The Smart One and the Pretty One

by Lazebnik, Claire

  “Actually,” Russell said, steering her toward the front door, “I feel like my past has gotten a real workout today. Which is good because it was getting flabby. You know how pasts get when they sit around watching TV all day.” He opened the front door. “Good-bye, Nickersons, one and all. You haven’t seen the last of us. Ava, I’ll call you. Say good-bye, Mom.”

  “Good-bye,” she said obediently. “Thank you all so much for your wonderful hospitality and the delicious food and for letting me spend a morning in your delightful home—” Even as she was talking, her son was propelling her firmly forward and down the front steps and onto the front walk, and she finally had to give up and just blow a final kiss in their general direction.

  Jimmy followed after them, holding the door open as they went down the walk and calling out a cheery “Good to see you both!” Social Daddy gave one last wave and a shouted good-bye and then slammed the door and returned to being their father. “Never again,” he said morosely and stalked off back to the family room with his newspaper, leaving the women to clean up.

  Chapter 15

  The next morning, Lauren examined the turquoise top she had stained. The water spot had dried, leaving behind a small dark wrinkled smudge. Staring miserably at it, she remembered how she used to stain her lips with berries when she was little and still forbidden cosmetics.

  She decided to try removing the spot one last time on her own before sending it to the dry cleaners, where a top she had never even worn out of the apartment would cost her yet another five to ten dollars.

  She had just squirted a dot of Woolite on a white rag when the apartment phone rang.

  “Hi, Lulu,” her mother said. “Just checking to see if you’re still taking me tomorrow.”

  “I’m planning on it,” Lauren said and realized she was, even though the hospital no longer held the allure of flirting with Daniel—in fact, she was desperately hoping to avoid running into him. But being Nancy’s chauffeur and support had become a source of pleasure for her in and of itself.

  A source of pleasure and of pride. For years she had been the prodigal daughter, and now she had remade herself into the responsible one. She liked that.

  “When I’m done with all this, will you still come visit me once in a while, even if I’m the healthiest mother in town? Or will I have to go back to being grateful for one phone call every few months?” Nancy’s tone was light, but Lauren got the sense there was a real question behind the joke.

  “Don’t worry,” Lauren said. “You’re not getting rid of me that easily. I’ll even take you to the hospital now and then for old times’ sake.”

  “I know why you want to keep going to the hospital. But you can find cute young men in other places too, you know. Have you ever, for example, tried going to a disco?”

  “Very funny,” Lauren said. “You’re real funny, Mom. A little outdated, but funny. I’ll see you tomorrow at one-thirty.”

  “Don’t be late.”

  “I won’t be.”

  “You always say that and then you’re always late.”

  “That’s not true,” Lauren said. “I don’t always say it.”

  “You’re funny, too.”

  “It’s the genes. I got your funny genes.”

  “We should take this show on the road,” Nancy said. “Once I’m all better, let’s put together a mother-daughter act.”

  “We could invite Lana Markowitz to join us,” Lauren said. “I hear her stand-up routine kills.”

  Her mother laughed so hard at that she couldn’t talk for a moment, but when she had regained her voice, she said, “So what’s the story with Russell and Ava? I saw them slip out the door together and he said he was going to call her—”

  “The guy obviously likes her,” Lauren said. “And I think she likes him. But your oldest daughter’s a psychotic mess when it comes to men. No offense.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “She was in a foul mood when we came back from brunch. You know why?”

  “Why?”

  “Russell gave her a pair of four-hundred-dollar shoes.”

  A pause. “She was mad about that?”

  “Yeah,” Lauren said. “Nothing pisses off a girl like an expensive gift.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Neither do I. She’s just weird.”

  “If you find out anything—”

  “You’ll be the first person I run and tell.”

  She had just finished her work on the top and was arranging it on a hanger, dubiously fingering the damp spot her ministrations had left, when her phone rang again. She didn’t recognize the number, but as soon as she heard the voice, she knew who it was.

  “Lauren?” he said.

  She paused before letting out a wary “Hi.” She hadn’t expected to hear from him again. Run into him at the hospital by accident, maybe, but not get a phone call from him.

  “I was wondering if I could see you,” he said. “Just for a few minutes. I need someone to talk to.” His voice had a strange quality—like something was flickering behind it, altering its rhythms in ways you couldn’t put your finger on but that made him not sound like himself.

  “Why don’t you call Elizabeth?” She knew it was a snarky thing to say but didn’t see any reason not to be snarky.

  “She’s a schoolteacher and can’t take phone calls during the day.” The blunt honesty of his response was so unexpected, Lauren didn’t know how to respond. “Can I see you?”

  Lauren tried to feel out her own emotions. Anger and hurt . . . and curiosity. Why would Daniel call her after things had ended so badly? It wasn’t like he could get her in bed again. He had to know that. You could only be betrayed once that way, unless you were a royal idiot.

  “We can talk,” she said finally, “but don’t expect me to be particularly warm or sympathetic.”

  “I’ll take my chances. Where do you want to meet?”

  “Come here. My sister won’t be home until late.”

  “Twenty minutes okay?”

  She assented and Daniel hung up.

  She didn’t bother changing her clothes. She was done dressing for Daniel. She greeted him at the door in what she had thrown on that morning to do chores: red Juicy Couture sweatpants and a pink baby-doll tee that was frayed at the neck and bottom and said “Daddy’s Little Princesse” in Olde English script. Lauren had bought one for Ava and one for herself as an ironic statement about their actual relationship with their father. Neither of them had yet dared to wear it in front of him.

  Daniel was also in sweats—gray bottoms and a green Dartmouth sweatshirt. His pale feet were jammed into flip-flops and he still had on his sunglasses even though the hallway was windowless and fairly dark.

  “Hi,” he said. He didn’t make a move to touch her.

  Lauren stepped back. “Come in.” She led him into the living room. “Do you want to sit down?”

  He was turning his head from side to side, staring around the room, like he had lost something there the last time he had come in. Which, now that she thought about it, was eminently possible, given how they had flung their clothing around that night. But he hadn’t said anything about that on the phone.

  Now he just said, “Yeah, okay,” and sat down hard on the armchair. After a moment, he seemed to realize he still had his sunglasses on and took them off, dropping them carelessly on the coffee table even though they were expensive Oliver Peoples aviators that Lauren had silently admired in the past.

  Lauren balanced on the arm of the sofa, catty-corner to him, one leg crossed over the other so that foot swung freely about a foot off the ground. They were both silent for a moment. Daniel clasped his hands between his knees and stared down at them.

  “You all right?” she said.

  He hunched his shoulders forward. “I’m fine,” he said with his old brusqueness. Then he shook his head. Then he put his hands on his knees and rubbed the tops of both legs in unison. Then he said, “We had an appointmen
t with the doctor this morning. We’re stopping chemo. I won’t be seeing you at the hospital anymore.”

  “Is that—” She was about to ask whether it was a good or bad thing, but it was too obvious what the answer was, so she stopped herself. “What else did the doctor say?”

  His voice was flat. “He said that it’s time for hospice care. We’ve been making calls, filing paperwork . . . She’s home for good. She won’t be leaving again. My brother’s with her now. But she’s been sleeping so much. I’m not sure it even matters who’s there.”

  “I’m sorry,” Lauren said.

  His face screwed up like something was hurting him, but then it went slack again. “The doctor said there was no point to continuing the chemo. That it was just making her weaker.”

  “I’m sorry,” Lauren said again, because she didn’t know what else to say. She was trying to hold on to her anger at him, but it was hard when he was so pitiful.

  His eyes darted around, not meeting hers or alighting on anything. There was a blindness behind them for all their motion. “He said we should just make her comfortable. Not worry about how much pain medication we give her. The important thing is that she not feel any pain.”

  “That makes sense.”

  She could have said anything: he wasn’t listening. “But all the meds—they keep her from being awake. She doesn’t even talk to us anymore. She can’t. She can’t stay awake long enough to finish a thought.” His face screwed up again, his mouth drawing up toward his nose, his eyes squinching half shut. Then his features fell back into place. It looked almost comical. “I thought when we got a time frame, we’d say, Okay, that’s it, but at least now we know how much time we have together so we’ll make the most of it. I didn’t think she’d be barely conscious.” He stared at Lauren’s bare and slightly dirty foot that was dangling a few inches above his own pale toes. “When she finally stops sleeping, she’ll be dead.”

  “You might still get some time,” Lauren said. “If she rests up enough—maybe later there’ll be some time when she’s awake and can talk to you.”

  “Maybe,” he said. “Maybe we’ll have a few minutes.” Then he said, “She’s my mom,” and his voice cracked on the last word.

  “I know.” Lauren slid down off the sofa arm and into a crouching position next to him. She put her arms around him. “I know.”

  He put his head on her shoulder and he cried—not the way Lauren cried when she felt sad, with tears choking in her throat and standing in her eyes, but big gulping, racking, wet sobs.

  Like a little kid crying for his mother.

  The rawness of it stunned Lauren. It made her realize that whatever she and Daniel had had—the flirting, the sex, the awkward dates—none of that had run very deep for either of them. They had gone through some motions, wondered if there were any feelings there, pretended for a few minutes maybe that there were, had some sex that was all the more exciting because they were really strangers.

  But then you saw this—you saw a boy who was crying because the mother he loved was dying—and you realized the difference between love that mattered and a casual flirtation.

  Seeing that made it easier for her to hold him. She didn’t even feel angry anymore, just sad, although she couldn’t have said whether she was sad for him, his mother, her mother, or herself, or for a world in which you had to watch your mother die because the only alternative sucked even more.

  She patted his back and made soothing sounds.

  Eventually he stopped and lifted his head. She released him and sat back on her heels.

  “You got a tissue?” he asked, swiping at his eyes with his forearm.

  “Yeah.” She went into Ava’s bedroom to grab some tissues from the box on her night table. When she came back, Daniel was standing near the window, his back to her. He held out his hand without turning around and she put the tissues in it.

  He didn’t turn back around until he had blown his nose and wiped his eyes. Then he faced her. “I’m sorry,” he said, taking a deep, uneven breath. “I didn’t know I was going to do that.”

  “You don’t need to apologize for that,” she said.

  “Thanks for listening.” He dropped the used tissues into the wastebasket near Ava’s desk. “I needed to talk to someone. My brother’s not the emotional type. I’m glad he’s here, but he and Mom weren’t all that close. It’s not hitting him the same way.”

  “It will, though,” Lauren said. “At some point. You can’t just lose a mother and not care.”

  “He cares,” Daniel said. “It’s just different.”

  They stood there for a moment in silence.

  “You want a cup of coffee or something?” Lauren asked.

  “That would be nice.” He glanced at his watch. “I should probably go home, though, in case she wakes up and has a few lucid minutes. It would kill me to miss that.”

  “You’ll drive yourself crazy if you think like that,” Lauren said. “You can’t stay next to her bed twenty-four hours a day.”

  “I know.”

  “One cup?”

  “Yeah. Okay.” He followed her into the kitchen.

  “Will your brother stay in L.A.?” Lauren asked as she poured water into Ava’s coffeemaker. “Until—” She stopped. “Sorry. Is this bad to talk about?”

  “No, it’s okay,” he said. “She’s going to die. I might as well get used to the idea. Saying it out loud doesn’t make it any more or less true.” He stuck his hands in his pockets. “Just don’t use any euphemisms. I hate when people talk about ‘passing’ or ask me how long it’s been since I ‘lost’ my father. I didn’t lose him: I know exactly where his ashes are.” He gave a short laugh. “In my mother’s linen closet—don’t ask me why. And he didn’t ‘pass on’ somewhere. He died. Avoiding the word doesn’t change the reality.”

  “I know what you mean,” Lauren said. But she couldn’t bring herself to use the word even so. “How long do they think it’ll be?”

  “Couple of weeks?” he said. “Give or take a few days. My brother told me that hospice nurses sometimes slip a little extra morphine into the drip when the time is near just to speed it along, make sure it’s painless.”

  “I wouldn’t want that job.” Lauren pressed the button on the coffeemaker and it immediately started gurgling.

  Daniel raised his hands and pressed them up against the top of the doorway like Samson bringing down the house. His sweatshirt rose up and showed a few inches of his flat stomach. Glancing over, Lauren thought it was amazing she had ever slid her hand across his muscles, that they had once been that intimate, even if only for a drunken moment or two. “I don’t know,” he said. “I guess you just think of it as an act of mercy. Which it probably is.”

  “Think I could convince them to come over and give my father a quick shot?” Lauren said. “He’s not sick or anything, but it might put me out of my misery.”

  Another ghost of a smile. “Sure,” Daniel said and dropped his hands down to his sides. “Go ahead, Lauren. Make jokes about parents dying. Nothing funnier than that.” At least he sounded a little more like himself.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s a bad habit of mine. I get tactless when I’m nervous.”

  “It’s fine. You should hear some of the jokes my brother and I have been making—some truly awful shit.”

  “Will you both stay in L.A.?” she said. “Until the end?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And Elizabeth? Will she come?” No snarkiness this time: she really wanted to know.

  “As soon as they can find a decent substitute.” They were both silent for a moment. Then he said, “Thanks for letting me come over. After everything . . .”

  “Guess I’m still your cancer buddy,” she said with a lightness she didn’t feel.

  “I thought maybe I’d ruined that forever.”

  “You kind of did,” she said. “But then you played the dying mother card.”

  “Clever of me.”

  “You only ge
t to use it once, though.”

  “The thing is”—and his face was crashing again, crushed by misery and self-loathing and self-pity and despair—“the thing is that she would have been so mad at me for what I did to both you and Elizabeth. She would have said it showed a lack of integrity. That was the worst thing to her. It meant I had disappointed her in every way possible. If she knew—”

  “She won’t know,” Lauren said. “She’ll never know.”

  “That’s not a consolation.”

  “I can’t do better than that,” Lauren said. “I’m not really in a place where I can tell you that what you did was okay.”

  “I know. I don’t expect you to.” He closed his eyes and took a deep breath, and when he opened them again he was once more in control of his features. “So where’s my coffee?”

  “Just about ready,” she said and busied herself getting the cups out.

  As they sat at the table, drinking coffee and not saying much, Lauren looked at him and thought, In a different time and place, this could have worked.

  But then again, maybe in a different time and place he would have been just another rich, self-centered banker, no different from most of the Financial District guys she met when they ran into her boutique to buy gifts for their thin, self-centered girlfriends. Maybe that was who Daniel was when his mother wasn’t dying.

  She didn’t really know him. He was a stranger. He had this whole life going on back in New York that she knew nothing about but was more real to him than anything here in L.A.

  For years, maybe even decades, he’d look back at this time in his life and think, Wow, those few weeks when my mother was dying were surreal. He might remember that there was a girl during that time, maybe even that he had slept with her, but once a year or two had gone by, Lauren seriously doubted he’d remember her name.

  She needed to talk to someone about what happened, so when Ava came home that night after a late client dinner, Lauren told her that Daniel had stopped by the apartment.

  “Really?” Ava said. “So did you sleep with him again?”

  They had both been curled up on the sofa, but that made Lauren sit up straight. “How did you know I slept with him?”