Mikell called at twelve-thirty. I tried to sound happy and bright. He really was intelligent, and it was beyond me how Millie could ever think of anything to argue with him about. I wanted to see him for coffee, except my eyes were all swollen up. I just broke down and told him how things had been hell around here for three days, how Stash went insane because I told him I had gone out for coffee with a man.
Mikell said, "Actually, that's what's been going on around here. She's gone totally out of her mind."
There was a silence. I said, "Well, let's meet for coffee tomorrow."
He said, "I can't. How about Wednesday?"
I said, "Let me call you in the morning, since I'm not sure if I can make it."
There was a silence. He said it would be better if I didn't call him.
We did get to meet one other time. It was really sad. After that, I bumped into him once at the bank. He was with Millie, and she gave me a strange smile. I had no makeup on, and I was wearing my glasses, which were pointy and had little rhinestones at the corners, and maybe she only half recognized me. I mean, at the party, the one other time she had seen me, I had been wearing my contact lenses and had on a lot of my original jewelry, things like my James Bond/Oddjob necklace and earring set. When Millie went to use the cash machine, Mikell came over to me and asked if I was going home after the bank.
Luckily, when I got home Stash wasn't there, and Mikell called a few minutes later. We spoke briefly. Mikell said things would be best if we didn't speak for a while. He was talking in a whisper. I said, "But, Mikell, I must meet you to continue our mad, passionate affair."
There was a moment of silence.
"Just kidding," I said.
After that, whenever Stash was home in the afternoons I just prayed the phone wouldn't ring.
I tried to keep the apartment clean. My mother lived upstate in a one-bedroom apartment. I couldn't escape to her. I got up at seven-thirty to walk Andrew. Things went okay. Stash bought me a coat, Day-Glo orange wool with a green velvet collar. It wasn't the one I would have chosen—I guess I would have selected something a little more conservative. But it was nice to have a new winter coat.
My friend Abby called me up from Boston. She was all hysterical. It's like this. She's been living with this guy for a few years. He was an art director for an advertising agency, and she has a good job teaching at Simmons, tenure. But it's Roger's house, an old Back Bay brownstone that he's fixed up, and now he's lost his job and he wants her to start making some financial contribution, but he still doesn't want to marry her. Just at this time Abby's old flame reappears. He wants her to move to New York and live with him.
"What are you going to do?" I said.
Abby said that even though this old flame, Bruce, was a jerk, she was bored with Boston and Roger. "I could live in New York with Bruce," she said, "and fly up to Boston to teach one day a week, and maybe I'll meet someone I like better than Bruce in New York."
I said, "Abby, don't do it. In the old days, marriages were arranged by the parents, and maybe you ended up with a jerk but at least you had the security of marriage, no one could dump you out on the street. In today's world, it's the slave system. If you live with this guy in New York, you'll be the slave."
"Well," she said, "I'm used to Roger cooking for me. Would I have to cook for Bruce?"
She already knew all about my dinner menus, the frantic daily preparations. "Yes," I said. "You'd have to cook for Bruce. What are you going to do if you two have a fight and he tells you to leave? With your salary, you'll never be able to find an apartment."
"I know Bruce is a creep," she said. "But I thought I'd be with him while I looked for someone else."
I said, "Abby, forget it. You think you'll be making an improvement, but that's not the case." I didn't want to tell her this before, because I didn't know the situation with Roger, but quite frankly it didn't sound so bad. I said, "If you live with Bruce, you'll be the slave. It's not the same in other cities, the rents aren't so high. Roger doesn't have the same power over you, because you could always threaten to move out and get your own place in Boston."
"I didn't know," she said. "I'm going to reconsider. Are you sure there're no available men in New York?"
"There're women," I said. "There're hundreds of women. They are out on the prowl. And all the men are gay or are in the slave class themselves. Your only solution is to get rich, so you can get an apartment and then you can have your own slave. He would be poor but amenable."
"Are these women, the ones that are prowling—are they attractive?" Abby said.
I could tell she hadn't been listening. "Abby," I said. "It's New York. They have hundred-and-seventy-dollar haircuts and wear black leather belts with sterling silver buckles."
"Oh," she said. "How are things otherwise?"
"Stash and I are getting along very well," I said. "He just bought me a new winter coat. I should probably go. Andrew needs his walkies."
After I hung up, I thought about what I should have told Abby: See, Fat and Fat Fat fell out, and in New York all that's left is Pinch Me. But I'm not sure she would have understood. I remembered when my brother Roland was five he wore these little boots with metal toe caps, and after my cousin told him the joke and pinched him my brother kicked him. My cousin was really enraged at Roland's behavior and called up my mother to complain. He had a black-and-blue mark. My mother was ashamed: obviously she was doing something all wrong in her child-rearing practices. Now Roland is a first-year resident in obstetrics/gynecology down in Texas.
Engagements
It was easy to find an apartment in New Haven, although my classes in feminist criticism were starting in a few days and most of the other grad students had arrived at Yale the week before. I rented a two-room flat, sunny but dingy, across the street from a punk-rock bar, and overlooking the edge of the ghetto. The manager of the building—I nicknamed him Père Goriot—sold me two twin beds for $10 each, and a battered fan. It was late August, the city felt airless. At the Salvation Army I discovered a shabby Victorian sofa in worn blue velvet for $60, a major investment, but I bought it anyway.
At a mixer at the Art and Architecture School, I met Ray Connors. He had small, worried eyes and fine, babyish hair, already receding. His back was hurting him; two years ago, at a New Year's Eve party, he had fallen down an elevator shaft. He was graduating from the Architecture School in January. He went off to get me a glass of wine; by the time he came back, I had practically forgotten his existence.
A few days later Ray showed up at my apartment. I offered him some Minute Maid lemonade, but Ray preferred Perrier, which I didn't have. "Listen, Cora, I was wondering," he said. "I'm going home this weekend and I wondered if you'd want to come into the city on Friday or Saturday night—you could meet my parents and see our apartment, and we could have dinner."
I don't know exactly why I agreed; it was difficult to think up a fast excuse, and I really had nothing else to do. I neither liked Ray nor disliked him—he just wasn't there.
He met me at Grand Central Terminal on Friday afternoon. I was wearing a black-and-white flowered dress with rhinestone buttons from the Salvation Army and an old forties straw hat the woman who lived next door had given me, white lace gloves, and ankle-strap sandals. I caught sight of myself as we went in the front door of Ray's parents' apartment: there were wall-to-ceiling mirrors opposite the front door. Though I wasn't wearing makeup, my face was shiny; to my surprise my outfit, which I had thought quite razzle-dazzle in New Haven, now resembled something worn by a person just off the train from Mississippi. In the mirror, with my moony, freckled face, I looked as gullible as a horse. This was not at all the image I had hoped to project.