Speaking with Strangers Read online

  Some people leave their ghosts in rooms where they’ve been, so whenever my mind’s eye sees Number 83, it also sees Lillian, sitting round as a Buddha on an angular twig chair or on the small rug next to the loveseat, gesturing with her glass of diet soda. She is talking about the woman she had slugged (“I had to, Mary. That little bitch had it in for me”) and what she should wear to cover Tricia Nixon’s wedding for the Australian news agency for which she worked (“I thought I’d go very Middle America, so I bought this kind of polyester shift at Lamston’s and a white plastic purse that snaps shut. Do you think it’ll do?”) and why David Bowie’s wife bit her (“I suppose she wanted attention”) and another rocker’s presumed genital measurements (“A lovely, lovely boy—bet you think that’s naughty, Mary”) and the day she’d get it together. “When I get it together, Mary, when I get it together, I’m going to Elizabeth Arden and I’m going to have a facial and a massage and a pedicure, the whole number.” I loved her language and the way she spoke it, spun through the nose with a touch of Cockney. Mostly, though, I loved being able to have a friend who didn’t have to pass B’s taste test. Like most wives—most husbands too, I suppose—I had trotted out each new acquaintance as if it were a purchase sent on approval.

  We were in the garden on this hot June afternoon because I had to go to Sydney. The magazine was involved in a promotion for Australian wool, and Lillian, who had lived there for most of her twenties, knew exactly whom I should see and whom I should avoid.

  “If you’re invited to meet ———, don’t, I beg you, Mary, don’t go. He’ll come at you with those big teeth of his and he’ll talk your ear off; and I know you, Mary. You’ll be too polite to move away and you won’t learn anything and you’ll be covered with spit besides, because he sprays when he speaks.

  “I’m only sorry you’re going to miss G. Did I tell you her latest? She really wanted to fuck M” (Lillian named a famous American writer), “but he wasn’t interested, so she picked up this cab driver. She had him around for about a week—he looked good you know; Italian—and she told everyone he was muy macho. But she told me he was a lousy lay. Then he split because he got bored, so she told everyone she’d had to dump him because he was so forceful she’d got vaginitis. My God, that woman’s got a mouth. I felt like saying to her, ‘But, G, how could he do that with a limp prick?’”

  Lillian widened her eyes and covered her mouth when she saw I was blushing. “Oh, Mary, I keep forgetting I have to watch my language when I’m around you. Now to get to a cleaner subject, more your thing, Mary—there’s a little antique shop, Kaleidoscope. And you must meet M.F. She’s got a finger in every pie in Sydney. Not that Sydney’s got that many pies, you understand.”

  I cannot remember saying goodbye any more than I can remember who took care of the children while I was gone. But I can picture the scene. My older daughter would have been stony-faced. The younger one would have been crying. I would have been poised at a midpoint between happiness and guilt, and promising to bring back souvenirs.

  Sydney didn’t provide much in the way of souvenirs, only kangaroo-fur change purses. Nor did it have many pies. Why else would I have been treated as the Messenger from the West, passed from hand to hand, usually by editors from Australian Vogue, as this week’s novelty. “What’s happening in New York?” I’d be asked. “What’s happening in the theater?” ”Have you ever been to Max’s Kansas City?” On and on they went, endless questions from what seemed to me a coterie of displaced persons, uncertain of their place on this planet. When, desperate to maintain my unearned status as a cultural Colossus, I mentioned a Hopper show at the Museum of Modern Art that I hadn’t even seen, a fellow guest said, ”At last! A spontaneous mention of Edward Hopper in Australia!”

  Lillian’s friend M.F. gave a cocktail party for me, culling the guests from an address book as big as an accountant’s ledger. “I think you should meet an anthropologist, don’t you? And a politician, so I’ll ask Gough Whitlam. I’ll ask Barry Humphries, because he’s got a big name here as a comic—does Edna Everage, you know. And, of course, you’ll want an economist . . .” I was awed. Not even the mayor of New York could have summoned so fancy a group in so short a time, but, then, Australia was a very small pond, so small that its big frogs could be clustered on the pages of just one address book.

  At the party, flashbulbs popped, the drinking and backbiting reminded me of Dublin, and one guest, flaunting what Australians called the cultural cringe, said grandly, “We’re all copyists here.” Soon everybody departed, my hostess included, and I was left in an empty house, looking for a phone to call a cab.

  Out in the harbor the Opera House seemed to scud before the wind, like a schooner under full sail, but most of the buildings, my hotel included, and many of the shop signs evoked the England of Lilibet and Princess Margaret Rose. So did the women in their sensible shoes and practical coats and glazed gray hair, and the five-and-tens that at intervals announced a sale on counter six or counter eight and sent their customers scurrying through the aisles. I had always been infatuated with what I had read and seen of the 1950s—mostly in movies starring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers or James Cagney and Ruby Keeler—and now I was living in that decade, suddenly tranformed into my own mother.

  The Rocks, where the first convict ships docked, hadn’t yet become a cross between Williamsburg and Boston’s Quincy Market, and the nearby streets through which I wandered, looking for antiques shops, seemed sinister and Dickensian. Kings Cross, Sydney’s version of Times Square, was thronged with fresh-faced hookers just in from the country, and every inner suburb—sections, still, of Sydney but with names of their own—had a High Street, lined with greengrocers and butchers. All that was missing to remind me of London were red double-decker buses brandishing signs for Ty-Phoo tea. Then night came and, with it, stars that were in the wrong places and the realization that I had never been on soil so foreign. My ancestors’ bones were scattered all over Great Britain and Europe, maybe even Asia and Africa and the Americas. But not here, not on this curious continent. Home seemed impossibly distant; the miles between this world and mine incalculable. Some people long for lovers; those people who are said to be the missing halves of their psyches. The missing half of my psyche was not a lover but two daughters, three cats, an obstreperous dog, and the six o’clock smell of lambchops broiling on a rack. In truth, it still is.

  The promotion for Australian wool meant that, in the great fashion magazine tradition of rolling over and playing dead for potential advertisers, we were to devote several pages to a sheep ranch. So, with a photographer, a fashion editor, and a young New Zealander we saw in a park and who, with his fair hair and toothy grin, seemed to us as essential a photographic prop as an emu or a koala, I flew south to an aiport so small that it was open only if you called ahead and asked them to turn on the runway lights.

  The ranch was miles from the airport, at the end of an empty road that arrowed through rust-colored earth and hard blue hills furred with dense green trees. It was like driving through a void, but for the occasional interruption of thick heavy birds that swooped, lumbered really, in front of the car, stands of tall, thin ragged trees, and sudden clumps of ugly, boxy buildings freighted with the elaborate ironwork called Sydney lace. The light was unearthly, filtered through pewter-colored clouds to sit on tiny towns that resembled sets for a movie about the American frontier.

  The ranch house was enormous, Victorian, a Nob Hill monstrosity set in tangled grass and ringed with thousands of sheep. Its owner and sole occupant was a young woman who, when I asked if she was ever lonely, said, “Not when I see this land, this space . . .” and flicked a hand toward emptiness. My eyes followed her hand—she was pointing, it seemed, at infinity—and at that moment I fell in love with Australia. It was alien and yet it was not—when she said, “We think nothing of driving one hundred miles to a ball,” I thought of Jane Austen—and, like the Wild West of my Saturday afternoons at the movies, it promised the impossible.
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  “You conquered your interior,” a man at the cocktail party had said, “but ours defeated us.” “For God’s sakes,” another warned, “don’t let yourself be talked into a flight across the outback. The only diversion is spotting brushfires.” But I had forgotten all that. I was besotted with the air and the clarity and a silence that soothed like aloes.

  The young woman and I talked all day, wrapped in the peculiar intimacy of people who will never see each other again, and walked among the small, silly sheep and the shearing sheds and men who looked like cigarette ads. At night we dined in a room as formal, as glossed with silver and slicked with china, as any Spreckels mansion, and the young New Zealander couldn’t get over the pink linen napkins. “Pretty posh,” he said, and watched to see how we settled ours on our laps.

  The space. I had never been in such space. It should have made me feel small. It didn’t. I felt magnified, and magnified even further by an image left me by a man whose letters I kept in the top drawer of my bureau. He had traveled through the outback, he said, and had met an aborigine carrying a didgeridoo, a wind instrument. He tuned his guitar to the didgeridoo, and they played together. It may have been a fiction—most of his stories were—but I didn’t know that yet. Even so, I was suspicious. It was too good, too pat: civilized and primitive man meeting in a fugue. No matter. The image, combined with what I had seen myself, lifted me into the air, so high I was like the all-seeing eye on a dollar bill, scanning Australia, all Australia, all at once.

  Then I came home and found Rose Red sad because I had missed her ninth birthday by one day. I doubt she has ever forgiven me, and I know I have never forgiven myself. There was nothing I could have done about it. The airline I was on, had to be on, because again, in the great tradition of fashion magazines, the flight was a freebie—had only three or four flights a week to the United States. Still, I kept telling myself, I should have been there. I should have baked the cake. I should not have left her to be wet-eyed on the day she turned nine.

  The letters in the top drawer of my bureau were from a writer whom I had asked to contribute a short piece to the magazine’s book column. He did, and we embarked on a brief correspondence that grew, on his part, flirtatious. Maybe he liked the way I turned a phrase. More likely he thought that the former wife of a former acquaintance of his, a man who had punctured his ego by declining to work any longer with someone whose mendacity outweighed his considerable talents (B held no brief for the term “artistic license,” no matter how craftily employed), might add a few imprecations to his own.

  Eventually he wrote that he was going to be in New York for the weekend and could I have dinner. If I had heard unsavory things about him, and later I remembered I had, I disregarded them, so eager was I to talk about books and poetry. When I went to meet him one cold November night, an anthology of his work was hidden in my shoulder bag. If he was friendly, if he seemed nice, I was going to ask him to sign it for me.

  There was a cab strike that week, and I’d had a long walk from the bus stop. The chilly air pinked my cheeks, made me prettier than usual, I suspect, because I saw his face light up when he saw me waiting by the house phones. My first sight of my husband—dark, wearing a raincoat, standing in the living room of my college dormitory—is etched on my mind. So is my first sight of this man, the famous writer: big, fair, balding (his back hair, which he’d let grow long, had been swept up on one side and brushed across his bare pate), in a bright blue suit whose paisley lining notched his tie.

  I walked to meet him, extended my hand; he mumbled something and steered me to the dining room. Just as we were sliding into the banquette, he said, “Mary, you evah been screwed till ya screamed?”

  Before I could reply (just as well, because I couldn’t have), he said, turning to face me, “Ah’m a womanizer. Ah just love them tight-assed little girls.”

  He described a few: assorted college sophomores (“They don’t know nothin’”), a waitress in Lubbock, Texas (“Said ah was the finest man she evah knew”), a movie actress (“flat-chested but a good-time gal”).

  Perhaps I should have stopped my solitary (he was too busy talking to extend a helping hand) struggle with my coat. Perhaps I should have pulled it back onto my shoulders and flounced out the door. But I was titillated. Besides, I was carefully weaving a tale for the gang at the office. “Talk about feet of clay,” I was going to tell them. “His clay feet went right up to his hips!” Too, as I had with the man who dared me to drink a full glass of Scotch, I wanted to prove to myself that I was tough, that I could take it, that nobody and nothing could faze me. So I chattered, I glissaded, skittish as a hog on ice.

  “We don’t need all this food,” he said, pointing to my steak tartare. (In all the years we dined together I always ordered steak tartare because I was too nervous to chew.) “Come up to mah room. I’ve got a couple of six-packs on the windowsill.” A loud laugh. “I call it the Pigeon Bar.”

  I dodged, and mentioned the magazine I worked for and how proud we were to have published him. “Ah love ladies’ magazines,” he said. “Mah wife’s a fashion freak and she buys them all. And ah love them Zonite ads.”

  (“Mary,” a friend said the next day. “You didn’t find him just a bit of an oaf?”

  “No,” I said defensively. “It’s just that he says what everyone else is thinking.”)

  “You know what these are?” He reached into his pocket and dropped two pieces of metal on the table.

  I picked them up. “Guitar picks?”

  He was surprised. “You know anything about guitar?”

  “A little,” I said. “I have a lot of Doc Watson records and . . .” I dropped the small talk. “But what I really love is fado. Have you ever heard fado?”

  I was off, forgetting to whom I was speaking, forgetting what he’d been suggesting, intent only on describing the music.

  “Fado is a Portuguese word for, I guess, fate. And it describes a certain kind of song, a kind of wail. And the women who sing them are called fadistas. They sing about saudade, which is sorrow, but that’s too narrow a definition. It means longing and loss and regret for what you haven’t had and cannot even name, as well as for what you had that’s gone.

  “B and I used to hear fado in Lisbon. We went to Portugal twice and stayed in a little fishing village called Cascais—it’s rather fancy now—and drove into the city almost every night to park our car near the Ritz Hotel. Then we’d take a cab downtown to the Alfama—that’s a rabbit warren of narrow streets, the oldest part of Lisbon—for fado. We’d sit in a little room with benches and tables, and a man with a guitar would come out and perch on a stool. Then the fadista would appear and put a black shawl over her head and shoulders—they always put on a black shawl—-and sing. It’s like keenmg, Irish keening. You must get an Amalia Rodngues record. She’s the greatest fadista in Portugal.”

  On I went, my hands sketching the room and the night and the shawl dropping over the shoulders, out of New York and into Lisbon with my husband, excited and happy.

  “Keep it up, mah Mary,” he said. “You’re lookin’ good.”

  He quieted then. Maybe the bourbon he’d been drinking before he came down to the lobby—I didn’t know he was a heavy drinker—had worn off. Maybe, though, what happened to him was what I saw happen many times later. He had run down. He was overexcited when he got to the city, overexcited when he saw a new face, overanxious to stamp himself on a person or a room so that she, even it, would know she had met someone.

  He had performed so constantly, had so consciously constructed a public image, that he had erased his self. Maybe he had no self. Maybe to live he had to kill it. Maybe, too, his best work was behind him, so his next work, the one that would keep him busy for the rest of his life, was to create the legend he wanted to leave after himself.

  For all his weight and height and boasts and booming voice, and the way he V’d his thin, pale eyebrows over his round blue eyes and drew back his lips over his tall, narrow teeth when he fe
igned anger, he was as insubstantial as the jack o’lantern he sometimes resembled. There was only one time when he was real, at least to me, and that time began when, after my description of the fadistas, we began capping one another’s quotations. I was—we were? how can I speak for him?—as giddy as I had been on my first date with my first boyfriend when we discovered we both liked lemon Cokes.

  “Dover Beach” turned out to be one of our favorite poems. We recited it, or tried to—neither of us had a good memory for verse—in alternating lines. We talked about Gerard Manley Hopkins, and I told him of how, when my younger daughter said she wanted to be “young in her youth,” I thought of “Margaret, are you grieving / Over Goldengrove unleaving.”

  “There’s a rather peculiar English woman I like, too,” I said.

  “I know. I know,” he crowed. ’“I was much too far out all my life . . .”

  “‘And,’” I finished, “‘Not waving, but drowning.’”

  “Mah Mary,” he said, putting his hand over mine, “I’ll bet we’re the only two people in New York who know that poem. You know what I like about you? You’re mah equal. Mary Cantwell, we’re gonna be one long thing.”

  It was late, and I had to walk to Ninth Avenue to find a bus, so I got up to leave. On our way through the lobby he said, “It’s just as well you didn’t come upstairs. I wouldn’t have been much good to you.”

  “That wouldn’t have mattered. I think I’d have been happy just to sleep beside you.” Then, stunned by what I had said, I put my arms around his neck and kissed him.

  The next day, when I told a friend about my dinner with this writer I had idolized, she laughed, as I hoped she would, especially when I aped the way our natural accents exaggerated themselves as we spoke to each other, his getting more Southern, mine more New England. Then—flushed, flustered, a little teary—I confessed how much his saying I was his equal meant to me.