The Best Contemporary Women's Fiction: Six Novels

by Jenna Blum

  "I'm Jewish," he said, "but in the English style, sort of half a Jew, as if it were only one of your parents, and you're not certain whether to take it or leave it."

  "What's the other half, in your case?"

  "Pure capitalist. I come from a long line of merchants. Fur and microchips. My great-grandfather was furrier to the czar. My father was the last furrier in London to move away from the East End when the Bangladeshis moved in. He went to Golders Green in 1962 and sold dead animals until the PETA people threw a can of fuchsia paint on my mother's full-length sable, which coincided roughly with the discovery of the microchip. He and my older brothers are computer consultants to the Queen. They have the lucrative gift of being able to endure long hours of bowing and scraping. I'm the youngest of four sons and, some say, the family rebel. Instead of software, I peddle paintings."

  In AA, of course, you are not supposed to tell anyone your last name, but Daniel blithely told me his. I knew it from going to galleries during all the years I lived in New York and reading art reviews in the Times during all the years I didn't.

  A cappuccino or two later, we were swapping infertility stories like girlfriends, by way of explaining how he ended up with four imports and I ended up with no offspring at all, except this gryphon-like dog Henry, whom I had left with my husband until I got settled. I didn't tell Daniel that night that Henry had been Will's present to me when I quit trying to get pregnant. "I still carry around a picture of him, ugly as he is."

  "Your husband?" Daniel said, visibly startled.

  "The dog."

  And I didn't tell Daniel about the immense sadness that had made me stop trying to have a baby. It was our first date, after all, and I wanted him to think my past was safely behind me, buried like nuclear waste, in airtight containers, even though I'd walked out on it only a handful of days earlier. Instead, I entertained Daniel with stories of my test-tube encounters with Green-Blue, the code name for the nuclear physicist at the California genius sperm bank I had wanted to be the father of my child, after it became clear that Will's sperm motility wasn't what it had been when he'd fathered my two grown, soon-to-be-ex stepdaughters.

  "Green-Blue is six-one, IQ of one fifty-six, and the father, as of two years ago, of thirty-one children of lesbian mothers and straight single women scattered across the fault lines of Southern California. They Fed Exed me the stuff in tanks of liquid nitrogen. But I ovulate funny. It was like waiting for three cherries to come up on a slot machine. And my husband was convinced that the only sperm donor in the joint was the skaggy-looking guy who ran the business and called me at seven in the morning—mind you, that's four A.M. in California—to say, 'Sophy, I have to know, is your temperature going up or down?'"

  Daniel told me that he and Blair had done the temperature business, test tubes, and Pergonal injections. She had even made an appointment with a faith healer named Falling Rain Drop, who insisted they participate in a fertility dance in Washington Square Park every day at dawn for a week. Daniel refused.

  The years of trying piled up, and Blair, pushing forty-three, grew impatient and fearful. In one fell swoop, they adopted three siblings, two boys and a girl, ages approximately six, four, and two, who had been living in an orphanage in Hoa Binh for six months, and a fourth child, Vicki, whose sad face in a photograph Blair could not resist. They nearly emptied out the orphanage and filled every room in the narrow, turn-of-the-century brownstone Blair had inherited from her stockbroker father.

  Adopting all those children, you could say she was Mia Farrow minus Woody, and now, poor lamb, poor Blair, she is Sunny von Bulow minus the millions. Not that they are destitute; Daniel's two art galleries are doing record business, despite his long afternoon absences. He was a willing partner in the international quest for children, and he is a devoted father, though he is often sleep-deprived and frequently flummoxed, as when his five-year-old said to him, "If you don't buy me a Beanie Baby, I'll say the F word all the time, starting right now."

  He wants me to think and seems to believe himself—and it may be the truth—that his essential nature is now subsumed by the condition of being overwhelmed. "I used to have a personality," he will say, "and a life I rather liked. Now I run an orphanage on a street where I am the only heterosexual man for ten blocks in every blinking direction."

  On the other hand, I'm not sure what that personality was, the one he claims to have had. He can predict whether a client will prefer a Miro etching to an obscure Delvaux oil painting, and he is consulted by museums and foreign governments to detect forgeries, but in matters of his heart, nuance is a rare commodity. When I asked him how his marriage had changed over the years, all he said was, "Once the children arrived, we quit having sex on Saturday afternoons."

  My friends are divided over the nature and severity of Daniel's affliction. Those who have spent time in England insist that his passport is his destiny, and his answer to my question about his marriage passes in that population for soul-searching. Other friends ascribe his limitations to gender. "He sounds just like a man," Annabelle said, "but worse." It may be most accurate on any continent to say that he is what Winston Churchill said about Russia: a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.

  But there is something else you should know about Daniel: I think he is still in love with Blair. She has this embalmed, waxy, forever-thirty-nine, Dick Clark quality. Perfect, silent, stricken, enveloped in the aura of her New York Stock Exchange pedigree and a life of excruciatingly good deeds. She founded and ran a literacy-and-reading center for inner city families and was always getting plaques and certificates from the mayor, the governor, Channel 7, the Amsterdam News, El Diario, and the Helen Keller Foundation. Daniel sells modern masters, wears Armani underwear, and a wristwatch as thin as a quarter, but his living room walls are now crammed with three-dollar pressed-wood plaques and ersatz diplomas from local TV news anchors who think Blair should have shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Nelson Mandela.

  Poor thing was hit by a UPS truck the year before while bicycling on Hilton Head Island, where she was attending her only sister's wedding. Can Daniel marry again without divorcing his brain-dead wife? The subject has not come up between us. We are efficient communicators in the sack and above-average conversationalists on terra firma, but on the question of our future—I mean anything beyond tomorrow—we are neophyte speakers of English, permanently stalled in the present tense.

  Blair is a tough act to follow, though I give it all I've got. In addition to baking Christmas cookies with Daniel's children in June, I frequently do a full-dress imitation of Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, which they have seen on video twenty-five or thirty times. I braid my hair and wear a polka-dot pinafore and a pair of glittery red shoes I found in a thrift store; and I rigged up a little stuffed dog, attached to a real leather leash, which I drag up the stairs of their brownstone and then sling over my shoulder, squealing, "Toto! Toto! I don't think we're in Kansas anymore!"

  One night I made the mistake of imitating their father for them. I put on one of his silk suits over my own clothes and carted four metal lunchboxes and a handful of naked Barbie dolls into the bedroom where they waited for me, perched on the edge of Vicki's bed—Vicki, the oldest, Vicki, who keeps a shelf of books about children who have no parents. This child who first heard English spoken three years ago has read The Secret Garden, Anne of Green Gables, Peter Pan, Pippi Longstocking, and, in a category of loss entirely its own, The Diary of Anne Frank.

  That night I studied each of their faces and said in the lowest growl I could summon and my best English accent, "What's all this blinking mess in here?" I pretended to trip and sent the lunchboxes and Barbies flying. They landed hard and clattered across the bare wood floor. From downstairs, Daniel hollered, "What's all that blinking noise up there?" and we collapsed with laughter, and I was still laughing when Tran said to me, "Now do Mommy."

  "But I don't know Mommy."

  "You don't know Dorothy, either," Vicki said. I knew only that I was bou
nd to fail in this, but four pair of beautiful, almond-shaped black eyes were on me, and I could not deprive them of another mother, even of the flimsy imposter they knew to expect.

  I slipped out of Daniel's clothes and tried to organize a game of Chinese checkers with them, tried to be a funny, light-hearted, old-fashioned, TV kind of Mom, before TV moms were cops and cardiologists, but my heart wasn't in it, or maybe I mean that I didn't want them to see how much it was in it, so I held back, and the whole thing fell flat. "Who wants peanut butter?" I said lamely. "Who wants to take a Tarzan bubble bath? Who wants an enormous plate of asparagus for dessert?" But none of them laughed, and I was relieved when Van said, "Do Dorothy again."

  At breakfast they have said to me, "Do our dad, please."

  "The school bus is outside."

  "Then do Toto."

  "Honey, let Sophy finish her cereal."

  "One little time, and we'll never ask you again."

  "I will," said Cam, the youngest, always out of synch with the consensus.

  "Don't get dressed up," Tran said. "Just talk funny and throw the Barbies."

  Early on, when Daniel and I were in bed and it was dark and our skin was as slippery as the inside of an oyster, he whispered, "Do me."

  "What?"

  "Do me."

  "Baby, I am doing you."

  "Imitate me. The way you did today at lunch."

  "Now?"

  "Now."

  "You pervert."

  "Don't stop moving."

  "You narcissist."

  "I'm guilty."

  "You're out of your blinking mind."

  "Do me."

  '"I have a little, uh, Chagall etching in the vault, uh, you might find enchanting. Once in the collection of His Majesty the Shah of Iran. Or was it the Duke of, uh, Windsor? Two-point-five.'"

  "His etchings never sold for that much."

  "'For you, then, two-point-three.'"

  "I never bargain. Or mix up monarchs."

  "You are out of your mind, Daniel."

  "I know."

  "I know you know."

  The truth was we both were. Fourteen days before, in a howling March nor'easter, on an island called Swansea, off the coast of Massachusetts—a place as desolate as the Hebrides that time of year—I had left my husband and a hideous hybrid hound dog with pointy ears. He was not only my consolation prize for not having a baby, but a sign from God, I'm sure, that had I succeeded, the poor creature would have been Rosemary's Baby. I had driven away from a ten-year marriage with what I could fit in a rented Toyota and a promise I did not think I would keep: to reconsider my decision when I got to New York.

  So much has happened since then. For one thing, the dog is gone. For another, I've just begun to write the story of my own life, at a desk in the house on Swansea that I walked out of in March, and I'm on a firm deadline. The story starts on a high note: a woman leaves her husband in search of happiness and ends up on a big-city roller-coaster ride that feels for moments at a time like sheer bliss, an urban fairy tale come true. Then, out of nowhere, her new life takes a plunge, then another, and a few dips, and before long she feels like Job. But there isn't much of a story to tell unless a few things go wrong, is there?

  I'm not going to trouble you with the story of my entire life since before my birth, like David Copperfield. I think it's best to stick to what's happened lately, starting two months ago, the morning of June twenty-second, when I was still in New York, still caught up, for the next few hours, in the great, mad joy of just being there, the morning of the day the police called.

  2. I'd Rather Eat Glass

  THE DAY BEGAN with a proposal from my neighbor Jesús as I opened my front door to pick up the Times from the welcome mat that had come with the sublet. My eyes veered from the lead story to another I'd been following since the beginning, from the heat wave that had engulfed the city to my lawyer friend Evan Lambert's defense of another foreign nanny accused of killing another baby: a nineteen-year-old German girl who had allegedly shaken an infant to death in the Back Bay section of Boston. So the moniker the Back Bay Baby had entered the language. On the bottom of the front page was a story about the sleepiest presidential campaign in recent memory, festooned with the red, white, and blue banner that attempted to generate a spark of enthusiasm for ELECTION 2000. I started to back into my apartment when I heard a voice.

  "Are you divorced yet?" It was Jesús, poking his head into the corridor as I skimmed Evan's strategy for defending the nanny.

  "I signed the separation agreement a few days ago and sent it to my lawyer."

  "Congratulations," Jesús said.

  "That's one way of looking at it." He had seen me move in three months before and asked a few nosy questions, which I thought at the time would be neighborly for me to answer, not having lived in New York for the past four years, and welcoming the openness. It looked as if Evan's client was going to plead insanity, which might lead Congress to place more restrictions on all nanny visas.

  "What's not to celebrate? You're free like a bird. When the divorce comes through, I know someone who wants to marry you."

  I looked at him over the rim of the half-glasses I'd recently begun to need for reading. "Who might that be?" I wasn't aware we knew a soul in common, except the building's super, and he seemed an unlikely candidate.

  "My Jaime."

  "Your who?"

  "My boyfriend. From Ecuador. He needs a green card." He went on to explain that Jaime sweeps hair from the floor at Bumble & Bumble, and that they'd pay me five thousand dollars. When I wrinkled my face, thinking not of the sum, which I could use, but of Daniel, whom I would marry tomorrow if we weren't both married to other people, Jesus said, "All right, seventy-five hundred and a perm."

  "Warm, you're getting warm," I said, though of course I didn't mean it, and what I meant about marrying Daniel was not that I thought multiple orgasms could be the basis for a lifelong partnership, because even with him and his antidepressants, they don't last much longer than a bowl of chocolate mousse. What I meant was that his children were badly in need of a mother. The times I felt this most urgently, when the boys buttoned their shirts wrong and the girls forgot to put on underwear and matching socks, I often toyed with writing a note to them from their mother— Sugar plums, Dumplings, my four precious Vietnamese spring rolls: When we rescued you from the orphanage in your sad and beautiful country, this is not how I imagined the story would end—but I did not want to frighten them, or myself, with the depth of my longing or the eerie projection of their mother's. Unlikely doppelgangers, Blair and I, yearning to take proper care of the same four orphans, if only we could.

  "I'll tell Jaime you're interested," Jesus said. "By the way, I saw your movie on video the other night. I didn't think it would have such a happy ending. For such a sad story."

  "They changed the ending of the book when they turned it into a movie."

  "What do you care, right? You must've made a mint."

  "A very small mint, fifteen years ago."

  "You still in touch with Whoopi?"

  "No."

  "So all you gotta do is write another."

  "Yup, that's all. There goes my phone." It was the Eighth Deadly calling to ask if I'd consider ghosting another autobiography. "I've got my deadline on Lili." Today was the day I'd determined to get back to the manuscript, now that my separation papers were gone. "Actually, I've missed my deadline, but I intend to—"

  "On who?"

  "Lili Boulanger."

  "Is that your French publisher?"

  Sometimes I thought the Eighth Deadly played the rube only to get a rise out of me; other times I was convinced "Entertainment Tonight" was his principal frame of reference. And I knew I'd explained all of this to him before. "She was Nadia Boulanger's little sister, the first woman to win the Prix de Rome for composing, in 1913. She died five years later, at twenty-four, and Nadia dedicated her life as a music teacher to Lili's memory. My novel is about what would have happen
ed if Lili had lived."

  "Doesn't sound right for our list."

  "I didn't think so. Whose autobiography do you want me to write this time?"

  "Can't tell you."

  "A Republican senator with AIDS?"

  "That was in our spring catalog."

  "Chelsea Clinton's jilted boyfriend?"

  "Can you get to him?"

  "Soon-Yi?"

  "No such luck."

  "Bruce Springsteen's plumber? Rudy Giuliani's priest?"

  "I'm not asking you to sign a contract, Sophy. I'm asking if I can put your name on a list of writers who are available." I turned to the beautiful photograph of Lili that Daniel had given me and that hangs over my desk. Lovely Lili, with her big brown, heartbreak eyes; Lili, who would disappear at the age of twenty-four, unless I finished my novel and breathed decades of new life into her. But here I was, being offered the possibility of money, and I knew mine would run out in five or six months. I couldn't afford to say no so blithely to the Eighth Deadly. And ghosting happens to be something I'm good at. A kind of ventriloquism, a species of drag, out-and-out mimicry. But how low would I sink, and how often? Lili spoke to me from her place on the wall: Are you going to finish your novel about me, or are you going to take the easy way out again? Do you have your sights set on winning the Prix de Rome, as I did, or will you end up with your mongrel dog doing stupid pet tricks on David Letterman?

  "Sure, put my name on the list," I said, though I hoped he wouldn't call for several months, long enough for me to tangle with Lili, to see how much farther we could take our duet.

  When the phone rang the instant I had replaced the receiver, I hoped it was Will. I had called him the day before and left a message on his machine, the third or fourth, about the thousand dollars he owed me, reimbursements from our health insurance that he did not want to give me. But it was Daniel; he'd be over later, and then we would go to his house for dinner to celebrate the third anniversary of the children's arrival from Vietnam. He had ordered a cake in the shape of an airplane from Jon Vie. How had my day been so far? "Uneventful," I lied, "so far." I wasn't ready to re-enact my collision with the Eighth Deadly, and mentioning the marriage proposal was out of the question. He was so skittish about matters of the heart, at least where our hearts might overlap, that I didn't know whether he'd feel relieved or threatened to learn I might soon be unavailable. "I'm about to lavish my complete attention on Lili. What time will I see you?"