by Susan Isaacs
He shrugged. She had to admit he was not exhibiting a pressing need to know. Fuck it, she’d tell him anyway. “Lily.”
“Oh,” he said politely. But then he must have said her name to himself: Lily White. He threw back his head, and for the first time since she’d known him, he laughed out loud. “Lily White.” A deep and wonderful roar. “No shit!”
And she threw back her head to join him, but it didn’t work, because she had already begun to weep.
Lee was not thinking clearly, but Will was. He drove her almost home but let her off a little more than halfway up the rutted hill to her house. Your car died, he coached her. Since you knew Jazz was watching the game, you called a cab. It’s better if he doesn’t see you get out of my car. When you open discussions about the possibility of splitting up, you don’t want him to think: Hmm, she said she was going to her office Sunday. How come her close male friend drove her home? Don’t give him an excuse to feel less guilty.
Okay, Lee said.
Obviously, Will went on, you only have to offer the whole broken-down-car-cab story if he notices you didn’t get home under your own steam.
Obviously, she said. It wasn’t obvious to her at all. She was relieved that Will was advising her. She wanted to be told exactly what to do and what to say, because otherwise she would be too afraid to go home.
You can handle this, Will assured her.
I know. She did not know.
Will made her promise—swear, insisting she actually raise her right hand—that she keep mum. You are Unfit to Think, he decreed. Wait till tomorrow. Then, when you’re calmer—to say nothing of sober—you’ll speak to my partner, Joe Clark. He handles our matrimonial work. Then Will waited while Lee trudged up to the house, his headlights illuminating her way, his Porsche purring like a protective mother cat.
Lee walked around the house so she could enter through the side entrance, as if coming from the garage. Evening was becoming night, and a cold wind was blowing in from the sound, but it was still crisp, perfect Thanksgiving weekend football weather. Twigs crackled under her feet. She inhaled the pungent rot of the leaves, smoke from the fire Jazz must have built. She hugged her blazer around her. Good smells. Before her mind could censor, her body reacted to the late-autumn air: Ah, how lovely. A night to cuddle up and keep warm. Then she shivered.
As she passed the den, she saw Jazz where she had left him, sitting on the couch staring at the television set. Concerned because Cherry, the nanny, had the day off, Lee was immediately relieved when she walked into the kitchen and found Robin sitting with Val, patiently watching the little girl interact with a bowl of the chicken noodle soup Lee had made that morning. A moment later, Val was in her arms. Lee went over to Robin and, as she usually did, touched her cheek to her sister’s and chirped into the air, in their standard mockery of their mother’s kisses.
“Jazz is in the den,” Robin told her.
“Bad mood?” Lee asked, sidestepping so her sister would not sniff brandy breath.
Robin shrugged. “Not a good mood, I would have to say.”
Too damn bad, Lee thought, setting Val back down so she could swish around the soup pot. She found a small piece of chicken and a carrot to cut up.
“No!” Val announced, shaking her head so ferociously at the carrot that her glossy pigtails whipped back and forth. In all honesty, Lee admitted to herself, repressing a smile, she loved that her nay-saying daughter was such an ornery pain in the ass. “Yucky peas!” To Val, every vegetable was a pea.
“Okay,” Lee said, “I’ll eat it,” knowing her offer would immediately stimulate Val’s appetite. She picked up a circle of carrot. Val immediately stuck out her hand. “What do you say?” Lee demanded, depositing it in the child’s tiny palm.
“T’anks.”
“‘T’anks,”’ Lee repeated to Robin. “She sounds like Grandma Bella. Next thing you know, she’ll say, ‘You’re velcome, dahl-ink.’”
“I really don’t remember her too well.” Robin had gone to the stove and was peering into the pot as if she had made the soup. “Listen, I’ll keep an eye on Val. You ought to let Jazz know you’re home. He keeps popping in, wanting to know if you’re here yet.”
Will was right, Lee mused as she walked toward the den. Unfit to think. She ought to be concentrating on keeping her face bland, unreadable, but her mind kept jumping: a cold-water washload with her burgundy sweater and black panty hose; that article on women playwrights she had torn out two Sundays ago, still on her night-stand; oh, and she had to add a protein conditioner to the drugstore list. The blue light of the television flickered inside the den. Lee stood beside the open door. She wished she had passed up Will’s brandy because she really wanted a tranquilizer. No, general anesthesia: if only she could be put out until it was all over. She forced herself through the door.
“I’m home.” Her weight rested on the balls of her feet. She was primed to pivot and get out.
“Come in,” Jazz said, rising from the couch. He switched on a lamp and turned off the TV.
“I’ve got a ton of stuff to do.”
“Please. I want to talk.”
“Go ahead,” Lee replied. Since she made no move to sit, Jazz remained standing. But he kept glancing back to the couch. Lee sensed he had rehearsed this scene in his mind, and this was not the way it had played. Her head hurt. Drunk. What was Will’s theory about preventing hangovers? Water. Drink huge amounts of water. She wondered if it was too late.
“It’s like this,” Jazz began. Then he fell silent. She waited, but it seemed as if he was expecting her to speak. When she did not, he finally said: “I don’t know how to say this.”
“Say it,” Lee snapped. She crossed her arms but felt awkward, unable to decide whether to rest them on top of her bust or beneath it. She glanced at Jazz to see if he had noticed her difficulty. No. He was looking past her. Lee turned. Robin was at the door, carrying Val as if she were an infant. “I’ll be with you in a minute,” Lee told her sister. But Robin merely stood there. Lee sighed. If she said: Excuse me, Robin, but Jazz and I need some privacy, Robin would say: Oh, sure, sorry. But for the next few days—just when Lee would need her sister most—Robin would sulk, answering all attempts to engage her in conversation with monosyllables.
“Come in,” Jazz invited, making an arcing my-house-is-your-house gesture. Before Lee could think of a diplomatic way to bounce her, Robin, still holding Val, plopped into the biggest seat in the room, a high, fat-armed wing chair.
“When you found out,” Jazz said to Lee, “I swore to you I would end it. And then I told you it was all over.”
For a moment, Lee did not understand what he was talking about or, at least, could not believe he was speaking of it in front of her sister. And Val! She was too young to understand the words, but to have such a conversation in front of your own child? “Are you insane?” she hissed at him.
“It was never over.”
“Would you be quiet, for God’s sake.” She could see Val struggling to climb off her aunt’s lap and get closer to her parents.
“I’m in love,” Jazz insisted. Lee shoved him away. The push said: Shut up! End this conversation now! Too hard a push. Jazz would have fallen backward if, in one swift movement, Robin had not set Val aside, vaulted from the big chair, and held him by his shoulders, steadying him. “I’m in love,” he insisted.
“No,” Robin corrected him. “We’re in love.”
Before Lee’s mind could absorb the shock, her body did. It crumpled. Her legs turned from sturdy limbs into flesh without bones. She aimed herself toward the couch and, mercifully, fell into it.
“Mommy?”
“I’m okay. I just tripped.”
A shudder passed through Lee’s body, and immediately another. Oh my God, she thought, I’m having a convulsion. I’ve got to get Val out of here so she doesn’t see me. She looked over at her child. Only three, but Val was no fool. Robin was attempting to distract her, offering the TV remote control, but Val kne
w there was a better show being broadcast. Emphatically, she shook her head: No.
In the ensuing silence, Jazz and Robin came together before Lee in such a fluid motion it might have been choreographed. Jazz and Robin, so close to each other that Lee’s eyes were forced to see them as a couple. Beside him, Robin appeared so fine and fragile that she, not strapping, red-cheeked Valerie, might have been his little girl. Horrible: They looked so beautiful together. “We’ve been in love for a long time,” Jazz began.
“Of course,” Robin said, taking up the story, “we couldn’t even admit it to ourselves for a while, much less each other.” Lee was surprised to discover that she could stand. She went to Val and drew the child to her, putting her hands on the little girl’s head, smoothing her silken hair. She mouthed: Stop! to her sister. “Lee,” Robin sighed, exasperated, “a child that age does not have the language. She cannot comprehend. Okay?” Jazz flushed. A mustache of perspiration grew on his upper lip. Robin, though, was not in a sweat. She seemed to grow calmer. Lovelier, too, and stronger with each passing second, as though she were being transfused with magic nutrients. “You have to listen, Lee. Because if you walk out now, it will still be there when you get back. It is not going to go away.”
Robin wore a white angora sweater and white wool slacks, and looked as though she had materialized from a cloud. Lee realized her sister had shopped for an outfit appropriate for the annunciation: I need something in an angelic fabric but that shows off my waist. Oh, and please, tight around the rear and the crotch. When did this begin? Lee cried, although not aloud. Still, her sister answered as if the question had been screamed out. “It happened the first time we saw each other.” A quickly suppressed sound, something that might have been the start of a delicious giggle of reminiscence. “Well, not the first time, because I was at the worst of my drug problem, when I was in”—Robin took a big, brave breath and came out with it—“heroin withdrawal.” That was in St. Bart’s, Lee thought. What is she talking about? Why doesn’t he interrupt her, correct her: No, no, St. Bart’s was right after Lee and I got married. Except there was Jazz beside Robin, his head moving up and down: Yes, yes, that was the very moment I fell in love.
Lee was astounded at her own clarity, that a part of her—the lawyer, the wronged wife—was taking notes while the rest of her crumbled into pieces, like the dying leaves she had crushed just minutes earlier. She understood why Jazz had sent Kent back to the Taylors. This performance had been meticulously planned, and he and Robin wanted no unruly members in their audience. Robin, head high, hands on her hips, lips bright red against her white face, pressed on with raw-meat energy. “Jazz said that day he first saw me, he thought he was happy, that he knew where his life was going. Then there I was, on the bed. I’m sure I was pale as a ghost”—Jazz nodded his confirmation—“and naked. And he said his heart stood still.”
“Too bad for all of us it started again,” Lee said softly.
“Robin,” Jazz said hesitantly. He spoke the name with a tenderness, a passionate doting that Lee had never even dreamed was part of his repertoire. “This probably isn’t the time.”
“No … Jazz,” Robin said, faltering right before his name, so it was clear she had been about to call him Darling, or Love. “It has to come out.”
“You’re right,” he agreed.
What kind of a lawyer is he, Lee thought, that he doesn’t shut her up, blabbing on and on about the chronology of their adultery? “It was when we landed in New York,” Robin continued, “and Jazz was carrying me out of the plane so the ambulance drivers who came to meet us could get me. I looked up”—Robin swallowed hard at the memory—“and there was this beautiful man I had never seen before. And I knew I would love him for the rest of my life.”
“But we never said anything to each other,” Jazz interjected. “Not for the longest time. I swear. And we didn’t do anything until …” He gazed down at Val, who had taken a seat on the rug. “Until after …”
Lee knelt and hugged her daughter.
“I told you she’d use the baby as a weapon,” Robin said to Jazz.
“Val,” Lee said to the little girl, “I know you want to stay here, but this is grown-up talk. So I’ll make you a deal. If you can get into your pj’s all by yourself, no bath tonight”—she could see her daughter growing intrigued—“I’ll give you two scoops of vanilla fudge.” With less reluctance than Lee had imagined, Val hurried from the room, but then, two scoops were a bribe beyond Val’s greediest imaginings.
With Valerie gone, the room’s atmosphere altered. More danger here. Ominous silence until the wind rattled a window. Lee sensed Robin waiting for Jazz to take over, but when, looking expectant, Robin turned his way, he hunkered down and began to align the Sunday papers that had been scattered on the floor around an ottoman. Lee knelt beside him. “You didn’t have the guts to face me alone,” she whispered.
“What?” Robin demanded. “This isn’t fair.” Jazz stood. “What did she say?”
“Nothing,” he replied.
Lee tried, and failed, to rise in a single fluid motion.
“Come on, Jazz,” Robin said, a note of exasperation mixing with the sexual teasing. “Tell me what she said.”
“Shut up, Robin,” Lee barked.
“Don’t tell me to shut up!”
Lee turned to the man she could not believe was still her husband, so thoroughly did he seem to belong to and with her sister. She noticed that he, also, was wearing a white sweater. “What do you want to do, Jazz?”
“I think it’s clear that we have to end the marriage.”
“Perfectly clear.” Perfectly clear? she asked herself. She sounded crisp, like a character talking to Sir Alec Guinness in a not very serious English movie. How could she not be howling in pain? “I assume you already have a lawyer?” Unlike Robin, who started nodding, Jazz had enough breeding to look ashamed. But not too ashamed. Abashed only at having sought legal counsel so quickly. Not about adultery, not about the terrible betrayal of her, of his daughter. “I’ll need a day or so to find proper representation,” Lee told him.
“Take all the time—”
“Don’t give me your gracious prep school manners. You’re a cheap piece of work.” Lee glanced at her sister, half expecting the old Robin—washed out, exhausted by the tension. But Robin looked radiant, so Lee turned back to Jazz. “Both of you: nice hair, great clothes, but cheap to the core. You were made for each other.” She turned to go. “Even if there is no God, you’ll get what you deserve.”
It would have been a fine exit line, but as Lee passed through the threshold of the room, Robin called out: “We want custody of Valerie.”
Lee did not freeze for more than a second. Then she whirled around and grabbed her sister by the front of her sweater, shaking Robin until Jazz grabbed Lee around the neck with a wrestling hold and pulled her back. “No!” Lee shouted. “Never! Over my dead body you’ll get custody.”
“I’m just as good a parent as you are!” Jazz shouted. “Better.”
“Much better,” Robin corrected him. “Much.” She looked at her sister. “You’re never home.”
“What are you talking about?” Lee cried, sick at heart, knowing she had worked late two nights that week. “I love that child. I’m a wonderful mother.”
“You consort with criminals,” Jazz shot back.
“You’re quoting your idiot girlfriend now,” Lee snapped at him. “I don’t ‘consort,’ you dipshit. I represent. You used to be a lawyer. A lousy one, but at least you used to know the difference.” Tiny tufts of the white angora from Robin’s sweater clung to her fingers. She tried to pull them off, but they stuck.
“I told you she’d bring up that you’re not practicing law anymore,” Robin practically sang to Jazz.
“I have spoken with my attorney,” Jazz said to Lee, taking Robin’s hand. “If we have to litigate, we’ll litigate. Believe me, he won’t shrink from it. It’s his life’s blood. But think about it. We have no intentio
n of driving you out of Val’s life. She just would do better living with us. With me. We have time for her.”
“Sure. Because neither of you has a grown-up job. You don’t have to work. Daddy takes care of you.”
“I hope you don’t think just because you’re the mother you’ll automatically get custody. Things are not what they were.”
Lee wanted to curl into a ball on the couch and cry. No, howl. She was so frightened, thinking of some of the idiot judges she knew on the Family Court bench. How easy for them to rule for a smiling, handsome, rich, come-home-early father from a centuries-old Long Island family and against someone just like her. “You don’t have a leg to stand on, you turkey.”
“He does have a leg to stand on,” Robin said, making it clear that she was tired of being understanding. “He has a damn good chance—”
Lee left them. As she rushed away, toward Valerie’s room, she heard Jazz reassuring Robin with what she knew were his attorney’s words. “She’s going to find that custody rulings have changed since she went to …”
Valerie was not in her room. Oh, dear God, Lee thought, they’ve arranged to have her … But she heard a high “Mommy?” and there was Val, in the kitchen, standing before the freezer. “Two scoops.”
“Not here, Val,” Lee said, and she grabbed her daughter and her handbag and was out so fast that Jazz still had not finished his discourse on matrimonial law when he and Robin heard his Mercedes pulling down the driveway and racing down the hill.
By the time Lee got to her parents’ new house in Palm Beach late the following morning, she looked as bad as she felt. Her hair was unkempt in the manner peculiar to distraught people—sticking out in clumps from her head, each individual strand frizzled to a fare-thee-well. Her skin, if not blotchy, at least looked as if she were suffering from a vitamin deficiency and she was certain her eyes had grown smaller. Her clothes looked slept in.
They had been. She had been afraid Jazz would call the police and the cops would come pounding in the night at her office door. She dared not spend the night there. So she drove out of the county, into Queens, and checked into a motel near the airport, paying cash and giving her name as Lily Rose. The moment they entered the room, she gave Val the two pints of ice cream—chocolate and vanilla—she had bought at an all-night convenience store. She was so ashamed of herself, using food as a bribe. Nevertheless, to Val, the payoff wasn’t good enough. Chocolate and vanilla did not equal her beloved vanilla fudge. The child began to wail. But she yawned mid-protest and two minutes later was sound asleep on the dubious sheets of the motel bed. Lee joined her, snuggling next to the warm little body, knowing that from now on, this was to be her only comfort. She knew, too, that she would not be able to sleep, yet she felt comforted by Val’s nearness. Amazingly, her eyes next opened at precisely six-thirty the following morning, her usual wake-up time.
