Following Polly Page 9

  Somewhere around three, Charlie emerges. I was certain he would. He’s my only hope. Even though he doesn’t know it, Charlie and I are connected. We have Harvard. We have Pennington & Litt. We have Kovitz.

  And Charlie’s a lawyer.

  A lawyer with nothing to do.

  I still get heart palpitations when I see him, even though I know he’s probably not looking his best. He’s wearing blue sweats and a blue down jacket. His jacket is open, and he looks as if he’s wearing a flannel pajama top underneath. It could be an old shirt; I’m too far away to distinguish. He heads east. I stuff my horse blanket into the bag, and follow him. He goes into a Food Emporium on Third Avenue. It’s so cold that even though I’m wearing my helmet, I go inside after him. Whenever I go to the grocery store with Jean it’s an event—like she has never been in a grocery store before. She examines each item—except for anything relating to cleaning—and discusses whether it’s delicious or has the potential to be so when mixed in with the right food. Figs, for example, don’t do much for her as a snack food, but earn all sorts of culinary honors starring in a Moroccan stew. Charlie is more like me. He’s at the cashier in less than three minutes with a half gallon of skim milk, Life cereal, and Pringles. I wait at the cashier reading my horoscope. Apparently, I have a lot of “energy to apply to my work,” but I “have a more complex agenda than others realize.”

  We go back to Charlie’s house. Well, he does. I just wait outside.

  It’s January 2 and the streets have come to life. There are more pedestrians trolling the streets today, and, well, more cops, too. I’m fine for now. I changed out of the dress and into Felisha’s riding britches. If you look at me, it’s unclear whether I’m homeless or I fell off of my horse.

  But no one does look at me. I’m ensconced in the sparse shrubbery. To take my mind off the increasingly cool wind, I think about the position I’ve put myself in. I have to come up with the most propitious time to approach Charlie, but I cannot imagine what time that will be. I am on the street, without shelter, without money, without the freedom to roam around. Meanwhile, I have to figure out how to deal with a day consisting of all these “withouts.”

  I have to find some way to move around without getting picked up by one of Kovitz’s minions. And I really must develop a method for cleaning myself up.

  Where on earth do the homeless relieve themselves?

  The plethora of large department stores in Manhattan comes to mind, and I feel absurdly relieved to have had one productive thought. Because the streets contain so many souls who have no way to live, I feel increasingly sure that I can remain here safely for as long as I need to.

  Then I feel guilty. After all, here I am benefiting not only from Felisha’s ordinarily objectionable noblesse oblige, but from the rampant state of homelessness that has suddenly become my greatest ally.

  Charlie emerges in the early afternoon. Unlike me, he’s wearing the same outfit he was wearing yesterday. He walks east again, but makes a right on Lexington Avenue and heads into a little coffee shop called Eat Here Now. I have long digested the food from Felisha and Justin’s and would give my britches for a plate of eggs. Charlie peers into the window. I do the same. We look at a woman sitting in the back corner. She has dirty-blond hair. I mean blond hair that is dirty. She wears a tight orange sweater that doesn’t quite cover her belly. It’s unclear whether it was designed that way or whether her belly is simply too large.

  If I sound jealous or mean, maybe it’s because this is Charlie and, despite my drastic circumstances, I see him in a romantic haze.

  This couldn’t be a date. The two certainly do not look their best, and when Charlie takes a seat, he doesn’t kiss her or touch her. Within minutes, however, he seems to be interrogating her. I can’t see her face. From my angle, all I get is the back of his head.

  He moves away and for a second, I see her; she’s crying. Has he broken up with her? Is she pregnant? Is he the father? This has to be personal, doesn’t it? This can’t be related to his job. From what Jean tells me, he’s still unemployed. They talk for thirty minutes or so. Charlie doesn’t eat anything. The blond girl eats a cheeseburger deluxe and a slice of lemon meringue pie. Charlie summons the waiter, gets the check, leaves a twenty on the table, and the two get up. The two leave the restaurant. The blond woman looks apologetic. She’s crying. Charlie looks angry.

  I’m so confused that I’m no longer cold. Charlie returns to his quarters and I to mine.

  I think about Charlie and the handful of times when our paths have crossed.

  In the winter of my sophomore year, when I was dating Mark the diagnostician, I was up late studying for my Japanese history exam in Hilles Library in the old Radcliffe Quad. I was getting ready to leave and I donned my grungy blue down parka with an enormous round hood when I spotted Charlie in the carrel across the aisle. His legs were up on the desk and his head was tilted back on the chair. I felt nervous just looking at him. Mark never made me feel nervous. Mark just made me feel alone. I tried to avoid looking in Charlie’s direction, but as I was heading past him, I heard him snoring very loudly in his carrel. I paused for a second to glance at him, hoping that his sleep would shield him from learning of my intrusion. I got a pretty good look at him, though I admit he looked a little less dashing with a trickle of drool streaming down his cheek, and that the accompanying sound effects were similarly unenchanting.

  Before I could step away, Charlie woke up. It was so abrupt. I didn’t have the wherewithal to smile at him. I just stood there mortified in my jacket, looking like Violet Beauregarde from Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory.

  Charlie smiled, though. He looked around his pockets. When he realized he didn’t have a Kleenex, he wiped his face with his sleeve.

  “My mother would die,” he chuckled.

  I couldn’t laugh or smile. I simply admired his handling of the entire situation. Realizing my speechlessness would continue, I turned around and left the library.

  Later, when I told Jean, she was unimpressed. “What do you care about him?” she admonished me. “He went out with Polly Linley and you have Mark.”

  I hang outside Charlie’s house for several days, but the climate has taken a turn for the worse. My hands have transformed from severely chapped to raw and bloody. My fingernails, which for the past thirty-two years have shown remarkable resilience, are now brittle and jagged. I’ve managed a couple of sink baths in the ladies’ room of Grand Central Station; walking to and from provided some much-needed exercise. To relieve the boredom of sitting in the cold twenty-three hours out of each twenty-four, I’ve taken some cards and a pen from the lobby of the Roosevelt Hotel, and have compiled lists of my favorite restaurants, the smartest people I’ve ever met, and dogs and cats I have loved. I am planning to pick up some more tomorrow, and to start in on the meals I most wish I were eating.

  It’s snowing pretty steadily, but even in the inclement weather, Charlie leaves his apartment at dawn to go for his fifty-minute run. It would be futile to attempt to keep up. My sneakers, which were in pretty poor condition when I was taken to the precinct, have disintegrated. Although Felisha’s riding boots are a full size too small for me and make long walks an unattainable dream, they are perfectly suited for keeping me warm. I have also wrapped Felisha’s red silk pajama top around my frozen legs.

  As usual, Charlie has gotten up at six-thirty for his run. I take this time to sift through the garbage in an attempt to see if I’m still a front-page story. Luckily for me, a fraudulent financier who cheated Wall Street investors of millions has fled the country and a famous Swedish athlete has claimed to have seen a UFO. I appear on page eight for several days in a row.

  I wait until Charlie returns from his run and is comfortably upstairs before I head out on my own constitutional. By ten-thirty my blood is back in full circulation and I make my pilgrimage to Bloomingdale’s, where I scrub myself in their rarely trafficked seventh-floor restroom. It’s a mile closer than Grand Central and jus
t as anonymous. Once I feel clean and warm, I go back to my Sixty-fifth Street residence, where I keep an eye on Charlie and imagine that he might come to help me.

  I shrug off several attempts to enlist me in a homeless facility by saying that I’ve been beaten and robbed in the shelters. A homeless man overhears me and gives me the schedule of a kindly driver on the Lexington Avenue bus.

  “He don’t ask for no bus fare,” he whispers, “and if you smile pretty, he’ll give you some bread.” At this point, my informant reveals to me his huge black-gummed toothless grin. “With those”—he points to my intact teeth—“he may even give you a loaf.”

  His information is correct. The bus driver takes me around for a couple of hours. When the bus is empty he gives me a couple of hot dog buns.

  “My wife gets it for the birds.” He doesn’t speak directly to me. “But I have better uses for it.”

  He’s a very nice man, and I think when I get out of my situation that I will thank him and his wife.

  I was at Pennington & Litt before Charlie even got there. I went right to that firm just after graduating from college. In fact, they recruited at Harvard, hoping to get a bunch of bright, energetic twenty-one-year-olds, and work them to death for a year before they quit and sought some other career.

  Jean had gone right to Harvard Law School and she liked the idea of my becoming a paralegal.

  “You’ll totally want to go to law school,” Jean assured me, hoping that I’d follow her.

  The one thing I learned at Pennington & Litt was that I would never go to law school. I can’t confront anybody and the work seems boring.

  After I’d been at the firm for two years, I was in the office library fetching a book for an attorney when I heard a somewhat familiar voice.

  “Is this a good place for a nap?”

  It was Charlie, and for a moment, I thought he was remembering our little encounter in Hilles Library four years before. But no, he was talking to Lydia Stone, a stiff beauty from Human Resources. She didn’t respond to the nap comment but instead told him about the state-of-the-art library at Pennington & Litt. Charlie chatted with her amiably.

  When the snow clears, and there are dry patches on Charlie’s block, I return to my surveillance. It’s not long before I follow him back to Eat Here Now. He’s there with another woman. Again, he doesn’t eat anything and she eats a huge plate of food. This one has short dark hair and her face is covered in makeup. At first, she’s very flirtatious with Charlie, putting her hand on his, touching his face. I’m not jealous this time because it is clear that Charlie is uncomfortable, like he wishes he had some bacterial soap or at least a moist towelette. As they interact, he gets increasingly angry with her.

  I had another interaction with Charlie about eight years ago. I know this appears to be pathetic and desperate, but I’m aiming for honesty here. I was still a paralegal at Pennington & Litt. I was terribly bored. I even confided to Mother that the most exciting part about the job was leaving. Mother, who has been busy every minute of every day since her depression ended, convinced me that my life would improve if I were to enhance myself creatively. At that time, she was taking a jewelry-design course at the New School. She was “working in metals” and presented Barnes and me with weekly gifts of cuff links, earrings, and other items. Jean was always happy to get what I didn’t want. Mother suggested that I take a bead-stringing class to help me open myself creatively. She said that bead stringing was a form of artistic meditation and that my questions about my future would be answered.

  Over a choker?

  Mother signed me up for the class and presented me with a list of tools I would need to get started: a crimper, some pliers, an awl, and, of course, beads. She instructed me to go to the bead district. (The bead district, if you’re not familiar with it, is really a couple of stores in the West Thirties, but Mother calls it the bead district to make her projects seem more compelling.)

  I didn’t tell Mother but I had all but taken the nonpaying job with K.I.N.D. the week that the jewelry class was to begin. The only problem was that I had avoided quitting my paralegal job, fearing it would lead to an unpleasant confrontation with paralegal management at Pennington & Litt. I had never had a real office job before working at the law firm, and so I had never left one before. I was hoping that my job performance would be so disgraceful that I would get fired: It would be their decision. I started coming to work especially late, leaving especially early, and forgetting to complete many of the tasks the lawyers had assigned me. Of course, you can get lost in the big law firm shuffle. Especially if you are me. So, unfortunately, no one seemed likely to fire me any time soon.

  My class was to start at ten after five in the afternoon, and I still hadn’t gone to the bead district to purchase the supplies. My job was in Midtown, the class was downtown, and the supplies were somewhere in between, so I left work at three-thirty. And it was clear I was leaving. I was wearing a raincoat, carrying an umbrella and my briefcase. Mother had gotten it for me when I started working as a paralegal so that I would take my work more seriously. I had all but sent a mass e-mail announcing my departure.

  To alleviate my self-consciousness, I pulled out my supply list in the elevator and studied all of Mother’s required and recommended items. I hadn’t known that beading was so complicated.

  “Where are you going?”

  It was Charlie.

  “Huh?”

  “I’m sorry to distract you. But I figured with that level of concentration you must be going somewhere interesting.”

  Charlie looks really good in a suit.

  “I am going to the bead district,” I told him.

  He thought I was kidding.

  “Oh, while you’re there, pick me up some beads.”

  So I did.

  Buying beads for Walter Redwin, a.k.a. Charlie, was probably the craziest thing I had ever done. In fact, it almost seems more plausible to me that I killed Polly Dawson than that I would buy Charlie a gift.

  But be clear: I didn’t do the former.

  And I did do the latter.

  I went to the bead store, I purchased all of the items on Mother’s list, and then as I was checking out I saw a little jar marked SELECT GLASS BEADS $7.95. I thought it would be sort of cute to present them to Charlie. So I bought them.

  I was so freaked out after my purchase that I never went to the bead class. I went home and stared at Charlie’s present for a couple of hours and failed to return Mother’s call about my review of the class. I went in to work at six-thirty the following morning, placed the jar on Charlie’s desk, and ran home.

  In retrospect and after the benefits of several months of therapy, I may have committed the act to expedite my job transition. You see, I never again went back to Pennington & Litt. I didn’t call in sick. I didn’t leave a note. I suppose I would have sent an e-mail if that option had been available to me. But it wasn’t.

  I’m sure nobody noticed anyway.

  So I will never know what Charlie’s response to the beads was. I wonder if he remembered the conversation in the elevator. Don’t get me wrong. I was incredibly curious, but not curious enough to face him or to confide to someone else at the firm what I had done. I didn’t even tell Jean. She was at Harvard Law School, and I was cutting bead class.

  I’m still outside. I’ve been hanging outside Charlie’s house for a week now, keeping warm with Felisha’s horse gear, riding the bus with an occasional trip to Bloomingdale’s.

  Charlie has met with eight different women now. I can’t figure him out. Is this a fetish? They don’t look alike—they’re all different colors and sizes—but they have a similar quality. And they all play out a similar scene with him. They eat a big meal; he has a cup of coffee. They cry at some point, and he gets angry at them. And then he leaves a twenty-dollar bill on the table. I feel like I am back at Mona Hawkins, watching a series of types all read for the same part in a movie.

  But what is the movie about?

 
I know I can’t do this for much longer. I was never much of a camper, and this is so unpleasant. The warmer weather is about to change. Snow is starting to fall and flurries cover the street. They could be the start of a blizzard. I don’t know; I haven’t watched TV in over a week. I cross the street to a row of garbage cans, which abut Charlie’s front door. Maybe there will be a newspaper in one of them with a weather report. I lift the lid and carefully dip my hand inside. Sometimes, as Freud might say, a newspaper is just a newspaper, but sometimes it’s a receptacle for dog shit. And while my hygiene is below acceptable, I don’t wish to add more gross things to my personal odor. I imagine what it’s like to be a surgeon. One false move and—

  “Who the fuck are you? And why are you following me?”

  Charlie is yelling at me.

  THREE

  CHARLIE

  I’m sitting in Charlie’s living room. He’s not saying anything, and I’m not saying anything. I see a phone, but he doesn’t use it. He’s not staring at me, but he has his eye on me, just in case I may want to escape. He doesn’t realize this is exactly where I want to be.

  He finally speaks.

  “Who do you work for?” His voice is deeper and gruffer than I remembered.

  I don’t think he wants me to tell him that until recently I worked for Mona Hawkins Casting.

  “I don’t work for anybody,” I tell him.

  “Are you with the FBI?”

  I don’t answer.

  “Are you?”

  “No. I’m not with the FBI. May I use your restroom?”

  “No.”

  We sit in silence. I stare at my surroundings. Charlie’s living room is really dark, which I find cozy. And it has a fireplace, which for now is posing as an obsolete-computer receptacle. There is one big empty brick wall, and the other three, which may have been painted white at one time, have evolved into aged bone. His only wall hangings are maps of famous World War I battles: Marne. Ypres, Verdun, and Lutsk. There are books everywhere: On the shelves, they are neatly categorized. I take a moment to notice that Charlie’s interest in history didn’t stop in college. He has a whole wall devoted to Europe 1700–1945. Another to law books and journals. I notice only a small section of fiction. Charlie’s clearly not a fan. There are weathered copies of paperback Shakespeare plays and random copies of American classics, college souvenirs more than anything else. The floor is littered with more history books: memoirs and biographies. Some are dog-eared, others are stuffed with old bills and credit-card receipts.