“Poppy. Gladys,” Julie said sternly, “we have to look happy for them.”
“What are you talking about?” Edward asked her.
She shook her head at him and sighed, a teacher striving for patience with a slow pupil. “They probably can’t get pregnant, and Chanel is just a consolation prize they’ve given themselves.” She was cradling the puppy as if it were a baby, a role it seemed to enjoy.
“Oh,” Edward said, chastened, and suddenly deeply admiring of Julie. She must have inherited some of her mother’s natural instincts about human behavior. But he had a queer, pervasive sense of loss, too. Only hours ago, he’d stood in the rain near the school, contemplating children calling in bomb threats, and others carrying out actual bombings elsewhere. The animal cell erased from the blackboard, the words running from that girl’s notepaper in the rain—an unlearning, the way we live now. It would be wanton to bring another hostage to fortune into this ephemeral, stupid world. So why did he feel so crestfallen?
Amanda and Nick came back inside. He set down a tray and went to Gladys and knelt before her. “I almost forgot,” he said. “We have something else to show you.” And he took a black-and-white picture from his shirt pocket and put it into her waiting hand.
The Missing Piece
Gladys didn’t work on jigsaw puzzles to fuel her aging brain. She’d begun doing them as a young housewife—a break from marriage and mothering that required her concentration, but not her heart—and there was always one in progress on the bridge table in her living room. Bee had learned her colors and flower names from a botanical gardens puzzle, and there was a half-finished replica of the Rockefeller Center ice rink on the table when Edward came to tell Gladys about Bee’s illness. Before he could speak, his glance fell on a twirling skater in a fur-trimmed red skirt, a dizzying image that stayed in his head for a long time afterward. He never saw that particular puzzle again, though, or any other at Gladys’s apartment until Nick and Amanda brought her a new one as a ninety-first birthday gift, and sat down with her to get it started.
They’d all gotten into the habit when they visited of working a bit on whatever puzzle was under way. If the frame wasn’t finished, they could look for a straight-edged piece or two to add—easy gratification—or try to join some of the scattered center pieces to one another and then look for a home for them. Julie had the least patience and perhaps the worst eye for the parts that might mesh. When she was little, she tried to force incompatible pieces together, bending them out of shape, and when they still wouldn’t fit she insisted the puzzle was “broken.”
Gladys told Edward that you could tell a lot about people by the way they approached the challenge of a dismantled picture. Bee had a wonderful sense of order, even at an early age. The frame had to be complete before she’d attempt to go any further. Nicky was good at seeing the whole in the parts, but he was careless in his execution and pieces went missing whenever he was around, to be found later under a sofa cushion or in the vacuum cleaner bag, or never seen again.
“What about me?” Edward asked Gladys as they sat side by side, trying to fill in the middle section of a safari puzzle. He was grateful for nature’s patterns—zebra stripes and leopard spots—camouflage in the jungle, and clues for the would-be puzzle solver.
“You,” she said, “are a good partner.” She went on to say that he didn’t grab all the easy fill-ins, or act too cocky about solving a difficult space.
But he believed that she was referring to him as a husband, as her lost daughter’s partner, and he savored the balm of her approval. He had been considering telling her something about his dating, about Laurel, a low-key version of the truth to ease her into the idea of his wanting to be part of a couple again. Instead he said, “That’s such good news about the baby, isn’t it?”
“Yes! But between you and me, I couldn’t make out a thing on that picture, even with my magnifying glass. And Amanda kept saying, ‘See, there’s the head, there’s the foot!’ I had to fake it. I hope they didn’t catch on.”
Edward found a place for the puzzle piece in his hand, completing a monkey almost hidden in a tree. “You’re an excellent faker,” he said. “And sonograms are hard to read, especially so early, when you’re really just looking at a cluster of cells.”
“They didn’t have such things when I was carrying Beattie. And in those days, women weren’t taught how to breathe—we just screamed, until they gave you something. Off to dreamland! Then I woke up and someone, a nurse, said, ‘Hello, Mother.’ ”
Edward smiled. “Were you hoping for a girl?” he asked.
“I didn’t care, so long as it was healthy. You didn’t know until the baby came out what it was, which I forgot to ask—can you believe it? I heard that little cry, like a chicken, and I said, ‘Does it have everything?’ And the doctor—Weisman was his name, a regular wise guy—said, “ ‘Everything but a handle, it’s a girl!’ ”
“You must have been very happy,” Edward said.
“Oh, honey, it was the best day of my life.”
“She was beautiful?”
“Well, not exactly. She took her time coming out, so her head was kind of peanut-shaped at first. I thought: Lucky I can make hats. And she had this hair on her shoulders, like a little fur cape!” She raised the magnifying glass to the puzzle. “Like that monkey. But thank God it fell out! And then she was beautiful.”
They sat in silence for a few minutes, until Gladys said, “So, what’s new with you, besides becoming a grandfather?”
“Me?” Edward said. She’d given him a perfect cue, but his courage flagged. Gladys couldn’t imagine him outside the family frame into which she and Julie had pulled him that fateful day. “Surprises are dangerous at my age,” she’d warned at Nick and Amanda’s. She was only being playful then, but now she looked especially frail. “Not much,” he said. “You know, gardening, school—that same old gang: Mendel, Burbank, Linnaeus … My birds.”
Although he hadn’t been back to Greenbrook since he’d returned from the Vineyard. And when he’d finally gotten around to refilling his own bird feeders, the neglected birds swooped down from everywhere—the trees, the rooftops, the sky. Like the women coming out of the woodwork after Bee died.
“And you have lots of friends,” Gladys said, as if she were encouraging a shy child.
“I do,” he said, “and they’re all happy about my news.”
After he’d called Catherine, who wept with joy about Amanda’s pregnancy, he called Peggy and Ike Martin in Boston, remembering to ask after their little granddaughter, the one whose gender Ellen had identified for him. In what he tried to pass off as an afterthought, he inquired about Ellen, too, and was told that she and her husband had reconciled.
Of course that was what he’d assumed, while holding out some dim hope that it was her grown son or some other relative or friend who’d answered the phone the evening that Edward called and hung right up. Ellen had described her situation as a trial separation, so maybe this was only a trial reconciliation he could wait out. Who did he think he was he kidding? Seize the woman was what he should have done. But how many women did he need?
Only one, if the one he had wasn’t so weirdly possessive and elusive at once, if he could trust that she would stay, and that he wanted her to. He was in the ridiculous bind of avoiding complete closeness with Laurel at least partly out of fear of being deserted by her again. But would she leave precisely because he was so wary of commitment? He was too old—almost a grandfather!—for the games of courtship, especially when he wasn’t certain of the rules, or even if there were any.
When Edward had told Frances and Bernie about Amanda, they’d congratulated and teased him, but they both seemed more interested in Laurel. So was Sybil, despite her pretended indifference. In a follow-up phone call to the one giving Edward Olga’s phone number, she asked if he and his “friend” had set up an appointment yet to visit Ollie at the Met. Sybil, who had an opinion about everyone and everything, didn’t say
another word about Laurel—a pointed omission. And when he announced Amanda and Nick’s news, she said, “That’s lovely, Edward. Bee would have been so thrilled.”
But Laurel’s reaction was the one he had wondered about the most, and all she’d said was, “I’m very glad for you.” Like a detective, or a paranoid lover, he’d tried to decode some hidden message in that simple and apparently sincere phrase, and didn’t find any. She really wished him well. But when he asked her about going to the Met with him, she said, “That sounds like more than we need to know, doesn’t it? I mean, the glory is in the tapestries themselves.”
“Is this part of the trees or the underbrush?” Gladys asked, startling him out of his reverie. He took the puzzle piece she’d proffered and tried to lay it here and there until it finally slipped neatly into place.
Glory
Laurel was right—the glory was in the tapestries—but Edward, who’d always been interested in process, was still curious about how they’d been restored to that glory. So one Friday afternoon after school, he went across town to see Olga and Elliot in their lab at the museum. Elliot met him in the lobby and escorted him to the private work area upstairs. Edward felt privileged, the way he had as a small child when his father had taken him behind the scenes at the post office, where the enormous stacks of mail being sorted and sent out gave him his first sense of the vast, populated world beyond their Queens neighborhood. That room, in his memory, was as large and imposing and well lit as the textile conservation lab at the Met.
There was less activity here, though. Two men sat at a table sorting through skeins of yarn from the palest pink to a deep plum, and a few women stood before a horizontal frame, examining the religious tapestry, a nativity scene, laid across it. “This one had bad repair work done somewhere else, long ago,” Elliot said. He had Edward look through a standing magnifier, while he pointed to a section of the Virgin’s hair that seemed to have resulted from a botched salon dye job. “We’ll have to undo that first.”
Next, they went past a large shallow tank where a tapestry lay under water being cleansed. It reminded Edward of the pre-digital days when student photographers’ work would come into focus in developing fluid in Fenton’s darkroom. Then Elliot said, “There’s our Penelope,” and Olga waved to them from her station at another, smaller frame on the other side of the room, where she resumed moving a long needle threaded in green wool in and out of what appeared to be a heavily worn tapestry.
As they came closer, Edward saw that it had a heraldic motif, and was missing most of its central area. That was where Olga, in a white lab coat, was plying her needle. After they’d greeted each other, he watched her work for a while, which she seemed to be doing from memory, or inspiration. When she looked up again, he asked, “How can you reconstruct what’s lost without a blueprint?”
“It’s something like a jigsaw puzzle, without the picture on the box to guide you.”
The ice skater in the fur-trimmed red skirt twirled by behind Edward’s eyes. “Then how do you know what’s missing?” he said.
Elliot answered. “We look at other tapestries that may have been part of the same series or came from the same studio, and at paintings from the period,” he said.
“There are repeated themes, objects, colors,” Olga added. “Some of it’s fairly easy, some just educated guessing.”
“Easy for you, Leonardo,” Edward said, earning a smile from her. She told him that large, important tapestries, like the Burgos at the Cloisters, could take decades to restore, and that when it was finally hung there, members of the restoration team applauded and some even wept. Edward was moved, imagining the scene. The long patience, he thought, in art as in science.
When some of the other lab workers started to leave for the day, he asked if he could take Elliot and Olga out for an early dinner. But Elliot had paperwork to attend to and begged off. “Another time,” he said to Edward before heading to an office down the hall.
Olga and Edward had a brief discussion about where to go. “There are a few places right in the building,” she said. “Even the cafeteria food is pretty good, and I have my employee’s discount.” Good food or not, Edward didn’t want an assembly-line meal. And he’d already staked out a few small, appealing restaurants on and off Madison Avenue. “It’s my treat,” he reminded her, “and don’t you want to get out of here?”
They stepped out of the museum into a stunning spring afternoon, a blend of intense sunlight and temperate, dry air that you had to comment on, not just enjoy, even if that comment, on Olga’s part, was only a deep breath, almost a gasp of pleasure. The steps of the museum were littered with people relishing the weather or simply felled by the beauty of it. “Let’s stay here for a little while,” Olga said, “okay? Let’s join the tourists.”
She found a place for them on a middle tier, away from the handrails, where museum visitors streamed up and down, and Edward sat down next to her. “I haven’t done this in years,” he said, leaning back on his elbows and turning his face upward.
“Sometimes we have lunch out here. Greasy, garlicky vendor hot dogs, ice-cold Orange Crush, dining alfresco. Heaven.”
He looked at her, shading his eyes. She’d left her lab coat upstairs and was wearing what appeared to be a vintage silk dress, with a low waistline and a pattern of cherries. Gladys, Edward imagined, would say she had “style.” Yet her eyeglasses were smudged, and there was a piece of green lint in her short russet hair. He stopped himself from reaching to pluck it out. “Do you and Elliot live nearby?”
She seemed amused. “Well, I live on the Upper West Side, near Amsterdam. Elliot is up in the Bronx.”
“Oh,” Edward said.
“Did Sybil give you the impression that we were a couple?”
“Actually, yes.”
Olga sighed. “She never gives up, does she?”
“Pardon?” Edward said.
“She was trying to make you jealous. At our age! And then you and Laurel foiled her plans.”
“So, Elliot and you …?”
“Old friends, colleagues. We met in grad school, I think we told you that. But no sparks, ever, except in my cousin’s fertile imagination. Elliot’s divorced, and I’m a fifty-eight-year-old spinster lady.”
They sat in silence for a few minutes and then Olga said, “You and I started off on the wrong foot because of her, didn’t we? Hate at first sight.”
“I wouldn’t say that,” Edward said.
She laughed. “Wouldn’t you?”
“Well, not hate, exactly. More like … cautious animosity.”
“You looked as miserable as I felt.”
“My wife had died earlier that year. She was Sybil’s best friend—it seemed like a betrayal.”
“No wonder. What was she thinking? And I was just out of a bad situation—not feeling that crazy about men in general. Sybil’s timing is lousy, and she’s shameless in her scheming, but she truly believes in her mission. She can’t stand for anyone to be lonely.”
“Are you? Lonely, I mean. Wait, I take that back, it was an intrusive question.”
“It was, but I’ll tell you, anyway. I am, sometimes, but not always. There are advantages to living alone. You can sing loudly and, in my case, off key. You can hog the bed. I wear a ratty old nightgown that I still love. And, besides, hell really often is other people.”
Edward glanced at the strangers scattered around them, with their street maps and bottled water. They all seemed completely benign—art lovers, sun worshipers, like Olga, like himself. Then he thought back to some of the dates he’d had since Bee’s death. “Yeah, hell just about sums it up.” Of course, that pretty well summed up loneliness, too.
“How long have you and Laurel been together?” Olga asked.
“About a million years, on and off,” he said. Then, “I’m getting hungry, aren’t you? Would you like to go someplace else?”
“Sure. My rear end is starting to get numb, anyway.”
They ended up at
one of the bistros Edward had checked out earlier, taking the last empty table. After their drinks came, he said, “So why do you despise the Garden State?”
“I don’t despise it,” she said. “It’s just that I love the city, city life.”
“Don’t you miss nature?”
“What’s wrong with Central Park?” She sounded a little testy, the way she had the first time they met. “I walk through it to work on nice days, on days like this. I get my fill of greenness.”
“Hey, I like the park, too. And I used to live in the city, in Hell’s Kitchen, a long time ago.”
“How about Laurel?”
“She’s in Chelsea now.” He believed she was asking him something else, though. “We lived together for a while when we were much younger,” he said.
She sipped her drink and waited, as if he’d only paused in the middle of a long story, which he had.
“We were going to get married then. But she left me stranded.”
Olga didn’t say anything, and Edward just sat there, taken aback by his own candor—he hardly knew this woman—and that he didn’t feel the usual discomfort attached to that ancient event. That was the thing—it was ancient history, just as he’d once reminded Laurel. Then why had he held on to it this long, using it as a shield against her? “Sybil and Henry don’t know about any of that,” he said.
“Don’t worry, I won’t tell them. I never give Sybil any ammunition.”
“What do you mean?”
“That she hasn’t given up on us as a possibility, that imbecile. That she’d consider your history with Laurel as a strike against her, compared with my immaculate past.”
“Is your past immaculate?” he asked.
“Only in Sybil’s eyes. Of course, I don’t tell her lots of things.”
Now it was Edward’s turn to wait, and it didn’t take long. “Well, for one thing, I dated a married man,” Olga said.
His heart spiked and fell. He remembered Laurel’s blunt statements about her married lover, how she’d gone to his house when his wife was away. “Was that your bad situation, just before we met?” he said.
An Available Man Page 19
