Hazel wore a gray skirt and a white linen shirt. “How are you?” she asked, and sat at her desk. “So you don’t like my plant.”

Calla leaned forward, catching the doggy scent of her woolen sweater: “And I don’t like the weather, it’s too warm for this time of year… I’ve just got all this stuff…”

“So tell me your stuff.”

“You don’t wear perfume.”

“No. You do sometimes, and sometimes you don’t.”

“What lipstick is that?” Calla asked.

“I think Clinique.”

“Red.”

“Well, yes, red.” Calla thought of Rebecca, a friend from college who had joined a strict sect of Hasidic Jews, where red was forbidden as apparel for women because it attracted attention. She remembered Rebecca telling her the story of a famous Hasidic master who cared luxuriantly about every one of his followers, evinced by how he called them yidele, diminutive for Yid, the Jew, as a husband would call his wife darling. Rebecca was an extremist. One week she dropped acid, the next she agreed to never go out without wearing a wig. “What size shoes do you wear?” Calla asked Hazel.

Hazel looked at her watch. “Two more minutes on me. Five and a half.”

“I thought so.” Calla wore eights. Hazel waited. “I have this book,” Calla said, “on names. Where they derive from.” It was actually a cheap paperback to help parents name babies and featured a pink husky one on the cover. “Hazel means authority or commander, from the Anglo-Saxon.” Calla carried the book in her bag with her scripts, makeup, paltry-ass money and the rest of her junk.

“I used to think my parents got it off the maid on that TV show—Shirley Booth. Remember her?” Hazel asked.

Calla laughed, too loudly. “When was that, the sixties?”

Hazel nodded. Booth had also starred in that sad play, Come Back, Little Sheba.   “How are the kids?” Calla asked. Hazel had two young boys, of whom Calla would have loved to hear more than the facts of their existence and Hazel’s divorce. But Hazel’s silence said that Calla had blown her chances for further information. Last week Calla remarked that raising the kids alone would be nicer anyway, wouldn’t it? Hazel had frowned and asked why Calla thought that. But Calla had seen in the practically seamless second before Hazel responded an instant of hurt, even anger—oh, why had she chosen to spend her life with off-the-beam people like this, like Calla? Calla knew by the subtle tightening of Hazel’s features. Calla was sure Hazel had no idea of the expressiveness of her own face, the messages jumping out at the room, the hopes unintentionally raised. What did Calla hope for? Answers, the wisdom Hazel had gleaned from the how-to guide that Calla figured she’d read in her crib.

“Talk,” Hazel said. Calla crossed her sweaty legs in the jeans and pushed her hot hair from her face. Hazel’s chin rested on her hands and the David hung in the triangle made by her arms and the surface of the desk. Silence bloomed, and within it Calla felt the tempo of herself increase to a throbbing in her temples and wrists.

“I’m going to do something desperate,” she said.

“You? Doubtful. Why do you feel like you will?”

True. Calla didn’t do desperate. Hers was a desperation that couldn’t be seen until one day your life was a smashed smoking wreck and you couldn’t conceive of what happened. If I could be you, Calla thought, watching Hazel. If I were a man and saw you I wouldn’t be immediately attracted, for Hazel’s beauty was quiet, and nothing of depth and value reaches; it waits. If I were a man, Calla thought, I would note the essential sobriety, the wit, detect the balance, the grace, wonder about the bright lips on the pale face until I drew close enough to sense the lushness of your body, see the fineness of your skin. She thought: how could he leave you? And: if you would tell me something, Hazel darling. Talk to me. Talk. And, oh, if you knew how well the transference is going.

“Come on, Calla. Get real.”

Pause. “This is stupid,” said Calla. “I don’t know what it has to do with. But in the third grade we were doing a difficult problem in math, in long division, and I came up with an answer I was sure was right. I fought for it, hard, because I was crummy at math and ecstatic at getting the answer. But the teacher said I was wrong. We went through the problem together and she showed me my error and… I mean, all that passion, all that conviction—I was wrong! I was upset, and you know what she said? That she admired my conviction. I wasn’t comforted though, because…so what? Who the hell cares if it’s—wrong?”

“Though your teacher had a point,” Hazel said. “In some situations, conviction itself would be the point. In acting—”

“Well.” Tone: well, that. Conviction over what was completely unreal. Of late her profession struck Calla with the force of a bad morning-after. It was like all the text had gone out of it—and the human breath, leaving lights, makeup, and tawdry sets: heat without sound, matter minus substance. “I miss Ralph,” she said to Hazel’s inquiring eyes. Ralph she could sum up in three or four words: I left Ralph. Ralph is a prick. “The thing of it is, I didn’t love him,” she said. “I loved his kids, his house.” Before Hazel could pounce on the kids Calla said, “I never told you about the house, did I?” Well, her feeling about the house was true, real, was riddled with meaning that twisted inside her. She felt a physical longing for its chill, the give of the old wooden floors and the light filtering through the dusty windows and his paint, god damn it, the creamy blobs on the palette, liquid in bowls, how it gleamed wetly on canvas, the wafts of it lacing the air.

The house wasn’t Ralph anymore, it was walls that held children and art and ghostly voices of worship.

“It’s a brick row house, with a big stoop and stone steps. The first floor’s the living room, with two little rooms at the front for Sophia and Montgomery. Ralph put up the walls himself. Something flimsy. Beaverboard? Dry wall? He sectioned a space for the bathroom to the side of the living room space, and at the back of this floor is the kitchen looking out at the yard.” The throbbing in her wrists had crept up to the soft insides of her elbows and the ones in her temples beat in her neck. “You go upstairs and the whole second floor is his studio. But it’s two floors high because the third floor was the balcony, from when the building was a synagogue and the women sat up there.” Yeah, so when he paints he’s with God, she thought. Like he needed the encouragement. But she still loved it. The house. He’d asked her home to see his etchings, hee-haw, and she didn’t care, didn’t care how many women he’d made like that, she was smitten. “His bedroom’s in the back part of the balcony, and along the sides are just long strips of floor with railings overlooking the studio.” Cold, always cold in the winter because there was no central heating, and he’d move the space heater from the studio up to the bedroom at night, and the coils panted heat across the raw wooden floor, to where she stood in high heels and a short yellow skirt by the full-length mirror leaned against dark dusty curtains that covered a wall, curtains that were there when the women chanted prayers. The mirror was propped, between lighted candles, on a steamer trunk. Ralph was Catholic, ritualistic, and here they started the sex they accomplished each night standing up, only moving to the bed for the mounting frenzy part. He’d sleep, and she’d put on her robe and walk out along one of the sides of the balcony to gaze down at the wet paintings that lay on the studio floor. Their sex quickly declined to a concession for her, mostly a bore, because Ralph was emotionally limited, tending to revel in dumb repetition, knowing nothing but how to inflate and defile. “He cleared all the pews himself,” she told Hazel. “The building was a deal he got from the city. It’s on the Lower East Side. Lots of black-coated Hasidim, Hebrew writing on buildings and signs, all very exotic to a WASP from suburban Detroit, where anyone Jewish was always reformed. What are you?”

“I’m more of a cultural Jew,” Hazel said.

“Oh. Well, the building, I suppose, was bohemian heaven to me,” and laughed.

“You’ll like this. I had a dream I remember.” The radiator chugged its vestigial heat into the room. “I was at my parents’ house, but I was myself now, and I heard crying from the backyard. So I went out. The crying had stopped, though there was a glow in the darkness of the ravine where I used to play as a kid. I went to its edge and it had turned to a stirring swamp. Something was moving within glowing murky watery darkness, a creature the size of a two-year-old child. It waded up from the ravine covered in murk, leaves stuck to its head and body. I held out my arms to it and it was coming. That’s all.”

“You really identified with that baby, didn’t you?” Hazel said.

“My interpretation is that it’s a straightforward abortion dream.”

Hazel maintained her relaxed, concentrated demeanor.

“I am the creature?” Calla said, angry. The entirety of the experience to Hazel was Calla, as though Calla was incapable of feeling for anything apart from herself.

“What’s going on?” Hazel said.

“You know what he did?”

“Ralph?”

“Dropped me off afterwards at the townhouse. Didn’t even come in. Went off to teach Life Drawing at the New School.” She hadn’t asked him to stay. They hadn’t been together since she moved out of his house in September. The pregnancy, therefore, was only an inconvenience, a mistake, impossible to consider or mourn. “I didn’t want him to come inside anyway,” she said. She had wanted to peel away the tight pants she had worn like a jerk to the clinic.

“What’s the swamp?” Hazel asked.

Calla’s eyes blurred with tears, “A womb.”

“Why are you thinking about religion?” Then Hazel said it was normal that Calla should obsess on it now.

“I believed when I was nine,” Calla said. It was after her parents died and before she had gone to live with her aunt and uncle. She had been sent to a Methodist church camp she adored. “I gave a speech at camp about my faith. I don’t remember what I said. But I held them spellbound. I remember my—” she laughed “—conviction. I was a child preacher, possessed. But what I said eludes me, utterly. I remember big sky and silvery lake. Pine trees were everywhere. Their needles softened the ground, and the pine scent was so strong it was the first thing I registered when I awoke in the morning—before I remembered my parents. But how I moved from my—optimally pantheistic awareness to an avowal of faith, I have no idea.”

“Interesting,” Hazel said.

“Thank you,” said Calla. “Am I your best patient?

“I haven’t decided,” Hazel said, writing.

“The creature wasn’t just me,” Calla said. Hazel looked up. “You meant in one sense.” Hazel did. “I would have named her Hester,” Calla said. “Persian for star.”

“In Hebrew it’s Esther,” said Hazel.

“And there’s Estelle.”

“Why would it have been a daughter?”

Calla smirked. “Got me there.” Or Helga, she thought, Teutonic for “holy.”

As the hour neared its end Hazel said, “I’d like to remind you of all the good things you’ve been doing for yourself.”

Calla wrote out a check and put it on Hazel’s desk. “I’d like to be,” she said without a trace of wistfulness, with decision in fact, “decisive. One who either wears perfume or doesn’t.”

“So make a decision, Calla,” said Hazel.

In the elevator, Calla decided that pinning “star” or “holy” on a kid was a bad idea, would create too much pressure, such outlandish hope, a lightning rod for god knows what. She resisted the urge to open her bag and flip through the baby naming book, thought of Iola, dawn cloud or violet, from the Greek, nice but neutral, more open to a number of interpretations.

In the lobby she ran into Cliff Berman, who lived in the building and whom she’d expected to see here since she began coming to Hazel. Cliff and Ralph had gone to high school together at Music & Art and had reconnected in their young middle age, four years ago, at about the time Ralph met Calla. Cliff had gifted Calla the airfare to get to a summer theater job in the Midwest. Cliff was in Broadway shows and had a recent role in a hit Hollywood movie. “Calla!” he called, approaching her as he leafed through his mail.

“What are you doing here?”

He didn’t look like a movie star. He was a stocky wearer of glasses. His coarse black hair was traditionally cut, his aura was Actor’s Studio rather than charismatic. She liked him, admired his talent. “Hi, Cliff.” She imagined he knew about the split with Ralph.

“Calla, what are you doing here?” Her manifestation in his building really impressed him. They stood by the elevator, where he shoved his considerable pile of envelopes into the large front pockets of his light coat.

“My therapist’s office is on the fifth floor. How are you?”

“You’re in therapy?”

“Yeah. Everyone does it, haven’t you?”

“God, Calla.” His response evoked the guy he played in the movie, sincere and sort of smarmy at the same time. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine.” Her eyes bright, but not red.

Beat. “How’s Ralph?” and he pressed the up button. “Tell him hello and we’ll get together.”

“Cliff? You know Oh! Calcutta? The show?”

“Why?” he said.

“Um. How bad is it?” she asked.

“Calla, it’s porn. It’s for tourists from countries where they don’t speak the language. You’re not in it, are you?”

“No. The elevator, Cliff.”

He got in but held the doors back with a hand. “Complete nudity,” he said. “Frontal, sideways, every which way,” and she pictured him in the film’s bedroom scene in his black bikini underpants and giggled.

His black brows drew together, and then the doors clamped shut fast like predatory jaws that swallowed him whole.

“Bye, Cliff!”

Outside it was cooler, and as she walked west on Fifty-Seventh Street for no particular reason, she enjoyed the air and staved off the renewed anxiety the encounter with Cliff had prompted by considering what she knew about him up until today. His wife was a pretty ex-model who sat knitting in her husband’s dressing room when he appeared on Broadway in the new Neil Simon. Ralph said that for years she and Cliff had wanted a child, but she couldn’t get pregnant. Calla knew nothing else regarding this sorrow. Cliff, Ralph said, had come far since Music & Art. At fifteen, an overweight putz in a yarmulke with a briefcase, an egghead and the object of taunts, at sixteen he had come back transformed, well-muscled, naked-headed and slim, hands freed of their former burden, and set on the course that would lead to his transfer to the Performing Arts High School and eventual glory on the Silver Screen. Calla said dryly to Ralph, alert to the condescension of the supposedly purer and cooler visual artists toward their goofy performing cousins, after he delivered this narrative of Cliff, that anyway Cliff’s application had certainly paid off—an intentional dig, given Ralph’s constant and exaggerated woes over money and recognition.

“No,” she said out loud in the middle of the crowded sidewalk. The pavement lurched, and she nearly fell. People were higher, stronger, bumping her shoulder, shooting dismissive looks. She tried to keep walking with purpose but couldn’t. Her orientation dissolved, as it had last night when she opened her closet and her clothes looked dead, devoid of their reason for hanging in wait for her body to shape them.

She dodged into a coffee shop and ordered tea from a seat at the counter.  Hamburgers sizzled in the long narrow mirror above. The waiter set down her cup, a spoon on a thin napkin. She opened the package and lowered the bag through the steam; someone lit a cigarette, and everything shifted, clicked back into place.

Why did Cliff behave as though therapy made her Sylvia Plath? She’d only asked his advice on the play. But she might have been rife with contagion, just saying the title. So thoroughly was he convinced of the artistic integrity of Neil Simon and the cameras recording his practically bare-assed leap into the bed of that star whose name she could never remember.

She got up to call Ralph, was directed to the back through a narrow passageway smelling of pine soap. Pine like the trees; they must use the soap on the floors. There was a rack on the wall holding coats, a sign for the restrooms and a payphone. She’d get Ralph’s opinion. She dropped in a coin. The machine would answer, and with luck, he would have on the sound.

“Hello?” Sophia.

“Hi, it’s Calla, what’re you doing home, honey?”

“Calla, hi, I got three loads of wash and I’m watching soaps.” This would be enough explanation for Ralph. Sophia went to school or she didn’t, a phase, don’t get exercised, he had said. If Sophia, however, failed to hold up her end of the housework, then there’d be exercise. Sophia was fourteen. “Daddy’s not here if you wanted to talk to him,” she said. “It’s Thursday, he’s teaching Landscape Painting at SVA. Then he’s going to the doctor’s, he’s got swollen glands.” Selfish, thought Calla, he pampered his hypochondria when, she recalled, Sophia needed a new winter coat. She had forgotten the class and was relieved that he wasn’t home. Sophia had a high nasal voice and spoke with a Puerto Rican accent, like her friends, though she wasn’t Puerto Rican: “Calla, how are you? Can I come by the house?”

“I told you anytime, honey, I’d love you to see it.” Calla lived in the library of a three-story townhome belonging to an heiress on the Upper East Side. It was a bargain, and she had plenty of space and privacy, with the heiress frequently off to another one of her many abodes that dotted the surface of the Western Hemisphere. But Calla couldn’t relax there, would always associate these months in her life with incidents like the dead clothes and the most deadening incident of all. What she had mainly looked forward to when she moved in was Sophia’s reaction to the house, the pleasure she knew Sophia would take—that bohemian child—in the cool quiet grandeur of the place: the garden, the spotless kitchen, the carpeted stairs, the massive rooms, the thick walls and doors. Like a dream! Calla imagined Sophia saying. But Sophia had yet to come, had not found the time or remembered to set a date, though Calla knew that Sophia cared about her and had appreciated her kindness. Too many women had passed through Sophia’s life, her own mother, her half-brother Montgomery’s mother, all of the girlfriends, and Calla had only lived in the synagogue house for a year. A year hadn’t been enough time to develop a lasting relationship with Sophia.

“I’ll come next week,” Sophia said.

“I’ll call and remind you.”

“Okay….” Sophia’s attention faded, and Calla heard the TV.

“I love you, Sophia.”

“I love you, Calla,” loud gush, with the accent.

“Don’t tell him I called,” Calla said.

Pine soap. Sadness, just dull solid sadness—I’m going, she decided. Frontal, sideways, every which way, she needed a job. It was one-thirty and the audition was at two.

“Calla?” She stood on the stage looking out into the darkness at the director, a middle-aged guy in a plaid flannel shirt and an unfortunate hairpiece, like the fur of an ugly little animal—the one tangible detail, she thought, that matched the sleaziness of the enterprise, although honestly, they had treated her with impeccable professionalism at both the first audition and this one so far. It was a full-scale union production at a Broadway house. They wouldn’t “sing her” today, they had said, and for that she was grateful, she wasn’t a singer. She had just finished reading Scene 22, a dirty takeoff on Jack and Jill during which Jill, the script specified, wore a pinafore and nothing else. It was bad, really bad, anyone would agree. “Great, Calla,” said the director, “really great,” and as he smiled at her, all of the paychecks, telephone calls, people, money, rent, paper, props, fabric, sweat, upkeep that enabled the enactment of this dirty little scene reeled through her mind and literally made her sway for a second. “You okay?” he asked. “Yeah, just hot.”

“Come out of the light,” he said, and she walked to the edge of the stage. She thought of men in glass towers, coolly discussing slaughter. Without rising from his seat in the sixth row between other men, the director said, “We need a nude audition.” She hadn’t known whether it would happen today. “There’s a robe offstage right. Put it on, take your time, and then come out and tell us a story, three or four minutes. Tell us about yourself, tell a secret, and make it physical, starting with the robe closed and then slowly—” he gestured with his hand “—take the robe off. Got it?”

“Okay.” An automaton, she listened to the heels of her shoes as she walked out of the light and into the shadows.  She saw a tall wooden stool next to the ropes but did not see a robe. Then the stage manager she had read with handed her a robe very gently and said, “Put your clothes here,” the stool, “there’s a mirror over there,” and disappeared. The robe, once white, was an indeterminately grayish thing beyond smell, almost slick to the touch with a substance composed of ground-in dirt, oil, makeup, and crusted dried sweat, the substances rather of a hundred, hell, a thousand bodies: she had never touched anything like it. She set it down on the stool, it felt almost alive, and slipped out of her shoes, took off her socks, felt the floor cool but unsurprising and strangely unthreatening beneath her bare feet: realized she was fine, unzipped and stepped out of her jeans. It was quiet back here; it was quiet out front. Contemplating the task ahead, she finished undressing and put on the robe: it fell to her calves. She shut it with the belt and stood thinking: a mirror? Why would I need a mirror? To check the state of my body before I go on? Last night her left breast leaked a thin stream of milk. She should check her hair, and she went to the mirror leaned against a brick wall but found it blurred in the spot where her head should have been. The silvering was worn thin. “All right,” she said, breathing, feeling her heart, and walked out on the stage.

“Hello,” casual, shy, clutching the robe, arms wrapped around herself over the belt, small steps like a geisha, warm in the light. She smiled at them and then saw another wooden stool at center stage and it startled her and stole her concentration, she hadn’t heard anyone put it there. “All right,” she said to the stool. Then she went and sat down on the stool and refocused.

“Hi.” She could not really see them. Onstage, you knew people were there, you felt them, but apart from the first row or two the audience was in blackness, vaguely perceived.  She had thought she should tell them the significance of her name, how it referred to the trumpet-like lily, and to Calliope—fair voiced—the muse of epic poetry. Instead, she said, “Money is real. Like most actors, I never have any. So I needed a job…. Somebody told me about a receptionist job at a bordello. I say ‘bordello’ rather than, say, I don’t know, ‘bawdyhouse’—” she laughed too loudly. Breathe. “I say bordello because this house of ill repute was in an elegant brownstone in Gramercy Park. The worlds, you know, behind doors in New York.”

Boring? She upped the intensity. “I was broke. Afraid. I hoped this would be the solution. When the guard buzzed me in and I entered, there were two young presentable women at the front desk. One of them called, I guess, the boss, and told me to wait. I sat on a gorgeous couch. The carpet was lush, the air sweet. I felt—embraced. The job was supposed to pay much more than answering phones at a restaurant or an office. There was a glass wall in front of me. Through it was a pool, where people swam and beautiful women served poolside drinks and chatted with men. They all wore swimsuits, so if these were the—hostesses and the—clients, you couldn’t tell.”

She stood, undid the belt and let the robe gape. “I was ushered into a room, where a man wearing shades sat at a desk. He asked me questions about myself. Then he told me I could make between two and six thousand a week. Most girls averaged four. There’d been a misunderstanding. ‘I’m here for the receptionist job,’ I said. ‘What does that pay?’ He said, ‘Minimum wage.’” One of the men in the darkness laughed. “Well, sure, I thought. Dolt. Nobody gets anything for nothing. But I felt—I saw that a door had opened. For a moment I felt that I could walk through it so easily, into another dimension. I’ll tell you, I was a little bit tempted. I was a little enticed, even a little proud that I qualified. I wondered if they offered on-the-job training.” The man laughed again. “But most of all,” she said, “I saw I could become someone entirely different.” She pushed the robe from a shoulder and then let it drop and stood holding it in one hand. Idiot, she thought, she should have done a slow strip. That was what they had wanted. And so she turned, and dragging the robe behind her, walked into the wings.

She should have put it back on. They’d think her belligerent, ungrateful for the opportunity. Dressed, she returned to the light, and the director actually waited at the foot of the stage. She noticed that his toupee had ripples when seen from up close: marcels. He’d liked it? He smiled. “Excellent, Calla, we’ll call with an offer tomorrow,” and he put out his hand and they shook, and as she came off the stage and collected her belongings from the front row, the other men also smiled, warmly, and she nodded, walking fast up the aisle, out of the theater, across the lobby and out to the sidewalk. Her teeth chattered violently, and as she shrugged on her jacket, she could tell that it really was colder than before.

Thinking that she would walk home she walked east, knowing as if she had always known, without having decided, that they could offer her a fortune to stand by for the one in the cast who didn’t get sick, put her in a foreign tour, she could be starving but she wouldn’t do it—and then she stopped thinking about it, wouldn’t think of it again for years, and when she did think of it later it was of something she’d done she could not comprehend, a numb chunk of her past like a block of ice big as a room but shrouded by a dark heavy drape, or like something tiny and lodged in her solar plexus, and she would never know really why she had gone and what she’d intended.

Walking due east, she arrived at the Diamond District, as if beckoned by the men in the black coats, the black hats, the peyots. They walked in two’s and three’s by the glittering windows, and into the doors where the gems were stored. She wondered if big yellow school buses brought them here. She often saw them in buses, like armies charging into the city and the market and the houses of learning, their uniforms leaching differences from them and blending them into a force, one black-white-yellow image. The hats, she knew, were to remind them that there was always something—someone—above them, because of coursethis was easy to forget. She stopped in front of a window where a man in a yarmulke, vest, and shirtsleeves was adding a diamond necklace to the display. As he stepped back from the window she tried to catch his eye, but he didn’t see her, there were too many people, people in the city stopped looking, or it was due to his faith, his veneer, or simply his businessman’s bustle causing him not to see. But he reminded her of the assembly line abortion, sitting outside the rooms where they did it in a line of women in matching gowns, each holding doomed inchoate flesh deep within.

She turned away from the window. What bothered her most was the drawing of Joan on Ralph’s bathroom wall. Joan was Ralph’s second wife and Montgomery’s mother. On the wall she was nude, great with child. Joan, variation of Jane, was Hebrew for god’s gracious gift. By the time Ralph met Calla he was finished with children and wives, didn’t draw anymore, was only interested in abstraction and had never done a portrait of her. No—she walked on—recalling a postcard of the Mona Lisa a friend had sent Ralph from the Louvre. Ralph had carefully cut Calla’s face from a photograph, pasted it to the postcard, and blended with tempera the hair and fleshly outlines of the painting with her own. He had also refined her features on the photographed face, creating an idealized Calla, a Calla-Lisa, which had pleased her then but didn’t now. There was no body, no real face but two combined, and the Mona Lisa was silent, unknown, mysterious, dead. Vendors hawked chestnuts and hot dogs and people looked grimmer in the cooling afternoon. Heavy clouds veiled the sky.

Pausing at another window, she thought of the time she had seen Andy Warhol studiously observing the sparkling rows through the glass. She was shocked, as if seeing an elephant in a parlor—although where would she have expected to see him, at the A & P studying soup? He was looking at real, valuable things. She recalled his famous pallor and pockmarked skin, and the window and the men in black coats, two coming at her against the crowd’s current, just didn’t fit, she couldn’t put it together, it was too disparate, dissonant, clashing, and she felt she might swoon. She didn’t want to be Calla-Lisa, or any representation. With all of herself that went down to the dark earth under the sidewalk, she wanted the child.

 

From a side window of Ray’s Pizza on Eleventh Street, she looked out at the Mondrian squares of PS 41, the Greenwich Village School. Joan lived with Montgomery twelve blocks away in a spacious loft leased by a quiet responsible architect—the very opposite of Ralph. Joan was a film and video editor and, lately, her name rushed down the screen at the end of the CBS local six o’clock news: her last name remained Ralph’s.

Calla had never met Joan, though they had frequently spoken on the phone before Calla handed the receiver to Ralph for what was most often a shouting match over money, in the midst of which Ralph would slam down the phone. Millstone, bitch, traitor, spy, he called Joan, and Calla had sided with him against her. Sell the house, Joan would say, if you can’t afford it. He could afford it, what he couldn’t afford were extras.

“You call your son extra?”

“He’s hungry? He hasn’t got clothes and a roof? Ask your boyfriend, Joanie, you’re looking for frills.”

Calla noted the familiarity of Joanie. They relished fighting, the flip side of passion. Joan was a twin, Ralph told her, the beautiful smart female twin, and her brother was a skinny stupid lug ever since they were babies, as if Joan had sucked all the vigor from him for herself in the womb. But then one Halloween, as Calla as Cat Woman sat next to Ralph as Zorro in a cab stopped at a light, not far from Ray’s Pizza, Ralph’s perpetual animation went dead like a plug yanked from a socket, and his eyes in the slits of the mask became narrow and fixed: “Joan,” he said. Crossing the street was the vampire, Mata Hari, the fertility goddess herself, an attractive blonde carefully dressed for underplayed hipness in a vintage riding jacket, worn jeans, expensive boots. But she was short. Passing a man, her head barely grazed his shoulder, and Calla deduced Joan didn’t crack five feet. Her stature could not have been easy. Eliciting even neutral regard, let alone respect, wasn’t easy for any woman, much less one short as a child. Never again could Calla think of Joan as the person Ralph claimed she was.

Not that she liked her. Joan was an arrogant woman and often insensitive, Calla believed, to Montgomery’s needs. Of course, Murray, as he’d asked to be called, was in Calla’s eyes perfect. If he preferred Murray to Monty, Joan’s moniker, Joan should honor his choice. Calla pushed away her half-eaten pizza and sipped her cold coffee. “No,” Joan had said, “I will not call you Murray, Monty, Murray sounds like a fuckin’ comedian in the Catskills.” That was three or four months ago when Calla had called to arrange the boy’s usual weekend visit with his father and Joan had answered the phone and Murray corrected her when she yelled “Hey! Monty!” Fortunately, Joan liked her space and didn’t use visitation as a weapon. And she wasn’t a jealous mother. Since Calla and Ralph broke up, Calla had taken Murray a couple times to the movies and dinner. Her little date. Montgomery, from the French: mountain hunter. She’d assumed this meant hunter in the mountains, killer of animals indigenous to mountainous terrain. Now, she thought, would he hunt mountains? Grandeur? The heights?

Just then, the schoolyard began expelling children to adults mingling outside, parents, nannies, older brothers, and sisters. Calla jumped up and hurried to join them. It was getting brisk, and people wore gloves and scarves, although some, who may have been out since morning, were underdressed and shivered, impatiently scanning the clots of children.

She couldn’t have missed him. Murray would never be the first out a door in his life. She felt the thrill of a voyeur, imposing herself into this oddly intimate area of his existence. School, for as long as he lived this place would be redolent, full of bright days echoing over the years. The scene was strangely bucolic to Calla, what with busy Sixth Avenue nearby, commerce and noise everywhere: but look at them coming from school, book bags and lunchboxes knocking and drawings waving from hands, parents gathered to lead them to snacks, homework, dinner, and wonderful beds. Joan wasn’t here, but if the architect waited, Calla wouldn’t know him. There he was! Oh god, wearing his new blue down jacket he’d carried since late September, with another little boy, who would be Jim, his best friend, his Dungeons & Dragons friend, handsome, Hispanic, and severely nearsighted. Murray resembled Edward G. Robinson. Even when he was four, descending alone from the bus on which he traveled from Woodstock where he then lived, Calla’s first impression was an impulse to stick in his mouth a fat cigar.

She met him at the end of the walkway. “Calla, hi!” he said. “What a coincidence.” They grinned at each other.

“Hi, Murray,” she said.

“Here’s Jim.”

“Hello, Jim.” Jim pushed his wire-rimmed glasses up higher on his nose, and a disarrayed woman, hanks of hair falling out of her ponytail, coat open over a wrinkled sweatshirt and stretched-out jeans, came and greeted the group. She looked happy, thought Calla, fulfilled.

“Selma, meet Calla,” said Murray, with graceful introductory motions, “my father’s girlfriend.” Socially adept—why clutter the moment with ex’s? Murray’s easy good nature, his precocity and knowing instincts, the broad sweep of his arms: host-like, that’s what he was. She thought he would grow up to be the much-loved host of a cozy steakhouse on the West Side.

Selma said she was taking both boys. “He goes home with you?” Calla asked.

“Most days,” said Selma.

“We have an appointment,” said Jim despondently.

“I bet you play Dungeons & Dragons,” said Calla, and the boys exchanged an almost romantic look of happy complicity.

“Dentist,” said Selma.

“So they’ll drop you off?” Calla asked Murray.

“It’s okay,” he said, “I lock up and Joan’s home at five.”

“Oh, look,” Calla said, “you want to go to McDonald’s?” Murray put his hand on his heart and staggered backward a step. “Then I’ll take him home,” Calla said to Selma. “I’ll feel better about it.”

“You don’t have to,” Selma said.

“I want to really,” said Calla warmly.

“Okay, see you tomorrow, Monty,” said Selma.

“Murray,” he answered firmly. “Bye, Jim, I’ll call you tonight,” and he turned to Calla: “McDonald’s, you thought I’d say no?”

Calla watched Selma and Jim walking off down the sidewalk, then set off with Murray in the other direction.

“So you were passing by,” he said.

“Yup, saw the kids coming out and thought I might see you. It’s been a while, how’ve you been, honey?”
“Oh good, good,” he had been good and wanted her to know it. To Calla this meant he trusted that she really cared, and this made her glad.

“There’s one at Fifteenth,” Murray said. “And how’ve you been?”

She smiled rather than answer, and Murray accepted this feint for the time being. Later he’d ask about her auditions, and even inquire about her love life, understandable given the divorces, live-ins, and dating among the adults of his acquaintance. Or it was due to Sophia’s influence.  As a teenager, Sophia felt that the one destination in life was true love. Calla could hardly bear to consider the potential reality of Sophia’s arrival after that long trip of dreams.

“I can smell it from here,” Murray said. They stepped up onto the curb after crossing Fourteenth Street. “That good juicy beef and rich sauce on a roll.” He had his father’s lust for sensation and his lack of inhibition in expressing it, but already Murray was subtler in his demands, more aware others had needs.

They went in and took their hard, plastic seats. “What’ll it be?” he asked.

“Get me tea, okay?” and she gave him money.

“Sure! Can do!” She watched him amble to the line, a comfortable city kid, then he turned back and waved: God, the face. Sophia had the face of a Madonna in a Renaissance painting, but Murray’s had character.

Hot again, she foraged in her bag for a clip to put back her hair. Her hand hit the book and a shock of anger coursed up her arm. She gave up, closed her bag and waited.

“Yum,” he said, setting down the tray. “Calla, what’s wrong?”

“Oh, Murray. I am so sad.” She shouldn’t do what each of his parents did to him.

“Ah, nothing serious,” she assured him. He recommenced unloading the tray, and albeit with less enthusiasm, unwrapped his Big Mac and started to eat. “Just, you know, one of those days,” she said. “No reason. Does that ever happen to you?”

“Oh, for sure. I can be grouchy big time.”

“How’s your hamburger?”

“Fit for a king. You get up on the wrong side of the bed.” While they ate he talked about Dungeons & Dragons and Jim, and she told him about a small part she’d done in a commercial for Hertz rental cars. Then he had another Coke and she had another tea and she felt so much better she said, “Know what? I want a kid.” Lightly. “You want to be my kid?” He could sleep in the heiress’s room, until she got back from Madrid. She recalled a McDonald’s at Lexington and 86^th.

Poor guy, his wide brown eyes that flashed with joy—until something outrageous was suddenly expected of him—had dimmed.

“I’m teasing you, honey,” she said. “I don’t want a kid yet.”

“Well,” he said, “you’re a young girl yourself.” She just knew Joan had said that about her when she and Ralph first got together. She glanced at her watch. Outside it was nearly dark. The thought of taking him home flooded her with despair.

“Murray, let’s go see Sophia!”

“Now?” he said delightedly.

They’d never get to the Lower East Side in time to call Joan at five. But Joan would call Selma. Calla liked the idea of Joan in a panic, just for a bit. Though she wouldn’t be pleased by Calla’s presumption, she’d know that Murray was safe.

Murray zipped up his jacket and put on his mittens. “Sophia,” he said, “my big beauty sister.” New, Calla thought, but consistent with the kids’ closeness.

She had to do it, obsession or exorcism, she had to go to the house. The F train was conveniently situated at the corner. Murray zoomed down the steps and waited for her at the bottom. “Crowded,” he said. “Rush hour,” she replied. But when the F came it wasn’t bad, they got seats together and only a few people stood swaying and jolting at stops. Murray kicked rhythmically at the base of his seat, studied an outdated ad for Ed Koch’s landslide re-election, winked at a woman admiring his cuteness, and Calla thought of the survivor she’d seen on this very train, the F. One afternoon in summer, returning to Ralph’s, as she stared at the dirty floor, hands reached to tie a shoelace and she saw numbers, the numbers, exposed by the cuff of a jacket pulled high, dark hair sparse against the white skin of his arm. At first, she didn’t look up, just breathed the air he breathed. She let his visage seep into her peripheral vision, sidelong glances roughing him in, cheaply dressed, khakis, dark blue polyester sport coat, light blue shirt open at the neck; thinning dark hair, prominent forehead, five o’clock shadow; sixty years old, she guessed. Then she looked him full in the face and—her skin burned at the memory—she wanted to kiss him. It wasn’t pity. It wasn’t to comfort, as if kissing a stranger would do anything but offend. It was attraction to what she thought he would know.

Hazel had once said that as time passed Calla would remember more about her parents, memories suppressed by the shock of their sudden deaths. And Hazel turned out to be right, until as the decades rolled by, Calla’s parents faded again, as others in her generation were orphaned, as with the years they all became orphans. The previous generation stepped farther back on the stage, a scrim dropped in front of them and they were wraiths, then gone. You strained to catch the lost timbre of a voice, the glint of an eye. But the survivor, across the years, retained for Calla the same concreteness of that day long ago on the train. She always felt ashamed for her attraction, her presumption, and yet his image blazed in her mind the world’s threat and terrible mercy.

“Hey,” Murray said, tugging her jacket. They stepped to the platform and went up the stairs. From the street she saw the river in the distance, crowned by the dark bridge.

“Cold,” Murray said, “I smell snow.” The sky was heavy, the neighborhood muted and dark, the Korean vegetable stand and the projects rising hard and still farther off, the barbecue joint and the dairy restaurant and the graffiti-marked wall by the gas station and Push ‘n Shoves, Ralph’s name for one of the markets, and the Catholic church where Thomas O’Shea, the young priest, hid from the world, according to Ralph. People hurried along, and a group of dark youths yelled from a stoop. The metallic cold lay over car exhaust and tempered whiffs of rank garbage. At the kosher bakery, lit in a row of dark shops, three boys in peyots and yarmulkes pushed against the counter and pointed, open-mouthed. “I know that guy,” said Murray, and knocked on the window. “Hey, hey, Bernard,” he called, and one of the boys looked up and waved, and the counter woman in the wig turned and smiled.

I have given you as a light to the nations,

To open the eyes that are blind.

Calla remembered it from the Bible.

“Dang it,” Murray said. They had reached their destination, and the house was dark. They trudged up the steps and Calla banged at the door with the cold iron knocker. Then Murray did likewise. “Not home,” he said, and for a minute they stood devastated with disappointment.

“Oh, they’ll be here soon,” said Calla, sitting down on the top step. “Have a seat.” He would be warm in his down jacket. They sat, watching the street. The stone chilled her hips, her legs, and spread up her spine like fresh blood. She felt the absence of many and the presence of much, along with herself and the stuff of her life, a yellow skirt, a robe, a line in a hallway, by herself forgiven, running on in the good cold river of life. “If I had a daughter,” she said to Murray, “I’d name her Caroline, one who is strong.”

“If you had a daughter,” he said, “she’d be a sweetheart.”

“Thanks, honey. God. I just—remembered this night when I was a kid, younger than you are. I was living with my parents in my first house. It was winter, right after the New Year. We’d been to my grandparents’ house for the holidays that year. They lived far away. When we got home it was late. I’d fallen asleep between my parents in the car. But I woke up, and in the headlights pulling into the driveway, we saw these shapes in the yard, like, I don’t know, people sleeping—these dark humps. We got out and saw they were Christmas trees. Used Christmas trees lying on either side of the walkway. There were remnants of tinsel, a couple ornaments, some of the trees were roped and there had to be, I don’t know, forty trees? We walked around looking, until my mother made us come inside. My father was furious. I didn’t know why. It was late, and we went upstairs. But before I went to bed I looked out at the trees, and in the night, I got up and it was snowing—and the trees sparkled with snow, glowed with whiteness.

“In the morning they were covered. I went downstairs to my mother making breakfast and my father on the phone. It was a prank, a practical joke played by a friend who’d put a notice with our address in the paper: drop your trees here!” Calla smiled. “But in a little while, a truck pulled up and my father’s friend and a couple others got out and loaded the Christmas trees into the truck. It was festive, everybody laughing, my father and mother too. Before the men drove away the trees, they sat in the kitchen and drank hot chocolate. It was so nice, all of them sitting there together. I remember it was such a nice day.”

Murray sat snug in his down on the step beside her. People hurried by, she could still hear the boys shout from the stoop in the distance, see the bakery’s lit window in the row of dark shops. They’d come back soon. Ralph would call Joan and explain what Calla had recently been through and it would be fine. For now, everyone was fine.

 

Varley O’Connor’s fifth novel, The Welsh Fasting Girl, will be published by Bellevue Literary Press in May 2019. Her other novels include The Master’s Muse and The Cure. Her shorter prose has appeared in Missouri Review, Santa Monica Review, The Sun Magazine, Writer’s Chronicle, Publisher’s Weekly, and elsewhere.  www.varleyoconnor.com