by Joy Fielding
As for Robert, we’d been communicating through our voice mail, never quite connecting. He’d call; I’d be tied up with clients. I’d return his call; he’d be in a meeting. He was thinking about me, he left word on my machine; I was thinking about his offer, I responded on his.
The Monday after Thanksgiving, there was a message waiting when I arrived at the office. “Enough of this nonsense,” Robert’s voice announced. “I’ll see you at my office this Wednesday at noon. I’ll take you around, introduce you to the gang, show you how we operate, then take you out for lunch. Have those ideas ready.” He then left the station’s address and directions on how to get there. There was no mention of my calling back to confirm. Since he already knew I didn’t go into the office on Wednesdays, it was simply assumed I’d be available. That I might have made other plans was obviously not part of the equation.
As it happened, I’d already promised to take my mother shopping on Wednesday. We’ll make a day of it, I’d offered after Thanksgiving dinner, almost giddy with relief at how well the evening had gone. First we’d go Christmas shopping, then have lunch, I’d suggested. No way was I going to call her now and cancel just because I’d had a better offer. This wasn’t high school, after all. Although it was business, I reminded myself, my hand already on the phone. “We can still go shopping in the morning,” I told my mother.
“What a nice idea,” she said, as if it was the first time she was hearing it.
I picked her up at ten o’clock Wednesday morning. She was already downstairs in the lobby, standing by herself just inside the front doors, casting furtive glances over each shoulder, anxiously clutching her purse. I waved. She looked startled, as if surprised to see me, then hurried outside. “Are you all right?” I asked, helping her into the front seat of my white Lexus, watching as her upper torso curved around her purse, as if protecting it from would-be thieves. “Mother?” I asked again, positioning myself behind the wheel. “Is something wrong? Are you okay?”
“I have something to show you,” she whispered. Then: “Drive.”
Slowly, reluctantly, I pulled out of the driveway onto Palm Beach Lakes Boulevard. “What is it?” I asked. “What do you want me to see?”
“I’ll show you when we get there.”
I was about to protest when I realized she was no longer listening, all her attention devoted to watching the road ahead. Quickly, my eyes absorbed her profile for any outward signs of disturbance, but her gray hair was freshly washed and neatly styled, her deep brown eyes were clear and focused, her small mouth was curled upward into a smile. Everything seemed normal. Only her posture, the way her body folded protectively over her purse, seemed out of place. Then I noticed her hands.
“What happened to your nails?” I asked, noting the dark purple smudges across her fingernails.
She glanced toward her long, slightly arthritic fingers, then displayed them proudly, as if surprised by what she saw. “Do you like them? The salesgirl at Saks assured me this polish is all-the rage.”
I reached over and rubbed the top of one thin nail. The so-called polish came off on my fingers. “This isn’t polish, Mom,” I told her, wondering what the salesclerk had been trying to pull.
“It isn’t?”
“It’s lipstick.” I rubbed at her other fingers. “You’ve put lipstick on your nails.”
She shook her head. “No,” she said adamantly. “You’re quite mistaken. And now you’ve ruined it,” she said, her eyes threatening tears.
“But, Mom,” I began, then stopped, driving on in confused silence. Clearly, something was very wrong with my mother. Although she’d been just fine over the weekend, I quickly assured myself. Maybe the weekend had been too much for her. Older people didn’t adjust as quickly to a break in their routine. Was seventy-five really all that old? What was happening to her?
We didn’t speak again until I pulled the car into the Marshalls plaza on Military Trail. As soon as I turned the engine off, my mother spun around in her seat, her eyes flashing excitement, her fingers fluttering nervously in the air, like a child’s. “Wait till you see this.” She reached inside her purse, cradling something gingerly in the palm of her hand.
“What is it?” I could hear the nervousness in my voice.
My mother smiled proudly, then slowly opened her fist, revealing a small white egg. “Have you ever seen anything like it?” she marveled, as my breath constricted in my chest. She looked nervously around, as if afraid someone might be, standing just outside the window, spying in on her. “They had some of these on the table at breakfast,” she continued, “and I couldn’t get over them. So, when no one was looking, I slipped one into my purse to show you. Just look at how perfectly it’s shaped. Have you ever seen anything like it?”
“It’s an egg, Mom,” I said gently, staring at the small ovate object in disbelief. “Don’t you know that?”
“An egg?”
“You eat them every day.”
My mother stared at me for several long seconds. “Well, of course I do,” she said, without changing her expression. She tucked the egg back inside her purse.
“Mom,” I began, not sure what I was going to say, but terrified of the silence.
“Don’t you look lovely,” she exclaimed, as if seeing me for the first time. “Is that a new dress? Very fancy just to go shopping.”
My hand automatically smoothed the folds of my newly purchased red-and-white-flowered print dress. “I have a luncheon meeting,” I reminded her. “About doing a possible radio show. Remember, I told you about it.”
“Of course I remember,” she said. “Have you got Michelle’s Christmas list?”
I suppose I should have realized at this point that there was something terribly wrong with my mother. Looking back, it seems incredible that I failed to recognize the obvious signs of Alzheimer’s disease. Had she been the mother of one of my clients, no doubt I would have seen this much earlier, or at least considered the possibility, but this was my mother, and she was only seventy-five. And besides, usually she was fine. Usually she didn’t go around stealing eggs from the breakfast table and applying lipstick to her fingernails. Usually she didn’t accuse her neighbors of harassment or bake with dishwashing detergent. Usually she was fine, a little forgetful maybe, but then weren’t we all? And it wasn’t as if she didn’t remember most things. Hadn’t she been fine all weekend? Hadn’t she just mentioned Michelle’s famous Christmas list?
“I have it right here,” I said, extricating the list from my black leather bag.
“She’s such a funny girl,” my mother said, and I laughed, although I wasn’t sure why.
Normally, I received tremendous pleasure from Michelle’s yearly list, which came complete with drawings of each requested item, their correct sizes, prices, and the stores where they could be purchased, along with an accompanying chart indicating preference. Items highlighted in yellow were deemed nice; those with an asterisk beside them were nicer, an arrow indicated very nice, and those marked with both an asterisk and an arrow were the nicest.
You always knew exactly where you stood with Michelle, I thought gratefully, clutching the list as if it were a lifeline.
Sara, it goes without saying, refused to make any list at all.
The morning progressed reasonably well. My mother snapped back into seeming normalcy; we managed to locate several of the items on Michelle’s list with a minimum of difficulty; I was feeling more comfortable about my upcoming meeting with Robert. I even had a few ideas for what I’d now started to think of as “my radio show.” So today’s lunch was legitimate after all, I rationalized, leading my mother across the parking lot toward a small shop that specialized in golfing equipment.
Of course, I was as delusional about Robert as I was with regard to my mother.
“What’s the best line of men’s clubs you carry?” I asked the Greg Norman look-alike who offered his assistance. Guilt had nothing to do with my decision to buy my husband the best set of clubs currentl
y on the market, I told myself, following the young man to the back of the store.
“Well, of course, that depends on your needs,” he said as he walked. “But there’s this new line of clubs called Titans that’s just fabulous.” He grabbed a long club with a large wooden head from its bag and began waxing rhapsodic about its particular virtues, his hand sliding up and down its smooth surface as lovingly as if it were a woman’s body. “It’s the perfect combination of titanium and graphite. For my money,” he concluded, replacing the wood with an iron, assuming I knew the difference, “it’s the best there is.”
“How much is it?” I asked. It was, after all, not his money, but mine.
“Well, let’s see,” he began, scanning the store as if he didn’t already have a price worked out in his head. His eyes suddenly widened, then froze, as if he’d been shot. “My God, watch out!” he yelled.
I heard the whoosh of the golf club before I actually saw it, felt the air beside me stir as it swept past me, the club missing my head by no more than six inches. Several young men suddenly appeared, seemingly from out of nowhere, and all but wrestled my mother to the floor, tearing the golf club she was wielding, as if it were a baseball bat, from her hands.
“Kate!” she cried, a look of pure terror distorting her delicate features as strange hands seized her. “Help me! Help me!”
“It’s all right,” I yelled. “She’s my mother.” Looks of astonishment crossed the faces of the young men as they reluctantly released her. “It’s all right,” I repeated, as confused as everyone else. “She wasn’t trying to hurt me.
“Hurt you?” My mother was whimpering now, her head bobbing up and down, as if attached to her body by wires, the bobbing accentuating the skin that hung in folds around her neck, like loose-fitting socks. “What are you talking about? I would never hurt you. I just wanted to try out that bat. Remember in high school, I was such a good hitter. The best on the team.”
“It’s okay, everything’s fine,” I assured the small crowd gathered around us. “She gets a little confused at times, that’s all. Are you all right?” I asked her.
“You know I would never do anything to hurt you,” my mother said as I led her from the store.
“I know,” I told her. It wasn’t until I was behind the wheel of my car that my knees stopped knocking together. And it wasn’t until I’d dropped her safely back at her apartment that I could breathe.
“You look a little flushed,” Robert was saying, his hand reaching over to touch my cheek. “Are you coming down with something?”
The touch of his hand on my cheek was almost more than I could bear. I closed my eyes, imagined us on a shimmering white beach, far away from mothers and daughters and husbands and wives. And sisters, I reminded myself, forcing my eyes open, firmly relocating us in his impressive suite of offices in the heart of Delray. “My mother thinks she’s Babe Ruth,” I said.
“Why do I think there’s an interesting story there?” he asked, eyes twinkling.
“Because you’re the media,” I told him. “Everything’s a story to you.”
“Ah,” he said, “but not always an interesting one. Why is it I find everything about you so interesting?”
“Because you haven’t seen me in thirty years,” I replied dryly. “Because you don’t know me very well.”
“Something I’d like to change.”
For the second time that morning, I was finding it hard to breathe. I looked around his office, forced my eyes to absorb a host of inconsequential details: the walls were pale blue, the broadloom thick and silver, the top of his large desk a black marble slab, dominated by a large-screen computer. There were two blue-and-gray tub chairs in fashionable ultra-suede positioned in front of the desk, and several more in front of a full-size sofa that sat at the far end of the rectangular room. We were on the top floor of a twelve-story building; floor-to-ceiling windows faced east toward the ocean. It was the spectacular view that was responsible for my shortness of breath, I told myself, almost laughing out loud at this feeble attempt at self-denial.
A row of framed photographs graced the top of the oak credenza behind Robert’s desk. I walked toward the pictures, casually perusing the happy family smiling back at me: a woman, dark-haired, petite, pretty enough without being beautiful, a slightly startled look about her eyes that indicated either surprise or plastic surgery; four children, two boys, two girls, their growth captured inside silver frames as they advanced from childhood through adolescence to young adulthood. “You have a lovely family,” I said, although, without my reading glasses, the more minute details of their faces were lost on me.
“Thank you,” he acknowledged. “And what about you? Any pictures of your girls?”
I fished around inside my purse, grateful for something to do with my hands. Immediately, I pictured my mother reaching inside her handbag and proudly proffering forth her wondrous new discovery. An egg. Maybe she was right, I found myself thinking. There was something pretty wondrous about an egg.
“What are you thinking about?” I heard Robert ask, his eyes crinkling into a smile.
“Eggs,” I told him, quickly resuming my search.
“Eggs,” he repeated, shaking his head. “You’re a woman of mystery, Kate Latimer.”
I smiled. It was something I’d always wanted to be. “Kate Sinclair,” I corrected softly, almost hopeful he wouldn’t hear, finally locating a small red leather folder that contained pictures of Sara and Michelle, and extending it toward him. “These are at least a year old. Michelle hasn’t changed that much, except she’s even thinner now.”
“She’s lovely.”
I studied the small photograph of my younger child: heart-shaped face and huge navy eyes; light shoulder-length brown hair and slightly sad little mouth. Of my two girls, Sara was the more striking, Michelle the more conventionally pretty.
“And this … ?”
“Is Sara,” I said. “Her hair’s different now. It’s shorter, and blond.”
“And you don’t approve?”
I returned the red leather folder to my purse. Was I that transparent? “I like the cut,” I qualified. “I’m not wild about the color.”
“No pictures of your husband?” A mischievous twinkle danced in Robert’s hazel eyes.
I moved to the window, stared out at the ocean, although I wasn’t able to distinguish where the sky ended and the water began. What did it matter? It was all a miraculous shade of blue. “No,” I said, wondering what I was really doing in Robert’s office, feeling slightly guilty. “No pictures of Larry.”
The intercom on his desk buzzed and his secretary informed him that a Mr. Jack Peterson was on the phone from New York. Robert excused himself to take the call, and I excused myself to go to the ladies’ room.
I leaned against the large bathroom mirror. “What are you getting yourself into?” I asked my reflection, applying some fresh blush to my cheeks, fluffing the sides of my hair. Do you need this in your life right now? Even if this whole thing is really about a job in radio, is that what you really want?
In truth, all I wanted was a semblance of normalcy back. I wanted a daughter with brown hair and a good report card, a sister with a steady job and no love life, a mother who wasn’t acting like a visitor from another planet.
At least I’d been able to persuade her to see a doctor, I consoled myself, smoothing on a fresh coat of lipstick, recalling the magenta lipstick smudged across my mother’s fingernails. At first, she refused to see a doctor, said she’d seen enough doctors, so I made it seem as if I was the one who required the appointment and wanted her along for moral support. “Of course, dear,” she’d readily agreed. Unfortunately, the earliest appointment I could schedule was two months away.
Maybe by then the problem, whatever it was, would have sorted itself out, I told myself. Maybe in two months’ time my daughter’s hair would have returned to its brown roots, Colin Friendly would be on his way to the electric chair, and my mother would be herself agai
n.
I had no way of knowing that things were only going to get worse.
Although maybe I suspected as much. Maybe that’s why I decided not to let Robert introduce me to the station brass, not to join him for lunch, not to pursue some half-baked notion of radio stardom. Instead, I splashed some cold water on my face, in what was decidedly a symbolic cleansing gesture, returned my makeup to my handbag, and marched from the ladies’ room.
Robert was waiting for me in front of the elevators. “Sorry about the interruption,” he began, taking me by the elbow and leading me across the hall to the office of his station manager. “I can’t wait to show you off,” he said.
I allowed myself to be led through the labyrinth of offices that made up the twelfth floor, shaking hands with the various managers and office workers, touring the recording studios below, meeting the announcers and producers, those who worked on-air and behind the scenes. I have to admit I loved everything about it, the atmosphere, the people, the lingo, the buzz. Mostly, I loved the feel of Robert’s arm on my elbow as he guided me from one room to the next, from one unfamiliar situation to another, from new face to new face. It wasn’t his touch so much as what that touch represented: the feeling of being gently led, of not having to do for myself, the knowledge that someone else was in charge, was making the decisions, was leading the way. That I was no longer responsible.
So I allowed myself to be seduced, as one always consents to a seduction, still insisting to myself as we left the station for the restaurant that Robert’s interest in me was strictly professional and that my interest in him was strictly the same, a way of branching out, of spreading my professional wings.
Of course, that was before we had our lunch.
Self-delusion, rationalization, outright denial—they’ll only take you so far.
Chapter 13
So, tell me, what are the secrets of a happy marriage?”
I stared across the table at Robert Crowe, searching for signs of irony in his bright hazel eyes. There weren’t any. I tried to laugh, but the intensity of his gaze caused the laugh to stick in my throat. My hand fluttered to my face, returned to my lap, stretched across the table for another roll—my third.
