David Gates - A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me

“It wasn’t like you did it,” I said. “I mean, we both did.” I sat up and reached down for my clothes. “God, I really, really don’t want to do this, but he doesn’t sleep that well, and if he finds me not there, you know? Are you going to be okay if I go up?”

“I guess so,” she said. “You probably need to go process. Is this the first time you…”

“Actually no. Did I seem like it?”

“I wasn’t even thinking about that.”

“Is this going to fuck up your thing with Madeleine?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “You better go.”

“Kiss good night,” I said.

“Isn’t that a little mooshy?” She raised her head to give me a peck, then lay back down and covered her eyes again. “So is one of us going to say it?”

“What would we say?”

“Nothing. I’m just being crazy now.”

“Oh.” I put on my T-shirt, found my socks. “That really would be a first. For me.”

She propped up on one elbow to face me, her long breasts touching the mattress. “What about my dad?”

“I’m just not very expressive,” I said. “I mean, I do . I just—”

“Okay, this is a little too much, all right?”

“We are in deep shit, aren’t we?” I got up, pulled on my jeans and stuffed my underpants in the pocket. “Was that enough of a confession?”

“Madeleine always says I have no filter,” she said. “You really better go. Tomorrow’s going to be one strange day.”

—

The next day was the Fourth, and my husband draped his Japanese flag over the railing of the deck; it used to piss people off in Rhine beck, but no one could see it up here. He told us he would make breakfast and set out bowls and a box of Cheerios; he was in high ironic mode. You’d think he would have seen it all over us, but he was so far away.

He took her for a father-daughter expedition—“No interlopers allowed,” he told me—up to Hyde Park, to see the Roosevelt mansion, and also Val-Kill, where Eleanor used to fuck Lorena Hickok, though he didn’t mention that as a reason for going. He did try to do everything right with her, as I hope she knows. In the afternoon, he listened to a ball game on the radio while showing her his latest paintings and letting her try to do his portrait in charcoal: in high school, she’d wanted to be an artist. His Mets beat the Reds seven to two, so that was good. As always, he refused to watch what he called “the fury of aerial bombardment,” though from the deck we could have seen the fireworks displays from towns up and down the river. Instead, he’d planned a double feature for us: The Parallax View to be followed by The Manchurian Candidate . It wasn’t a strange day, particularly. They’d stopped to buy steaks at the organic supermarket in Poughkeepsie—you remember the one—which he grilled for us like a real husband and father. “Dig in,” he said. “Grub first, then ethics. I forget who said that.” I’d been noticing that he was starting to repeat himself. While we ate, he and I made her talk about her music, as if we were Mom and Dad. Proud, but concerned, but proud. He fell asleep during The Parallax View; I stopped it and she and I helped him up to bed. “Let’s not watch the rest,” she whispered as we came back downstairs.

“I’ve seen it,” I said. “I can tell you how it ends.”

She put both arms around my waist. “Yeah, we both know how it ends,” she said. “I don’t care, do you?”

We put her on the train the next day, to go stay with her mother before her flight on Sunday afternoon. I packed a bag on Sunday morning, while he was in working, enough stuff to last me, and left a note: Had to go to the city. Will explain later . That would be quite the explanation. I waited where she’d said, at the corner of Sixth Avenue and Eleventh Street, in front of Ray’s Pizza, and she got out of a taxi with all her things. “I can’t believe we’re really doing this,” she said. “So now what?”

5

The other day I went with Andrea to a memorial for the Newsweek writer, who’d somehow managed to make it to seventy-six, because who wouldn’t be curious. The family funeral and the cremation had been a month ago, but, this being New York, it had taken time to line up the venue and the speakers. We sat in the back of St. Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery and people told stories about old days I hadn’t been around for at a magazine that no longer existed. Crashing a cover when Frank Sinatra died, then heading out to a dive near the Lexington Avenue subway at six in the morning. The headline they’d rejected for the writer’s Linda Lovelace obit. The Friday night when he got a stupid edit and stomped a metal wastebasket flat. The still older days at 444—the address on Madison, before the move to Fifty-Seventh Street—drinking at a bar called the Cowboy with people called Ax and Shew. A middle-aged woman, all put together, got up and told about the note he’d put in an interoffice envelope after she’d written her first takeout: A star is born . I didn’t recognize her as my onetime rival, until Andrea whispered her name. It seemed brazen of her to be up there speaking in front of the wife, who sat in the front row waiting her turn. It was as if we were already in a place where we no longer saw through a glass darkly, but he’d probably taken his secrets to the urn.

The wife spoke last. She looked like somebody’s grandmother, which I guess she must have been, since a boy in a blue blazer was sitting there with what looked to be the family. Even in his last years, she said, he’d never stopped keeping up with the new books, and he’d given her the encouragement to sit down and write her memoir of growing up in Washington during the Kennedy years—which, she said, peering over her glasses to milk the laugh, was still in search of a publisher.

When the reminiscences were over, and his daughter—a cabaret singer who’d come in from Chicago—had sung “Bridge over Troubled Water,” I went up to the star-is-born woman and said, “How many of us do you suppose there were?”

“I’m sorry?” she said. “Do we know each other?”

—

I live in the city now, where I’ve had the good luck to find a studio I could afford in the West Village, and every day I walk to the subway past a gated cul-de-sac where E. E. Cummings and Djuna Barnes and somebody else used to live. I work for a women’s magazine, in ad sales—at Newsweek we used to call it the business side, as if a business had any other side. I’m the assistant to the director, meaning that I make myself useful, answer the phone and the emails—one no longer says “Girl Friday.” I had the Yale degree, however many years out of date, I’d worked at Newsweek and so on, but mostly Andrea had interceded, and had told me how to finesse the lost years: everyone understands a failed marriage, as long as you don’t present yourself as a woman who’s belatedly ambitious. They let me write—without pay; what year do you think this is?—for the blog, about books and movies that wouldn’t make it into the magazine proper: my choice, as long as it’s something womansy. So I, too, have become a keeper-up-with. I’m known—not that I’m known—for being hard to please, and the editor of the blog, a young woman whose ambition isn’t yet belated, finds this “refreshing once in a while.” If I learned one thing from my husband, meaning my second husband, it was finicking. Yes, I see the wavy red line under that word, and no, I don’t mean being finicky , which is a habit of mind: he actually taught me to finick. As you see.

Andrea’s husband told her he was gay a year after they got married, but you must have known that, and so must she. She still sees the little boy, so there’s that. She’s been a better friend to me than I’ve been to her: she not only got me my job but let me stay with her when I needed someplace to go—not to diminish her generosity, but by that time she had room in her apartment. She’s set me up with men she knows, age appropriate—what else could I expect?—and not all of them grotesque. The now-ex-husband gets her theater tickets, and she’s always offering to take me to this or that, and I go sometimes to keep her company. I’ve become a person who’s seen Kinky Boots and The Book of Mormon .