Olivia

by Judith Rossner

  Rennie remembered her mother in ways she assumed were specific and accurate. She remembered sitting on her mother’s lap, hugging and kissing, being dressed and undressed, listening to her mother explain the contents of the shop windows they passed as they walked. She remembered her mother, very pregnant, letting her crawl between her legs and rest her ear on the huge mound of belly to hear Annie kicking in the womb. But now she began to have nightmares related to “memories” of events that hadn’t happened. She remembered being carried onto a plane by her mother, and then, for some reason, having to get off. She remembered awakening in the middle of the night after a specific school event to find her mother, who’d left a year or so earlier, sitting at her bedside. Her mother had never come back but Rennie still felt she might. Nor would she buy Leon’s insistence that her parents had been, to all intents and purposes, divorced for years. There was no such thing as a marriage that didn’t exist. If there was a piece of paper that said you were married, then you were.

  “There’s something to that, you know,” Leon said. “There’s some final step, whether it’s a piece of paper or a ring or just holding hands with people watching. If you take the final step, you’re married. If you don’t undo it, you’re not divorced. It’s time for me to undo it.”

  Olivia returned from Easter vacation and settled into school and her job. She’d dieted before going to Rome, gained weight while she was there, was frantic to take it off again. She said Pablo was still around, but I never saw him at the house, nor did her girlfriends visit. Mr. Moffetta had offered her full-time work for the summer. A major problem if I was going to be in Southampton with Leon’s kids, full time. She didn’t see what the problem was. Didn’t I trust her to walk, talk, and brush her teeth, just the way she did when I was there? I said that trust wasn’t precisely the issue, and maybe she could find a waitressing job in the Hamptons. She said that was pretty funny, my thinking she would live with Leon’s brats for two months. I said she hadn’t thought they were brats when she baby-sat for them. It was my first reference to that time, and it was a terrible mistake. She left the room and called her father, who called me. He said he understood why I’d been so concerned about Olivia, she was turning into quite a young woman.

  “I’d like her to be happy,” I said, “but I’m worried—”

  “Non mi frega un cazzo she’s happy,” he said. “Just make her behave. Sometimes the mother doesn’t see this. But the girl needs protection.”

  “Oh? Are we talking about her getting pregnant, or just about getting laid?”

  “Caroline,” he said stiffly, “you are speaking of my daughter.”

  “Well, since she’s your daughter,” I said instantly, “maybe she should go back to Rome and live with you and you can protect her.”

  He heard me. His voice softened instantly.

  “You know this is not possible. She loves New York. Her school. Her friends.”

  “How interesting. She never told me any of that.”

  A pause, then: “I am not trying to make trouble.”

  “But what are you trying to do, Angelo? Or, maybe I should ask, what do you expect me to do? She doesn’t talk to me at all. Whatever she’s told you, she hasn’t told me.”

  Silence.

  “Has she told you she’s sleeping with somebody?”

  “No,” he said. “She tells me that you are sleeping with somebody.”

  “Oh, shit. You’re not going to dare to bawl me out for having an affair, are you? You’re not going to do some macho routine about how it’s okay for men but a woman who’s been divorced for years can’t—”

  “Please, Cara mia, calm yourself.”

  “What did she tell you, for God’s sake? I thought you were finally going to tell her the truth about how I loved her.”

  “I did, I told her the truth. She says I was the only one to love her, so I told her. She begged me to see Mirella, so I took her down there. But Mirella would not see her. She was, you know, embarrassed.”

  Of course. Mirella needed to be embarrassed. Mirella was a female.

  “Then she tells me, Mirella’s house is very old, you know, with stone walls. She tells me you do not have real walls. Sometimes she cannot concentrate on her schoolwork.”

  I wanted to scream, but I held myself in until I could speak, then told him that it was true the walls were not thick, but my lover and I were extremely careful when Livvy or his children were around, that Livvy concentrated very well on her schoolwork, got excellent grades, and was talking about going to Harvard College when she graduated from high school. As a matter of fact, she talked about it so much that I worried about what would happen if she didn’t get in. It was the hardest school in the United States to get into.

  There was a lengthy silence. Finally Angelo, with a sigh, said, “I am sorry, Cara. I am truly sorry. I see she is not so different with you as I think. Let us be friends now.”

  I took a deep breath and told him that would be good. We agreed to speak more frequently and to let her know we were doing so. I called her Livvy, then laughed.

  “You heard me call her Livvy? That’s a crime. She yells at me every time I don’t call her Olivia.”

  “Are you kidding me?” Angelo replied. “If we say Olivia, she tells us in America she is called only Livvy.”

  “Oh, my God.” But it made me feel a little better. “Angelo? She didn’t tell you anything about her boyfriend, did she?”

  “She spoke of nothing but school and her girlfriends.”

  “Well, she has a boyfriend. Or she had one. I’m not sure if he’s still around. I’m not sure if . . . But sooner or later . . .”

  Angelo sighed. “I don’t know what I can do about this, Cara. She will know . . . from what I tell her . . . if it’s from you or from me.”

  What he was able to do was to instruct his daughter in the terrible things that can happen when a man beds a young woman to whom he is not married. So that on one of those rare evenings when my daughter and I sat quietly in the living room, and she initiated a conversation about her stupid hygiene class, where nobody ever wanted to talk about anything but AIDS, and I said that in the concern about AIDS, everyone had forgotten the first reason for condoms, which was to avoid pregnancy, she said, “There you go again. I’m not the same person you are and I don’t behave the same way.”

  I sighed. After almost two years in a New York City high school she was still talking as though I were the first unmarried woman in history to get laid.

  “Are we back to Leon, Olivia? You know, Leon really isn’t your problem.”

  “No, we’re not back to Leon,” she said, very slowly and deliberately. “We’re back to my father telling me why he had to marry you.”

  It took my breath away. I’d have to remember not to ask Angelo for help anymore.

  I smiled. “Not a very good lesson, since you gave us both more pleasure than anything else in our lives.”

  “Oh, sure,” she said. “That’s why . . .” But she trailed off, for once unable to come up with a suitably devastating reply.

  “The point is,” I finally said, “I think you’re a real student, which I never was. And if you want to go to college, as you seem to, then it would be better if you didn’t get pregnant. I’m not saying you shouldn’t go to bed with Pablo if you feel like it, only that—”

  She stood up abruptly.

  “I’m not going to bed with Pablo or anyone. I’m not even talking to Pablo anymore. All right? We’re finished. Are you happy?”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I mean, if you are.”

  “Don’t worry,” she said. “If I was sorry, I’d see him.”

  My whole life was holding its breath. The PR. people were trying to get coverage of my fall show, but they hadn’t found a hook, and nobody was interested. We were going to look at summer rentals as soon as Leon had a Saturday and Sunday off, but he hadn’t yet, and he seemed to have stopped talking about renting. I’d been seeing less of him, anyway. Rennie’s shr
ink had suggested it would be helpful if he could spend more time than he had been with the kids. Rennie had complained that he was downstairs with me whenever he was free.

  “Maybe it’d be a good idea for a while . . . I don’t mean weekends, but maybe during the week, you should stay downstairs, and I’ll stay upstairs.”

  Gee, Leon, I think it’s really great that you’re getting a piece of paper that proves you’re divorced so you and I can sleep apart.

  But I didn’t say it and he didn’t press to find out how I was feeling about what he’d said. At that point, he didn’t really want to know.

  I refused to allow myself to think a great deal about Leon or his children. Ovvy was still very much my son-pal. Life being what it was, maybe I was lucky to have lost only another daughter.

  On this night I was reading The African Heritage Cookbook, the only one I’d found that tied African food by its region into the specifics of soul food cooked in this country, when Leon called to ask if I felt like taking a walk. We hadn’t spoken in a couple of days. I said all right, left the door ajar and went back to my book, feigning such concentration as barely to notice when he entered. Then, almost reluctantly, I set aside my book and left the house with him.

  It was a beautiful night in May, comfortable for a jacket, though he was just in shirtsleeves. I’d put on a sweater. We walked in silence for a block or two.

  “You mad at me?” Leon asked.

  “Mad? No, I’m not mad at you.”

  “You seem very cool,” Leon said.

  “Well, that sounds right,” I said. “I’m cool at you.”

  “Why?”

  It was a trap. Anything I told him, he could say was necessary for his kids.

  “I don’t know. Does there have to be a reason?”

  He laughed shortly.

  We were at Twenty-third Street. By common consent, we headed east. There would be more people on the street in that direction.

  “How’s Madame Olivia these days?”

  A clear bid to change me-against-him into us-against-her. He would be utterly sympathetic. There’d be none of those suggestions I occasionally heard that I must have done something worse than getting mad in the kitchen to make her hate me so much. He could, after all, trace any problems his kids had. To their mother.

  “She’s okay. She seems to have broken off with Pablo.”

  “How come?”

  “I don’t know. But when I tried to talk about birth control, she said she wasn’t seeing him.”

  “She should learn about it, anyway.”

  “Ah, yes,” I said. “Should. We all know about our children and Should.”

  He thought he might as well steer away from that one, too.

  We turned off at Lexington Avenue, walked down to Gramercy Park. It was close to ten and dark out, but the park was lighted and beautiful.

  “Maybe,” I said, “if I get rich and famous, I’ll move to someplace where I can see a park. Central Park. Riverside. It’d be nice to have a view. And real walls.”

  And to be someplace where you’d have to put a little more effort into finding me. Of course, the kids would, too. Ovvy.

  He put his arm around me as though we’d returned to the old days, walked so springily fast that I had trouble keeping up with him. At Union Square he asked if I’d like to find a cup of cappuccino someplace. I said I’d just as soon make it at home. But at home I poured wine for both of us and we settled on the sofa that wasn’t against Olivia’s wall. The lights were off in her room. We hadn’t been in bed together in a week. I felt like a mouse near a trap baited with room-temperature bleu de bresse. I moved away from him.

  He said, “So you are mad at me.”

  I shrugged.

  We both sipped at our wine.

  “It hasn’t been very easy for me, either, you know,” he said seductively.

  I shrugged again.

  “They feel as though I put one over on them. They thought you were their friend and then it turns out—”

  Given the choice at that moment, I would have gone back to being their friend rather than remain his.

  “Then it turns out that you’re not just my friend but my . . .”

  Cook? Fuck? I kept my mouth shut.

  “I’ll tell you what I’ve been thinking,” he continued suavely. “I think I’ll be free next weekend. It’s getting past time to find a place. Maybe . . . you’re working hard on the show, anyway. . . . Maybe the kids and I should go out there and look at some houses. Then, if we see something we like, you can go with me and check it out.”

  So, there it was. I’m not sure precisely what he saw on my face that made him stop talking, but I felt like a sack of potatoes that’s been deposited in the mudroom until someone has use for it. Tied up in knots so I could be left behind more easily while he and his children went off to find the house where I would take care of them that summer.

  “I think that might work very well for you and the kids,” I finally managed. “I think I’ll go up to Westport. Maybe I’ll rent a cottage there. I can get into the city more easily if the TV people need me. And it’s closer to my family.”

  The only family I have in the world.

  I was too steeped in self-pity for my tears not to spill out, but I wasn’t going to let Leon see them. I went to the kitchen for the wine bottle.

  Leon sighed. “I can’t say I didn’t expect this, but I don’t see why it has to be such a big deal.”

  That took care of the tears, though I still couldn’t look at him.

  “No big deal.”

  He sighed. “All right. I get it. We’ll all go.”

  “I’m busy.”

  “Are you really or are you just getting back at me?”

  “I’m just getting back at you.”

  A short laugh rode out on a sigh. This man was sorely tried.

  “No,” I said. “Not just. I’m trying to tell you something.”

  “Okay. So tell me.”

  I didn’t want to begin the way I did, but it was what had entered my mind, and until it left, I wasn’t going to be able to deal with the present in any simple way.

  “When I was little . . . Sunday was the housekeeper’s day off, and my parents always wanted to do something with the older kids, a museum or some movie that I wouldn’t enjoy, and I’d get so restless, I’d make them all miserable. They had to find someone to take me on a day when every other kid in the world was with her family. Or so it seemed. I know better now, of course. But that doesn’t leave me in an entirely different place. I still feel like, you wanted me in your bed, I was there. Your kids want me out, I’m out. Like some big stuffed animal that was taking up too much space.”

  “You were the one who didn’t want them to know we were sleeping together,” he said. “You were the one who knew how they’d feel. I had no idea. Maybe if they’d known all along . . .”

  I shook my head.

  “I just would have had them for less time.”

  And they were the best thing in my life.

  I wasn’t even sure it was true anymore. I’d thought it in the past tense. If falling in love with Leon hadn’t diminished my affection for them, it had altered my priorities. At some point, I’d needed to see him even more than I’d needed to see them.

  Leon came over to me and held me, kissing the top of my head, smoothing back my disheveled hair.

  “Poor baby,” he said. “It’s not me you’re upset about, it’s them.”

  “It’s everything,” I said. “Everything is too goddamned difficult.”

  “Come,” he said. “Let’s go to bed and try to figure things out.”

  I inclined my head in the direction of Olivia’s room. I was even more self-conscious than I’d once been since my conversation with Angelo.

  “We’ll go upstairs,” Leon said. “My little sweethearts are all tucked away.”

  We didn’t figure out much that night, but in the next few days, whether for reasons of affection or something more practica
l, Leon made a serious effort to improve matters, and, of course, he succeeded. He told his girls (Ovvy would just have been puzzled by the conversation) that I had to look at houses with them because the plan they’d had, of spending the summer at the beach instead of going to camp, would work only if I stayed with them. They didn’t have to love me, but they had to be nice. If they made me feel unwanted, they were going to end up in camp.

  The recession had already hit the Hamptons, and we found a reasonably priced renovated Bridgehampton farmhouse whose owner had put in a pool, then decided he couldn’t afford any of it. Nobody was crazy about the furnishings, but there were five bedrooms, and the fifth was downstairs, with its own bathroom, as I told Livvy when I was trying to persuade her to look for a job out there.

  I could not. (Probably because she knew, as I did not, that she was seeing Pablo again, had begun to sleep with him, and was keeping him invisible so I’d feel less uncomfortable about leaving her “alone.”) Her line ending that phase of the discussion was something to the effect that I treated her like a three-year-old who got dragged wherever Mommy had to go. Just close enough to my own sack-of-potatoes line to stop me. On the other hand, I couldn’t leave her unsupervised all summer. Our compromise (the name I gave her triumph) was that I’d give Leon a set of our keys and he would “check the apartment” frequently. I told her, though I wasn’t sure it was true, that I would also be coming into the city regularly, and wouldn’t feel I needed to give her notice. As she began to protest, I said, quickly, “And of course I hope you’ll come out whenever you have a couple of days off. With any friend you want to bring. There’s plenty of room.”