Once, only once, had Lady tried to talk to him about what it was they were doing. This was soon after he’d announced his engagement, although announced wasn’t quite right; it had been more like an aside at the end of a busy day. She hadn’t even known he’d been seeing anyone. She felt knocked for a loop, stunned and disbelieving, like those women you sometimes hear about who go to the doctor with a stomachache and learn they’re not only pregnant, they’re in the end stages of labor. Still, she hadn’t said a thing other than the pleasantries anyone would utter in response to such wonderful news—the same pleasantries the hygienist had just offered.
But a few days after he’d confessed to the engagement, the two of them in his office, Lady straightening her skirt, the dentist hanging up his white tunic, Lady thought it would be nice to reassure him, to let him know she would not be falling apart or making a scene, which, while sobbing in the shower that morning, she’d decided would have to be the case. Her reassurance, she thought now, would be a type of engagement present. What else could she do? She’d long known she had no rights. She’d always known what she’d signed up for. She wanted to tell him that. “You know,” she said, pulling her sweater back over her head, “the thing about our relationship is—”
He was zipping his trousers. “We don’t have a relationship,” he said.
She made the mistake of plowing on. “Well, of course we do,” she said, “and the thing about it is—”
“We don’t have a relationship.”
Now she was considering making a scene. Although, having never made one before, she wasn’t sure how to go about it. “I agree we don’t have a relationship,” she said, “but we have a relationship.”
He put on the jacket he allegedly hated, tawny suede, expensive, indisputably gorgeous, and popped the collar.
“What I mean,” Lady said, “is that we may not have a romantic relationship with any kind of future. I get that. But we do have a relationship. I’m your receptionist. I’m your coworker. Any two people who know each other have a relationship. It’s what the word means. The kid I buy snow peas from at the Korean market—I don’t know his name, but we have a relationship.”
“Maybe you and snow pea boy have a relationship,” he said, “but you and I don’t.”
By then she couldn’t remember what she’d wanted to say in the first place. She’d forgotten what the thing about their relationship was. She said, “You know what? I’ll see you tomorrow,” and went home. She was exasperated, but only because he’d refused to admit she was right. Even at the time, even in the middle of whatever it was you’d call what they had, what they were doing, what they were to each other, she knew she didn’t love him, not really. She certainly didn’t count on him, not ever. She never initiated anything with him, although sometimes she dropped hints.
Just as she told nobody she was screwing the dentist—even after her divorce, she’d told no one—so she told no one about her mandatory vacation. Day after stifling day she remained indoors with the shades pulled, a futile attempt to stay cool. Even now she remembers the oily sweat between and under her breasts, how she’d pull up her T-shirt, baring her chest, the T-shirt absorbing the sweat on her forehead and cooling her nape and covering her hair like the veil of a topless nun.
She also remembers the small rabbit-eared TV in her bedroom—her entire divorce settlement, the retention of that little TV—that she watched almost nonstop during those interminable days. One afternoon she tuned into Bill Boggs to find an impressively drunk Tennessee Williams slouched on the couch while Rich Little did impressions of Johnny Carson and John Wayne. Right after Boggs, Walter Matthau appeared on Dinah Shore, and, right after Dinah Shore, Walter Matthau showed up again, this time on Mike Douglas. Lady had nothing against Walter Matthau—who didn’t like Walter Matthau?—but his reappearance, his repeated gags, the same clip from The Bad News Bears, made her feel unhinged. Then night fell with its soothing reruns of Rhoda, Phyllis, and Maude, and later an appearance by the Happy Hooker on Tom Snyder. Lady was beginning to understand how this could become your life, how it could make you feel like you had companions with whom you’d chatted and done things that day. Rhoda, Phyllis, Maude, Xaviera, Tennessee. Girlfriends.
Each day she told herself that she’d do something productive, that she’d watch no more TV, but each day she’d stay in bed, dozing on and off until midafternoon. Then she’d break, she’d crack, she’d turn on the set. Also she’d drink. And sometimes there might be some eating, might be some showering, might be some teeth brushing with the Oral-B extra-firm and sample-size Crest she got free from the office. But most often there was none of the above, just TV and cocktails and her T-shirt pulled over her head like a snood.
Not a day went by that she didn’t order herself to call Vee or Delph or even Eddie—maybe just Eddie, the most compassionate of the lot—to say that perhaps she hadn’t mentioned it, but she was on vacation, and she seemed unable to get out of bed, and could they please come over and yank her to her feet and make her get dressed. Maybe bringing some food would also be a good idea. A pizza. A turkey sandwich. An entire pound cake.
But she didn’t call, she couldn’t, because that was the week her fear of talking on the phone materialized as suddenly and surprisingly as a paper bouquet from a magician’s sleeve. All at once: poof, you’re telephobic.
The unanticipated phobia was accompanied by nausea and nerves and stomach adventures, and it escalated rapidly. At the beginning of the vacation she just ignored the ringing phone, a taupe standard Ma Bell table unit that could, if properly wielded, kill someone. By the end she was skittering across the hall, hiding in the bathroom, where she kept an extra bottle of vodka so she could calm herself until the jangling stopped. She would drink directly from the bottle, one glug, then two, call it a dry martini—which it was, sans olives—or an extra-dry Gibson—which it was, sans cocktail onions. Also sans ice bucket and stemware. She was a self-proclaimed hippie; she didn’t much care about elegance or ritual, which was good, given that she kept the crystal clear bottle of Popov on the sweating top of the toilet tank, alongside the green container of pHisohex and blue jar of Noxzema and brown vial of Miltown, the latter prescribed by the dentist.
It wasn’t until the final Saturday of the vacation—the third of July—that Lady emerged from her apartment. She hadn’t left before then, not for companionship, not for exercise, not for fresh air or groceries, not for snow peas, not for nothing. But then something came up, or rather something came down. A switch plate in the bedroom had lost its top screw several weeks before. It now hung upside down from its bottom screw, exposing the electrical box and the unpainted wall behind it.
Joe Hopper had taken all the tools when he’d moved out—that had been his divorce settlement—so she tried to stick it back into place with Scotch tape. When that didn’t work, she tried ignoring it. That didn’t work either, and the switch plate had come to remind her of someone hanging from a ledge, holding on to its lip with the fingertips of one hand. It was driving her crazy. She needed to get to a hardware store and buy a screwdriver.
The dentist’s office was—maybe still is—in shabby downtown Riverdale, by the elevated train station. On weekdays Lady reverse-commuted there. Daily she clattered down the metal staircase, and, at its landing, propelled herself over a puddle that she swore never evaporated. The weather might be hot and dry; the mayor (little Abe Beame) might have banned residents of all five boroughs from watering their houseplants and flushing their toilets. It didn’t matter. The puddle remained, shrunken perhaps, sometimes a mere muddy outline, but there nonetheless, dead leaves on its surface. In 1976 the puddle lay directly across the street from a dive called the Terminal Bar, a fairly ominous name if you thought about it, and given Lady’s proclivity for both suicide and puns, she did. Accordingly, Lady had named it the Puddle Styx.
On one side of the Terminal Bar was a four-story office building. The dentist’s office was on its second floor. On the other side of the bar was a hardware store owned