Emily and Einstein

by Linda Francis Lee

  “That’s it? Good luck? You’re an editor. You’re my sister. The least you could do is help me.”

  I watched Emily’s temple, fascinated by the way I could sense blood pounding through the veins.

  “Fine, write the book and then I’ll tell you what I think.”

  “Like I said, Em, I’m not going to write the freaking thing first.”

  “It is rare that an unpublished author with no particular credentials gets published without first writing the book, or at least a good portion of it.”

  “You’re just saying that so you don’t have to help me. Figures. You never want to help me!”

  “That isn’t true.”

  “Then prove it. Just listen to what it’s about. How hard is that?”

  They stared at each other for a moment before Emily said, “All right. What’s it about?”

  Jordan’s ire burned out as quickly as it had ignited, and her excitement rushed back. “It’s about Mom!”

  Even I was thrown by this. Emily rarely spoke about her infamous mother.

  “What are you talking about, Jordan?”

  The younger sister launched into an excited if somewhat erratic spiel about a biography/memoir of the great Lillian Barlow and what it was like to live with her. “Everyone who knows she was my mom wants to know what she was like. I’m calling it My Mother’s Daughter. Isn’t that great?”

  You’d think Jordan had shot Emily between the eyes.

  “I was thinking about it and it occurred to me,” Jordan continued, “that it would be totally awesome if you, as her other daughter, edited it!”

  Silence. Then, “I can’t do that,” Emily said, her voice strained.

  Watching Jordan from my vantage point as an uninterested, though keen, observer brought home the fact that my sister-in-law was a living roller coaster of emotion. Up, down, zinging every which way.

  “You can’t or you won’t?” Jordan fired back.

  “It’s a conflict of interest.”

  “Only if you want it to be. Just read what I have. It’s not that long.”

  Emily shook herself. “No.”

  “I knew it! Ever since I was little you always had a book in your hand. You were always reading something. Big books, little books. Long-as-hell books! But you won’t even read my short proposal!”

  Emily turned away and Jordan visibly tamped down her anger.

  “Aw, Em, don’t be that way. Just read a little bit. It’s not like it’s going to take up tons of your time.”

  “I said no.”

  Emily left the room. Jordan was wise enough not to follow.

  *

  For two of the three days it took my stomach to recover from the unfortunate Lucky Charms episode, Emily and Jordan barely spoke. They came and went, passing carefully in the narrow hallways like ships in the Panama Canal. This would have been fine with me, but while they were ignoring each other it spilled over and they ignored me too.

  During this time I became consumed by a new understanding. I had to find a way to fix my own life since clearly the old man was no help. Emily couldn’t do it; she could hardly help herself. Jordan was worthless—not that I would have turned to her anyway. And even if I could figure out how to use the telephone, I doubted a call to my lawyer would produce more than a hang up.

  Which left my mother. She might be a harridan of the first order, but she was a harridan who could get things done. Stat. I had no clue what exactly she could do, but it occurred to me that if anyone could solve this whole dog dilemma it was Althea Portman. She was the only person I knew who could make magic happen. Hadn’t she gotten my wealthy father to marry her? Then later, the woman with virtually no art credentials had landed her very own one-woman show at one of the city’s most prestigious art galleries. Wasn’t that a feat worthy of a magician? If I wanted her to make some magic happen for me, I had to find a way to get her to the Dakota and make her realize Einstein was me.

  Easier said than done.

  But the solution came an hour later when one of the building’s staff members slipped a notice under the front door. My eyes might not have been the best, but they were good enough to make out the big red block letters that spelled out LATE. The maintenance fees for my apartment hadn’t been paid since my unfortunate demise.

  Maintenance in Manhattan co-ops is a staggering expense. My maintenance at the Dakota was more than most people spent on their mortgage. Not that I ever gave it a thought when I was a man. My accountant took care of all that. So I couldn’t understand why he had let it go now.

  I went in search of more information. On the desk in Emily’s room I found a letter from Gruber, Hartwell, and Macon. Through a series of eye squints, head cocks, and a basic understanding of how the Vandermeer Regal Portman world worked, I deduced that now that I, me, Sandy was dead, under the prenuptial agreement the apartment would be turned over to the Portman family estate. No news there.

  I continued to snuffle through my wife’s papers using my squint-and-head-cock thing until I figured out that the Portman Family Trust had advised Emily that they would not pay the maintenance on the apartment until she vacated the premises.

  Hmmm. This was a dicey move, as far as I saw it. What would stop the Dakota from taking legal action against the estate for not paying?

  I had never given much, if any, thought to how much Emily made working as an editor. But standing there I realized that my wife wasn’t the type to let bills go unpaid and would have taken care of the fees if she’d had the money. At the back of my mind, I had a half-formed thought that she had probably spent a fortune saving me, him, Einstein, whatever. But again, I wasn’t big on guilt.

  What I was big on was self-preservation and I wondered what would happen if I found a way to pay the past-due bills.

  If I could have I would have smiled. I had no doubt that if I foiled my mother’s plan, Althea Portman would storm back over here faster than a cab speeds down Broadway in the middle of the night with no traffic. Then I would get my chance to prove my identity to my mother.

  The only thing I had to do was determine how to pay the maintenance and figure out what would convince my mother that I was her son.

  emily

  I know my sister Emily loves me. But I also know that she believes she was the good one, the one who did everything right while I broke all the rules, disregarding everyone but myself. But life isn’t as black and white as she believes. Sometimes there is more to a person’s need for white picket fences than safety, just as sometimes there is more to a person’s rebellion than the need to lash out against rules.

  —EXCERPT FROM My Mother’s Daughter

  chapter seventeen

  Einstein stood in the gallery in that odd way he had of anticipating my arrival. But this time he wasn’t waiting to be taken out or given a treat. His teeth were clamped onto a maintenance fee late notice.

  My own mouth fell open. “Where did you get that?”

  He shook the notice at me in answer.

  “I can’t believe you went through my things!”

  He barked, the slip falling to the ground.

  I walked over and snatched up the notice. “This is none of your business.”

  He growled.

  I glared. “So you live here too. I get that. But until you have the ability to cough up this kind of money, keep your mouth shut.”

  He glared right back.

  Then we both jumped when someone spoke. “Uh hum.”

  We whirled around to find Jordan standing in the open doorway, her backpack slung over her shoulder. She glanced from me to Einstein, her face scrunched in disbelief. “I’d say you’re losing it, Em, talking to a dog, and all. But I swear he’s talking back. You two are way too weird for me.”

  With a grimace, she headed for her room.

  Einstein glared at Jordan. “Brat,” I’m sure he barked at her.

  “Don’t talk that way about my sister.”

  I shook myself. Jordan was right. I was talking to a
dog like he was human.

  “You’re making me crazy,” I said.

  He grabbed the late notice in his mouth and shook it.

  Whether Einstein understood me or not, the fact remained that the maintenance fee problem was a dark cloud hanging over my head. I knew Sandy’s parents were using the mounting debt as a way to pry me out of the apartment, but I refused to give in. If I walked away, if I let the Portmans have my home, somehow it proved that everything about Sandy and me was a lie.

  Now that I had accepted the reality of the journals, and even the other women, I had come back to the place I had been when I married him. I might be furious with him for his lies, but I believed he had cared for me, loved me in a way that was deeper than the surface feelings he was used to. A man who hadn’t felt something intense for me would never have held me like he was afraid of what would happen if he let go. End of story. I refused to believe anything else. His promise to give me the apartment represented the truth of the connection we’d had from the beginning.

  But sitting there, I couldn’t deny that in all the time we had been together, he had said he wanted me, needed me. He had never said he loved me.

  I felt the cracks in my foundation widen as I realized that I needed Sandy’s promise to be true because I needed to believe that I hadn’t given up so much—the home my mother gave me, my love, my pride—for a man who hadn’t really loved me in return.

  I told myself that I hadn’t believed blindly. My strength wasn’t an illusion. I wasn’t weak. I had believed in something real. To prove that, nobody was going to take Sandy’s gift away from me. Which meant I had to come up with the maintenance fee, if only to buy some time.

  I tipped my head back and pressed my eyes closed. “I need a miracle.”

  Einstein barked.

  When I didn’t immediately turn to him he barked again.

  “What is it, E?”

  He trotted to the stairs leading up to the suite, then looked back. When he saw that I was still standing there, he barked again.

  Hesitantly, I followed him to the suite, and once inside Einstein walked over to the beautiful old desk. He growled under his breath, then nudged a bottom drawer.

  “What?” I asked carefully.

  He barked again, nudging a second time.

  It was the strangest thing. For a second I felt something I could only call otherworldly. But then it was gone and I pulled the drawer open and looked inside.

  “Nothing here.”

  He growled his frustration before he used his muzzle to point toward the back of the drawer.

  My heart started to race and I looked at the dog. Half shaking, I reached inside. At first I didn’t feel anything. But then I felt a tiny groove in the wood.

  Einstein came up to me holding a sharp pencil between his teeth. Feeling strangely disconnected from the real world, I took the pencil and worked it into the groove, prying until the back panel of the drawer came free. When I emptied the contents I found a savings account book.

  “How did you know this was here?” I whispered.

  He just barked, nudging me on.

  I flipped open the leather cover, then fell back onto the floor when I saw that it was a joint account with both Sandy’s and my names at the top. The account balance nearly made me pass out. There was enough money to pay the maintenance for several months and then some. If I used the money I could buy myself a temporary reprieve.

  chapter eighteen

  Despite my mother’s feminist beliefs, and her absolute conviction that a woman should always support herself, she had a thing for men. Old ones, young ones, it didn’t matter, as long as they adored her.

  The summer I was eight, she took me with her to the Hamptons on Long Island. We stayed in a big cedar shingle house on the beach, a two-story fairyland owned by one of the long line of men she teased with her affection. He was letting her use the place for a month, and during that time the parties never stopped.

  The Professor came out with us, along with Mother’s other friends from the city. Most nights a darkly handsome man showed up for my mother’s parties. He was from Italy and spoke with an accent that made familiar words sound like poetry. I knew my mother well enough to know she had found her new toy, despite the Professor, despite the fact that she was staying in a house that belonged to another man.

  Mother and her group of hangers-on talked politics and glass ceilings, Karl Marx and corner offices. It was the usual suspects discussing the usual topics. One night I was half asleep on the sofa when the Italian leaned forward, taking the tips of my mother’s fingers.

  “You speak of a pragmatic world,” he commented, “where who succeeds and who fails is determined by a finite set of rules established by opinions that are not necessarily held by all. What about the power of something beyond what you can see?” He turned her palm over and traced the very center, the others watching. I watched too, feeling hot, embarrassed. “Where I am from,” he added, “we believe God looks deep inside us and determines who is worth saving.”

  The group was silent. My mother sat there, her martini held forgotten in her other hand.

  Her friend Willa laughed uncomfortably. “That’s ridiculous.”

  The Professor sat back and considered.

  After a second, my mother smiled boldly at the Italian. “Who are you and how did you get invited to my party?”

  “You invited me,” he said with an undercurrent I didn’t understand.

  Mother laughed then. “So I did. Well, fine, God it is. Though if you’re sure there is a God, then you’d do well to tell him to stop looking deep inside anyone around here and get busy working on far bigger problems than me.”

  I uncurled myself from the sofa, unused to talk about God. I expected everyone to laugh, tell my mother how clever she was, then move back to the kind of conversation they were used to.

  The man wouldn’t let it go. “But if He did look, what would He see, Lillian?”

  Lillian, spoken like a one-word poem.

  Mother shifted uncomfortably. Her friends murmured until Willa broke the strained moment. “Emily, sweetie, hand me that bottle of wine.”

  My mother blinked. “This is a ridiculous conversation. Emily, it’s past midnight. Why aren’t you in bed?”

  She didn’t look at me; she stared at the man. It was the Professor, seemingly amused, who broke the charged silence. Years later I searched until I found the exact quote he used.

  For as bats’ eyes are to daylight so is our

  intellectual eye to those truths which are, in their

  own nature, the most obvious of all.

  —Aristotle, Metaphysics, I (Brevior) i.

  As a child I hadn’t understood the words, but I could tell my mother had. She set her drink down and met the Italian’s eye.

  “If this God of yours looked deep inside me, or if you did, or if even I looked deep inside myself, all we’d find would be me, nothing more, nothing less. I’ve never pretended to be anything other than who I am.”

  The Italian smiled then, picking up her drink and handing it back. “To a maddeningly wonderful woman who is as intelligent as she is beautiful.”

  All these years later, I understood that Lillian Barlow had never been a woman interested in self-reflection. Was she afraid of what she would find? Or did she already know, and didn’t like what she saw?

  *

  For the month-long stay on Long Island, I had brought a stack of books to keep me company since none of the other adults who came and went had children. While the whole looking-deep thing had caught my attention, nothing else they talked about interested me.

  I sat in the room where I was staying with its white eyelet canopy bed and miniature vanity, the ocean just beyond the dunes, sounds of water lulling me while I read. I felt like a princess, serving fake tea to the stuffed animals in someone else’s room. Such a child’s game when on most Saturdays at home in the city I made real tea for my mother, who remained in bed until her friends showed up
in the afternoons.

  I would stay in the cedar shingle house forever, I promised myself. I would sink my toes in the warm sand, build castles, and hide among the stuffed animals and dolls when my mother and her friends returned to the city.

  After breakfast each morning, my mother and I went to the beach. She laid in a lounge chair, outlining an article or writing letters to editors around the country with her current list of complaints. While she worked, I read or stood at the edge of the water, looking out but never going in.

  One night toward the end of the month while a party raged on, I found myself alone in my room, bored and hot. I had gotten tired of fake teas with childish toys. I had read all my books, everything from Eloise to a Young Reader on the ocean that my mother had bought me. Lillian Barlow thought I should learn about currents and tsunamis, but she hadn’t thought to teach me how to swim.

  When I left my room that night, I didn’t intend to go to the beach. Dressed in my nightgown I walked downstairs, past the adults amused at “Lillian’s little woman,” and out the back door to get away from the noise.

  The moon was high, the black sky dotted with stars. I made my way over the dunes, the still-warm sand sifting between my toes. The beach was empty, the ocean spread out before me. I looked up at the sky, thinking about the Italian’s words. Lying back in the sand I wondered if God really was watching, and if He was, what did He see deep inside me.

  *

  When I became an editor, I was drawn toward manuscripts that stretched the mind. In college I had learned that through reading, difficult ideas and even unpalatable truths could be digested in manageable bites. When I thought about Jordan’s pitch of My Mother’s Daughter, I felt certain that no matter how she doled out the pages, they would not be manageable bites, at least for me.

  Jordan and I had barely spoken since she pitched her proposal. I couldn’t put into words what I felt. Threatened. Or maybe jealous. I knew her version of life with Mother would be different from mine. I loved my sister, but I didn’t want to read about how great she and Mother got along.

  Jordan was still asleep when I headed for work. I had the savings account book Einstein had guided me to in my purse, but I was still unsure what I was going to do with it.