Mail Page 3

  I shook my head. I hadn’t any clue.

  “Seamus O’Toole!” he exclaimed.

  Oh God, I thought. “How interesting,” I said. Obviously Professor Haven was one of those who assumed that any spouse, even an ex, was a cherished extension of oneself. “But Seamus is a Joyce scholar,” I protested.

  “Precisely my sentiment. But he’d always been interested in young writers, he explained, and had written a bit himself as a youth.”

  His interest in young writers was certainly true, I was able to attest to that. But as far as Seamus’ own writing…Iwaspretty sure Seamus’ fiction was a fiction. But what could I say? Professor Haven was beaming at me. “Now we are connected on both sides, as it were,”he said.

  I thought of that song—I knew a guy who had danced with a girl who had danced with the Prince of Wales. Guilt by association. And all too cozy for words.

  No, cozy isn’t the word, I think now. More like smothering. It’s quarter of eleven and I’m out in the front hall waiting for Louie. Yes, I’m back stalking Louie. After all, I’m thirty-one years old, a grown daughter and an ex-wife. Why should my mother pick out my boyfriends the way she chose my barrettes when I was eight? Besides, she approved of Seamus, and look what happened to that. So, the morning after my mother leaves, I am leaning wantonly against the letterbox of 2B wafting Arpłge without an ounce of shame. It’s certainly easier to go after an unsuitable man when the person who finds him unsuitable is two hundred fifty miles away.

  Louie arrives at five of eleven. First the door rattles. I get a glimpse of his earflaps through the smudged glass and know by the fact that he’s wearing them it’s below thirty-two. Perhaps I can offer him coffee. Cocoa. Warm those fingertips between my own.

  The door opens. My knees go weak. He slaps his mailbag down against the entry tiles. A sound which causes my shoulders to give a little jerk. He looks up at me from the bottom step. I feel like Juliet on her balcony. I smooth my hair. “Hey Katinka,” Louie says, “haven’t seen you in a while.” He gives me one of those wide-eyed grins that make heat rise in my body like a slowly filling glass.

  I manage what I hope is an enigmatic Mona Lisa smile.

  “In fact in another week I would’ve started to think you’d been avoiding me.”

  “Oh, no,” I protest in a rush. “My mother just left. We were out every minute shopping up a storm.”

  Louie nods. His earflaps flap. For one treacherous moment I see him through my mother’s eyes. If only he weren’t a mailman, if only he had a degree or at least the mitigating presidency of some garden club … I hold my breath. I am turning into my mother. “You know mothers,” I say with a vehemence that startles me.

  “Mothers,” he says.

  I nod, and a look passes between us which passeth all understanding.

  Or so I think until he says, “Your mother is a stunning woman.”

  Which astonishes me. I suppose she’s cute with her cap of tinted curls and the rhinestones that glitter in the corners of her designer eyeglasses. She has tiny feet. “Size five, the sample size,” she boasts. She flaunts her shapely calves. When miniskirts went out, she was in despair—“a woman’s legs are the last to go.” But despite her ageless legs, she’s sixty-three and my mother, neither a sibling rival nor some rival cheerleader chasing the captain of the team.

  Perhaps Louie notices my confusion because he adds, “You take after her.”

  “Thank you,” I say, figuring, given the context, this is flattery. I decide it’s time to change the subject. Shall I suggest the coffee? Compliment him on his way with a kiss? Any more where that came from, I want to ask. Instead, I lead with a scintillating, “So, it’s pretty cold out there.”

  “You bet.” Louie rubs his hands together and blows on them, his lips puckered adorably.

  “I can always tell the temperature by whether you wear your earflaps down.”

  “No kidding,” he says as if I have made a brilliant observation. “I guess I’m a kind of human barometer.”

  Thermometer you mean. But I don’t say anything. Who am I to correct anyone’s English? To this day I still remember the moment in ninth grade when I spoke before the whole school and pronounced the word gesture with a hard g. But I learned. So can Louie. Only a little teaching’s needed to narrow the gap in syntax.

  Now Louie reaches into his mailbag and starts to pull out some magazines. The letters themselves are separated into bunches and wrapped in rubber bands. But the magazines are loose. There are the expected New Yorkers, New Yorks, New York Reviews, Atlantics, Smithsonians, National Geographics, and the esoteric, scientific journals, volumes on linguistics, deconstructionism, astrophysics, a journal of parisitology. Louie fans them out like a deck of cards. I scooch next to him. I smell soap, mint. “No Playboys,” I joke. “I suppose not in this crowd.”

  Louie’s face turns serious. “I wouldn’t know,” he says. “Postal personnel aren’t supposed to check the content of the mail.”

  “Really? In Maine our mailman used to stand blatantly under the maple and read our Time magazines. “How about that Man of the Year,’ he’d say to me.”

  Louie smiles. “But I can’t help looking through yours, Katinka, just in case one of those places has sent you that big fat check.”

  I think of Seamus’ messenger. No matter what the news, this messenger I’ll kiss. But once again the very thought of Seamus seems to release some powerful telegenic rays because Louie frowns and says, “You know that guy, with a gray beard and sandals. He visited you once, brought you your mail …”

  I shiver. “Seamus …”

  “He’s on my route. I knew the name, of course, but never met him till the other day. I put two and two together. So did he. He’s pretty sharp. Figured out who I was. Said he never forgot a face.”

  It wasn’t the face that Seamus always remembered. “What a coincidence,” I say.

  “I think you told me,” he goes on, “that O’Toole’s your ex-husband’s name. But this guy …” He shrugs. “Is he your uncle? Some kind of relative?”

  “Husband once. Now ex. Thank God,” I add.

  “Wow.” Louie’s mouth forms an O, an open kiss in which I can make out the tip of a glistening tongue. “I mean isn’t he kind of—”

  “Old?” I finish. “Exactly. It was my father-figure stage.”

  Louie looks puzzled.

  “Which I’m out of. Now I’m looking for someone more my age.” This I say pointedly. I can’t tell Louie’s reaction, though, because he’s bent over the magazines and his face is turned from me. He picks up a Daedalus and rolls it into Professor Haven’s box. All at once I am warmed with joy. Not only have I been given a reprieve from further dissections of my Seamus complex but I have been handed the opening I’ve been waiting for. I point to the white rectangle on which “Professor Arthur T. Haven” has been carefully lettered in black. “This guy’s got a crush on my mother.”

  “Whattya know,” he says, then adds, “I’m not surprised.”

  “He’s the one who bid on our gingerbread men. At Derek and Gregory’s party.”

  “How about that.”

  “They met at that party.”

  “Gee.”

  “That was the start.”

  “It was a great party,” Louie says.

  “I had a great time.”

  “Me, too.” Louie rubs his hand along his chin. His top button, I notice, dangles from a nest of loosened thread.

  “There’s no reason that there shouldn’t be more get-togethers,” I begin. “Maybe sometime you and I—”

  But I am interrupted by an “Oh, Katinka, my dear,” as Arthur Haven, my ubiquitous building mate, appears bundled up in tweed and sporting one of those fur hats that Russian politicians wear. We mill about the hall discussing the weather, the new traffic light at the end of Linnaean Street, the best way to carry a mailbag to save your back. Louie tells Professor Haven about the coincidence of Seamus being on his route. They discuss the stunning qualities
of my stunning mother. They discuss my writing. Professor Haven says I must have learned a lot from Seamus. He thinks my mother would make a splendid heroine. I tell Louie he needs to have his button attended to. Louie tells me if I go outside to wear a hat, that the largest percentage of body heat escapes from the head. I am pretty sure that his body heat escapes from somewhere else, a place where I don’t dare to look. I keep my eyes on his loose button, my thoughts to myself. We are a cozy group, the three of us plus my mother’s ghost and Seamus’, and God knows who else’s. Then we all smile warmly and say good-bye.

  * * *

  Later that afternoon my mother calls. “I’ve just had the loveliest conversation with Arthur,” she announces without even a preliminary hello.

  “Arthur?” I ask.

  “Professor Haven.”

  “Of course.” There is a tattoo of coffee rings on my desktop which looks like the interlocking circles from the Olympics. I place the telephone over it and notice I have uncovered a matching set of rings. I try to move the phone in such a way to camouflage both marks. This doesn’t work. As if to emphasize the inadequacy of this solution, the receiver erupts in a burst of static.

  “Are you still there, dear?” my mother asks. “This connection isn’t good.”

  “Sorry. You were saying … ?”

  “Well, Arthur invited me for New Year’s Eve. I plan to come back to Cambridge on the thirtieth …”

  My head swirls with disconnected thoughts: My mother has a date for New Year’s Eve. Will Louie lose his button? Will I ever know if he has lost it or if he sews it on? I need to put the garbage out. Did I enclose a SASE with the story I posted Saturday? I look across my desk to the sofabed. A corner of a Laura Ashley sheet peeks out from its tweed upholstery like an untucked shirttail. “Fine. I won’t even have to change the sheets.”

  “Actually, Arthur,” my mother pauses, clears her throat, “invited me to stay with him.”

  I scratch at the desktop with my letter opener, which is a head of Shakespeare on a silver blade. I notice I have put stems on the Olympic rings, turning them into bunches of balloons. Before I can process my mother’s startling announcement or vandalize any more of my furniture, she counters with a parry and a thrust. “Now, Katinka dear,” she asks, “what are your plans for New Year’s Eve?”

  A low blow. In Old Town, Maine, possessing a date for New Year’s Eve and being a cheerleader are the Oscar and Nobel of social life. My mother knows this, having held my hand through the will-he-or-won’t-he-call seventh- to twelfth-grade phase. In college she wrote me pep letters and enclosed clippings from Vogue of the perfect little black dress. And when Seamus and I eloped, she sent me a telegram which read Congratulations! No more worries about a date for you know when. A year after the marriage I didn’t have the heart to tell her I watched the ball drop over Times Square with my friend Jenny and her cat Tigger on their black and white portable.

  “I’m not sure what my plans are yet,” I say. This is not entirely a lie, for I haven’t decided with what fellow wallflower I’ll lift a Diet Pepsi to toast another socially unfruitful year.

  “Good,” my mother says, surprising me, “because Arthur wanted to have a little dinner party. With his daughter and her family. So we can all get to know each other.”

  “How cozy.”

  “Isn’t it? Of course afterward, Arthur and I will go to something at the Faculty Club. And Zenobia has plans …”

  “Me, too. I mean I have a bunch of invitations. I just have to pick one.”

  “Well, that’s perfect, dear,” my mother practically trills. I picture her eyes twinkling behind their twinkly rhinestone frames. I can hear the twinkling of her delight. She is happy about Arthur, his Harvard Ph.D., his little dinner party, and her daughter, who seems to be—oh glorious word—popular. “To think,” she says, “that you and I are both so popular.”

  We discuss what we will wear to the dinner party and the subsequent sites of our various invitations. I garnish this mixture with the names of a few deluxe hotels. My mother mentions Harvard three times in two sentences.

  The minute we hang up, something happens that if I wrote it in a story would seem too contrived. But at this very moment, someone slides an envelope under my door. It’s a small pink square which, when I bend to pick it up, I notice smells like the perfumed inserts in fashion magazines. Tuberoses, maybe, or those huge pink lilies that look like they belong to movie stars.

  It’s an invitation, surrounded by a border of painted violets and written in mauve ink. Gregory and Derek request my presence from ten o’clock on to ring in the NewYear. And if I’d like, I may bring a friend.

  I know just the friend.

  For the rest of the afternoon I write in a heat. It’s a literal heat. By dinnertime the path from my desk to coffee machine is strewn with discarded layers of my clothes. A sweater. Kneesocks. A ribbed turtleneck. I finish the first draft of my story though I can barely tell if it is any good. When I read it through, every line the diaper man speaks to the UPS girl vibrates with innuendo, even on the first page when they’ve just met. The baby has a come-hither look. His mother might as well be wearing a black garter belt.

  I put my story in the file of things that need work. I warm up a bowl of chili and eat it in front of the TV. I watch television straight until eleven. I watch sitcoms and quiz shows. A variety hour. The last program I watch is a rerun of a sitcom about a group of friends. The plot seems to hinge on previous episodes I’ve never seen. I usually allot my TV time to the news and programs that are good for you on PBS. I think I’m trying to atone for all those years in Old Town watching reruns of Father Knows Best and wanting desperately to be the kind of daughter my own father would call Kitten or Princess. On this one everybody seems to be jumping in and out of bed. One character’s T-shirt says “Princeton.” Another’s says “Penn.”This is a program for my mother, I decide. But maybe she’s already a fan. I am more than pleased, though, when one character in Yale sweats kisses the guy painting her kitchen wall.

  In bed I fall asleep immediately but wake after half an hour. I feel confused. There is something I have missed. Something I have overlooked. Is it a problem with my story? Have I left the oven on? I lie back against the pillows. I pull the blankets up under my chin. My nose itches. I rub it with a corner of the sheet. I remember.

  My mother will be staying upstairs with Arthur T. Haven, Harvard Ph.D., professor emeritus of philosophy. My freshman year I took a course in logic in the Philosophy department. We studied the Greeks, Plato’s dialogues, syllogisms, and hypotheses. I was hoping to develop a rational form of mind. As I’ve grown older, my mind has become less rational, and I’ve forgotten most of the logic I’ve learned. I do have a vague sense, however, of how to set up a syllogism. (A) Humans are sexual beings; (B) my mother is a human; (C) if my mother is staying with Arthur Haven, it will come to follow that she’ll be staying in Arthur Haven’s bed. I feel the first stirrings of panic. I sit up. My knowledge of logic is illogical, I comfort myself. I have probably structured the proof wrong.

  I picture the family in Father Knows Best. I picture the parents’ bedroom. I see the narrow virginal twin beds bisected by the night table with its little coolie-hat shaded lamp. Here, in their pressed, buttoned-up pajamas and their lilting good-humored voices, the parents discussed the children. How to surprise Kitten. What about Bud’s grades. I read somewhere that the children in real life turned out bad. Kitten was a druggie. Princess married in multiples. Bud, I think, pumped gas.

  I picture my own parents’ bedroom in Old Town. Similar twin beds. A night table on rickety mahogany legs. A hooked rug of red flowers. My mother wore flannel nightgowns edged in rickrack. My father’s pajamas were blue and white stripes. Nevertheless, somebody crossed that flowered rug to create me.

  Now I picture Arthur Haven’s bed which, though I don’t know this, I assume is queen-sized if not king. The sheets are a swirl of twists and knots. Across them lies my mother, brazen in backles
s satin mules and strapless black lace. I sigh. At sixty-three my mother is having a nineties sex life while I am having none at all. Maybe there’s a reason sixty-year-olds are called sexagenarians.

  I stop. There is, after all, something wrong with this picture. It’s not so black and white. Once, as a child, rummaging in my mother’s bureau drawers, I found a round rubber disk in a pink plastic case. And, at the back of the closet, a book, printed in Sweden, called The ABC’s of Love. Near the end of that alphabet, there were drawings that might make even the guys from the Kama Sutra blush. A big bed does not necessarily a sex life make, I tell myself. I think of Seamus’ office in the English department. Of the tiny strip of floor between the bookcase and the desk. The floor was cold. The desk was metal and sharp-edged. No matter. The dust motes that danced in the light could have been stars. The planked boards could have been a mattress of eiderdown.

  I am in such a state that it’s after three by the time I get back to sleep. I only manage this by forcing myself to think of pleasant things: waves, beaches, bylines, Louie’s kisses at the strike of twelve. But I sleep late and my schedule is skewed. I don’t have breakfast till ten. It’s ten-thirty by the time I make it to my desk. It takes me so long to get into my story that when I check my watch I realize I’ve missed my chance to waft Derek and Gregory’s invitation under Louie’s nose.

  For the first time it dawns on me that maybe Louie, like my mother, like most of the population of Old Town, Maine, and unlike me, has already got plans for New Year’s Eve. I start to make myself even more miserable. I project girlfriend, I project Person of Opposite Sex Sharing Living Quarters, I project wife. What do I know of him? Just because he came to the Christmas party without a date, just because he kissed me once under the mistletoe—he would have kissed my mother if she’d been standing there, or Gregory himself. The mention of Gregory opens up a whole new set of possibilities that I can barely stand to contemplate. I am saved by the knock at the door.