“No, I don’t mind at all,” I say. “I want to meet them.”
“I am worried about your meeting them. They can be quite sharp.”
I give Mitchell a Paddington stare over the top of my menu. He might see it as the furious stare of a human being, not the inscrutable one of a fictional Peruvian bear. “Some people think I’m quite sharp myself.”
Mitchell shakes his head.
“Not that kind of sharp. Not everything is about how smart you are. Some of it is—social.”
“Is it?” I say, marveling.
“You know it is. Don’t be silly. My family can be difficult, if they feel there is a challenge to the accepted order of things. I am just trying to prepare you.”
“I appreciate your concern,” I say brightly. “And now I had better concentrate on eating, or I’ll be late for work.”
“That’s another thing,” he says. “Your job. I don’t think you need to work for extra money any longer. I will provide for everything you need because of the baby. You don’t need to worry about any of that. And I know it isn’t up to me—of course, you’re very much your own person—but I really think you should resign.”
I hope they don’t find other ways to make the pressure work in New York; the water towers are so beautiful. And simple, and intelligible. Can you love something because you understand it? Why don’t they advertise on the water towers? You could do such funny things with them. They could make them look like giant tins of Bird’s Custard. Bournville Cocoa. Lyle’s Golden Syrup. A kind of English retail nostalgia across the skyline of New York. I bet there is a city ordinance to stop it.
“In fact, I don’t want to insist, but please give it some serious thought, Esme. I don’t want you working in that drab little secondhand store when you meet my mother.”
AFTER MY LUNCH of quails and hegemony I come back to The Owl and say to George, who is in the main chair, “Who cleans the shop?”
“Excuse me?” says George. It is not a good sign.
“Who cleans? Do you have a cleaner?”
“Tee cleans the windows,” says Luke.
“And Luke does the nightly vacuuming,” says George.
“Esme does the vacuuming,” says Luke.
“I don’t mean that so much as actual cleaning. Who cleans the toilet?”
The toilet down there is revolting; it has a spongy red mouth glued fast to the seat, voluptuous and red. It bothers me for symbolic reasons as well as hygienic.
George gazes at me. “It’s a question that has never occurred to me. Somebody must, I assume.”
He has had the shop since 1973.
“Where are the cleaning things?” I ask.
“They would be—at the drugstore. If you take some money out of the register, Esme, you can go buy them.”
“Okay,” I say, but before I can even open it, George says, “But be sure not to get anything with harmful chemicals in it. Especially in your condition.”
I shouldn’t have asked. I should have just got them.
“I think you would be better getting some lemon juice and some vinegar. And a scouring pad. Not an aluminum one.”
“Can I get bleach?” I say, as I open the till.
“Bleach!” says George, as if the word is a terrible profanity. “No. No no. Put the money back.”
“I won’t get bleach,” I say. “I’ll get Ecover.”
George shakes his head. “Put the money back. Put it back, Esme. I’ll go.”
I close the register. “Okay. And please can you get some rubber gloves?” He turns to stare at me again. “You know—a pair of Marigolds—do you have Marigolds here? Yellow rubber gloves?”
“You know that latex can be incredibly dangerous? Especially with the cornstarch they’re dusted with. Latex molecules adhere to the cornstarch, and you can breathe them in. If you are allergic, you can get anaphylaxis from latex gloves.”
“I don’t mean the kind that surgeons wear, and I wasn’t going to inhale them. I mean the kind that you wear to clean the toilet. Yellow ones. No cornstarch.”
He trundles off down Broadway in search of cleaning agents that don’t work.
“How can he be more worried about Marigolds than germs?” I say.
“What’s with the sudden urge to clean?” asks Luke.
“My cleaning urge is not sudden. But Mitchell said—I mean—I think the store might be a bit drab. I don’t know—”
Luke nods.
“What?” I say.
“Nothing.” Luke walks rapidly to the back of the store with a pile of books, and then rapidly back again. He still has the pile of books in his hand.
“What?” I say again. “What’s the matter?”
“Nothing. You’re being very—wifely.”
Luke doesn’t talk to me like this. It stings.
“I think he has a point,” I say.
“Evidently.”
“Whatever,” I say. I hate that word, but I am hoping Luke hates it more.
“Take charge of the front,” Luke says. “I’m going to be dealing with the Internet orders.”
“Fine,” I say. I watch him stalk up the stairs.
There are two customers in the shop. They look very settled. I think of ways to get rid of them so that I can argue with Luke.
“Gosh,” I say loudly, “I had no idea that it was so late. We’re closing early, aren’t we?” He stares at me over the banister in disdain and puzzlement, and then goes back to the computer screen. I wait for the power of suggestion or discomfiture to propel the people out of the shop, but it doesn’t work. Scanning our little shelf of CDs, which still sell quite well, I pick out The Best of Christian Rock and take the disc from its pristine case. I press “play.” After a minute, both customers shoot out of the shop.
Luke is looking in their wake. “Esme, take this crap off,” he says.
I leave it playing. I think about what I want to say to him, and then I decide that I will forgo being nice, and be truthful.
“You’re treating me badly,” I say.
Luke makes a good job of looking bewildered. “I’m not treating you badly. I just don’t want to hear that Jesus loves me with a lame guitar riff in the background and a drummer who sounds like he’s playing a different song.”
“Not the music. You were mean about Mitchell.”
He shrugs. “Yeah.”
He carries on working at the computer. I leave the music on, just to infuriate him, and start to put the new CDs in order. The uncompanionable minutes tick by.
“You’re so wrong about Mitchell,” I say.
“I told you before, I don’t have an opinion on Mitchell,” Luke says. He types. He picks up another book, opens it to the title page, types some more.
“You don’t know anything about him.”
“I know, that’s what I said. I kind of have to work, here?”
“You just seem to be judging him. He has a perfect right to express an opinion on what the shop is like—anybody does.”
Luke says nothing at all.
“Really. Free speech. You’re supposed to be fond of that?”
“Esme. Leave it alone. Please.”
“You just have no idea. He has had to work really hard to get where he is.”
“Oh sure, it’s nice to see someone from that kind of background struggle through. And when you say ‘where he is,’ where is that, exactly? I have no idea. Does he manage hedge funds? Sell arms?”
I feel a surge of unholy triumph that I’ve got him to respond. Perhaps I am deeply unpleasant.
“You want him to be a hedge fund man so that you can despise him more. He teaches economics at the New School, that’s all. He’s not a stockbroker. He’s got a PhD from the LSE.”
Luke is in full flow now. He is standing up, his fists clenched. “A PhD from the LSE? Does talking in acronyms that no one else will understand make you feel better? Seems to me you two are a good fit.”
“And it seems to me that you’re desperate to justify
your lack of ambition by sneering at other people who have some. Mitchell’s just been offered a faculty job at Berkeley. You don’t get invited to a place like that just because of your background.”
“Er, yeah, honey, that’s exactly what you do.”
I say nothing at all. I squeeze the pencil in my hand until it snaps.
“Berkeley,” says Luke. “Wow. I guess you’ve made it. We’ll sure miss you.”
I go downstairs, get my bag, and come back to the front. “Tell George I feel sick,” I say. “You won’t be lying.” I march out of the shop.
I hear the door burst open again behind me. Luke runs out and stands in front of me on the street.
“Let me past,” I say. I try to push past him, but he just moves again. I say, “I want to hit you.”
“Too bad,” he says. “We’ve just covered for and tried to help you for days because of the baby—now we cover for you because you’re pissed off? You’re coming back inside, or you’re fired.”
“You can’t fire me.”
“Watch me.”
He stops. So do I.
“You’re going to Berkeley with him? Just like that? You’re at the start of a PhD yourself, right? Is that just bullshit too? It means nothing to you now that you’ve got your man?”
I raise my hand to slap him. I want to slap him very, very hard. He catches my wrist. “Think,” he says. He is almost gentle.
We both—I think we both—see George at the same time. He is standing a little way off, his arms by his sides, holding two carrier bags from Whole Foods.
Luke lets go of my wrist. I am out of breath. George looks at us, and then pointedly back at The Owl.
“I hate to interrupt,” he says, “but the store doesn’t seem to be quite so well staffed as it was when I left.”
“Come back inside,” Luke says to me, in a quieter tone. “Come back inside. I’m yelling at a pregnant girl on the street.”
“I think you should apologize,” I say. He casts his eyes to the heavens.
“Yeah, I should. And so should you, for coming out with that—that misguided crap about ambition. So, shall we go back into the drab bookstore and apologize to each other?”
“If you both want to continue in your employment, it might be a good idea,” says George.
“All right,” I say. Luke takes my arm and propels me back round. We follow George inside. The very dreadful Christian-rock lyrics are still playing, and nobody has stolen the money from the register.
I turn the music off and sit down in the chair at the front. Luke stands on the bottom stair, a hand on each banister. George has put the carrier bags on the counter and is standing in front of them. We are all silent. Nobody apologizes to anybody.
I go to the basement, with its single, low-watt lightbulb illuminating the grime, and I set to work. I wear the rubber gloves, and I clean the toilet with its horrible red mouth seat cover, and the stained basin, and all around the revolting little bathroom. I am deeply ashamed that I didn’t think of it before. I spend so much time making sure the shop is tidy, but I was assuming that somebody else did all the menial cleaning. Maybe I am going to fit right in with Mitchell’s people after all.
When I come back up, Luke has finished his shift and is gone.
THE FOLLOWING MORNING, Mitchell turns up outside my apartment in a black car. I knew he had a car, but I have never seen it before. I don’t know where he keeps it, but when people have finished telling you how near you are to a rat in any part of Manhattan, moving on from the near certainty that you’ve just inhaled cockroach limbs, they start talking about how insane it is to have a car here, naming prices for parking that are on a par with my rent.
I come down with my bags; the tiny boot is full of Mitchell’s stuff, so we have to put mine in the back. The back is tiny too, and yet the car seems long and sleek. It is all car and no space.
“Do you like it?” asks Mitchell, casting a loving glance at its insides, which probably cost the lives of several cows and a couple of tortoises. Or is it walnuts?
“Yes,” I say politely. “What kind is it?”
He says that it is a twin-turbo double-jewel-powered Aston Martin with a wraparound lynx action, or something very like that. I say that that is very nice.
“But you won’t be able to keep this when the baby comes,” I say. “You’ll have to get—I don’t know—the kind that is the very safest.”
Mitchell turns to me. He looks like a model for Munch’s The Scream. When he speaks, even his voice is pale.
“The . . . baby . . . can go in the back,” he says.
I glance over my shoulder, enjoying myself.
“Then I’d better not eat much between now and July,” I say. “Are we going to go soon?”
Mitchell switches the car on and we swoosh off to the Hamptons.
As we are driving out along the flat American expanses of the Long Island Expressway, Mitchell says that there is nothing to worry about in the way I am dressed, and that I shouldn’t be nervous.
I reply that I am not nervous.
“There’s no reason to be.”
“Good. And there is nothing wrong with the way you’re dressed either,” I say, in reassuring tones. He looks a little puzzled, but doesn’t pursue it.
“Are you nervous?” I ask.
“I rarely introduce women to them,” he says.
Mitchell can say things that scald me, as if I have inadvertently stuck my hands in boiling water.
“And this time you’re introducing your pregnant fiancée.”
“Yep.”
“Will they think you are only marrying me for the sake of the baby?”
There is no answer. There is just the black sound of Mitchell’s laughter.
“Are you?” I say. “Mitchell? Are you?”
He stops laughing. “No, as a matter of fact,” he says. “No. I told you, Esme Garland. I have singled you out from all the world.”
I am basking in this sentence when Mitchell, very uncharacteristically, lets out a long and sonorous fart.
He starts laughing again at my expression.
“My mother can’t bear people farting,” he says, “I mean, in a really OCD fucked-up way. So, I guess either I need to fart because I am getting near to her, or I let them out before I get there. But nobody farts in the Hamptons.”
“Really? The air must be very clear.”
“You can see for miles.”
WE EVENTUALLY ARRIVE in a seaside village: clapboard houses of pastel hue, a pretty little schoolhouse that ought to have Laura Ingalls on the steps, and a post office that is open alternate mornings in the winter.
We go first to the Winslow House, owned by a man called Carter Winslow, who has said we can use it for the whole visit. Outside the house is a whitewashed fence, and then the Naples yellow of the sand and the pale blue of the winter sea stretching out to the horizon. On one of the fence posts, someone has tied a red bow, for Christmas.
Carter Winslow is in Singapore, doing something with money.
Mitchell checks his phone for instructions. The house is unlocked, and we have been given the Blue Room. When we go in, we are greeted with an outpouring of light, of sea light, from the window. Even the shadiest corners of the room are lightened by the radiant turquoise light. Outside, a rickety wooden jetty juts into the sea.
The walls are papered with some soft blue floral pattern, and there are twin beds with a wool blanket on each, the old-fashioned kind that have a silk edge in the same color as the wool. The beds are iron; they have a flavor of wartime England, as if they were painted by Eric Ravilious.
“Like it?” Mitchell asks.
I beam at him.
“Not sure about the twin beds,” he says. “That’s probably Mother, allowing us a room together but making herself feel better by making sure they’re twins. No, Esme, don’t get comfortable. We should walk across and meet them.”
Mitchell’s parents live in the next house along the shoreline. Their house i
s grander than the Winslow House, which twenty minutes ago I would have been hard-pushed to believe.
Mitchell ushers me into a room with pale gray walls and gray woolen rugs on the wood floor. Translucent white blinds are pulled down; otherwise we would be able to see the sea. Over the fireplace is a painting that looks like a John Marin. It probably is a John Marin. Mitchell’s mother—I assume it is Mitchell’s mother—is sitting on the sofa. She is reading.
“Mother!” says Mitchell, and goes over to the sofa to kiss her. She submits to the kiss, and then finds her bookmark and lays her book carefully aside. She stands up, looking at me.
“Mother, this is Esme. Esme Garland, my mother, Olivia van Leuven.”
Mitchell’s mother moves forward, murmurs, “So pleased,” holds out her hand, and places her cool cheek against mine for a scant moment. She is a scented person—she smells of violets. She withdraws from me and stands still, without saying anything. She is wearing an English Liberty print blouse and a pair of beautifully cut trousers. And pearls.
“And here is my father,” says Mitchell, as a man comes quietly in. Mitchell performs the introductions again. Cornelius van Leuven is an older, more chiseled, more tanned version of Mitchell. He shakes my hand and says good afternoon.
“You have cut your hair quite charmingly,” Olivia says. “Presumably you have done it yourself. I doubt that a salon would have managed it with so much—brio.”
Her manner of speaking has some sort of affinity with dandelion clocks—her words float gently in the powdery air of her living room without any seeming intent. The manner is somewhat at odds with the message.
“My friend cuts it,” I say.
“Yes,” she says. “And is hairdressing his profession?”
It is tempting to say, of course, that Stella is working on an exhibition of lesbian sex-dungeon photographs, but no. Treat each blow with a kiss.
“She’s at Columbia with me.”
“Oh yes. Mitchell spoke of that,” she says. “Drinks, Cornelius?”
Mitchell’s father asks us what we would like, and then Mrs. van Leuven indicates a sofa for us to sit on. Mitchell holds my hand when we sit down on it together. I think this is very nice of him. Then I see him grinning at his mother, and the hand-holding suddenly feels like a performance. There is something in all this that is amusing Mitchell.
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