A Reunion of Ghosts

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 and run by a pair of aging brothers, two irritable men, short and ovate, with glaring black eyes, bulbous thread-veined noses, and patchy pubic beards. Despite the countless hardware stores on the Upper West Side, it was this hardware store—half an hour from her apartment if there were no delays, but of course there were always delays—that Lady decided to patronize.

She had a reason for traveling that distance when she didn’t really have to: she wasn’t at ease inside hardware stores, and at least she’d been in this one before. Not often, but sometimes the dentist sent her there to pick up some Windex or a three-way plug adaptor or an extension cord. She would feel less unnerved in the somewhat familiar surroundings.

On this summer morning no one in the store paid her any attention or asked if they could help her or gave any indication that they’d seen her before, or, for that matter, were seeing her now. She didn’t care. In stores, as in most places and situations, she preferred to be left to herself. This was particularly true now, consumed as she was with the switch-plate crisis.

Before leaving home, she’d unscrewed the plate completely, using her fingers to turn the bottom screw, which was also on the brink of falling out. She’d put the plate and the screw inside a baggie and put the baggie in her purse. This had turned out to be smart. In an aisle filled with, surely, over a hundred bins of over a million screws, she was able to find the one she needed.

Buoyed, she continued to the next aisle with its multiple bins of screwdrivers, but here she was at a loss. She wasn’t sure how to choose among screwdrivers, didn’t know which characteristics of a screwdriver were determinant. She decided to go by color.

She considered one with a rubbery blue handle, rejected it, picked up another, cherry red, put it back. She walked up and down the aisle, then snatched up a model with a handle of translucent plastic, acid green, a hue she’d once experimented with, borrowing an Indian tunic in that shade from Delph. “It makes you look dead,” Joe Hopper said, and she returned it unworn.

So—fuck you, Joe Hopper—she took the acid-green screwdriver by the shaft and made her way to the register. She imagined him watching all this, frustrated by his inability to criticize a thing she’d done. She fantasized Walter Matthau sidling up to her, asking for local restaurant advice. The two of them would chat a bit, amusing each other, hitting it off; then they’d go to the Terminal Bar for a couple of vodka tonics, some chicken parm and spaghetti, and, after a couple of self-deprecating jokes about expanding waistlines, a shared slice of pie. What Walter Matthau would be doing in a Riverdale hardware store, she’d work out another time.

After she left the store, she put the bag with the screwdriver in her purse. She thought about her dungeon of an apartment. She decided to take a walk. Van Cortlandt Park was right across the street, summer green and lush. She stood on the corner, waiting for the Walk signal.

But as she waited, the idea of crossing the street became overwhelming. It was such a vast street, this section of Broadway, and the thought of traversing it, of sprinting from cement island to cement island as cars and taxis whipped by, discouraged her, depressed her, filled her with a fear that, she immediately registered, would not serve a New Yorker well. But what could she do? The new fear was upon her, and she changed her mind and decided to admit defeat and just go home.

Instead she pivoted and went into the building where she worked. She climbed the two flights of stairs. She tried to peer through the opaque window set in the office door, the dentist’s name painted on that glass in an arc like a rainbow. She saw nothing, just the wires threaded through the safety glass.

She rummaged through her purse for her keys. She unlocked the door. Inside, she turned off the alarm, turned on the lights.

Everything in the reception area was as she left it. The magazines and brochures were undisturbed, the gray dustcover over her Selectric untouched. Something was off, though, and she figured out what it was when she poked a finger into the soil of the leggy philodendron on the windowsill. Someone had been here and watered the plant—someone had done her job for her.

The door to the dentist’s private office was shut. She crossed the room, put her hand on the round knob. She didn’t turn it, just held it. She put her ear to the hollow wood. Although she heard nothing but the loud ticking of his desk clock, she felt uneasy. She found herself picturing the dentist on the other side of that door, splayed on the floor where she and he had their trysts, his wife standing over him just a little ashamed of herself, holding a bloody Huber probe. It was a premonition, she later realized, not of an actual murder but of something gone terribly wrong in there. Or maybe it was a wish.

She held her breath as she turned the knob, but she didn’t take the next step of pushing open the door. She was annoyed by how jittery she felt. Her reaction was inexplicable, really. Stupid, if she were being honest. She went in and out of that office all the time. True, the door was almost never shut as it was today, but still … Fear of picking up a ringing telephone’s receiver was bad enough. Then there’d been the anxiety over crossing the street. Was her fear generalizing; was she now going to become unable to open doors as well?

But no, she thought. Her hesitancy wasn’t a sign of neuroses—or not only that. She was hesitating because she was not supposed to be there that day. She was feeling like a trespasser, like a vandal. She had to give herself a stern talking-to. Entering that office was allowed. It was part of her job; it was something she did all the time. The dentist went out for lunch, and Lady went in to do the filing or find an invoice or sit in his comfortable chair and work the crossword. She didn’t need to ask permission. “Mi office es su office,” he’d say, and why not? He was lucky to have someone like her, a self-starter, diligent and devoted.

An example of that diligence: she would do the filing right now. She’d straighten up some of the mess that had been left on his desk when they closed in late June. It would be good to get that work done, good to get a jump on things before the office reopened on Tuesday.

Yet even as she opened the door, she couldn’t shake her apprehension. Now she imagined finding not a body on the carpet—still life with slit throat—but two bodies, much alive, naked, sparkling with perspiration. Giddy husband and naughty wife. If this were a TV show, a movie, isn’t that exactly what would happen next? Music swelling, the receptionist gasping, then rushing to the street below, pressing her hand to her heart, the tears welling, as she cries out his name—

Or no. Because the receptionist would be the villain in the movie, wouldn’t she? She’d be the housebreaker, the slut, the brunette. The camera wouldn’t think to follow her once she left. It would be the dentist’s wife the camera would care about, the dentist’s wife who’d be the heroine. That would be the name of the movie, in fact. The Dentist’s Wife.

The door was slightly ajar now, but Lady still didn’t peek inside. She only listened again, listened harder. All she could hear were the clicks of the passing seconds. She took one more of those seconds to inform herself that she was an idiot. Then she pushed the door fully open and flicked on the light.

No swelling music, but she couldn’t help herself—she gasped anyway. It wasn’t just that the soil of the ficus tree inside the dentist’s office had also been watered. It was that the walls, for the past five years the same grayed white as the plaster of paris dentition molds in the prostheses closet, had been painted a feminine mauve. It was that an ornately framed O’Keeffe had been hung by his desk. The flower in the poster was meant, of course, to evoke a receptive vagina, pink and clitoral—Joe’s work and O’Keeffe’s had that in common—but Lady suspected it had been viewed instead as the pink gums and beckoning uvula of the wide-open mouth of the dentist’s dreams.

His desk had been cleared too. Gone, the stack of unfiled insurance forms, the stack of unfiled patient info, even the stack of pink While You Were Out messages, those little notes from her to him. “Mr. Bonfiglio’s temp fell off,” followed by two exclamation points with a caret underneath:

Sad bunny, she called it. (It’s true. She invented the whole emoticon thing.)

She also had a happy bunny and a confused bunny, and then there was the one he’d made up, the one he’d draw on the back of one of those While You Were Out slips and leave on her chair on afternoons he hoped she’d stay late: Playboy bunny, the two exclamation points plus a wiggly come-hither grin.

As she gawked at the pristine desk, the absence of clutter felt like a rebuke. Other than the noisy brass clock, every item on its surface was new: a leather blotter, a set of unimaginative but shiny Cross pens, a deluxe version of Galileo’s Pendulum, blond wood and steel balls.

And there was more. On the wall above his credenza, the diplomas documenting his unadventurous education—NYU undergrad, NYU College of Dentistry—had been framed and hung. On a nearby shelf, photographs, once propped against books, their edges curling, had also been framed and arranged in ascending height order, like a Rockettes kick line.

The smallest of these photos was of the dentist and his golden retriever Beef, a sweet aging dog that Lady had, at various times, taken to the vet’s or groomer’s. Next there was a slightly larger shot of Beef alone, a professional portrait in which Beef’s mouth was open and his pink tongue lolling, so he looked as though he were smiling, although he was probably just panting from the heat of the photographer’s lights.

Next, larger still: the dentist and his wife under a chuppah. Beef was in this one, too, sitting alongside one of the chuppah bearers, both the bearer and Beef in paisley vests and bow ties. Then there were two new additions, each one Beef-free. There was an eight-by-ten, just dentist and wife squinting into the sun on their honeymoon. There was a nine-by-twelve, dentist and wife aboard a sailboat that Lady hadn’t known he owned but could see was named The Tooth Ferry.

And on the credenza itself, a small piece of white card stock tented over like a place card at a dinner party. Surprise!! it said. Lady opened it. Happy Anniversary!! it said. Love!! Patty, it said. And along with the exclamation points—not deliberately silly and facetious exclamation points like Lady’s bunny ears and wide bunny eyes, but conventionally employed and rather hysterical exclamation points—were Patty’s hearts and x’s and o’s.

Lady returned the card to the credenza. She took the professional photo of Beef, the one with the tongue. She held the frame with both hands, looked into the dog’s brown eyes. She dropped it, frame and all, into her purse.

Leaving, she made sure to close the door to the dentist’s office, to punch in the alarm code, to secure the outside locks—to do everything methodically and correctly so nothing would let on she’d been here. Once outside, she hurried past the Terminal Bar, jetéd over the Puddle Styx, trundled up the metal staircase, and caught the Broadway local, which was shimmying on the platform, waiting to take her home.

The blade of the acid-green screwdriver didn’t come close to fitting into the grooves of the screw. Lady looked at the tip of the blade and realized the thing she’d purchased wasn’t a screwdriver at all. Oh, sure, it looked like a screwdriver, but it was something else, a screwdriver’s stepbrother, a bastard screwdriver, the tip shaped like a crucifix.

She was so disappointed in herself, felt so inept, so useless, she couldn’t help it; she, who never cried, began to weep. She had to give herself another little lecture, tell herself that it wasn’t a big deal, that she’d simply return to the store and exchange the screwdriver-like tool for an actual screwdriver. How hard would that be? She knew she could alternatively stick the impostor screwdriver into a drawer, then go out and buy a replacement within blocks of her apartment. It wasn’t as if the aggregate cost of the almost-screwdriver and a genuine screwdriver both was going to break her. But if she did that, then she would have to live with a screwdriver-like device that made her feel stupid. She might as well have invited Joe Hopper back.

She wiped her eyes with a nearby dish towel and got a grip. The truth was, she needed to go back to Riverdale anyway. She not only had to return the goddamn screwdriver, she had to return the photo of Beef. How stupid to give in to the impulse to swipe it. How baffling the impulse itself. Had she imagined that the dentist, when he surveyed his new and improved office, wouldn’t notice its absence?

Of course he’d notice its absence. A professional portrait, scheduled, paid for. He’d ask the wife if she had deaccessioned the photo; the wife would say no. Then one of two things would occur. He’d accuse the wife of lying. He’d tell her he’d always known she didn’t love Beef. He’d say that this, her stealthy elimination of his dog’s portrait, was the first step in removing Beef from his life. He’d add that mauve was no color for a man’s office. A fight, then a divorce, would ensue. He’d tell Lady he’d been a fool.

Or he’d figure out at once that it was Lady who took the picture in what, he’d conclude, was some sort of statement, some sort of expression of Lady’s attachment to him, of her never expressed but clearly out-of-control desire for him, of her persistent if wrongheaded conviction that they had a relationship. Or maybe he’d think it was some kind of threat—admit we have a relationship or you’ll never see your dog again—when all it was, really, was an irresistible urge to screw with the wife’s prissy and predictable sense of interior design, to violate the rigid order of the photographs.

But he’d never get it, would never see the verve, the art, the sly humor in what she’d done, and so, when she went back to the hardware store later that same day to return the acid-green piece of useless crap she’d bought, the photograph was still in her purse so she could return it too.

She should have realized the hardware store would close early on the Saturday of a long Fourth of July weekend, but she hadn’t, which is why, at two o’clock, she found herself standing on the street looking at the half-lowered security gate sprayed with graffiti: gang symbols, swastikas, the names of lovers in hearts.

One of the brothers who owned the place came outside, crouching to avoid hitting his head on the gate. He was wearing dark blue work pants and a malodorous short-sleeved dress shirt. On his head he’d plopped, of all things on this sultry afternoon, a felt homburg. The hat appeared to possess gravity-defying properties, remaining atop his head even as he exited the store in this half-bent position, as if he were dancing the limbo upside down. He was sweating oceans, of course. Each of the large pores of his purple fleshy nose was ringed with gray moisture. He stood, looked briefly at Lady, then turned his back on her.

This was what courage looked like for Lady: she didn’t immediately retreat. Instead she pulled the screwdriver from her purse, explained her problem, told him the whole sad saga.

“Forget it, lady,” he said when she was done. He still hadn’t turned to face her. “I ain’t taking that back.”

She looked around, as if for support, as if there might be some neutral observer stepping up to assist her. But it was the Saturday of the long Fourth of July weekend. It was New York. The street was empty.

She tried explaining again. Right screw, wrong blade.

He spun around. For a moment she thought he might hit her, that’s how angry he seemed. She thought his anger might have something to do with his heavy accent. Perhaps he didn’t understand English all that well, perhaps he’d misunderstood her, thought she’d said something rude or belittling. But it turned out she was the one who didn’t get it.

“It’s a Phillips head, lady,” he said with disgust.

Over the course of her twenty-six years on this earth, Lady had become extremely adroit at distinguishing the proper from the common noun. Still, his repeating her name, even unwittingly, was disquieting.