And I saw in Rudy's face what my face must have betrayed when I hadn't a clue about what he and Ron or even David had been talking about. And I felt the same queer near-panic I imagine now he must have felt all week. We both listened as something sweetly baroque filtered through the limousine intercom's grille.
"It's like my birthday," I said, holding my second husband's hand in mine. "We agreed, on my birthday. I'm forty, and have both grown and tiny children, and a husband who is dear to me, and I'm a television actress who's agreed to represent a brand of wiener. We drank wine to that, Rudy. We held the facts out and looked, together. We agreed just last week about the way I am. What other way is there for me to be, now?"
My husband disengaged his hand and felt at the panel's grille. The Spanish driver's hatless head was cocked. A part of his neck was without pigment, I saw. The lighter area was circular; it spiraled into his dark hair and was lost to me.
"He leaned across right up to me, Rudy. I could see every little part of his face. He was freckled. I could see little pinheads of sweat, from the lights. A tiny mole, near that label. His eyes were the same denim color Jamie and Lynnette's eyes get in the summer. I looked at him. I saw him."
"But we told you, Edilyn," my husband said, reaching into his jacket pocket. "What put him there, here and now, for you to see, is that he can't be seen. That's what the whole thing's about, now. That no one is really the way they have to be seen."
I looked at him. "You really think that's true."
His cigarette crackled. "Doesn't matter what I think. That's what the show is about. They make it true. By watching him."
"You believe that," I said.
"I believe what I see," he said, putting his cigarette down to manipulate the bottle's cap. The thing's typed label read TAKE SEVERAL, OFTEN. "If it wasn't true, could he use it the way he does. .?"
"That strikes me as really naive."
". . The way we used to?" he said.
Certain pills are literally bitter. When I'd finished my drink from the back seat's bar, I still tasted the Xanax on the back of my tongue. The adrenaline's ebb had left me very tired. We broke out of the tall buildings near the water. I watched the Manhattan Bridge pass. The late sun came into view. It hung to our right, red. We both looked at the water as we were driven past. The sheet of its surface was wound-colored under the March sunset.
I swallowed. "So you believe no one's really the way we see them?"
I got no response. Rudy's eyes were on the window.
"Ron doesn't really have a mouth, I noticed today. It's more like a gash in his head." I paused. "You needn't defer to him in our personal lives just because of your decisions in business, Rudy." I smiled. "We're loaded, sweetie."
My husband laughed without smiling. He looked at the last of the sun-colored water as we approached the Brooklyn Bridge's system of angled shadow.
"Because if no one is really the way we see them," I said, "that would include me. And you."
Rudy admired the sunset out loud. He said it looked explosive, hanging, all round, just slightly over the water. Reflected and doubled in that bit of river. But he'd been looking only at the water. I'd watched him.
"Oh, my," is what David Letterman said when Reese the coordinator's distinguished but raccoon-ringed face had resolved out of a perfect ring of exploded explosives. Months later, after I'd come through something by being in its center, survived in the stillness created by great disturbance from which I, as cause, perfectly circled, was exempt, I'd be struck all over again by what a real and simply right thing it was for a person in such a place to say.
And I have remembered and worked hard to show that, if nothing else at all, I am a woman who speaks her mind. It is the way I have to see myself, to live.
And so I did ask my husband, as we were driven in our complimentary limousine to join Ron and Charmian and maybe Lindsay for drinks and dinner across the river at NBC's expense, just what way he thought he and I really were, then, did he think.
Which turned out to be the mistake.
SAY NEVER
LABOV
A THING that is no fun? Stomach trouble. You don't believe me, you ask Mrs. Tagus here, she'll illuminate issues. Me: no stomach trouble. A stomach of hardy elements, such as stone. Arthritis yes, stomach trouble no.
The tea is not helping Mrs. Tagus's stomach trouble. "Such discomfort Mr. Labov!" she says to me in my kitchen of my apartment, where we are. "Excuse me for the constant complaining," she says, "but it seems that to me anything that is the least little worry these days means the automatic making of my stomach into a fist!" She makes with a fist in the air, in her coat, and bends to blow on the very hot tea, which is steaming with violence into the cold air of my kitchen. "And now such worry," Mrs. Tagus says. She is making an example of a fist in the air in a firm manner I envy, because of the arthritis I have in my limbs every day, especially in these winters; but I only express sympathy to the stomach of Mrs. Tagus, who has been my best and closest friend since my late wife and then her late husband passed away inside three months of each other seven years ago may they rest in peace.
I am a tailor. Labov the North-side tailor who can make anything. Now retired. I chose, cut, fit, stitched and tailored the raccoon coat Mrs. Tagus has been wearing for years now and is inside of now in my kitchen which my landlord keeps cold, like the rest of this apartment, which my late wife Sandra Labov and I first rented in the years of President Truman. The landlord wants Labov out so he can raise rent to a younger person. But he should know who should know better than a tailor how it's no trouble to wear finely stitched coats and wait for spring. An ability to wait has always been one of my abilities.
I made the heavy raincoat with lining of various fur Mrs. Tagus's late husband and my close friend Arnold Tagus was interred in eight years ago this August.
"Lenny," Mrs. Tagus has murmured to her tea. There is no more fist in the air; she is warming her hands on the emergency cup of tea. "Lenny," she says, distracted from me by the warmth she holds in her dry hands.
Lenny is Mr. and Mrs. Tagus's son, Lenny Tagus. Also there is a younger son, Mike Tagus. Me: no children. Mrs. Labov had reproduction troubles which I loved her no less when we found out. But no children. But Labovs and all the Taguses are like this. Close. I watched the Tagus boys grow up, Lenny and Mike, prides and joys.
You know the type who comes right out with it? Mrs. Tagus is not such a type of person. Something is on her mind: she beats around it, a gesture here, a word there, a sigh maybe; she shapes it inside her like with a soft medium, for instance clay, and you have to patiently work the medium with her to get the something out in the open.
Me: I come right out with it, when there's something.
MIKEY AND LOUIS
"You want to still date her?"
"Are you fucking kidding? I want to strangle her."
"Uh-huh."
"I'd love to still date her."
"Just stay away. She seems like bad news. She seemed like she was really into it."
"She blew me off. I didn't blow her off."
"How, exactly?"
"Carlina blew me off."
"So how, Tagus?"
"She just said how she didn't want to go out no more. It didn't feel so good, either. I can maybe see why they cry, when you blow them off."
"She said that? Just like that?"
"Just like after I'd rammed about half a gram up her nose and bought her drinks all night."
"Bad news."
"I must of rammed about a gram up her nose."
"I bet you didn't have to ram anything up anything. I bet her nose didn't need much persuading."