by Sally Koslow
“Please hear me out,” she pleads against my sarcasm. I give consent by slogging straight ahead. “Something clicked. I was happier to find Ben again than I ever expected, and he felt the same way.”
How can she know that? I refuse to believe she didn’t seduce him like one of the leggy, high-heeled working girls I used to see in their fishnet stockings every night going in and out of the hotels lining Central Park South.
“We started seeing one another.” Naomi pulls a tissue from her pocket and wipes her eyes. Mine stay dry. “I violated my rule of never dating married men.”
A woman of scruples.
Naomi goes on, oblivious to my feelings or my reaction, an emotional bulimic, purging. Like the Ancient Mariner, she needs to get her story out, and as if I am anticipating every soppy detail, like the wedding guest, I listen while I put one foot in front of the other. I am oblivious to stalking seagulls and the detritus washed up by the sea. I can only listen.
“I kept telling myself to end it, and weeks and even months would go by when we’d be apart. Then he’d call or I’d call and it would start up all over again. After every split, we found a way back to one another. He was a drug and I was an addict.”
Where was I during all of this? Content and oblivious, trusting my husband; making plans and dinner and love; being a wife and a mother and a daughter and a docent and a dope.
“I was tortured, but it was worse for Ben. He didn’t want to hurt you—he never said he didn’t love you.”
The chop of the water blows and stings. That my husband talked about me to this woman is a violation that slices into my heart. I bark out, “I get it! I’ve heard enough.”
“I think you need to hear more. Please. Ben started suggesting how I could improve Adam and Eve. He thought I was a pretty good businesswoman.”
Ben loved to give people gratis legal advice, help kids get into Brown and Columbia, find them jobs, and connect buyers with sellers. I loved that my husband could be generous, without agenda—but not to her.
“And then I got pregnant.”
She bends to pick up Theo as I feel myself turn into a shadow that the wind will surely whisk into the sea.
Then she got pregnant.
I want to wail. I want to run back to my car. I want to stop listening to this treason, which my bullshit detector uncovered long ago, yet all of me denied. Naomi goes on. Does she think if I hear everything, I will forgive her? I wish I could make myself stick my fingers in my ears and scream.
“I missed a few periods and figured, okay, menopause. Forty-two is young but it happens. I was three months gone by the time I saw a doctor. When she said ‘pregnant’ . . .”
Naomi’s sentences drift into the wind.
“I never asked Ben to take care of the baby. I didn’t want him to break up his family for me—for us—not that I ever thought he would. Then he had the idea to invest in my business. It wasn’t just a way to help me and the baby. . . .”
Ben was expecting a baby. We slept together every night, laughed over dinners and sitcoms and our daughters’ foibles, worried about my mother, celebrated holidays and birthdays, planned a trip to Japan, all while he had a child on the way with a woman he loved. And he’s not even here for me to kill.
“He expected to get a return on his investment when Adam and Eve became profitable—knock wood.”
She says “knock wood” exactly as Ben does.
“A handsome profit.”
“Naomi, stop!” I say, standing still. Theo starts to cry at the shrillness of my voice. Naomi scoops him up. “Did you ever wonder where all that investment money came from?” I didn’t intend to grab her arm but I did, squeezing tightly.
She flinches. “Ben led me to believe he had deep pockets.” She tries to pull away but I hold tight through Theo’s wailing.
“That money ate up all of our savings, our investments. Ben took out second mortgages. . . .” To impress this woman?
“I didn’t let myself think I’d taken it from you and your daughters.”
I am incredulous. We had been comfortable, but not wealthy enough to bankroll a whole business, and even if Ben considered Adam and Eve to be a risk-free venture on which he’d see a significant return, it was our money, not his to spend without consulting me.
I am changing dance partners. My anger shifts to Ben, though I recognize this man, who always tried to do right by everyone he loved. This was something I adored, as long as the loved ones were people I loved, too.
“After Theo was born, I moved into my mother’s house and with her help and Clem’s, I’ve managed,” Naomi is saying. “Clementine and I don’t have many friends—it’s fair to call us loners. Most folks think the baby is hers. Out here single moms don’t turn a head. No one asks questions.”
I take in her story, sordid and ordinary, except that it involves my own husband. I try not think of how the life of Luey’s unborn child began, and whether it’s any nobler to get impregnated by a single man during a one-night hookup.
“When did Ben give you the ring?” I look at her hands, which are free of gloves, and the jewelry in question.
“Last year on Theo’s first birthday. I knew by then Ben would never leave you, so it was instead of an engagement ring. I only wore it a few times, because once he told me how much it was worth—’’
“Which was how much?” Is it wrong to ask your husband’s mistress such a question? Hell, no.
“Plenty, though a fraction of what Ben thought. He was pissed at your brother’s appraisal—that much I know. He wanted to use the ring as collateral for a loan. So he got it appraised by another jeweler who must have been a swindler, swapping out the original ring for another. Of course I didn’t know that until last week. But what does it matter? Frankly, I never loved it. Where would I wear something like that? I’m usually up to my elbows in manure.”
“Mommy, I’m cold,” Theo says, his teeth chattering.
Naomi holds him close. I stare into the toddler’s tiny face to search for Benjamin Theodore Silver. I find innocence and my husband’s puckish smile, which almost makes me forgive Ben. But not quite.
“I’m with Theo,” I say, sorry for making this little boy suffer. “This is no place for any of us”—the wind slams a wet chill against my face—“and I’ve heard enough.”
We tramp in silence on the hard sand back to the parking lot. I feel dazed and as heavy as wet laundry, when Naomi says, “Now I hope you understand why I sent you whatever money was left in the account. The last check was from selling the ring.”
“Restitution?”
“Call it whatever you want—it was less than I expected it to be.” She laughs, a short, caustic snicker. “Ben was ripped off. What does it matter? He’s dead, poor guy. And I miss him.”
I don’t, I think, less today than yesterday, as we walk to the parking lot. My life is going forward without him, with its own problems to wrangle and solve. Luey. Her baby. Nicola. My mother. Me. The money from Naomi can buy me time. If I’m frugal, I could stretch it for two years. But whether I keep it or not, I’m in the same three-penny opera as when I woke up this morning, although now I also need to decide whether to tell Nicola and Luey that they have a stepbrother young enough to be their child. And who am I to Ben’s son? Perhaps there’s a term for it in French.
“Are we done here?” I ask, tired in every way.
“I’m hoping we’re not,” she says. “I want to show you something. It’s not far. We could drive together.”
“No,” I say. “I’ll follow.”
She walks to her van, I to my car. Naomi drives slowly, a responsible parent, as we travel roads slick with drizzle turning to ice. The fog is more socked in than before; I was wrong about the sun burning through. I’ve been wrong about so much.
I consider going back home, but my car is propelling itself. Naomi makes a right tu
rn, then another, and travels down a newly graveled road lined with blue spruce and scrubby pines. At the end is a sprawling gray-shingled building attached to large, empty greenhouses. She slows and stops.
“You can park here,” she says, as she gets out and unbuckles Theo from his car seat. He runs to the building’s door, Naomi two steps behind. She reaches into her pocket, unlocks the door, and with a smile that turns her tense face pretty, says, “Welcome to the new home of Adam and Eve.”
I follow Naomi and Theo into a wide open space and breathe in the clean aroma of sawdust and freshly cut wood. The room is crowded with carpentry equipment and unopened cans of polyurethane. Floor-to-ceiling shelves and deep, glass-fronted refrigerated units that line three walls, waiting for plants and tall, galvanized steel buckets of cut flowers. The ceiling is high, with two industrial fans. Theo runs around the room, his arms spread like wings.
“Terrific, yes?” Naomi says. Before I can answer, she says, “There’s more,” motioning me to follow through a door. There is pride in her voice as we enter a space with wide casement windows and a view of a large field. “I’ll plant sunflowers this summer,” she says. “Imagine.” She points to another window. “Trees and shrubs and topiaries and garden ornaments will be for sale out front and back here.”
White wooden cabinets have already been installed in what is clearly a kitchen. Appliances stand by in large cardboard boxes and a slab of soapstone has been fashioned into a sink. “If you walk through here”—she points to a door—“there’s a living room with a wood stove, three bedrooms, and a bathroom. The apartment’s not fancy, but what do you think?”
I peek into a room with unpainted wainscotings. I think, this is where my family’s security has gone, into hardwood floors, skim-coated walls, and Naomi’s dreams. I think, this is agony. I think, that’s a God-awful plastic light fixture. I look out the window. I don’t see a ripe golden haze on the meadow. I’ve seen enough.
“It should be done by July. My contractor friend Vince and his crew are working six days a week.”
What can I say? You know contractors—good luck with that.
“I was planning to move in with Theo and Clementine, but I’ve changed my mind.”
“Are you going to sell?” Because if you do, those proceeds are mine. Winner takes all.
“It would break my heart to sell. This is everything I’ve ever wanted,” Naomi says.
Did she want Ben—or just what he could buy her?
“Georgia, what I’m saying is, it’s yours.”
Naomi McCann is insane, conceivably. “Excuse me. You’re giving away your business?”
“I haven’t made myself entirely clear.”
“No, you haven’t.” I am determined not to like Naomi but in our tug-of-war, she is putting everything into trying to make me believe that inside her lives a fair and almost saintly woman.
“I want you to run the store—there will be a shop here—and start a business selling houseplants. I’ve seen what you can do, and I’ve heard more from Ben. He would brag about you a bit. I hated it. . . .” She burbles on about how she would handle the landscaping and I, indoor plants; how we could build the business together; how she’s been thinking about this ever since she saw my double amaryllis and how she can continue to live in her Three Little Pigs brick house with her mother and Clem.
“Dial back. You’re suggesting I live here, too?”
“Why not, for a while? Everyone in town knows your house is on the market. You can stay til you figure things out.”
I wonder what it would take for me to see this crackpot offer not as a deal with the devil but as one of two women united by need, pragmatism, and conjoined history, each solving their own problems and possibly building something new, something together.
Naomi McCann is crazy. But in the role of crazier, I, Georgia Waltz, am not saying no.
51.
“Finish up, Theo honey,” Naomi says. “We’re leaving in five minutes.”
She and Clementine have loaded the van with plants to surround Ben’s grave before the rest of us arrive. They will pay their respects, then leave Theo with me and his sisters.
Naomi’s sea of sunflowers has come and gone. I accepted her olive branch and the two of us are partners, with me living in the back of a store. Most of what Adam and Eve clears we invest in the business—we’re far from being in the black—but when I fall asleep, it’s with no regrets. I’m taking care of the people I love, and one of them is me. As for my old house, with its vast new garage, dark blue paint, and a second-story renovation that’s made history of the widow’s walk, the place no longer feels like home. I’ve stopped circling past it when I travel into town. I have paid my taxes, even those strictly emotional.
To call Naomi a friend would be as disingenuous as a Best Actress contender breathlessly declaring that she slept through the announcement of Oscar nominees. I see us as a team, women who have declared a truce and are too busy to strip-search their souls and indulge in acid flashbacks. I’ve stopped looking for answers and try to live in the present, sinking myself into running the shop, cultivating hothouse hydrangeas, and scouting hither and yon for garden ornaments. No gnomes need apply. I fix Theo’s eggs exactly as he wants them, as yellow as the man in the moon, just as Naomi is an ace at slaying slugs, planning major jobs, and calming Luey’s baby by singing “Too Ra, Loo Ra, Luey.”
Once, I thought a family was a mother, a father, and their biological progeny. Foolish me. A family is whatever you make it, and mine is a supple infrastructure whose roots grow stronger by the day, as do Theo and my newborn granddaughter, who makes him grin, exactly like his father made all of us grin. She is round with spiky, white-blond hair, a coconut macaroon we pass from arm to welcoming arm. The baby sees her mother on weekends along with her aunt Cola. Clementine is here every day, often with Caleb, the tree EMT. He has that timeless hard-hat-plaid-shirt-Levi’s-work-boot-stubble-chainsaw thing going. If I were twenty-three, I wouldn’t be able to resist him either.
Stephan and Daniel do drive-bys. For my brother, two tiny children may as well be a pair of barking dingoes. It’s Nat who is the secret sauce that makes my life complete. Some weekends he mans the griddle—pancakes for all!—and on others, I escape to his place in Manhattan for cultural pig-outs: MoMA, eel-avocado rolls, arthouse movies, and conversation with envoys from the smooth-talking, fast-walking, New Yorker–quoting universe who think that eight hundred dollars is what you spend on shoes, not rent. As never before, I notice the city’s clamor and grime. By Sunday night I am happy to return to my grassy sanctuary filled with seedlings and secondhand baby gear, grill bluefish freshly caught from Peconic Bay, and settle down with a library book. I’m not sure if I’ve grown or shrunk and I don’t give a damn.
Peter makes his presence known mostly in bank deposits, toys—a stuffed alpaca the size of a collie arrived last week—and, his most generous gift of all, Luey’s NYU tuition. He shows up less often than she might like, though that is conjecture. My daughter guards her heart and I try to respect her privacy. Like learning to share, this is a lifelong lesson, because whenever I look at Peter’s daughter, I ache for what he and she are missing.
Every day I see more of Ben in Theo—his mojo and, occasionally, his mulishness. Naomi’s mother keeps her distance, but from ten to five each day she looks after Theo as well as Luey’s baby, whom she appears to like far more than she does me. The woman has her loyalties to her own daughter. This I understand.
Ben is a ghost that Naomi and I do not mention, though some days I feel him hovering, a breeze that could turn to a gale if I allowed it. Then the baby cries or Theo laughs or the bell announces a customer and Ben fades into celestial oblivion.
I look at the clock. “Time to leave, toots,” I say as I lift my granddaughter. She is wearing a lavender velvet dress and a striped sweater of which her great-grandmother would approve. I am sure
Camille Waltz would ratify little else in my life and—rah, rah, dementia—I haven’t had to explain my armistice with Naomi. I am only sorry that my mother is now so far gone, she doesn’t realize she has a namesake: Camille Silver-Waltz. Camille Prairie-Rose Silver-Waltz.
Since taking care of one small baby is the hardest job on earth, I am constantly late, as I am today. By the time I arrive at Westchester Hills, Nicola and Luey are standing by a handful of Ben’s cousins. Stephan and Daniel are holding Theo’s hands. I didn’t invite Nat. This isn’t a plus-one occasion, though I know he’ll expect a full accounting. He calls himself my forever-boyfriend.
“Camy!” Luey rushes to her child and holds her close. “Did you miss Mommy? Where’s my kiss? I missed you, baby girl.” Luey and her daughter are in love with the force of ten thousand suns.
“Mother,” Cola says, and crushes me in a hug. “Did you see what Naomi and Clementine did?”
Until I feel Nicola’s tears, I was keeping it together. When I reach Ben’s grave, I, too, cry. Naomi and Clementine have surrounded it with boxwood and myrtle and have planted a maple sapling. In years to come, I imagine its scarlet leaves shading his headstone, a final resting place fit for a Broadway supernova. A passerby might say, Remind me, please—did Ben Silver once co-star with Tony Randall? I don’t recall. Who was he?
Good question. Father, husband, lawyer, friend, lover. For Ben’s inscription, I considered each honorific, even Stephan’s suggestion, “Deceiving others—that is what the world calls a romance.” With all due respect to Oscar Wilde, however, I went with, Benjamin Theodore Silver, an enigma loved by many. Let generations stand by his grave and think, Hmmm, interesting. Ben would like that, my last gift to him.
We make short work of the ceremony. Theo clutches my hand, spellbound by Ben’s bearded cousin from Philadelphia chanting kaddish. Nicola recites the twenty-third psalm, and lest this occasion become too macabre, Luey plays “What a Wonderful World” on her iPod while Camille grooves to Louis Armstrong in her arms.
