Love Maps Page 12

  Maya was getting married. There had been an engagement notice in the Sunday Times a few months ago. Maya Myrrh, soon-to-be-sixty, saying “I do” for the first time. The guy was an architect ten years her junior. Yes, an architect. Original. But not Philip. Bigger and better, the man who was building the next new tallest building in the world, over in Singapore, or Shanghai, or wherever it was. A bulbous needle, twice as tall as the World Trade Center. Maybe Philip had heard. He could have heard, even off in the Congo, slapping mosquitoes, avoiding further insanity. Maya had a kind of fame—no household name these days, but you bumped into people who had heard of her. He could have been having a bourbon with some UN people and met a doctor who’d been invited to their wedding, that kind of thing. It would be an elaborate wedding, according to the Times. Sarah wouldn’t even know how to crash it. It was being held on an island she’d never heard of, some hotshot’s personal volcano out in the middle of the Pacific.

  The phone rang. The phone! She sprang out of the narrow space behind the dryer and raced up the stairs three at a time. But it wasn’t the phone. Or if it had been, it wasn’t any longer. Just a dial tone. Her arm was scraped, angry lines of pink and loose snatches of skin. She must have scratched it against the basement wall. She wiped off plaster and cobweb and washed it under the faucet. Aspirin would be good, but to hell with it. She uncorked a second bottle of wine, looked for the glass, found it nice and clean, ready for more.

  She sat at the table, drinking.

  He hadn’t driven her crazy when they were married. When they were married, things felt right. Being with him felt right. She hated this. She hated middle-aged women sobbing over their past. Somewhere, perhaps somewhere near, he breathed. She didn’t have to eulogize him. They’d fought. Not often, but she remembered locking herself in the bathroom and sitting in the tub fully clothed for hours as Philip pounded on the door. Why hadn’t she sat on the toilet? It would have more comfortable. What had they been fighting about? Something stupid. The laundry. The hours for the liquor store. They only fought about stupid things. The serious stuff they left alone.

  They got married in City Hall. But they marked their anniversary from the day they hung the Map of X in Philip’s office and walked back through the park, that first kiss that they hadn’t cut short. There hadn’t been any question in her mind after that kiss. Her favorite anniversary was their third, when Philip turned their bedroom into an Arabian oasis. God, that tent. He’d done it so well that, at first glance, she thought he’d bought it from some Far Eastern bazaar, but it was made of old household stuff: sheets, tablecloths, curtains, mosquito netting, expertly draped and folded to hide stains, seams, labels. It was an elaborate wrapping for the present inside: a brass candelabra with Arabic flourishes. He’d rigged it so that it hung over the center of the bed. She crawled onto the mattress, and he got in behind. They lit it together. The tent glowed. It seemed to be moving. It was the way the candles flickered, the light they cast on the fabric. She untied his pajamas. They rolled, him on top, then her, then him, a festival of it, backward, frontward, sideways, giggling like kids, with the bedsprings squeaking and the lamp waving; in the interludes, one of their hands or legs would reach up and steady the candelabra to keep the flames from the fabric. Sometime afterward, she padded to the kitchen for a glass of water. It was dark. They had long since missed their dinner reservation. She sat naked on a chair, Philip still warm inside her, feeling like they had a life stretching out before them.

  The official wedding was more an excuse for a party, a nostalgic toast to Ma and Max, who would have insisted, were they alive. They met outside City Hall, under the arched entryway, the late-summer sun hot on the asphalt. There was a hot dog vendor in a corduroy cap who wheeled his cart after Maya, insisting on giving her a free Coke. It had taken awhile to find the room. They’d clacked up and down marble-floored halls, happily bickering. City Hall was so big. When they found the room, the benches were full. There were so many people, a flock of Puerto Ricans in pink taffeta, a tweedy white couple in their late seventies, a young soldier in full dress uniform with his skinny, freckled bride-to-be, all sorts, rich, poor, black, white, united only in the desire to get married and to do it quickly, efficiently, for forty dollars a pop. Clyde Bandersnatch was supposed to have been Philip’s witness, but he got caught up in a traffic jam and didn’t get there until the reception. Maya covered for him.

  She and Philip had reached a gruff sort of understanding. “As long as I don’t have to pretend that I like him,” Maya would say. She called him “The Drag.” What’s The Drag up to? Philip called her either “The Floozy” or “La Grande Flu.” They didn’t say these things to each other’s faces. They greeted one another with resigned smiles. Overall, Sarah couldn’t complain. She kept them apart and everyone agreed that this was the best way to do it.

  They behaved at the wedding. And at the reception afterward—held in a Chinese restaurant under the Manhattan Bridge—Maya and her date, a famous Spanish guitarist, did a flamenco-inspired number that people talked about for years afterward. Then she toasted Philip, welcomed him as a brother, and Philip toasted her back. “Thank you for sharing your sister.” Sarah had never heard those words spoken out loud, and for a moment she couldn’t breathe. That’s what the wedding had meant to Sarah—not so much a new thing between Philip and herself as a new thing between Philip and Maya.

  Maybe what happened later was, as Maya claimed, a fluke, a misjudgment. More likely it was a relapse. Oh, who knew? How did her glass get empty so soon? A film of red wine clung to the cup like diluted blood, reminding her of the streaks of it clinging to the porcelain bathtub. That horrid shower after Philip got back from the hospital.

  Chapter 12

  New York City, Winter 1989

  A high-ceilinged Soho gallery, iron columns painted white, the floor messy with bubble wrap and scraps of masking tape and brown paper. Earlier in the evening, the place was crowded with artists and assistants tape-measuring, tapping nails, nudging corners. Now the art has been hung and the crowd has relocated to a nearby bar where Sarah plans to take Philip, if he ever shows up. She sits on an aluminum ladder, watching Eddie Kiebbler examine her work. He wears overalls and horn-rimmed glasses, and his freshly famous face, befuddled and bearish, breaks into a goofy grin. “These rock! They’re painterly, baby, really cool!”

  They are her love maps, personalized per respondent: Where have you done it in New York? Here, here, and here. Red dots for unions, greens for breakups. They are modeled on the New York City subway map, partly because she loves the map’s geographical incorrectness, a blatant fiction that everyone uses to orient themselves, partly because of the colors and curves of the subway lines, their swerviness. She thinks of them as electric currents, connecting everyone in the city.

  Eddie noses up to the Danish au pair’s map. “Look at this big red dot. Over the water? Did she do it on the Kosciuszko Bridge?”

  “In a Honda hatchback, in a traffic jam.”

  “No way.”

  “It is not for me to question. I simply transcribe.”

  The next map is Eric Peterson’s, Bambi’s younger brother, dying of AIDS. A great swath of reds up and down the West Side, barely a green in there. Why break up? Why not leave it open? She is proud of that map, not for her artistry, but proud of Eric, for doing it. She had been nervous on the way to his hospital room, wondering what he would think of her, traipsing around collecting fucks and breakups as if it were all a great joke. But he applauded as she entered, his IV tube glimmering. The room was crowded with people and their stuff—cassette decks, cards, plants, an enormous stuffed rabbit. Bambi sat on a pile of coats, her hair bunched into a messy topknot, eating a piece of chocolate cake. His boyfriend was sprawled in the armchair, snoozing, and there were more friends of theirs, shoulder to shoulder on the window ledge, kicking their legs in time to a Prince song. Everyone was rumpled. They’d been camping in that room for days.

  “Turn off the music,” Eric order
ed. “I can’t think straight. Sarah, so good to see you! Should I think straight? No. Keep the music on. Who wants to think straight?” He laid back on his pillow, exhausted from his speech. Bambi took the list from her back pocket, and everyone watched Sarah read it. It was clearly a group production, the addresses and dates done in different pens and pencils. They’d been working on it for a couple of days, and they all seemed pleased by its depth and scope, even Eric’s boyfriend.

  “He wants his map buried with him,” Bambi said. “Is that okay?”

  “Of course,” said Sarah. Eric smiled. She tried not to stare at his body, almost unrecognizable. She focused on his face, his eyes still bright, looking at her, at that moment, with a kindness that she had not remembered when he was healthy.

  His is the only map not for sale. Eddie Kiebbler glances at it, then moves on to the next. Sarah closes her eyes and listens to her own breath, the pipes banging, the intern stuffing trash into a bag. There is a tapping on the window. Gus, in a fur cap with earflaps, his breath white in the cold, gestures at his watch. Everyone’s waiting at the bar. But she can’t leave the gallery. Philip is supposed to meet her here. The intern sweeps up the packing debris, increasingly grumpy.

  Finally she clears her throat. “I’m locking up.” They wait on the sidewalk out front, smoking in the February damp. Eddie bounces beside her, warming himself, chiding her for worrying. Brice is always late. But it’s not like Philip. He ought to have come by nine thirty. It’s now past ten.

  “He just built a museum, for Christ’s sake. He can have an extra glass of wine.”

  Sarah thinks of the Haupt House more as a folly, the vanity project of an aging bazillionaire, but it is an impressive folly, thanks to Philip. Half nineteenth-century town house that has been reelectrified, replumbed, retiled, refloored, rewalled, reconfigured, reroofed, and half Philip’s own glass-domed creation. Haupt, Emile Haupt, the collector behind the thing, had practically swung her in the air, he was so pleased with it. “Your husband’s a genius! A genius!” Speaking in emphatic doubles. “Top rate! Top rate!” He’d given Philip plenty of artistic rein, but hadn’t expected much on the aesthetic front. He’d hired him for his security smarts.

  A taxi appears at the end of the block, the light on its roof fuzzy in the wet air. It slows as it nears them. Samuel Fischbaum, Philip’s droopy-eyed lawyer, unrolls the back window. His skin sags pale and wrinkled. There was an attempted burglary at the Haupt House. Philip’s at the hospital. That’s where she would like it to stop: Samuel Fischbaum’s face, lit by a streetlamp, the pit in her stomach, the simplicity of that.

  In the cab, Samuel tells her that Philip will be fine, but the thief is in bad shape. Philip had apparently stabbed him. Static-plagued cheering comes from the radio, some game the cabbie is listening to. An excitable announcer shouts words that Sarah can’t decipher. The taxi cruises up Lafayette, past the cube at Astor Place. Kids in leather and spikes sit on the curb, shivering and bored.

  A couple of years before, she and Philip, walking back from a dinner, had come across a fight in Riverside Park. Teenagers yelling and throttling one another, the kind of thing anyone would want to avoid, but Philip had known those kids. He had played basketball with them. He had shouted angrily, his tone more of a bark, startling her. She had never heard him sound like that. The mass of boys disbanded, all except the two at the center. Philip put hands on their shoulders and pulled them apart. He stood between them, calm and stern in the midst of all that heat. The fighters looked at the ground, panting, their expressions sullen and disoriented. She had hardly been able to believe it: her Philip, like some mythic Wild West sheriff, establishing order merely by standing there.

  How could he have stabbed a man?

  But then she sees Maya, tripping down the vaulted halls of New York Presbyterian, her face flushed, engulfed in a suspicious urgency. A stout, older man guides her, murmuring gravely, his white hair bright under the fluorescents, the veins on his cheeks spidery and red. Sarah only recognizes him as Emile Haupt when they are almost upon her. This is partly due to his mood—she’s only met him once, when he’d been jolly and ebullient: “Your husband’s a genius! A genius!” But also because of the way that Maya leans upon him, as if they are intimates. Maya has never given any indication that she knew him, and what the hell is she doing there, anyway?

  Sarah retracts from her hug. A mute appeal, a warning in Maya’s eyes. Sarah looks past her, at the closed door to the hospital chapel and the brass names of donors lining the wall. Where is Philip? Samuel holds her back. Voices rise and fall. Samuel’s calm, methodical questions. Haupt and Maya’s excitable replies.

  The story they give: Thomas Price, a prominent architectural critic, wanted to see Haupt’s office, and so Philip took him there, along with Maya and Haupt. The exhibition rooms were gorgeous, but Haupt’s office was the jewel in the crown. At first sight, it looked like any executive office: a mahogany desk and a wall full of windows. But there was handsome paneling everywhere, and if you flicked subtle switches, the walls would slide back to reveal a glowing, thrumming collection of video monitors and computer screens as well as old-fashioned safes and papers. An expert from the British Museum had gathered together any information that Haupt could want about the building, his personnel, and his collection, and codified it all in this multimedia brain, sleekly hidden away. The entryway, not quite up to code, but somehow finagled, continued in this hidden vein. There was no door. One simply touched a fingerprint sensor on an unremarkable corridor wall, and the wall slid away. But tonight when Philip touched the sensor and the wall slid away, instead of an empty, elegant office, the critic, Maya, and Haupt discovered a compact man in black, standing by an open panel, blueprints in hand.

  “Your husband’s reflexes were okay. I’ll give him that.” Haupt’s eyes are blue and cold. “He would have made an all right security guard. As an architect, he sucks. That fingerprint sensor cost as much as a house. Who the hell does he think I am?”

  Someone else, someone perhaps more useful to Philip, would soothe Haupt. All Sarah can do is stop herself from sneering at him. She tugs at Samuel’s sleeve. “Please, I need to see Philip.”

  They wander through the halls. At his room, a policeman makes them wait in the corridor. Philip is being questioned. The detective finally comes out; somewhere in middle age, with pale gray eyes behind thick glasses, his complexion suggests he’s been up for the past twenty-four hours. He unwraps a stick of gum and thoughtfully, or exhaustedly, folds it into his mouth. He offers Sarah a stick. Not wanting to offend, she takes it and enters Philip’s room with the strange taste of Doublemint on her tongue. Philip lies on the bed, facing the ceiling, swollen and discolored and unsettlingly expressionless. She spits the gum into a piece of paper.

  “Philip?” She is aware of her footsteps, his absence. “Philip? Philip, baby.” A flicker. There he is. “They’re going to let you go home, if you can get yourself out of this bed.”

  He tries to smile. “Hi, Sar.”

  She squeezes his hand. He winces. People in various uniforms file in and out of the room, bearing clipboards, questions, a polite request from the police for Philip to stay in the city until things get sorted out.

  “Of course, of course,” says Samuel, nodding in reasonable agreement.

  Maya knocks discreetly on the door, bearing coffee for Sarah and fresh clothes for Philip. “Don’t say they came from me,” she says, lingering in the hallway. “He won’t want to wear them.” Which is true, so Sarah doesn’t.

  Later, as they are finally getting ready to leave, and Sarah is helping Philip into the stiff new jeans, she worries that the clothes might be another one of Maya’s tricks. But they have just been bought, the receipt is there in the bag. What could she have possibly done, except mutter some curse, and hasn’t she cursed him enough? Samuel escorts her and Philip out of the building.

  It is day, past noon already, and Sarah is so glad to be out of the hospital that she finds herself swingi
ng her bag, a plastic bag, given to her by a hospital attendant, which is stuffed with Philip’s bloody suit. She stops, then with a pang remembers swinging the bag with Conningsby’s ashes those many years ago on the streets of Tulapek. Samuel helps them into a waiting cab. There is grungy blue upholstery, and on the floor, a portable pack of Kleenex someone has left behind. “How handy,” says Sarah, trying to cheer Philip, but he doesn’t hear.

  “Will he be all right?” Philip asks, once the cab has left the curb and Samuel is far behind. She wishes he would look at her. Instead he gazes at the back of the cabbie’s head, an oily bald spot, rung around with dark, still-supple hair.

  “I don’t know. They said he was in critical condition.”

  Philip turns toward his window. “Fucker.”

  She wonders which fucker he’s referring to, but thinks it better not to ask. They drive around Columbus Circle, the pigeons perched on the statue.

  “I am sorry I missed your hanging,” says Philip. “How did it go?”

  “Oh. Fine. It doesn’t really matter.”

  “Yes it does. I’d like to take a shower and rest and then I’d like to go see it.”

  She smooths his hair. There are dried hard bits in it. Blood.

  *

  She gets into the shower with him and scrubs him with a washcloth. He moans at the pain. He has bruises everywhere—on his face, arms, chest, legs, and particularly his neck. There is blood under his fingernails, in the hairs of his chest, in his eyelashes. There are teeth marks on his shoulder. “They just went at it,” Maya had said softly. Her voice had betrayed a certain wonder. It was the first time, to Sarah’s knowledge, that Maya had been impressed by Philip. The water runs pink down the drain. She throws the washcloth away.

  He sleeps, thanks to a strong dose of painkillers. He sleeps curled up into her. The setting sun comes in through the windows, shining down on him, on the white sheets, on the grays in his hair. She lies beside him, propped up on pillows. She can’t read; she can’t concentrate on anything. She listens to him breathe. Around them are the books on the shelves, the Indian chest with the blankets inside, the figure fashioned from matchsticks glued together, a funny little man Philip had made as they were playing Scrabble. A siren wails outside; Philip sleeps through it. He wakes later, confused. Why is he in bed? He tries to move and groans.