Saturn's Return to New York Read online

  It was the Jennifers who drove me nuts Upper-class girls from private schools who knew nothing about childcare or homemaking and were eternally trying to draw me out of my shell. Jennifers smiled too brightly and hugged too tight at bedtime. They called me honey and sweetie and wanted to play games: Monopoly, Go Fish, Boggle, Gin. None of them could cook and they were likely to go into a panic if I so much as sneezed. Once a Jennifer cut her hand opening a can of condensed chicken-noodle soup and fell into a cold faint at the sight of her own blood. I thought they were lonely themselves, to be so dead-set on making a connection

  Amy was a great babysitter who made sure I was alive and considered her job done Now she’s in her early forties, a brilliant writer, attractive with dark hair and second-hand designer clothes, obscure outside of a small circle of literary journals, barely making a living, totally bitter. I tell her I’m hiding out from an ex. She agrees to keep me company at the bar until the coast is clear I don’t think she needs much persuasion to knock back a few

  “Can you imagine?” she asks, looking around the million-dollar kitchen.

  “No,” I tell her. “I live in a one-bedroom in Inwood.”

  “I moved again last month,” Amy tells me “My new place is like a closet But I have a terrace almost as big as the apartment, so I can have forsythia, gardenias, basil, mint So it’s worth it.”

  “Ooh. Sounds nice I have a lawn in front of my building,” I tell her.

  “That’s good”

  “It’s not Imagine a suburban corporate headquarters. Do not step on the grass But at least it’s green.”

  “Well that calls for another drink,” she says.

  “Mm-hmm ”

  Then we hear someone call the guests into the living room. My mother is ready to give her speech.

  “First, I’d like to thank you all so much, not only for coming here tonight, but for supporting the Greenwich Village Review every step of the way for the past thirty-three years. When Michael Forrest and I started GV in nineteen sixty-six, it was a different world. Thanks to the efforts of some truly remarkable men, obscenity laws had been drastically altered and it was finally possible to publish writers like Jean Genet, Vladimir Nabokov, and our own William Burroughs and Terry Southern here in America So these writers were, on paper, now legal In reality, of course, it was a different story. If my mother, in nineteen sixty, had come to visit me at Columbia and found a copy of Lolita in my room, believe me, all the laws in the world wouldn’t have helped me.”

  Laughter

  “So the world changed, and yet in so many ways it remained the same. Michael felt that in the world of literary scholarship, minds were still not open to some of the really exciting work being done. Nabokov once said something to the effect of that there are no genres, there’s only one category of writing, and that’s good writing Michael and I held the same theory and tried to make that the driving force behind GV. We tried never to concern ourselves with categorization, popularity, or trendiness, only with good writing, particularly good writing that we knew would have a hard time finding a home elsewhere. Of course the success of GV owes itself to these writers. I have been so fortunate over the years not just to publish, but to get to know and learn from so many of the great writers of this century. And in all honesty, that’s been the real thrill at staying with GV— the writers. Not advertisers or circulation or sales, although all of that has gone well and I’m grateful. But what’s made it worthwhile has been the writers. I’ve led such a charmed life, working with such brilliant people every day for the past thirty years and, again, thank you.

  “Now, on to the second topic of the evening: the promotion of Kevin Clarence to editor-in-chief of GV. For ten years, Kevin has been my right hand man at GV. Under various titles like assistant to the editor, editorial assistant, and assistant editor, Kevin’s job has been to do everything I couldn’t or wouldn’t do, and everything he’s just plain better at than I am Kevin is a man whose sensitivity and kindness are matched only by his literary acumen. I have absolute faith in his talents as a writer, an editor, and a human being, and I know the rest of the GV staff shares my faith. So now, both literally and figuratively, I’ll step down and give the podium to Kevin

  “Thank you all for a wonderful thirty-three years.”

  Applause

  While the crowd is lauding Evelyn I look around the room and see my ex-boyfriend, across the room, looking me right in the eye. I drop my drink on the floor No one hears over the applause Amy asks if I’m okay. I he and say yes. It’s too much—my mother, the crowd, the booze, the pack of cigarettes I’ve smoked already today, now my ex, Austin.

  Now he’s seen me, he’s getting closer and closer and then he’s here

  “Hi Mary,” he says His blond hair is shorter, his Miami tan is gone, and he’s put on a few pounds, but his rich pretty voice is the same.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “I moved back to New York,” Austin says. “I live here now.”

  “That’s good news ”

  “Look, I-”

  “Why are you at my mother’s party?”

  “Because I got myself invited, through a friend. Because I wanted to see you I thought you’d hang up again if I called ”

  “Probably,” I say, but with a story like that I can’t resist softening a little Maybe it’s even true

  Evelyn’s received her kudos and she beelines for the bar Amy and I follow my mother, and Austin follows me.

  “Honey—” she starts

  “Oh, Mom, shh, everything’s fine “ I hug her and tell her how wonderful her speech was. People dip in and out of our circle, congratulating Evelyn. Everyone is talking at once, or maybe it’s that I’m too drunk to distinguish the speakers Your speech was wonderful. Amy, what did you think, was it too long? It was great, it really was. We’re so sorry to see you go. Well, I’m sorry to go I really am.

  Uncomfortable pause, broken by Evelyn “So, didn’t you two used to go out?”

  “Mom, please ”

  Austin smiles. Thankfully Amy has enough common sense to abruptly change the topic. Has anyone ever heard of Wild-weed Press? They want to include an essay of mine in this anthology they’re doing and I don’t quite know what to make of them. Yeah, actually, they put out a chapbook by this friend of mine, Evan Sanders, this poet I know up in Vermont. He was happy with them, I think. I got something of theirs at the office recently, what was it, a book of writers writing about television Martin Amis has a piece in there on Gilligan’s Island, it’s hysterical. I don’t know why we didn’t review it, I think we didn’t have space. Where are you working now again? Intelligentsia. Internet bookseller. Oh yeah I’ve heard of them.

  Uncomfortable pause

  Clever Amy picks a new topic and the conversation flows again, like the hors d’oeuvres, like the drinks, like the strange feelings

  I saw Austin for the first time in a photograph. I was in Miami, at the bookstore, in a meeting with a sales rep from Buena Vista, a small fine-art publisher based in Los Angeles The rep was a chubby woman in a pale pink suit with lemon-yellow hair in an updo and a dark tan. She didn’t know a lot about Buena Vista, or fine art, but she was a good saleswoman and it was a good meeting. I was flipping through a book of photography she was pitching by a young photographer I liked who took snapshots of his friends in New York and Los Angeles One photograph drew me in; a thin man with shoulder-length, messy blond hair, shot from the hips up One hand was casually stuck in his hip pocket and the other hand held a camera. It was his face that got me High cheekbones, feline eyes, and a mouth that looked to be smiling, then on a second look didn’t, and then on a third did indeed seem to be curling up just a bit at the left corner He looked messy and relaxed and confident, like the term young women use when their hair looks tousled and sexy, JBF—just been fucked I read the caption Austin Ellis, photographer. I bought five copies of the book for the store in order to justify asking for the sample for myself, which the chubby rep happily gave.


  Later I looked up Ellis, Austin, on our database. He had three books, each with successively better publishers, and I ordered them all. Most of the pictures were fashion and editorial work for the big women’s glossies and other high-end magazines. A young Hollywood actress in the back of an old limousine, in nineteen-forties style makeup and lingerie, sleeping. An Abstract Expressionist artist, famous for his bombastic attitude, riding the L train in a cheap suit and tie. I read on the back flap of the most recent book, after a list of awards he had won and magazines he had published in, that Austin Ellis recently moved from Los Angeles to Miami’s South Beach. Well Even though I had spent the better part of my twenty-six years spaced out on books, booze, drugs, and an overactive imagination, I had never been one to fixate on a celebrity. I knew when I was daydreaming and when I was living. I knew—as much as anyone else, at least—what was real and what wasn’t. And I was in love with a photograph. In my life so far I’ve only told two people the whole story of Austin, including the photograph One person was Crystal, who raised an eyebrow and put one hand on my shoulder and said nothing. The other was Chloe, who asked what it was I loved about him. She of all people should know, I thought, that you love a person as a whole, not in bits and pieces.

  It was a few months later that I saw him in the flesh. Carolyn and I had been busy opening the bookstore, which was a success from the first day. Half the staff didn’t show up, the computers crashed, and the phones went down, but people came and bought books It was a Friday, my first day off for two weeks, and I was on the beach, walking toward the water in cut-offs and a black string bikini—I had a wardrobe of bikinis by then. I was walking toward a spot by the water when I saw Austin from behind and stopped dead in my tracks Even from behind he was beautiful. He held a camera and was shooting a girl who was right at the edge of the surf. The girl wore a turquoise crochet bikini and funny little turquoise snakeskin boots. Austin was barefoot, in black jeans rolled up a few inches and a black T-shirt. Near his feet were a pair of black shoes, a camera case, and a Vuitton suitcase I guessed was the model’s. There was no fanfare like at other photo shoots I had seen, just Austin and the girl.

  I sat down where I could watch him without being seen. He shot her for another twenty minutes, stopping to change cameras and load film a few times. He called something out to her I couldn’t hear and then she walked toward him and they spoke for a few seconds. Then she took her suitcase and started to dress. Austin turned around and crouched down to pick up his cameras and put on his shoes, and I saw his face straight-on for the first time. He lifted his head, about to stand, and he saw me. He didn’t move. I thought, I will remember this as long as I live (and so far, I have). Then the model said something to him and he turned toward her and stood up, and they walked back to Ocean Drive together.

  South Beach was a small town, and if Austin Ellis was around I would see him again. It was seven days later that I came to the bookstore one morning to see Austin up at the register in a friendly conversation with Carolyn It turned out he was asking her permission to shoot in front of the store. For the first time I noticed the Amazons in bikinis and fur stoles smoking cigarettes on the pavement out front “Why the fuck not,” said Carolyn.

  “It’s good publicity” The shoot went on until evening, and at seven, when the store closed, Austin shyly asked me out to dinner. We walked in silence, smiling, to a lapanese restaurant on Washington Avenue, the first on the beach Over sushi we spoke quietly, modestly, about where we had come from and how we ended up in Miami Over coffee at News Cafe we traded childhood traumas By the time we watched the sun rise on the beach we thought we knew everything we needed to know.

  Austin came from the kind of family situation bad television movies are made from. He left when he was sixteen to live with a woman a few years older than his mother—still, she was only thirty-five—who picked him up at a cafe on Melrose Place The woman was a music editor for a small film studio, she made plenty of money and hung around with a chic, avant-garde crowd. Every morning Austin got breakfast at Nate & Al’s, the famous lewish deli, and twenty bucks for dinner when she went out with her friends

  After a few months she set up an internship for him with a friend of hers, a photographer, to keep Austin busy during the day He refused to go to school. When Austin was eighteen and he left the woman to get his own apartment and sleep around, the photographer agreed to pay him a salary and promote him from apprentice to assistant. Slowly Austin learned When he was twenty he left to work for a fashion photographer, who was soon pawning off his smaller shoots to Austin, even though he still took the credit He also started to hit on Austin every time he had a few drinks. Austin set out on his own

  This didn’t all come out until our second date, another all-night marathon that ended on the beach at sunrise At six in the morning it was already eighty degrees, a real Miami summer day, and we had just taken a swim in our underwear We lay on the beach, wet and salty, dripping onto our wrinkled clothes, which tomorrow would smell like the date and remind us of each other

  “So basically,” I said, “every advance you’ve made in your career has been because somebody wanted to fuck you.”

  He laughed. “I guess so. But only up until that point.” His voice was light and even and rich and he laughed a lot It was like listening to a natural phenomenon, like the ocean or the wind. This voice and this laugh made anything and everything, even childhood horror stories, okay The past didn’t matter, the future was far away, and everything was fine Until it wasn’t—but that wouldn’t happen for a while. “Then I got married,” he said.

  “To who?”

  “A model I met her on one of my first shoots She was from L A. too, white trash like me Her mother pushed her into modeling when she was twelve, basically pimping her, until she finally told her to fuck off when she was eighteen She was a junkie. The mother, and the daughter too It was a horror show.”

  “You mean the family or the marriage?”

  “Both, actually. Edie She’s a great girl, we’re still friends, but what a disaster. We both came from these fucked-up families, neither of us had any idea what a regular married life was like We did therapy, everything. Nothing helped. No, that’s not true, the therapy helped us each a lot, it just didn’t help the relationship. She’s a photographer now, I’m really proud of her. That was what—six years ago? I was twenty-three ”

  Austin was twenty-nine when we met Knowing what I know now, it all makes a lot more sense Saturn Return. But I was twenty-six then and I knew nothing He had only moved to Miami a few months before and hadn’t furnished his apartment yet, so that weekend we went shopping together at a ritzy department store in the city. Money was still new to Austin, even though he had a lot of it, and I helped him pick out the best. Le Creuset kitchenware, a Krups coffee maker, pure Egyptian cotton sheets with a high thread count, goose down pillows, lokey sexual innuendos in the bedding department

  I thought I knew everything, that weekend, but there was still so much to learn. Like that one of his father’s many incarcerations had been for sexually abusing Austin Like that his mother had not, when she found out, blamed her husband, but sent Austin to live with foster parents for a year. But with Austin, everything was fine. So he had a fucked-up childhood—who didn’t? Nothing he said was shocking to me, none of it was significantly worse than the horror stories I had heard in New York, even from the elite youth at St Elizabeth’s. My first boyfriend, Max, had been abandoned by his mother at the age of of five, left to live with a father who didn’t even know he had a son until the mother decided to move to Wisconsin with her new boyfriend Another girl at St Liz’s was beaten so badly by her father that he was brought to trial—but no one would put the CEO of an international oil conglomerate in jail, so back home he went This kind of story wasn’t new.

  From that weekend on we were a couple. We would go with Carolyn to dive bars off Washington Avenue and with models to the tony spots on Ocean Drive Austin bought a car, a convertible, and
on our days off we drove around the city picking up knick-knacks for his still too-empty apartment and eating in little Cuban seafood restaurants we could never remember how to find again The city was new to both of us and it was ours. We agreed on everything and when we didn’t, it wasn’t a problem. Nothing in those days was a problem. Each morning I woke up and drank a shotglass-size serving of wheatgrass juice and arrived at the store nicely buzzed from the chlorophyll. Carolyn and Austin, like brother and sister, took turns teaching me how to drive. Once a month I spoke to Evelyn on the phone and we got along well I told her about Austin and she asked around among some editors she knew and they all approved. She called me back with the information and we giggled like schoolgirls, like friends. I swam in the ocean every morning and I even got a tan

  Everything was fine—until it wasn’t One evening after work I showed up at Austin’s apartment and found Austin drunk and the apartment trashed Everything we had bought together—the vintage porcelain lamps, the Fiestaware plates, the Mexican blown-glass tumblers—in pieces on the floor. I thought there had been a robbery, but it was worse: His mother had died I called Carolyn, who met me at the door with some sleeping pills. He took a few and while he slept I swept up some of the mess and then crawled back into bed so I would be there when he woke up I thought that would help I was so naive.

  The next day he went to Los Angeles I offered to come with him but he said it wasn’t necessary, he would be fine and he would be back in three days We hugged at the airport and he told me he loved me and would call the next day He didn’t call for two weeks, and I didn’t see him again until my mother’s retirement party three years later.

  I turned into one of those women who wait. I waited for him to call, imagining all kinds of murderous scenes, drunken mistakes, encounters with carjackers. I waited for him to come home, to prove to me that I existed. Finally after fourteen days he called, apologetic, and told me there was more to do than he had imagined—selling the house, settling a few debts. He left a number where I could reach him A friend’s. The next day I called the friend’s and a woman answered I hung up, and I waited. A few days later he called again, clearly high. He had run into some friends, he was still sorting out his mother’s mess, but he missed me terribly and would come home soon He loved me. I loved him I waited A week later he called again, drunk, and said he was staying a while I waited He called less and less and I spent more and more time waiting. We had been together for almost a full year, long enough, I thought, for a relationship to jell