Olivia

by Judith Rossner

  “One thing I was thinking when you complained about the calls, not being able to find each other, if you and I were in the same apartment, you wouldn’t be so upset if you couldn’t get me on the phone. You’d just come home. We’d see each other in the natural course of events. Sleep in the same bed. Feel each other there. Be together for meals without arranging it. Have a hug and a kiss just in passing. This way, if we don’t see each other, we really don’t see each other.”

  Fear, temptation, and I don’t know what else made tracks across his face.

  The waitress delivered our cheeseburgers and asked if we wanted anything else. Leon stared at his plate in such a way that I was afraid to start eating. Suddenly he stood up, fished out his wallet, slapped a twenty-dollar bill and then, after a moment, a ten on the table, the latter, presumably, for the tip, and said, “C’mon. Get your coat.”

  It was clear that there was nothing to be gained by asking questions. I put on my coat and let him lead me out of the restaurant and to Sixth Avenue, where, still gripping my hand like a mother who really does, or doesn’t, want her kid to get lost, he hailed a cab. A couple of minutes later we were at Beth Israel, where he showed the guard his identity card, took an elevator up to a floor I was pretty sure wasn’t the one where he worked, and pulled me to a reception desk, where he appeared to be known by the nurse standing in front of the desk with some charts.

  He said, grimly, “Letitia, we want blood tests.”

  I stared at him. She stared at him.

  “Blood tests, Dr. Klein?”

  He nodded. “We’re getting married.”

  Letitia and the nurse behind the desk burst into laughter.

  “Dr. Klein, you don’t need blood tests no more to get married!”

  Leon’s grip on my hand loosened in his astonishment.

  “You don’t?”

  She shook her head. “It’s been years. You sure are giving away your age.”

  Now I was staring at him; he was still staring at her. “All you have to do is go home and get a good night’s sleep. Or whatever you care to do. Then, in the morning, you go down to City Hall with your birth certificates and your divorce papers, and then you stand on line and get married.”

  “You’re kidding!”

  Later he would laugh. But not yet. He needed to do something before he could change his mind.

  At the house, he pulled me upstairs to his apartment. It was almost ten. The kids were in their rooms. We tiptoed to his bedroom, where he found that week’s unwrapped package of shirts from the laundry. He pulled off the cord, carefully undid the brown wrapping paper, smoothed it out on the dresser and wrote, in large Magic Marker letters, CARA AND I ARE GETTING MARRIED.

  Then he tried to lead me outside to help him find a place to tape it.

  “Leon,” I said, “you’re making me nervous.”

  “Aha!” he said. “I knew it!”

  “Knew what? That you could act so crazy you’d make me nervous?”

  “You’re looking for an excuse to back out!” he shouted.

  “Of what?” I asked as Rennie knocked at the door and asked if something was wrong. He said that nothing was wrong except we were having a fight, and she should go back to bed.

  I laughed. “Well, if she wasn’t scared of living with me before, she will be now.”

  “So,” he said, sitting down at the edge of the bed, “I was right. You don’t want to.”

  “I’ve been trying to figure out what I want,” I said. “And I think I know. But I’ll only tell you if you stop acting like a maniac.”

  He stood up, wrestled with himself for a moment, sat down again.

  “I want to live with you and see if we can be comfortable. And then, after a while, if we are, get married. I’ll move up here tomorrow, tonight if you want me to. At least I’ll move up some of my clothes, and my best toothbrush.”

  After a struggle that seemed intense and lengthy for a man who claimed to be unconflicted, he said, “I want you to. But I don’t understand why you talk about moving up your clothes, as though you weren’t exactly moving up with them.”

  “My kid’s downstairs. And her boyfriend. And my kitchen. And my computer. There’s no way to move everything. And it’s not as though we have to do it.”

  “What’s wrong with the kitchen up here?” he asked.

  “Downstairs is roomier. Much more counter space. It’s better for classes. I haven’t even told you what’s going on with Bob. I’m not sure I can do what they want for next year. For all I know, I’ll be giving classes at home again.”

  “I have a perfect solution. Maybe you should marry a nice Jewish doctor and become a housewife and stay home and just cook for him. And his family.”

  And he should be open to the idea of more children, so that if the ones he had turned against me when they saw my toothbrush, and my own daughter kept her distance, or solidified it by moving to Boston or some other remote clime, he’d be eager to recapture with me the pleasures only children could provide.

  On Saturday morning I moved my winter clothes to Leon’s long bedroom closet.

  Rennie whispered something to Annie and they both laughed.

  “Okay, you two,” Leon said. “Let’s have it.”

  “We were just thinking,” Rennie said, “that now there’ll be equal toothpastes. Two different kinds in each bathroom.”

  After that, everyone was in a good mood, particularly me, and Leon decided we should go out for brunch to someplace special. I said I’d get my winter coat and jackets, and meanwhile I’d check with Livvy and Pablo to see if they were awake and wanted to come. Leon’s surprise suggested that he thought “my” kids had no reason to be at a family celebration. Or maybe it was just that the mood would be different if they were with us. But he didn’t say anything, and I went downstairs, knocked as was my custom, went in and got my coats from the living-room closet. I didn’t see Livvy and Pablo, but as I was about to leave, she came out of the bedroom.

  She looked startled and I suddenly realized I hadn’t spoken with her, except in passing, in the three days since Leon and I had made our decision. Doubtless she would be delighted to have me out of her way.

  I smiled. “I’m moving my stuff upstairs, try out, sort-of-living with Leon. I can’t promise you total privacy, I’ll still work down here, cook, but—”

  She said, “I don’t understand.”

  I said, “About what?”

  “Why you’re doing it.”

  I laughed. “Not just to make you happy, word of honor.”

  But she wasn’t amused. “Have I been bugging you?”

  “No, it has nothing to do with you.”

  She was silent, still looked puzzled.

  “Leon and I were talking about maybe getting married,” I explained. “And it seemed as though we ought to try living together for a while.”

  “What will happen to me?” she asked, so plaintive a little girl that I moved toward her to give her a hug.

  She stepped back.

  “Nothing, sweetheart,” I said. “Absolutely nothing. I’m still going to be down here to work. Cook. If I give classes, they’ll be here. My office’ll be here. I’ll be here whenever you want me. There’s no room upstairs for everything, even if I wanted to move it there.”

  She nodded thoughtfully, turned away to go back to her room.

  “What I really came downstairs for was to pick up up a couple of coats, and tell you we’re all going out to brunch, and we were hoping you guys’d come with us.”

  She smiled, but there was a sort of ironic twist to our smile.

  “ ‘We’re all’?”

  I smiled back. “The upstairs bunch.”

  She nodded slowly. “And ‘you’ guys is Pablo and me.”

  I shrugged. “Not if you don’t like it.”

  “No,” she said slowly. “It doesn’t matter. But I think . . . Pablo isn’t even awake yet, or hardly, so I think we’ll just . . . have breakfast here.”

  I
nodded. “Okay. See you later.”

  I didn’t see them later. I checked in when we returned from our brunch, but they’d apparently gone out to eat.

  I continued to make dinner downstairs most nights, and to prepare for the show down there, but I didn’t see much of Livvy until an evening when Leon was working, I’d come back downstairs to look for some coats and books, and she was alone, reading, in the living room. She mentioned, yawning, that she was invited to a New Year’s Eve party at Mayumi’s. Mayumi had a brother who went to Yale and a lot of his friends would be there.

  When I asked whether she’d invite Pablo, on the chance that she wanted to discuss it, I tipped the scales and she said that of course she was going with him.

  On New Year’s Day, when I asked how the party was, she shrugged and said, “Boring.”

  “Oh, dear.” I smiled sympathetically. “I don’t know why it’s harder to have a good New Year’s Eve party than any other kind.”

  She looked at me speculatively as she did on the rare occasion when she was considering having a conversation with me.

  “Most of them were idiots. Yale, Brown-type idiots.”

  She waited for me to point out that there were idiots—what was it Rennie called them, dweebs?—at Harvard, too, and when I passed the test by keeping silent, she went on.

  “There was one boy I liked.”

  “Oh?”

  “Very tall, blond, handsome.”

  Very Not Jewish. Or Italian or Puerto Rican, for that matter.

  “Let me guess. Yale.”

  She shook her head, smiled. “Berkeley. He’s Mayumi’s neighbor’s nephew. His parents live in California.”

  I smiled. “Oh, well, there are nice boys on the East Coast, too.”

  She shrugged.

  “Did Pablo have a good time?” I asked cautiously.

  “Are you kidding?” she burst out; I’d touched a button. “With that bunch of—? They ask which school you go to, and you say you work for the phone company, and they are shocked out of their gourds! They don’t want to know what you do, you’re just there because you’re not smart enough to sell junk bonds or something.”

  I nodded sympathetically. After I’d written to a couple of my friends about marrying Angelo, I’d never heard from them again.

  “That’s too bad,” I said carefully. “I hope he wasn’t upset.”

  She shrugged.

  “He doesn’t care. I’m the one who gets mad. They think they’re not prejudiced, but they are. They make sure to have a black friend, a bunch of them were hanging around Shevaun as if they really wanted to be with her instead of the skinny blonde they brought, but a Nuyorican? Forget it.”

  I smiled. “You won’t put up with any prejudice, except about the Jews.”

  She looked at me reflectively.

  “Prejudice is what you think before you know people.”

  I held my smile, although it was getting more difficult.

  “And you’ve always known one Jew, your mother, so . . . ?”

  She shrugged. “So nothing. Maybe you just tried to push it on me when I was too young.”

  “Push what?” I asked, astounded in spite of myself. “It never came up until I was leaving Rome.”

  “Hah!” she said. “Never. Who do you think you’re kidding, Mother?”

  Her attachment to Pablo seemed to grow stronger. There was no talk of other boys. Nor did she mention Harvard; I couldn’t tell if she’d simply put it away for the following year. It was remarkable how little difference my having more or less moved upstairs had made in our lives. In mine, anyway. If Livvy’s reaction hadn’t been what I would have expected, there didn’t seem to be any continuing problems. As far as I could tell, Pablo was never sleeping anyplace else. One night in the spring Rennie, and then, some weeks later, Annie, had a pajama party. Leon and I slept downstairs to make room for their friends. Where I’d once fallen asleep faster down there, it now took me longer than usual on those nights. But aside from that, I didn’t feel as though anything had changed. Leon was content with the new arrangement and never mentioned marriage.

  In fact, it wasn’t until another summer had passed, and we were well into the new school term, and my show had resumed, and Sheldon was making exactly the same comments as he had the previous year (Bob was friendlier than ever but less involved than he’d once been in the program’s specifics) that I grew restive. Once or twice I hinted to Leon that “all the business with the locks” to the two apartments was beginning to feel like a nuisance, and when he didn’t pick up on my hints, I asked whether it might be time to think about getting married. Each time he said that things were too good as they were, we shouldn’t risk a change.

  In December Livvy learned she’d been refused early admission to Harvard. She left the notice on the kitchen counter where I’d see it, but didn’t want to discuss it with me. Her adviser said she was as keyed up as ever about Harvard but didn’t appear to be working as hard in her classes, and the results of her senior-year SAT’s were less sensational than the previous year’s. The adviser thought I should try to talk to her about this. She understood Olivia had a part-time job; would it be possible for her to give it up for a while? It wasn’t a good idea for Livvy to relax about grades this first half of her senior year. I talked to Livvy about it, anticipating at least a little argument. But before I’d even raised the job issue, she said she was going to quit, she was tired of work, anyway.

  Bob invited me to a lunch that he’d “prefer you didn’t mention to Sheldon.” He wanted to tell me something that was a secret, though it wouldn’t be for long. He was moving to ABC in January. He would be developing new shows for the network, and he hoped to take some version of “Pot Luck” with him.

  I was speechless. It took me a long time even to realize it was funny, and giggle. How long had it been since Sheldon had begun talking as though Bob were the only thing between us and a network? Now Bob was the network. A network, anyway. My long-term contract was with Sheldon’s company, not with the cable people, so he would be part of such a deal, no matter what.

  “Pretty funny, huh?” Bob said. “I know he’s been scrambling all over the place, trying to get something.”

  I nodded, but I felt obliged to say that if it weren’t for Sheldon, none of this would have happened.

  “It may be true in a different way than you mean it,” Bob said. “The people at ABC are crazy about you, but they’re even more concerned with the stuff I always talk about. A thread. A story.”

  “A story?” I repeated uneasily.

  “They like Seymour.”

  I was silent.

  “What would be a good idea,” Bob said after a while, “with everybody watching the show for possibilities, is to be as funny as you can be in the next few weeks. Especially at the expense of See-more.” He suggested I try a new version of the bread-murdering routine, with Seymour as the person I was’ mad at.

  “I don’t know how Sheldon’s going to feel about that,” I told him.

  “Don’t worry about Sheldon,” Bob said. “He’s going to be crazy for anything you do that gets you on network TV.”

  During the second week of January, he told Sheldon about going to ABC and Sheldon met me for lunch sounding for all the world as though he had engineered the switch. Just as Bob had said a couple of things to me that he wouldn’t say to Sheldon, my lack of enthusiasm had caused him to walk with Sheldon along lines he’d been discouraged from treading with me. Story lines, to be precise. At least that was the phrase Sheldon kept using. Where Sheldon had once been angry about my “turning me into Seymour,” now he was dying for me to move into a See-more-Cara mode.

  That week I did the familiar bread routine, the bread I was mad at being a Seymour who was never content with anything I did, wanted more drama in the show, asked why I couldn’t for God sake get excited about vegetables. Bob and Seymour both loved it, but I had other things to worry about.

  Livvy seemed to be sleeping more than ever,
since quitting her job, and to be somewhat depressed. For a while I thought it was just the early-admissions rejection, but she sounded as though she expected to be admitted for September, so that didn’t make sense. I told Leon I thought she might be realizing for the first time that going away to any of the colleges she’d applied to would mean leaving Pablo. He was around much less than he’d been. She said he was working very hard, but working hard hadn’t prevented him from being there in the past. He turned up late one night when I was working downstairs, and I told him I’d like to have a talk, but he apologized, he was exhausted, and it was a while before I saw him again. Livvy was sleeping a lot but eating very little, as far as I could see. She looked thin and drawn. Once I came into the bathroom in the morning to find the seat up, and it crossed my mind that she was throwing up again, then I reminded myself that Pablo had been there and doubtless used the bathroom. I had to stop looking to old explanations for new events. My brain kept working at the matter of what else I might be picking up, but it was like an object in one of those hard plastic packages that lets you see the front clearly but doesn’t let you open it to make sure the underside is all right.

  Robert L. Kupferman’s appointment as vice president of ABC with responsibility for developing new series was announced. Sheldon and I had lunch with him the following week. Sheldon warned me not to think we were home free just because we were being taken to the Four Seasons. On the contrary. We were being courted, but courted to do what they wanted “us” to do, not what “we’d” been doing all along. I was to be a good girl, listen carefully, be open to new ideas. “Just remember,” he said in a tone suggesting I’d spent my TV time in purgatory, “if we’re not flexible, we’re gonna be on cable for the rest of our lives.”

  Bob was, or pretended to be, interested in my ideas. He ordered a bottle of fancy champagne to celebrate what he hoped would be my move with him, gently pushed me when I was more interested in reading the menu than in ordering. Once our food had been served, he got down to business. The viewers loved me and tended to be faithful once they got hooked in. The only thing they complained about over and over was that I didn’t do enough while I was talking.