Agnes butters another sourdough roll. "What about it?"
"Where does it fit in your life?"
"I could squeeze it in, if something came up."
"Then you're not seeing anyone?"
It strikes Agnes as odd that she cares. "No."
"My daughter hates it when I ask her that," says Madelaine. "She calls me a sexist. But I'm not. I just want her to be happy. I want her to have someone special. Loving Ron's made all the difference to me. That's why I owe you everything. Really, I couldn't go on without him."
The woman must surely be batty. How could she possibly feel love for that piece of flesh convalescing on the other side of the triplex? It doesn't make any sense. If loving Ron's made all the difference, then she's got to get out in the world a little more. Agnes finds her fascinatingly grotesque—the tears she cries for her husband's fate which she allows to adhere to her cheeks for an unseemly length of time; her undulating blond pageboy; her expressive, perfectly painted mouth (undercoat and highlights and glosses, three coats)--as the meal progresses Madelaine's presence starts to bear down on Agnes, like a movie viewed from the front row.
Agnes should have wiped out the lot of them.
Daintily, Madelaine blows her nose. "I wish you luck, Agnes. It's not easy to find someone out there."
Agnes agrees. "It seems harder than it was meant to be. We are supposed to mate, and all."
"I consider myself nothing but lucky. If not for Ron, I'd probably be shut up in a house somewhere in Long Island with my mother and a dozen cats."
A rather large house right on the tip of the island, thinks Agnes unsportingly.
"My problem is I've imagined someone who may not exist," says Agnes.
"I used to think the same thing!" says Madelaine, growing excited. And Barbara thought she and Madelaine were similar—wait'll she hears about this. "You can't believe the relief I felt when I met Ron."
The Great Man is the culmination of her desires? She dreamt of him, and didn't wake up bathed in sweat?
"What do you want, Agnes?"
"Someone intelligent."
"Oh, yes."
"And not effete."
"You don't want a librarian."
"A very tough librarian would be okay," says Agnes. "Someone tall enough to reach the top shelves. Someone who never has to shush anyone, whose sheer presence commands silence."
Madelaine telephones Bob Syker. She brings Agnes into her office to wait for him. She shows Agnes a picture in a silver frame.
"My daughter Sarah," says Madelaine. "She's in her last year at Miss Clavelle's."
Agnes sees a broad-shouldered girl clutching a lacrosse stick. She has a flat face and a wide nose, and she smiles amiably for the camera.
"Handsome girl," says Agnes.
"Thank you. She's the image of her father. She's going to film school at NYU next year." It must occur to Madelaine that Agnes is someone with a fresh perspective. "What do you think about film school?"
"I think it's a million dollar idea for a business. I wish I'd thought of it."
"Do you think NYU can turn out a good filmmaker?'
"You may be asking the wrong person. I think the last thing we need is more filmmakers. They're already a blight.
Madelaine, despairing of getting anything resembling an answer, stops asking the question. "Sarah insists on going, but I think she'd be better off just making films, don't you?"
"It's lovely that she has that option, of course, but I understand the allure of school. I've always enjoyed it—the enrolling, the posted grades, the pastries in the cafeteria, the registrar and the bursar and the ombudsman. If you decide to make movies on your own, then you pretty much have to spend all your time making movies on your own. But school gives you a comforting direction. Even when you're doing nothing, you're doing something—you're in school. Once you finish your homework, you can sit around and eat pastries with a clear conscience."
"I caught that little thing in your voice," says Madelaine.
"What thing?"
"When you said it was lovely that she had that option. You think everything is easy when you're rich, don't you?"
"I suppose I do, to be honest with you."
"Just remember this, Agnes. Nobody wants to shoot you."
A blood-curdling scream sounds on the other side of the triplex. Agnes looks at Madelaine with alarm. Has somebody jumped off one of the terraces?
Madelaine checks her wristwatch.
"Three o'clock," she says casually. "Ron just had one of his vitamin shots, the big baby."
* * *
Bob Syker opens his briefcase on Madelaine's desk. He studies Agnes over the raised lid. He flashes a knowing smile. "Let's get the formalities over with. Ron wants to offer you something for your services. A reward. I know that money can't even begin to compensate you for that you did, and I hope you won't be insulted"
Agnes jumps right in. "I'm not insulted. You may make the check out to my mother."
"What a beautiful thing," he says.
"I'm planning to start a account she'll know nothing about," says Agnes, creasing the check. The amount, $5000, is satisfactory, but almost immediately little buds of greed blossom within Agnes. $5000? Why not half a million? Would her mother be set then! A million would be even better.
"It's touching," says Syker. "I'm really moved. People don't take care of their parents. But this is great. Very moral. Good job."
"Not so moral," says Agnes. "It's not like I want to hang out with her or anything."
"Let me tell you something. I wish I could do this for my mother. Then I wouldn't have to hang out with her. Unfortunately, she has all the money."
Madelaine's office has a terrific view of the Prentiss Building, so controversial when it was first erected in the Thirties by the great impresario, Si Prentiss. It is one of Agnes's favorites. The tower is an inverted ziggurat; defying the normal logic of a skyscraper, the building gets broader near its summit. The odd design was actually a tribute to Prentiss's wife, Brenda Tartabull Prentiss, the former striptease artist, who was built the same way.
Syker has tightly coiled graying hair and a long equine face. His lips are moist and full. His skin is pitted. His mother was the last one at the helm of Syker's, the great Union Square department store. Agnes has fond memories of Syker's. She went there often with her mother. It was a place Hannah truly understood. Other stores rattled her, but she could cite the duties and privileges of every rank of floorwalker in the Syker hierarchy. Whether an old lady had fainted or the line was too long at Gift Wrapping, Hannah always knew if the swiftest action would come from speaking to a man wearing a red, white, yellow, or blue carnation.
"Can I ask you something?" says Syker. "How come we didn't see you after you saved the boss's life? You pulled a Greta Garbo."
"I did what I did and I didn't think any more about it."
"Well, it's nice that someone deserving got a little of the Wegeman money for a change," he says warmly. "But of course it isn't money that makes you happy."
Agnes asks Syker what makes him happy.
"Me? Right now I have an ulcer, so I'm on this crazy diet. A nice piece of crisp chicken skin would make me really happy. What about you?"
Agnes mulls it over. "Old buildings, of course. I like those."
"Oh, me too."
"I guess I like the feeling that I've made the right choices," says Agnes. "Even if things don't work out. I almost don't care if they work out. I just don't want people shaking their heads at me, clucking at my bad decisions."
This seems to depress him. His emotions bubble very near the surface.
"People will always do that," he says morosely. "You're better off with chicken skin. Go. Spend your money. Momentary pleasure—what else is there?"
* * *
Agnes and Madelaine depart Wegeman Tower together. The palace guard snaps to attention. The afternoon is waning and the sun low, but Madelaine slips on a pair of harlequin sunglasses. She seems small
er and more vulnerable outside, too thin, too precarious on her heels, too gaudy in her gray sable and Cossack-style hat.
"You live—where did you say? Brooklyn Heights?" Madelaine doesn't seem as friendly outside her guarded sanctum. She seems almost afraid that someone will spot her and Agnes together.
"Washington Heights. Just north of Harlem."
Madelaine doesn't know how to respond to this tragic news. "I've heard there are good things happening up there."
"In Washington Heights? Very few, unless you consider drug dealers murdering each other a positive trend."
"I thought you were gentrifying," says Madelaine vaguely.
"We're a little far up for that sort of thing."
Madelaine heads determinedly for the cream-colored Rolls that has pulled silently to the curb.
"I'm off to get Ron his Valentine's Day present," she tells Agnes as she gets in the car. "May I offer you a lift?"
"I'll take the subway, thanks anyway."
"Are you sure?"
"It's quicker. I'll take the Fifth Avenue Line."
Agnes feels a little like her mother. Hannah was always talking up the virtues of the El, and feeling sorry for rich people stuck in limousines.
"Okay," says Madelaine. "I'll be in touch."
The Rolls glides away. The license plate reads WEGETTE. Agnes suffers the hollow feeling of one who has behaved badly. Madelaine is pleasant enough, considering her caste, and she and the Great Man have been generous. So what if she doesn't know that there's no such thing as the Fifth Avenue Subway?
Chapter Ten
"Ma, is something wrong with the phone?"
"What? I don't think so."
"What's that noise?"
"You must mean the vacuum cleaner. Ken's doing the drapes."
"Ken who?"
"Ken Park Rhee. His parents have that little fruit market on Queens Boulevard. He does odd jobs for pocket money."
Agnes knows that store. When Salvatore Vincenza came over from Genoa and strung a canopy over his pushcart on Mott Street, that was a little fruit market. What the Park Rhees have is nothing less than a fruit-o-rama, a wonderland of produce and impulse purchases, 900 square feet of vegetables and salads, cold cuts and cookies, imported beers, Gotham Amber, Gotham Lager, Gotham Premium Porter, ladyfingers, dense ice cream, eggplants in three colors.
"There's an attachment for the molding, Ken," says Hannah.
Agnes burns. She's giving him pocket money! The world will forever be divided into the Park Rhees and the Travertines, the producers and the consumers, the accumulators and the dissipaters.
Partly to blame is Hannah's mother, Leta Brezcouscus. Leta was a Lithuanian firebrand, a perpetually hoarse little stewpot of a woman who worked as a building superintendent and moved in a cloud of coal dust and bacon drippings and mothballs. She embodied all the peasant virtues and shortcomings. She never spent a dime she didn't have to.
"She had a heart as black and cold as one of her skillets," was Hannah's verdict.
Hannah could never quite get out from under the old girl's thumb. She married Johnny Travertine to spite her because Johnny was so handsome and glib and fundamentally American, pointedly not Lithuanian, and of course Leta loved him, couldn't do enough for him, and Johnny could never understand his wife's antipathy toward her mother. A pox on both of them, thought Hannah. That was when she started having cleaning women in.
"Pay me! I'll do it," Leta would cry, clutching what looked like her heart but was actually the chamois moneybag she wore around her neck.
Eventually, Hannah had her own daughter, Brigette. Brigette died, so Hannah had Agnes. Hannah had always hoped for a girlish girl, someone with whom she could giggle and make cookies and lemonade, but the poor luckless woman was to be disappointed in that regard. The cookies grew stale and pond scum formed on the lemonade while little Agnes fretted over her electric trains—their going in a circle disturbed her sense of realism; the figure-eight intersected itself near the water tower, which would only be possible in a small town on the edge of hyperspace.
"I have to tell you something," says Hannah. "I spoke to Mrs. Fuentes at Social Security. There's been some sort of snafu. Your father's divorce decree seems to have disappeared."
Johnny's brief first marriage isn't often spoken about.
"What does that mean to you?" Agnes asks her.
"Oh, nothing, I'm sure."
"Did you ask?"
"I didn't have to. I'm not particularly concerned."
"Maybe you should be."
"Agnes, don't be such a worry-wart. Documents are always being swallowed by the great maw of the bureaucracy. They turn up sooner or later."
"I hope you're right," says Agnes uncertainly.
A misplaced divorce? It doesn't sit right with Agnes.
"And I have to find my marriage license," Hannah adds blandly. "Otherwise my benefits might be held up."
"I didn't know it was lost."
"Agnes, it's been lost for years. I always vowed I'd look for it, or send for another copy, but I just never got around to it. And then after your father died, there didn't seem to be much point."
Chapter Eleven
Agnes returns to work at Infertility. She arrives at the office to find her desk covered with cards and presents. Half the presents are wrapped in pink paper; the other half in blue. Silver Mylar helium balloons hover above Agnes's desk. Some say IT'S A BOY! The rest say IT'S A GIRL!
"We weren't sure about all this, since you never told us," says Jeff Tetter, one of the Infertility staff writers. "But then we decided that such a joyous event couldn't pass without some recognition."
Agnes's colleagues gather around. She opens the gifts: Onesies and booties, receiving blankets, a Busy Box.
They have gone to a lot of trouble for her. Agnes would never have expected it. She hovers in a weird state between gratification and extreme embarrassment.
"We would have invited the father, but Mike didn't know who he was, and of course you told us nothing," says Jeff.
When the presents have been opened, and the cake is about to be cut, Agnes pulls Jeff Tetter aside and tells him that she's not pregnant.
"Hmm," says Tetter thoughtfully. "Why did Mike say it, then?"
"I told him I was."
"See, Agnes, that's how these little mix-ups start."
"I didn't think he'd believe me," says Agnes. "It was a social lie. I didn't want to see him anymore, so...." Her voice trails off.
Tetter shrugs. "Next time you might want to consider the bit about having to wash your hair. It's an old wheeze, but it's tried-and-true. Or terminal cancer—at least you won't be subjected to any awkward parties. All right, everybody," he says to the gathering, "let's break out that cake. Please be sure Agnes gets the flower. And let's make ourselves comfortable for Agnes's little speech. It's sure to be interesting."
* * *
That afternoon Barbara calls Agnes. Agnes tells her about the baby shower.
"I'm sorry I wasn't there," says Barbara. "You got what you so richly deserved."
"I have nothing to be ashamed of," says Agnes.
"That's debatable. You'll be gratified to know that Jack left me with a lovely parting gift—a first-class bladder infection. I tell him again and again that you can't go in the front way after you've been in the back door."
"You sound like you're in a good mood," says Agnes. "You're not usually so merry about the Pinboy."
"What can you do, Agnes? They come and they go. There'll be other men— maybe none with Jack's intriguing mix of intellect and poetry and violent animal passion—but there'll be others."
"That's sensible, sort of."
"And I have great news. Remember my director's audition? Well, I got it. I'm in. I'm a director. So now I don't have to shake my ass around at auditions anymore, or at least not as much. I plan to spend the rest of my life ordering mindless actors around and thoroughly enjoying it."
Agnes congratulates her.
"We go into rehearsal next Monday," says Barbara. "I've got a million things to do."
"Tell me about the show."
"Try to restrain your mirth," says Barbara drily. "It's called Where is Sonja Henie Now That We Really Need Her? The premise is that the world is a different place, and Madonna never existed, and Sonja Henie is our modern symbol of sexuality. There are jokes about ice skating and bras and MTV and, of course, muffs."
"You've read the script?" says Agnes.
"I may be new at this, but I do know that's the first thing one does."
"Is it as inane as it sounds?"
Barbara sighs. "Nothing about the show is fully-realized, not even its inanity. I would say there are three good jokes in the thing, one per act."
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