Vivian In Red

by Kristina Riggle

  “I’m not! I just… I’ve been trying to nail down some details from Grampa’s early life, is all…”

  “So what details? What have you been doing, exactly? Who have you talked to, how much progress have you made? You remember that tight deadline, right? If I’m going to pitch this book as part of our whole strategy I have to know it’s really coming. I went out on a limb for you, kid, when Naomi wanted to give it to some slick pro. So tell me: how much have you got done?”

  I swallow hard, too hard, tasting panic at the back of my throat in the same way I did back in that poor mother’s kitchen, the one with the dead child who started screaming at me, with damn good reason. But now in the face of my bossy, frustrated uncle, I curl my fists tightly, my own nails biting into my palms, and draw up taller. “That’s between me and my editor. I’m working hard as I always have and I resent that you even imply otherwise.”

  Uncle Paul sighs roughly and shakes his head. “You want to help the family? Write the damn book.”

  And with that, he twirls his chair back to the desk and begins slapping papers around. He snatches the phone receiver up, and jabs the keypad with such ferocity he has to hang up and start dialing again.

  I dash across the hall and slam my way into my room, standing with my back to the inside of the door, waiting for my pulse to slow down.

  Diligent young Eleanor should redouble her efforts on the book, should get in touch with Bernadette Peters’ people and line up that interview, hell, maybe even start outlining the damn thing. If Uncle Paul is to be believed, the future of Short Productions—if it’s going to outlive Grampa Milo—may hang on a revival of The High Hat, with this book as a promotional tool. Help the family, he says. Help the family by writing the book.

  I walk with shaky legs over to the edge of the tall bed and perch on the edge, my feet swinging free a few inches over the carpet. I put my head in my hands. No one’s ever asked me to help the family before. It was always everyone else trying to help pathetic little motherless Ellie.

  But real help won’t come in the form of interviewing some stars for fawning quotes, this much I know.

  This stupid biography project has raked up something in Grampa Milo’s past. Not that the project caused his stroke, nothing so simple. My conviction of this lives in the radical oddity of his strange recovery, and his strange behavior. His leg movement came back so quickly. He’s strong in other ways, yet every part of him that could help him communicate with us… there’s just no progress at all, and our doctor cousin, Joel, admits, much to his own irritation, that there’s no medical reason this should be true. No matter how long he stares at the alphabet board and listens to Marla sing nursery songs, his voice and his words remain elusive. I overheard Aunt Rebekah saying they’re going to let Marla go, “throwing good money after bad” being her expression. They’ve cancelled the round-the-clock nursing, seeing as how I’m here now, anyway, and there have been no more nighttime wanderings. It’s like the family has declared this our new normal. Mute and compromised grandfather, nearly ninety, and we’ll just be around him until he croaks.

  That’s not good enough for me. I don’t care that he’s eighty-eight, this doesn’t mean his life doesn’t count. He shouldn’t have to drift through his last years like a shadow.

  I have an urge to book a plane ticket to Michigan and root through that box of things myself until I can tell the story. If Grampa Milo can’t tell it, won’t tell it, doesn’t dare tell it… But I have my voice. I can tell that story.

  A prickly sensation crawls up my neck and I glance around the room, as if by this audacious thought I’d conjure up Vivian Adair to silence me, too.

  The doorbell rings and I can hear the braying laughter of Eva all the way upstairs in my room.

  I’m weighing my options between the black dress Eva loaned me for the benefit, and an outfit all my own. I hang up the dress back in the wardrobe, electing instead to wear my olive green, ankle-length broomstick skirt and a plain black blouse.

  One side effect of moving into the townhouse is that I can no longer escape family dinners with the vague excuse of “work.” Though they never really believed I was working all those times, they’d grudgingly accepted that as a writer, my hours were unpredictable, and thus granted me the courtesy of pretending to believe my plausible lie.

  But now that I live here, I am well and truly stuck. The occasion for this one, I think, is Joel and Jessica’s anniversary, but I might have that wrong. There never needed to be an excuse when Grandma Bee was alive, she’d just declare “Dinner Thursday night” or “We’re having a Shabbat dinner” and we’d attend because that’s what one does when your grandmother asks.

  Now it’s Linda who organizes the dinners, even before Grampa’s stroke, and she seems to like to have a reason of some kind.

  I’m tugging my tights up into place when I hear a soft knock on the door. I pull it open to find Daniel standing there, wearing a bashful grin.

  I hadn’t invited him to this dinner. Eva had done it, when she’d chanced to run into him helping me move into the townhouse. I think she thought she was helping get us back together, curing my broken heart by bringing back my boyfriend.

  “Didn’t want to wait downstairs in the chaos?” I ask, walking away from the door by way of invitation.

  He comes in and closes the door softly, sitting on a wooden chest at the end of the four-poster bed. As I finish futzing with my tights and slip my feet into my comfortable, broken-in flats, I catch him glancing around the room, maybe comparing my old place to this one.

  This room is heavy with dark furnishings, landscape paintings, and a standing oval mirror in the corner. A vanity on the wall across from the bed is where I’ve plopped my hair things and sparse makeup supply. The mirror on the vanity reflects the bed itself and every time I get ready to turn out the light I’m confronted with my tired, washed out face and my frizzy late-day hair, and every night I think the next day I will move that thing somewhere else.

  I sit at the stool in front of the vanity and pick through my little jewelry box until I find the birthstone my father gave me. Daniel still hasn’t spoken as I begin to fumble with the clasp under my pile of curls.

  He stands and I can see him approach me in the mirror until I see his midsection only. He’s wearing a black silk shirt I bought for him on his last birthday.

  “Let me,” he finally says, reaching under my hair. As his fingers brush my neck a shiver races down my back. I hold my hair up out of his way. It takes him far too long with the clasp. I could have done it faster myself. I’m on the point of telling him so and taking the necklace back out of his hands when he says “There, all set” and brushes the sharp point of my jaw with his fingers, which skate down my neck until his hands rest on my shoulders.

  Only now do I remember to let go of my hair, which lands in an unromantic lump over his hands.

  I reach up and cover his left hand with my right, squeeze it lightly, then move it off of my shoulder. At this he stands back and releases me, and by the time I turn around, he has turned around, his face hidden.

  “So, do you realize what you’re in for tonight? A special Eva interrogation, I have no doubt.”

  He sits down on the trunk again, elbows on his knees, kneading his own hands. His hair has gotten a little long and it has flopped down, his expression inscrutable.

  “I can withstand Eva’s interrogation. I have before.”

  “I can’t promise she won’t have a whole gang of supporters tonight—”

  “Eleanor.” He stands up and turns to me, his jaw tight. Then he begins to pace like a little toy at a carnival that marches back and forth, waiting to get shot for a prize.

  My door opens just then, with Eva sticking her head in. “Oh good, you’re decent. Oh, hi, Daniel, didn’t know you were up here. You coming down or what? Linda won’t let them start with the drinks until you get down there, so move it.”

  Eva’s head disappears from the door, and I jump when she scre
ams down the stairs, “She’s coming!”

  Daniel stares at the open door a moment and then says, “It can wait.” He gestures for me to go ahead of him.

  “Oh thank God!” shouts Naomi when I appear, which is not a reaction I typically get, except when my appearance hails the beginning of alcohol consumption.

  I wave at the assembled Shorts, really just a lift of the hand, and scan the room for Grampa Milo. I see him already ensconced in his usual head-of-table seat, staring into his whiskey and soda, swirling the ice around.

  Daniel keeps his hand at the small of my back as we weave through the formal dining room toward the bar cart. I am not looking at relatives but I feel the electricity of their interest in the air. I know without having to look that they are studying Daniel’s minutest gestures to tease out whether we are in fact together again.

  Someone has put Ella Fitzgerald on the stereo, and for this I’m grateful, though her velvet voice can’t keep me from reprising Daniel’s grim expression just before he was about to tell me something.

  I pour myself some white wine, and Daniel helps himself to a beer out of an ice bucket. I wedge myself into a corner and he joins me there. He gently clinks my glass without a word.

  Eva bears down on us, as I knew she would. “There you are!” Aunt Rebekah’s younger child, Naomi’s younger sister, Eva has distinguished herself as the ultimate in ladies who lunch, who volunteer, who parent and who shop. She also is keen to decorate. Last family dinner I attended, she joked that she decorated another room every time she was tempted to have another baby and so far she’d redone the entire Hamptons house.

  “I think it’s wonderful that you’re doing a book! Just amazing, and at your young age, too. Quite an accomplishment.”

  I glance down into the golden glow of my drink. “Thanks. I haven’t accomplished it just yet.”

  “Oh, you will, I’m sure. Uncle Paul has faith in you. And so do we all,” she adds in a rush, with a sideways glance to Naomi, who is chucking the chin of Joel’s baby boy. She always was a rotten liar.

  She moves closer to me, stage whispering. “So how is he doing? I mean, really? No one tells me anything.” She throws a disgusted glance toward Linda. I know what she means; Grandma Bee was the source of all Short family news. Linda never talks about anything of consequence, not because she’s shallow, but because she’s private. I may be the only one who understands this. Most everyone thinks she strained her brain by wearing her bun too tight.

  “You could talk to him yourself,” I tell her, spotting Joel and Jessica whispering to each other in another room, having handed off the babies to cooing cousins. They smile over a secret joke; Jessica brushes his cheek with a kiss. Daniel shifts a bit closer to me.

  “What do you mean talk to him?”

  “If you ask him the right kind of questions he’s perfectly communicative. He’s not a vegetable.”

  “I didn’t say he was, for God’s sake. Honestly. And I will talk to him.” She looks in his direction and so do Daniel and I. He’s sitting alone in the throng. Not a single person within two strides of him. This is not a big room, so that’s quite a trick, really. “I just mean, how do you think he is, spending so much time with him.”

  She aims her rapacious gaze right at me and I take another sip of wine and glance at Daniel, though why I don’t really know.

  “I think he’s feeling depressed and defeated, and lonely. Being unable to talk is isolating him. I mean look at that. It’s like a force field. We tried going out to the benefit and he got startled almost right out of his chair. He—” No. I stop. Eva is not the one to tell about him seeing things. Seeing people.

  At this, I see Grampa Milo turn his attention to the empty chair at his elbow, the one at right angles to his right hand. This might be something a person does when lost in thought, not looking at anything, but his posture looks purposeful, alert. I watch him shake his head, and try to mutter something, then glare over at the chair again.

  I glance at Eva and notice her watching him.

  I touch her hand to get her attention back to me. “Eva, tell me about your kids, I haven’t seen them in ages, is Hannah still dancing?”

  This sets her off on her favorite subject, and carries me all the way through my last swallow of wine in the glass before Linda announces it’s time to sit down.

  There’s some awkwardness as Linda’s place cards—really, we need place cards?—have placed Daniel at the opposite end of the table from Grampa Milo, so they are forced to stare at each other if they look up, the patriarch and the man who used to live with his granddaughter.

  Daniel flashes me that look again, that gaze of stricken intensity, and I return my attention to the food, the linen napkin in my lap, and Grampa Milo to my left. He’s trying to follow the dinner conversation but there’s too much of it, too fast, words zipping like arrows across a battlefield. He keeps cupping his hand to his ear when there’s something he’s missed, and I spend most of the dinner repeating it, though I edit some of the more colorful commentary about Bill Clinton’s exploits and whether they matter in light of his job.

  Jessica declares, “I think it shows an inherent disregard for women in general, not to mention the office he holds. It throws into question his judgment on everything!”

  Naomi barks a mocking laugh. “Please! Would you have preferred that shriveled raisin Bob Dole instead? Sure, plenty of respect for women except for supporting their basic rights.”

  Naomi’s husband jumps in, pointing at her with his fork so that a piece of lettuce flies off. “Now you’re oversimplifying just to score rhetorical points…”

  And so it goes, for the salad and main course, until they finally start to run out of steam around the time slices of cheesecake are handed around and coffee is poured by a server brought along by the caterers.

  Joel has been sitting to my right, engrossed in the debate and making asides to Jessica on his other side, but he startles me by standing up abruptly. “Pager,” he announces, and strides out of the room.

  “Come on, Daniel,” Jessica declares, over the murmur of sidebar conversations that have sprung up around the table. “‘Move your feet, lose your seat,’ that’s the rule in our house.” She crooks a finger and Daniel smiles genially and stands up from his seat. The entire table watches in gawking silence as he takes the empty chair next to me.

  “Can I eat his cheesecake, too?” he asks, sparking a round of charmed laughter before the hum of conversation cranks up again.

  Under the tablecloth, Daniel seeks my hand and squeezes it. He leans in toward my hair. “Let’s take a walk or something soon.”

  I nod to show that I hear him, though I’m not sure I want to know what’s coming.

  Daniel and I step into the night. In my head dance the visions of knowing winks and glances exchanged when we announced we were going out for some air.

  In the Short family, taking a walk with a boy was about the only way to get any sense of privacy. You could never have a boy in your room, God forbid, and in the main parts of the house, the adults would make like buzzards and circle. For me it was worse yet because I had the older cousins, too.

  Daniel drapes one arm around me. Our heights are perfectly proportional for the greatest ease of his hand on my shoulder; I have thought this so many times in gratitude while we were together, with a pang of remorse when we were apart.

  “I’m going to L.A.”

  Of course he is. I should have known he would.

  He goes on, as if he could hear my thoughts, “I’m not having much luck here lately. I didn’t get that callback, and working as an extra now and then isn’t enough to make a career. A buddy of mine is getting some commercial work out there, a couple of TV pilots. I’m not a native New Yorker like you. This was never my city in the first place, so what’s really keeping me?”

  The weight of this question does not escape me. He wants me to say that I am enough to keep him here.

  “Oh. Well, good luck then.”

/>   “I’m waiting until Tom’s lease is up, though. So I’ve got three months.”

  “Good.”

  “You don’t have anything else to say, Ellie?”

  We have turned toward the park, darkening now with the autumn’s onrushing dusk. A breeze stirs the branches and swirls the crumbling leaves. What else is there?

  “I’ll miss you,” I say, folding my arms and clenching tight, like my arms can steady my voice.

  “I don’t really want to go.” He pulls me in for a sideways squeeze, causing me to stumble slightly, and at this we both chuckle. The sound is mirthless, empty. “I wish I had reasons to stay. And it’s not just the work.”

  Don’t ask this of me. Don’t hand your life to me, I’m not capable.

  He pulls me to a stop under a streetlight. Our feet crunch into a pool of early leaves not yet swept away by the wind. I notice a couple of leaves tangled in the hem of my long skirt.

  “If you told me to stay, I would.”

  He did it. He put his future in my hands. I did not ask for this. It’s not fair.

  “It’s your choice, not mine. It always was.”

  “It’s supposed to be ours.”

  “So why did you leave me in the first place, then? And why are you coming back around now? I just got used to your absence, which was no easy trick.”

  “I just missed you. But I missed you when we lived together, too. Since Moira, which I apologized for up one side and down the other… But even before then. I thought one of these days you’d let me into those silences. I want to be let in, doesn’t that count for something?”

  What if I don’t want to let you in? This thought bursts into existence, surprising even me, and I find myself glad I’m not the type to blurt every thought out loud.