Motherland

by Amy Sohn

  That week David had been on the cover of New York magazine, posed with his hands over his crotch and two burlesque dancers stroking his nipples. Above his head, it said, DAVID KELLER: EXTREMELY LEWD AND INCREDIBLY GROSS. Rebecca had seen it on a table outside a candy store and, unable to resist, had plunked down the money for a magazine, getting a Charleston Chew along with it for comfort. She read it standing up outside of the store.

  In the laudatory story, he told of his early struggles as a comedian without mentioning that Rebecca had gotten him his gigs. He bemoaned his short-lived marriage to Cassie Trainor, insisting that Cassie had ended it—though the tabloids had said she left him after he cheated on her with a waitress at Locanda Verde. Rebecca had finished the article thinking that perhaps her ex-boyfriend was the greatest spinmeister who ever lived.

  As she shielded her eyes from the lights, she saw that an entire brownstone had been taken over for David’s show. She could see artificial lights in one of the bedrooms and a crane setting up outside. She had wanted to be a writer once. She and David had bonded over it, and she’d encouraged him, and then his career took off and hers went nowhere and now she sold kids’ clothes for a living. Three male figures crossed the street, two women trailing behind them. The man in the center was tall and bearded. At first she did not recognize him as her anemic and jaundiced ex, but as they got closer, she saw that it was David. He walked with his arms held out a few inches from his body, like a weight lifter or a roadie. It was the walk of someone broadcasting his importance. She ducked behind a car as he approached so he wouldn’t see her. A production assistant eyed her. Having lived in New York for almost twenty years, she was used to ducking behind cars to hide from ex-boyfriends, but most of them weren’t shooting television shows.

  The Montauk Club was a Venetian Gothic building on Eighth Avenue and Lincoln Place. When she got inside, she found Stuart standing at the upstairs bar. She could see why Boardwalk shot on this floor. The room had all the original Venetian Gothic styling. Oriental carpets, pointed windows, a terrace where you could sit in the summer, drinking white wine and watching the sun set.

  “You look stunning,” Stuart said. She thought she saw his eyes linger on her bigger-than-last-time breasts—full from the nursing—but wasn’t sure.

  He was wearing a blue-and-white-striped crew neck with a ribbed V at the neck, something that would have looked dorky on anyone but Stuart Ashby. “Thank you,” she said. “So, what do you think of this place?”

  “I can’t get over it. It’s like a walk back in time. Reminds me of the Ca’ d’Oro in Venice.”

  “Have you been there?”

  “No, I read about it in the brochure downstairs. What are you drinking?”

  “Gin and tonic,” she said. The tab would come to her because it was a private club, but Stuart didn’t know that. She wondered whether he would try to slip her some cash, and if not, how much the evening would wind up costing her. She regretted not making him take her to some fancy restaurant in Tribeca.

  He raised his hand to the bartender. “Plymouth and tonic and a Stella.” She saw Benny’s face in Stuart’s face—a reversal of the last year and a half, when she had seen Stuart’s in Benny’s.

  They sat at a tiny round table by the window overlooking Plaza Street, clinking glasses. She had brought Abbie to this same table one afternoon and ordered a Shirley Temple for her and a Prosecco for herself. They had looked through the curtained windows down at the street, and Rebecca had sighed happily, feeling grateful to be in such a historic building, when she noticed a Hispanic man helping his young son urinate on a lamppost.

  Her gin went down smoothly and she savored it. She would have to wean Benny soon; he was already losing interest in the breast, and it was irresponsible to drink the way she did while nursing. She looked out at the dining room and saw a couple of AARPers, plus a few mid-thirties couples. They had been joining the Montauk Club of late. If any of them recognized Stuart, they didn’t show it.

  “I can’t stop thinking about you,” Stuart said. “Even when I was trying to work it out with Melora, I missed you. I kept imagining I was passing you on the street, and it always turned out to be someone else.”

  “In Bulgaria?”

  “After we came back. You were the best thing about Park Slope.” His eyes were as seductive and limpid as they were on the movie screens.

  “That’s an underhanded compliment.”

  “My father died last month.” Where was this coming from? As he spoke, his face went slack and pale.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It was a heart attack. Very sudden. Seventy-two years old. Dropped dead one morning while eating breakfast with my mum. He wasn’t young, but I never expected it to happen so quickly. It’s been strange since then.” His eyes turned moist, though she didn’t see any actual tears. “Anyway, it got me thinking about what life’s really about. Melora was wrong for me. I want Orion to grow up to be someone caring, and I don’t think it’s helped him having Melora for a mother.”

  “She was his mother before you were his father.”

  “She adopted for the wrong reasons. Anyway, I’m trying to move on in my life, but it’s taking longer than I thought. Someone once said divorce is more traumatic than any life event, including the death of a parent.”

  “Oh my God, you read Committed?”

  “Melora’s a good person, but she was wrong for me. Always was. She’s very cold. She’s not—heimish. It’s Yiddish. It means—”

  “I know what heimish means.”

  “You’re Jewish, right?” She nodded. “Anyway, I try to be heimish. My father was the most loving man you ever met. He talked to you like you were the only person in the room. Since he died, I’ve been thinking of the time I spent with you—and how giving you were—and I, I missed you. And then I saw you in Wellfleet. I didn’t used to be spiritual, but I believe there was a reason we ran into each other.” He blew his nose into the cocktail napkin. All actors overemoted. That was why Tom Hanks was so unforgivable at awards ceremonies but so lovable on-screen.

  “I was a shit to you when you got pregnant,” Stuart went on. “It must have been brutal for you, going through it. Was it awful?”

  “What?”

  “The abortion.”

  Though she didn’t want to lie about something so macabre, she felt she had no choice. “Yes. Awful,” she said. (There. The Lie.) She felt the instinct to tell him the truth, but it was better that he not know about Benny. Then again, if she wasn’t going to tell him, why was she here? She could feel her breasts throb, or was it her heart beating? Theo was right; she didn’t appreciate him enough. Maybe she had to start appreciating him more. He was the best father another man’s son could have hoped for.

  “So have you gotten a lot of writing jobs since your nominations?” she asked, to change the subject.

  “A few. Some rewrites I’m contractually obligated not to discuss. I haven’t found my next original idea. She’s very fickle, the Muse. In the meantime, I’m working on an opera for the Public.”

  “Oh yeah, what’s that?”

  “It’s based on Diabolique. I wanted to try theater, because that’s where I got my start in Sydney. Theater’s so real in a way the industry isn’t. We open in October.”

  “Are you in it?”

  “No, it’s a bunch of actors from the Wooster Group and Elevator Repair Service. It’s an opera, but it’s told primarily through spoken word. There was a huge piece on my rehearsal process in the Arts section the other day. I’m surprised you didn’t see it.”

  “I try not to read about you. Is it true that you fired Melora from Atlantic Yards because your marriage was falling apart?”

  “No. No way. Our relationship had been deteriorating for a long time.” She wondered whether he’d ever loved Melora, or if he had used her for his career. If he had, it had worked. He was way more famous than he’d been before he met her. He was like Padma Lakshmi and Justin Timberlake, one of those people whos
e fame eventually surpassed their famous exes’. He wasn’t a bad person, but she was starting to think he was a bit of an idiot.

  “I saw your movie,” Rebecca said. “You used my ideas. You put in my chase scene, in the arch at Grand Army Plaza. And you rewrote the ending.” In December Atlantic Yards had been released, and she had gone to see it at Park Slope’s Pavilion Theater alone. The opening was just as she remembered it from the script—a crane knocking down a real building near the Atlantic Yards. It continued according to what she had read: The fictitious borough president (Harvey Keitel) was embezzling money from the city to pay for a mistress and an expensive cocaine addiction. Lucy Flanagan, the Seventy-eighth Precinct cop (Maggie Gyllenhaal), was a lonely divorcée living in Brighton Beach and going on bad dates with construction workers.

  After that, the film took a different tack. Maggie Gyllenhaal turned out to be a single mother estranged from her son, who was being raised by her ex-husband (John Leguizamo). Rebecca had given Stuart that idea, to make her a mother; she’d said motherhood would soften the character. There were half a dozen other ideas of hers in there, too. As the credits rolled, she sat in the Pavilion, dumbfounded. Stuart had taken her notes without compensating her, crediting her, or asking her permission. She had a fantasy of suing him but quickly eliminated it: It cost a lot of money to sue someone. How could she prove it? She had better things to worry about than a movie credit. She had a family, and an affair to hide. “I felt like there should have been an asterisk next to your name, crediting me.”

  “I made Lucy my own,” he said. “You planted seeds, but the script was my flower.”

  “Do you really feel like those were your ideas?”

  “We were just spitballing.” She felt the blood rise to her face. It was bad enough that he’d stolen from her; now he was pretending he hadn’t. “Look,” he said, “I didn’t know you were so invested in your notes.”

  “I used to want to write,” she said.

  “You never told me.”

  “I never told you a lot of things.”

  “I know! I feel like everything was so rushed before. I want us to slow down and get to know each other. You’re so beautiful, Rebecca.” She wasn’t beautiful and knew it. Her body was better than her face. Was he saying this to charm her into . . . ?

  “Just let me kiss you.” He moved closer.

  “No.”

  “Don’t you miss me?”

  “I don’t know.”

  She did miss him, she had missed him, but some part of her didn’t trust his renewed interest. It seemed to be all about him, not her. And his father. But he was Stuart Ashby, and he was freckled and strong and tall and gorgeous, and he was telling her he had never stopped thinking about her. Stuart was swoon-worthy, and he wanted her. She thought about Theo, having dinner with his “college friend” in the city. Theo cheating? Was he out with a woman right this second? Did he love Rebecca the way he once did? Would he ever?

  Stuart moved his hand to her knee under the table and inched it between her legs. She didn’t stop him. His hand was warm against her thigh, and she felt herself get wet. How could he have this power over her even now?

  She jerked her chair back a few inches. “I should go.” She stood up, walked to the bar, signed the tab. She would go home and pay Sonam and go to her sleeping children’s room and appreciate them. She walked out the door of the parlor level and down the wooden stairs, past a statue of a black man playing a banjo, a remnant of a racist period in the Montauk Club’s past.

  Often there was a woman at the front desk downstairs, stationed there to make sure only members got in, but her hours were erratic and she wasn’t there now. Rebecca went to the front door and opened it. Stuart was behind her, pressed up against her. He was kissing her neck. She closed her eyes in spite of herself. He was guiding her to the front parlor next to the door. People threw cocktail parties there; she had learned all this on her tour. The door was open. The room was dark and cold and musty. Against the door, he kissed her on the mouth. She felt fifteen, going to second on a bunk bed at Camp Kinderland.

  “You feel so good,” Stuart said. His hands were on her face, her neck, unbuttoning her shirt, and then he moved her to the antique couch, where generations of men had probably smoked pipes, discussing their hatred of Jews.

  She could feel him hard against her. “Nobody ever kissed me the way you do,” she said, realizing as she said it that it was from From Here to Eternity.

  “Nobody?” he said, Burt Lancaster’s next line.

  She thought he was riffing, but when she answered with Deborah Kerr’s next line, “No, nobody,” Stuart said, “I must have magical powers, then,” and she realized he didn’t know the film. He had been nominated for a screenwriting Oscar and he didn’t know the famous scene from From Here to Eternity. That was what was wrong with Hollywood today.

  He lifted her skirt and buried his face in her, making growling noises. She wondered whether he would discover something new about her vagina that hadn’t been there before Benny was born. Would he pull out a slip of paper reading, “Confucius says the baby is your son”?

  She shut her eyes. On the street she could hear someone saying, “Reyner Banham. The four ecologies of L.A.”

  Stuart’s hands were on her breasts, on top of her shirt, as she came. Her nipples burned and she felt milk squirting out into her bra. The same hormone that made you horny also made you squirt milk. This had happened before, during sex with Theo, but not recently, not since she cut down the nursing. She was horrified. She pulled Stuart up her body, hoping his weight would stop the geysers.

  “What was that?” he said.

  “What was what?” Women worried about a lot of things on clandestine dates with the fathers of their illegitimate children, but she figured she was the first to worry about a man’s familiarity with oxytocin and arousal.

  “It’s all right. You shouldn’t be afraid. You can tell me.”

  “I can?” She sat up on the couch. He sat, too, searching her eyes. She had imagined this scene, imagined the relief that would come from telling the truth. People broke down because lying was too stressful. Her problem was that she was a bad liar pretending to be a good one.

  “It’s nothing to be ashamed of,” he said heavily. “Lots of women do what you did.”

  “They do?”

  “Sure. Life takes an unexpected turn, and instead of fighting it, they embrace it. You’re not the first.” She began to cry. He had known all along, suspected she kept the baby. He knew. “And that’s why you’re crying. Because it makes you emotional.”

  “You’re right.” Everything would change now. She had wanted change, and that was why she had come here to the Montauk Club with him.

  “Why were you afraid to tell me?” he asked.

  “I thought you . . . wouldn’t understand. I thought you’d be angry with me.”

  “Why would I be angry? In Africa it’s very common.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You’re still nursing Abbie, right? I heard that when women nurse, something can come out when they’re . . . aroused. There’s nothing wrong with it. I kind of like it.” He put his hand on her breast over her bra.

  “Please don’t do that,” she said.

  “I always wanted to know what it tasted like.”

  “Please!” She swatted him away. To feed a man the milk that was sustaining the son he didn’t know existed? Some things could be too meta.

  “I have to go home,” she said. He kissed her with force and warmth, a warmth she could not recall from him before this night. She broke it off first, stood up quickly, and walked out. She was halfway up her front stairs when she realized that she had forgotten her panties.

  It was the strollers in front of Starbucks that pushed Helene over the edge. She liked to order an iced coffee and drink it at a table in the store’s backyard while doing the crossword puzzle. Starbucks was on Seventh Avenue, near First Street, and she still thought of it
as Little Things, because that was the old location of the toy store. Her children had called it the Purple Monster because it was so big. After Starbucks came in, the toy store moved to a smaller place near Chase bank, a few blocks north on Seventh.

  It had taken Helene some time to come around to the idea of patronizing a Starbucks. Its presence represented everything that was wrong with the neighborhood nowadays, but it was her favorite coffee, and she liked the fast service, the baristas who actually seemed happy to be doing what they were doing. Connecticut Muffin across the street was a nightmare, with the mommy scene outside.

  On this September morning at eight-thirty, she arrived at Starbucks to find half a dozen strollers outside. As she reached to open the door, she tripped on a wheel and started to go over. She caught herself at the last minute, hand against the glass, but it hurt. “Dammit!” she yelled, massaging her wrist. Thank God she hadn’t broken it. If they were going to park the strollers there, why couldn’t they fold them? The smallest consideration was anathema.

  Inside, she ordered her iced coffee. As the barista set it down, she grabbed it, took it to the milk station, put in milk. She went out to the garden and saw, clustered around three of the four outside tables, a dozen mothers chatting loudly, their toddlers wandering the garden and making a ruckus. “I just feel like Grace Church has better exmissions than Garfield Temple,” one of them was saying.

  They were a scourge. She would have to drink her coffee at home.

  The idea didn’t occur to her until she passed her car, a 1994 Camry, parked on Sixth Street in front of her brownstone. She was going to teach these women a lesson. She opened the trunk and folded the rear seats flat, removed the jumbo pack of toilet paper she had picked up on a sojourn to Costco with her book-group friend Tina Miller.

  She drove back to Seventh and double-parked in front of the newsstand next to Starbucks, the one that had an annoying electronic children’s pony ride that played “It’s a Small World (After All).” She opened the trunk, got out casually, and approached the sea of Stokkes, the ocean of Maclarens. She was an expert at folding them now, getting the clamps to click. Within a minute she had gotten half a dozen into the trunk. The Pakistani newsstand owner smoking a cigarette outside eyed her but said nothing.