Thirty-three Swoons

by Martha Cooley

  Sam shrugged. “That may be what happened, but nobody knows for sure. No one can know, with Eve. You know how it was—always plenty of men in her life . . .”

  OUR BOOTH felt suddenly confining; I nearly signaled the waitress for a check, then thought better of it. There was more for us to talk about.

  “Well, your ideas sound far-fetched,” I said. “And I bet they sounded that way to Danny, too.”

  Leaning forward, Sam put his elbows on the table. “Stuart’s right, you know—what he said, the other day. About Danny being in a messy place. And there’s something else. She seems to have this idea that you’re holding out on her, Cam.”

  Something like exasperation coursed through me, a similar jazzing of my nerves but more distressing. Out of nowhere came a memory of Eve in Frenchtown, the summer of Jordan’s death. Eve tending his backyard with a spade and a trowel, weeding, watering. Acting like the woman of the house.

  “As far as my cousin was concerned,” I said, “her lovers were never any of my business. That includes Danny’s father.”

  Sam’s left hand pumped an invisible brake. “I know. And I’ve told Danny she’s got to accept that you might not want to talk about certain things.”

  “Such as?”

  “Such as your father.” His gaze held mine steadily. “I don’t know what you’ve already shared with her . . .”

  I shook my head. “You and Stuart are still the only people who know how Jordan died.”

  Again he frowned. “Yes, but you need to realize something, Cam. Danny’s got pretty clear memories of that day. She was six years old, it’s not just a big blur to her. She’s got specific recollections and questions. And she feels you’ve been keeping secrets about that. As well as about Eve.”

  Another tap dance of my nerves. “Well, I guess she’ll just have to be mad at me, then,” I responded. “Because I made a promise to my father, and I don’t plan to break it—especially since Eve was involved. Don’t push me on this one, Sam.”

  He lay a hand over both of mine, his touch less reassuring than strange; I couldn’t remember the last time my fingers had been cupped in his.

  “I’m just disturbed that she’d be thinking of herself as having somehow failed,” he said.

  “Failed at what?”

  “Dealing with Eve. Accepting her as she was—a lousy mother, an unhappy woman. I think Danny’s worried that her anger made Eve all the more withheld. She always longed for Eve to be open with her—”

  “I know that. But Danny would never have gotten what she wanted. Eve was incapable of being open with anyone.”

  “Except your father, maybe?”

  “Perhaps,” I answered. “I have no way of knowing. Eve certainly couldn’t be open with me. Or with Danny. Or you, for that matter.”

  He looked away, and when he spoke again, the pain in his voice was palpable. “Did you and I do enough for Danny?”

  “We stepped into the breach. And we can keep doing that, Sam.”

  He nodded. “You’re right. And it’s ended up good for both of us, having her in our lives. Don’t you think?”

  I heard no uncertainty in his voice. He wasn’t looking for a confirmation of his own belief; he wanted to know what I felt.

  “I think so. Now.”

  “We needed a kid.”

  “It didn’t help.” The old heartbreak, not yet dispatched. Dormant, it could still be jostled into stinging life. “You can’t will such things, can’t order yourself to want your own child. I wish I’d known that, for your sake. Having Danny in our life was enough for me. But for you . . .”

  My sentence required no finishing. Something like embarrassment, a deep surprise at the unexpected rawness on display, came over us. We stared off into nowhere until a waitress slid a check onto our table.

  MY AFTERNOON with Sam triggered memories. Most were of Eve after her return from Ithaca to Manhattan. Random details: her answering machine’s jingle (the tune from the Yogi Bear cartoon series); a set of framed botanical prints in her bedroom; her enjoyment of macaroons and marzipan (the stickies, she’d called them, licking her fingers while eating them). And an amber necklace I’d found on the sidewalk when I was five, which I’d given to her. I could still recall my fierce pride when I’d presented it—how pleased I’d been to make her blush in happy surprise.

  Eve hadn’t been one for verbal acknowledgments. She’d had other ways of signaling thanks: with a bunch of fresh rosemary tied in twine, or an African violet in a clay pot. And her own way of laughing, too: a low, skittish trill, at once alluring and evasive. It was the laughter to which she’d treated Sam and me while commending us for rescue work performed on her behalf.

  We’d done plenty of it. Within a few months after Eve’s return from Ithaca, my studio apartment had become Danny’s second home. Then, after I met and married Sam, our apartment became the place where Danny could most often be found when she wasn’t in school. Eve’s garden shop was in Chelsea, and her landscaping clients lived all over the city and on Long Island. She was incessantly, aggressively on the go. Gradually her busy schedule began edging Danny out.

  There were, of course, day care centers and after-school programs where a single mother could deposit a young child, and Eve took advantage of these—but she also had a cousin nearby. When all else failed (and it frequently did), Sam and I were there to pick up the slack. Eve had no real friends, no one else to ask for help. So Sam ended up keeping track of Danny’s pediatrician and dentist appointments, and I took her shopping for school clothes, books, toys, and games—always with cash supplied by Eve, who was careful never to incur any financial obligations to me. Sam and I both attended Danny’s school plays and athletic events. Our work and social schedules were flexible and seldom jammed. We liked hanging out with Danny, and we usually had room to maneuver when Eve found excuses for not maneuvering herself.

  Beneath the issue of our availability lay something more basic. Sam and I wanted what Danny offered us: regular doses of warmth, and a mix of silliness and verve to which we both grew addicted. Occasionally we’d wonder aloud what Danny herself was making of Eve’s unmotherly behavior—how it was affecting her at some hidden level. But of course neither of us spoke about this with her, and I knew there’d be no speaking of it with Eve.

  THESE MEMORIES linked with others. Of being married and coming unmarried, as in unglued.

  When Sam and I finally got round to confronting the issue of parenthood, sometime in the fifth year of our union, I was overwhelmed by ambivalence. Or so I called it, though my version seemed more intractable than that of other women I knew. Sam, I suddenly understood, was expecting me to convert without angst to his way of seeing things. For him, having a child was an inevitability, not an option. How had I managed to overlook something so obvious? And how had he failed to plumb the depths of my uncertainty? Beneath love lay bewildered incomprehension.

  Meanwhile there was daily life to attend to. The Fourth Wall was earning a steady income, but after a time, Sam grew less gung ho about it than I was. He left the running of it to me, instead pursuing his central enthusiasm—the photo-book projects he’d begun undertaking as a freelancer. And because he was also thinking about opening an art gallery, he spent his spare hours making visits to potential spaces and developing contacts with artists and dealers.

  One of his dealer friends employed Lila as an assistant. Sam didn’t pursue her until he and I were divorced, but she was there: an alternative future, with full-time parenthood built in.

  BY THE time he and I did begin trying in earnest to conceive, I was in my late thirties. Months went by and nothing happened. I didn’t become pregnant, nor did either of us make an appointment to talk with a doctor or explore other possibilities for “starting a family,” as the antiseptic saying went.

  Near the end of a long stretch of scheduled copulating, my resolve gave out. One evening in the fall of 1990, we both gravitated toward separate beds. Sam threw a sheet and blanket on the living room sof
a, and I headed for the daybed in our small guest room. The next morning I arose and walked into the bedroom we shared, expecting to find my husband there. Our bed lay empty, its spread pulled over its pillows. I remember exactly how it looked, unrumpled and unremonstrative, as smooth-faced as a confessor.

  Sam entered the room right behind me, his surprise at the sight of the pristine bed as evident as mine. Later that week, after we’d both dumped buckets of tears (Sam wasn’t the crying type, and the sight of his sobbing was at once oddly beautiful and heart-stoppingly sad), we separated.

  We were divorced on a beautiful morning in May, the kind that brides-to-be pray for. We took the subway downtown to the municipal building, where we sat in an open courtroom with a half-dozen other couples. Waiting patiently to be sundered, we held hands the entire time. When our moment arrived, the judge, a woman, threw a puzzled glance at our interlocked fingers. Were we sure, she asked, that we wanted to do what we were about to do? Her question, so like the one posed by the person who’d married us, drew a wan smile from us both. We nodded like a pair of well-mannered children too shy to talk.

  The judge pronounced and gaveled, then signed our rupture into reality. We got back on the subway and returned to the Village, where we entered a café and drank coffee dazedly, like two people who’d just walked away from an explosion. I remember Sam’s and my parting: the two of us on the sidewalk, smiling bravely. Sunlight glinting everywhere. A swift embrace of hands. A prickling sensation in my fingertips afterward, which lasted hours and felt purposive, like a code, though I couldn’t crack it.

  OUR MARRIAGE was over, yet Danny was still in it.

  Sam and Lila were married in July of 1996. Eve, Danny, and I attended the wedding. A party took place after the ceremony, in a large, ramshackle loft belonging to a painter friend of Lila’s.

  At the request of the bride and groom, Eve had decorated (transformed, really) the loft. There were rose petals all over the floor, as well as quantities of red roses strewn on a bed pushed into one corner. A lamp above the bed illuminated the entire garnet-colored mass. It was so attractively done, I remember thinking. Tasteful and amusing at once—just what Sam would want.

  At one point during the party, I found myself standing with Eve off to one side, near the rose-covered bed. People were dancing; the party was in full swing. Eve turned to me, raising her champagne flute.

  “Cheers,” she said, and we tapped glasses. She wore a long green dress, deeply V’d in front and back, which showed off the column of her spine and her strong collarbones and décolletage. Several men did double takes as they walked past her. Her fragrance, Lune, surrounded her lightly, a sublime aura. Inhaling it, I felt as if I’d entered an invisible chamber; the fragrance wasn’t only in the air but also, and perhaps chiefly, in my memory. Lune was Eve, the woman I’d adored and raged at (silently, fiercely) since the day she’d first started wearing my father’s perfume. Since she was fifteen.

  “I just had a flash,” she said, “of the fathers. Ours.”

  “Jordan and Dan?” I asked, nonplussed. Eve rarely mentioned either man.

  She chuckled softly. “Can you believe Dan’s been dead twenty years? And how many has it been since Jordan died?”

  I counted. “Fourteen.”

  She nodded. “Ever miss him?”

  Possible answers sparred within me. “Sometimes I’d like to ask him a few questions,” I said.

  “About?”

  “Oh, theater, his travels . . . Things he’s seen and done and smelled.”

  That low trill. “You make him sound like an old dog.”

  “He was, in a way.”

  “No, Dan was an old dog. Jordan was someone with an excellent nose. And a need for privacy.”

  I’d never heard Eve state such things about my father. “He did keep to himself,” I said. “And he wasn’t into memorabilia, that’s for sure. Ten years in that house in Frenchtown and almost no possessions. It was easy for Stuart and me to clean the place out after he died.”

  “Nothing to give him away.”

  I glanced at her. “I guess so.”

  “You think that’s how he wanted it?” Her question was uninflected by any emotion I could detect.

  “I guess,” I repeated.

  “Me, too. But you’d know better, being his daughter.” She set down her glass of champagne. Returning her gaze to the dancers, she extended one hand, gesturing lightly. “Why didn’t you have one with him, Cam?”

  I followed the trajectory of her forefinger. She appeared to be pointing at Sam, who was dancing with Danny to an upbeat number that had brought lots of people onto the dance floor. “Have one what?” I asked.

  “A kid,” she answered.

  I turned to stare at her, wondering if I’d heard her right.

  “I mean, would it really have been such a hard thing to do?” she added.

  “I suppose I didn’t want it enough,” I replied. “It was always hypothetical for me.”

  Eve said nothing, and we sipped our champagne and stared at the dancers. Then she lit a cigarette. She smoked infrequently and only at parties, when enough other people were doing it. She levered her cigarette up and down with her thumb, using it as a pointer.

  “Do you know if he’s slept with her?” she asked.

  Again I followed the gesture’s trajectory, the lit tip of the cigarette. My astonishment was so large I could barely say the two names.

  “Sam?” I asked. “Sam, you mean—with Danny?”

  “Yes,” said Eve, “that’s who I’m talking about.”

  Her face told me nothing. “Eve,” I said, “are you really asking me if while Sam and I were married, he ever—”

  “No,” she broke in, “of course not, Cam! Not while you were married. Danny was too young then! I mean sometime later. Like during the past year or so.”

  For a moment I wondered if she was drunk, though I knew that was highly unlikely. She’d probably had no more than a glass of champagne all evening.

  “What on earth are you talking about?” I said. “What sort of a man do you think Sam is? And have you forgotten he started dating Lila over a year ago?”

  “No,” she responded, “I haven’t forgotten. But he and Danny did take that trip to London a few years back.”

  For her twentieth birthday, Sam had offered to accompany Danny on a five-day trip to London. It was her first journey abroad. They’d gone to a bunch of plays and galleries, and she’d had an excellent time.

  “Listen to me,” I said, putting down my glass. “I met the two of them at the airport when they returned from that trip. And I can tell you they didn’t sleep together while they were over there. Because I would’ve known right away—”

  “I believe you, Cam. But admit it. You weren’t entirely sure until you saw them. Aren’t I right? There’d been a little question in the back of your mind . . .”

  For a moment I felt as though she’d placed her hands over my eyes and whispered something malevolently irresistible in my ear. “As soon as they walked through the gate at JFK, I knew nothing had happened. Nothing,” I repeated.

  The smoke from her cigarette formed a pale gray wreath around her head. “I expect that’s true,” she replied. “Nothing happened in London. It’s afterward I’m thinking about.”

  “Afterward?” I came unstuck. “This conversation’s absurd,” I snapped. “Sam’s been like a father to Danny, and she’s like a daughter to him—and you ought to know that better than anyone else. Why are you saying these things?”

  Before I could add anything else, she’d taken my hand, pulling me behind her. We were headed, I saw, straight for Sam and Danny. Reaching them, Eve released me and took one of her daughter’s hands, pivoting Danny away from Sam and leaving him to me and me to a shocked silence that Sam mistook for my usual unruffledness.

  He and I danced together briefly. When the tune ended, he kissed my cheek, handed me off to Carl (who received me graciously), and went off in search of another partner�
��his bride, in all likelihood, since he’d scarcely seen her all evening.

  MY COUSIN and I did not revisit that conversation. For several weeks after the wedding, I avoided her. I was too angry to deal with her even perfunctorily. As I saw it, she’d set out deliberately to provoke and distress me.

  This had nothing to do with Danny, I decided. Eve’s aim had been to rattle me. She’d wanted to drive a wedge between Sam and me, just as she’d sought, when we lived in the family apartment, to insert herself between my father and me. Some old frustration or resentment was driving her now, causing her to make ridiculous statements.

  Thereafter I made sure that our conversations about Danny were confined to the mundane. For her part Eve seemed content to leave well enough alone. It dawned on me (and as the months passed, I grew more committed to this thought) that my cousin hadn’t actually believed what she’d suggested about Sam. It had been something to toss out, a verbal hand grenade whose bang—my dismay—was worth the ensuing mess.

  I SPOKE with no one, not even Stuart, about what Eve had said to me. The best thing to do, I concluded, was to treat our exchange as if it had never taken place. But it had, and I found myself wondering whether I’d missed something. Before Lila, in that interval of confusion after Sam and I parted, what assuagement might he have longed for—Danny being, after all, no longer a girl but a woman?

  I thought of Sam’s body, the languid heat of him in my recent dream, when he’d pleaded with Meyerhold for the child I’d resisted—the child he hadn’t figured out how to claim. Meyerhold had told him, sternly, that he’d need to find himself a different partner.

  No, I thought. Not Danny. That couldn’t have happened. But there was something I’d missed—there had to be. I couldn’t be dreaming so much for nothing.

  STUART AND Carl stopped by at around ten the night before Danny and I were to leave. I’d just placed my packed duffel bag in the front hall when the doorbell rang.