Life Among the Clouds
She emerges from a taxi one handmade Italian pump at a time and then strides across the wide Fifth Avenue sidewalk, with her eyes fixed intently on the brass-framed front door of the building she calls home.
The door is held open for her by Max, the weekday doorman, decked out in his usual uniform that makes him look like a comedic Russian general on loan from an old Peter Sellers film.
She doesn’t hear the traffic; she doesn’t see the pedestrians; she doesn’t even see Max.
He’s a useful fixture in her world, and one doesn’t notice such things unless they’re missing or cease to function as expected. She is generous at Christmas time, as she should be, and that is quite enough.
She pays no attention to the park, the 843 acres of green things living just across Fifth Avenue. It, too, is just a useful fixture, although never for her, personally.
Her last husband went to the park every morning to jog around the reservoir, always in a counterclockwise direction, as is the local custom, and that suited him to a tee, because she always thought of him as a counterclockwise kind of man. But that matters not. Someone else is winding his clock these days.
Her children also use the park. They go to the playground every afternoon with Katya, the au pair, where they fly high on the swings, climb the monkey bars and are starting to acquire the Slavic accents of Katya’s native land.
She hasn’t noticed that either. Not yet. She’s far too busy.
But she always notices her reflection in a pane of glass or any similar shiny surface and can tell at a glance if even a single hair is out of place. And she never fails to notice another woman’s shoes. She can always take the measure of a potential rival by sizing up her footwear. Jewelry may draw the eye, but only a pair of shoes may be trusted to tell the unvarnished truth.
This evening, dripping with noblesse oblige, she will use her considerable and very well-polished wiles to charm pledges in obscene amounts on behalf of a museum filled with art treasures that she never quite understood; and, next Saturday, she will pretend to care every bit as much for the sort of disadvantaged people she can barely stand to see through the darkened glass of a chauffeured limousine.
Her favorite game is charades, and she plays it like a champion—not the party kind of charades, but the penthouse kind—the kind that is played in only the very best venues overlooking the East River or the Park, where the glitterati duel for social pre-eminence with subtlety, innuendo and the kind of effortless insincerity that can be acquired only from an early age.
She enters the waiting elevator, thankful that its gleaming brass car had been converted to automatic operation. She was never fully comfortable riding all the way to the penthouse floor in close proximity to the old, uniformed operator, especially when she was alone.
Up, up, up she goes, leaving Fifth Avenue’s lesser lights far behind, to the penthouse and then to the clouds and beyond, to a vantage point from which the Earth appears as nothing more than a peaceful, blue orb. From such a lofty altitude, she cannot see uncollected garbage rotting at the curb, crime committed in the streets, her children falling off the playground equipment or other mundane details of everyday life, and, having been so liberated from such worldly concerns, she is free to concentrate on the sort of important matters that truly warrant her time and attention, like the evening’s gala event and spending the better part of the next half hour picking out the perfect pair of shoes.
Even among the clouds, women will always believe the shoes.
Noah Cutler is a retired real estate lawyer living in St. Davids, Pennsylvania. He enjoys writing essays and novels, as well as writing and performing his poetry. |
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