“No one,” she says. I hang up, shivering less from the weather than from the electroshock of reality.
Every time I walk Sadie throughout the day—four times more than usual—I pass the phone. It is on the last walk of the evening that I muster the nerve to once again drop coins in the slot. This time the phone obediently answers on the first ring. The voice is robotic. The number, I am informed, is no longer in service.
I slam down the phone so hard that I’m sure I damage the earpiece. One less pay phone for midtown Manhattan.
As I lumber into the apartment, music blares. Luey shouts “Hey!” but she doesn’t lift her eyes from her laptop. I collapse on the couch next to her, finish off a pretzel sitting on the coffee table, note the comfort delivered by food with absolutely no value, and think that tomorrow I’ll have to lecture Luey on prenatal nutrition, though pregnancy has graced her in a way that perhaps only a mother would notice. With her hair pulled back to expose every plane and poreless inch of her face, the effect is ethereal. Her skin is the clearest I’ve seen since she was in seventh grade. As she leans back, lamplight shines on her slightly softer face. My daughter looks ebullient. This is the sort of girl I was myself, the sort that Luey abhors. She’d choke on
wholesome,
but tonight I could imagine Luey leading a group of volunteers building a school in Senegal.
“Where’s Cola?” I ask.
“Don’t know,” Luey says, transfixed by a YouTube video of a performer gyrating in front of a keyboard. “Isn’t he amazing?” she asks. I think it is fair to call her expression starry.
My musical taste stalled at K.D. Lang, Sting, and Diana Krall. In my playbook these are singers whose talent qualifies as amazing. “What makes him ‘amazing?’” I want to know in the same way I struggle to understand how anyone would willingly pay good money to see movies where characters guzzle blood as if it’s tomato juice.
“Everything. The package. The records he picks. His originality. The way he plays guitar to the melodies on the turntable, how he moves his body.” Luey sighs and laughs. “Should I go on?”
Now I’m curious. All the camera is showing is the neck-down portion of a thin, pale body with hipbones visibly jutting under snug black jeans. He’s wearing a white T-shirt that could have as easily cost a dime at a yard sale as two hundred dollars in a designer shop. His muscles are elongated but defined, although he doesn’t look like the sort who’d put in time at the gym. There is a long close-up of fancy footwork that seems to have nothing to do with the music. Maybe he’s got a dog’s ability to hear sounds in a register I cannot.
The camera pans to the performer’s head. I lean forward and squint. He is wearing a brown-and-white hide headdress with cowish eyes and white horns; it covers him from the neck up. I scrunch my face to take a closer look. “Does he always perform in this getup or is it some sort of stunt?” I ask.
Luey beams and I admire her mouthful of small, straight, naturally white teeth. Four years of braces. “He calls himself Buffalo Bob and this is his regular act. Isn’t it genius?”
Underneath the headgear he could be Keith Richards or the kid who bags groceries at the supermarket. “How old is this big-headed brute?”
“Twenty-five and his shows are sold out everywhere.” I hear pride.
“People pay to watch this?”
“Lots. On college campuses, mostly, but he’s toured in Europe and Australia.”
I upgrade him from a mole living in his parents’ basement to a man in a van filled with unwashed roadies, stubby joints, and blister packs of beef jerky. “So Buffalo Bill is successful?”
“Buffalo
Bob
. He’s made two albums.”
I elevate the bus to a Hampton’s Inn and the food to Taco Bell. The drugs stay. “Has anyone bought them?”
“Two million-plus fans.”
I’m seeing a Four Seasons with an in-room masseuse and wonder where irony has left me behind. After people started calling hip-hop poetry but before graphic novels took off, I suspect.
“Has he toured in Palo Alto?”
“Twice—I saw Peter both times.”
“Peter?”
“That’s his real name. Peter Eisenberg.”
I knew a Peter Eisenberg. Peter Eisenbergs join a fraternity and later, a country club, earn a CPA, marry a girl named Nancy, leave her for a younger woman named Carol, have kids named Josh and Emily, turn Republican, and at the twentieth class reunion brag about their golf handicap and squawk about illegal immigrants. They don’t wear buffalo heads while they strut their stuff, which they don’t call “their stuff.” I feel so ancient I could have shambled out of the Old Testament.
“Have you met Peter?”
Here Luey turns to me and says slowly, “Yeah, I’ve
met
him—after the show.”
My smarty-pants Stanford student is someone who parties with a scruffy musician. I jump to assignations on stained mattresses, documentaries about Ecstasy and STDs. Do I need to dig out the lecture on sobriety and restraint that I thought I’d left behind? I reach for the most obvious remark. “Not to be judgmental, but I’m just saying he looks like the kind of guy who could give a girl something.”
Luey shoots me a battle-weary look. “He gave me something, all right.”
There are times when being a mother is like passing a kidney stone. My daughter is a pregnant college dropout. The father is a beast from the prairie. What could go wrong?
No. No, no, no. Just, no.
I open my mouth; nothing comes out.
When I haven’t been obsessing about how my financial situation may have truly been caused by a betrayal, how I will pay bills six months from now, and, moving down the list, my mother’s health and Nicola and Luey’s future, I’ve been tripping on the thought of my daughter’s baby’s mystery dad. He need not be Luey-smart, I’ve decided. He doesn’t have to be handsome or gifted, but please, God, let him be kind. And let him be earnest. She needs a shot of earnestness, for ballast. Lately I’ve pictured a war correspondent bearing a remarkable resemblance to a safari-jacketed TV correspondent who consistently puts himself in harm’s way, then reports on it with twitchy excitement. Before that, on safer ground, I’ve imagined an architect who designs spare, shiny houses you see in
Dwell,
and a vet, big animal or small—I wasn’t picky. I haven’t foreseen a hirsute musical caricature, successful or otherwise, who most likely dropped out of college, if he even enrolled, and obsesses with video games when he isn’t impregnating groupies and trying on lewd animal heads.
“Does he know?” I ask, trying to arrange my face, which keeps defaulting to a smoldering shock and anger.
“Why should he?” Luey harrumphs. She has crossed her arms around her chest, pulling herself away from my judgment.
“Don’t you think he has a right, for starters?”
“I’m making up my mind,” my indignant daughter shouts as she stands to leave the room.
What was it like, your time together?
I say, only to myself. Has Luey blanked out their hook-up like a failed Italian final, or can she replay the evening, moment by moment, stroke by stroke, word by word, as I can the first time with Ben, because—on the chance that the last few months have been a nightmare from which I will awake—I haven’t yet burnt his pictures. A good opinion of Ben simmers on the back burner.
“Mom, some credit, please,” she says, no longer shouting. “Get a grip. I can’t talk to you when you’re like this.” This time she makes the first move, sitting back down and embracing me as, yes, an equal. “I will figure this out. For God’s sake, you know how competitive I am
.
I’m not going to let myself fail life!”
My heart is starting to return to a normal rhythm. “Of course you’re not.” And if she will allow my help, I won’t let her.
“I called that ER doctor and he gave me the name of an ob-gyn, and I have an appointment for Friday.”
“Excellent, Luey. Good job.”
“It’s still early days, and if I want to, you know . . .”
I raise my hand to silence her. “I’ve done the math.” Then I ask, “Who is he? The doctor.”
“She? The name and number are in my room. I’ll get it.” She runs off, and I can sense that she is as relieved as I am that the air is cleared—for the moment. “Dr. Madeline Casey,” Luey reads when she returns. “On the Upper East Side.”
“I’ve heard of her. What time’s your appointment?”
“No, you can’t come with me. In fact, this subject is now closed.” Before I have a chance to object, she adds, “I made four more decent eBay sales, two trips to the post office, and one to Staples for more supplies.”
“Thank you.”
“And some people called.”
The first message is from the city broker: “Very good news in the form of a counteroffer.” The second is from a Naomi, no last name, just a number, and the third is from a Susan.
Maybe these are distant cousins on Ben’s side of the family whom I’ve never met yet am supposed to remember—or bill collectors. I’ve started to hear from their ilk. The fourth, fifth, and sixth messages are Nat Ross. We had a dinner date, for three hours ago.
H
er mother was keeping the thermostat low to save money. Nicola threw a robe over her nightgown and knocked on Luey’s door. “I come in peace,” she said. “Can we talk?”
“Suit yourself,” Luey answered, her voice barely audible as she continued to text, not looking up. Nicola entered and breathed in the scent of a burning candle.
Don’t do it,
Nicola had been thinking for the past hour as she sipped glass after glass of Shiraz.
Stay pregnant.
She sat down on the bed and before she lost her nerve, sidled close to her sister and put her arms around her. Luey stiffened, but put down her phone.
“If you decide to keep the baby, I’ll help you,” Nicola said. “I’m sure Mother will, too. We’ll see you find a way.” It was easier to say the words without having to look at her sister’s face. Certainly she could learn to give bottles or change diapers. If there was a TED talk about a robot who flies, an expert must podcast this, too.
“I’ve been thinking of giving up the baby for adoption,” Luey said. On television, Luciano Pavarotti and Tracy Chapman, Luey’s favorite, were harmonizing on the lyrics to “Baby Can I Hold You” Pavarotti’s tenor was so rich and dark it probably had calories.
“That seems like a rash step,” Nicola said, though it was exactly what she would do.
“I’m a rash kind of a gal, you know that.”
Nicola did. “I don’t envy your having to make up your mind about this,” she said.
For the next few minutes, both of them cried, as much from fear as affection. Nicola wasn’t sure if her own tears were for Luey’s bad luck, or because Luey had shared something personal.
“Let’s talk in the morning,” Luey said, sleepily, after some time passed. Nicola got up to leave. “Thank you, Cola,” she added. “I’m so lucky to have you as a sister.”
Nicola tightened her robe around her, blowing Luey a kiss. As she scuttled down the hall, she felt happy, as if she had done some good in the world.
She was also immensely glad that it was her sister who was pregnant. Not her.
N
icola kicks off my best pair of faux-alligator heels, rubs her feet, and takes a sip of a martini she’s made in a silver shaker that has yet to find its next owner. This is the last of the vermouth.
“Uncle Stephan asked you to call,” she adds.
“You don’t have to move there, you know,” I say, as I did yesterday, and the day before. Once I planted the idea with Daniel and Stephan, it quickly took hold, my brother believing, I’m sure, that if Nicola has full immersion, he can perform a complete Eliza Doolittle. I suspect she sees the move as a gap semester where life will be all Mozart and chiffon, at the end of which she’ll have a belated debut. Having Nicola live with Stephan and Daniel seemed ingenious when I first thought of it, but now I worry that if she’s naughty and idle or leaves her undies on the floor, she’ll be kicked to the drafty room off the kitchen with the skis and the luggage.
I’ll miss Cola, and not only because she hasn’t asked for money in six weeks. After making her bed, unloading the dishwasher, and walking Sadie, she leaves each morning by eight and arrives home in the evening weary but pleased with herself. She is kindhearted and sympathetic, as she has been all her life. Her bags, however, are packed. She moves tomorrow. Daniel has ordered new bedding with white-on-white embroidery in an obscene thread count and has told me he’s stocked the refrigerator with out-of-season raspberries, green tea, and organic everything. Princess food.
My daughter has been getting home from work every night around eight, because only after Stephan’s daily inventory and a ceremonial lock-down, does he offer her a one-on-one tutorial, teaching her to find flaws in both gemstones and professional technique.
“Selling is seduction,” is his war cry, and since Stephan believes that stage presence counts as much as inventory, courtesy, and refined diction, one of his first tasks was to take Nicola to his tailor. She now rotates three impeccable sleeveless sheaths—black, navy, and taupe—that showcase her hips and arms, skinny as spaghetti but as toned as a fifteen year old boy’s. Her hair is swept into a chignon, which in the evening she lets fall to her shoulders. Nicola’s once nibbled nails are manicured with scarlet polish. Every morning when Nicola gets to the office he selects one piece of jewelry, never more, for her to display as she works, though the jewels don’t leave the shop. The only adornment of her own that my brother allows my daughter are pinpoint diamond studs and a string of sea pearls my mother gave her when she graduated from high school. She fingers them when she is nervous, as she is now.
“I think I’m making a sale,” she says. “This man came in looking for a gift for his wife. At least he said it’s his wife.” Nicola reacts as if I’ve winced, though I’m sure I have remained impassive. “Sorry, Mother.” She bows her head and covers her eyes.
I’ve never said that I may suspect their father of adultery, but my daughters are not without imagination. “Continue.” I wave her on.
“He wanted a topaz pendant that to me looked like the amber Nana brought home from her cruise to St. Petersburg. He’d shown me a picture ripped out of
Town & Country
, but I steered him to a harlequin bracelet, aquamarine and amethysts, from the 1830s.”
“Well done,” I say. “How?”
“I tried it on. That’s all it seemed to take.”
One glance at a bracelet on Cola’s arm and a man spends thousands? Why did I allow myself to get middle-aged? “Do you think he’ll come back for it?”
“We put it aside til next week. Uncle Stephan doesn’t require a deposit. Strange, isn’t it?”
Requiring no deposit is one of Stephan’s courtly twirls.
What a gentleman
, subliminal thought suggests, and usually shoppers return, feeling as if they’ve been done a special favor by a true merchant prince.
“Whatever.” Nicola finishes her cocktail. “How was your date?” she asks.
I was hoping she’d be too caught up with herself to remember. Nat Ross kept calling, and I finally said yes.
“Alarmingly tame. It was a talky movie and dinner at six in a restaurant that was empty except for a couple who were ninety-two.”
“Nat Ross has the patience of a golden retriever.”
Hardly an endorsement, but just as well, since I am as ready to become intimate with a man as I am to pull my own tooth. “Cola, it’s only been three months since your father passed away.”
“I thought you might want to put that part of your life on fast forward—considering how messy things are.”
You’d hope that the heart would mend faster when it may have been betrayed—you certainly want it to—but logic and desire have nothing do with healing, which moves at its own solemn, out-of-body pace. I am caught between yesterday and tomorrow with barely a scab on my wound. Perhaps I’d be less bruised if I allowed myself to collect a full quota of pity chits, but when friends call to offer tickets to the theater or ballet or suggest dinner or lunch or even simply a walk, I plead “busy,” unless the friend is Daniel. Thus, friends have stopped calling. Even when I sat in a movie theater and, later, across a table from Nat, with his calm demeanor and dark brown eyes that never judge—an appealing man in every way—I felt restless and absent. I couldn’t shake the sense that to my side was a photographer casting a shadow over the table as he captured the scene. The phantom was Ben, an uninvited ghost scrutinizing me as I tried to make conversation with Nat on trending, impersonal topics. This is harder than it should be.
“We had a good time,” I admit. Nat asked the right number of questions, and he didn’t reveal so much admiration for his own wit or store of arcane information that I felt as if I was eating with an op-ed column come to life. “It was pleasant.”
“Mother, if that’s all I reported after an evening out, you’d let me know how ‘deeply disappointed’ you were in the sketchy detail.”
In truth, I remember little, although I like Nat, not least because he didn’t know Ben, is less boisterous than Ben, and, with his thinning hair and glasses, looks nothing like Ben.
“You should see the movie,” I offer up. “It’s the one about the Parisian concierge who was secretly brilliant.”
“You can’t get to know someone at a movie,” Nicola says. “You’ve always told me that. How was dinner?”
“Excellent. We had sushi—that’s what they ate in the movie. We started with edamame. I had the Dancing Eel Roll and Nat tried the Green River Roll.”
“You know those aren’t the details I want.”
“We ended with sorbet and tea. Better?”
“No!”
Nor was that the end. Before I got into a taxi, Nat cupped my face and kissed me, gently. His lips, which I observed with the remove of an anthropologist, felt warm and smooth. I knew the kiss was coming, my first non-Ben kiss since my engagement, discounting a slobbering, overfed husband of a mortified friend at their tenth anniversary party. When Nat’s lips left mine, I felt a shadow of a glow, hardly orgasmic, but present nonetheless. It might have been happiness but I’d have to repeat it to know for sure.
Then Nat said the oddest thing. “Happy early Valentine’s Day, Georgia.”
Is tomorrow February fourteenth? All day? I almost had what every lonely heart older than eleven covets—a Valentine’s Day date—and I didn’t know it.
“Are you going to see him again?” Nicola asks.
“Up to Nat,” I say, although in this century any woman with desire for romance would find a reason to follow the date with an email or text, today’s standard siren calls.
“You’ll hear from him,” Nicola intones like an oracle, as Luey pads through the door, shedding her hat, gloves, and down coat as she heads in our direction. I still can’t see her pregnancy, but at this stage I, too, was as tight as a roll of Saran Wrap.
“Six dogs are a lot of dogs,” she says, without preamble, “especially when one’s a rotti.” Luey has branched into dog walking, a service she established by slapping flyers on lampposts after she discovered that neighbors fork over thirty dollars per walk, all cash. “I don’t know how walkers manage seven.”
I am enormously proud of my daughter, who once refused to babysit on grounds of terminal boredom and who was fired from her only real job, as a day-camp counselor, for flunking a drug test on account of smoking weed in the infirmary with the waterfront director. She gives us a full accounting of how you manage rowdy pups along with grumpy older dogs, and I think how her charges—Gracie, Nadine, Ruby, Percy, and two Maxes—are better preparation for motherhood than Stanford—assuming she still intends to be a mother.
“Where were you all day, Georgia?” Luey asks. I don’t like the first-name business, but I pick my fights.
“Here and there,” I lie, surprised that she noticed I was gone. “Another meeting that I hope will end with a job interview.” I tell them about yesterday, when through a favor from a friend’s cousin I met with a headhunter, who patronized me with a smirk, half listened, suggested how I could beef up my career-deficient résumé and steered me to Web site after Web site filled with terms like
people person
. Maybe, he said, I could become an administrative assistant once I learn to use Excel.
The three of us finish a pint of pistachio ice cream as I enjoy my daughters enjoying each other, and I turn in for the night after a long day, my first as a stalker.
Last week Stephan took it upon himself to hire a detective. In the diamond-and-emerald department, my brother is on the case with renewed, post-holiday vigor. The ring hasn’t turned up. But with respect to finding the Silver-Waltz money, he has even less faith in Wally than I do, and once I came clean to him about my Clementine paranoia—at a price paid in ignominy far dearer than any bauble in his velvet-lined trays—he hired a detective. His investigator wears shoes that are as expensive as my brother’s. Can you trust an urbane Sam Spade? Apparently not, because all the man has come up with so far are photographs of Clementine shoveling the snow in front of Adam and Eve’s office, unloading a Christmas tree at the dump, recycling garbage, and shopping for root vegetables and Preparation H at the IGA. There are no pictures of her pushing a stroller or carrying a baby in a sling, no pilgrimages to lay a wreath at the grave of the unknown soldier of lechery and lust. Beyond evidence that Clem seems as wholesome as a beet, the most I have learned is her address, 321 Hedge Lane in Hampton Bays, a nearby Long Island town I’ve never visited.
That is where I had driven today. I cruised Hedge Lane several times, then parked in a lot by a church on the next street. Bundled in one of Luey’s snowboard hats with strings that dangle like braids, my face eclipsed by the dark, wraparound sunglasses my mother wore after cataract surgery, I felt as foolish as I looked. This village is where hard-working locals live, away from the high rollers of the über-Hamptons on whom their incomes largely depend. The air was raw and bone chilling and carried the scent of fish.
I skulked down the street—there were no sidewalks—and arrived at a redbrick house in the architectural style of the
Three Little Pigs,
solid and snug, defying any wolfish gust off Shinnecock Bay. I tried to stare innocently, as if it’s normal to be riveted by a garden-variety wren perched atop a country-style mailbox. Given the family business, the front yard was no calling card. On the door was a tired evergreen wreath with a dangling tartan ribbon, its message falling short of welcome. There were holly bushes but few other perennials. The grandest feature was a blue spruce big enough to be a third-tier contender for Rockefeller Center.
I could not imagine Ben dropping anchor—or drawers—in this house. He was a man who favored expensively cobbled monk strap shoes that would have looked at home in Covent Gardens, a guy who rattled on about transforming our East Hampton roof into an herb garden, and, if he made a mega-score, buying a Bentley. He was a man who employed a driver and rarely accepted the first table offered to him at a restaurant. Until my meeting in December with Wally, none of this bothered me.
My doppelgänger lurched to the door, pressed the bell, and heard it chime. For good measure, she rapped the knocker, shaped like a whale. Real-me was impressed. Where did she find her conviction?
A woman opened the door and peered from behind the security chain. She had an unlined face, thick eyeglass lenses, and a fluff of snowy hair. I put her age north of menopause yet substantially south of assisted living.
“Yes?” she said. Her suspicion came across as clearly as a wail.
No,
I thought. I cannot be on this expedition. I coughed several times, although when I left the house I had been in fine health. “Does Clementine D’Angelo live here?” I asked, after I found my voice.
“Who wants to know?”
“Is she home, please?”
“She ain’t here now.”
I heard an unmistakable bleating. “Oh, you have a baby,” I said.
She grimaced. “The gulls,” she said, tilting her head toward the sunless sky. “Those damn flying rats.”
While I looked up toward the soundless birds above, I heard a
thud
. I turned around to say good-bye. The door was closed.
I hurried to my car and collapsed on the seat, steadying my hands by gripping the steering wheel. After a few minutes I wound through the empty village streets until I passed by Adam and Eve. The van bearing its name was parked nearby, but I would not be knocking on another door. I had used up today’s allotment of courage.
Without a break I drove eighty miles back to Manhattan, exceeding the speed limit as I told myself I must be deranged. Now, as I get in bed, I expect that tonight will be like all other nights, only worse. My mind will churn. Bogeymen will creep from under my bed. I will hear every car alarm, and New York’s entire fleet of garbage trucks will grunt down my street, grinding refuse. Yet none of this happens. I shut my eyes and sleep like a block of cement, without a thought in my head. This is not to say that I luxuriated cozily until a decent hour. At five-thirty I opened my eyes to darkness, fumbled for my slippers, and felt compelled to check on each daughter. Luey, looking like a fawn, is curled, fittingly, in a fetal position. Nicola’s long black hair sweeps over her shoulders.