Under My Skin Read online

  ‘Do you, Larry, take Hope to be your lawfully wedded wife?’ asks Mr Costello.

  ‘I do,’ Larry says and he has taken off his hat.

  ‘Do you, Hope, take Larry to be your lawfully wedded husband?’

  ‘I do,’ I reply and then our rings are exchanged. These came from a pawnbroker in Dublin. Mine fits on my index finger and Larry has to wear his on his thumb.

  ‘You may kiss the bride,’ Mr Costello says and then he looks at us over his glasses.

  ‘Kids, a promise is a promise,’ he says.

  Email to Hope Swann

  From Matilda Vaughan

  Hope,

  I am so happy for you. I can’t imagine anything more romantic than marrying your first love. Tell me everything… are there any photos? What is the ring like? I would love to see you in your dress and veil.

  (By the way… don’t tell anyone… but I think a certain man in my life… is going to pop the question too. He hasn’t said anything yet – but I feel so sure… when you meet the right guy, Hope… you just know.

  Much love,

  M x.

  Jonathan Kirk stands on the cream marble stairs and when he smiles he looks almost as young as me. There is a red carpet in the reception with blue lights on either side. He beckons, he waves and he guides me in. The second interview goes like this. It is just myself and Jonathan and we are sitting on two red couches near his desk. The quote on his wall says, ‘If each of us hires people smaller than we are, we shall become a company of dwarfs.’

  When he speaks he puts one foot over his knee and talks for an hour. He tells me that great brands need great ads, that great ads come from great clients, that we are all here because we want to make great ads, that there is no overtime system but we all stay until the work is done and how does that sound?

  ‘Great’ is the only possible response.

  ‘If you work for me,’ he says, ‘I expect you to come up with solutions, don’t bring me your problems, and if there is a problem with a client – I would rather you told me before the client does.’

  This seems like a contradiction to me but my response is to swallow quietly and breathe.

  ‘Why do you want to work in advertising?’ he asks and then, ‘Let me tell you why I work in advertising. Last night I was watching TV and three of the ads in the break were ours. Now I don’t know about you… but I get aroused by that.

  ‘Is there anything you would like to say?’ And now he is leaning forward and being friendly and kind.

  ‘Yes,’ I tell him. ‘If I was having a dinner party I would ask Eleanor Roosevelt, Walt Whitman and Benjamin Cardoso.’

  ‘I see,’ he says and his face is very serious even though his eyes are beginning to smile.

  It rains and we throw a party in Vertigo.

  We drink the profits and we eat all the food. Larry drinks to celebrate our wedding and I drink to wish both of us luck. We drink and we dance and he turns me, turns me. We leave the blinds up and when we open the doors people crowd in. We drink because we found each other early and Juna shakes her head and says, ‘Too young, too young.’

  Arouse v. – 1. To evoke a feeling, response, or desire. 2. To cause feelings of sexual desire in somebody. 3. To make someone angry. 4. To wake up, to wake somebody up from sleep or unconsciousness.

  2 1029 Prince Street – Manhattan

  In time Glassman would grow tired of it, his own face in the mirror, and knowing that he was the last person other people saw before they died. On 2 January 2001 a snowstorm was forecast in New York and the city seemed strong to him then, and safe. On that day he did not think about snow. Instead he stood in his undershorts at the bathroom mirror and looked and looked until he saw himself fail. He was aware of the heat in his apartment and he was aware of Paul Simon coming from the CD player on the landing but he noticed the sleet on the skylight as if the sound came through a third ear he did not know he had.

  The disease had begun with a chain of small red spots, delicate embroidery on his spine and around his waist and in some bizarre flamboyant gesture up and over his shoulder again. The first treatment meant that he had a negative charge. Static shocks were an issue. The escalator at Macy’s, cab doors, some street signs. On a bad day he could stand still on the sidewalk and put the street lights out. Two doses of radium and every woman he met smiled at him. Later Matilda would say that he glowed. And women were drawn to him anyway. And mostly younger women too. Women who were somehow damaged, and loners like him.

  Before Matilda there was a woman from Alaska and before her a Mongolian woman called Boo. One night she took a knife in her hand and refused to put it down. And the Eskimo drove with her baby through snow in a pickup truck to find him at the cottage in Cape Cod. All the hopeless cases followed him like a lighthouse and somehow thought they had found hope in him. Then she went home and jumped from the top window of her house with the baby in her arms, and both of them – ‘Why?’ Glassman wondered – ‘Why?’ – survived.

  Now there were three kinds of antibiotics, a nasal spray that hit the back sinus wall and went straight to his brain. And binders. Painkillers. Vitamins. Every kind. All like bolts and screws to make a together man. His sexuality was unpredictable and it seemed as though the drugs and the disease had run away with his old life and his happy thoughts. Lately he believed it had taken his passions and feelings and he only seemed to like women now. He saw them and he was somehow pleased by them, but there were no real feelings of enthusiasm or desire attached.

  Matilda stood on the other side of the bathroom door. She inched it open and looked at his reflection in the glass.

  ‘Arthur,’ she asked in a whisper, ‘are you home?’

  Together they looked into the mirror and only his eyes, slate-grey and considered beautiful, could save him from becoming a shadow now.

  In the kitchen he took his meds and she made green tea. She poured some over the spider plant on the window ledge and he watched as she scalded the only green thing he had left.

  Plants died around him anyway. Bees buzzed and then spun on their backs until they were gone. But he could not infect people. His physician talked a lot about the pituitary gland and how the disease had gotten itself into the cockpit and taken the controls. ‘You may not be fully in charge of your emotions,’ he said, and when Arthur thought about this he saw devils in red cars driving his feelings around. Now, as he watched her for a moment over his small silver glasses, he could have blamed these devils but really he believed it was more about him and her.

  So she was pretty, Matilda, in a voluptuous 1950s way, but he had no real feelings left for her. He would tell her soon, and without her, some of the headaches in his life would go. Lately women seemed to take from him and just leave a weaker fight inside himself.

  She talked about her work and he listened and asked questions like ‘Really?’ and ‘Why?’ and ‘Why there?’

  He was always interested in other people’s lives and he liked conversation. He knew how to use words to connect people and how to make them all feel as if they were the centre of his world. With women, that gift – and his eyes – seemed to be enough to bring them down.

  The pale winter sunlight came in across the river and New Jersey and they sat across from each other and talked about her parents who were in town.

  ‘Mom bought a scarf in Bloomingdales,’ she said, and although Glassman tried he could not think of any possible response to this. His eyes over his glasses were growing warm with amusement and inside he thought, ‘She’s going to ask me to meet them now.’

  She sounded even younger when she spoke about her mom and dad. Matilda was thirty-four and he was fifty-one. When The Chief teased him about dating younger women he said calmly, ‘I would like to date a woman who is my age… or a little younger… but do you know any fifty-one-year-old women who are single and not completely insane?’

  He had met Matilda at the local swimming pool. She swam towards him in the shallow end and was beautiful, with pale w
et skin. And she could swim, long athletic strokes learned and practised from a very young age. She had large breasts which he admired and he liked the modesty of her old-fashioned bathing suit, and she in turn saw the marks and the scars from the injections and spinal taps, and because she seemed OK with that they slept together at his SoHo apartment that afternoon.

  He knew then that it would not last of course, as he always knew, but he was distracted by her raven-black hair, her thick slanted eyebrows, her wit and her smile, and so he let what he called another of the ‘undead’ slip in. He had read somewhere that orphans could always recognize another orphan in a crowded room. He sensed that she was already broken and read the telling ‘Please love me’ sign in her eyes. The next night she called at his apartment on Prince Street at 4 a.m. and he smiled at her in his sleep and let her in. And later he stayed up and watched her while she slept in an armchair, like a beautiful blackbird, her shoulder supporting her bill.

  The next morning she said she was sorry to have woken him up and when she smiled that lovely smile and asked if he would meet her again, he heard himself say, ‘OK.’

  And now it was somehow five months later and her Connecticut parents who were concerned and wealthy wanted to meet Glassman. They wanted to see, and he enjoyed the irony of this, if he was good and kind and safe enough. Everyone loved Glassman. Lately he had been loved by a group of visiting German doctors and they had wanted photographs and had stood at JFK smiling broadly with their arms around him. He felt bewildered by their love and found it difficult to react. He told Matilda about it now and he frowned and knew there was a joke hidden somewhere in this.

  ‘German love,’ he said slowly, ‘is very difficult to reciprocate.’

  And she sipped her tea and laughed.

  ‘Mom and Dad want to have dinner at Elaine’s,’ and here she smiled and looked right into his eyes, ‘and then… they really want to meet you.’

  ‘What Mom and Dad… really want,’ Arthur replied in a deadpan voice, ‘is to have dinner at Elaine’s… and then meet someone who is a lot younger than me.’

  And again Glassman asked why, why when he was swimming lengths in the swimming pool did he decide to stop and why did Matilda also stop and turn around? And why did he take her home and make love to her and then continue to let her in again and again? Glassman had never met a good woman in a bar. He did try of course but he could not connect with the women he met there. And besides, a certain type of woman seemed to find their way to him anyway and this was something he found difficult to explain. To him they were like wild birds who could fly higher than the Himalayas and no matter what sort of storm clouds they encountered, they would not, could not, turn around. They would not stop until they found him standing – ready to be pecked apart – doing what he liked to do best, walking in the wind and collecting old sea glass on the beach. They found him the same way Matilda found him in the swimming pool – and perhaps he preferred it that way. But sometimes when he was lonely, as he often was, he too, like so many men, would have to go to a bar and drink and hope.

  ‘And what happens if you don’t find anyone?’ The Chief asked.

  ‘What happens?’ Glassman replied mildly. ‘I do what any self-respecting fifty-one-year-old man does, get a pint of frozen yoghurt and go home.’

  But on that one morning in January when he found himself at the mirror in his bathroom and he was not even sure how he got there, for the first time his spirit waned, and Glassman was afraid he was going to die.

  He saw for the first time what he needed to see – a real person, losing strength and growing older, feeling older and not very well in himself.

  ‘I do not look good,’ he said and it was the saddest voice he had ever heard. He knew then that he was in trouble but he didn’t want to be too harsh with himself. He looked down at his hands and said, ‘I promise myself that I will use these hands in a different way – and use these eyes to see new things, other than people who sometimes die.’ He promised himself that if he ever got out of it – and ‘it’ must have meant the special body corset for his back, the injections, the drugs – he would leave the ER at St Vincent’s and have a different kind of life. He had an idea around glass. Whenever he found a new piece on Long Island or Cahoon’s Hollow Beach he would pocket it and he knew that if he became well, this one piece, attached to many others, could allow him to make something great.

  Matilda called him at his studio and she was at Elaine’s. He could hear her parents in the background and they were drunk and gung-ho and wanted to meet him now.

  He did not want to hurt her, so he agreed, but picked a place where the barman knew him, and where he knew every drink on the cocktail menu and every picture on the wall. The barman was waiting for him and he asked, ‘What gives, Arthur?’ as he gave a sideways nod to the people at the bar.

  ‘You watch,’ Glassman said, ‘this is better than the Jerry Springer Show.’ When he walked towards Matilda’s parents he saw – and they saw – that he was almost as old as them. It was embarrassing but soon everyone was smiling. Glassman pulled it off, for himself and for her, and that night when she put her hand in his, he told her that really he wanted to be alone. And what he meant, although he could not say it yet, was that she was beginning to trouble him and that he just wanted her to go off somewhere and leave him by himself. The night before she had woken him by taking a photograph of him asleep.

  The trouble with Matilda had begun with Marilyn.

  The Marilyn. Marilyn Monroe.

  One night he said it to her and now she could not let it go. He mentioned it in the afterglow and watched as she lit up in front of him. He made a casual remark out through the dark of his bedroom and she turned into a star right before his eyes. She did remind him of her – the high brows, the red mouth kiss, the sleepy sensuous eyes – but now he was getting tired of her. No, she was making him feel tired – which was a different thing. She was, he felt, somewhat ‘displaced’. Maybe even a little ‘unhinged’? One night she came wearing a blonde wig and a raincoat and not very much else. Every man’s fantasy, wouldn’t you think? But Glassman felt uncomfortable and a little afraid. He began to wish, in the most basic terms, that Matilda would simply go away.

  ‘Go buy a farm in Virginia,’ he wanted to say. ‘Have a cobra, ostriches, a boa constrictor, just find new ways to extend your madness.’

  Now when she left her parents at their hotel she came back and banged on his door. And he let her in. ‘You’re my umbilical cord,’ she said and she slept on a chair again. She looked beautiful to him then but this was something that he did not need to know. In the morning after she went to work he drank two cups of coffee and went to the bathroom, and here he cursed the medication for burning up his inners and looking into his own face in the mirror he congratulated himself on managing three rabbit pellets and a fart.

  The next day, a businessman ordered chocolate ice cream at Darcy’s in the Village. He was celebrating the christening of his first granddaughter and he ate a fillet steak and fries before ordering a poached pear with chocolate ice cream. He did not know that there was a crushed almond in it and within minutes he was in anaphylactic shock and it was Glassman, who was on reduced hours now, who injected the adrenaline, even though he knew it was already too late. And as they elbowed each other around the gurney at St Vincent’s it was Glassman that was elbowed closer than anyone else. He was moved up from the end so that he saw the body jump and some kind of aura move upwards and then the man opened his eyes and he was able to tell him that his granddaughter was called Anna Louise. But then the pink and orange aura lifted again and he was gone, and before he died, he saw the face of Glassman.

  And ‘What a face’ – that was what Matilda once said – ‘like a younger Samuel Beckett.’ But it all seemed too familiar to him now – the metallic grey of his hair, the weathered Cape Cod skin – and the deep lines from temple to jaw and each one with a story of a different woman and a different kind of song.

  When Matil
da wrote her column she called out to him for spellings and definitions. Whatever question she had he could always explain and then add new words. As he buttoned his overcoat in the hallway he answered her and she made light tapping sounds on her laptop in response. Glassman had the gift of vocabulary. He loved words and gathered them around him – he kept some, used some, loaned some, explained some. He had a word for everything. He had words that could fix a person and a place. His apartment was full of books, read and underlined. And in his bedroom, he had begun typing words on his old Remington typewriter again. Old-fashioned expressions and feelings to remind him of something he once had. ‘Ardour’, ‘lustful’, ‘woo’ and then in his small neat letters a word that he would stare at and could no longer draw meaning from – ‘love’.

  As she worked he went to see his own version of New York again and quietly visited each favourite place. But when he stood at the Stock Exchange he felt nothing. He was unmoved at the foot of the Empire State. He became bored at Writers’ Row in Central Park. He fell asleep during his favourite Broadway play. He even took a cab to Lugar’s in Brooklyn and ordered, something forbidden in his diet, fried onions and a red rare T-bone steak.

  But in the early evening of the cold winter day he saw it, and he asked the cab driver to stop and he got out in the middle of the biting wind and the honks of commuter traffic on Brooklyn Bridge. He saw the Statue of Liberty and the World Trade Center and as if he had never seen them before, he caught his breath and marvelled at how she pointed upwards and how there were two other man-made giants to care for her – and Glassman felt something at last. At home he lay on his bed and took his medication and when Matilda went out for a run, he typed in small black letters, one word – hope.

  He did not believe in God any more. But he believed in the power of the universe and the stars and the cosmos. So that night, because he wanted something very badly, he typed it on a piece of paper and went up on to the terrace and sent his wishes out into the night sky.