Trixie

When you were going out with Reid, Suellen Beauchamp called you “Trixie”.

It started one Monday in mid-July; Suellen was inquiring about what you had done that weekend and you answered, “My boyfriend–”. You must have followed up with a verb, but couldn’t be sure because she had looked at you slyly, reading the uncomfortable spaces between your words. You and Reid had listened to the band rehearse for the Friday evening Summerdance performance in Grant Park. As you lay in the grass, he dozed off, but you were too self-conscious to follow. You kept an uncomfortable watch, turned on your side, wedged against his hip and encircled by one arm (the other arm was bent and pillowed under his head–he would be sorry later when it fell asleep). Before Reid, you would have looked at such a display with contempt, and now you have become that girl, the lucky one with the boyfriend, unselfconscious and confident, some might say even exhibitionist in public. You got used to the idea of him, as if he has always been there, snoring next to you–but that was banking on the assumption that he wanted to be there. For the moment, you thought he did. The mournful yet unrepentant sound of the Latin horn section at the Summerdance stage drove home the understanding that the longer you waited, the more difficult it would be to change your mind.

“So, you went dancing?” Suellen asked, raising a carefully plucked and shaded eyebrow.

There were rumba lessons before the performance but Reid wouldn’t–or more accurately couldn’t dance. Following his noncommittal lead and hanging on to his spaghetti arms was not any easier just because you knew the steps. You were simply killing time before an 8:00 movie at the Film Center. Still, he had no problem telling you what to do, and for the moment, you listened to him.

“Hey babe, let’s sit this one out.”

And that’s how you ended up lying like a luncheon on the grass, without a blanket because this was so far past your first and second date that he didn’t think about these details anymore. He didn’t have to. You were already won, like a prize. He listened to you when it benefited him most, when he had something to gain.

Suellen listened too: She picked, she pried, she eavesdropped. Wearing kitten-heeled mules, she minced her way over to your cubicle. You were both temporaries at the Arts Council office, on the tenth floor of a monstrosity of a building that resembled the Mother Ship from Close Encounters. On the plaza outside tourists froze for minutes on end, their heads thrown back, gawking up at its grand ugliness. Suellen, who wore her hair in a tangle of Medusa-inspired ringlets, commanded similar attention. She had gone through a bitter divorce almost ten years earlier, and while her husband (she said) claimed that she had slowly turned him into stone, she kept his last name as a souvenir.

“SOO-ellin BEE–chum,” she would say, fixing her unblinking gaze straight into the eyes of new acquaintances, crushing their hands in her viselike grip. Now, clutching a waxed paper bag that contained her usual cruller, Suellen stood in the entryway of your space, leaning against the ugly fabric-covered dividers, smiling like she knew something that you didn’t know. Then she lunged forward to hand something to you, sloshing lukewarm coffee over the plastic lip of her Styrofoam cup and onto the fake wood surface of your desk. Her offering was one of those free commercial postcards displayed in restaurant vestibules, only the surface was creased and the edges dog-eared, as if Suellen had been carrying it around in her pocket for weeks.

“Hi Trixie! Still have the boyfriend this morning?” Suellen asked brightly.

The postcard promoted Alan Rudolph’s film Trixie, which had opened a few months earlier to mixed reviews. Emily Watson played the title character, an attractive but inept girl detective who was always saying things out of context. You were partial to non sequiturs and puns but you found nothing funny about the misuse of grammar. Nobody had ever addressed you as Trixie. You had previously associated it with Speed Racer’s girlfriend. You knew it was a nickname for Beatrix–which you also knew was from Latin, meaning to bring joy, a tall order, indeed. And despite the movie reference, Suellen had probably co-opted the nickname from the Lincoln Park Trixies, rumored to be a secret society of yuppie girls living in a trendy neighborhood. The existence of the Trixies could very well have been a hoax, but in Lincoln Park there were regular sightings of these post-entry level young urban professional women. They traveled in threes and fours from apartment to office to bar, so it was difficult to determine if they were an organized group. Trixies were said to be single, but spoken for, although it was acceptable to live in Lincoln Park for up to three years with a newly acquired husband and possibly a child (the gender didn’t matter so much as long as there was an oversized pram in which to wheel it around). Then, when the first kid was ready to start school, the Trixie, the husband, and the 1.5 children moved to a house in the suburbs, magically transformed into a real demographic family. You, on the other hand, were not Trixie material. You were serious about finishing your graduate thesis in Art History. You were a lightweight when it came to drinking and partying. While Trixies reportedly drove VW Jettas because they looked like BMWs from a distance, you got around on buses and the “L” train. You lived in a second floor walk-up in Ravenswood, far too north for fashion. You were even farther away from marriage, though on the surface, Reid looked suspiciously like a catch.

At times you wondered how you had gotten so far away from the sea. You constantly had to remind yourself that you lived in the state of Illinois–though you felt more like you existed in a nervous state, a state of disbelief. It was simpler to say that you lived in Chicago, a city self-contained and shielded from Midwestern mediocrity by its bubble of culture. You thought you were safe.

“Nobody’s safe, Trixie,” Suellen said unexpectedly. “Not even you”.

You were startled by this outburst. Were you thinking out loud? When you turned to confront her, Suellen had escaped, the tendrils of her heavy fragrance unraveling in her wake.

She reappeared later to ask you out to lunch.
“For fun,” she said.
To dish, you knew. To get you to talk.

You crossed the street to Marshall Field’s, and took the elevator up to the seventh floor, where you ordered lush, overpriced salads and carried your trays to the southwest corner where sunlight filtered in through tall windows, hazy with residue.

At the table, you observed that Suellen was artificially tanned everywhere except for two inches of startlingly white skin exposed by a wildly patterned silk blouse tied at the waist. As usual she wore capri-length pants, fine for summer, but in September when it started to get cold she would most likely fly south rather than buy a button-down shirt or a pair of sensible trousers. Suellen ate her food with gusto, crunching the lettuce, gnawing the carrots noisily, but what she really fed on, was gossip. It was a substantial part of her diet, like coffee and pastries. She used herself as a reference point, one of those people who, halfway through listening to somebody else, is already pitching the story that she wants to tell, formulating a new narrative, making the story her own; stealing the spotlight, changing the subject.

“So, Trixie, you’ve never talked about your boyfriend before. Is this a new thing?”
You nodded, chewing your asparagus.
“I bet he’s tall,” Suellen cooed. “I bet he’s blond.”

Six-one in fact, blond-haired and blue-eyed, and such a dictionary definition of all-American that at first glance you couldn’t even see him for himself; he blended in too easily into the crowd. You never told him that on your first lunch date you didn’t remember what he looked like. You waited for him in the lobby of your office building, pretending to read a book so that he would have to be the one to find you. When he did, you looked up surprised and slightly disappointed. You still had the luxury of being critical back then, when you didn’t care as much.

“So how did you two meet?” Suellen wanted to know. “Was it love at first signt?”

First sight was in the vestibule of Corin Beal’s apartment building, the day she moved to Seattle. You were separating Corin’s boxes into heavy, medium and light. She had told you to keep an eye out for the Foundation intern that she had wheedled into helping her because she needed guys to wrangle her heavy furniture down five flights of stairs. You looked up and smiled at the tall young man, but he did not smile back. His eyes were trained on you although his body was walking forward; he would have walked straight into a wall if he had kept on going. You laughed at the potentially slapstick routine, and then almost immediately, you sobered up. Later, you found out that he was hung over (from the previous night’s attempt to get drunk enough to beg off this chore). He was distracted, but for different reasons than what you assumed. You thought: he’s cute, but not that cute.

For the next four hours you were driven by the task of making Corin’s worldly belongings fit into the Penske truck parked at the curb. Reid moved heavy items quickly and proficiently but didn’t interact with anyone. Concentric ripples of cool dislike radiated from him. Three hours later, you were surprised to find Reid still there in the empty apartment, sitting on the floor against the wall, legs splayed straight-out in front of him. He seemed less standoffish, or maybe he was just exhausted. You started to talk to him and found out that he wasn’t an undergrad after all. You were both New Yorkers: he grew up in Jamestown, you were from Albany, and you both tossed names back and forth until you came up with someone you both knew.

Small world, you said.

When Reid stood up, you noticed that he was a head taller than Corin’s ficus tree, the only thing left in the apartment. Like Reid, it leaned aimlessly against the wall. Corin had finally come to the conclusion that it would not survive the drive to Seattle. Still, someone had to take it downstairs. You told him that you would adopt the plant if he gave you a ride.

“I’ll give you a ride,” he said.

He could have cared less about the plant. You thought that he was getting nothing out of the deal.
He drove northbound on Lake Shore Drive, a crown of buildings to the left, the light-spangled lake to the right. It was five or six on a Saturday afternoon. You sat in the back seat of his Honda Accord. The ficus tree rode shotgun, its wind-lashed leafy head sticking out the passenger window. Reid spent most of that drive turned three-quarters, staring intently at you when he should have been looking at the road. You prattled on, obliviously. He parked the car on the side street and carried the ficus up the stairs to your apartment, propping it up against a wall in the sun porch.

“We should have lunch,” he said, “since we both work downtown.”

You exchanged phone numbers on scraps of paper. He had an unusual last name, you noted as he wrote it down in blue ink, in handwriting that was considerably neat for a boy’s. Then he had to leave, “prior engagement,” he said. But he’d call.

At the door, you shook hands goodbye, though it seemed a little staged. You pinned the paper scrap with his name and phone number on the bulletin board in the kitchen. Every time you walked past it, you looked at the paper and said his name out loud, or in your head. I’ll call him on Monday, you thought. It was Saturday then. He called on Sunday. The ficus never quite recovered from the shock of that ride. It withered and ailed and finally expired, and for three months it stood like a reminder of winter before you dragged it out to the curb.

Suellen leaned in confidentially. “I bet he’s good in bed.”

To you, touch was a revelation. To him, touch was a discipline, a skill, a cause that resulted in an effect. At the end of your third date, he wanted to drive you home. You told him that it was late and a long way away, on the other side of town. You could take the train.

“But you can’t take the train. It’s a long way and it’s late,” he insisted. He could drive one-handed, left-handed, his hand right hand planted firmly on your knee. He boasted that his apartment was a complete and utter wreck. You had never actually seen it, this place of mythic disarray, so you were inclined to doubt that it even existed. He parked on the other side of Montrose Avenue.

“Is this okay?” he asked, looking nervously at the meter. I don’t want to get a ticket.”

You told him that he wouldn’t be over long enough to get a ticket. Then you couldn’t find your house keys. They always sank to the bottom of your purse, those stupid keys, but you started to panic, feeling around in the dark. There was no reassuring jangle when you shook your purse. You looked at him over the top of the car.

You said, “I think I left my keys at the office.”

Actually, you knew it. Hours earlier, when you consolidated your stuff in the smaller purse so that you wouldn’t have to drag around the larger bag during the date, you forgot to transfer the keys.

He looked disappointed. No groping on the love seat tonight. He offered to drive you to work, but your office was in a State building, locked down for the night. You didn’t have 24 hour access.

He asked if you have a spare key.

You didn’t.

“Oh, okay,” he conceded, as if you had been twisting his arm. “You can spend the night. But you’ll have to sleep on the couch.”

Your mind was whirling. You couldn’t believe you forgot the keys.

“I was kidding about the couch,” he said.

What bothered you was not where you were going–or where you were going to end up. What you didn’t like was that it looked suspiciously like you planned it. And what bothered you most was that it seemed to be working. Reid made a right on Lake Shore off of Montrose. The grid system was supposed to make navigation easy but you could not tell left and right from east and west. You had to remind yourself that even though you were southbound, the Lake was still and would always be east, at least from the fixed point of Chicago. You flew through the city, past familiar landmarks: Buckingham Fountain, Grant Park, The Field Museum, McCormick Place, The Museum of Science and Industry. To the right, the gothic spires of the University jutted up out of nowhere. You did a turn around the perimeter of the campus, and then he pulled the car to a stop on Ingleside Drive.

You were still absentmindedly digging for the keys, as if they might have materialized out of nowhere.

He laughed. “Forget it. We’re not going back even if you find them.”

You followed him up the sidewalk, and he held the door open for you. He stooped down to riffle through the mail. The foyer held that sweet acrid smell that seeped into buildings as they aged–not unpleasant, but almost unwillingly familiar. It was stuffy, and it only promised to get worse as you drifted up with the warm air to the third floor. He stopped at a door and unlocked it, but barred your way.

Give me a minute, he said. I need to clean up the apartment.

You started to protest–did it really matter? But you conceded. He pulled the door closed behind him. You were playing hide and seek, and you were it.

You started to count slowly backward from 100, but you only got to eighty-two before he called you in.

“What does he do?” Suellen asked. “For a living, I mean. No matter what they tell you about love, it’s money that matters, Trixie. Remember that. I, for example, married for love, and now look at me.”

You did as she said. You looked at her. You were frightened.

Reid had been a basketball player in high school and college, but had since become a solemnly academic PhD candidate. As if to prove his dedication, he read 500 pages of sociological theory every night, and his eyesight was steadily worsening. You constantly hounded him about getting new eyeglasses, but you refused to see the great divide within him. In his heart, he wanted Lincoln Park, and the Trixie wife, and everything that sort of life entailed, including a Lexus and a hired cook and private schools for the children–but his social conscience wouldn’t let him indulge himself. Not yet, at least; not with you. You were fine for the short term, and he showed his appreciation at least two nights a week by taking you out. On your first date he took you to a play at Theater on the Lake. After almost an hour of disjointed dialogue, the house lights came up and half the audience was gone. You picked up your coat.

“It’s only intermission,” he said, pointing at Act II in the program book. So you left your coat draped over your chairs. You followed the exodus of people down the stairs, single-file through the narrow winding corridor and out the door. Reid paid for a bottle of water at the concession stand and you both walked outside. You passed the bottle back and forth. The Lakefront was paved to the edge, but there was a wide strip of grass between the concrete and the asphalt running track along the lake. You shivered as you walked up to the grass.

“They don’t call it ‘Theater on the Lake’ for nothing,” he said.

For a few minutes you watched the distant forms of a couple embracing on the pavement.
“It’s still not the same as the sea,” you said, taking the last drop of water. “Though you can drown just as well in a lake.” You told him that you didn’t know how to swim.

He considered this. “I’ve almost drowned. It happened over Spring Break in Hilton Head my senior year of college. I was walking alone by the shore. It didn’t seem deep. At a certain point, the sand just dropped off. I wasn’t paying attention and the sand just crumbled under my feet. I went under. There was a really strong current that kept pulling me away. The harder I struggled to make it back to shore, the more it pulled me out. I was putting all this effort into going nowhere and I was getting tired. I started to sink and swallow water, and I thought: this is it. I’m done for. I’m going to die. Obviously, I lived to tell. Guess that takes some of the suspense out of it, huh? I finally stopped struggling and swam with the current until I broke through. Even then I clawed at the sand for the longest five minutes of my life until I pulled myself back onto the beach. And then I cried. I couldn’t stop crying. It’s embarrassing, but I was so sure that I was going to die. For days after that my arms hurt like hell.”

You thought about his left arm, how it had been draped along the back of your theater seat for the whole first act. He was testing you, or rather he was testing the situation. The thin edge of the chair was the only thing holding his arm up. A word, a nod–and presto! The hand was quicker than the eye, and now it was curving around your shoulder.

It was at least five degrees cooler by the water. Your teeth were chattering.
“You’re cold?” he asked. His basketball warm-up jacket didn’t go with what you were wearing but he draped it over your shoulders anyway. You were facing south, against the chill breeze, looking out over Navy Pier, River North, and the Loop behind it.

“From where we are the Hancock Building looks like it’s the same size as the Ferris wheel.” He pretended to measure one against the other with thumb and forefinger.

Perspective was a funny thing, you observed.

He stretched up straight and tall, his fingers locked above his head, working out the kink in his neck. You figured that he was probably thinking of ways to move his arm from its stationary position on the back of your chair.

“We should go back in,” he said. “It’s time for the second act.”

A grin turned up the ends of Suellen’s plum mouth. “You two sound perfect for each other.”

You looked at her suspiciously.

Once, when Reid stayed the night, over and under you in your tiny bed, you drifted through layers of sleep listening to the radio that had been playing jazz all night and was now broadcasting Weekend Edition Saturday. You thought he was still asleep when you came awake slowly to a story about an accident. Isn’t it always an accident, and isn’t it always a married couple and isn’t it always the wife who gets hurt, and isn’t it always a head injury? In this story, it was a boating accident. Something about a hook. Lots of blood. You didn’t care to remember the details but could recall that it was particularly gruesome. The husband managed to save his wife, but for twenty years she remained in a permanent vegetative state. The husband had taken care of the wife until she finally died. Now he had written a book about the experience.

In bed, you shifted to face him and were surprised to find his eyes open and blinking. He had been listening along with you the whole time.

“I’m sorry, but I would have divorced you and gotten married again,” he said gruffly. “I would have kept on taking care of you, but I would have had to have my own life.”

“Stop talking about it like it was us,” you said.

He muttered, “This is what we want to hear first thing in the morning. Depressing shit. Stupid fucking public radio.”

You climbed over him to get to the radio, to switch it firmly off. “Okay, already,” you said then, settling your body against him to dam up the bad feeling. “Enough.”

“So, has he said it yet?” Suellen asked, her eyes narrowed, her mouth still fixed in a smile. “Love, I mean. Things always change after that. After my husband –sorry, my ex-husband–said it to me, we married within the year, not that that was a good thing.”

You tuned her out to the sound of long strange imaginary words from your childhood running through your head: “And then I said it to me girl, and now me girl’s my wife.”

“I only want the best for you Trixie,” Suellen insisted. “I don’t want you to get hurt.”

Don’t you? you thought, pushing your plate away and pulling the napkin off your lap. It was time to get back to work.

Reid was writing his dissertation on the effect of urban development on local communities. He made his rounds of the Projects, taking photographs with disposable cameras to illustrate his thesis. You asked him, once, why he cared so much about people living on the fringes of society.

He looked at you blankly, his voice defiant. “Because I do.”

This is what you understood of his work: the neighborhood residents were real people with real lives, but in the name of scientific research, they were reduced to subjects and statistics. This is what you learned: it is hard to remain scientific and impartial about something you feel passionate about.

But you weren’t thinking ahead were you, Trixie? You were thinking about how Reid folded you into his arms and wrapped his body around yours, and how for those few minutes, it felt like you were floating in that horribly vast lake and he was the only thing that could keep you from being swept away.

You didn’t tell this to Suellen. Whenever she asked, “Still have the boyfriend?” you would smile and nod. In time, you came to do this without even turning your head. You listened for her: the slippery swish of her shirts, the muted crumple of the paper bag, the occasional expletive sworn under her breath when she spilled coffee on the carpet. Every day that you smiled and nodded you couldn’t be sure if somewhere under that haphazard bottle-red hair, behind the kohl-rimmed eyes, she wasn’t counting down the days to the end.