Eric’s office was cold. He’d called to say the boiler had broken and did I want to cancel. My first reaction was that he was lying and just needed an extra day to Christmas-shop, buy some lingerie for his wife, a new mobile for the boy. I suggested meeting in his apartment and after the silence told him I’d be at his office regular time.
I was wearing Yvonne’s leather coat, lying on the couch under a huge blanket. Eric had on a heavy alpaca sweater under his wool jacket and looked sportier than usual. I hadn’t brought him a Christmas present and I was beginning to regret it. I thought I should have brought a book or some music. A silk scarf. Then I thought of his wife giving him an expensive sweater, helping his little son make a gift for him, and I was glad I hadn’t brought him anything. I laughed to myself.
“Is something funny?” Eric asked. A puff of air formed when he spoke. The room was that cold.
“Yeah,” I said and watched my own breath take form in front of me. The boat hanging behind him looked like it was sitting on his head like an angel on top of a tree.
“Christmas,” I said.
Eric didn’t say anything.
“What do you think your son is going to give you for Christmas?”
“What do you think he is going to give me?”
“He told me not to tell,” I said.
It wasn’t even funny. Everything I said sounded weird. I couldn’t even be funny anymore. I pulled the blanket closer and kept talking so he wouldn’t think I had thought it was funny.
“Maybe he’ll make you a finger painting so you can get rid of that awful boat.”
“You don’t like that painting?”
I ignored it. Maybe he had painted it himself. In which case I hope he’s a better shrink than he is a painter or I’ll end up like that boat—stuck in the middle of a setting that has nothing to do with me.
“You know,” I said, “in second grade I made my father a tie-clip and cuff link holder out of an old tunafish can covered with black and white felt.”
It’s true. Miss Hudson had slit the can and bent two edges back so it looked like a jacket, collar, and tie. Lisa and Carla had made the same thing in their class so my father ended up with three of them.
Eric didn’t say anything.
“But you don’t wear cuff links, do you?”
“Terry, isn’t there something you wanted to bring up?”
I didn’t say anything.
“About the other night?”
“It was wonderful,” I said, and regretted it immediately.
Eric stared at me like he could wait forever.
I was beginning to think he was crazy. I wanted to tell him about hearing Mark’s message, but then I’d have to tell him about going to Yvonne’s. Maybe he already knew. Maybe that’s what he meant.
I pulled the covers up and around me and brought my knees up to my chest. The clock was making a buzzing sound that was louder than usual. It felt funny to be all wrapped up in a blanket looking at Eric sitting in his chair. The fact that it was the week before Christmas and there was no heat gave the room an unusual feeling of intimacy. Like we were really supposed to be sharing cups of hot chocolate and talking like old friends around a fire. Or like he was visiting me in a hospital, that he would see how cold I was, come over to the couch, and tuck me in tighter. When he handed me the blanket I’d almost asked him to cover me. I had the strangest urge to call him “Daddy.”
“What was your favorite song when you were a kid?” I asked him.
“What was your favorite song?” he asked.
Predictable.
“What was your favorite song?” I sounded like an ornery five-year-old.
Eric didn’t say anything.
“What was your favorite song?” I said again in a mimicky voice.
“Terry, I think you are angry at me.”
I wanted to push his face into the wall clock.
“MacArthur Park,” I said.
Eric just sat there, legs crossed at the ankle, arms wrapped around himself. He must have been cold but he didn’t even shiver. I wonder if he was upset I hadn’t just canceled.
“Do you want to hear a poem I wrote?”
He said nothing. I propped up on my elbow and stared at him. “There once was a girl named Yvonne / Who studied French at the Sorbonne / She struck her instructor / Who bucked when he fucked her / Until she would scream ‘bonne, c’est bonne.’”
“Terry, I want to talk about the other night.”
Not even a comment about the poem. No sense of humor. Eric is starting to sound like Mark.
“Terry I want to talk about last night,” Mark said after I’d spent the night at Brian’s. I got home late yesterday and didn’t say a word about where I’d been.
“Where were you?” He was standing on a ladder, changing a bulb in one of the fixtures that had been out for a couple of days. “I don’t want to have to wonder whether you’re going to be here on any given night.”
I looked up at him standing on top of that ladder thinking he was so great. I didn’t even hold the ladder to steady it, the way I always do. He screwed in the light and climbed down.
“Terry, I want to know where you were last night,” he said. He tossed the old bulb into the trash can.
“I don’t feel like talking about it, okay?”
“No. Not okay. You don’t just disappear without any explanation and then come home no questions asked.”
“Oh,” I said, “and do you think Foucault answered his wife’s questions?”
“Foucault wasn’t married.”
“Maybe you don’t want to be married.”
“Terry, I am tired of playing games,” he said. He really said that. “And stop doing that.”
I’d been chipping pieces of paint off the wall as I talked. The chipped area looked like a giant loofah mitt.
“I feel like I don’t have anything,” I said now to Eric. “Nothing is mine. Mark owns the loft and pays most of the maintenance and I feel like a poor relation. Or a guest. Everything in there is his. Paintings, sculptures, furniture. Pots, plants. Espresso machines. Even the bed. Everything except the books. The books are mine. And most of the CDs.”
“Why are you bringing this up now?” Eric asked.
“I was just thinking about it.”
“I think there’s something you are really afraid to talk about.”
I lay back down and pulled the covers up higher.
“Okay. What else don’t you feel is completely yours?”
“Have you forgotten the minor fact that my husband is having an affair?”
“No. But who else?”
“Well, I don’t like it that Sarah and Elly are starting to be friends.” I figured I might as well be cooperative.
“Terry, what about me? I think you are very angry about having to share me with my family. And I think you are very upset about the other night at Rockefeller Center.”
“What are you talking about?”
I hadn’t even mentioned Rockefeller Center. And I know he’s not psychic.
“You don’t remember?”
“What?”
“Seeing me.”
“Seeing you?”
Eric leaned forward. The boat looked so forlorn and alone, hanging there in that water. Nowhere to go.
I sat up, pulled the blanket around me, and held myself. Eric was staring at me pretty intently, both oxblood shoes positioned squarely on the floor, leaning forward as though he were about to run the marathon. And then he told me. It seems I walked right into him and his wife and child by the rink at Rockefeller Center. Stared right at them. Walked right past.
“I didn’t see you,” I said.
“You did see me. Us. Maybe you didn’t consciously see us, but you did see us.”
I couldn’t believe it. I tried to remember. I pictured myself walking around the rink. Now that I think about it, maybe it’s why I felt so nauseous and hopeless and alone all of a sudden. But it’s hard to believe you could see something and not see something. That some part of you could register it and the rest of you remain unconscious. Like it completely bypassed part of your brain. It’s absolutely scary.
“Did you feel that you couldn’t speak to me outside this room?”
“Eric, I didn’t see you.”
“You did see me. You obviously could not handle seeing me with my family . . .”
“I hate when you say that. I can’t handle it.”
“You’re angry at me.”
“I am not angry.”
“You are angry.”
When I play back the session it sounds like two second-graders fighting in a schoolyard.
“Terry, we are going to have to stop.”
I looked at the clock. We’d gone over two minutes. Eric was standing stiff and erect, like a statue of a mayor in a small town park.
“I think this has been an important session,” he said.
I folded the blanket and stuck it on his couch. He looked bulkier with that sweater under his jacket. I wanted to hug him, feel his chest next to mine. For a second I thought he’d lean over and hug me for Christmas.
“Well,” I said. I didn’t want to leave. “Have a nice Christmas.”
“You too,” he said.
“My best to your family. I don’t believe I’ve ever met them.”
He smiled.
When I thought about it later it seemed like the kind of smile someone who liked you would smile.
I made a note to send him a Christmas card. To him and his family. But I didn’t.