We walk into the side entrance of the library, and now I have a good excuse to stare, because everyone is staring, looking for whoever they might schmooze up to. I’ve been the schmooz-ee more than a few times. Being a producer forces you to do that. And of course I’ve perpetrated the schmoozing many a time. Being a producer forces you to do that, too.
Eleanor hands a champagne flute into my left hand, and touches the brim of hers to mine. “Cheers.”
I smile and raise my glass. I’m not tired of standing yet—I sit too damn much as it is—so Eleanor and I gaze around at the crowd like we’ve gone to the zoo. A flash of red zips past me and when I look over it’s Naomi swooping onto someone with her hand out. I’ve seen her darn near shake a man’s hand right off, no limp-wristed girly handshake for her. I spot some people I know and they acknowledge me and wave, or nod, and then they lean to their companion and whisper. I can well imagine. Oh look, Milo Short is here. He still can’t talk since his stroke, though. So sad.
Finally, a few of them break away from the pack to come greet me, approaching with the sad little head-tilt of “poor you” I remember after Bee died.
When an old casting director of mine breaks eye contact to laugh at her own story, clearly on her third or eighth glass of champagne, I elbow Eleanor and cross my eyes at her. Eleanor laughs, which is fine because the casting gal thinks it’s for her own story which is incoherent and has something to do with a Tony award statue and a bathroom stall.
Eleanor jumps in when the gal—I think her name is Leslie—pauses for air. “I’m sorry, I think we should excuse ourselves and sit down. Nice to see you, though.”
At our own table near one of the pillars supporting the glass dome, Eleanor takes a moment to stare up. Tiny circles of light speckle the inside of the dome, which rises three stories over our heads. “It looks like a starry sky. You know I hardly went to the beach this summer?” Eleanor turns to me, and she tugs the skin near her eye again. “I was working so much. I’m not sure the last time I saw real stars.”
I smile back, thinking about trying to reply, like my therapy lady Marla would have me do. But I don’t want to try it here, out in public, and end up groaning like an imbecile, or spouting nonsense.
Eleanor fills the silence, toying with the stem of her glass, rolling it back and forth. “Oh, do you know I might have found Vivian’s records? Did you know she died young? In Michigan, of all places. Not even thirty years old.”
Now I feel warm, all right. I clear my throat and try to be subtle about loosening my tie, but it’s so awkward left-handed I quickly give up. Eleanor hasn’t noticed; her eyes have a faraway look, like she’s mentally in Michigan.
Then she turns to face me, tilting her head and squinting a little, as if in concentration. “Was she an actress, maybe? Vivian, I mean? Seems the most likely way you’d have known her. Maybe she was in one of your very early shows? I suppose I could get the cast lists of those shows easily enough and look. There must be an archive of playbills somewhere. Not that it matters, really. It’s just one of those irritating things, do you know, Grampa? Like when you can’t think of an answer to a riddle but you’re sure it’s really obvious and it haunts you until you figure it out? I feel like I’m going to lie awake at night until I can figure out how she knew you, is all. I guess if you remember we can play some Twenty Questions until I get it right.”
Twenty questions, charades. My past reduced to party games.
Eleanor’s makeup is all smeared up from where she was rubbing her eye. I take out my clean handkerchief and hand it to her, pointing at my own eye so she’ll know what I mean.
“Oh, shoot. I’m not used to wearing much makeup either, but Eva told me if I didn’t put some on and ended up being photographed I’d look like a cadaver. Will you be okay here a minute if I go try to fix this up?”
Sure, sure, I wave her away. Fine.
She shuffles away as quickly as she can manage in her shoes, which are taller than she usually wears and seem a little big, too. They keep slipping off. Probably also Eva’s.
I stare down at my own hands and wonder if I shouldn’t just let her know I remember Vivian. Pretending not to know has turned this into a bigger deal than it would have been. I smirk to myself. It’s what they always said after Watergate. It’s the cover-up that gets you.
I’ll just let Eleanor know through our questions and charades that she was a secretary for Harms and that Allen didn’t like her and neither did Mrs. Allen. That’s it, ta-da, we can dust our hands of this. Maybe then I’ll stop seeing her, too, because I won’t be thinking about her anymore.
And maybe then I can concentrate on getting my words back.
Smoke and flowers, dark waves of hair, and now the pressure of a small feminine hand on my forearm.
I push back from the table, scrabbling away, shaking the pressure of that hand off my arm. How is she touching me? How can I feel her? I hear broken glass and a couple of startled yelps but in my sweaty panic all I see is a blur of candlelight and glasses and dresses.
I try to slow down my breathing before I black out, then will myself to look right at her… Not Vivian! This gal has brown eyes, and she’s short. I can still smell roses and smoke but then, lots of people smoke and walk around smelling like perfume and ashtrays. Her eyes are wide and watery, and she’s angled slightly away from me, a wet splash across her pink dress.
“Oh, Mr. Short, I didn’t mean to scare you, I’m so sorry. I just saw the empty chair next to you, and wanted to tell you how much I admire and respect your work.” She looked around to the assembled crowd. “I swear, I only lightly touched his arm, I didn’t know it would scare him so bad.”
Now it’s my turn to look apologetic, as the crowd rushes in, some of them ministering to her dress, others asking me if I’m all right. Other than my body temperature shooting through the roof with this scare and all the gaping attention, I’m in the pink. I nod, dab my forehead with a cloth napkin, make another apologetic face at the girl, who is acting so flustered and upset you’d think I’d thrown my drink in her face on purpose.
Eleanor strides up, almost sliding in her too-big shoes. Her face is half made up now. Looks like she was washing her makeup completely off and got interrupted.
Joel has appeared now, and he and Eleanor have a whispered conference with each other and the nearest bystanders, who are either old business contacts and friends, or vaguely recognizable types who make the gala circuit something of a second job. None of them approach me. They either stare, or look sideways like I can’t tell they’re staring.
Finally they come back to the table, and Joel tells me he has to go because the twins’ nanny has to get home. He says Eleanor will escort me back to the townhouse. “I’m going to stay over,” Eleanor adds, with a weak smile. “Just to keep an eye on you.”
The nurses are paid to keep an eye out, but I won’t mind the company, anyhow.
Just now I want to get the hell out of here, too. Eleanor says, as the crowd around us thins out, clucking their expressions of concern over their shoulders, “I’m going to wait just a few minutes to give the driver time to get back to the door. Joel called his car phone. Then we can blow this joint.” Eleanor gives me a tired sideways smile. “Slumber party at your house.”
I can feel an arc of interest around us, where people are standing back, giving me and my granddaughter a moment, I guess, but they’re gawking in that too-cool-for-you society way. If only I could get up and do a soft-shoe on the table just to show them what for. Back when I had good knees and strong bones, I never did. Too polite, I guess, and too busy keeping everyone else in line. Shame, truth be told. When I get my words back I’m telling that to every young person I meet, starting with Eleanor. Dance on tables, kid, just because you can.
“You know, Grampa, why don’t I move in?”
I frown. Move in with me? Not that I wouldn’t enjoy her company, but doesn’t she want her own real life? She can’t really think that being a nursemaid to her ric
kety, mute grandfather counts as a future.
“I mean, look, staying at Uncle Paul’s apartment doesn’t make sense anymore, does it? It’s too big for just me, and he should get a tenant in there who can pay him some real money. I know, I know”—Eleanor waves away the objection I can’t give anyway—“but really it’s just embarrassing. That place was meant for Daniel and me, and there is no Daniel and me.” She peers into her empty champagne flute. “Well. Let’s go find that driver.”
We get up and she takes my elbow, and I wrap my opposite hand over hers, and together we make a slow but steady progression away from the rapacious, glittering room.
I startle awake, my mind scrambling to understand where I am.
Oh, Grampa Milo’s house. I flop back onto the overfull pillows as the benefit comes back to me in flashes. The pity, the staring, Grampa for some reason freaking out and spilling his drink all over that girl. And there I went, on my third glass of champagne, thinking it was a great idea to move in.
It felt so right at the time. He could use the company, and I don’t need that apartment, not really. We can work on the book much more efficiently if I’m here anytime, and can grab him at cheerful moments.
But this also means packing up my things and closing the door where Daniel and I… Well. Perhaps all the more reason to move.
I’ll have to go back to the apartment today. My computer is there, most of my notes. I should check my home answering machine, too, in case Vivian’s grandson called me back. I’d called him the next day after his email, but so far, no response. The silence, after he’d freely given his number, has only made my curiosity burn hotter.
I swing my feet off the side of the huge bed. Lace-edged flannel tickles my ankles. I’d scrounged up an old nightgown of Grandma Bee’s last night for lack of anything else to wear besides the party dress, and used a new toothbrush we’d picked up with a quick stop at Duane Reade on the way home. Once we got back, the nurse and I helped Grampa Milo to his upstairs room—he pointed happily at his old canopy bed, indicating how glad he was to sleep there again—and we hovered in the hallway as Grampa Milo readied himself for bed. As we did so, I couldn’t help but think how he was getting physically stronger, while his words remained stubbornly absent, his dominant hand stubbornly limp.
The nightgown is so soft that I believe I’ll keep it, patterned as it is with rosebuds and bows. It felt odd at first, wearing my late grandmother’s nightgown. Then as I pulled the bedspread up around my chin, I decided that she’d have insisted I wear it, had she been here to do so. And it’s as cozy as Grandma Bee herself always was.
While I’m waking myself up, I make a mental list of what else to do today. Call Uncle Paul and tell him I’m giving up the apartment. Get the essentials I’ll need here. Arrange for storage for things like that brown leather couch, my bed.
I give up on combing the tangles out of my hair with my fingers, instead wrestling it into a fat braid with an elastic that I always keep in my purse, just in case. A corona of frizz frames my forehead. I use a bar of soap I find in the shower to wash my face.
The smell of coffee wafts up the stairs as I step into the hall. I’m smacked by a retroactive wallop of loneliness. No one makes coffee at my apartment for me, because there’s no one there to do it. I’d forgotten about the simple joy of having a cup already waiting.
In the kitchen, I find Esme bustling around and a full plate of eggs and toast in the center of the butcher block island.
My delight at the coffee fades as I see that Grampa Milo isn’t in here. Instead we have a woman I don’t know with rings of shoulder-length curls, sitting in front of a breakfast plate. She gives me a genial smile and I fidget with my flannel nightgown. I didn’t expect to be in my pajamas in front of a stranger.
“Good morning. Where’s Grampa?” I ask Esme.
“Good morning, Miss Eleanor. He only ate a piece of toast and went back to lie down. I think he is overtired. This here is Ms. Marla, the therapist helping Mr. Short with his words.”
“Hello,” she says. “I’ve met most of the grandkids. You must be David’s daughter?”
“Yes, David was my dad.” I swirl the creamer into the black coffee, and keep swirling, just for something to do.
“I’m sorry he passed.”
“Thank you.”
“I saw a picture the other day in the parlor and it must have been him. Lots of dark curly hair, just like you.”
“We all have dark curly hair,” I answer.
“Not just that, but just the look of him, the shape of your face, I just knew. Do you favor your mother, too? I’ve got two little towheaded blondes, because of my husband, but their eyes are dark like mine. Quite a mix.” Marla sips her coffee and looks at me with her eyebrows up, waiting for me to chime in with my mother’s physical attributes.
Esme clears her throat and offers Marla more eggs.
I put on what I hope registers as a serene smile. “My mom left a long time ago. It’s hard for me even to remember what she looked like.”
Marla gasps and puts her hand to her chest. “Oh! I’m sorry, I didn’t know. Thoughtless of me to pry, I hope you forgive me.”
“No, it’s fine. You couldn’t know.”
At this, the conversation curls up and dies. A siren outside breaks the silence at last, and Marla informs us she’s going to check with “dear Milo” one more time before officially abandoning today’s therapy session. I’m grateful that she doesn’t throw me pitying looks, or continue with stammered apologies. She clears her own place before Esme has a chance to do it and slides out through the swinging doors. Esme follows her, no doubt attending to her work elsewhere in the house.
I notice I’m breathing fast when little ripples appear in the surface of my coffee as I raise it to my face. This agitation is not Marla’s fault, nor was it anyone else’s any other time this has happened. Why shouldn’t they ask? Everyone has a mother; everyone came from somewhere.
I know too little about my mother, and also too much. What I know for sure is she was a gentile girlfriend my father had, name of Charlotte, who was always reserved and cold in public, but my dad assured me was a laugh riot when it was just the two of them. I have to take his word for it, because she left before I went off to nursery school. My father’s fumbled explanations were along the lines of “she couldn’t handle it” and “wasn’t ready,” never defining what “it” was supposed to be. My child-self filled it in the way all children do, by nature self-centered. “It” was me. She wasn’t ready for me.
My Aunt Rebekah unknowingly filled in the blanks. She got tipsy one night and got into it with my father when we were all out at the Hamptons house. They were sitting around the embers of a bonfire, and I’d gotten bored playing Monopoly with Naomi and Eva, and Joel was on the Atari. So I figured I’d come out to the fire and look at the stars. I didn’t know that my dad and Aunt Rebekah were the only ones out there, until I got so close I could hear every word of their conversation.
“You owe that child a mother,” was the sentence from my aunt that froze me in place.
“What are you talking about?” my dad had answered, his voice more weary than indignant or angry.
“She’s growing up weird, and it’s your fault there is no feminine influence in her life.”
“There’s so much wrong with that I don’t even know where to begin. Feminine influence? If she’s lacking that, look in the mirror, Bekah. You barely talk to her, and you’re the closest thing she’s got to a mother. And anyway, our mother is doing a wonderful job picking up your slack there, lucky for Eleanor. She is not weird, she’s shy. And anyway…my fault? How is it my fault that Charlotte left us? I gave that woman everything.”
“You got her knocked up is what, and talked her into keeping it. That’s what she told me.”
“That ‘it’ is my daughter, and you better shut your mouth right now.”
“She never wanted a baby, but you convinced Charlotte to go through with it and play house, and
what did you think would happen, huh? That she’d squeeze the kid out and she’d be magically transformed into Mother of the Year? Honestly, it’s a wonder she didn’t run for the hills the first week, my God. And now the poor girl is so screwed up having been abandoned like that, and you haven’t done a single thing about getting remarried to give her something like a normal life.”
“I’m getting up right now before I … Don’t talk to me again. Ever.”
It was easy not to be noticed. My dad wasn’t looking for me, and it was so dark away from the fire. He headed off for the house like he was shot from a bow. I stared at Rebekah, and then watched her put her head down and start shaking. It took a minute for me to tease out the sound from the rush of the surf; she was crying ragged sobs.
They didn’t speak for a month, and it was me who begged Dad to make up with her. I never let on what I knew, but I couldn’t stand the tension and the pain the two of them wore like branded skin in each other’s presence, knowing it was all because of me.
I clung to the notion that my father had fought for me as a way to blunt what I’d learned, and finally just put that knowledge away in the dusty attic of things you know but don’t need, next to the quadratic equation and verb tenses in French.
Aunt Rebekah and I never did manage to be close. But I had Grandma Bee, and my dad was as sweet-natured and soft with me as any mother would have been.
I slurp some more coffee and feel guilty about leaving the eggs behind that Esme made, but I have no appetite now. A chord of sympathy for my grandfather vibrates in me, at having someone pry into your past.
I shove open the door to the Midtown apartment and I wish I could turn back out and leave again. Just buy all new clothes, new toiletries, new books. I’d like to just throw open the doors with a sign that says “Free, take it” and start over.
But this is not what one does, so I start with the obvious and listen to my answering machine while I dig out my suitcase from under the bed.
A few messages are from book sources, and I’ll have to listen again to write those down.
Vivian In Red Page 14
