Writers & Lovers(59)
It’s a clean copy. Oscar hasn’t made a mark. I bring it to the couch. Star is a woman trying to save an old tree from being chopped down in the town center. She goes door-to-door to a series of oddball neighbors, and when the men with a backhoe come there is a protest with all the people she has mustered, awkwardly holding hands around the big tree. It turns out Star’s ex-husband proposed to her under the tree, extemporaneously, with few words and no ring. She hadn’t liked the proposal at the time and made him do it again properly a week later by the lake with a diamond and a dozen roses, but it is the first proposal beneath the strong branches of that tree that she remembers and that moves her, years after they have divorced, at unexpected moments of the day.
I wonder how the discussion of the story went. Muriel is in Italy, so I have no mole. I wonder where Silas sat. I can imagine how people might talk about it, how it lacks narrative tension, how there are unnecessary adverbs in the tag lines, like ‘she said pleadingly,’ how we don’t find out if she saves the tree. It seems like it was written in a rush of feeling, as if the writer were determined to follow the emotion no matter how rough-hewn the prose. There is something raw and uneven about it that people would try to fix.
I get up and put it back on the pile. I look at the pictures in magazines on the couch. An hour later I return to the recycling bin and shove the story into my bag, deep down to the bottom. It’s the only thing I’ve been able to read in weeks. I should save it for that reason alone.
After a few more hours I go upstairs and slip back into bed and wait for morning.
When I walk the dog I’m aware now of the size of the three oak trees on the far side of the park. Their limbs are enormous, ribbed with muscles and veins, as alive as we are.
At Iris, a woman takes a bite of her BLT and sends it back. She says she doesn’t like the spicy mayonnaise. The kitchen makes another, with a milder aioli. I bring it out to her, and a few minutes later she asks me to bring some of the spicy mayonnaise back.
‘I thought I didn’t like it, but I did,’ she says.
Muriel returns from Rome and meets me for coffee before work. She laughs at how hard I hug her. She tells me that on the second day of her conference she came out of the hotel and saw Christian across the street under a jacaranda. I told you I’d only go to Italy for romance, he said and asked her if she would marry him.
Star would have liked that proposal.
I pore over the Globe classifieds for an apartment. I call about the smallest, cheapest ones, and they are already taken. Finally, I find one I can go and see. It’s in Cambridge. Inman Square. A basement studio in a yellow Victorian. The landlord is surprised by how captivated I am by it. I stand at the stove for a long time. A real gas stove. I turn on and off each gas burner. And the fridge is enormous. He laughs at my awe and says it’s standard size. The wall-to-wall carpet smells a bit, but nothing like my potting shed. Off the back, through sliding glass doors, is a private patio encircled by flower beds and a crab apple tree. It’s more than I can bear.
Probably because I’m so taken with his worst apartment, he asks if I want to see the two-bedroom he’s renovating upstairs. I follow him up three flights. As he unlocks the door he says he’s planning to renovate all four units. The basement will be last, he says, but he’ll get to it. He swings the door open. It’s all light and shiny wood floors. The kitchen gleams with new appliances. A bay window with a wide built-in seat looks down on the neighborhood. Big arms of a maple tree stretch out at eye level as if protecting the house. Beyond it you can see out across the tops of all the other trees and gray roofs. Something in my chest eases and aches at the same time.
‘They’re still working on the bathroom.’ He looks at his watch. ‘Of course they haven’t shown up yet.’
He shows me a big bedroom with the same polished floors and the attached bathroom where the floors are still plywood and the vanity is in a box. In the corner is a modern tub below a skylight. We go through to the second bedroom. There is a wall of bookshelves and a space between two long windows where a desk would go.
I go back to the window seat in the living area. I know he’ll make me leave soon.
‘What do you do?’ he asks.
I shake my head. ‘I don’t even make enough for the basement.’
‘I wasn’t asking for that. Just curious.’
I need him to know how pathetic I am. ‘I’m a writer.’
‘A writer. That’s cool. Tough, making a living in the arts.’ He turns toward the door, jangling the keys. ‘But worth a shot, right?’
Finally, I get fired from Iris. It’s the night before the Harvard-Yale game. We have 192 on the books and a line of walk-ins down the stairs. We open a half hour early. Harry, Dana, James, and I are upstairs. Tony and Victor are down. An hour in, Fabiana tells me Tony is swamped and I need to take a four down in the club bar. She’s already punched in the drink order with my number and when it’s ready I bring the drinks down and take their order. On my way to the computer upstairs, I see my two sixes have been seated.
I approach the closest one, and the man at the head of the table grips my waist. ‘Listen, sweetness.’ He squeezes. ‘Men of a certain age need cocktails of a certain proof within a certain amount of time.’
The three men give me very specific drink orders with the importance of doctors giving pre-op instruction. The women order glasses of house white. The man lets go of my waist.