Surrounding her, all the time, like a cloud of gnats, was Hazel’s awareness (everyone’s awareness, she supposed) that there was something unseemly about being a divorced woman. Perhaps it was the mystery of what it was that was keeping an attractive woman all alone. Perhaps it was the unbecoming notion of a woman in her forties still going out on dates like a teenager. Perhaps it was the cliché of the desperate divorcée, bitter and on the hunt.
With a sigh, Hazel pushed through the front doors of Lord & Taylor—and there, just a few paces ahead of her, was Remy. Hazel could have caught up to her if she wanted to, could have said a friendly hello. Instead she slowed her steps, let Remy continue into the women’s section. This city really was too small. Hazel was already in the men’s section; there was no need to pretend to want to chat with Remy. Absently she picked up a packet of boxer underwear, but she couldn’t help it: she looked ahead to where Remy was—and saw her fingering a big ruby-colored maternity blouse.
Hazel dropped the packet of underwear. She tried to retrieve it but her fingers wouldn’t quite work. Again she looked over, to make certain she was correct. Yes, there it was, the sign overhead: MATERNITY. Now Remy was holding the blouse up against her front, admiring herself dreamily in the mirror.
So, it was possible, after all these years. Hazel had assumed that was one thing that would never work out for them; after all, it had taken long enough for Hazel herself to conceive. The doctors had said Nicholas had a low sperm count, that his sperm were “weak swimmers”—well, something like that, was how she had understood why it had taken four long years for him to finally fertilize one of her perfectly healthy eggs.
“May I help you, ma’am?” The store clerk, very young, bent down to retrieve the packet of underwear.
“Oh . . . yes. I’m looking for a good pair of men’s wool socks. The best you have.” To Hazel’s surprise, her hands were trembling. Ridiculous. Why should it matter to her if Remy was pregnant? Well, because her own daughter would now have a sibling. Hazel recalled the vision she used to have: the boy and girl in front of the steps to the beautiful house. Was this to be the boy, then?
Hazel followed the young man toward the socks.
“These are our most elegant ones,” he told her, displaying a pair of dark gray knee-highs. “Merino wool. Made in Italy.”
Ridiculous they looked. A skinny, droopy, overpriced pair of socks. She rubbed the long toe between her fingertips. What if Hugh thought a pair of socks like this piddly? On the other hand, what if he thought them extravagant, too much money spent on something unnecessary? The key to this thing with Hugh, she knew, was not to appear too invested, not to need him too much.
“The toe is double-knit,” the man told her.
“It feels thin,” Hazel said, concerned. Maybe this wasn’t the perfect gift after all.
“If you’d like something thicker, we have these over here.” The young man was turning toward a tree of socks atop one of the glass cabinets. “Or if you want something in between, we have these.” He reached underneath, into the glass cabinet, where an array of socks were layered one over the other in a fan. “They come with a lifetime guarantee. When they wear out, you just send them in for a replacement pair.”
Hazel felt her brow furrowing, her heart racing as the man handed her a pair to admire.
“Is there a problem?” he asked.
How could she explain? The problem was that only the perfect gift would do. Because it was all so difficult, and the chances so slim. Whatever she gave Hugh had to be just right, because if it wasn’t, and things didn’t work out, she would blame herself—for buying the wrong gift, for doing the wrong thing.
“I . . . I’m sorry. I need to think this through a bit more.” It mattered now, somehow, so much more than she had thought it mattered.
“Yes, of course,” the young man said, “take your time.” But he took the pair of socks from her and put them back under the glass, as if to show her that she had missed her chance.
AT HOME, IN THE GOLDEN LIGHT OF AFTERNOON, NICHOLAS SAT AT his desk in the music room.
It was his favorite room, a former screened-in porch the previous owners had winterized, which now housed the piano, an incongruous flowered settee, a long glass coffee table, and an enormous couch Remy called “the miracle sofa” because it was covered in some tweedy fabric that managed to mask whatever was spilled on it—a frequent enough occurrence. So many friends and guests had sat there, wine or coffee in hand, listening, laughing, or joining in with their own music-making. Three walls of windows looked onto the trees and shrubbery that bordered the majestic house next door, and during the day, when the sun was at just the right angle, the room became part of the landscape, the brownish carpet (under which, the realty agent had repeatedly assured them, was a beautiful parquet floor) soaking up the warm rays, with flickering light and shadows of tree branches passing across it like a benediction. A twist of a handle tilted open each tall window, admitting the twittering of birds, the chattering of squirrels, and breezes adorned by neighborhood sounds—the postman chatting with a dog walker, or from Beacon Street the occasional screech of brakes or bleat of a car horn. Now Nicholas could hear the T conductor’s ineffectual ringing of a tinkly trolley bell; the house, an ivy-covered brick one in Brookline, was just a block from the C-line.
Trying not to submit to distraction, Nicholas again faced his work in progress.
It was the large-scale piece he had begun the year he met Remy, the year that everything became complicated. Sometimes he allowed himself to suppose that was the root of the problem (although he didn’t really believe that kind of psychobabble). Yet it was true that the point when he had begun having trouble was soon after his return from Italy—that his realizations about his mother and about Remy had somehow stymied his progress. It was as though the complexities of life had crept into the work itself, not in a way that might add texture or depth, but in a confounding way.
And so Nicholas had put the piece aside and for years not looked back at it. All the while, though, he intended to return to it, and when last year he finally took it up again, he found it as promising as he remembered. For nearly a year now he had been working on it—yet still it wasn’t right. Though individual sections were quite good, the structure was too broad, almost meandering. It needed to be reined in—but to do so seemed to compromise all he wanted to convey. At times he thought the piece Promethean, in other moments, simply a mess. What had begun as an excursion into his youth in Scotland had taken a darker turn in the second movement and from there grew increasingly unwieldy.
He blamed various factors. As his finished pieces won increasing praise, he was continually receiving commissions for other, smaller works—ten-minute pieces, usually, nothing overly daunting—yet fulfilling these requests meant setting this larger piece aside for long periods. And while time away from a work in progress usually allowed him to view it with a fresh eye, with this piece it had been a struggle to find, again, his original impulse.
Yet he was determined to finish it. There was too much good in it not to.
Today, though, Nicholas had barely lifted his mechanical pencil. Hearing the front door click open, and the thunk of a heavy book bag, he called, “That you, Jess?” eager for distraction.
“Hey, Dad.” There came the faint squeak of the refrigerator door, and Jessie pouring herself a glass of juice. Nicholas waited hopefully as she came to peer into the music room.
“There’s a bunch of bands playing on Lansdowne Street Saturday night.” Her tone was suspiciously nonchalant. “It’s an all-ages show. Some kids from school are going.”
The evasive “kids from school” made him wonder if that boy Kevin might be there.
Jessie took a swig of her cranberry juice. “So . . . can I go?”
Nicholas suspected he should say no. Hazel probably would have. If only Remy were home, she would know what to do. Shouldn’t she be home now? Where was she, anyway? Suddenly everything felt precarious.
“Ten! Dad, come on!”
“Well, eleven, then. As long as you all stick together.”
“Dad! Some of the best bands won’t even start playing until eleven!” Jessie stomped off in a way that let Nicholas understand he had been too lenient; clearly she was satisfied with the outcome, not to have wrangled for an extra hour.
“Ingrate,” he muttered as the door to her room slammed. The girl he once knew had been replaced by this foreign creature who pouted and sulked. Nicholas blamed the teen novels she had been reading all summer—morbid tales in which the protagonist invariably had a terminal illness, a drug addiction, or multiple personality disorder. (Glenda the psychologist of course said they were “developmentally appropriate” and that Jessie was learning about the real world in a safe way.) The Barbies she and her best friend, Allison, once worshipped had been stuffed into a plastic bin in the hall closet; searching for something on an upper shelf, Nicholas would glimpse the mass grave of plumed heads, naked legs and feet in permanent demi-pointe, and recall cheerier times. These days Jessie and Allison spent hours locked in the bathroom, emerging with their hair tied in little twisting foam-rubber wires.
“She’s thirteen,” was how Remy explained it. “It’s what thirteen-year-old girls do.”
But to Nicholas a pouting female felt like an allegation against him. His daughter’s new sensitivity seemed to him an indictment—yet what had he ever done to her?
Enough of this. He stood, went upstairs to her room, and knocked firmly on the door.
From the other side came harangued footsteps, and then, “What do you want?”
“I’d like to talk to you.”
The door opened slowly, like a bridge lowered over a moat. “Yes?”
“There’s a matter I’ve been meaning to speak to you about.” But already he could feel himself faltering. After all, she was usually quite sweet, really.
“Fine, what?”
It wouldn’t do to start a fight. He never did like to make trouble. Quickly he said the first thing he could come up with: “Wasn’t Jasper to have returned to school along with you this fall?”
The guinea pig. Jessie claimed to have rescued the thing from a science teacher’s menagerie last June, when students took the animals home for the summer. But Jessie still hadn’t brought Jasper back.
“If I’m not mistaken, that poor, already sluggish creature is now nearly a month behind in his academic career.”
“Dad! If you saw the conditions there, you would totally cringe. It’s inhumane.”
“Are you sure that’s not an exaggeration?”
“Believe me,” Jessie said, “we’re doing a service.”
“For . . . the guinea pig?”
“His name is Jasper.”
“For Jasper.” Nicholas frowned. “And his middle school education.”
“Yes. Believe me.” Jessie said this very seriously.
Nicholas thought for a moment. “Well, so. All right, then.”
He couldn’t help it, couldn’t help his pride, that this girl was his daughter, the same one who had once been a mere frog-shaped newborn who fit in the crook of his arm, sucking on his pinkie, with eyes that sometimes crossed, listening to his singing with an involuntary, twitchy, blissful smile on her tiny moist lips.
“Is that it?” she asked, as if forever interrupted.
“Well, yes.”
“Okay.” The door was closing. Nicholas’s panic returned, as if he were about to lose something.
“What are you doing in there, anyway?” he heard himself asking.
The door stopped moving. “I’m thinking,” came the voice.
“Oh, well, yes, please, go on, cerebrate.”
The door closed.
Nicholas remained there even when he had heard the lock on the door click shut. Something was happening, he just couldn’t put his finger on it. If only he could regain control of the situation.
Chapter 3
A MONDAY, A NIGHT WITHOUT CONCERTS OR SYMPHONIES, THE first truly cold October night, dying leaves trembling, moon hanging like a shard of ice. None of Remy’s sweaters was warm enough. She settled on a thick wool turtleneck the same brown as her eyes, and then she and Nicholas went to pick up Yoni. Nicholas was taking them to dinner.
“To celebrate!” he said now, steering the old Volvo down Huntington toward Yoni’s building.
Remy asked what they were celebrating.
“Our anniversary!”
She raised an eyebrow. “And which anniversary would that be?”
“It’s nine years ago that we took our first vacation together.” Nicholas’s voice was chipper and matter-of-fact. “As I recall, the sand on the beach was so hot you leapt onto my back and ordered me to carry you back to the hotel.”
Remy had to smile as Nicholas continued. “It’s six years ago that you cooked the best vegetarian bouillabaisse one could ever hope for, for the first and thankfully last time. It’s—let’s see—two years ago that you put on that polka-dot skirt for Vivian’s opening. And it’s twelve hours ago that I had the intense pleasure of lying next to you as you slept, watching your mouth twitch.”
“My mouth doesn’t twitch.”
“Like a rabbit. Always nibbling.”
That was Nicholas. He might forget your actual anniversary, but he could come through with some other one when you least expected it.
It was part of the bargain that Remy had agreed to—though at the time she hadn’t thought of it that way. She had just followed her heart and found herself in this shared life. If she pondered it too much, their ending up together seemed haphazard. But really that was how most things in life came about—people just didn’t like to admit it.
People were always looking for meaning. Remy knew better than to second-guess her luck. When her birthday went unrecognized, her haircut unnoticed, she reminded herself that none of it meant much in the long run. When during intense bouts of work Nicholas seemed, for days, to forget her existence, when he tossed off some comment that made her feel small, discarded . . . she knew he would make it up to her without even meaning to, in some other way. And sure enough, at some other point entirely, Nicholas would remark, with an enthusiasm close to disbelief, on her very presence, the taste of her tongue, the warmth of her palm in his.
At times this was enough for her. Other times she found herself wanting him to be someone else: the man who had come back from Italy to claim her, decisive and confident—not the one who was easily impressed by the simplest things, whether it was a colleague’s supposed friendship with President Clinton, or Gary’s risky sports bets, or Yoni’s real estate ventures. Not the one who was suddenly so ineffectual in dealing with his own daughter.
Yoni was there in front of the building, and hopped into the backseat with an air of propriety. He asked about the restaurant. Nicholas wouldn’t quite say what it was, only that it sounded intriguing, that they simply had to go. “A gypsy place,” he added, as if it were a type of cuisine.
“What does that mean?” Remy asked. “Is it Czech? Rumanian?”
“We’ll starve,” Yoni said.
Remy was glad to have him along. He often came to them for companionship, and for comforting, when his romantic escapades went awry. The conspicuous absence of the moment was Patricia, who seemed to have disappeared shortly after their trip to Madrid. And though Remy had thought Patricia perfectly nice, it was good to have Yoni back to his old self, independent of any one woman, reclined in the backseat as if this were his car and Nicholas and Remy his drivers. He claimed to be happier as a single man, said he was now cultivating a “friendship” with his previous girlfriend, Cybil—whom Remy had preferred to his other women, and who might even join them at the restaurant tonight.
“They have palm readers!” Nicholas added. “But for some reason there’s never anyone there.”
“We have to help them out,” Nicholas insisted. “Who else is going to? Ah, here we are.” He pulled up to the curb. “Go ahead, hop out. I’ll find a parking spot. See, doesn’t it look like a cozy place?”
The restaurant indeed looked cozy, perhaps too much so, more like someone’s living room, into which they hadn’t exactly been invited: through the window Remy could see a few tables, two of them occupied, as well as a couch and an armchair. Warm, dim lighting. Racks of wine against the wall. “Go on in,” Nicholas said as Remy and Yoni stepped out into the brisk air. “I’ll be back soon.”
“Good luck parking.” Remy pulled her coat tightly around her as Nicholas drove off. To Yoni she said, “He gets so excited about his own ideas.” It was what she liked about him; you never quite knew where you might end up.
They entered the little restaurant, just one small room, plastic flowers along the ceiling as if forgotten from another season. From stereo speakers came folk music played on some wailing instrument. Remy laughed at Nicholas’s enthusiasm, unworried by the way he had deposited her and Yoni in this strange place and then driven off without them.
The hostess, a small, gray-haired woman in a pilled sweater, looked shocked to see them. “Table for four, please,” Remy told her, then asked Yoni, “Did Cybil decide she was coming?”
“I told her I’d call her at seven-thirty,” he said but made no move to do so. “She wasn’t sure if she’d have finished her project or not.” Cybil worked at a high-end design firm near the waterfront.
They settled into a table in the corner of the room, near a small, square one where two men in wool caps were speaking a language Remy didn’t recognize. At another table a man who looked like a bulldog and a woman who looked like a fashion model were sipping coffee and ignoring each other. Some of the tables were laid with linen and silverware, but others had no tablecloths at all. “Is this a café or a restaurant?” Remy asked.
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