Any Place I Hang My Hat Read online

  My skirt was a hand-me-down from a fabulously dressed girl from Greece who’d been in the class ahead of me at Ivey. Before she’d graduated, she put a huge pile of winter clothes on the common room couch with a note saying, “Help yourselfs!” Three of us full-needs students, i.e., kids totally on scholarship, guilted out our classmates whose parents had money. We wound up with enough clothes to get us to parties from October through March for decades to come. The skirt was a black velvet so fine that it felt like a cross between silk and flesh. I wore it with an extremely scoop-necked white sweater and rhinestone chandelier earrings I’d bought from a street vendor one lunch hour for eight bucks.

  All that day, out running, cleaning my apartment, getting a manicure, rewatching Brazil, I’d gotten whooshes of fear, those momentary waves of impending doom—the sort of fear that seizes you when you’re late for a period and it’s too early to test. I was pretty sure John wouldn’t want to end things on our way to his cousin’s wedding because there was always the chance I’d become hysterical and wind up red-eyed and sniffling as he introduced me to Aunt Gertie. No, he’d be affectionate, hold my hand—though not during the ceremony, which would give me the totally wrong idea. We’d dance. And when we were talking to his family, he’d put an arm around me and I’d feel the heat of his hand on the bare part of my back. He would tell me goodbye on the way home. Except what John didn’t know was that I was going to dump him first.

  So the trip up was predictably comfortable: too much traffic, but we had enough of his Herbert Hoover and my evangelical Christians to keep us busy for the hour and change it took to get from my apartment to the wedding palace. Its name was Allenthorpe. It was a late-nineteenth-century robber baron’s dream of a Norman castle, now converted into a chichi catering site. While the architecture was French, the name was English and the car valets were dressed like butlers in a 1930s Hollywood comedy about rich people.

  I got through the ceremony without once—okay, without twice—noting that Cousin Laurel was three years younger than I and had parents who could afford to pay not only for her gorgeously understated, probably Vera Wang gown, but to feed and wow with flowers their upscale, ostensibly unwowable guests. Fortunately, I was sitting beside Dr. Orenstein, John’s mother, who not only welcomed me with a kiss, but throughout the wedding procession whispered, “Did you see that cat tattoo on her back!” and “Isn’t that Asian girl beautiful?” about the bridesmaids, who were wearing eight different styles of gown, all in pink faille. Dr. Orenstein’s asides were the kind of things a real mother would say to a daughter. I glanced at her profile. An unremarkable face, but appealing, browned and crinkled from her gardening, with a few moles. She was the human correlative of a just-baked oatmeal-raisin cookie. I could still feel her Hello, Amy! kiss, a brush on my cheek with her winter-dried lips.

  Except I was going to lose her. I’d written the entire John-Amy breakup script in my head, but for some stupid reason, what hadn’t occurred to me was that naturally I’d be breaking up with his family. So at dinner, when his father asked me to dance and twirled me around in a waltz in a graceful way you wouldn’t necessarily expect from a history professor, I kept thinking: I’m never going to see this man again. It wasn’t just that I’d never hear him talk about the Inquisition in Castile and Aragon. John’s father was a born storyteller. He could even make a saga of having his tonsils taken out in 1949 come alive.

  And though I didn’t know them so well, I’d be losing John’s two younger brothers, too. One was a landscape architect, the other in medical school. Both of them had their mother’s sweet smile and round cookie face. By now I knew them well enough that I no longer needed my tortured mnemonic devices to distinguish them. Tall and thin like a tree was landscape guy; medicine was Mike, so landscape guy was Alex. I found myself glancing at John’s watch too often. The later it got, the sadder I felt about being thrown out of their lives. Would Professor Orenstein become history department chair? Would Alex marry Nora? I’d only managed to see a frame or two when all along I’d assumed I’d be there for the entire movie.

  Maybe I was a little too hearty in my good-byes to the Orensteins, knowing they really were good-byes. In the car, I recall watching John as he turned his head to check for traffic as we got onto the parkway, thinking how wonderful-looking he was. I suddenly realized that in the past two years my vision of my kids was Orenstein-ish children. Like John and his father, intelligent, decent, manly—or like his brothers and mother, with cheery cookie faces.

  In the silence between us, family images—his, not mine-flashed one after another, snippets of Orenstein scenes from a documentary I’d put together in my head. John’s little cousin lisping the Four Questions at the family Seder. His mother cutting a bouquet of flowers for me to take home after I’d spent a weekend at their house in Connecticut. Sitting in a dark editing room John was renting, watching his first documentary for the History Channel, reaching out to squeeze his hand because his work was so admirably done. The great sex and, okay, not one single I-love-you. And finally, seeing his face lit up as he talked to La Belleza during intermission.

  I turned away from him, pretending to be mesmerized by the wonders of the Hutchinson River Parkway. Except not only was I crying, I couldn’t get the tears to stop. I know I couldn’t have planned on it, even subconsciously, because if I had, I’d have worn waterproof mascara. Great, I thought: I’ll wind up with raccoon eyes, the ineluctable sign of a woman suddenly freed from her dependence on a man. I knew I had to stop the weepies and say good-bye fast. But first I’d have to sniffle to dam up the tears, to say nothing of the waterfall of snot cascading down my upper lip.

  “So?” John suddenly asked. “I’m waiting for your critique of the entire wedding.” I shrugged. “Amy, come on. You’re the best amateur anthropologist I know ... The only one, actually ...” He went into a short monologue I barely heard, breezy, about how there had never been a social class I hadn’t met. It was the kind of patter he was great at, that he’d used on all the distant relatives at the wedding. It said, I know you only slightly, but it’s really good being with you. Easy, warm, disarming. John could always make interview subjects and third cousins from San Diego feel comfortable. He’d never spoken to me in that congenial, distant way, even the first time we went out.

  It hit me then that he understood that simultaneously breaking up with me and driving safely back to Manhattan might be mutually exclusive. What he’d more likely do would be to get near my place, double-park on a side street, and then give his prepared speech. That way, he’d avoid all the agonies he could face if he actually escorted me up to my apartment: my pleading with him, my trying to seduce him into the Big Wow Final Fuck, my throwing my body against the door to keep him from leaving.

  What other end-of-the-affair nightmare could he conjure? Oh, that I’d get suicidal and try a swan dive from the eighth floor. No, homicidal. Why in God’s name had I told him that one of Chicky’s imprisonments was for aggravated assault? On the other hand, maybe John was afraid he’d be overcome with guilt about leaving someone who was pretty much alone in the world and would, against his better judgment, take me back. “Amy.” I wiped my nose with my hand and turned back. Grandma Lil told me a lady is never without a handkerchief; I didn’t even have tissues. In all my rehearsals, I never considered I might cry.

  “Hey, Amy, what’s the matter?”

  It took me a few long seconds before I could speak. “I saw you that night—the Mahler.”

  “What?”

  Filtered through tears and a too-full nose, broken up by the occasional sob, my words were either inaudible or they hadn’t hit him. “I saw you the night of the all-Mahler concert. During intermission.”

  “You went to hear Mahler?” Less than a second later, he added: “Oh. Listen—”

  “After more than two years, John,” I began. I didn’t want to say, How could you? Except I couldn’t think of anything else.

  “Why the hell were you at a Mahler concert? You
can’t fake it, you know.” His voice was getting tight, his charm wearing thin. He didn’t like the timing of this. “Any composer between Beethoven and Gershwin is lost on you.”

  I looked away from him and stared down into those little brush things that line the track on a car’s gear shift. A metal ring from a soda can was stuck between D2 and D3. I stuck my pinky in and fished it out. “The point, John, isn’t my taste or lack of it in music.”

  He did the thing he usually did when upset, pulling in his right cheek and gnawing on it. Finally he snapped: “I know what you’re thinking and you’re wrong.”

  He gave me the briefest glance, then looked back at the road and checked his rearview mirror. Quickly, without signaling, he cut to the right and got off at the next exit. We drove in silence for a few blocks into some suburb. I stared out the window until he parked midblock between a Tudor that looked like a pub and its neighbor, a brick box with columns. Both had American flags that drooped in the windless night. The sky was clouding over into blackness, and on the entire block there was not a single light on in any of the houses.

  John switched off the engine. I wasn’t going to play the who’ll-break-down-and-talk-first game. I knew I had to go first. “There are a lot of things to admire about you, John, but your sense of decency was always in my Top Ten. Couldn’t you at least have said, Amy, listen, this monogamy stuff isn’t working so well for me. Or I met someone I really like, or have fallen in love with, and I want to be free to pursue a relationship with her?”

  He unlocked his seat belt and shifted to face me. “What are you talking about—fallen in love with? You saw me at Rose Hall listening to Mahler. Why are you assuming it’s a romantic thing?”

  “I’ve got eyes. And I’ve got sense. And I know how you look when you’re hot for a woman.”

  “Amy, this is crazy!”

  “You told me you were busy researching Garth Brooks for Biography that week!” For someone who was trying to sound rational, if not cool, my voice came out in almost a shriek. “Even though we never talked about the future, two years entitles me—”

  He punched the steering wheel with his fist. “Fuck it, Amy! Talk about entitlement! Aren’t I entitled to be believed? Do you want to discuss what I’m entitled to after two years? How about some closeness with you? Didn’t you think I was entitled to that? But no matter how many times I tried, I always hit a wall.

  The Amy Lincoln dance: I take a step forward, you take a step back.”

  “I feel as if I’m eavesdropping on some other woman’s relationship,” I responded. He was staring straight out the windshield, hands gripping the steering wheel as if he were driving somewhere in a storm. “I don’t know what you’re talking about! I never did a dance with you.”

  “How about after nine-eleven? When I all but begged you to stay at my place, and you practically ran out, saying, ‘Oh, you must want your space’—”

  “John, I honestly thought—”

  “Bullshit! And I start talking about how I’d love to have kids, and you tell me you weren’t sure you would because they all might look like your grandma Lil—”

  “I was kidding!”

  “Listen to me,” he said, disturbingly calm. “Tonight is just the tip of the iceberg. The two of us ... It hasn’t been working. We ought to have been a wonderful couple, at least from my point of view. You’re fun, interesting. Terrifically smart. Sometimes I’m awed by your analytical ability. And I admire the empathy you feel for anyone who’s gotten a raw deal in life. But there’s no life in our life together anymore—except for sex. And every time I want to talk afterward—that’s prime time between two people—you either fly out of bed because a little cum is running down your leg or you make some wiseass remark that kills whatever mood there is. You never give me credit for caring. You never trusted me.”

  “That’s so not true, John. How can you think that?”

  “Because after two years you think I’m lying!”

  “This is different!” My nose and/or eyes must have started up again, because he spent a couple of seconds searching his pockets for a tissue and at last came up with a section of paper towel from his door compartment he’d probably stuck there for checking his dipstick.

  “The last time we were together,” he said, more coolly, “you picked up I was pissed off at your pulling back. So you told me about Joan the social worker like you were bestowing some precious gift: I hope this proves that I’m not afraid of getting close; I’m trusting you with my secrets. You’re getting a special screening of my private, vulnerable self. So don’t expect anything for your birthday or Valentine’s Day.”

  “I can’t believe”—I thought about his Valentine waffle iron and my voice went out of control again—“that you’re being so unfair!”

  “I can’t believe we’ve spent, whatever, more than two years together and all I hear from you is the same story, over and over: that your father was in jail more often than he was out, and your mother ran off and your grandmother lived in a dream world—which incidentally, as I see it, you’ve spent your life trying to turn into a reality—and that’s all I know. The story you’d tell anybody. A bare outline. Roman numerals one, two, and three. No capital As and Bs. Definitely not any regular numbers or anything lowercase. And don’t tell me you’re not doing a dance, because you’ve been doing that from day one. Tell me, didn’t you ever hear the word intimacy?”

  “Yes. It’s a cliche. Did you ever hear the word ...” I really couldn’t come up with anything. Reticence wasn’t right. Neither was I didn’t want you to think I came with a thousand emotional problems attached. In one of the houses, a dog began to howl.

  “Not believing me tonight is just another way of backing off.” His tone had become disturbingly even, as if he were narrating a documentary. “What do you expect me to do, Amy? Hang around for five to ten years to see whether you can learn to trust me enough not to jump back whenever I get close?”

  “You never said anything about this, goddamn it!”

  “I said it all the fucking time. And on the rare occasion you decided to open up, it was in some half-jokey way that said, Don’t you dare take this too seriously. What if you trusted me and you’d really opened up? And what if—for the sake of hypothesis—you’d stayed at my apartment for one week after nine-eleven? Or ten weeks, or whatever. Amy, I’m really sorry for all the sad stuff you had to live through. But for months now I’ve been thinking that I can’t be with someone who’s always coming up with preemptive strategies to avoid getting hurt.”

  “Are you sleeping with her?”

  “No!”

  “The one deal we had was to be sexually monogamous.”

  “How can you think I wasn’t?”

  “John, I never thought I’d see you try to weasel out of the truth.”

  “She’s my producer at PBS. She’s married, for God’s sake.”

  “John, a married producer couldn’t have brought out that glow I saw on your face.”

  “Listen to me. She’s a business acquaintance—believe it or don’t believe it. I really don’t care anymore.” His voice grew softer, like a doctor about to impart bad news. “You know what, Amy?”

  “What?”

  “I feel sorry for you. Do you want to know why?” I kept silent. “You’ll never allow yourself to have what you’ve been looking for all your life.”

  “Tell me, John. What have I been looking for all my life?”

  “Someone who will accept you and love you just the way you are.”

  So naturally the next morning, Sunday, I went over to Tatty’s. She was in the kitchen finishing a sweet sixteen cake. “So that’s it?” she demanded. “John was making pleasant conversation and you, with your genius for timing, brought up catching him with some cheap PBS slut—”

  “Expensive. And how could she be from PBS? A public broadcasting woman wouldn’t wear stiletto heels. That was his story and it was totally lame. And could you please stop with the Katharine Hepburn lighthear
ted banter. Be a regular Park Avenue boring person who listens.”

  “You listen. You have a nice time at the wedding and what do you do? Bring up catching him with a babe in a silver suit.”

  “You should have seen his expression that night. It said, This woman is pure pleasure.”

  “Maybe the music gave him that expression.”

  “The music didn’t have cleavage.”

  “You don’t think it’s possible that what he told you was the truth?” Tatty asked.

  “I wish I could. But even the best music in the world couldn’t give him that glow.”

  “Was her suit very nipped in at the waist?” With incredible care and sureness of hand, she pressed a piece of old lace onto the virginal blush-pink icing on the cake, then removed it. Still talking, she meticulously traced the debossed lace pattern with a fine line of ivory icing that exuded from the tiny opening of a tube on a pastry bag. “This girl must be a major loser to have a sweet sixteen on a Sunday afternoon,” she muttered. “To have a sweet sixteen, period.” Her head swayed back and forth and in figure eights, rehearsing the motions the pastry tube would make next. “Aimée, I can’t look up to check you out. Are you crying?”

  “No, I’m not crying, for God’s sake.” I ran my finger over a piece of waxed paper she’d practiced on and ate a blob of icing.

  “Well, I cried last night. During, when I was with him. And after.”

  “Really?”

  “Buckets. Now I’m just exhausted. But the weird thing is that when I finally stopped, I wound up sleeping like a baby.”

  “So was it nipped in at the waist?”

  “The silver suit? Yes. What the hell difference does that make?”

  “I’m wondering if it could have been a vintage Valentino. Did it have a narrow shawl collar?”

  “Tatty, how can you go through life with your head continually up your ass?” I demanded. “We’re talking about ... a personal crisis. How about a little sensitivity?”