A Dual Inheritance

by Joanna Hershon

  When she returned, she sat right next to Vivi on the banquette. “So tell me something else,” she said. “Something good.”

  Vivi’s face cracked into the smile that Rebecca would always think of as the best. As if life really worked like a yearbook or a tabloid: best legs, best voice, best smile. “I’m pregnant,” Vivi said.

  “You—”

  “Yup.”

  Rebecca recalled the two different waiting rooms for both of Vivi’s abortions: one in college (the father was in her Italian poetry class; a sweet, brief encounter), and one that had put an end to a spectacularly bad affair in her mid-twenties, during which Vivi was frequently and uncharacteristically weepy.

  “Are you going to—”

  “Nope.” Vivi shook her head definitively. “Not this time.”

  Both times Vivi was sure that she’d done the right thing. And now? Rebecca scanned her friend’s face for anxiety. She saw none. Vivi seemed concerned only with her placement of pillows, and as she arranged herself on the window banquette it took several tries to get the velvet ones against her lower back just so. Vivi had always made a production of sitting exactly the way she wanted.

  “I’m sure about it,” she said now. “Four months,” said Vivi, placing her hand on her belly, which Rebecca only now noticed but for some reason had no inclination at all to touch. There it was: the bump; minor but there. And Rebecca realized then that Vivi was happy, really happy; during the past half hour, she’d been actively repressing the extent of her joy. Rebecca was suddenly aware of heat rising to her own cheeks, aware that this heat was a result of feeling too many things at once, including embarrassment, because Vivi was clearly worried how Rebecca would handle this news.

  “You’re pregnant,” Rebecca said weakly. She felt dizzy. “Boy, I should have called you back.”

  “It’s okay,” Vivi said.

  As Rebecca took in the smile, the posture, the slightly bowed head, it became evident that Vivi had found her pregnant persona. Rebecca couldn’t quite put her finger on it, but Liv Ullmann came to mind. A splash of Ingrid Bergman.

  “I’m happy for you,” Rebecca managed. “I don’t know who the father is, so that’s a little weird, but I’m really happy for you.”

  “You do know who he is, actually.”

  “The Sentimental Penis?”

  “Ew. Rebecca. It’s Brian,” said Vivi. She was nodding.

  As Vivi said Brian’s name, whoosh came the pine needles, the rush of nicotine, and the particular longing that accompanied being sixteen years old. It was a different class of longing—more desperate but also more hopeful—from the kind Rebecca had these days. “No way.”

  Vivi continued to nod.

  Rebecca pictured his shiny brown hair, that freckle-tan skin. She pictured his ease, the way he smiled while sitting on the branch of a tree. “Brian? The Dirty Hippie King?”

  “The who?”

  Rebecca shook her head fuzzily. “You had sex with Brian and you’re pregnant? You do know how to steal my thunder.” They were both smiling now, but Rebecca realized she was also shaking.

  “It’s been crazy,” said Vivi. “I was in Baja shooting with these leatherback-sea-turtle people—whole other story—and I bumped into him. On the beach. He had just finished surfing,” said Vivi. “That’s when I first called you,” she said. “I hadn’t even seen the Times article yet. And, listen—I know you don’t want to talk about it and I know your father dug his own hole, but I just want to say that it did cross my mind that the reporter was out to get him.”

  “So does Brian live in Baja?” Rebecca asked.

  “San Francisco. He’s a journalist, actually.”

  “What does he write about?” Rebecca inquired as if, at this point in the conversation, Brian’s bylines really mattered.

  “Food, politics.”

  “Food politics?”

  “Not really. More like separately—food and also politics. Rebecca,” said Vivi, suddenly impatient, “I’m so sorry about that article. I’m so sorry about your dad.”

  “I know,” she said.

  “And I know this isn’t great timing, my news—”

  “Don’t be ridiculous—please. It just makes it worse. It’s better right now if you talk.”

  And—almost obediently—Vivi began to ramble: “I never thought I’d even want to be pregnant before I was forty. Let alone before thirty-five. I was sure I’d wait till that last shriveled egg was crying out for mercy. That, or adopt. And, it’s funny, but for some reason I always pictured doing it on my own.…”

  Rebecca half-listened to Vivi, grateful to know that she could half-listen, that Vivi fully expected her to. She was not sure what she’d expected this evening, but this was definitely not it. Brian was from Greenwich, Connecticut. His father and Vivi’s father learned to sail at the same club on Fishers Island. Vivi had traveled around the world and attached herself to a pretty diverse sampling of men, but at the end of the day it was Brian she would choose, Brian Kells Avery (Rebecca remembered his full name from their boarding school facebook, as well as his puka-shell necklace in the picture, his sweetly mischievous grin). She felt her face flushing from the alcohol in a way that always brought it all back—drinking wine with the Shipleys in Anguilla and everything that followed.

  “Do your parents know you’re pregnant?” Rebecca asked now, even though she knew. Vivi had always told them everything.

  Vivi nodded. “They’re excited about the baby, but they’re worried that if we don’t get married now we might drag our feet too long. Or something. I’m not sure exactly what they’re afraid of. But I just—” Vivi took another slow sip of wine. “We’ll have a big party after the baby is born. My friend Marion—remember Marion?—she got married when she was six months’ pregnant, and she looked around at all the tables like: What the hell am I doing here?”

  Rebecca gnawed on an olive pit until it was smooth. “Did you just ask me if I remember Marion? As if I might not?”

  “It was a turn of phrase,” said Vivi.

  “Aha. Well, I’m surprised her family went for a big shotgun wedding. As I remember, they were pretty conservative.”

  “Yeah, well, Marion’s their only daughter,” said Vivi, neither acknowledging Rebecca’s slight aggression nor backing down. “I guess the idea of missing the opportunity to host her wedding trumped their politics.”

  “I guess so,” said Rebecca. “Good for them.”

  And suddenly she remembered a window. Or was it a terrace? Sitting by the window with Marion and Vivi. Rebecca couldn’t help remembering what Marion was wearing: a nubby wool miniskirt and Wellington boots. Spring.

  Rebecca: I heard you have to submit your parents’ tax returns in order to get into St. A’s.

  Marion: Bullshit.

  Rebecca: One of the members Maced an African American student outside the building last year. They said it was an accident. Like, whoops—sorry—we thought you were dangerous.

  Marion: Total and complete bullshit. Where do you come up with these fabrications?

  Rebecca: They have an undisputed history of anti-Semitism and racism.

  Marion: Welcome to America, where things can actually change.

  “So how is Marion?” she asked.

  Vivi looked at her shrewdly. “You don’t care about Marion,” she said.

  “You’re right,” said Rebecca, “I don’t.”

  She hadn’t smoked a cigarette in sixteen years—not since the night that Hugh lost two fingers—and, not for the first (or five hundredth) time, she really really wanted one.

  She settled for finishing her drink. She looked at Vivi, sitting on a banquette: black wrap dress and incomprehensible symbolic tattoos, the familiar way she ran a multi-ringed hand through her neo-hippie, still-blond hair. It struck her that—more than the fuller face and the lovely skin, more than her new no-joke cleavage that she was not afraid to flaunt—Vivi’s power lay here: Not once during the whole time that Rebecca had known her had Vivi ever
made a negative remark about her own appearance. She could be bloated beyond recognition and she would—Rebecca knew—find a way to telegraph that look as the way a woman should look.

  “You know what I thought of when I saw Brian again?” asked Vivi. “When we started talking on that beach?”

  Rebecca shook her head.

  “How you sounded after you met Gabriel,” she said. “I never imagined I could feel that level of pure interest.”

  She remembered that morning perfectly. Kissing Gabriel goodbye outside her apartment building. Taking her cordless phone onto the fire escape and watching the sunrise. Then calling Vivi, who mumbled, Hello? Hello? And Who is this?

  Just kill me now is what she’d said. What a drama queen.

  She’d taken a rare day out of town for a friend’s birthday. People lay around a swimming pool in the sun-dappled woods of the Catskills. That she’d chosen to surround herself with people, she realized—as she often did, a little too late—was a bad idea, because she wasn’t in any kind of social mood. She closed her eyes and tried to relax but instead found herself casting about for how, during law school—somewhere between wanting to help people and realizing she didn’t have a great legal mind—she’d been sucked into accepting a summer offer from a prestigious corporate New York firm despite never having wanted to work in corporate law, and how it was that she’d been at the same firm for over three years.

  But, for a second, none of it mattered—not her tenuous career track, not her antisocial tendencies—when this stranger arrived and waved a general friendly hello. He wasn’t particularly fit or spectacular-looking, but when he took off all of his clothes and jumped into the water, she felt it in her toes. It wasn’t that he’d stripped completely naked without modesty but that he’d somehow accomplished this without even a whiff of exhibitionism. She’d sat up taller, watching for what he’d do next. When he finally came up for air, he’d caught her staring, and she hadn’t looked away.

  Have a swim, he’d said. He didn’t sound foreign, not exactly, but he didn’t sound American, either.

  I forgot my suit. He laughed.

  I’m not into public nakedness. She’d shrugged. For me, that is. Works for you, though.

  Oh, you reckon?

  Later that day, when—fully clothed—he’d revealed himself as a corporate litigator, she’d been even more intrigued. He was passionate about his job, and for a while (six months? a year?) she saw her own work differently, because she saw everything differently, because—as Vivi had pointed out—that’s just how far gone she was.

  “So now you have that level of interest?” asked Rebecca. “In Brian?”

  Vivi nodded. “I mean, I think so.”

  “Proceed with caution,” Rebecca laughed, and she hated her own laugh, so dark and dry.

  “But would you ever trade what you had?” Vivi asked.

  “In a heartbeat.”

  “I’m just talking about the beginning,” maintained Vivi.

  But Rebecca had nothing more to say. Vivi’s insistence on romance—which had once been enthralling, then mildly annoying—only made her seem further away than ever. Rebecca couldn’t—or wouldn’t—relate.

  Vivi had barely touched her wine, but now she basically swilled it. “You know he asked if you were a surgeon or a CEO or something,” she said. “He assumed you were doing something important.”

  “Who did?”

  “Brian,” said Vivi.

  “The father of your child,” Rebecca said; again her dark laugh.

  “People always expect that you’re doing great things.” Vivi said this without a hint of pity. She said this as if to say: Pay attention. Rebecca wanted to stop her. She wanted to stop Vivi’s efforts to shore her up and also the sob that was spiraling upward from her gut with not a single, tolerable, possible resolution.

  But Vivi didn’t stop. “Because you are that person,” she said, deadly serious. “You were in high school, you were in college, and you are now.” Vivi leaned forward, so close that Rebecca could smell the sour-sweet warmth of Bordeaux. “You’re just in a funk. You’ve had a shitty shitty year.”

  “Shitty shitty bang bang.” Rebecca mimed a gun to her head.

  “Not funny.”

  “No,” Rebecca said, contrite, “you’re right.”

  By the time the food arrived, she was dizzy with hunger. She tore into bread and cannellini beans, the paper-thin prosciutto, the big green olives, and the cheese.

  “I can’t believe he really left,” Vivi said, quietly.

  “Well,” Rebecca said, “that’s because you’re an optimist.”

  “Is that so,” she said. “Because you know that when you say that, what I think you actually mean is dumb.”

  “I’m not going to even respond to that. You’re an optimist and a romantic. You are.”

  “Fine, but—”

  “From the moment I quit my job, we were doomed. I thought it wouldn’t matter to him, but it did. Sometimes things are simple.”

  “I guess,” said Vivi. “But he had been operating under the impression that you both wanted the same things. Right?”

  “What are you saying?”

  “Nothing. I’m just saying that when you met, and for a good couple of years, he thought you were after the same life. So he probably felt judged when you stepped off—what do you call it?”

  “The moving sidewalk,” Rebecca said.

  “Right,” Vivi said. “I love that image.”

  “Judged?”

  “Yes, judged.”

  “What are you trying to do to me? It’s over. Vivi, he left me.”

  “I know.”

  “And I know you’re a great big fan of his, but Gabriel only loved me when he thought my drive was really drive and not sheer anxiety.”

  “I just can’t believe that.”

  What Rebecca chose not to mention was that, despite how driven Gabriel was (and he was, and she’d loved that about him!), he’d always made a point of turning his BlackBerry off when at all possible. What Rebecca also chose not to mention was that his impatience with her had more than a little something to do with the fact that she was constantly checking messages and returning phone calls and that, when she finally went ahead and quit her job and still couldn’t manage to find a way to stop doing either one of these things, when she was still anxious and resisted his (and her therapist’s) suggestions to make time for him even when she had nothing but time—this was when their relationship took a truly bad turn.

  “Look,” Rebecca insisted, “people like Gabriel get it done. And he didn’t have the patience for my … current ambivalence with, well, pretty much everything. I was—I am pretty directionless right now. I’m not entirely sure I blame him. He’s basically a good person. Whatever that means.”

  “Don’t you know?”

  Rebecca slowly shook her head.

  “Well, that makes sense,” Vivi acknowledged. “That you would feel confused about that these days. I mean, with your dad—”

  “I said I don’t know,” Rebecca said, hoping to put an end to this thread of conversation.

  Vivi, to her credit, went silent. Until: “Sometimes you just remind me so much of my father.”

  Rebecca’s stomach was suddenly far too full. She felt nerves spike her gut and wished she’d stuck to olives. “I remind you of your father?”

  “What—I’ve said that before.”

  “No, you haven’t.”

  “Yes, I have. Of course I have.”

  “How do you mean?” asked Rebecca, as if she was only vaguely interested in knowing.

  “Well, you know, you’re both kind of idealistic and passionate and also kind of difficult.” She winced. “You’re both difficult to talk to sometimes. Sorry.”

  She shrugged. “Don’t be.”

  The waiter, with excellent timing, set down another martini. Rebecca took a greedy sip.

  “Okay,” Vivi said, dispensing with her worried expression. “Okay, listen. I have a brill
iant idea.”

  “Yes?”

  “Go see him.”

  “Go see who?”

  “My father.”

  Rebecca felt her stomach flip straight into her throat. As if she hadn’t thought of that already, over so many years, with accompanying fantasy scenarios of how such a visit might go. Thinking of Hugh never changed. No matter what her life looked like. And though she’d seen him at Vivi’s college graduation—and several times during that visit, once with her own father present—when Rebecca thought about Hugh Shipley it was always the two of them together in an unfamiliar room.

  “Go see your father?” she finally managed.

  “I mean go work for him,” said Vivi.

  “Volunteer?”

  “You obviously need a real change. And of course he always needs help. You have an Ivy League law degree and you’ve just—of your own accord—left one of the most powerful firms in the free world. So you need to figure some shit out. My parents are good at hosting confused people and—”

  “I don’t want to be that person.”

  “What person?”

  “That person—you know—who travels to Africa because they’re confused.”

  “My father did it.” Vivi shrugged.

  “That was the sixties. We know better now.”

  “You should call him. You should go.”

  Rebecca started to feel an uncomfortable pounding in her chest. She imagined sitting down at her butcher-block table and dialing Hugh and Helen’s number in Dar es Salaam. Hello? She could imagine Hugh’s voice—the somehow intimate timbre of it—and, stomach dropping, ears popping, she felt as if she were taking an elevator to the world’s highest floor.

  “Really?” she asked Vivi.

  “That’s what I’m saying.”

  Rebecca sat back. She set her drink down. “You know, your parents did invite me.”

  “When?”

  “A long time ago, but they did. They said it was an open invitation to visit wherever they moved in the world.” She neglected to mention that Helen had issued the invitation during Vivi’s high school graduation and that Rebecca was pretty sure that, even then, she hadn’t meant it.