Out of Time Read online

  Out of Time

  Paula Martinac

  Bywater Books

  “Quite suddenly, some moment of the past has become totally real, as real as the present, and we realize that it is as real as the present—or rather, that the present does not have some special status of super-reality, just because it happens to be here and now.”

  Colin Wilson, Afterlife

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  1

  For a long time, I forgot the date that I walked into the antiques shop, but now I remember it again. For months, I was not even sure which shop it was. I could see the inside clearly—the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves lining one wall, the homey scattering of bric-a-brac over creamy lace doilies, the black silk evening gown trimmed with jet beads draped casually across a velvet-upholstered settee. But when I tried to find it again, I always ended up in the wrong place, with concerned salesclerks asking if I was looking for something in particular. No, I answered, because I was not sure what I was looking for, or what I thought I would find by being in the shop again. I ended up apologizing to them for my confusion and standing helplessly out on the sidewalk, looking north and south, and wondering if it was Sixth Avenue I was on that day and not Eighth.

  I remember that it was raining and that I ducked into the shop just as the rain started to drip off my hair onto my cheeks. I shook my head like a dog as I stepped through the door. A bell tinkled as it closed behind me, and I noticed with embarrassment that I was dripping onto a small Persian rug. At the sound of the bell, the shopkeeper had appeared through a damask curtain at the back of the store.

  “Don’t worry,” she said, seeming to understand why I wasn’t budging from the entry. “It’s just water.”

  I smiled and began to move around carefully. I was the only customer in the shop, and each creak of the floorboards under my feet resounded through the room. The shop looked more like a middle-class parlor in 1910 than a store. I took in everything but touched nothing, afraid of intruding. I wanted to be out on the street again, or in another shop where I would be less conspicuous, where I could happily browse through the merchandise, feeling like a customer and not a house guest. But how could I leave without appearing rude?

  The shopkeeper said, “Feel free to pick things up,” again reading my mind. “Antiques should be touched, picked up, lived with.” She smiled from behind the counter, where she was carefully rearranging a tray of marcasite pins on a deep red velvet cloth. Her fingers were long and delicate and they seemed to embrace each pin as she touched it.

  I cleared my throat and said, “Thank you,” but it came out hoarsely. I realized they were the first words I had spoken in several hours.

  I gradually made my way to the bookshelves, once or twice lifting an object from a table to inspect it, but less out of interest than out of a feeling of obligation. I was more comfortable at the bookshelves, my eyes scanning the titles quickly, zooming in on the interesting ones. I was always looking for the same thing, and every now and then I found it. Once I located an old copy of Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness; in another store with shelves of old paperbacks, I found several lesbian pulp novels from the fifties, including Vin Packer’s famous Spring Fire. It had been inscribed on the title page, “To my Charlotte, you set me on fire, Yours forever, Jeannie.”

  I had a small shelf in my apartment for these books. It wasn’t really a hobby yet, maybe just a passing phase that I would someday look back on and say, “Oh, yes, that’s when I was buying old books about lesbians.” I never read them, I just stacked them on the shelf. More than being interested in the books, I was fascinated by trying to imagine the women who had owned them, who read and reread them, who dog-eared the pages, who dusted them every week, whose fingerprints oiled the pages and whose tears made circles on the paper. When I held the books, it was almost like holding the women, protecting them from the silence of time.

  Because it wasn’t a real hobby yet, I didn’t know exactly what to look for. I didn’t know the titles I should be hunting, beyond the most obvious ones, and I must have passed over a lot of valuable books because the titles were vague. I tended to look at anything with the word “woman” in it, which was usually not very fruitful. I had a few authors’ names, like Helen Hull and Jo Sinclair, but I almost never found anything written by them.

  So mostly it was luck. And that day I remember I had almost turned away from the bookshelves. I was thinking of looking at the pins, because I needed a present for Catherine’s birthday. I thought I had spent a reasonable amount of time shopping, so that leaving wouldn’t be rude. And just as I was turning, my eye caught an oversized green Moroccan leather book on the table next to the bookshelves, which looked as if it had just been tossed there. On the cover in gold leaf was stamped the word “Scrapbook.”

  I had a scrapbook of my own, which I had been saving for posterity. Someday, I thought, it would be scrutinized by curious, hungry lesbian historians. The scrapbook was a chronicle of my first relationship, with Elaine Loring, and was pasted together when I was a romantic teenager. It included everything from movie stubs to pressed roses to the program from my senior prom, where Elaine and I were the dates of the Calabrese twins, Rob and Rich, who later moved to San Francisco and opened a gay nightclub together.

  So I flipped open the cover. Inside it was more of a photo album than a scrapbook. It was similar to an old album my mother kept, with little black paper mounting corners holding the photos loosely in place. Half of the corners had lost their glue and were gathered in the binding, falling out as the pages turned. But in this album, there were no pictures of Mom and Dad or uncles, aunts and cousins. I flicked the pages over quickly, taking in the faces of four amazing women.

  The first pages held photos of the group of them, in various poses and locales. They were labeled on the borders, “The Gang at Montauk” or “The Gang at Provincetown.” “The Gang,” it appeared, traveled a lot. Then there were the winter season shots, The Gang members in fur-trimmed coats with cloche hats pulled tightly down to their eyes, which peered out at me seductively. None of the group pictures were labeled with names, and I felt cheated. I turned the pages more quickly, till I came to a section devoted to Harriet. Harriet in a high-necked white lace blouse, in the purity of girlhood. Harriet in a low-waisted mesh dress that just grazed her knees. Harriet close up, in a hat that covered one eye and left the other beckoning.

  Finally there were the “Me” pages. “Me, with Harriet at Saratoga.” “Me, in the new apt on 85th St.” “Me, in my office, 1925.” Like the other women in the pictures, “Me” stared back at me suggestively from the sepia prints. Or was it just my imagination? Had I been browsing too long in a shop that time forgot?

  The shopkeeper was studying me when I at last looked up. “That’s a lovely book, isn’t it?” she said. Her abili
ty to know my thoughts was unnerving. I stammered, “Is—is it for sale?” I turned it over and over in my hands, searching for the price.

  She took a deep, loud breath through her nose, and the sound filled the room. “I wouldn’t know what to charge,” she answered. “It belonged to my aunt, Lucy Warner Weir. I leave it out simply to add to the shop’s ambience.”

  “I’d pay whatever you want,” I said. Then regretting my desperate tone, I lied quickly, “I collect old photographs.”

  “What do you do with them?” She continued, as we spoke, to work on her jewelry display.

  “Nothing,” I said. “Nothing. I just look at them.”

  “Oh, in that case,” she said, giving a final smoothing to the red velvet. I waited expectantly for her next words, hoping they would put the book in my price range. “Perhaps twenty dollars?” “You may have it for twenty-five.” But her mouth was set in a firm line and she did not speak.

  “Will you take thirty dollars for it?” I ventured, starting at what I thought was high so as not to insult her.

  “I have to think about it,” she said. “Perhaps you could come back another time. Say, next week. I won’t sell it to anyone else before that.”

  I opened the cover again, my eyes falling on the coy smile and haunting eyes of “Me.”

  “Please. I’d really like to buy this. Maybe thirty-five? I’d take good care of it.”

  She glanced past me out the window. “It’s stopped raining,” she noted. Behind the damask curtain a telephone rang faintly, an old-fashioned tinkle and not the harsh, electronic ring of AT&T. “Excuse me one minute,” and she disappeared into the back room.

  Then I did something I had never done before and will never do again. Something that haunted me for months. I placed a hastily scrawled check for thirty-five dollars on the glass countertop, with “Pay To The Order Of” left blank, because I hadn’t noticed the name of the store. Then I hurried out with the scrapbook tucked into my bag. The doorbell ruined my escape, but I did not turn around to see the shopkeeper’s face. I jumped into the nearest cab and directed the driver to my apartment. The bizarre thing is that the check was never cashed.

  2

  For weeks, I screened my calls with the answering machine, afraid that the shopkeeper would call and demand the return of the scrapbook. It had been stupid to leave a check with my name at the top, which she could easily use to find me. But I only had a little cash and was not willing to resort to outright theft, and I didn’t realize till I was in the cab heading uptown that the check had been a foolish move. Thieves don’t leave their calling cards. I can’t explain what overtook me in the shop, what feeling of panic and terror that I would never see the faces in the photos again, that when I returned for the book, the shopkeeper would have broken her promise and sold it to the highest bidder. I felt like a criminal, even though I’d left a check and an easy way to trace me. I hid the album under my bed and did not even tell Catherine about it. In fact, I couldn’t look at it myself for several weeks. When the notice from the post office arrived, I was convinced I would go to jail.

  That Saturday, I came home from staying overnight at Catherine’s and found a yellow delivery slip in my mailbox. It wasn’t unusual, because I belonged to several book clubs and was always getting packages. I tossed it aside with the rest of my mail and made lunch. Later, I picked up the slip when I was sorting through the bills and fundraising letters. In the space for the description of the article to be claimed, the mail carrier had checked “Certified Letter,” and not “Parcel,” as usual. At first, I was sure he had made a mistake. Who would be sending me a certified letter? The zip code of origin read “10199,” a strange, phantom number not recognizable like others in Manhattan. I pulled out the phone book and searched through the opening pages till I came to the zip code map. “10199” did not even seem to exist. My finger traced the contours of Manhattan, up and down, then crosstown. Then I noticed a chart to one side of the map, listing post offices and their corresponding zip codes. The first on the list was 10199, the James B. Farley Post Office at 421 Eighth Avenue.

  A note at the bottom of the page explained how to calculate cross streets by the avenue address. I did it incorrectly once before I came up with Thirty-first Street.

  “Thirty-first Street,” I said to myself.

  I couldn’t think of any reason for someone in Manhattan to send me a certified letter. And I didn’t know anyone who lived or worked in the vicinity of Thirty-first and Eighth, who might have posted it in that neighborhood. My guilty conscience decided on the answer: It was a notice from the shopkeeper’s lawyer, whose office must be in that neighborhood. But I had to wait till Monday morning to find out for sure.

  I called Catherine to confirm our dinner plans. “By the way,” I said casually, “why do you suppose someone would send me a certified letter?”

  “Can’t you just open it and find out?” she asked, always practical. She also knew me too well. It would have been like me to sit and stare at a threatening letter instead of opening it.

  “I just have the notice that they tried to deliver it,” I explained. “It’s from the James B. Farley Post Office on Eighth Avenue at Thirty-first Street.”

  “Hmm,” she said. “That usually means something very good or something very bad.” She took a drink and the ice cubes rattled in my ear. “Have you been playing Lotto again, or did you enter the Publishers Clearinghouse?”

  “I did enter the sweepstakes,” I admitted, and I had the useless magazine subscription to U. S. Health to prove it. “But I asked them to send me a telegram if I won.” I turned the yellow slip over and read the fine print on the back, which held no further clues. “I’m afraid I’m in big trouble.”

  “Have you done anything wrong?” Her words echoed in my ears so I thought she said them twice.

  “Not that I can think of,” I said. “Not that I can think of.”

  “Well, then,” she said, sensibly, ready to move on to another topic, “I guess there’s nothing to be worried about.”

  “Suppose,” I continued, and thought I heard her sigh on the other end, “suppose someone’s suing me. I mean, this could be something like that, right?”

  “Why would anyone sue you?”

  My mind raced back to another time I had felt guilty. “That story I published a few years ago. Remember? I used the real name of Fellini’s Restaurant and had one of my characters say the food was terrible.”

  “Oh, Susan,” she said, and didn’t say anything else.

  “Well, I can’t find out till Monday.” I folded the slip twice into a neat square that didn’t show the words “Certified Letter.”

  “It’s probably something stupid,” she said. “Something totally inconsequential that didn’t really require a certified letter. Someone just did it trying to be important. Now let’s forget about it, okay? What time should I meet you?”

  I must have said a time, because she responded with “See you then,” and hung up.

  But I had to call her back a little later to find out what time I had actually said.

  • • •

  Catherine Synge lived on the Lower East Side on Henry Street, a world away from my apartment on the Upper West Side. You could connect our apartments on a map with a sharp diagonal line, but the actual traveling time between the two was formidable. It had almost been the ruin of our relationship several times in the three years we had been together. I was often asking her to move in with me, and she would counter by proposing I move in with her. She liked being downtown, near her job and in the area where she grew up. I liked being uptown, near my classes at Columbia. There seemed to be no good compromise, unless we wanted to meet in the middle, somewhere, I thought, around the Public Library.

  We had chosen to eat at Catherine’s favorite Chinese restaurant in her neighborhood, on East Broadway. Before I met Catherine, who made it a point to get to know other cultures, I never ventured to the Chinese restaurants deep in Chinatown, but always stayed on t
he fringes with the other white people. Catherine began taking me to restaurants where we sat at large round tables with Chinese couples, and I learned to eat from my rice bowl and to wield my chopsticks almost as well as she.

  At dinner I was drinking Tsing-Tao and beginning to feel a little drunk, like I was going to start to divulge my secret any minute. Catherine was talking earnestly about a women’s history conference she was helping to organize. Though I was interested, I couldn’t help thinking how she would love the photographs I found, since she was a historian and had mounted several historical photo exhibits in her area of expertise, which was immigration. She asked me a question and I was about to answer with a non sequitur, when I stopped myself.

  “Well?” she said, sitting straighter in her chair and looking less animated than she had the moment before.

  “I’m sorry,” I said helplessly.

  She sighed deeply. “Are you still thinking about that letter?” she asked impatiently. “You haven’t heard a word I’ve said, have you?”

  “Yes, I have,” I said. “I have.”

  She leaned back in her chair and touched the waitress as she passed, to ask for the bill.

  “I’m sorry,” I said again. “I really am interested in the conference, you know that. I’m just preoccupied.”

  I offered to pay for dinner, and she let me.

  That night, in Catherine’s loft bed, I tossed and turned and almost pushed her out onto the floor. I woke up with her elbow in my side. “Susan,” she said, sleepily, “stop it.”

  I apologized and we switched sides of the mattress.

  My dreams were interconnected and fragmented at the same time. I woke up briefly in between them, just to fall back asleep and into the same general dream theme. They were, of course, all about a certified letter and what it might signify.

  In the first segment, the IRS discovered that I had cheated on my taxes for the last three years and hadn’t claimed five thousand dollars in income. The notice that I had ten days to pay the delinquent taxes plus the fines came in a certified letter.