Wally Lamb - We Are Water

My daughter Ariane wouldn’t have been a wimp about it; she’d have jumped right in and stuck up for Hector. She’s been a defender of the underdog ever since she was a kid. There was that time in high school when she had the party on prom night for all the girls who, like her, hadn’t been asked. I can still hear them all, down in our rec room, laughing and playing music, yakking away. And then there was the time when she defended that mentally retarded boy who was being taunted by the bullies. They were getting their kicks by circling him and pitching pennies at him, and Ariane had elbowed her way past them, taken the boy by the hand, and led him out of the circle. The bullies had targeted her for a few days after that, but when they saw that they couldn’t get to her, they knocked it off. It had stopped being fun …

The help: it angered me, that superior tone, but I kept my mouth shut. That co-op board is like some kind of supreme body around here that everyone’s supposed to kowtow to. Before I moved into the building, Viveca had to have them approve my occupancy of her guest room, which, in my opinion, was bullshit. Whose apartment is it? Hers or theirs? The co-op board: they’re like those athletic boys in junior high that the principal picked to be hallway monitors. They’d put on their sashes and boss around the rest of us mere mortals. Move to the right! No talking during passing time! I said no talking! What are you, deaf? How’d you like to get reported? Goddamned Gestapo hall monitors. Well, it was previews of coming attractions. It’s not as if, after you leave junior high, you’re ever going to be free of bullies. They follow you through life. And okay, maybe I didn’t say anything when that stupid building manager was chewing out Hector. But my art says it. What did it say in that Village Voice review of my last show? That my pieces are political. Howls of protest against the misuse of power. Something like that …

Coffee. I need coffee. Maybe a couple of cups of caffeine will motivate me to get to the studio today. I’m not sure why I’ve been avoiding going there, or why I lied to Viveca and said I was going. Is it wedding nerves? Has my creativity begun to abandon me? I take the beans out of the freezer (fair-trade, Guatemalan, thirteen dollars a pound at Zabar’s). Grind them, hit the “brew” button. Everything’s high end here. This new coffeemaker Viveca had sent over from Saks brews espresso and cappuccino, froths up milk for latté. I should check the manual; for all I know, it’ll dust the furniture and wipe your rear end for you as well. When it arrived, I saw the price on the receipt: seven hundred dollars. Jesus! The last I checked, you could get a Mr. Coffee on sale for $19.99 … Comfort the disturbed, disturb the comfortable . Maybe that’s it. Maybe I’m avoiding the studio because my life’s become too goddamned comfortable.

To stop thinking, I put on the TV, the morning news, and there’s Diane Sawyer, looking as pretty as ever. She must be in her sixties by now. Has she had work done? Have her lips always been that full, or have they been plumped with collagen? These are New York questions. Before I moved to Manhattan, I wouldn’t have given a rat’s ass one way or another. Well, she’s probably got her burdens, too. Ratings wars, celebrity stalkers. Being that famous must be so strange … Last week, when I recognized Diane’s husband buying toothpaste at that Duane Reed, I couldn’t remember any of the movies he’s directed, but what I did recall was that his family had had to escape from the Nazis when he was a little boy, and that some childhood illness had left him without body hair. Passing him in the aisle, I glanced over to see if he had eyebrows, but when he caught me looking, I had to turn away. It’s not that I’m a celebrity. Far from it, thank god. But I’m known in the art world now to some extent—here in Manhattan at least. How would I like it if some collector knew more about my shitty childhood than they did about my work?

One time on this morning show—Valentine’s Day, I think it was—Diane said that when her husband travels and she misses him, she sometimes wraps herself in one of his shirts and his scent comforts her … The Graduate : wasn’t that one of his films? “Mrs. Robinson, are you trying to seduce me?” The evening Viveca came into my room, sat down next to me on the bed, and touched her impeccably manicured fingernails to my lips, kissed them, I remember feeling as confused as Dustin Hoffman was in that scene. But when we made love that night and she brought me to that long, unhurried orgasm, it reduced me to happy tears. It had been so long, and I was so grateful for the release, that I could barely catch my breath. But Viveca isn’t predatory the way Mrs. Robinson was. And our relationship is about much more than good sex. She loves me, and I love her. Trust her. I’ve missed her so much since she’s been away. Miss her the way I missed Orion when he was down there tending to his mother. The way I missed my own mother after those floodwaters carried her away. Missed my father those nights when I’d wait for him to come home from the bars. Is that what love is all about? Needing them to come back to you when they’re away? To come home and keep you safe? …

There’s the doorbell. I call down the hall to Minnie. “I’ll get it!”

It’s Hector. “Package for Ms. Christophoulos-Shabbas,” he says, handing it to me. When I tell him he didn’t have to come up, that he could have given it to me when he saw me in the lobby, he shakes his head. Reminds me that Viveca’s instructions are to bring deliveries right up to the apartment.

“Oh, okay,” I say. “Hold on a sec.” I go get my wallet. There are a few singles in there, a five, a twenty. Five seems too little and twenty seems too much, but I give him the larger bill anyway. He glances quickly at it before putting it in his pocket. “Thank you ,” he says.

The package is from Neiman Marcus, and I know what’s in it: that expensive perfume Viveca wears: Clive Christian Floral Oriental. Yesterday when we talked, she wanted to know if it had arrived yet. When I said it hadn’t, she asked if I’d track the shipment on the computer. Can’t blame her for that, I guess. After I found out it was en route, I went on the Neiman Marcus Web site to see what that perfume costs. I wish I hadn’t. Twelve hundred dollars an ounce: that’s just plain ridiculous … But why shouldn’t she buy these luxury items if she wants them? She works hard, she’s inherited money from both her father and her late husband, she’s generous with the charities she supports—even sits on the boards of a couple of them: Literacy Partners, God’s Love We Deliver. I should stop being so goddamned judgmental. Stop feeling guilty that I love the smell of that perfume on her, the taste of the coffee that our Esclusivo Magnifica makes. I guess I’m suffering from … what would you call it? Lifestyle guilt? I should ask Orion to look it up in that book he was always consulting—the DSM whatever it was. Maybe I’ve got some fashionable rich lady’s neurosis.

Independent of Viveca, I’m financially comfortable now—more than comfortable, actually, because of what collectors pay for my work. Well, independent of Viveca and independent because of her, too. My art is sold exclusively at her gallery, and I’m the featured artist on viveca.com. But I remember what it’s like to live a nickel-and-dime life. To count on waitressing tips—a couple of pounds of change per shift, plus dollar bills and the occasional five or ten. I doubt Hector would be putting on that gray doorman’s uniform and standing in the lobby every Saturday and Sunday if he didn’t need the extra income. Still, he’s always so good-natured. Hector may be the most noncynical New Yorker I’ve met in the four years I’ve lived here … Unless it’s an act. Maybe that big, warm smile of his hides his resentment. “The service people aren’t your friends,” Viveca warned me once, shortly after I moved in here. “Nor do they want to be. Be respectful of that.”