Saïd Sayrafiezadeh - New American Stories

In this way he was forced to trudge back into the shop, hold the phone out, and say to the girl, “She wants to talk to you.”

The girl hesitated, then reached out and let him pass the phone into her hand.

“Hello?” she said into his phone.

He retreated to a corner of the store. Joking aside, he didn’t care to loiter about, smelling the flowers, while the girl wrote down his wife’s American Express number. He would never learn the girl’s name, not now, Kate would see to that, he told himself as he peered out from his hiding place behind a leafy potted tree. He saw the shop’s buckets of flowers and the refrigerators in a row, and the door leading to the back, but where was the girl? He heard her laugh in response to some remark Kate must’ve made, and realized that she was standing behind the bouquet. “Oh, don’t I just know that about men and their important purchases!” she exclaimed.

What was Kate saying to her? Was he being made fun of? Was she calling him bipolar?

He had a problem with anxiety and suicidality, and, as Kate had reminded him in their conversation a moment earlier, everyone knew about his previous autumn’s sojourns on the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge and his games of chicken — no, not games, not at all, really — on the fire escape outside their bedroom window.

He didn’t want to think about any of that. Yet it was the reason he was now crouched behind a ficus, eavesdropping while a girl he wanted to fuck got treated to an earful of Kate — on his phone! And what was the big problem, anyway, if a handful of times on his way home from day care, as he sometimes called his ongoing treatment, he’d got excited about life and jumped off the crosstown bus at Fifth Avenue and run into Bergdorf Goodman and ridden the elevator to the second floor and tried on clothes until closing? Was that unhealthy? His doctors didn’t think he was manic-depressive; in fact, they’d ruled it out. Kate had been reading the clinical literature, though, and felt autodidactically certain that the Payne Whitney professionals were minimizing something in plain sight: His death-trip history, considered alongside the “conspicuous” spending on coats, ties, shirts, and shoes, represented, at the least, she thought, a mixed-state depression. “Why don’t they have you on olanzapine?” she’d got in the habit of asking him. He begged her not to interfere with his treatment, and suggested — thinking of her father’s death and the forfeiture of the family farm in Massachusetts, when she was a teenager — that her consuming anxiety about bankruptcy, her emphasis on this as a potentially mortal trauma, might have less to do with his new handmade suits than with the ways in which his almost dying had reactivated an old mourning in her.

He peered from behind the ficus. He was wearing a ridiculous cashmere overcoat, and his suit today was a medium-gray flannel herringbone. It featured, on the jacket, minimal shoulder padding, dual vents, and a graceful, three-rolled-to-two-button stance (his current favorite lapel style), and, on the pants, single reverse pleats and one-and-a-quarter-inch-cuffed trouser legs. Why would a man ever not cuff his trousers? He kept a single jacket-sleeve button open on the left, another open on the right. He didn’t look like blown credit. Did he?

Kate was going to kill him. She was mad enough to kill him. That was a fact. What was he doing, charging expensive flowers for no reason on an average night in the middle of the week when they were already committed to a crippling tab — it was sure to be a huge bar bill, by evening’s close — for dinner with Elliot and Susan? But, Kate thought, as she sat with their friends, waiting for him at a tiny table near the back of the restaurant, this was how it went with her husband: He made the gestures; she absorbed the costs. “How awful this all is,” she sighed. She was on the phone to the girl at the florist’s. Kate hadn’t meant to be audible, not to the girl, and certainly not to Elliot, who would take her vexation over Jim as a cue to call her up the next day and argue for more afternoons at the hotel.

She’d been going once or sometimes twice a week to the Upper East Side to meet Elliot at the Lowell Hotel, on Sixty-third Street between Madison and Park. She rode the bus. Typically, she arrived first. She got the room key, went up, and showered; if Elliot was delayed at the lab and the day was growing dark, she might unlock the minibar and make a Manhattan or an approximation of a Manhattan, then recline naked by the window and look north toward the East Nineties, Carnegie Hill, where her mother, an only child, like Kate, had lived before marrying her father and moving to the farm.

Manhattans had been her mother’s drink. Unlike her mother, Kate tried to keep herself to three an evening. At Lorenzo’s that night, she was ahead of pace, finishing her second before having eaten a bite. She held her glass in one hand and her phone in the other, listening hard through the restaurant noise as the girl at the florist’s recited back her AmEx number. Elliot sat quietly beside her. He had his arms crossed, and his chair pushed back at an angle to make room for his legs. Susan had got up from the table; she’d announced to Kate — sounding well on the way to being tight—“Kate, you’re my best friend, but I don’t know how you drink such a strong drink.” To Kate and Elliot together, she’d added, “Will you two do me a big giant favor? Will you snag Lorenzo and ask him to bring me a Cosmo?”

“Don’t utter a word to me about my husband,” Kate warned Elliot, once Susan had gone to the bathroom.

Into the phone, to the girl, she said, “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean you. I was talking to somebody else.”

Meanwhile, in the women’s room, Susan was on her own phone, calling Jim’s number from a stall.

It was the girl who answered, of course.

“Hello, can you hold?” the girl said. The line went briefly dead. After a pause, the girl came back and said, “May I ask who is calling?”

“May I ask who’s answering?”

“Hold, please.”

“Sir?” the girl called out to Jim. She looked this way and that for him. Where had he gone? The shop closed at eight. It was nearly closing time. “A woman is calling you!”

“I’m here! I’m right here!” he answered from behind his tree.

“He’ll be with you in one second,” he heard her promise into the phone. After that, there was a pause, before, in a businesslike tone, the girl resumed with Kate. “I’m sorry to have to ask you this again. Would you mind verifying the last five digits and the expiration date?”

Back when he was in the hospital — in the past six months, there had been three emergency-room visits and two locked-ward admissions — he had spent day after day lying on a mattress, crying. His doctors (along with the psychiatric nurses and the social workers who led the daily therapy groups) had encouraged him to uncurl himself from the fetal position and try, at least try, to watch television or play a board game with the other patients, but this had mostly proved too great a challenge. There had been times when, walking to or from the bathroom or the water fountain or the patients’ common room, or standing in line to receive his medications at the nurses’ station, or even simply sitting upright on the table in the examining room, he’d had the strong sensation that the air through which he moved was gathering around him and becoming — really, no word was sufficient to name it — substantive. Its weight pressed in on him. This hurt, it hurt terribly, yet when he tried to locate the source of the pain he could not: It came, as he knew, only from himself. On the mattress, shattered and sobbing over Kate and their messed-up love, he’d lain crushed.