The quilt on top of the blanket was called Sunshine and Shadow. It had been on this bed as long as he could remember, but it was only lately, in the city, when quilts became fashionable, that he had found out the name of the pattern. It was a quilt begun by his grandmother and finished by his mother and his aunt. He had stared at it when he was a child: squares of differing sizes, alternately light and dark — a diamond pattern radiating from the smallest gray square in the center. He had hypnotized himself into dizziness studying the pattern and come to no conclusions, the way he had stared at inanimate objects years ago when he was tripping. Whatever revelations he had were long gone; he couldn’t paraphrase them, so he didn’t know how to talk about them. He could remember things he had thought about, but he couldn’t remember his conclusions. Or, if he could, they no longer seemed to have any context.
Laura Ann was lying next to him in bed, breathing quietly, deep in sleep. The light was coming up. The star-shaped barrette had almost worked its way loose; her long, curly hair was spread around her on the pillow like a Vargas girl’s in Playboy, but instead of being picture-pretty, her face was puffy from sleep. He kissed the tip of a curl and wondered if he loved her. On a trip to Pennsylvania a year ago, they had built a snowman, and while he chipped away, trying to make it anatomically correct below its snow belly, she had worked equally hard to pile on breasts. Somewhere in the woods, behind the junkyard, until it melted, there had been a hermaphroditic snowman.
He put his cheek against her hair, trying to think about all the strange, funny times he had had with Laura Ann, trying to forget his ex-lover. Awake, Laura Ann was often as quiet about things as she was now, in sleep, but not deliberately secretive. She had begun a course in photography during her lunch hour. He had seen the little gray plastic film container on a table and asked about it. She was going to study photography, she had said simply. Just another thing she had considered, and acted on, without ever mentioning it. His anger had been childish, saying that photography made everything into potential art, that there were easy shots sure to succeed. “You’re not the first one to come up with that,” she had said.
What she had not said was that knowing odd facts could be an equally cheap trick: why Bill Monroe fired Richard Greene; who made the first chocolate-chip cookie; the way to get dried wax off of candlesticks. He had always remembered odd facts, trying to outshine his brother, Derek, who operated in a fog and always came out in the clear. He rolled over and remembered advice from his shrink: Don’t fall asleep thinking bad thoughts about yourself. He remembered apologizing to Laura Ann for condemning photography by showing an interest in her recent prints, and the irregular black borders around them. “You chisel out the negative holder,” she had said, holding her first finger an inch above the thumb so that he could see the imaginary negative holder. “You print it exactly the way it was shot. Then there’s no way you can cheat.”
Before he had gone to California the previous spring, he had tried to clear his head about what he wanted. When Derek called from Los Angeles and threw around phrases like “in the money” or “out of the money,” discussing closing transactions and sure ways to beat the system, all he could think of was that silliness in Bonnie and Clyde when Bonnie and Clyde go to the movies and watch Ginger Rogers and the chorus singing “We’re in the Money” in Gold Diggers of 1933. Now his brother was in California with a teenage girlfriend, driving a silver Porsche and practically living on undercooked pasta. He visited him and was amazed at his brother’s life — that Derek and Liz sat on the sofa and bent over a small, square pin with a picture of Elvis Costello on it and snorted coke off of Elvis’s face the way millions of middle-class people sat down for an evening cocktail.
He came back to New York with huaraches from Olvera Street and ten pints of the best-tasting strawberries he had ever eaten. He remembered standing on the other side of the X-ray machine at the airport, watching the fuzzy stacks of strawberries pass through. Thinking about The Situation, he had drunk too much wine and smoked too much with his brother, and he had fixated on one little aspect of Mary or Laura Ann: Laura Ann’s hair versus Mary’s wide-set eyes. Taking an overview? Laura Ann, naked, long and smooth-skinned; Mary, her sexy adolescent thinness, her flat breasts. Mary had given him an ultimatum: Decide or forget it. Laura Ann, who didn’t know he was having an affair then, had given him a soft leather traveling bag.
When he returned that summer, the city looked grim. Few places to see the sky, buildings crowding each other. He looked out the window of the cab and saw a sharp-nosed gargoyle above the door of a building; he saw bums curled with their backs to buildings, sleeping expressionlessly, as if they had just shared some intimacy with the sidewalk. He thought about calling Mary, but didn’t. She had an answering machine, and he didn’t want to risk hearing Mary’s voice that was not Mary’s voice.
His last thought before he went to sleep now made him smile: as he had passed a man walking his golden retriever, the man had said to the dog, “I don’t believe you, Morty. You pissed on the one sign of life in that treebox.”
Laura Ann knew Mary. Those tearful late-night phone calls she had made months ago weren’t to some mystery lover, as he had at first suspected, but to Mary. And then the phone calls stopped and she began to be nice to him again. “You pretend to be so casual,” she said. “It’s a good cover-up, but I know what’s underneath. I know how you spend hours with your calculator meticulously going over your bank statement. I know that you’ll even read a bad book to the end. I know how you make love.”
The last time he saw Mary, she was sitting at a table inside the Empire Diner when he was walking by. She didn’t see him. On his way back from his cash machine, he walked into the Empire. They were squirting Windex on the table where Mary and her friends had been. He went to the phone at the end of the counter and said what he’d wanted to say for a long time. “If I love anybody, I love you, Laura Ann. Admit that you’ve never forgiven me. I don’t want to come back and walk into that strain again.”
“You wouldn’t come back if you didn’t want to,” she said.
The woman at the piano bobbed her shoulders as she played “Fascinatin’ Rhythm.” A man in a gorilla suit walked in and began talking to one of the waiters, gesturing with his paw. A chauffeur, arms crossed, waited outside by a long white Cadillac.
“You love me,” she said. Then, in a near whisper: “The way I cheat and chip dried food off the plates when I’m setting the table. The way I rub your shoulders. My perfume.”
“Your voice,” he said.
“I’m exhausted.” She sighed. “Don’t take it personally if I’ve gone to sleep when you come home.”
The counterman was talking in a huddle with a waitress. “I told him that we don’t take reservations. ‘You show up, that’s when we take your name,’ I said to him. ‘You come back with four other people, we’ll give you the back table.’ I was just doing my job.”
Jake searched through his wallet and took out a business card. He dialed another number.
“This is Doctor Garfield,” Garfield’s voice said. “I’m not available at this time. Please leave your message at the tone, or call me at my home in an emergency.” Garfield gave his home number, and there was a beep. Listening to the silence that followed, Jake thought: Alexander Graham Bell would never have believed that it would come to this.