Laurene’s friend Shell, a large brunette woman who wore red lipstick and spoke loudly, with a New York accent, came to visit us at the suite at the Carlyle Hotel. She stood beside the piano, playing a few notes. They talked about people I didn’t know, calling them “total losers.”
That afternoon, my father said, “There’s something I want to show you two.” We took a taxi to a tall building and then a freight elevator with blankets for walls up to the very top. My ears popped. The elevator opened onto a dusty, windy space, full of watery light.
It was an apartment at the top of a building called the San Remo. It was still under renovation, and it took me a few minutes to grasp that it was his apartment. The ceilings were at least twice the height of ordinary ceilings. Pieces of cardboard covered the floor; he lifted one up to show us the marble below, a glossy deep black that also lined the walls. He told us that I. M. Pei designed the apartment in 1982, and when one of the quarries ran out, they’d had to find another one and replace the old marble with the new marble. Otherwise the blacks wouldn’t match. Construction had lasted six years and it was still unfinished.
“It’s incredible,” Laurene said, looking around.
Other than a bank of windows along two sides, all the surfaces in the apartment were black marble. I swept up a line of dust with my finger; the marble gleamed beneath. We stood in the main room, with its triple-height ceilings and windows, gaping fireplace, black walls and floor. The staircase looked wet, dripping down from the second floor, each level of stair opening wider than the last, like molasses poured from a jar. He said it was based on the design of a staircase by Michelangelo.
It was hard to tell how a person could possibly be comfortable in such a place. It was hard-edged like rich people’s apartments in movies. It was opulent, the opposite of the counterculture ideals he talked about, a showcase made to impress. Yes, he had the Porsche and the nice suits, but I’d believed he thought the best things were simple things, so that looking at this apartment felt like a shock. Maybe his ideals were only for me, an excuse not to be generous with me. Maybe he was bifurcated, and couldn’t help trying to impress other people in the obvious ways rich people do, even as I’d thought, with his holey jeans, his strange diet, his emphasis on simplicity, his crumbling house, he didn’t care.
“It was supposed to be the ultimate bachelor pad,” he said sadly. “Oh well.”
We went out onto the balcony, a line of stone balustrades like candlesticks wrapped around the corner. From up this high, New York smelled like nothing. The wind made a sound like a sheet flapping. Below us, Central Park looked like it was cut out of the concrete.
“It’s a great view, isn’t it?” he asked.
“It is,” I said.
“This is amazing, Steve,” Laurene said, with a lightness to her voice I wished I felt too. He grabbed her and I looked away. I felt stuck, unable to talk, my feet heavy on the ground.
Soon after I returned, my mother and I bought a couch, a chair, and an ottoman at the mall.
Wings made of white feathers hung in a children’s store window display. “When I was a kid, my mother told me all children are born with wings, but the doctors cut them off at birth. The scapulae are what remain. Isn’t that strange?”
We walked past Woolworth’s, with its tubes of watermelon-flavored lip gloss and packets of press-on nails, past the restaurant Bravo Fono, where we still went sometimes with my father, and into Ralph Lauren. The store was half outside. Cement planters came up to my waist and held impatiens with swollen green seed pods that popped open when I squeezed them, spraying tiny yellow seeds and springing back to a horizontal curl.
“Hey, what do you think of this couch? Do you like it?” she asked. It was two cushions wide. I sat; the cushions did not spring back, but sank slowly under my weight.
“I like it,” I said. “Is it expensive?”
She looked at a price tag pinned to the side and took a sharp breath.
I knew she hated the couch we had, the one we’d taken from Steve’s house years before; it was nothing she would have chosen for herself. It made her feel, I think, like her life was composed of the castoffs of other lives.
She bought the couch, along with its matching chair and ottoman, on her new credit card. It was, by far, the largest purchase we’d ever made. To reduce the cost, she took it in the natural cotton linen it came in—the color of sand—instead of having it re-covered. We were both giddy afterward, as if the mall was a different place to us now, opened up.
We must have more money, I guessed. Why else was she buying big things? She’d wanted a new couch for a long time. Where was she getting the money? I didn’t know. She said no, always. This time, yes. If I asked why, it might pop. She seemed happy and confident, and I thought this is how we should have been at the mall all along, and maybe this is what the future would be like.
At Banana Republic we tried on the same jean jacket in different sizes. It was nicely boxy, with a collar made of stone-colored corduroy. I tried not to act excited; I knew not to push. But she bought them both. Both! Compared with a couch, two jackets were nothing. We walked out of the store with the weighted paper bags.
“That,” I said, pointing to a sweater and skirt in a shop window. The small, minimalist shop sold expensive clothing from Switzerland. The long skirt was dark gray cashmere, the sweater was made of maroon angora with fabric teddy bears appliquéd. “That’s the kind of thing you should wear.” It maybe could have done without the bears, I thought.
“Where would I wear it?” she asked.
“Anywhere,” I said. “To parent-teacher conferences. Out to dinner or lunch.” I imagined another life for her.
“I don’t really like it,” she said.
“Just try it on. You can’t tell on the hanger.” I’d heard someone say that in another shop. When she came out of the changing room, still ambivalent, she looked exactly right. I insisted, the saleswoman insisted, and she bought the set.
When we were almost home, we stopped at the stop sign of the four-way intersection before the turn to our block. My mother began to make the turn, but continued to spin the car past ninety-degrees, missing our street as if by accident. “Oops,” she said, the steering wheel kinked as far as it would go.
She made a full circle, and we came back to our starting position. But again, when the time came to turn, she missed it.
“Oops again!” she said, laughing.
She spun us round and round, as if we were caught in a vortex: sidewalk, lawn, tree, house; sidewalk, lawn, tree, house.
“Turn now!” I yelled each time we approached our street.
“I just … can’t seem … to turn!” she said. Bushes grew halfway up the houses, so they looked like faces with beards, watching us as we spun. She went round and round until we were both dizzy, and then—finally—she made the turn and took us home.
At home that night we heated up chicken potpies in the microwave and watched Masterpiece Theatre sitting on the floor in front of the television. She wanted to read Andy Warhol’s diaries out loud to me in bed before sleep, even though I was too old to be read to, and I let her.
“You’re a Simpleton,” I said, as a joke, a few days later when we were stopped at a gas station filling up and she said she liked the smell of gasoline. I’d never called her that before. I might have gotten the word from the Mock Turtle’s Story in Alice in Wonderland, parts of which she also liked to read aloud to me. When I said the word, I wanted her to deny it. I wanted her to get mad at me: how dare I call her Simpleton—it wasn’t true. But she only laughed.