Olivia

by Judith Rossner

  “Oh, my God!” Rick said when he’d done the same. “I’m in heaven.”

  “Who made the artichokes?” Sheldon asked, innocent to the point of burlesque. I think he was concerned that Rick was losing interest in me.

  “Mama did,” Livvy said. “You mustn’t give me credit for the whole meal, I only made the dessert.”

  “But you, my dear,” Rick said, à la Claude Rains—or was it Ronald Colman?—“taught me to eat them.”

  “It’s wonderful,” I said. “A few hundred years after the Jews brought artichokes to the Italians, an Italian, a half-Italian, brings them back to the Jews.”

  The three of them looked at me as though I’d just gotten off a spaceship from Mars. Even Livvy didn’t understand what I was saying well enough to be offended. I was disconcerted, myself, by what had come out of me. I finished my wine. The bottle was nearly empty.

  “It’s nothing,” I assured them. “I just—the Jews were the first people in Italy to cook artichokes.”

  They went back to eating. I brought another bottle of wine to the table. How was I ever going to make it clear to my grandchild that he or she was Jewish? Partly Jewish? A wonderful part. A mother’s life takes precedence over an unborn child’s. That was beautiful. Where had Leon learned it? He hadn’t had any more religious education than I had. Someone at the hospital must have told him. Unless he’d taken a course: 1001 Reasons That Most Babies Should Be Aborted.

  Pablo came in as I was setting up the gumbo dishes. I was glad I’d insisted that Livvy set a place for him. She was talking now about the fact that her father’s wife didn’t like the business, so he wasn’t able to spend as much time at the restaurant as he’d have liked. Rick wanted to know how the wife wanted him to spend his time, if not at the restaurant.

  She shrugged. “Maybe in church.”

  Pablo went to kiss her cheek. She ignored him as she told Rick that what her father’s wife wanted was not actually easy to figure out, other than that she wanted everyone in the whole world to do what she told them to. In the ensuing silence, I introduced Pablo as Livvy’s husband. Her look of annoyance should have been my first clue to the fantasy that was suddenly dominating her thoughts. Pablo went to wash.

  “It’s a shame, in a way,” I said. “Angelo had a terrific personality for a restaurateur. Sociable, expansive, really interested in people. And wine. He knew everything there was to know about the Italian wines. He’d worked for vintners.”

  I was surprised to find Rick listening to my words as attentively as he had to Livvy’s. And then, as I served the gumbo, I heard him ask Pablo what he did.

  Pablo said that he worked for the phone company.

  “Oh?” Rick asked politely. “Lineman?”

  Not trying to conceal his pride, Pablo said no, that he worked with the Secret Service, checking out hacker fraud.

  “That’s very interesting,” Rick said. “Hackers. Those’re computer whizzes, right?”

  “Computer nuts is more like it,” Pablo said, more than willing to explain. “They sit there day and night, don’t do anything else, know every program, talk like . . . They know all the computer words, they think it’s regular language. Some of them don’t know they’re not talking English.” He glanced at Livvy, corrected himself. “Speaking English. Most people don’t understand them when they talk. It could be Chinese. They try to do different things on the computer. Sometimes pretty crazy stuff. Illegal.”

  “Like what?” Rick asked.

  Our lives were being fed into the maw of a monster who, before the evening was over, would file away every detail and discard our blood and bones. “What was that business, the kid who broke into the Defense Department’s records?”

  “They break in different ways, different reasons. I don’t deal with Defense Department break-ins. Wish I did. It’s the most interesting part. Anyhow, the access codes on most of the voice-mail systems . . . You know what a voice-mail system is?”

  Rick confessed that he didn’t.

  Sheldon looked as if he was trying to figure out how to slip a contract in front of Pablo.

  Pablo had to think how best to explain it, but clearly he was absorbed in the subject, happy to have a reason to talk about it. “People who work for a company can make calls, get their own messages. There’s a four-to-seven-digit code.” He explained how hackers could run up thousands of dollars’ worth of long-distance calls they didn’t pay for or arrange a “mailbox” for themselves by telling the computer to forward certain groups of messages, which the company whose code was being used would get charged for.

  Rick was rapt, interrupting only to ask for some detail or explanation, then urging Pablo to go on. Olivia, at first offended by the shift in his attention, now looked at Pablo with something resembling pride for the first time in my memory. I had the conflicting desires to be drunk and to remain sober to protect myself and my family. The main problem being, of course, that my family did not feel in need of protection.

  I made coffee, cleared the table, served the Chocolate Pecan Pralines.

  Amidst various exclamations of rapture, Rick said to Pablo, “You know, your wife is in danger of being kidnapped for her Chocolate Pecan Pralines.”

  “This is my wife,” Pablo corrected, gesturing toward Livvy.

  Sheldon said, “Candy wasn’t her specialty, eh, Pablo?”

  His attempt to cover would have alerted Rick that something was going on even if nothing else had.

  “You don’t usually make candy?” he asked Livvy.

  She blushed, shook her head, looked down.

  “Tell me what your specialties are,” he prodded gently. “Maybe they’ll give me some more ideas.”

  She looked up, not at him, but at me.

  “There’s something I’d better tell you, Rick,” I said. “It has nothing to do with Olivia. You know what a wonderful salesman Sheldon is. Well, he got a little carried away. To put it mildly, he exaggerated her cooking experience. She really did mostly make the candy, but we’ve been trying not to embarrass him by letting you know . . . you know.”

  Livvy didn’t look up, but Rick was smiling. He closed his eyes.

  “They wanna sell the restaurant, and the new owner, he has an eye on the daughter. Wants her and the mother to come along as the cooks. He thinks they both cook and she has to learn fast because . . . hmm . . . Maybe the mother gets sick. Or breaks a leg.”

  Bob said, “You’re unbelievable.”

  Sheldon said, “You’re a genius.”

  I said, “Thanks a lot.”

  But my daughter was smiling again.

  Pablo turned to her and asked, in a low voice, “What’s going on?”

  She said she’d tell him later.

  “Maybe I can explain, Pablo.” I took a deep breath. “The basic fact is, everyone feels I don’t have enough ideas to keep the show going for another year.”

  Pablo said, “My mother’s crazy about it.”

  I blew him a kiss. “Well, the producers . . . What we’re supposed to be talking about tonight is ideas for a cooking show. Or that’s what I thought we were supposed to talk about. But it turns out, what these guys have in mind isn’t a cooking show, it’s a story about a cook. They want to make a TV story out of my life. Our lives. Anyone’s life.”

  “Ever since we began, it’s an issue,” Sheldon said to Rick. “I always tell her to do more of her life and she acts like I said do a centerfold.”

  Rick looked at me. I nodded.

  “It’s not the same as what we’re talking about,” he said.

  “No,” I replied. “This is worse.”

  “Would we get to play ourselves?” Livvy asked eagerly.

  Rick took another praline, bit into it, winked at Livvy, suggested I explain what bothered me.

  “I know I’ve been lucky to have a show at all. My classes, then the show. Not just the money. The praise. Being known by some people. I remember how awful it was when I moved down here, from my parents’, and nobody kne
w me. I was thrilled the first time someone said hello to me on the street. Maybe it’s the reason people stay in their little towns. Or dye their hair purple. Or wear torn clothes. To be seen. But then at some point, when the show had been on for a while, I decided that wasn’t what was happening. I wasn’t being seen. It’s some character they’re mostly seeing. And that’s when you’re being yourself! I went to a book party and Frank Purdue was one of the guests, this funny-looking man who sells chickens, and the next thing you know, he’s playing himself at a book party!”

  I paused, looked around me. Everyone was listening intently.

  Rick grinned. “You’re good, kid. You should have a talk show, except nobody’s looking for a talk show about food.”

  “Well,” I said, “I guess we’re back where we started.”

  “Nobody’s even looking for a food sitcom,” Rick said. A warning. “Except Bob.”

  “I don’t know about that,” Sheldon protested.

  “It’s true there’ve been a lot of tries at a good cooking story,” Bob said. “It’s also true there were a lot of tries at an airplane before the Wright Brothers.”

  “How’d you feel about making some more coffee?” Sheldon asked me.

  Pablo excused himself, saying he’d put in a long day. He looked at Livvy inquiringly; perhaps she’d like to retire with him? She said she’d be in soon and sat back to watch Rick breathe.

  “Let’s try this one,” Rick said to Bob. “Kid grows up in the kitchen. Her mother’s Am—No, her mother’s Italian. Works in the family restaurant. Marries this American who comes to Italy. He’s in the wine business. Vineyards. They could even meet in California, she’s an American, cooks in the vineyard restaurant. You know, all these California vineyards have restaurants for tourists. Her father dies, he takes over the business and they have this adorable kid, they keep it in the kitchen, she cooks practically from the time she can walk.” He winked at Livvy. “Just like you, sweetheart. As a matter of fact, you could have the same kid play the young mother as plays the daughter, flash forward. Have to figure it out. Be nice if Livvy wanted to do it, actually. It’s easier to teach someone to act than to cook.”

  Bob laughed. “You’re a genius.”

  I said, avoiding Livvy’s eyes, “You shouldn’t say those things unless you mean them. She’s very young.”

  “Later on,” said Rick, who lived in a state where thirteen-year-olds were routinely left on doorsteps to play bit parts in producers’ beds, “there’re all kinds of possibilities. Father gets homesick. He loves Italy, but he realizes he’s bringing up this kid who’s part American and she’s never seen the place. Or vice versa, depending on whether he starts here or Italy. Or maybe his wife gets fat. . . . No, the kid gets fat, and then they realize she’s pregnant.”

  Livvy stood up so swiftly that her chair was overturned in back of her.

  “You told him!” she shouted at me.

  “Nobody told him anything!” Sheldon shouted at her.

  “You’re lying to protect her!” Livvy shouted at him.

  “I got news for you, kiddo,” Sheldon shouted back. “Nobody has to tell anybody anything when a seventeen-year-old gets married! The whole world’s gonna figure it out, you might as well know that right now!”

  I began clearing the dishes. There was a moment of raging silence. Then Rick stood, picked up Livvy’s chair, spoke to her softly.

  “I should’ve guessed. There’s nobody so beautiful as a pregnant woman.”

  She grew quiet, allowed him to help her back to her seat.

  “I should’ve known,” he repeated, softly seductive. “But I would’ve thought of it sooner or later. Someone else would’ve been pregnant, and I’d have seen her, or I’d just have needed something to happen, and I’d have thought of it.”

  They were gone a short while later, saying they’d be in touch, leaving Livvy, who didn’t know that they always said they’d be in touch, in a state so high that she not only helped clean up the kitchen, but was wide awake and eager to talk afterward. I was exhausted, and very uneasy. She’d asked Rick for a number where she could reach him if she had a good idea. He’d given her a New York number that was on a service, told her he was out of town a lot, and she shouldn’t get upset if she didn’t hear from him, he’d get her messages. She hadn’t understood what he was saying. I had no feeling at all for the seriousness with which he regarded his own ramblings about show ideas. I did know that if he took them seriously, Kupferman would; Rick had never been associated with a commercial failure. I didn’t know how to protect my daughter from the fantasy in which she was obviously immersing herself, of being a TV star. Should I try, gently, to keep her feet on the ground, or encourage the fantasy, daydream, whatever, in the hope that she’d change that ground with an abortion before it was too late? Anything I said might be dangerous, I just didn’t know where the greatest danger lay. Should I tell her the truth, that there was no way I could have anything to do with the kind of series they were talking about? That it was barely a matter of choice? One thing to be cooking for fun and profit. Quite another to become a thread in Rick’s invisible reweaving process, feeding him pieces of yourself that seconds later turned into a piece of prime-time cloth that wouldn’t feel good or keep you warm.

  Livvy was moving around the apartment, remembering adventures from her childhood that might or might not have occurred, then altering them in the manner she’d learned so handily from Rick:

  “I remember the time Papa and Mirella took me to this café that was right on—no, maybe it’d be a boy instead of a girl, and instead of Sicily—except it’d be so nice to do something about the beautiful part of Sicily. All anybody American talks about is the Mafia. Is it too late to call Rick’s number?”

  I suggested that she make notes of her ideas, and that way, if nothing came of them with Rick, she might use them to fulfill a writing assignment, but before I was finished, she was looking at me, puzzled, asking whether I didn’t want to have a series. I measured my answer carefully.

  “It’s too remote even to think about. These guys have hundreds of ideas for every one that gets on the air. I just think the best idea is for us to work on things we know’re going to happen, and then . . .”

  “Oh . . .” She was irritated, didn’t want to think about what she knew was going to happen. She went to her room although there was no way she was going to fall asleep in the state she was in.

  And I moved around the apartment like some small, hoppity-nervous caged animal that knows there are twenty beasts waiting to eat him but can’t figure out if they’re in or out of the cage. Pablo, Livvy, and I had all sorts of things to talk about, from the Catholic wedding they needed in order to be considered married by the Cruz family, to whether they wanted to have a wedding party, and if so how they felt about doing it in the apartment, as opposed to some fancy place that would cost a fortune and probably not feel as nice. I went to put on my nightgown, remembered that I lived upstairs. More or less. Leon. What would Leon have thought if he’d heard the conversation tonight? Leon was angry with me because I wasn’t willing to risk losing my daughter by pushing for an abortion she was unlikely to have. It was difficult to imagine that his anger would be so great as to make him leave me. On the other hand, I had to be prepared. No. I couldn’t be prepared. The best I could do would be to proceed as though I were prepared. I could, for example, push the landlord on the matter of building real walls. Even if Livvy and Pablo were just with me for another few months, it would be good to have those walls. And it could only improve the apartment for the future, for whoever ended up sleeping in the second bedroom. Me. A baby. A baby and me. None of the above. Livvy should have a doctor. There hadn’t been the need of a due date when we saw Widner. If she was going ahead with this baby, she should know approximately when it was going to be born. Maybe having a doctor and a due date would make her reconsider. I didn’t believe it. I didn’t feel anything in the real world would.

  I washed, brushed my tee
th, and put on an imperfectly clean T-shirt, a practice I’d never thought about twice until I returned to the States and a TV-commercialized culture that had convinced everyone they were dirty if they weren’t perfectly clean. Maybe I should’ve stayed in Italy, lived with Angelo’s screwing around and his provocations, allowed Livvy’s life to go on without radical change. I’d told myself my leaving wouldn’t constitute a serious change, but maybe I’d been lying. Maybe I should’ve thrown away another ten years of my life to protect my daughter’s. The good things that’d happened to me since my return wouldn’t’ve happened, but maybe the bad things wouldn’t have happened to Livvy. Not that an unmarried girl never got pregnant in Rome just because the Vatican was there. Not that Angelo couldn’t have found the sainted Annunciata, gotten a barely-necessary-because-we-weren’t-really-married divorce and married her with me living a few blocks away.

  I was very tired. I was going to fall asleep early.

  Or I would have, if only Leon were there in bed with me, to talk with, to snuggle, to scratch the spot on my back that itched. To ward off thought with feeling. It was after eleven, too late to call and see if he was still mad. It would be nice to have an inside staircase between our apartments, so I could just sneak up there and crawl into bed with him. On the other hand, it was difficult to imagine a staircase, even one of those round wrought-iron jobs, that wouldn’t screw up both apartments, his worse than mine. The only possibility was to take space from his entrance foyer. Actually, you could just close off the upstairs door and everyone would enter what would be a duplex downstairs. Then the downstairs bedrooms would be left for Livvy and Pablo, and their baby.

  But what on earth was I doing? Not only was I thinking as though Livvy, all of them, would be here indefinitely, I’d let my brain vault over my problems with Leon to a place where he’d not only accept Livvy’s baby but would want to live virtually in the same apartment. Not virtually. With a staircase it would be one apartment. I had to stop thinking about stuff like that for now. I had to concentrate on what I could do without Leon.