Transparency Read online

  “So how are you doing?” he asked me.

  “I’m doing fine,” I said. That wasn’t true. I wasn’t eating and wanted to disappear. But instead of turning as light as a ghost, my flesh felt tired and heavy, and I dragged myself from one room to another, unable to sleep. The doctor had prescribed some sleeping pills (I had lied to him and said I had jet lag), but they knocked me out for only four hours before I woke up again. Awake or asleep, I felt empty, but I would be fine soon enough. That was the sad thing.

  Vincent folded his arms around me, and I felt awkward, ready to spring away, but he only pressed me closer. It confused me because for the moment at least it seemed that he cared for me, that he was the one who was more true. My hand slid down his arm until I reached the edge of his hand, and I held his last two fingers softly before letting go.

  III.Lilies

  I moved to San Francisco and soon met my businessman, the one etched on my palm whom I was supposed to marry.

  I taught English at a private Christian school, where the principal informed me I would be fired if anyone saw me buying alcohol. I began to drink a glass of wine by myself at dinnertime anyway, always choosing white because I wanted to have a taste in my mouth that was simple and light and clear. I read Buddhist books about impermanence, how there is no self or soul connecting the pieces of ourselves together, and I liked the idea of relinquishing my ego and merging with the void and of having no more desires for anything or anyone.

  Vincent and I were still in touch. We exchanged polite, impersonal e-mails a few times each month, and any small detail he was willing to give me about his life made me brood about him a little more.

  He once told me, with some regret, that he was an amoral person. I had been fascinated and disturbed by the number of women he had slept with, all those bodies he had left behind. Now he had left me behind, and it was sobering to realize that there was nothing that distinguished me from the rest.

  I met the businessman at a dinner party hosted by a friend. He was holding a drink the color of avocados with a marigold floating on top. “What’s that?” I asked. “It’s very pretty.”

  “Pea soup. Do you want to try?” He handed me his glass, and I took a sip. “Well?”

  I hesitated. “It tastes like . . .”

  “Pea soup?”

  “Perhaps if you put in some salt.”

  “Hmm. I don’t ever taste what I cook before serving it.”

  “You made this?”

  “Well, it isn’t any good.”

  “It’s quite aesthetic. The flower is a nice touch.”

  He shrugged. “I always care more about how the food looks than how it tastes.” The businessman was tall and thickening around the middle. He had a heavy, handsome face that was at once masculine and babyish, light quick eyes, and a cleft chin. I already knew from my friend, who wanted to set us up, that his name was Clay and that he was from Georgia. He liked old films and owned a small collection of Venetian masks.

  Clay asked me what I did on the weekends, and I told him I went to concerts at Davies Symphony Hall, where I paid twenty dollars for a Center Terrace seat overlooking the back of the orchestra.

  “You go alone?” he asked.

  I blushed and asked if he had heard of Leon Fleisher, who was performing next week. “He’s this pianist who was at the height of his career when he was afflicted with a neurological disorder,” I said. “It made the muscles of his right hand contract and his fingers curl under. For a while, he couldn’t perform in concerts, but then he developed a repertoire of left-hand pieces. There’s a surprising amount of pieces you can play for the left hand alone.”

  Clay smiled. “You want to pay to go see someone play with one hand?”

  This made me like him a little less. “Well, he’s still brilliant,” I said. “I mean he plays better with one hand than most people play with two. But the thing is, he recently regained the use of his right hand. He gets injections that relax the muscles, so now he can play with both hands.”

  “But he can play only the easy pieces, right?” He smiled at me and said he was only teasing. “Let’s go hear this Leon Fleisher guy together.”

  I hesitated for a moment. “All right,” I said.

  I didn’t tell Clay I got a painful pleasure out of going to these concerts by myself. The only reason I knew about Leon Fleisher was because of Vincent, of course. His interests and tastes exerted a more powerful influence over me now that he was no longer in my life.

  The following week, Clay and I watched Leon Fleisher appear onstage, looking battered and untamed in spite of his tuxedo. Set apart and shielded from the world by square black glasses, he was a sturdy, deep-chested man with spindly legs, his hair streaked black and iron gray, his Mephistophelian beard whitening at the chin. He was larger than life and yet also all too human. There was the frailty of his age, the remarkable history of his hands. He played a Mozart concerto with lightness and joy, and as I leaned forward in my chair, I was startled when Clay reached over and patted my back. A moment later, he removed his hand and began flipping through his program and reading the concert notes.

  During the intermission, he held out my jacket for me as I slipped it on, and we walked onto the terrace and leaned over the railing, looking across the street at the lighted dome ot City Hall. “Sometimes my attention wanders when I listen to music,” Clay told me. “I’m bored, and I think about other things. But it’s funny how it can get under your skin when you’re least expecting it. When it stirs you up, there’s nothing you can do. Seriously, there were moments just now when I felt I was going to lose it.” He grinned, putting a knuckle to the corner of his eye, and I smiled as well.

  “A sensitive businessman,” I said.

  “Whatever preconceptions you have about me are dead wrong,” he replied.

  We walked back through the shining lobby with its walls of glass, past people sitting at small tables and others standing in line at the bar, couples sipping their drinks and looking out at the city or leaning back against the windows and observing other people go by. The constant murmur of voices, the sound of laughter and tinkling glasses, filled my ears. Rising beneath this din, the whirling cacophony of the orchestra as musicians practiced or tuned their instruments, a chaos of sound that lent itself to anticipation.

  Clay guided me through the crowd by touching my elbow, and it occurred to me that anyone who saw us might think we were together and in love. We found our seats again, and as the concert resumed I felt disappointed by my own detachment. This evening with Clay was pleasant enough, but there was no part of me that was deeply engaged. I glanced at my watch, then looked out into the audience at the sea of cold, pensive faces, the fine glittering dresses of the women, the sober husbands crumpled in their chairs.

  Clay called me a few days later and said he wanted to take me out to dinner that night. “I’m going away this weekend and want to see you before I leave.”

  “Why don’t we do something when you get back?”

  “No, I’m sorry,” he said, “but you’ll have to give me a compelling reason why you can’t go out to dinner with me tonight.”

  I thought this was unusual. Here was a definite man who made demands of me. And so I agreed to meet him for dinner.

  At the restaurant, Clay said he had been looking forward to seeing me all day. I opened my menu, but a fog had descended on my brain and I couldn’t make up my mind. Clay merely glanced at the menu and closed it, observing my confusion with a smile on his lips.

  “You’re a decisive person,” I said.

  “I was born knowing what I want.” He spoke with charming ease and a subtle drawl that disarmed me.

  The appetizer arrived, figs wrapped in prosciutto, and I cut my fig carefully in half before taking a small bite. “The way you’re eating sums up the differences between us,” he said, popping an entire fig into his mouth.

  The restaurant was small and crowded, and we had to raise our voices to hear each other. Finally, he set dow
n his fork and leaned forward with his hands folded together. “I’m not going to try to talk over this noise,” he said. “I just want to look at you.” He cocked his head and gazed at me, at one point blinking rapidly as if he were starry-eyed. I tried to stare back at him boldly, but I lacked the nerve and looked down at my plate. I was playing the typical role of a woman who is looked at, and it made me very unhappy.

  “Look,” I said. “If you’re not going to talk to me, then I don’t want to get coffee with you afterward.”

  This put his gazing to an end, and he paid for the meal, one that I couldn’t have afforded. Outside the restaurant, he said, “You greeted me so coldly before. Can I have a perfunctory hug now?”

  “Of course.” I opened my arms, and he pressed me fully against him. When I tried to back away, he wouldn’t let go and squeezed me even tighter. It was unpleasant to be so close, to feel his desire when I felt nothing at all. At last, Clay released me, and we walked on to the cafe. I tried to pay for the coffee, but he looked at me in a steely way, as if I had just insulted him. “Money is no object,” he said lightly, taking out his wallet.

  Later, as he walked me back to my car, he insisted on walking on my left-hand side, closer to the curb. “Why that side?” I asked.

  “If a car should lose control, I’ll be able to push you away in time and sacrifice myself.”

  “Well, thanks,”` I said. We had arrived at my car, but he continued to hover beside me. I was nervous and afraid that he would ask for a perfunctory kiss. “Well, bye now.”

  “Hey, I’m sorry I’ve been so pushy,” he said, moving toward me. His stubble grazed my face, and I felt his moist parted lips, the warm insistence of his breath, as he kissed me on the cheek.

  A few days later I received a bouquet of oriental lilies. Only three lilies had bloomed, and it seemed a modest arrangement at first. I knew I should call to thank him, but I felt an obscure dread that manifested itself as passivity, and I couldn’t do it. He called me later that evening and told me the flowers were a small gift.

  The lilies smelled heavy and sweet and close. Each day another bud opened, and the bouquet spread out and grew more lush until I counted nine starlike, poisonous faces the size of my palm. They crowded my desk, blocking my peaceful view of the bay. If I drew the blinds, I came away with flecks of pollen on my sleeve, and even when I was careful not to brush against the anthers, the slightest stir or exhalation was enough for them to mark me.

  I once asked Vincent if he had ever slept with someone he wasn’t attracted to. He had widened his eyes and with careful emphasis, because he knew what he was going to say would upset me, he confessed that he had been with Miranda, one of the teachers at our school. “People say you can have sex only with those you love,” he told me, “but you can have sex with those you don’t even like.”

  When Clay called me again, I didn’t pick up the phone. He called two more times after that and left messages, and I wondered why a person became less desirable when they showed need. His interest in me seemed odd, even unnatural. I had done little to encourage him, yet he continued to press on. I recalled the moment when Clay took his shoes off in the cafe and put his socked feet on the bench beside me. It was an intimacy I hadn’t asked for, but he remained oblivious of my feelings, quite comfortable in fact with his feet lying there next to me. He was so sure of himself, acting as if he knew something I didn’t, and I felt an irrational fear that the gypsy woman had cursed me. I saw myself moving toward him in fits and starts, a dangling, convulsive puppet.

  For some reason, Clay was fixated on me just as I was fixated on Vincent. Vincent was probably fixated on a former student of his, a twenty-year-old blonde with cornflower blue eyes, a pointy nose, and a pale little smile. When he and I were still together, I had stopped by Vincent’s apartment one afternoon without warning and found him and the girl playing cards together at his dining room table. The girl was slouched in a chair with a languid expression on her face, her long legs slanting under the table. Vincent sat upright, his feet spread slightly apart, slowly flipping over cards. Their legs were close enough to be touching, and an image of the two spending the entire afternoon in bed with their legs entwined and then playing this desultory game of cards rose up before me. The girl immediately straightened up in her chair when she saw me.

  “Anne,” Vincent said without missing a beat, “this is Lisa. I’m helping her procrastinate from writing her final paper.”

  I already knew who she was. Vincent had told me he wanted to sleep with her when she was his student. I felt unbearably hot all at once, standing there in the middle of the room, and I realized that as usual I was wearing too many clothes, whereas the girl was dressed in a tank top and a short skirt, things that you’re supposed to wear when you’re young. I took off my jacket, but it was hard for me to focus and reply to what Vincent was saying. I finally gave up trying. “Well, I’ll leave you two alone now,” I said, turning to leave.

  “Bye,” the girl said quietly — it was almost a whisper—and I quickly left.

  Vincent called me a half hour later at my house. “Why did you leave like that?” he asked me. “It was so sad the way you rushed out. You were practically running away from us. Lisa felt awful and left early.”

  “I’m glad,” I told him.

  “Oh, you are, are you?”

  “You’re sleeping with her, aren’t you? You’ve always said you’re amoral, the type to cheat, so just tell me the truth, you fucking degenerate. Are you sleeping with her?”

  “You know, in a way, I’m flattered by your reaction,” Vincent said. “Your jealousy makes me think you really care about me. But it also makes me like you a little less. You’re so quick to think the worst of me.”

  I never knew for sure whether Vincent cheated on me. What was certain was that he liked me less after that. By the time we broke up, he said he felt nothing. He didn’t want to pretend anymore and dreaded having to touch me.

  In the evenings, I prepared lesson plans and graded student papers in a large open cafe in my neighborhood. One night, I looked across the room and saw a man with a small wrinkled face staring at me. He had a clipboard tilted toward him and seemed to be drawing something, and the way he looked at me, moving his pencil across the page, filled me with alarm: I thought he might be sketching me. We made eye contact, he smiled, and I quickly looked down. The woman at the table beside me got up to leave, and I was dismayed to see the man gather up his clipboard and stainless steel mug and approach me. For the first time, I noticed he was missing his entire left arm. He set his things down at the empty table beside mine, then went back to the other table to retrieve his satchel and long walking stick. As his back was turned, I took the opportunity to glance at his clipboard.

  The drawing was crude and nonsensical, done with colored pencils. It depicted a man standing behind an electric pole. What the man was doing behind that pole was a mystery, but I suspected it was fairly obscene. The electric pole rose in front of him in a grand phallic statement.

  The one-armed man returned, eyeing me as he sat down. He was wearing a beret and sandals, with one gold stud in his ear. He examined his drawing and began coloring with itty-bitty strokes, sometimes dabbing at them with an eraser, turning the clipboard this way and that to judge what he had done. Now and then he grunted or made small exclamations over his work, then turned to look at me slyly as if to include me in his private conversation. l tried to ignore him, but I couldn’t focus on what I was doing. Finally, I crossed my arms and glared at the television mounted in the corner. There was a baseball game on.

  “Do you know what the score is?” he asked me.

  “No idea,” I said. I picked up my crumpled napkin and brushed at my computer screen, and the one-armed man got up out of his seat and returned with a few napkins in his hand.

  “You’ll want some clean ones for that,” he said, presenting them to me. “I saw you typing and thought to myself, Wow, she can really type.” He smiled, peering at my screen
. “So what is it you were typing?”

  “I’m trying to do some work.”

  “Too busy to talk to me, huh? Hey, what’s that doing there?” He leaned over, his finger touching a bruise on my arm.

  I got up and stuffed my papers into my bag, picked up my laptop, and headed toward a table at the opposite end of the café.

  “So you want to play musical chairs?” he called out behind me.

  I settled into my new space but was too distracted to do any work now. Even from across the cafe, I could feel his presence demanding my attention, and when I glanced over in his direction, he was staring right at me, his mouth moving, though I couldn’t hear a word he was saying.

  In my studio, I stared at the lilies from Clay. A few had darkened to a moribund purple, the glossy petals curling back, starting to fall in clumps on my desk.

  On Sunday afternoon I was startled by an imperious rapping at my door. It was Clay, looking as though he’d just stepped off the golf course. He handed me a box of chocolates. “Sorry to disturb you,” he said, smiling. “But I’ve been forced to take action. You haven’t been returning my calls.”

  “No,” I said. “I’ve been busy.”

  “Doing what exactly?”

  I shrugged but didn’t answer.

  He stepped closer, pretending to peer around me. “So are you going to invite me in? I want to see your digs.”

  I hesitated. “Well, I’m working now.”

  “I won’t take up too much time.”

  I opened the door wider for him. “There’s really not much to see.” Besides the tiny kitchen, there was only one room with a chair in the corner, my desk facing the window, and my unmade bed with its heap of blankets. “It’s cozy,” he said, sitting in the chair.

  I sat down on a corner of my bed. “Thanks for these,” I said, opening the box of chocolates. “Do you want one?”

  He shook his head, gazing at me. “You should wear your hair down.”

  “I do,” I said. “Today, though, I’m wearing it up.”