Any Place I Hang My Hat Read online

“The what?”

  “Never mind. And trust me. If there was anything to report, I’d tell you.” We heard a clip-clip-clip of rapid footsteps. A guy in a white shirt and narrow, black funeral-director’s tie was galloping toward us. The store manager. “For God’s sake, does he think I’m stealing his fruit? Tatty, you know I would never—”

  Tatty turned toward the man and offered a barely discernible bend of her head. People bred like Tatty do not expend energy on broad movements. Still, the manager got her nod, which said This woman is one of us. Us meaning me and my sort, not you and your. She was always rescuing me, even though she surely knew I did not need rescuing. In any case, the man immediately stopped short and practically genuflected before her. He smiled hugely at the green fruit in my hand, then at me, all but saying How fortunate for us that you deigned to taste our produce!

  Tatty’s silence caught his attention. She waited a couple of uncomfortable seconds before demanding of him: “Could you possibly have thought—”

  “No, no, no, Miss Damaris!” He smiled and turned his head from her to me and back again.

  Tatty narrowed her dark blue eyes as he hurried off. “Quel jerk.” A stranger would have difficulty sizing up such a woman: Sure, boots made from a better class of Reptilia, mink-lined trench coat, handbag from primo ostrich. But take away the wardrobe and accessories, and what was left was a tall, angular body, narrow oval face, and shoulder-length dark blond hair teased big. She might be taken for a country singer on a mediocre record label.

  However, if the stranger knew his ass from a hole in the ground as far as the city was concerned, Tatty truly looked like what she was—old New York. A flawless ivory complexion, angel-wing eyebrows that had never been plucked, a somewhat long, angular jaw that resembled a shovel. Her ’do? Not 2003 Nashville. Strictly 1962 Manhattan, sprayed until it was no longer hair but a shoulder-length, monsoon-proof structure. While Tatty naturally understood that among Betty Friedan, the Beatles, Black Power, and Vietnam, hair had been liberated, women like her—and her mother and grandmother—turned up their diminutive though slightly beaky noses to such emancipation. They remained true to Mr. Roland, a society hairdresser who had clearly been granted the gift of eternal life. He’d teased Jackie’s mother’s hair and Jackie’s and saw no reason to pay homage to the vulgarity of the late sixties, much less the begooped coarseness of twenty-first-century hair.

  “I forgot where I was,” I told her.

  “The City College psychotic.”

  “Right. Anyway, he came into the apartment and hardly got past the door. Before the I-am-his-son stuff, and before Bowles’s bodyguard grabbed him and frisked him and dragged him back into the elevator, all he did was try to speak to the senator. He is not a psychotic. The End.” She looked skeptical. “Okay, so his voice was a little loud.”

  “Where were Bowles’s Secret Service agents?”

  “Secret Service doesn’t kick in until a hundred twenty days before the general election.”

  This legality displeased Tatty. A single tsk emerged. After a moment of silence, she said, “About this boy, man, whatever. Was he believed?”

  “Hard to tell. The party broke up with what is known as unseemly haste. Before I could get to Thom Bowles, he came over to me and muttered, off the record, that the kid had been stalking him whenever he came to New York. I asked if he’d gotten a restraining order. He wasn’t sure. Said I should ask his campaign manager. Lovely Moira said the kid was a radical right dirty-tricks person, but they hadn’t gotten an order because then the paternity charge would have inevitably become public. She also said she was relying on my sense of decency not to blow this out of proportion, which was her way of warning she would rip the flesh from my bones if I made it the focal point of my coverage.”

  “Did the boy look like a Bowles?” Tatty asked. Her intelligence was keen, but almost entirely visual. She could remember a painting forever, but even if she’d read War and Peace five times, to her it would only be an Audrey Hepburn film. Add that visual ability to the fact that she was related to, or a former schoolmate of, the New York affiliate of Everyone Who Matters—a self-designated group of patricians, i.e., families who managed to slog through the entire twentieth century without completely exhausting their inherited wealth—she might have actually known what features or mannerisms were peculiar to Bowleses.

  “I have no idea what Bowleses are supposed to look like and, frankly, I don’t give a damn.” Having unburdened myself, I pictured the half-frozen kid in his sodden gray sweatshirt and the senator in his gray pinstriped suit tailored slightly on the baggy side so as not to look custom-made. “Well,” I conceded, “if there’s a petit size for guys, they’d both wear it. You know, they’ve both got butts the size of ...” I held up my two fists side by side.

  “You’re still as cultivated as you were on your first day of school.”

  “My first day of school was at P.S. 97.”

  “You know I meant your first day of boarding school.” Tatty’s voice was pitched low. Dictionwise, she was fond of vowels, though not enamored. For a score or more years, alumnae and alumni of New England boarding schools hadn’t sounded like the preppies of old who articulated as if auditioning for Lady Windermere’s Fan. Still, her diction was different enough from mine that a non–New Yorker might find it hard to believe we’d both been born and bred on the same twenty-two-square-mile island. “Besides their butts,” Tatty asked, “was there a resemblance?”

  “I don’t think so,” I told her. “I mean, Thom Bowles looks like the Marlboro Man, except photocopied to three-quarter size. The kid could have been Italian, Latino, Jewish—your basic Mediterranean model. Or some other mix that results in beige. Listen, I may be semi-street-smart, but I can’t look at a guy and say, ‘Oh, yeah, Sri Lankan and Belgian.’”

  “Did he have an accent?”

  “No. Well, he didn’t start reciting Leaves of Grass, so I can’t vouch for his every word, but he sounded like a regular guy in a sweatshirt.” I thought back to I am Senator Thomas Bowles’s son! “Probably a guy in a sweatshirt from one of the five boroughs. Anyhow, the moment was sensational only in the tabloid sense. Honestly, I didn’t think of him being a psycho or a drama queen.” True, it had been a night of rain and sleet, with a bitter wind. It may have been mildly weird for the kid just to be wearing a sweatshirt. But he might have been wearing layers underneath. He could have been too poor to buy a jacket. Or maybe February 2003 was like my second winter at Ivey-Rush, when Tatty and I and all the girls ran around coatless with lips blue and fingertips fading from red to white as they went numb from frost-nip. We were all convinced we were so incredibly cool not to be wearing coats. “Tell me what you know about Thom Bowles,” I said.

  “Let me think.” For some reason, she put her index finger to her lips rather than to her head. “Okay, I forget Thom’s father’s first name,” she said slowly, “but I know he was big in banking.”

  “William Bryson Bowles,” I informed her.

  “Or investment banking,” she continued. “Stock market. One of those.”

  “The father was an investment banker,” I said. “I already know the senator’s biographical stuff.”

  “If you’ve done so much research, do you know why he spells his nickname T-H-O-M?”

  “No. Tatty, I don’t know nor do I want to know. However, what I would like to know is this: Is there any dirt? Not that I could use it in my piece, but it would be comforting to know it’s there.”

  Tatty picked up a lemon and squeezed it gently. Then she sniffed it and set it and five others in the country-cute woven wood basket Charlotte’s Yums offered its patrons in lieu of red plastic with wire handles. “Dirt on Thom?” She ruminated for a second and a half, then shook her head. Naturally, her carved amber hair remained motionless. “Not that I can remember. After college, he moved to one of those Washington, Oregon states and did something Sierra Club–ish but that made him tons of money. Not a whiff of scandal, as far as I ever heard.
But I’ll ask the parents tonight.” After her divorces—both of which occurred around the time her monogrammed towels began to fray—Tatty had gone back to living in her family’s palace of an apartment on Park and Seventieth. She claimed it was because the kitchen was the size of many commercial bakeries. “Naturally, I’ll e-mail you if they have anything interesting to say, although such a thing has not occurred in my lifetime.” Then she smiled. “I promise not to call. You know there’s no way I would interruptus your coitus with John.”

  John Orenstein, my boyfriend, was a documentary filmmaker who had spent the day cutting five minutes out of a History Channel show about the Germans’ summer offensive in southern Russia during 1942. Too much of a pro to protest that losing five minutes was commensurate with the excision of a vital organ, he was, nevertheless, not his usual easy self. For someone normally crazy about baked ziti and oral sex, he’d seemed less than wildly enthusiastic during dinner and after. “Do you have anything to drink?” he asked as he squished a pillow to his liking and put it behind his head.

  “I’ve got Diet Coke, vodka, and orange juice. Oh, there’s some milk. But I wouldn’t drink it if I were you.”

  “Almost sour? Or curdled and gross?” I’d dimmed the lights to romantic candlepower. As long as the halogen reading lamp on the table beside my couch?bed remained off, I could look like Venus on the half shell. As for John, while he probably wouldn’t be asked to pose bare-chested for the cover of Men’s Health, he wasn’t bad. Not only did he have defined biceps, but actual, visible triceps. Add to that a solid torso with the perfect amount of chest hair: neither a half-plucked chicken nor someone with a shag rug over his pectorals. And while he was too big-featured and ham-handed to make anyone gasp and say Stunning!, or even Handsome, his broad shoulders, brown hair, caramel brown eyes, along with the gold undertone of his skin, always reminded me—if not the rest of the world—of the Oscar. Dressed, he didn’t look like the archetypal doc filmmaker. He wasn’t one of those vitamin-D-deficient downtown guys with black-framed glasses to match all-black, all-the-time clothes. His style was casual but cool, like an academic who got good consulting fees. Mostly he wore khakis or jeans with hand-knit sweaters and denim shirts that fit as though they were custom-made.

  I got back to the milk. “If I had to guess? I’d say more than repulsive, but it won’t be totally gross until tomorrow.”

  “Water’s good,” he said.

  Before he could get up, I did one of those flying leaps that gets you from supine to upright in one fluid instant. “It’s okay, I’ll get it.”

  Over the years, I’d gotten enough compliments and seen enough of myself in those three-way mirrors while trying on bathing suits to be relatively confident about my rear view. This was not to say I would jog through Central Park bare-assed at noon, but I figured fetching a glass of water, high-butted and low-cellulited, was the kind of visual I wanted looping in John’s mind after I dumped him.

  Maybe “dumped” sounds a little harsh. Well, I suppose I was still angry and/or hurt from Valentine’s Day. I’d been expecting a small, lightweight box. He’d handed me a heavy, medium-sized one. Oooh, I’d said, hoping I sounded more pleased than surprised. I opened it to find an electric appliance that produced heart-shaped waffles. It wasn’t the fact of a waffle iron that had upset me so much.

  It was that despite what I thought of as his apparent clinging—the same behavior he referred to as enjoying my company—our relationship was stuck in the mud. Yes, he wanted to be with me when I was buying groceries, and no, he didn’t want to go off and pick up a roll of paper towels while I was checking out the green teas because Wouldn’t it be more fun if we did both things together?

  Yet he was perfectly capable of telling me he was going to the Fulton Fish Market the following morning, just to see what sunrise there looked like, then calling two weeks later to say sorry, he’d been out of touch. But hey, he’d been to a soybean-processing plant in Ohio, a pig farm in Georgia, and Safeway headquarters in California because he’d gotten backing to do a documentary called Food Chain. And what did I think of the idea?

  One time, when I asked him how come he hadn’t called, he’d replied, “Amy, the phone’s a two-way instrument.” It wasn’t that John was undependable. I saw him as a man of enormous enthusiasms. He could become intrigued by a fly perched on the edge of a beer can, start to gather footage on houseflies, put together a film crew, set out a bowl of sugar, and wind up finding someone to pay for a documentary. And also make a profit on it. A small profit to be sure, but then he hadn’t become a documentarian because he wanted to be rich.

  After two years of seeing each other exclusively, I realized I’d become one of his lesser enthusiasms. No matter that we could talk about politics for hours, or even whole weekends, analyze the lives of our friends. No matter we both loved classic Hollywood movies, the Yankees, and walking for miles and miles all over Manhattan. He had never once said I love you. And after the waffle iron, I couldn’t see asking him, Hey, John, do you love me? Because I knew he didn’t.

  Not that I loved John either—of that I was sure—but he’d taken me on such a damn long ride. Two years, two months. We’d gotten past his friends, then gone on to meet his family, then down to his assistant, his summer intern, and his professional pals at the History Channel and A&E. Naturally I figured: Well, he’s revving up to ask the Big One. I’ve got to at least give it consideration, because John all but wore an identifying neon sign flashing Hey, Women of New York! Great Catch. After I wound up on New Year’s Day minus a ring, I’d been positive February fourteenth would be the day he’d pop the question. Maybe he’d even have a ring ready. Instead, I got the waffle iron along with a small bottle of 100-percent-pure Vermont maple syrup.

  “Since you’re doing the whole hostess thing,” John called out, “throw in a couple of ice cubes.”

  “If you want, but I have this theory why you shouldn’t want ice.”

  “A theory on ice?”

  “Yes. Jews have bad ice.” I walked over to the refrigerator, not much of a hike as my apartment was a studio so small that I’d had to give a lot of thought as to whether a chessboard was too much furniture.

  “You’ve been to my place a million times,” he said. “Do I have bad ice?”

  “Did I ever say anything negative about your ice?”

  “Amy, this is the first time since I’ve known you that we’re discussing ice, so you’ve never said anything either negative or positive.” Although I didn’t turn back to look, I could hear him shifting on the sheets, rearranging the pillow once again for our usual postcoital banter. Even after all this time, our lovemaking remained somewhere between passionate and wild. Yet it felt impersonal, or maybe desperate, as though we’d just been sprung after a decade in solitary. I guess we both needed the reassurance that after lust, we could have What-a-happy-couple! chitchat before we parted. “What’s wrong with my ice?” John inquired.

  “The same thing that’s wrong with mine. Jewish ice cubes—okay, Ashkenazic, not Sephardic—always taste oniony. It’s probably from bagels and bialys. Seriously, if you went to Tatty’s freezer—any non-Jew’s—you’d find totally tasteless ice. You get iced tea at Tatty’s and it doesn’t smell as if it had been stirred with a scallion. Do you still want ice?”

  “Yes. Even more than I did before.”

  So how come I was getting ready to dump this not-bad-looking, smart, decent guy who probably didn’t have a misogynistic bone in his six-foot body? Because together we had everything—except love. We were great at exchanging ideas and bodily fluids, yet there was a whole middle ground of transcendent emotion that eluded us. Plus I could see the writing on the wall, and it said, He’s going to be saying bye-bye pretty soon.

  Considering where my hands had been a few minutes earlier, I figured it would be genteel to wash them. I did that in the mini-sink in the mini-kitchen that took up three linear feet in my studio, a sublet on Central Park South that was mine until the apartment�
�s owner, In Depth’s Asia editor, came back from Tokyo. It was stunningly cheap, as the owner’s trust fund took care of the co-op’s maintenance. Having gotten his colleagues’ testimony that I was a neat freak, he’d decided it was wise to trust the place to someone who cleaned her keyboard with a Q-tip and precisely aligned her expense vouchers. The apartment faced West Fifty-eighth Street, not the park. All I could see from my window were other people’s apartments and an old wooden water tower. I was too low for sky, too high for ground, so without watching TV or going outside, I could not tell what the weather was. But on good nights, the scent of flowers and trees and horseshit made it through my open window, the same smells that had wafted from the stables and grounds, across the quad and into the dorm at Ivey on spring evenings.

  Anyhow, knowing John was watching, I bent over carefully. I didn’t want to overplay the memorable butt bit, so I opened the minifridge and quickly grabbed a couple of ice cubes. That instant, I got this memory of the night we were standing on line to see Adaptation: I’d been babbling something to John about the consequences of the Democrats’ loss of the House that November 2002, but I happened to notice the guy behind us.

  He was about our age and was standing there alone with a sweet, dopey smile spreading across his face. I realized he was watching his boyfriend coming up the street, almost a block away. They probably couldn’t see each other’s face, but I was sure the boyfriend was smiling too. They not only delight in each other, I remember thinking, I bet they can rely on each other. If one of them decided to make a documentary called Food Chain, he’d call the other every day. Twice a day. When someone treasures you, you become a necessary step in his thought processes; he doesn’t just miss you, he needs you.

  “Hey,” John said as I walked back, taking a different route, around a chair where the light was dimmer. Full frontal was acceptable, though not as good as the rear view.

  “When did we stop saying ‘Hi’ and start saying ‘Hey’?” I inquired. “We as a generation, I mean.” He smiled and I handed him the glass. “Here’s your onion water. The cubes are almost in meltdown.” I retrieved my duvet from the floor and wrapped it around myself and sat at the edge of the couch?bed. “Why do guys like to stay naked after sex?” I asked.