The Three Weissmanns of Westport

by Cathleen Schine

  One of Annie's talents was convincing writers to participate. At first she had simply kept abreast of who had a book coming out and might therefore be eager to promote it. But after a few years, she began giving the authors a percentage of the take, something she had observed at readings she'd attended in Germany. It seemed to excite the writers when she handed them a wad of smooth, worn bills, far more than an honorarium check would have done. They were like children receiving shiny coins. Annie had no illusions about authors. On the one hand, she admired them, for they created the books she admired. But, too, she felt most of them were rather sad, desperate people who couldn't hold down a job, and she counted out the money into their open palms with the same expression she wore when tipping the doorman.

  But even with the inducement of a pile of twenty-dollar bills, it was unusual for her to get a writer like Frederick Barrow to read at her library. He was not only revered and rich, he was also reserved, and he rarely appeared in public. Felicity's offer had been a welcome one.

  Annie had first met Felicity one evening a year ago when Annie went to the suite of offices to surprise her stepfather and join him on his walk home. Joseph walked home every day, rain or shine, and Annie liked to join him sometimes. It was not far from his office to the apartment, eighteen blocks, it was on her way home, and that night had been a lovely, cool spring evening, the sunlight lingering and the finches warbling gloriously from the light poles.

  The receptionist was not there when Annie stepped out of the elevator. Felicity, who was just leaving Joseph's office, appeared to be the only other person around, and Joseph introduced the two women. It was then that Felicity had offered up her brother. Annie, though excited at the prospect, did not take her seriously and forgot all about it. But a month later, an e-mail appeared in her inbox from Felicity with Frederick Barrow's phone number, e-mail address, and pledge that he would participate.

  The reading promised to be a huge success. They had sent out the announcements, and one hundred tickets had been ordered already. Frederick Barrow himself, though he wrote turbulent, wrenching books, turned out to be as tranquil a man as Annie had ever met. They went for drinks to discuss the event, drinks somehow became dinner, and dinner led to after-dinner drinks at Bemelman's Bar. They walked together up Fifth Avenue past the closed museums and the dark forest of Central Park at night. They walked and walked in the windy night, quoting Shakespeare like undergraduates and holding hands.

  Never, Annie thought, have I regretted an evening as a librarian less. This mood lasted for weeks. Then Frederick Barrow joined the library and began to use it for his research, which led to more lunches, more dinners, and considerably more quotation. Indeed, on the day that Annie and Miranda left their stepfather in tears and retreated to a cafe to drink tea, Annie was planning to have dinner with Frederick.

  "He's so handsome in his author photos," Miranda said.

  "They're not terribly recent. His hair is almost white now. I think writers should keep their photos up-to-date. When he does finally use a new one, it will be a terrible shock to his readers. They'll think he's been ill."

  "Good God, Annie."

  Miranda's cell phone gave a plaintive cry, and she checked a text message, frowned, and swore beneath her breath. "Where does he live, anyway?" she said as she typed into the cell phone. "These fuckers." She put the phone away. "So? Where?" It was important to Miranda that Frederick Barrow be a New Yorker. It would not do anyone any good if he lived in San Francisco or taught at the University of Iowa.

  "He's been in Berlin for the past year--that's where I first got in touch with him."

  "Oh, Berlin!" Miranda, in her enthusiasm for a city she found endlessly fascinating, forgot for a moment that she wanted Frederick to live nearby. "Wonderful."

  "But I think he actually lives in Massachusetts. Cape Cod? He's been staying with his kids in the city."

  Massachusetts was not bad. Miranda nodded in approval. She'd had a boyfriend in college who went to Harvard while she went to Barnard. There was a good train, and Miranda liked trains. A train felt fast, faster than a car, faster even than a plane, and the illusion of speed was almost as important to Miranda as was speed itself. She became bored and impatient easily, but had found that anything framed by a train window could hold her attention, as if the undersides and back ends and rusty corners of dying cities were episodes of a rough, rousing life flashing by. She had ended up detesting the Harvard boyfriend, Scarsdale Nick, as she used to call him, but the train had never disappointed her. No, Frederick Barrow in Massachusetts was not bad at all.

  "He is still pretty good-looking," Annie said. "He wears nice old tweed jackets."

  Annie's tone was serious and full of warmth. Miranda gave a snort.

  "What?" Annie said.

  "Ha!"

  "You're crazy."

  "I know what I know," Miranda said.

  As the weeks wore on, the marriage mediation sessions began. Betty and Joseph went to an office oddly situated in Chelsea.

  "Where did you find out about this woman?" Betty asked.

  "Referral."

  "This is a very dumpy office," Betty whispered. They had walked down the narrow stairs of a decrepit brownstone to what was the basement level. "This was called the English basement when they first started doing them in New York. Nineteenth century. Very Upstairs, Downstairs, don't you think? Do you remember when Annie hired a carpenter she found in the Village Voice classifieds? Did you find this woman in the Village Voice classifieds, honey? Those bookcases tilted terribly."

  A small dumpy woman appeared at the door to an inner dumpy office. She had full, poorly cut salt-and-pepper hair. She was, Betty noticed, wearing space shoes.

  "Are those back?" she asked the woman. "They were very popular in the fifties. Our dentist wore them."

  The mediator did not smile. But she did hold out her hand and introduce herself. Her name was Nina Britsky. A matzoh-punim, Betty thought, feeling sad for her.

  The office was small and crowded with piles of bulging folders. It resembled a closet, really--the bulging file closet. The mediator sat on a complicated ergonomic chair and placed her feet on a small stool that was on rockers. So much specialized equipment, Betty thought, just to listen to Joseph and me disagree.

  Nina Britsky opened her laptop and began to type and speak.

  Betty did not hear much of what she said. The initial barrage of New Age pop-psychological platitudes delivered in a hoarse Bronx accent immediately told Betty that daydreaming would be the most polite response. And Nina Britsky looked so much like a chimpanzee curled on her ergonomic chair: her coarse cap of hair; her lips pursed in contemplation, then opening wide to reveal large teeth. Betty imagined herself in a dark chimpanzee cave, though she did not believe, now that she thought of it, that chimpanzees slept in caves. Surely they slept in trees. But the room was almost as dark as a cave. Perhaps there was a divorce mediation lighting theory: if the two people could no longer see each other, they would leave each other more easily. The woman was probably just trying to keep her electricity bills down, and who could blame her? Betty had just begun changing over to the new energy-saving bulbs herself. They were so pretty, twisting and turning, like old-fashioned filaments . . .

  "It's good there's no child custody involved," the woman was saying. She typed importantly on her laptop. "In these cases, that can get pretty ugly."

  "These cases?" Betty said. "In all cases, I would think."

  "Well, it can be much worse in same-sex cases."

  "But Joseph and I are not the same sex," Betty explained gently.

  Joseph was squirming a bit, she noticed.

  "Are we, Joseph?"

  "I was referring to the third party," Nina Britsky said.

  "There is no third party," Joseph said hurriedly.

  "And if there were, I don't think it would be a man," Betty said.

  "Well, I assumed it was a woman," Nina Britsky said, throwing Betty a pointed look. "A same-sex woman," she
added, to Betty's further confusion. "Why else would you come to me?"

  It was only after they had been handed pamphlets inviting them to a support group--My Spouse's Closet Anonymous or MYSPCL, pronounced like bicycle--and left the office in a dull daze that Betty asked Joseph exactly who it was who had referred the ergonomic chimpanzee.

  "Because, Joseph, she seems a rather specialized mediator."

  Joseph said, "That was a disaster. Let's go get dinner."

  "Look at her card: For couples seeking divorce when women seek women. It could be a classified ad in The Village Voice, couldn't it? Maybe she'll build us a crooked bookcase."

  Joseph couldn't help laughing. Betty had always made him laugh.

  "You're so funny," he said.

  Betty burst into tears.

  2

  It was around this time that Miranda made her infamous appearance on Oprah. It was all a blur at the time--being led from a room full of snacks she was far too nervous to eat, stepping over cables, stepping onto a stage, sitting on a sofa, the sound of applause, the radiance and confidence of the woman across from her, some questions, some answers . . . How could she have let this happen? Didn't she check up on the stories the writers told her? Couldn't she see? Didn't she care? . . .

  She felt like a corrupt politician stonewalling the press, like a criminal, like one of her disgraced writers. But Miranda knew that what she was saying to this woman, who hardly seemed real she was so very Oprah-like, was not only true, it was profound. Why did no one understand when she tried to explain? When she told them that her writers' stories were real-life stories even when they were lies?

  "Because in real life people make things up," she said to Oprah.

  But Oprah shook her iconic head, and Miranda was overwhelmed with shame.

  She stayed in her loft for weeks after that, not answering the phone, not picking up calls from the clients whom she had tried to defend, ignoring the chorus of pleading voices on her answering machine: her mother, her sister, even the lawyer who was trying to defend her, for several publishers were now coming after her for fraud.

  She lay in bed, tangled in her sheets, asking herself and her four walls in a loud keening voice: Why?

  And then imagining, in the ironic voice with its Yiddish lilt that she had always playfully bestowed on God, a voice that answered by raising its shoulders and helplessly holding out its hands: Why not?

  This is Miranda Weissmann, the answering machine said. This is your lawyer, the answering machine answered, and there is a lien on all your property until the lawsuit is settled, so couldn't you please call me back?

  In real life, people don't call back, Miranda explained to the pillow. In real life, people have tantrums.

  Annie and Betty both tried to visit her, but even they were left standing in the hallway banging on the door, Annie calling in, "Oh, don't be such an ass."

  It wasn't until Annie left a message on the answering machine describing their mother's unhappy state in gruesome detail that Miranda felt she actually had to answer the phone.

  "She's really suffering," Annie said when Miranda finally picked up. "She needs you."

  Miranda showered and dressed and headed uptown. Though she was acknowledged even by herself to be extraordinarily self-absorbed, no one had ever accused Miranda Weissmann of being selfish.

  The apartment was on the tenth floor, just high enough for a spacious view of the park, just low enough for a human one. Central Park was their front yard, Joseph liked to say. Their grounds. He and Betty had tried living in the suburbs when the children were little, in Westport, Connecticut. Dull and lonely there, they agreed, and after only one year, when so many other young couples were leaving the city, they found the big apartment on Central Park West and bought it for a song. That was the word Joseph had used, a "song," and Betty still recalled that day when they signed the papers and went to look at their new home. That sickly ambiance of someone else's old age had surrounded them--the filthy fingerprints around the light switches, the greasy Venetian blinds, the grime of the windows, and an amber spiral of ancient flypaper studded with ancient flies. But all Betty could think of was that they bought it for a song, and she had looked so happy and so beautiful in the weak silver city light that Joseph had not had the heart to explain the expression, to tell her they had paid the song, not received it.

  Now they both stalked the premises like irritable old housecats, watching each other, waiting.

  "You are leaving me," Betty said late one morning. "Hadn't you better leave, then?"

  "Hadn't?"

  "I think a certain formality of address is required under the circumstances, don't you? Unless you want to call the calling off off, of course."

  There were times when Joe did want to call the calling off off. But that day was not one of them. Betty was being insufferable. She was vamping mercilessly, wearing her bathrobe, speaking in an arch yet melodramatic voice, and, perhaps most alarming of all, drinking shots of single malt in midmorning.

  "That's a sipping whiskey. Not a gulping whiskey."

  "I'm distraught."

  "You're being ridiculous, Betty. You look like something out of The Lost Weekend. This is not healthy, moping around the apartment, drinking."

  "My husband of fifty years is leaving me," she said.

  Forty-eight, he thought.

  As if she'd heard him, she said, "Bastard."

  She threw her glass at him.

  "All right, Elizabeth Taylor," he said, getting a towel from the bathroom.

  "Wrong movie," she screamed.

  "It's not a movie, Betty," Joseph said. "That's the point."

  "Bastard," she said again. She sat down on the couch.

  The buzzer rang, and Betty stayed where she was, staring straight ahead at the fireplace. She had discovered the mantel with its towering mirror and decorative gesso detail at a salvage yard decades ago. How could Joseph expect her to leave her Greek Revival mantel? Her hearth, as it were? She saw her reflection, sullen, in the mirror. The matching busts of impassive Greek Revival women adorned with gold leaf gazed back at her from either side of the mantel. She heard Joseph's footsteps. What a heavy tread he had. How she would miss it when he was gone, when she was alone with the mantel's two white wooden busts. Through the intercom, she heard the doorman announcing Miranda. As a child, Miranda had talked to the fireplace ladies, sometimes staging elaborate tea parties with the disembodied heads as her guests.

  "Do you want her to see you like this?" Joe said when he returned to the living room.

  For a moment Betty thought he was addressing one of the busts. Then she understood.

  "Do you want her to see you at all?" she said. She heard and hated the sound of her voice. Oh, Joseph, she wanted to say. Let's stop all this nonsense now.

  They could hear Miranda's key in the lock. Joe thought, I have to get that key back. Annie's, too. He glanced at his wife. She was wearing her old white bathrobe, and curled in on herself on the couch, she looked like someone's crumpled, abandoned Kleenex. Joe winced at his own word, the word "abandoned." No one was abandoning anyone. He would be generous. He was generous. She was being irrational. It wasn't like her. She didn't even look like herself, her face puffy from crying. If she would just be reasonable, everything would be fine: she would be so much happier once she moved into her own place.

  "This situation is becoming sordid," he said.

  "Squalid even."

  Miranda came into the living room, walked to the couch, and gave her mother a kiss.

  "Whew," she said, sniffing. "Someone got started early."

  "I'm suffering."

  Miranda sat down and put her arms around her mother.

  "My poor darling," Betty said. "So are you, aren't you? There, there, Miranda darling. There, there."

  Joe looked at the two of them patting each other's back and murmuring, "There, there." He felt awkward, an ogre standing with an enormous white bath towel. But what had he really done? Was it so wrong to fal
l in love?

  "This is a very unhealthy situation," he said.

  The two women ignored him.

  He threw the towel down at the spill and stared at it. "Your mother never drinks," he said. "You have to talk to her, Miranda. I'm worried about her."

  There was withering silence. The warm perfume of Scotch whiskey hung in the room.

  "I'm not an ogre," he said.

  The next day, Joseph packed his bags and left for Hong Kong on a business trip.

  "You must be relieved," Annie said to her mother on the phone.

  But Betty was not relieved. She was even more miserable than before.

  And, too, there was the problem of money. An immediate, acute problem. Unaccustomed, unaccountable. Undeniable. On the advice of Joseph's lawyers, Joseph's lawyers now informed her, Joseph was cutting off all credit cards. The joint bank account, which Betty used for household expenses, would not be replenished until a settlement had been reached.

  "I thought Mr. Weissmann didn't want to use lawyers," Betty said to the lawyers. "We have a mediator." The lawyers replied only that they supposed, judging by the evidence of their employment, that Mr. Weissmann had changed his mind.

  "I'm awfully sorry," Joseph said when he called. "It was on the advice of my lawyers that I got lawyers."

  "Do they advise me to get lawyers, too?"

  "We can work this out equitably. It just takes a little time. I'm prepared to be generous."

  "Joseph, you're squeezing me out of my own home."

  "Well, maybe that would be best. While we settle things."

  Just hearing his voice made Betty feel a little better. It was a voice she had heard every day. After the conversation, she felt more herself.

  "That's crazy," Annie said when her mother explained this to her. "He's behaving horribly. And you can't move out. That's Divorce 101."