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Have you ever gone to a bar alone? Sat there and not participated, but watched as an observe? Eventually, if you keep yourself there long enough, you’ll get pulled in.
—Velvet Rope Diaries, New York, New York
7:00 a.m., December 31
It was the last day of the year. I woke up early and jogged around the reservoir in Central Park. It was a “new thing” Ray and I were trying, something we started together, a shared experience that’s ours alone. I left Ray, matted and sweaty, at the subway station, and headed downtown to Nina’s.
The sun was just up, and I could hear the wind howling at the old wood frame windows alongside her kitchen table. A garbage truck back up with a beep, beep, beep, and then I heard the empty clanging of its back and lowering to take in the trash. The thing is, all your trash has to go somewhere.
I knew where, too. Thomas worked at a garbage recycling plant after high school, and he’d once told me about a woman who’d come in frenzied, looking for her wedding ring, which she said she’d accidentally thrown in the trash. Thomas tried to tell her, “There’s no way you’re going to find it in all that trash.” But she’d insisted he let her in the square-mile room, where they kept the trash until it was ready to be burned and converted into energy. When he took her there, he said, she just looked in at all of it—everyone’s trash piled so wide and so high and mixed in like that—and said, “Oh.”
The thing is, the pieces of yourself can seem meaningless among all that other stuff from everyone else. The woman lost hope and turned around to try to forget about her ring.
I’d always thought that a very sad story, all of our trash and missing treasures, side by side. The fact that they were recycled so that someone to charge their cell phone didn’t seem enough for a bright side.
One of the garbage men yelled, “All done, Ronnie!” and I could hear the truck putt away.
“Morning again, Glory,” Nina said, re-emerging from her bedroom better attired than when I’d first arrived, her face freshly made up. Against her wet hair her colored lips looked too bright—false or something. “Bernard made some pancakes a little while ago if you want some breakfast.”
“He’s a real keeper, huh?” I asked.
“Yeah.” She smiled.
“What’s your plan for the day?” I asked. Later, we were going to a fancy formal party at The Four Seasons restaurant. I’d been personally invited by one of the owners, even after the public firing. He’d called and cooed in his Italian accent, “Please, darling, come and spend New Year’s with us.”
“Well first thing, I’m handing in my resignation letter,” she said. “And then at lunch, Susan and I are choosing the sink fixtures.”
10:30 a.m.
Afterward, I went to Bloomingdales, to buy some gloves and a hat. Right away the puff of warm air inside comforted me. This is the kind of place, with its attractive take on life, that can make you feel good no matter what. A pretty, neat woman in a white lab coat and black pants and heels sweetly asked, “Would you like to try some Like Yourself by Selvin Krein?” Her eyes were blinky and her mouth soft. She shimmied my sleeve up a bit and pressed the atomizer. Sweet lilac and currant came at me. You’d better not open that door, David had said, at Fashionable, when I’d changed into the Selvin Krein.
“Thank you.” This is a place that amazes me. I passed the glass cases, with their potions, their colorful accessories, back to the hat and scarf displays.
There were lots of sale signs over the chrome racks. A muzak version of Hey Nineteen played as I pulled on a brimmed green cashmere hat. The matching gloves hung just beneath the hats, in between a zebra print and a funny stripe. I pulled those on, too, and looked around for a mirror. There was a little girl looking in the nearest mirror, in the very same hat I had on. Her hair was thin, just a whisper of curls at the back of her head, and the ends peeked out below the brim. Her father stood to the side, watching her in the mirror. The hat covered her face, and she sang precociously, “I can’t see, I can’t see, oh dear me, I cannot see.” The father chuckled. “I might be able to help you with that,” he said and crouched down beside her. I watched them in the mirror and in real life, just a couple of feet away.
He pulled the hat down in back, folded up the brim so she could see him. She was semi-toothless with a dimple in the middle of her left cheek. She turned and saw me. “Dad, she’s got the same hat as me.” The dad looked at me, and I’m not sure what I saw in that look, but I didn’t want that hat any longer. I wanted only to remember it on the girl, with her two big rabbit teeth and keep it at that. I finally went for a purple beret, which wasn’t all that warm and kept flopping to one side. The gloves had delicate stripes of pink woven through.
On the way home, with the wind testing the limits of my beret, I thought I might be someone new in this getup. When people regarded me, I felt they saw it too. That slender woman in the charcoal waiting impatiently to cross the street, she too saw that I had let something go for good and that my life would be very different . . . no matter what it might bring.