Cleopatra and Frankenstein(23)
Growing up, he’d often had dinner with her at restaurants near their apartment on the Upper East Side; she’d order them escargot, truffle salad, or steak tartare, dishes not particularly suited to the indelicate palate of a child, and talk about her life in the same frank manner she would to any adult. Oh, men are afraid of women my age. They think any woman over thirty’s got a bear trap instead of a cooch! Occasionally they’d steal the cutlery, just for the hell of it, laughing as they pushed past the doors hand in hand, butter knives sliding down his trouser legs. Even now, when he thinks of his mother’s laugh, he can hear the jangling sound of silverware on the sidewalk.
“Little Z,” he said, picking up the phone. He looked out the window at the pleasant bustle of Madison Square Park below. “What have I told you about grown-ups with jobs?”
“Fraaaaaank.” Zoe’s voice was high and keening.
“Zoooooooo,” Frank echoed, elaborately miming tying a noose around his neck for the benefit of Jacky, who was lingering in the doorway to ensure he’d answered. Jacky shook her head, but her eyes were smiling with the good humor that had allowed her to tolerate Frank’s antics for over a decade. Frank noticed she’d left a bottle of water and two Advil by the phone.
“It’s not funny!” Zoe’s voice wailed in his ear. “I’m at Beth Israel. I had a seizure at the theater, and the stage manager took me here. I’m meant to be getting a brain scan, but they want to put this weird glue in my hair.” She raised her voice, presumably for the benefit of some harried medical personnel within earshot. “Which is never going to happen! Can you come down here? I’m freaking out.”
Zoe had been diagnosed with epilepsy at boarding school after having a seizure while drunkenly breaking into a boy’s dorm room. It was Frank who had gone to the family weekends at the wilderness program (or “not-a-rehab,” as his mother referred to it) she’d spent her last semester of high school in, and it was Frank who’d taken over Zoe’s Tisch tuition and rent her sophomore year, when his mother’s ski business failed to produce profits.
He had even given Zoe a monthly allowance so she could focus on rehearsals for Tisch’s production of Antigone that summer, but he had stopped that once he and Cleo decided to get married. There were only so many wayward young female artists a man could support at once. But he never stopped worrying about Zoe, and he would still do anything, go anywhere, to make sure no one touched a hair on her head without her permission.
“I’ll be there,” said Frank. “Give me fifteen minutes.”
He lunged for his bag on the white leather sofa, inadvertently pulling the phone and a pile of papers off his desk.
“I got it!” yelled Jacky from the hallway.
The rush of the elevator sent a wave of nausea through him. He slid on his sunglasses and tried to breathe deeply, resting his head against the cool steel of the walls as they stopped at floors 24, now 19, now 11 … God, he was getting old. When he was Cleo’s age, he’d been able to stay out all night before work, even squeezing in time for the gym at lunch. Now, if he hadn’t known he was hungover, he would have thought he was dying.
He and Anders had downed a few more beers and finished the highlights, which ended on a high note with a gorgeous goal from twenty-five yards out. The celebratory spirit carried Frank all the way to the basement bar of a restaurant downtown, where Anders knew someone doing something with some magazine. He was downstairs at the bar, the music pulsing around him, and Anders was passing him a shot. Then he was talking to the DJ and buying another round for him, for Anders, for a guy wearing a bolo tie, for anyone. He was in the bathroom cutting lines on the sink with two girls both called Sara who thought everything he said was hilarious. He was on the dance floor again and a song he knew was playing and he was feeling fine, fine, fine. He was crushed in a cab with five other people going to he wasn’t sure where. There’s a party somewhere. Find it. Then he was in his hallway, standing in front of his apartment door, trying to work out how to get the key into the lock when there was one hole, three keys, and he was seeing double.
When Frank finally managed to open the door, he’d found Cleo sitting in the darkness, staring at the front door. The only concession she made to his entrance was to close her eyes against the bar of yellow light from the hallway that fell across her face. The thought of her silently listening to him scrabble to get the keys in the lock sent a pulse of humiliation through him. He closed the door behind him with pointless care, as though still trying not to wake her. When he turned, her stare was so direct it startled him. Why do you do this to yourself?
The truth was, he had no more idea why he drank than why his heart pumped blood or his lungs absorbed oxygen. It just happened. There was no language to explain that, so he had simply stepped around her, leaving her sitting in the dark, and fallen blindly into bed. When he woke up that morning, she was already gone.
In the taxi on the way to the hospital Frank rolled down the window, trying to cool down, and took out his phone. He sat with his thumb hovering over Cleo’s contact for five blocks. When he finally did call, asking her to come meet him there, nothing in her tone of voice revealed either warmth or coolness. Listening to her was like trying to test the temperature of bathwater with biohazard gloves on.
Frank made his way up to the radiology department through the steel swinging doors and found Zoe curled in the waiting area, flicking dispassionately through the New Yorker. She was wearing her usual nouveau bohemian attire of a tiny leopard-print dress, espadrilles, and giant hoop earrings. A passing internist did a double take as Zoe unfolded her legs from beneath her. Frank resisted the urge, as he always did, to bark at her to cover up. He was not her father, after all.