothermia and the anesthetic. Also, little pieces of plaque kind of bombard your brain. People have as much trouble with the depression as any other part of the recovery after the kind of surgery you had.”
“So you’re what? A doctor?”
“Better than that,” Thaddeus interjected. “She’s a children’s book designer.” He knew it was a mistake as soon as he’d said it. He’d thrown Grace to the wolves for a little joke. He saw her flash red and he knew it was something she was going to remember.
On the way out of the hospital, Grace said, “He kept staring at my arms.” They were at the front entrance. A security guard was posted nearby, half asleep, his long legs stretched out before him. He opened his eyes for a moment to look at them, decided they weren’t worth the bother.
“Was he?” Thaddeus answered. It was a subject he avoided. He wasn’t certain why it was so, but dark hair on a woman’s arms seemed somehow wrong to him.
Grace lifted her left arm, turned it just so. “I love my little monkey arms. I think they’re amazing.”
“I do, too,” Thaddeus said, uncertainly.
“Good. Because I’ve been getting shit about this my whole life. I’ve broken up with people over these little monkey arms.”
“Good!” Thaddeus had said, light-headed. It was as if he had luckily stepped back onto the curb as a bus whizzed by.
“I just can’t let anyone tell me I’m not good enough.”
“Me either. Or neither? Either, neither?” They were outside now. An ambulance was slowly turning toward the ER entrance, as if the patient inside was already lost.
Somehow, the issue of her arms remained unsettled, and they were not mentioned again until on the day of the wedding Thaddeus noticed they had been denuded, and were as smooth as the ring of fat around a steak, though reddened after two burning, buzzing hours of electrolysis, recommended to her by someone at work, a woman named Sophia Krafchek, a good-natured Polish woman with a gold tooth and two grown sons. “I was shaggy like coconut,” Sophia said, presenting Grace with a pre-wedding present of a gift certificate to Sonya of Seventy-Ninth Street, where women went to be bleached, plucked, waxed, and zapped.
Sophia turned out to be one of the first arrivals. She had come up on the elevator with Bruce Abernathy. The Ethical Culture minister was a young and hale man; he’d traveled on cross-country skis from his church on Central Park West to Kip’s loft, and he entered with his jolly-looking cheeks glowing red. And as it turned out, the guests for the most part braved the elements, and soon they were arriving in waves of icy good cheer, giddy from their adventures, collars and eyelashes wet and sparkling. Some had taken certified taxis, some had settled for so-called gypsy cabs, some had walked, kicking their way through snowbanks. Here were a lawyer, a social worker, a window dresser, a fireman, the guys with whom Thaddeus played basketball at the YMCA, where the hierarchy was based on conditioning and skills—a trust fund couldn’t buy you a layup, and if you picked up the ball while dribbling and then dribbled again, even if you were Robert Motherwell it was still a double dribble and you surrendered the ball.
And then came three women with whom Grace shared a painting studio above a pork and lamb wholesaler on Little West Twelfth Street. The studio, redolent of slaughtered flesh and the fumes of the West Side Highway, cost thirty-five dollars a month for each of them; Liam had paid a year’s rent as a birthday present for Grace. She admired the other women artists, their energy, their wiry hair, their eyeglasses (either small as silver dollars, or large as grapefruit), the complicated alluring things they could achieve with a scarf, their booming, ribald back-and-forth on the rare occasions when they were all in the studio at the same time. But it was just her luck to find herself with artists who saw no value in her work. These were people who believed verisimilitude was a kind of failure of the imagination. They themselves were proudly incapable of it. They asked her strained, vaguely insulting questions, such as “Is this from a photograph?” and “Are you hoping to sell these?”
STILL NO SIGN OF MAUREEN Cornell. And with the bride’s mother missing and the ceremony put on hold, Kip insisted that Thaddeus and Grace absent themselves from the general throng and wait it out in his bedroom.
“You’re the stars so you have to act like stars,” Kip said, escorting them into his room. Since the night at Nero’s, his tone with Thaddeus and Grace had become more and more artificial, careening between the solicitous and the sarcastic, the tender and the teasing. Today, he was wearing an Armani suit in a shade of gray that looked somehow European, a white shirt, and a black bow tie that he had already undone, like a lounge singer at the end of a long set. “We’ll give Mom another twenty minutes and then I think you two little bunnies ought to do the deed.”
“We can’t do it without Grace’s mother here,” said Thaddeus.
“One of the fat girls from Periodic Books has already damaged the cake,” Kip said. “She ran her finger over the icing.” He pointed at Grace. “One of your friends.”
“I hope everyone here is my friend,” said Grace.
“Sorry for the delay, man,” Thaddeus said.
“It’s not like my mother wants to be wandering around in the snow. I’m actually pretty worried about her,” Grace said.
“Oh, we’ll survive. My date’s not here anyhow,” Kip said.
“Who’s your date?” Thaddeus asked. His face lit up, like a child about to open a present.
“Linda Ronstadt.”
“You’re dating Linda Ronstadt?”
“Well, that might be pushing things. She said she’ll try and make it.” There was a burst of laughter from the front of the loft. “I’d better see to our guests. I’m going to close you two in here. Sit tight and no snooping around my stuff.”
There was a desk pushed against the wall opposite the bed, covered by a light blue bedsheet. The desk chair was piled high with neatly folded T-shirts. The room itself had been carved out of the loft’s once-open space, and the walls did not reach all the way to the high ceiling. An old oak wardrobe was his closet. His bookshelves were filled with first editions—Djuna Barnes, Wyndham Lewis, H.D.
“What do you think is under the sheet?” asked Grace.
Thaddeus lifted a corner of the sheet. A pile of continuous computer printout paper, each sheet with holes running down the left and right side.
“Maybe we can find out a tip on some hot stock,” Grace said.
Thaddeus sat next to her on the end of the bed. “You look beautiful,” he said. He took her hand, patted it.
“I feel about as sexy as saddle shoes,” she said.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “She’ll be here.”
“Your parents got here on time.”
“I’ve never questioned their punctuality.”
Grace’s brother walked in without knocking, holding a plate of Swedish meatballs, each impaled by a frilly toothpick. “You guys hungry?” Liam asked, using his foot to close the door behind him. He had a good-natured, boyish appearance, a conservative haircut, and wore a drab blue suit made even drabber by very wide lapels and fabric-covered buttons. To Thaddeus, Liam always looked more like someone who taught PE at a Catholic school than someone moving kilos of Mexican pot.
“You know,” Liam said, “whenever I enter into any kind of transaction I always take the time to go through the variables. I know everything that could possibly go wrong in any situation. I don’t care if it’s personal or business, ordering a meal or buying ten ki’s of product. I don’t like surprises. Surprises don’t happen to me. But I let this one get away from me. I should have never put her in that shitty hotel.” Liam paid his mother’s rent and her utilities, and made certain there was cash on hand for extras—beauty parlor appointments, nice clothes, the depression-fighting little luxuries. He had had tickets to New York waiting for her at the American Airlines desk at O’Hare, and a car and driver waiting for her at LaGuardia, whisking her to the Hotel Edison near Times Square. It was not a hotel Liam would have chosen. He was staying at the St. Regis, but Maureen had a sentimental attachment to the Edison. She had stayed there for a week when she was seventeen, when she daringly ran off to New York with a Midwestern boy who played saxophone and was on a mission to meet Louis Jordan.
“Maybe we should look for her,” Thaddeus said.
“Where?” Grace asked. “I knew she would do this. We shouldn’t have even invited her.”
“Grace, come on,” Liam said. “She’s fine.”
“She’s not fine, Liam. She’s never been fine. She’s like a snail crawling around leaving her ooze on everything she touches.”
There was a brief knock on the door and Libby walked in. “I think we should proceed with the ceremony,” she said, in a nervous whisper. “I don’t know what you think is going on out there. But those two waiters? They’re very, very angry. They’re sitting around watching sports on the TV and making rude remarks about the guests.”
“Great. We still have to wait for her mother,” Thaddeus said.
“It’s almost an hour already. People are getting restless.” She looked at her watch, and then her gaze locked onto Thaddeus. Sometimes when his mother looked at him, it felt like the captain from an enemy vessel had just boarded his ship to dictate the terms of surrender.
Liam contrived to leave the bedroom as quickly as possible, as if he was visiting Grace and Thaddeus in a hospital and did not want to overwhelm them. “I’ll keep an eye out for Maureen,” he said, over his shoulder.
“It’s a wedding,” Libby said. “It can’t wait forever.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Thaddeus said. “There’s food out there, drink, and let’s not forget the joy of good friends being together for an afternoon of unparalleled conviviality.” He put his hand over his heart and smiled with no small measure of desperation.
“You joke around too much,” Libby said. “You really do.”
“Do I? Nietzsche said a joke is the death of an emotion.”
“Since when did Nietzsche know his ass from a hole in the ground?” asked Libby.
“He had insights,” Thaddeus said. “Anyhow, maybe he didn’t say joke. Maybe he said wit. At any rate, I have plenty of emotions. I can afford to kill a few. It’s like thinning out a row of lettuce.”
“Who told you about lettuce? What are you now? A kulak?”
“Maybe it wasn’t the death of an emotion,” Thaddeus said. “Maybe Nietzsche said epitaph. In which case, I am like one big obituary page.”
“I’m going to look for her,” Grace said.
“Have you called the police?” Libby asked.
“What are the cops going to do?” Grace asked, hoping her tone wasn’t conveying the annoyance she felt.
“Find her, it’s their job,” answered Libby.
“Let’s go, let’s just fucking find her,” said Thaddeus. He rose from the end of the bed, put his hand out to Grace, but she rose without accepting his assistance, or moral support, or ironic chivalry, or whatever it was he had offered her.
Grace and Thaddeus announced their intentions to the guests, and it touched them that everyone wanted to help. They watched with gratitude as people shrugged back into wet coats, pulled on boots. Even under cover of snow, Manhattan was essentially a grid, and searchers were sent in pairs north and south on the avenues, while other pairs went east and west on the narrower, less traveled streets. The north-south searchers were to cover the territory from Forty-Seventh Street to Houston Street, while the east-west crew was to cover from Eighth Avenue to Second Avenue, except for Abernathy, who would zip around on skis, guided by instinct. Kip was to stay home, in case Maureen arrived on her own or Linda Ronstadt showed up. The two E.F. Hutton waiters were in the section of the loft where Kip had set up his largest Sony Trinitron, watching a soccer match, Costa Rica versus Argentina. Kip had a jar filled with change and he gave each person several dimes, with the instruction to call in every fifteen minutes or so to see if Maureen had been found or had strolled in on her own. No one dared worry aloud. A kind of antic spirit prevailed, as if this was all a part of the wedding day, a game they might all play, a scavenger hunt—the first one to find Maureen Cornell wins!
In the lobby, Grace and Thaddeus stood for an extra few moments at the door leading to the street, like uncertain swimmers at the lip of a diving board. The street before them had been plowed, but the sidewalks were matters of conjecture.
The wind swirled the snow from the ground up.
“Well, there goes my new dress,” Grace said.
“We can still put it in one of those plastic garment bags and save it for our daughter to be married in,” said Thaddeus.
Grace was so far from being amused, she didn’t bother punching his arm. She made a little squeak of distress each time she took another step in the snow. Their quadrant was Park Avenue South from Nineteenth Street to Thirtieth, east to Lexington, and Lexington back to Nineteenth Street. What had once been a kind of soft, magical snowfall was sterner now, sparser but swifter, with a stinging, depressing quality to it. It was just past two in the afternoon but the sky was the gray of discarded machinery. Some of the shopkeepers were out, trying to clear portions of the sidewalk. A well-built, Indian man in his fifties, wearing a ski jacket and earmuffs, shoveled a narrow path to his shoe store, perspiring mightily. He seemed on his way to heart failure, and when Thaddeus and Grace availed themselves of the cleared pavement only to walk past his store he glared at them, as if they had taken advantage of him.
“I’m not surprised that my mother is wrecking this,” Grace said. “You see now why I could never be a mother? The word, honestly, the very word makes me crazy.”
They stood on the corner of Twentieth and Park Avenue South. A massive mound of snow had accumulated and a middle-aged woman in a long coat and a brightly colored Peruvian wool cap watched with pleasure as her long-haired dachshund cavorted at the top of the drift, as if it had just scaled Everest.
“I can carry you across the street, if you want,” Thaddeus said.
“Why do we live here?” Grace wailed. She could feel slush packing itself into her instep. “This whole thing is fucked.”
“This isn’t the only place it snows,” Thaddeus said. Since Nero’s, hardly a day went by without Grace expressing her unhappiness about their life in the city. His own feelings about New York weren’t all that different from hers, yet he often felt compelled to counter her arguments. True, they lived near the theaters and concert halls they couldn’t afford to attend, and near the publishers and art galleries who were all completely uninterested in them, and near the avant-garde bohemians whose sexual liberties and iffy grooming were far from the Astaire-like sophistication that Thaddeus thought was going to be the city’s dominant style, but for now they were stuck here and he wished she would make the best of it.
“This fucking place,” she said. “I wish I was anywhere else.”
“Come on, Grace, it’s our wedding day.”
“Our wedding day,” she said, as if the three words described the height of absurdity. She took his arm. “I’m sorry. I’m in a horrible mood. She could be stoned somewhere. She could be with some fat, bald man she met at a bar.”
“Why does everyone speak poorly about heavyset men who have experienced hair loss?”
“Fuck you, Thaddeus, I’m serious.”
“I know you are. But she’s not drunk, and she’s not having sex with Chef Boyardee.”
“Rilly,” she said, forcing herself not to smile.
A few determined taxi drivers made their way up and down the avenue, rear ends fishtailing, hands clenched at two o’clock and ten on the steering wheel. You could see the whites of their eyes, their willingness to risk it all for another hour or two on the meter. Directly ahead of them, a man in a leather jacket and bright yellow boots stood holding a leash while his German shepherd diligently dug at a mound of snow that had been built up around a parking meter. The mound looked like one of those gigantic columns full of termites you see in pictures of Africa. The dog clawed the snow with his forepaws and shot it out under his shaggy gray-and-black torso and through his back legs. He seemed like a dog in a cartoon.
“Busy boy, huh,” the man said, soliciting their goodwill. He had a dark narrow face, etched in suffering. Wiry dark hairs stood up from his eyebrows like antennae.
“I can’t wait to see what he finds,” said Thaddeus.
“He gets like this sometimes,” the man said. “Once he dug up a crucifix in Madison Square Park. It blew my mind. I almost converted.”
“We’re looking for my mother,” Grace said. “And we’re very worried. It all seems so hopeless.”
Thaddeus turned to look at her straight on. This called for more than just a sideways glance because he had never heard her voice so plain and uninflected, except in moments of the most exquisite intimacy, the times the words rose up from a place deep within her and managed to elude all the little baffles and spurs and roundabouts of personality, motive, and agenda.
The man seemed not to have heard her—his attentions were occupied by the dog’s vocalizing, the highs and lows of it, from whines that were almost whistles to barks that were almost sonic booms, all accompanied by an ever more frantic digging.
“Atlantis, take it easy, take it easy,” the man said. He approached the dog with the leash, ready to snap it onto its collar, but when he touched the dog it turned quickly, snarling, and the man snatched his hand away, almost losing his footing.
“He must really be on the scent of something,” the man said, like the mother of a child having a tantrum in a food shop.
“We should go,” Thaddeus said to Grace.
“Let’s see what he finds.”
The man continued to try and get the leash hooked onto Atlantis’s collar, but after a couple of feints in the dog’s direction he decided to wait, and now the three of them stood in the snow waiting and waiting and waiting still more for the dog to finish its dig, and the longer they waited, with the temperature dropping and the gray in the sky steadily darkening, the more their own speculations about what scent might be driving Atlantis to such great effort steadily darkened as well, until they were all hoping that what the dog was after was merely garbage, and not some urban archaeology of a sterner sort—a severed head, a hand, an ear. At last, with a couple of violent shakes of his head, Atlantis yanked his prey out of the thick icy core of the mound.
A leather glove. It was partially turned in on itself, but surmising from the color—maroon—and its smallness, it was a woman’s. Thaddeus laughed with relief and touched Grace’s elbow. “We should boogie on, reggae woman,” he said.
She nodded, her face grave, her eyes fixed on the glove in the dog’s mouth. Atlantis shook it back and forth as if it were a small animal whose neck he was snapping.
“I hate this city,” she said, more to herself than to him.
They walked slowly, looking in front of them and on the other side of the street, hoping to spot Maureen.
“I didn’t even have a chance to give you your wedding present,” Grace said, in a voice that suggested all was lost.
Thaddeus was silent. No one had told him they were supposed to give each other something, as well.
“You want to know what it is?”
“Okay.”
“A picture.”
“A drawing?”
“Yes. Remember that ring? The emerald? I found a photo of one just like it and I made a drawing.”
“Meaning we’ll never be able to afford the real thing?”
“Meaning that art is the real thing, or better. And that I am very very very very very very happy with what we have and who we are.”
“I am, too, baby.”
“But you wish we had the ring, too, right?”
“All I want is to be happy, and for us to be happy. It’s the whole purpose of life.”
“Happy.”
“Yeah. A simple word. But it’s not so easily done. You have to seize it from the jaws of the Shit Monster. And once you have it you have to protect it.”
“You want to give me happy?”
“Of course.”
“You want to give me the best present I could ever get? Give me your word. This is what I want, and it’s what I’ve always wanted. I want us to be each other’s main thing, and to know that whatever you say to me in the privacy of our marriage is fine. You’re always on my side, and I am always on yours. You will always keep my secrets and I will keep yours. I get it why married people can’t be called on to testify against each other in court. What we know about each other no one else knows. And we stand with each other against all others.”
“Are the ‘others’ coming after us?”
“I’m serious, Thaddeus.”
“I’m sorry. I’m with you.”
“So do you agree? Is that how you see it?”
“I do.” He placed his hand over his heart. “I really do.”
“I do, too,” Grace said.
“So . . . are we married? May I kiss the bride?”
Someone was calling out to Grace, a wind-raked call that turned her middle vowel into triplets. They both looked up and saw Lisa Kaplan, one of the women from the shared studio. Lisa wore a fuchsia wool coat, and her dark curly hair bubbled from her wool cap, like espresso boiling out of the pot. Of all of them in the studio, Lisa was the most forceful in her opinions on everything from art to diet.
“Can I join your search party?” she said when she caught up to Grace and Thaddeus. “Either Jenny and Octavia ditched me or they went home.” She placed herself between them and linked her arms through theirs, though the sidewalk, where it had been shoveled at all, was still a narrow path and they could certainly not walk three abreast, or even two abreast. She unhooked herself from them and noticed the distraught expression on Grace’s face.
“You okay, little Gracey?”
Thaddeus knitted his brows. He did not much care for that “little Gracey,” the diminishment of it, turning his wife into something adorable and unserious, a tchotchke.
“I’m okay,” Grace said. “Worried.”
“Weddings,” said Lisa, rolling her abnormally large eyes, as if snowstorms and disappearing mothers were part of the tedious typicality of people getting married.
More taxis were starting to brave their way north and south, and another snowplow was in sight, its front blade churning up waves of snow and salt. A slow-moving police car appeared, siren silent, flashers on.
On Twenty-Third Street, they found a pay phone on the corner, bolted to the wall of a drugstore. The pharmacist was out, pouring rock salt from a bag, though the pavement had not yet been cleared and the pellets merely disappeared into the snow.
“Is the phone working?” Thaddeus asked.
The pharmacist said, “How in the living breathing motherfucking hell should I know?” before stomping back into his empty store.
“What a pig,” said Lisa. “Pig!” she shouted at the closed door.
Grace closed her eyes. This was the world her mother was wandering around in, lost and alone.
Thaddeus dropped two dimes into the slot, ignoring the residue of some mysterious goo. He waited breathlessly for a moment—and there it was: a dial tone. He wished he had something other than his finger to put into the holes of the rotary dial, and as he was having the thought, Grace was already rummaging around in her purse and finding an eyebrow pencil, which she handed to him. “Oh my God,” he said, “how am I ever going to live without you?”
Moments later, Kip answered the phone. “Wood here.”
“Kip, it’s me.”
“Hello, Me. Nice to hear your voice.”
“Any word?”
“She’s here.”
“She is? Is she okay?”
Grace covered her mouth with her icy hand.
“She’s fine,” Kip said. “She’s getting relaxed. You better get back and close the deal.”
“She’s fine,” Thaddeus said to Grace.
“She’s with someone,” Kip said. “Wait. I’m seeing if this cord stretches into the bathroom.”
“You can—”
“Just wait, all right?” The sound of a door closing. “There. She’s with someone. This woman who found her on Thirtieth and Fifth and walked her over here.”
“Thank God.”
“What do you want me to do? Should we invite her to stay?”
“Of course. She probably saved her life.”
“She’s fine. There’s nothing wrong with her. She’s actually pretty. Grace will age well.”
Grace made an impatient gesture.
“What’s going on?” Lisa asked.
“The thing is,” Kip said, his voice lowering. “This woman. I think she might be homeless.”
“All the more reason to let her stay.”
“Yeah. Marry the girl, and do a good deed. Gives you the daily double, you lucky dog.”
When Thaddeus hung up the phone, he put his arm around Grace.
“She’s fine,” he said. “Kip says she looks beautiful.”
On the way back to Kip’s apartment, Lisa said, “I never even asked you if you were going to keep your name.”
“No, she’s changing her name to Linda,” Thaddeus said. “Why do you ask?”
“Funny man,” said Lisa. “But are you?” She leaned closer to Grace, and her expression was serious, expectant.
“Of course I am,” Grace said.
“Well, I’m proud of you,” Lisa said.
“I keep forgetting,” Thaddeus said to Lisa, “that you actually invented women’s liberation.”
Now that Maureen had arrived, the fear Grace had been holding in check began to flood. Her breath was shallow, and smelled like pennies steeped in malt vinegar. Thaddeus pulled her close.
A snarl of taxis moved slowly behind the snowplow that was clearing Park Avenue. The plow’s yellow lights were spinning. The cascades of snow arcing away from the blade looked like waves coming to shore in the moonlight.
“Are you going to keep your share in the studio after this?” Lisa asked, when they reached Kip’s block.
“Why wouldn’t she?” Thaddeus said, surprising even himself with the vehemence of his question.
“I don’t know,” Lisa said, unperturbed by Thaddeus’s anger. “She might not need it, or want it. How would I know?”
“Her work is amazing. It’s radical traditionalism. It makes you love the world. You might not get it, it’s out of step with all the mountains of bullshit out there. A bunch of little crappy things pasted onto cardboard. Sorry, Lisa, but you don’t even know how to paste right. Didn’t you learn that in third grade?”
“I went to Yale, asshole.”
“Get a refund.”
Grace gave his hand a small secret squeeze. Thaddeus had been moaning for weeks about not being able to get her that old emerald ring from Gina’s Gems. For a while, she’d wondered if this was a cover story of some kind, and he had found a way to get it for her after all. But that was clearly impossible. She was prepared to give him something without receiving anything in return. But now she understood that right out here in the snow with their shoes soaked and their eyelashes frozen and their guests waiting for them and getting drunk, he’d come up with a wedding present for her after all.
TO LIAM CORNELL/POSTE RESTANTE/CUERNAVACA, MEXICO
March 19, 1979
Dear Liam,
If this letter reaches you it will give me new faith in the world. Me in Turkey, you in Mexico, all the eyes and hands and cars and planes that will have to pitch in and get this to you. I realize I am a provincial girl after all. This supersonic world doesn’t make sense to me. Thaddeus tells me I came up a bit short on the thank-yous when you gave us this trip, but you know I was scared shitless flying from Chicago to New York. And then you’re telling me I’m supposed to fly from New York all the way to Istanbul? With all that ocean, with sharks licking their chops waiting for me to fall in? But as soon as we sat in first class all my bad thoughts trotted off to the phobia graveyard. I felt so safe up there with all the vodka and the French wines. I had one terrifying moment during takeoff—the wheels made a noise when they folded up into the belly of the jet—but after that it was perfect. I firmly believe that if anything happens on one of those planes the first-class passengers are spared. I think that part of the cabin breaks off and has its own parachute. T kept singing this song from 1950, Istanbul, no longer Constantinople, but other than that it was all so perfect.
I slept for twenty-one hours once we got here. Thaddeus was off sightseeing, kebabbing, and Grand Bazaaring his ass off, but the flight and the time change and the culture shock was too much for me. I totally conked out. The Pera Palace is totally out of sight. So dignified and judicious on the outside, like the Federal Reserve building in New York. As soon as the taxi dropped us here, I felt safe. Inside is amazing. Sort of a dusty old museum of past glories, sort of churchy, sort of mosquey, sort of gentleman’s club out of Sherlock Holmes. Our suite is huge and decorated like a really hip grandmother used to live here. But the best part is this: the day manager is this great guy named Galip. He’s over forty, frizzy black hair, except where he’s bald. Just for the hell of it I did a sketch of him, and when I showed it to him, it blew his mind, if I do say so myself. Next thing I know he’s insisting I show him more of my work, and it just so happens I have that Fabriano sketchbook you gave me, already half filled with drawings. Galip spends about five minutes on each drawing, I swear to God, sitting there in his linen suit, frowning like he’s trying to memorize the drawings. T walks in in the middle of all this, but I give him the shush sign and he gets it. When Galip finally looks up, the first thing he says is, “I see you use the best paper. That shows me you are a very serious artist.” I don’t tell him that most of my drawings were done on notebook paper. He thinks we’re rich, since we’re occupying a suite at his hotel and our baggage claim tickets say first class and we kept them on the handles of our suitcases—we are never taking those little beauties off! And the next thing he says is he wants to show them to his boss, who is the nephew of one of the owners, because they are looking for artwork to go in their lounge area and the lobby, too. He didn’t even care that none of the drawings were of Istanbul or anything about Turkey. He really just flipped out over the work. My work! T and I spend so much time talking about his work that it’s easy for me to sort of forget my own art. But this thing inside, this little tender invisible but always present thing that is the self that is me, I can feel it coming forward when I make my art and I can feel it disappearing when all the other shit takes over, stuff like the job, and relationships, even washing my hands or brushing my hair. And when someone—even a stranger with a voice that sounds like a bunch of flies buzzing in an empty jar, and whose English starts to wobble when he gets excited and he says things like one drawing makes him hear “vague music,” and another is “most happily laconic”—when that someone actually SEES what I am doing, and gives me positive vibes about it. Liam my dearer than dear wandering pirate brother—there is nothing like it in all the universe. My art is my soul, for what it’s worth. It’s my blood and my breath. The fact is, I have been given a lot of shit about my work—by those phony bastards at the Art Institute who couldn’t even draw so naturally they HAD to insist that drawing was passé, and Caroline Kovac, that girl who was such a careerist and made me feel like a dope, but whose voice haunts me even though she’s in California and I’m in New York, where the artists I meet think art is pasting a pubic hair onto an old copy of TV Guide. “This one is very erotic,” Galip said about my newest egg drawing—the one with the little crack on the side. T cleared his throat when he heard that. I felt the rivalry. Galip courting my innermost being and T trying to keep his grip on my shell. I know I sound terrible and like the bitch of all bitches, but the thought that my work might be hanging in this amazing hotel all the way in Istanbul is making me completely trip out with excitement. For the first time since meeting Thaddeus my life feels as if it’s about Me. And we all know how long that lasts! Maybe six hours. That night after dinner, T says to me, “Let’s have a kid!”