Joan Silber - Fools - Stories

He used to bring his girlfriends to galas, and they had liked dressing up and getting the glamour of it. He was just as glad he was single at the moment. Liliane was going to require undistracted attention. She was arch and wary (how had she captured the sheikh?), an unlikely pal for Deedee, and he didn’t have long to cultivate her.

His boss, Mary the Figurehead, was now stepping across the grass to literally pat him on the head. She was a bulky, mild-voiced woman in beige linen. “Well done,” she said.

“Oh, you say that to all the boys,” Rudy said. It was never a mistake to flirt just slightly with her. She was chief executive, though most of the decisions were made on the ground without her, in India and Bangladesh.

“I’m always so glad you’re with us,” she said, which was bullshit, it was just the way she talked.

HH was not in good shape, in truth. In South Asia, the rainy season was just starting again. Last year’s flooding rains had washed out no less than four of the organization’s centers, and the rebuilding wasn’t anywhere near finished on three of them. His email was full of pleas from the managers, piles of painful details, as if he were the one to persuade. Please do not forget us , they liked to say.

One of Rudy’s girlfriends had referred to what he did as “a high-stress job,” and he’d ditched her after that. Dear managers, your pesky suffering is so stressing me out . Right. All the same, he was probably drinking more since he’d been doing this. And a few other things.

When he left the gala, he walked across the park (how beautiful the last mellow daylight was, he loved his city) to get the Brooklyn-bound subway to his apartment in Fort Greene. There he collapsed on his sofa in front of the news, and when he woke up what felt like many years later, his cell phone said 11:03 p.m., an hour at which there was nothing to do but get up and splash water on his face and go out into the night.

At a bar a few blocks away, he swilled down beer and listened to an okay but not thrilling neo-punk group that blasted out monotonous chants and then broke into a pretty close imitation of the Sex Pistols (he had loved them when he was ten) screeching how they wanted to destroy the passerby ’cause they wanted to be anarchy . Surely this wasn’t all that was left of the anarchists of the world. This fabulous shrieking. Had anybody occupying Wall Street remembered to sing those songs? He hoped so. Rudy could see why revolution was no longer a faith, but the results of that were not all good, as the Occupiers had pointed out quite eloquently. He sort of hated rich people himself, and he probably saw the best of them.

He left when the band did a loud and louder brain-blitz that didn’t feel like pleasure. He was getting too old for this shit. But it was too early to go to bed, and he walked a few blocks to a club that booked untrendy jazz and oddball blues, old-timers and upstarts, a place almost ruined when the Times ran a feature on it. So it was mobbed with assholes now, so what? Assholes had a right to like music.

When he walked inside, it was indeed packed. He liked the mixed audience — a Latino kid with an eentsy beard and a hooded sweatshirt next to a dame from a different neighborhood in pearls (pearls!) and satin slacks. A piano player who looked six years older than God was doing great things with “I’m a King Bee.”

At the end of the set, people shuffled around, and Rudy got a good seat at the bar. At a table near him two older women were cracking each other up as they ordered drinks. One of them could not seem to pronounce, “One more Rob Roy on the rocks,” and he saw (could this be right?) that her friend in pearls, laughing away, was Liliane. How had she gotten here? Was this place in guidebooks now, drawing Euro-trash? “Hello, hello,” he called across to her.

It took her a second to get who he was. “Oh, my friend from the garden,” she said.

“How nice to see you again,” he said. ”How very, very nice.”

Liliane had been having an excellent time. She was with a truly old friend, an American whom she had known in her twenties. Barbara had spent a year in Paris as a college student, and for this trip had been miraculously located again through email by Emile, smart boy that he was. In their youth the two women had spent many vivid evenings picking up men together. Barbara remembered quite a few details that Liliane had mercifully forgotten. The current Barbara was stringier and paler — Liliane would not have known her — but as the evening went on, her younger face began to surface. She had kept something of her looks, in a messy, New York way.

They were not as drunk as they were acting, but they were not sober either. Why should they be? Barbara’s husband had gone home to sleep, and Liliane kept thinking she saw an ex-lover at one of the tables, an American clarinet player she’d once stolen some cash from. It was never him, and she wasn’t even picturing him at what would be his real age, but she kept thinking what she would say if it was. That money wasn’t doing you any good anyway. He’d been an alcoholic, he was probably dead by now. When last seen, he was playing his clarinet for spare change in the Métro.

“Your friend got this round,” the bartender said. He meant the boy from the garden party.

“ Très gentil .” Liliane saluted him in thanks.

Barbara introduced herself. “I knew Liliane when she was just a young babe.”

“She’s still a babe,” Rudy said.

“Oof,” Liliane said. “Enough of that.”

The piano player had started again. He had a way of approaching the keyboard as if the motion of his own hands surprised him. He was really the best thing she’d seen in New York.

“You love music, don’t you?” the boy turned and said. “I could tell by the way you walk.”

She had to laugh. “I’m walking very much in your city.”

“You have to let me show you some things. My New York.”

“It’s better than anyone else’s New York?”

“You’ll see,” he said.

Oh, she would? She liked this boy, but his self-assurance could get annoying. She went back to looking at the piano player. How weary and quietly jaunty these tunes were. The man had found a good way to be old, she thought.

“I’ll show you great neighborhoods,” the boy said. “And you can show me Paris sometime.”

“She’s a good guide.” Barbara snickered.

When the music was over, they all got up to leave. The boy went out to help them get a taxi, on the busier corner a block away. “You’re gleaming in the night,” he said to her. “Your satin.”

“Let’s hope a cab sees it,” Barbara said.

“You look like the moon,” he said. He reached out and flicked one of her dangling pearl earrings. His fingertip grazed her neck. What is he doing? she thought.

And then he was waving wildly at a cab, which did pull over and stop. “Tell me the name of your hotel,” he said to her, very fast, “and I’ll call so we can make a time for our walk.” She wasn’t so glad to say the hotel’s name but she did. And then he swooped down on her for a kiss on the cheek. His bristled face smelled of sweat and the oils in male skin, and he whispered, “I look forward to seeing you,” as he held her in a hug that went on too long. She gave him an icy look when it was over, but he was shaking hands with Barbara by then. He told the cabdriver, “Take very good care of these ladies.”

Liliane had never in her life been insulted by the fact of male attention. It had not always been welcome, but she had never held it against men that they were bothering her with their desire or admiration. That was the way of things, and it usually served her well. In the cab, with Barbara half asleep and the dark streets outside, she was affronted by that dramatic hug. If she were young, she would’ve just known he wanted to have sex with her (everyone did), but it was about money. He was trying to use her vanity for money.