Solos Read online

  Emily is at the penthouse on Sunday afternoon, perched on the window seat that runs the length of the living room. Lying on the rug in front of her is Gus, the obese cat Oliver takes once a month, along with a shiitake mushroom, to the nursing home on North Sixth where the old folks chuckle over his powerful purr—when he really gets going, Gus can be heard two rooms away—and his legendary lust for mushrooms. Gus is purring now, though at muted volume, only revving into higher gear when Emily reaches out a foot to scratch his big belly. She is just finishing the Sunday Times crossword. If she looks up, which she does frequently, she can see the three bridges: Williamsburg, Manhattan, Brooklyn. The Brooklyn Bridge is very distant and beautiful. The Williamsburg, closer up, is massive and ugly. The Manhattan Bridge sits blahly in the middle. If she turned slightly to the right she would be able to see the Queensboro Bridge, but she has no particular desire to do this. She prefers the Brooklyn bridges and the view to the south.

  Pat and Oliver are in the kitchen making a cake for Lamont’s birthday party later that night. Pat Shapp is, oddly, as plain as the sound of her name. Her features are small and neat, as are her hats, her handwriting, her gestures, her hands and feet, and her studio apartment in Greenpoint. She is brisk and practical and teaches English in a private high school on the Upper East Side, where she is Ms. Shapp, hinting at erratic, even drunken wantonness. Emily pictures the headmaster at Pat’s retirement dinner chuckling about how “We’ve had a li’l misshapp at our school.”

  Oliver is the other English teacher at Taggart, and he is as large and rumpled as Pat is small and neat. He is tall and overweight, and his many-angled but somehow fleshy face reflects his complicated heritage, which encompasses Poland, France, Russia, England, and—Oliver claims—a far distant maverick great-grandmother who married a man named Juan Menchaca to provide a soupçon of Basque. A thin beard decorates Oliver’s chin like pencil strokes, but his hair is thick and black, and straight as porcupine quills.

  Both are writers: Pat occasionally writes a sharp, nasty essay on New York City politics for the Village Voice; Oliver publishes sonnets in an obscure literary magazine based in South Dakota. Emily can hear the two of them talking softly in the kitchen, but she can’t hear what they are saying; there’s loud big band music on the CD player. Pat and Oliver tend to talk about literature or current events: They are probably talking about Trollope or the Williamsburg rapist.

  Emily is thinking about a different subject entirely. She’s thinking about Tab Hartwell.

  Her ex-husband is still occupying her head after coming into it the night before while she was cooking dinner. She cut up broccoli, put it in the steamer, and remembered that Hart would tolerate broccoli only if it had lemon juice squeezed on it. In her mind she said to herself, as she had so often said to him, “Damn it, I forgot to pick up a lemon.” Emily is mulling over the night Hart left. It was a warm September night, and he went out to pick up Thai food. Both terrible cooks, she and Hart took their take-out seriously, especially Thai. They discussed for quite a while—ten minutes, maybe even as many as fifteen—whether to call Thai Café or Planet Thailand. Finally they decided Thai Café had better chicken peanut curry. Hart preferred to phone in the order and then go pick it up to avoid tipping a deliveryman. It was seven thirty when he left, not yet dark.

  “Get that table set, Roderick, I’ll be right back,” he said as he went out the door.

  Roderick was their imaginary butler.

  They’d ordered the curry, some vegetarian panang, and a couple of spring rolls. By eight thirty, Emily had found the chopsticks, set the table, poured herself a beer, and stared out the window for a while at the dark green river. The sky was turning rosy pink, laced with shards of purple. She skipped through the Times crossword puzzle (the Tuesday puzzle, so easy it was hardly worth doing), finished her beer, looked at the clock, and called the restaurant.

  No, the order for Hartwell had not yet been picked up, a Thai voice said, sounding harassed, over crowd noises in the background.

  “Well, he’s on his way,” Emily said. “Don’t do anything with it.”

  “Getting cold,” the voice said. “You can heat up?”

  “Yes, don’t worry, we can heat up. I’m sorry. Thank you.”

  He had run into someone. Lamont or Luther. Saul Smith. Or Gene Rae and Kurt. He could still be downstairs in Saul’s studio, yakking with him about Saul’s newest digital doo-dad or what they did over Labor Day weekend. (Hart and Emily had barbecued chicken up on the roof with Oliver and Pat and a few other people, which hadn’t gone well partly because Hart drank too much sangria and became alternately mean and maudlin.) She could call Saul and ask him. She could take the elevator down and check. Or she could just wait and not interfere, let Hart lead his mysterious messy life, which is what she did until nine thirty, and then she called Thai Café again.

  “No, sorry, no pick up yet. You want we hold it?”

  “No, no, I guess not, I’m really sorry, no, don’t hold it, something must have happened, sorry, thank you.”

  She stared at the river for another half-hour, wishing she had someone to hug and wondering if she should call the police. She finally called Saul, who hadn’t seen Hart, and he and Luther drove around the neighborhood in Saul’s truck looking for him, while she stayed home in case he tried to get in touch. Finally, at eleven o’clock, she went to the phone to call 911, and as she reached for it, it rang. It was Hart saying he wasn’t coming back, he thought they should separate, he was sorry he couldn’t tell her to her face but she knew what a shit he was, what did she expect?

  What stunned her was not that he had left—their life together had been mediocre for a long time, and she was not under the illusion that he was faithful to her—but that he had actually called the Thai Café, ordered the food, and forced her to be embarrassed and to make excuses about why they didn’t pick it up.

  And he’d stuck those nice people at the café with an unclaimed order.

  Also, she was shocked that he had taken nothing with him, which was distinctly unlike Hart, who (“I’m a thing person”) liked his possessions. Especially his clothes. After his call, on a hunch, she went into the bedroom to check, and discovered the drawers of his dresser contained only the shabbiest remnants of his T-shirt collection and a pair of socks with holes in them. His shirts were missing from the closet, except for the old stained denim one that she always borrowed. His suitcase was no longer under the bed. She looked in the closet in the hall: His tweed overcoat was gone, and his leather jacket, and his plaid hunting cap, and his cowboy hat. There were gaps in the shelf where his jazz CDs had been. He must have been spiriting his stuff away for days.

  Well.

  When Luther and Saul rang the doorbell, Hart-less of course, and she told them about the call, they confirmed that he was indeed a shit. A mega-shit. A world-class shit and a grade-A shit. Then Oliver came down from the penthouse and confirmed that Hart was a top-of-the-line shit. Oliver called Pat, and when he put Emily on the phone Pat said she always knew Hart was a premium peerless deluxe shit. And though Emily agreed with them all, she buried her face in the denim shirt and cried. He had abandoned her. Over the years she had learned to work around his shittiness, and now, suddenly, he was gone. In some awful way she didn’t want to admit, she knew she would miss him.

  It is at that point, as she is recalling the humiliating comfort of having her friends around her when the husband they all disliked deserted her, that Pat and Oliver come out of the kitchen. “Safely in the oven,” Pat says. She sits down on the couch opposite Emily. “I just hope it will be cool enough to frost by the time we have to leave.”

  “We could eat it warm,” Oliver says. “The frosting would melt, but we could pretend we intended it that way and tell Lamont it’s a sauce.”

  “Sounds delicious,” Emily says. “Is it chocolate?”

  “Yep. Deep dark chocolate butter cream, and the cake is marble.”

  “Over the top.”

  �
�Way, way over.”

  “We’re worried about you,” Pat says.

  “What?” Weren’t they talking about cake?

  “Worried. And we decided we should tell you.”

  Oliver sits down beside Pat and they confront her like a pair of upset parents. Emily feels like a teenager who’s failing algebra or hanging with the wrong crowd. Or did they find the joint she hid in her underwear drawer? It worries her that Pat and Oliver are worried. She is the least worrisome creature on the planet. If Pat and Oliver are worried about her, maybe she should worry about them?

  “So tell me,” she says.

  Oliver says, “Well,” and looks at Pat, and Pat says, “Well,” and pauses. And then she says, “Since you and Hart split up you haven’t gotten involved with anyone else.”

  There is a silence while they look at her.

  “So?”

  “So are you still, like, grieving or something? I mean, not grieving, of course, but—I don’t know.” Pat shrugs and looks at Oliver, as if she’s just realized her concern is absurd. Then she frowns and recovers. “I don’t know, Em. It’s been six years. Are you permanently alienated from the whole male sex?”

  “I haven’t met anyone I like.”

  “But—” Pat leans forward, her elbows on her thighs and her hands clasped before her. She is wearing dark green knee socks, loafers, and a plaid skirt. Only Pat can get away with outfits like that. In fact, she can’t get away with anything else. “Why is that, do you think?”

  Emily stares at her. “Pat, have you forgotten that before you met Oliver all you talked about was how the world is full of men who don’t like animals, or who wear gold chains around their necks? Or corporate guys who think the most important thing is thinking outside the box 24/7 so they can hit the ground running? Guys who go to the gym at six A.M. and yak about their therapy all the time and buy forty-dollar T-shirts with designer logos? All that is still true.” She looks down at her puzzle. The upper right-hand corner is pesky. Dartmouth founder Wheelock. Shrub of the heath family. She looks up again. “And now it’s even worse. They’re older, they’re more set in their ways, and they have Palm Pilots and cell phones and Web logs.”

  “Well, we thought—” Oliver says, and falters.

  Pat takes it up. “We have this person we thought you might like to meet.”

  “Why would I want to meet him?” Emily asks. She keeps looking at the puzzle, but she is, in fact, interested. She is mildly tired of not meeting men she likes. The only man she likes is Marcus Mead, and he’s not only fifteen years younger than she is but he’s Hart’s son. He also seems to be asexual. But for over a year she has been in something approaching love with him, which she knows is crazy. If she could meet someone who would detach her from her feelings for Marcus, she might be grateful.…

  “He’s a guy named Hugh Lang,” Pat says. “The father of one of my students. Divorced. Joint custody. Journalist. Very nice guy.”

  They’re waiting. She can sense Pat and Oliver glancing at each other, raising their eyebrows, maybe even shrugging. What’s with her? Doesn’t she want to be happy?

  “Yeah? So?”

  “So we think you’d like him.”

  Shrubs of the heath family. The blasted heath.

  “I have his daughter Heather in my class, and his son Josh is in Oliver’s sophomore Shakespeare class.”

  Emily stares at her. “Heather?” Is heath related to heather? Heather is seven letters, but it only fits if allium and tempura and harmony are wrong. Besides, it would be so tacky to make heather the answer to a heath clue. Also, it’s not plural.

  “Cute little thing, and quite gifted as a writer. She wrote a snappy poem about her hamster, named Dirty Gertie.”

  Azaleas, Emily thinks, with relief, and writes it in. Not heather. Still, it was a bizarre moment. She writes azaleas with the maroon-and-white TAGGART SCHOOL pen Oliver lent her. And so it must be Eleazar. Is that really a name? Eleazar Wheelock. And that’s it. She sighs and puts down the Times magazine. Out the window, a flock of pigeons wheels over Wythe Avenue, turns somewhere down around Metropolitan, and heads back. The view, she thinks, the view. You can see the whole world from here. A spasm of longing pierces her heart. Oh, how she wants this penthouse!

  “Isn’t that sweet, Em? Dirty Gertie?”

  “It’s a poker game,” Emily says. “Dirty Gertie.”

  “Maybe that means Hugh is a poker player. You’d like that,” Oliver says encouragingly.

  “And it means they have pets,” says Pat. “That Hugh is not an animal-hater like Hart.”

  “It means the kids talked him into a hamster. Why don’t they have a normal pet, like a dog or a cat?”

  Pat and Oliver are silent. Emily brings her attention gradually back from the view—the birds, the slate-colored river, the blue sky soft with clouds, and gray Manhattan with the two tall blanks in it that no one will never get used to—and focuses on Oliver and Pat. She smiles. “I’m sorry,” she says. “He sounds nice. I actually think hamsters are sweet. I’m sure I’d like him.”

  Pat seizes on this. “Should we invite you both for dinner? Or would you rather go out? What would make you feel least uncomfortable? What would be the most fun?”

  Marcus, Emily thinks. He will be at the party tonight. Will he wear his beautiful hemp shirt?

  “Hey! We could all play poker,” Pat goes on. “You could teach us.”

  Emily smiles, shakes her head. “I’m sorry. I really am.” She stretches out her foot to rub Gus’s tummy, and he wraps his paws around her moccasin and bites it. “I don’t mean to be difficult or ungrateful, but I don’t want to meet him.”

  “You said you thought you’d like him!”

  “I probably would like him if I met him.”

  “So?”

  She can’t bear Pat’s earnest, affectionate, puzzled, getting-irritated face. Gus drops her foot and lies back, sated and fat, purring. Emily leans her cheek against the cold glass, looking out the window at the sky and its scrapers. From seven flights down, a car alarm starts up. The pigeons swoop by again.

  “I just don’t want to. Thanks.”

  4

  Flee to me, remote elf!

  “Did you do the puzzle?”

  “It was too easy.”

  “I had a small upper-right-hand-corner problem.”

  “Eleazar?”

  “What a silly name.”

  “Ridiculous. What were his parents thinking?”

  They are eating cake and drinking brandy at Luther and Lamont’s place on Grand Street. It’s the loft Emily lived in when she first came to New York, but it has been, to severely understate the case, fixed up. The party is a success. First a lot of beer, then presents, then more beer. Then Lamont’s famous vegetarian chili and Luther’s hush puppies and somebody’s cole slaw and somebody else’s garlic bread—superfluous but delicious—and then “Happy Birthday to You” and candles and Pat and Oliver’s chocolate cake, which cooled and so has regular frosting, not warm sauce. Lamont believes in serving dessert not with coffee or tea but with brandy: it’s V.S.O.P., but a brand Marcus doesn’t recognize, which is how he knows it’s really good.

  Now the party is winding down. Even Gene Rae and Kurt have left—Gene Rae, famous for partying, has changed since she became pregnant and now goes to bed by midnight. Even the intrepid Tragedy Club staff—Fiona and Zelda and Carey the bartender—are on their way out.

  “You’re not eating that cake,” Emily says. “You’re pushing it around on your plate like a kid does with spinach.”

  “I’ll take it home.” Marcus wonders if his appetite will ever return. He sees Emily studying his face, and knows it must have a strange look on it. The look of someone who has brunched with a monster. He says, “You never told me about Fort Salonga. How did it go?”

  “It was a bust. I got a nice TIME from a billboard, but I’d really hoped to find a BREAD or two.”

  “Not a good bakery town?”

  “Nope. And no
t a single DOG, either.”

  “Well, damn. Did you have fun, though?”

  “I did have fun,” Emily says, as Marcus knew she would. He watches her slow smile assemble itself: the little puckers in her pouty bottom lip smooth out and disappear, the bow in her top lip flattens and stretches, and a deep dimple appears in her left cheek as if she’d slept on a button. Her lips are very pink. She picks up her plastic glass of brandy and sips. “So did Izzy and Otto. Izzy chirped along with my Pretenders tape, and Otto sat next to me and looked out the window.”

  “Dog is your co-pilot.”

  “Exactly. And somewhere around Cold Spring Harbor my cough departed for good. Isn’t that strange? My cold sprang away!”

  “You’re making that up.”

  “Yes, sort of, I am. I wish it were true. But I actually felt completely better by the time I got on the expressway. Hey, Marcus, there’s the rottweiler guy.”

  Marcus turns and sees that the rottweiler guy has just come in, he is hugging Lamont, he is being given brandy and a piece of cake. “Yeah, I knew he was a friend of Lamont’s.”

  “He’s pretty late.”

  “Elliot. That’s his name. I remember now. Elliot something that begins with a C.”

  Emily finishes her cake. “I’m going to go over there and get another piece. Maybe I can find out why he doesn’t talk to his dog.”

  “Wait. Emily. Do you have any … insurance, or anything?” Marcus asks.

  “Do I have any insurance or anything? Like—health? Yeah, I have health. I pay three hundred a month for it. I have a huge deductible. Why?”

  “You don’t have any, like, life insurance or anything?”

  “Are you crazy?” Emily smiles again, her fast one this time: a flash of small white teeth, slightly crooked. “Of course not. Why on earth are you asking?”

  Marcus is ready. “I was thinking I should maybe get some insurance, and I just wondered if—you know. I thought I’d ask around.”

  She stops smiling. “Is something wrong? Are you ill?”