by Susan Isaacs
It wasn’t just the run-down condition of the house. Lee, who had been raised by Leonard to revere—if not worship—the upper-class god of genteel shabbiness, could not stop herself from noting that there was a profound difference between a threadbare Chippendale settee and a toilet dripping brown water onto a rust stain that had eaten through the tile floor. That single two-by-two-inch tile told Lee the story: The Taylors were either cheap or poor—poor meaning not rich enough to maintain an estate as grand as Hart’s Hill. Her heart was heavy. She had wanted them to be inexhaustibly wealthy, to say nothing of benevolent and eccentric and effervescent—like characters in a thirties screwball comedy. However, what disturbed Lee most was not the lack of money.
It was the lack of care: breakfast dishes with bits of bacon stuck in gluey maple syrup never cleared from the table in the kitchen; moisture-beaded highball glasses exuding a stale liquor smell in the living room; the Times from the previous Sunday still spread out on the unvacuumed rug in the library. It was more than just mess, however. Taylor did not care about Taylor.
After saying “Nice girl you’ve got there, pal” Fos clomped up the grand staircase in his golf shoes. By the time Lee returned from the doghouse and passed the library, Fos was seated, barefoot, on a leather sofa. His toes, splayed out on the rug, were fat, shaped like a collection of tablespoons. He was scraping the cleats of his shoes with an ivory-handled letter opener. Scrape, scrape, and bits of grass and tiny clumps of dirt fell onto the rug. Later, when Jazz brought her into the library to show her his grandfather’s maps of Shorehaven, Fos, hunched over the newspaper reading sports statistics, a smoldering cigarette held between his thumb and index finger, cupped in his hand, did not even look up.
“Looking for Granddad Toby’s maps,” Jazz muttered, and his father muttered back something like “Nnn” or “Mmm.” Lee couldn’t be certain because his head was twisted at an odd angle as he scrutinized a list of American League pitchers’ earned-run averages.
Fos’s conversation at dinner (pizza Jazz had volunteered to pick up, an offer for which Lee was pathetically grateful, sensing the alternative might be tuna-basenji-hair casserole) was not much more stimulating. The kitchen table around which they sat was an oblong of cherry wood more imposing than most people’s dining room tables. Ginger, from the foot of the table, called out to her husband at the head: “Fos, Lee’s working for the D.A. in Manhattan this summer.”
Fos stopped flattening the fluting on the edges of his paper plate and squinted in Lee’s direction. “Manhattan D.A.’s?” he said.
“Yes,” Lee responded.
She must have looked pathetically eager for a response, because he sighed and came up with one further observation. “The senior litigating partner at my old law firm was there. Years ago. Cap Malcolm.”
“Chester Malcolm,” Ginger elaborated, sliding the pizza box across the wood to Jazz.
“Oh,” replied Lee, a little too brightly, she realized. She wished she had heard something wonderful about good ole Cap Malcolm so she could have something to say to the Taylors. They seemed to have no need to say anything to one another, and hardly any to say anything to her. She wished Jazz’s sisters were there. Maybe they would talk. But Hope, the eldest, was married to a golf pro and living in Palm Springs and Irene, a year older than Jazz, was on a commune in Oregon.
The Taylors ate slice after slice of the two large pizzas Jazz had brought home. Each chewed with intense concentration, as if he or she were dining alone in a tiny Neapolitan cafe and trying this dish for the first time. Jazz, usually full of bright observations or intelligent questions, fell into a silence she wished was not so comfortable. In fact, engrossed as he was with the elasticity of his mozzarella cheese, he seemed to have forgotten she was his guest/girlfriend and that he was in love with her. And they all ignored Kent, despite the fact that the boy was having problems separating his slice of pizza from the pie and, then, from the box.
Lee held back from helping, thinking that it was some family decision, or possibly a principle of Down’s syndrome child psychology: Let the child fend for himself. But as Fos was reaching for his third slice, Lee could no longer bear the desperate, hungry look on Kent’s face. She disengaged a slice from the box and handed it to the boy. Glancing around, fearful of a rebuke, or at least a scathing look, she saw Jazz was studying a cross-section of pepperoni and Ginger wiping off the olive oil that had dribbled down her arm. Fos, head thrown back, chins quivering, drank from his can of Coke with soft glugging sounds.
“Thank you!” Kent said to Lee, his gloriously blue eyes shining brighter than ever. With a shudder of anticipated pleasure, he stuffed the triangular tip of the pizza in his mouth.
“You’re welcome.” Realizing that might be the end of the dinner conversation, she asked him: “Do you like pizza?”
“Yes,” Kent replied, charmed by her question. “I like pizza.”
“I like pizza too.”
“I like pizza,” Kent said, his words filtered through a jumble of crust and tomato sauce. “I like pizza.” For a frightened instant, she was afraid he would repeat the sentence over and over, and Jazz—to say nothing of his parents—would be irate with her for having set Kent off: Doesn’t the girl have the brains to know how to behave with someone like that? But Jazz was now engrossed in the take-out menu taped to the cover of the pizza box, Ginger was breaking her crusts into tiny pieces and Fos was once again defluting his paper plate. “I like pizza.” Suddenly Lee realized that Kent was making conversation, being hospitable, trying to put her at ease.
“I like pizza,” she confided. “And Coke.”
“Ilike Coke,” Kent responded, amazed and gladdened by the coincidence. “I like …” He paused. No one noticed the hesitation; certainly no one jumped in to help him. “I like …” Abruptly he slapped his hand down on the table: I’ve got it! “I like chocolate milk!”
“Me too!” Lee answered. “And ice cream.”
“Cake!”
“Hamburgers.”
“Hot dogs!”
They might have gone from macaroni and cheese through Cocoa Puffs to Twinkies except Fos left the table. Then Ginger called in the basenjis and began flinging the bits of crust into their midst. Then Jazz told Lee it was getting late. They had work the next day. They really ought to get back to the city.
On the ride back, Lee read Gideon’s Trumpet, while Jazz read a golf magazine he had fished out of his father’s attaché case. As the train crept through Queens, he looked up and said: “What can I tell you? My old man isn’t a laugh a minute.” She felt she waited a second too long before responding: “Wait till you meet mine.” The hesitation came because she had fully expected Jazz to add: “And my mother’s not going to win the Better Homes & Gardens gracious hostess award either,” as well as to offer an apology for the terrible condition of the house—or at least for the neglect of his kid brother. Kent had looked so bereft at her leaving that she’d wanted to grab him up in her arms, bring him back to their studio apartment. She would buy him new shorts and a T-shirt and a big box of Froot Loops, give him a bath and scrub his neck. Or if Jazz could not offer an apology, she mused, what about an explanation for his parents’ behavior? But Jazz did not notice her concern, because he went back to reading an editorial about driving ranges in Maui.
Well, Lee had to concede, if he had been a visitor at her house, would she have spent the next thirty-six hours apologizing for her family’s defects? True, her father had stopped trying to pass for what he thought the Taylors were. But now he had taken to acting as if he were Noël Coward’s houseguest—kiss-kiss, dahling, a Beautiful People peck on each cheek. Would he kiss-kiss Jazz? Or would he shift back into High Wasp mode for the occasion and, in a voice pitched mortifyingly low, boom out: Glad to meetcha! What could she possibly say? Uh, my dad’s a little affected. And gee, sorry that my mother just sat there picking on the nubs of her Chanel suit and not talking. And oh, yeah—my sister has a serious drug problem—and she’s married t
o a junkie and a thief.
So they went back to their sublet apartment and, exhausted, went to sleep without making love. The next morning, they returned to work. Then, before they knew it, they were caught up in their third and final year of law school. So Jazz Taylor never got to meet Lee’s family until … well, in fact, until the day after he married her.
Now, that might make it sound as though a long time passed, but it happened quite soon, sooner than either of them expected it would. And it was all because of Christmas.
A week before, Ginger called Jazz in his dorm room. As she had not phoned him since the beginning of law school, he thought (as he later explained to Lee) that something terrible had happened: The canine equivalent of Dutch elm disease wiping out all the basenjis. Or his sister Irene getting fatally mangled in some malevolent piece of farm machinery on her commune. What’s wrong? Jazz had asked, and his mother responded: Your father had to fly down to St. Petersburg to play golf with Mr. Whosis from the Atlantic Citrus Council who is having a conniption about something your father forgot to do so please get yourself home in time to buy the tree and set it up—damn, I forgot to buy the ham—because I’m in charge of the entire dessert table at the Kennel Club’s Yappy Yule party and Kent ate something funny and has the trotsies and I cannot get out of the house.
The next caller was Leonard White, who telephoned a mere hour and a half later. Jazz was still in Lee’s room, expounding to her how profound his dread of Christmas was. Chaos. His father was always someplace else and always arrived late. His mother was perpetually overwhelmed. Two years earlier, she had given him a roll of gift paper and three stick-on bows along with the presents she had not had time to wrap.
Leonard sounded far less frazzled than had Ginger. In fact, Leonard sounded like a million bucks (which at that moment happened to be one-quarter of his net worth, part of the reason for his ebullience). But for the young couple, his call was even greater cause for apprehension than Ginger’s had been.
“I’ve rented a house in St. Bart’s for the holidays!” Leonard exulted. Lee got so irritated at his pronunciation, “hollydays”—an attempt to sound educated-at-Oxford? a non-sectarian Christmas euphemism among pro-Semitic jet-setters? a playful reference to the evergreen?—she did not at first understand what he was saying. “When are your finals over?” Leonard inquired.
“My last one’s the twentieth.”
“Then you’ll have to meet us there.”
“Where?”
“St. Bart’s.”
“Where?”
“St. Bart’s. An island in the Caribbean. Everyone says it’s very in. But not overrun, if you know what I mean.”
Lee covered the mouthpiece of the phone and whispered: “St. Bart’s?”
“A nickname for the church?” Jazz murmured back, knowing all about Leonard’s Episcopaliphilia.
“An island,” Lee whispered.
“Never heard of it.”
“Lee?” her father demanded.
She turned away from Jazz so she could focus on her argument. “Why can’t we stay home?”
“Because we have a magnificent villa right on the ocean, with a butler, a cook, and two housemaids, and I’d rather spend the holidays there with fun people than on Long Island with no one and Greta’s greasy goose.”
“But I made plans with my boyfriend—”
“Unmake them.”
“Dad, I can’t.” Her parents knew there was someone in her life. However, preoccupied as they were with their troubles, the continuing occupation of their house by Robin and Ira, Lee had never found the right moment for telling them just who the fellow was, much less bringing him home to introduce them. Sometimes she was afraid that her father, having forsworn his Taylor fixation, would treat Jazz badly just to prove how little Protestants meant to him. At other times, she feared Leonard hadn’t gotten over the Taylors at all, that he would grovel before Jazz in such a sickening, relentless manner—Can I get you a glass of Veuve Clicquot? A snifter of Rémy XO? A sable coat for your mother?—that even good-natured Jazz would recoil.
“Look, Lee,” her father said, “I know people your age don’t want to hang around with a bunch of old farts like us. But I’ve invited some terrific people. Bright. Movers and shakers. People who if you’re going to be a lawyer you should meet.”
“Dad—”
“Bob and Bobbie Prager. He’s going to be Lindsay’s next consumer affairs commissioner. Very well respected. And Bobbie’s mother was part of the Frick family. From the museum. She’s been a customer for years. And Polly and Lloyd Gilliam. The journalists. She’s a contributing editor for Vogue and he—”
“Dad, please. I’ve been working like a madwoman—”
“And I haven’t?”
“Dad, I know how hard you work, but I need time—”
“This is what St. Bart’s is all about!” Leonard roared. “Relaxing!”
“Not for me!”
“Well, how about doing something for the family for a change? Or is it all right by you just to have me pay for your tuition, your room and board, your clothes, your whatever? You know damn well your mother is a little shaky.”
“So why are you taking her down to the Caribbean and loading her up with houseguests?”
“Because the house comes with plenty of help. I’m entitled to a little fun! Have you ever heard me say that before? No. You haven’t. But I am entitled. I work like a dog, and I’m entitled to a little life in my life. I wanted to move to the city. No. Your mother’s not up to it. Okay, fine. I want to go on a buying trip to Copenhagen, stop over in London, see some theater, and Greta—the maid!—comes crying to me that she’s afraid to stay in the house alone with Ira. Don’t worry, Greta. I won’t go. But don’t I ever get a turn?”
“Are Robin and Ira coming to St. Bart’s?” Lee asked, imagining Ira’s silhouette blackening the sun as the Fun Couples lunched on the terrace; Ira passing them on his way to sneak into their rooms and rip off their suitcases.
“I offered to send them to California, so they can visit with their friends. I really think … it looks like … I’m hoping they’ll take me up on it.”
“I can stay home with Greta.”
“You can come with us. That’s where you belong on the holidays. With your family.”
Lee did not slam down the phone. She hung it up and turned to Jazz. “He wants me to be with them for Christmas. Translated, that means if he can’t terrorize my mother into getting out of bed once they get down there, he’ll do the old ‘Sylvia has the flu’ routine. She’s pretty good at it. Once she coughs on cue, she’s off the hook. Then he’ll put his arm around me and say, ‘Lee will fill in, won’t you, dahling. Lee, have the girl bring the coffee out to the terrazzo.’” Jazz put an arm around Lee, she put an arm around him, and they stood beside her desk, rocking side to side, comforting each other.
A few days later, with final examinations behind her, Lee was back in her dorm room, getting ready for St. Bart’s. More precisely, she was folding and refolding a blue cotton T-shirt as if expecting a grade in packing skills to be computed into her cumulative average. For the fourth time, she aligned the shoulder seams only to have a gigantic wrinkle pop up front and center. No matter what clothes she packed, she knew, her mother would be prepared with a fashion antidote. Lee would get to St. Bart’s and there would be, God help her, a closet full of cruise wear in her room. Shocking-pink two-piece bathing suits with matching jackets or, worse, sarongs. Sun-yellow jumpsuits with palazzo pants legs. Lime-green shorts and halter tops, the sort of thing Robin could wear and look like an elf-queen, but that would make Lee look like a troll. Lee felt a lump midthroat. It’s only for ten days, she soothed herself. At worst, I’ll get a tan, and at best … Who knows? Maybe the fun people really will be fun.
She knew she was getting overemotional. It was not as if Jazz would meet some limpid-eyed beauty at the country club’s New Year’s Eve dance and immediately realize the error of his ways. Actually, Lee conceded
, that was it. The lump in her throat grew so large it forced tears out of her eyes. A drop slipped from her cheek onto the T-shirt and made a sad little mark. All fumpfed up, that’s what she was. Fumpfed—or something like it—was a Greta word. It seemed to mean something like filled with grief. It was a word she and Robin could never pronounce. But when one of them got upset, the other used to say, in a cruelly comic German accent: You are all fumpfed up.
Lee was so fumpfed up she did not notice that Jazz had come in. When he sat beside her on the bed—on top of her T-shirt, actually—she gave a too loud hoot of surprise.
“Sorry,” he said. “I thought you heard me come in.”
“No. I was so spaced out …” Her voice was excessively husky, she noticed, a combination of a constricted throat and a need to fight fire with fire and best the blonde hussy from Rolling Hills Country Club.
But such tactics were not necessary. When Jazz saw her tears, his eyes filled as well. They sat beside each other on the single, lumpy dormitory bed. Then they wept. “It’s only for ten days,” Lee managed to say. Not two seconds later, Jazz said the same thing back to her. “Why are we carrying on like this?” she demanded.
“Beats the hell out of me,” he said, checking out the ceiling in the embarrassed way men do when they discover themselves crying. After a second, he added: “Maybe …”
“Maybe what?”
“Maybe we’re all upset because our being apart is a crime against nature.” Lee started to laugh, but her nose began dripping so fiercely she settled for a fast guffaw. “I’m serious,” Jazz continued. “We were meant to be with each other. You and I … we’re a given in natural law.”
“Lee and Jazz. Axiomatic.”
“Exactly,” he agreed, without her irony. “And to be apart on Christmas is the worst. You know why?”
“Why?”
“Because the two of us, we’re more family to each other than our own families are.”
From there, it seemed only logical that the following afternoon, as soon as Jazz finished his Antitrust final, they visited Dr. Donald Humm, an internist known to the students around NYU for his fondness for writing prescriptions. He did the blood test. And a mere three telephone calls later, Judge Susan Margules Steinhardt, the august, cerebral New York State Supreme Court justice presiding in the Howie the Hose extortion proceedings, said that indeed she did remember Lee as the student intern from the previous summer—first-rate demeanor, so rare these days—and yes, she would be delighted to marry the couple Monday at noon in chambers and wasn’t it, um, adventurous that the two of them were eloping and—no problem at all—she’d be pleased to read Shakespeare’s one hundred sixteenth sonnet (her husband had in fact recited it to her while they were courting) and wasn’t it romantic that they were going to spend their honeymoon in St. Bart’s. Romantic and lovely. Just lovely.
