The Private Lives of Pippa Lee

by Rebecca Miller

  The twins were eight. She had decided to take them to the Dairy Queen on Sixth Avenue, after their piano lessons. It was the first spring day after a frigid winter, and the warm air felt liquid against Pippa’s skin. People on the street moved languorously, as if drugged with relief. Pippa looked down at the twins, their messy, light blond hair shining in the sun, and swelled with gratitude for her good fortune. When they drifted into the ice cream store, a lady of about sixty in a blue skirt and loafers, white socks pulled up past her ankles, gray hair held back in a ponytail, stood at the counter beside a dark-haired girl of about the twins’ age. The lady was saying, in broken English, ‘How much is a milk-shake?’ The bored man behind the counter told her. The little girl beside the woman had a tight, embarrassed smile on her face as the older woman counted out her change. When the lady saw that Pippa and the twins were waiting, she moved aside to let them order, scraping her coins a few inches to the left with her cupped palm. Pippa asked for two vanilla cones and gave the man a twenty. As he made change, Pippa noticed Grace gaping at the lady as she sifted through her little pile of coins, squinting up at the board with the prices on it anxiously, the little girl by her side stiff with shame. Pippa poked Grace, but she wouldn’t look away.

  ‘And how much is a soda?’ asked the lady, smiling. Her dark eyes were shining with kindness and a hint of apology for the fuss she was making. The man gave her a price, and she went back to counting her change. Pippa could feel tears coming to her eyes. This poor woman had taken her granddaughter out for a treat, and now she couldn’t afford it. The clerk gave Pippa her change, and she crammed the bills into her wallet furtively, wondering if it would humiliate the lady if she offered to pay for the little girl’s dessert. She decided against it; it would be condescending.

  The man handed Pippa the cones. The soft white cream looked perfect, plastic, shiny, like ice cream in a commercial. Pippa gave Ben his, Grace hers. Ben licked his hungrily, but Grace didn’t touch hers. Pippa began to move toward the door. Ben followed. Grace stood stock-still, glaring at the ground, clutching her cone. ‘Grace,’ Pippa said softly. Abruptly, Grace bolted toward the little dark-haired girl, stood a foot away from her, and offered her the ice cream. The girl stared at the gift, uncomprehending. Grace stood still, the ice cream cone in her fist raised like a sword in the hand of a statue. The lady said something to the little girl in some foreign tongue, and the child took the cone shyly, casting her eyes to the floor. Then Grace turned and fled the Dairy Queen. Pippa rushed out behind her. She could hear the woman calling out a thank-you as the glass door sighed shut behind her. When Pippa finally caught up with Grace, halfway down the block, the child’s face was flushed, her gray eyes clouded with fury.

  ‘That was a lovely thing to do,’ Pippa said.

  ‘No it wasn’t,’ Grace said. She didn’t want to talk about it after that. She was quiet on the cab ride home and all through dinner. Pippa knew that something had changed in her child that day. She’d become angry at her own good fortune.

  *

  Sponge, spray cleaner, water, mop: time to clean the kitchen! Pippa liked things neat, but she was naturally chaotic. She had to use all her concentration to bend her mind to the task of cleaning, like a high wind forcing a tall tree to the ground. One stray thought and she would wander away from her scrubbing, end up staring at hummingbirds through her binoculars or checking a recipe for spaghetti alla primavera, only to return to the kitchen forty minutes later, surprised to see the dishes still piled high. This morning, however, Pippa was keeping an image of a perfectly neat kitchen in mind, trying to replicate it in reality. She took everything off the counter, sponged it down, then replaced the vitamin bottles and condiments, carefully lining them up. She wiped down the stove, scrubbed the pan encrusted with Herb’s chicken sausage, emptied the dishwasher, putting away clean dishes and flatware, then filled it again with dirty dishes and flatware. She poured blue and white speckled dishwashing powder into the little rectangular box, slid its door shut till it clicked, turned on the machine, selecting ‘heavy duty wash’ because there was a pan in there. She swept the floor, mopped it. She wiped out the sink, even opened up the fridge and threw out everything that looked sad or rotten. She made a list: eggs, soy milk, yogurt, aluminum foil. Grape-Nuts. She folded the list, tucked it into the zip-up compartment inside her purse, and walked out onto the patio. Herb was on the phone. He looked at her expectantly.

  ‘I’m going shopping. Is there anything you need?’ she asked.

  He shook his head, waved, and went back to his phone call. He was talking about the book. Pippa wondered who the author of the cash cow might be. She walked through the livingroom, out the door, got into the car, and froze.

  The floor of the car was littered with cigarette butts. There must have been ten of them, stamped right into the carpeting. Pippa had quit smoking twenty years ago. The smell of smoke made her throat close up. Herb had never smoked cigarettes, and he had given up cigars on the advice of his heart specialist. So what the hell was this? She picked up the butts, dropped them into a Baggie she kept in the glove compartment, and hurried back into the house to tell Herb. He was still on the phone. She lingered in the living room for a few seconds, waiting. The car had been open. It could have been teenagers, some kids from the nearby town, out having fun. It could have been Chris Nadeau, in an oblique act of revenge for coming upon him as she had. Or it could have been Pippa. She felt her cheeks growing hot. And if it was she, if she had walked in her sleep, and smoked in the car, she might have driven the car. She found this thought terrifying.

  Where did she get the cigarettes? A feeling of bottomless panic came over her; it felt like she was standing in an elevator with the cord cut, going down – down – down. Herb, unaware, continued: ‘Well, Phil, you can do two things,’ he was saying. ‘You can get an agent, I can recommend an agent to you. You’ll need one eventually anyway, you’re a writer now. Or you can hold off, make this deal on your own, forget about their cut. The good news is, you get the entire advance. The other side of the coin is, an agent will be more interested in you if he has this book, and he’ll be loyal, because you’re gonna make him a lot of money.’

  Pippa, feeling slightly dizzy, turned and walked out of the house, got into the car, then drove a very slow mile to the convenience store. They stocked simple groceries, and it was the only place in Marigold Village that sold The New York Times. She walked in, still wearing her sunglasses. Forgetting about her list, she distractedly picked up the newspaper, eggs, a packet of pancake mix. Her hands were shaking. She walked to the register and looked up. There was Chris Nadeau, his hair wet and slicked back, face freshly shaved, thick brows like dark brush marks on light skin, lips chapped. He smelled of aftershave. There was something hulking about him, strength coiled so tight it looked like relaxation. ‘Pippa Lee, right?’

  ‘Oh, hi,’ she said, taking off her glasses. ‘You got a job already.’

  ‘I’m working my way to the top,’ said Chris.

  ‘It’s a beautiful day,’ said Pippa.

  ‘I’m trying not to notice,’ he said, punching in the items on the cash register; his fingernails were bitten down to the quick, Pippa noticed. Her eyes then wandered to the wall of cigarettes displayed behind him; she felt a sudden impulse to smoke clutching at her chest.

  ‘Oh, and, ah – a packet of … Marlboro Lights. Please.’

  Chris turned around and found the cigarettes. ‘Costly habit,’ he said.

  ‘It’s just – I don’t really smoke,’ she said. And then, a thought dawning, ‘You don’t work here at night, do you?’

  ‘I haven’t yet,’ he said. ‘Why do you ask?’

  She felt relieved.

  ‘It’s open all night, and I always thought it would be a terrible job, just waiting … all night, for someone to buy … you know, cigarettes, or something.’ Tears were starting to come to her eyes, the breath catching in her throat. Chris looked at her with a patient, listening gaze, his face express
ionless. She felt completely exposed before him. His total lack of mannerisms was almost offensive in its directness. Mercifully, her emotion began to recede.

  ‘Matches?’ he asked.

  ‘Please. How’s your mother?’

  ‘Recovering,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry I skipped out on you the other day. I’m not a big party person.’

  ‘I shouldn’t have – I shouldn’t have interrupted,’ she said. A man in line behind her cleared his throat. She put some bills down, fumbled through her purse for exact change. ‘Well,’ she said. ‘Tell Dot to call me, if she wants to.’

  ‘You’ll have to call her,’ said Chris. ‘She’s too mortified.’

  Pippa left the convenience store, got into the car, ripped open the cigarettes, pulled one out and lit up. As the smoke filled her lungs, she felt a tingling in her hands and lips. Everything she looked at – the steering wheel, her hand, the gas pump outside – seemed saturated with color and detail. She hung her arm out the window. Why am I doing this? she thought. Her eyes wandered to Chris, tallying up someone’s purchases. What a strange young man. Seems bright, but … She was beginning to know what Dot meant. There was something not quite right about him. Chris looked up and saw her through the glass. She waved at him cheerfully, put out the cigarette, and drove away.

  Sam Shapiro and Moira Dulles were coming over for dinner again. It was too hot for warm dishes, so Pippa poached a salmon, made potato salad with vinaigrette dressing, and served it all on the patio. After dinner, the four of them sat quietly eating strawberries, looking out at the small artificial lake in the golden light and listening to the crickets. ‘Delicious strawberries, Pippa,’ said Sam.

  ‘I got them at the farm stand,’ Pippa said, looking at him and thinking how he had changed over the years. The skin on his long neck had loosened and trembled now like a turkey’s wattle. The point of his hawk’s nose had been dulled, rounded somehow, as if worn away by the grindstone he’d kept it to for the past thirty years, writing twelve hours a day almost without fail, hounded by the stories in his head like Orestes by the Furies. His eyes, once liquid black like molten tar, now looked dead as coals. It was as though, by writing all his life, he had consumed himself, chunk by chunk, and now he was a host, a husk. Time and again, Sam took his life and the people in it, boiled it all down – skin, bones, all of it – till it was a paste the color, Pippa imagined, of whale blubber. Then he built up an image with this paste, a kind of complex frieze, a story made of human beings, human feelings, human memory.

  The main problem Pippa had with Sam (much as she loved him as a friend) was that she suspected he needed his relationships to fail so he could use them later. He would be a monster, she thought, if he wasn’t more merciless with himself than with anyone else. But it was he who jumped into the caldron first, every time. To be cooked down and rise again; that was Sam’s endless, exhausting destiny. A writer, and no more. The hopefulness had gone out of him, she thought sadly. But that was the deal he had made: in exchange for a real life, he had been given nine novels, two of them classics, the rest excellent, his immortality almost assured. Still, she pitied her old friend. And she felt sorry for Moira for having fallen in love with him; he would never give her what she wanted. She was too needy. The trick with Sam, Pippa knew, would be to make his life so appealing, such a pleasure, that he could not but turn toward it, and away from himself – at least a little bit. But then, she thought, Moira is a writer, too. So maybe they understand each other. She sighed and noticed Chris Nadeau’s yellow truck parked across the way. She wondered what was going on inside the Nadeau house at that moment.

  ‘How’s the novel coming?’ asked Herb.

  ‘I’m only a hundred pages in,’ said Sam. ‘I don’t even know if it’ll work yet.’

  ‘Excuse me for a minute,’ Pippa said. She went to the bathroom, locked herself in, opened the window, and took the cigarettes out from behind Herb’s blood pressure medication. She blew the smoke through the screen, watched it expand and disappear into the dark air. Then she brushed her teeth.

  She came back to the patio with a slab of pistachio halvah, feeling toxic from the cigarette and berating herself for smoking. Moira sighed deeply and craned her neck to see the sky, drawing her knees up to her heavy bust and clutching them to her, her large, black, kohl-rimmed eyes glazing over with wonder. All of Moira’s gestures and reactions had an element of self-consciousness. At twenty-four, she had won the coveted Yale Younger Poets prize. From there she’d gone on to publish a few volumes of surprisingly vitriolic poetry, her private life a brushfire of failed romances. In her middle thirties now, she clung to the demeanor of near-constant astonishment that had clashed so beautifully with her intellect in her early years. Not that Moira was old. No, she was a good deal younger than Pippa. Among the aging literary set she circulated in, she was a bombshell. Pippa found her endearing – and occasionally pitiful. She was irresponsible and neurotic, a grown woman without children, without health insurance even, still searching for love with the reckless hopefulness of a twenty-year-old. Yet occasionally, Pippa found herself envying Moira’s chaotic, self-centered life.

  ‘Is that a bat?’ Moira asked, squinting.

  ‘Yes,’ said Herb.

  ‘“Like a glove, a black glove thrown up at the light,”’ said Moira. ‘Who said that? What’s his name.’

  ‘The sex fiend,’ said Sam. ‘Mr Lawrence.’

  ‘You should talk,’ said Herb.

  ‘And he got it wrong, too. Look at that. Does that look like a black glove to you?’ asked Sam. They all looked up. ‘It’s a fucking bat.’

  ‘Ben used to subscribe to a magazine about bats, remember?’ Pippa said to Herb.

  ‘Oh, yeah,’ he said, squinting in recollection.

  ‘Look how frenetic the fluttering wings are; that’s how you can tell it’s not a bird,’ said Moira.

  ‘No,’ said Sam. ‘It’s the way it changes direction so fast – like a stunt kite.’

  ‘That’s good.’ Herb chuckled. ‘A stunt kite.’ Sam tucked his chin into his neck, content; Herb never said anything was good unless he meant it.

  ‘Do they really get in your hair?’ asked Moira.

  Sam tossed his head. ‘Could you maybe just once come up with an idea that isn’t a cliché?’ Moira looked at him, an incredu lous expression on her face. ‘Just kidding,’ he said. ‘You’re an original, baby, and don’t you forget it.’

  ‘Fuck you, too,’ said Moira.

  Pippa stood up. ‘Decaf, anyone?’ she asked in mock-stewardess style.

  Moira stood up as well, and followed Pippa into the kitchen. By the time they got to the stove, she was sobbing. ‘Every time I open my mouth, he puts me down. I can’t take it any more. He’s such a prick.’

  Pippa sighed. Sam was cruel to his women. Everyone knew that. She’d seen him gnaw through a handful of them over the years.

  ‘That’s just the way he is sometimes. He has a mean streak. Maybe if you just laughed along?’

  ‘I’ve been laughing for four years. Now I’m crying.’

  ‘Are you talking about breaking up?’

  ‘We’re not talking about anything. Sam is so involved with his novel, he barely looks up. I’m having all of our discussions with myself.’

  ‘Have you found … someone else?’ Pippa knew Moira well enough to guess she wouldn’t think of leaving a man as powerful and desirable as Sam Shapiro unless she had a replacement in the wings. Gifted as she was, this poet needed big men.

  Moira looked down at her hands. ‘No … I mean –’ Then, pressing her palms against her eyes, ‘Oh, Pippa, I’m so confused!’

  That night in bed, as Herb tried to read and Pippa rubbed cream between the backs of her hands, she mused, ‘I bet you Moira’s having an affair.’

  ‘What makes you say that?’ Herb asked.

  ‘She’s talking about leaving Sam, but she’s terrified of being on her own. It just adds up.’

  ‘Maybe she wants you to think she�
�s having an affair so you’ll tell me, and I’ll tell Sam, and he’ll pay more attention to her.’

  ‘Do you really think Moira is that conniving?’

  ‘That’s what women are like.’

  ‘Devious?’

  ‘It’s instinct. Survival of the fittest. Of all people, you should know.’

  ‘Never mind.’

  ‘Does that mean I get to go to sleep now?’ Herb said, yawning and putting his reading glasses in their case. ‘Since reading is clearly out.’

  ‘I still think she’s having an affair,’ said Pippa, turning out her light.

  A Little Death

  The office of Maxwell, Lee and Brewer Publishing was in New York, five surprisingly shabby, glassed-in rooms choked with books. In Herb’s absence, the company was being run by Marianne Stapleton, a muscular, somewhat manic person with excellent taste and a penchant for self-doubt. She called Herb at least five times a day with questions.