She might have had dinner with Joanie (at least until Joanie left for Paris) or her aunt and uncle (whom she adored) or even gone down to Washington to stay with her parents.
For the most part, though, she hung out with Patrick. Dinner, movie, TV. Sex. Usually sex. She took pride in keeping the electricity in her marriage. Her husband would never have to saw on the old chestnut that he wasn’t getting any at home now that Ella had a ring on her finger. Oh, no. She almost always said yes, even when she was tired or busy with work. Ella’s father looked eternally on her mother like she was Ginger and Mary Ann all rolled in one—Ella had caught them at it more than once, so embarrassing—and that was her model. That was the marriage she wanted to have. The kind everybody envied. She wanted the radiant, satisfied skin her mother had. The adoring gaze that followed her mother around the house.
Tonight, however, and for all the Saturday nights stretching into the imaginable future, there would be no sex. No cabernet and steak frites at the bistro around the corner. No twilight movie theater, laughing together at the same jokes, hands bumping in the popcorn. Just this half-empty fridge, this leftover baked ziti from the pizza place next to the subway stop. This TV set. These books. This studio apartment, the sprawling, affluent contents of her life compacted back into a single room, as if the past six years had never really occurred, as if they were just some play she had watched, some theme park she had visited, and now she was back in her rightful life.
This clock, ticking steadily into bedtime.
She ate the ziti and washed the dishes. She picked up a book she was supposed to read last year, for that book club she went to for a while, and poured herself a glass of wine. And another. Went to bed at eleven and stared at the dark ceiling. Somewhere in the building, somebody was playing a jazz CD, solo trumpet, Wynton Marsalis or something. Long and lonely and melancholy, rolling up and down the scale like it was reaching for something that didn’t exist.
And then she remembered. She’d left her laundry downstairs.
THE BUILDING WAS IRREDEEMABLY OLD-FASHIONED, even though the paint was fresh and the staircase sturdy, maybe because it seemed to have largely escaped any horrifying postwar renovations or—worse—ersatz period details added back later. When she’d inspected the place last week, Ella had liked that. She wanted something different from the sleek SoHo loft she had just escaped, which they had bought two years ago when Patrick got promoted to managing director and came home with his first really serious bonus, and whatever your preference for traditional design or new, you certainly couldn’t detect the handprints of some visionary, wall-demolishing architect on this place. She loved all the authentic, handmade moldings and the creaky floorboards, the quirky layout and the low-voltage lighting.
Of course, that was during the afternoon, when the winter sun had flooded softly through the old windows and turned the air gentle. Now, at nine o’clock on a Saturday night, Ella felt she was creeping downstairs through some kind of gothic novel. Or maybe that was the wine and the book—In Cold Blood, not the best choice for your lonely Saturday night—and the nocturnal melancholy of discovering your husband was having sex with other women. Or possibly the ziti, which sat unsteadily in Ella’s stomach, like it knew it wasn’t wanted.
And there was something else, something she’d noticed on her first visit. Something that had made her turn to the super and pull out her checkbook and say, I’ll take it. Something vibrant in the air, something that lived inside the walls. Her parents’ house had it. Her first apartment had had it. Her junior-year dorm had had it. The SoHo loft—gutted and cleared out and renovated to the studs from a derelict warehouse, everything old replaced by everything new—had not. Until now, turning the last corner of the stairwell, she hadn’t realized just how dead that apartment was. How she’d missed the company.
So maybe it wasn’t fear that she felt, reaching for the laundry room door. Maybe it wasn’t dread of the unknown, or of Hector’s strange warning about rats and noise from the bar and vibrating walls.
Maybe it was anticipation.
She opened the door.
We Meet
(and it’s a doozy)
THERE’S THIS joint on Christopher Street, a joint I’d know like the beat of my own heart, if I happened to have one. They used to call it the Christopher Club, and now it’s just Christopher’s. When you enter through a door in the basement of the grocery next door, you first smell the rotting vegetables and the cat piss, but never worry: all that stink clears up when the cigarettes and the liquor engulf you. And the music. The best jazz south of Ninety-Sixth Street. The bass player’s a good friend of mine. Bruno. I don’t know his last name; nobody does. We don’t deal in surnames unless absolutely necessary.
Now, I don’t inhabit the place every evening—I’m a working girl, you know, and I need my beauty sleep—but as I happen to live on the other side of said grocery, in a tiny room at the back of the fourth floor, I like to drop in from time to time, friendly-like, for a drink and a dance and a smoke and a gossip. As I’m doing now. Right there at the corner table—no, the other corner, next to the music—wearing a black dress and crimson lips and a head of strawberry hair. (The hair’s natural, the lips aren’t.) And that darling rosy-scrubbed black-and-white fellow I’m flirting with, the one who’s taken the trouble to dress like a gentleman? That’s Billy Marshall, my latest. A Princeton boy. You know the type. He’s reading me this poem he’s written in my honor—a real sweetie pie, my Billy-boy—but I’m afraid I’m not listening. A man’s just walked through the door like a prizefighter looking for a prize, the kind of fellow who demands your immediate attention. Square shoulders, bony jaw. Plain gray suit, sharp felt hat. You know the type.
The thing is, you don’t see him around a joint like this, a joint in the Village, long wooden bar and no chandelier, starving artists and starving artists’ models, queers and poets, Jews and Negroes, swank babies like Billy-boy descending southward in search of local color. We haven’t seen a gray suit around here since that stockbroker last year who lost his way back to the IRT station from a Bedford Street brothel on the down-low, if you know what I mean. Where he got the password, God knows. Anyway, this particular suit is cold sober, overcoat over his arm, nose as monochrome as the rest of him. Wouldn’t know a good time if it kissed him on the kisser and unbuttoned his starched white shirt.
Right away, I give the eyebrows to the owner, the man behind the bar—we call him Christopher, nobody knows his real name—and he gives the eyebrows right back, only more in the nature of a question mark. I flick the gaze back to the newcomer. Christopher makes this tiny nod and strolls down the bar, directly in the fellow’s line of sight, and braces two hands on the edge of the counter, like the knots of a terribly thick rope.
“Darling,” says Billy, “are you listening?”
“Of course I’m listening, sweetie. Go on.”
By now, the stranger has reached the bar, along a line right down the center of Christopher’s wingspan. He sets one foot on the rail and one elbow on the counter and he asks for something, I can’t hear what. Over the rim of his shoulder, Christopher’s eyebrows glide upward.
“You don’t like it.”
“I adore it! I think it’s awfully clever. And those rhymes. Why, you could have Bruno here set it to music.”
“It’s a sonnet, Gin, an English sonnet. Not a music-hall song.”
“You can make a lot of bread from a music-hall song.”
“Who cares about money?” He seizes my hand on the table. “I care about you, darling. I care about