I take an almond biscotti and an amaretto cappuccino and turn to the forms. A half an hour and two refills later I’ve managed to scare up a few extra hundred dollars and thought of a few scholarship suggestions—she’s already gotten one from the Rotary Club and one from the Sons of Columbus—but it’s clear that she’s still thousands short of making even the first semester’s tuition.
“I think we can clear about five thousand dollars if we take on more catering jobs this summer. We’ve gotten three calls already from people who were at Gavin Penrose’s engagement party. Thanks for helping with the cake, by the way. When I got back here I discovered that the power was out so I had to move all the perishables to our refrigerator at home.”
“No problem. Everyone loved the cake—” Instead of remembering Annemarie’s lovely cake, though, I suddenly see the bleeding cake of my dreams. “Has Gavin Penrose paid up your bill yet?” I ask, trying to drive the image from my mind. “Portia told me he owed you for two jobs.”
“Three including last night,” Annemarie says. She nods at Portia—which Portia takes as a cue to go back to the counter—and then she looks back at me and, lowering her voice, asks, “Why? Have you heard of any problems with other people getting paid?”
I think of the phone call I overheard between Gavin and Dominic Minelli. Although I can hardly tell Annemarie that I’ve been eavesdropping on private conversations I feel I have to give her some warning. I take a look around to see who’s in the cafe, but it’s mostly old Italian-American men. The lunch crowd from the Heights hasn’t turned up yet. Only two women customers in casual khakis and T-shirts, but expensive-looking loafers and handbags, are having salads on the other side of the room too far away to overhear.
“Look, I don’t know anything for sure, but why don’t you ask Ray’s uncle, Dom, if he knows anything, okay? And maybe you should ask for cash up front for any other jobs for him.” I look over toward the two women in khakis to let Annemarie know why I’m not pronouncing Gavin’s name. “Are you doing their wedding?”
“Yes, in August. I could ask for a fifty percent deposit, but if I get him angry he might tell his friends that he wasn’t happy with us …” Annemarie shrugs her elegant shoulders and rolls her eyes heavenward as if to indicate the disapproval that might emanate from the celestial beings on high. It’s ridiculous, I think, as if we were medieval serfs living at the whim and pleasure of the landed gentry. I know it’s not that bad, but it’s true that many of the town’s businesses—Gal’s and Minelli and Sons and McKay Glass—are dependent on the money and goodwill of the people who live in the Heights, on people like Gavin Penrose.
“I’ll see if I can find out anything else. Meanwhile, why don’t you try dealing directly with Joan Shelley? I’m pretty sure she’s loaded.”
Annemarie gives my hand a squeeze and tells me to wait a moment—she’ll get me some food for lunch. Do I want anything else?
“Well, I am making dinner for a friend tonight. Could I buy one of your tiramisu cakes?”
“Buy? After all your help, cara? Don’t insult me.”
Annemarie disappears into the kitchen and I finish my coffee. A group of young women come in wearing the same khakis-loafers-Louis-Vuitton-handbag uniform as the first pair and take the table next to me. They talk about the relative merits of several nursery schools and the competition to get into the best ones. Portia comes over and they order salads with dressing on the side and mineral water with extra lemon, slowly pronouncing their special requests as if Portia were a deaf-mute. After they order the conversation turns to nannies. One woman mentions that she’s had to fire hers because she wanted a month off to go home to Jamaica to visit her children.
“I’ve been a corporate lawyer for twelve years and I only get two weeks off,” she says.
By the time Annemarie comes back with two shopping bags full of food I’m wondering if it’s really so important that Bea finish out high school in Rosedale. I’ve stuck it out here for all these years, first because of my dad, and then because of the good schools and, I suppose, a sense of nostalgia, but I’m beginning to wonder if it’s really such a healthy environment.
IN ADDITION TO SANDWICHES, COFFEES, AND PASTRIES FOR THE GUYS, ANNEMARIE has given me enough food to serve an elegant dinner for a party of twelve. Salad, thinly sliced prosciutto, a whole melon, fresh mozzarella, a huge chunk of imported parmesan, hand-rolled spaghetti, a loaf of sour dough, and a tiramisu cake. I unpack it all into the refrigerator and spend the rest of the afternoon cleaning the loft. Before my father can get too nosy our daily thundershower rolls in with such fury that it knocks the power out.
“Are you sure you’ll be all right here all alone in the dark?” my father asks before leaving.
“I’ve got plenty of candles,” I tell him.
When they’ve finally gone I light the candles. I’ve got dozens from the crafts shows I used to sell at—hand-dipped tapers and scented votives, enormous squat pillars and ones shaped like flowers that float in water. When I finish lighting them all the loft with its high-pitched roof looks like a cathedral—the panes in the skylight misted over by the rain, the pattern of interlaced vines and leaves in the glass a dark tracery of shadows.
I slice the honeydew into thin crescents that I fan out on a willowware platter and then drape with a sheer layer of pink prosciutto. I go out onto the roof and pick some tomatoes and basil and make another platter with the fresh mozzarella. Then I pour a glass of wine and, taking one of the votive candles with me, go into the bathroom and fill up the tub.
It’s not until I step in that I remember that the hot water heater is electric. The water isn’t exactly frigid—there must have been some hot water left in the tank—but it’s cool enough to shock me. Still, I’m sweaty from all that cleaning so I force myself in and once I’m in it feels kind of good. I dip my head back until the water touches my forehead and my hair fans out behind me—I can make out a dim reflection of myself in the misty skylight above me—and it reminds me of Millais’s painting of drowned Ophelia. All I need are flowers. Then I remember Christine’s experiment to see how long she could stay in a tub filled with cold water and instantly I feel the chill of the water seeping into my bones—an insistent pressure pushing all the warmth out of my veins. I pull myself out of the tub and grab the towel hanging next to the bathroom mirror, where I meet my own gaze. The face that looks back at me in the candlelit half light is drained of blood, lips blue, eyes cavernous—the face of someone drowning. “What in the world are you thinking?” I ask myself for the second time today. “What do you think you’re doing?”
AFTER THAT I PUT ON JEANS AND A T-SHIRT—NOT THE GAUZY LITTLE SUMMER DRESS I’d laid out on my bed—and blow out about half the candles. I pour my glass of wine down the drain. My cold bath has done nothing for my tangled mess of hair, but at least it’s cleared my head.
I’m making dinner for my ex-husband, I say to myself as I chop onions and lay bacon strips in the cast-iron skillet—my daughter’s father. Lots of divorced women I know have amicable relationships with their exes. It’ll be good for Bea to see that we get along—but that’s it. It would not be good for Bea for me to become romantically involved with an ex-mental patient—the man who tried to drown us both fourteen years ago.
The buzzer from the front door sounds when the last of the bacon is fried. I turn off the burner, wipe my hands on the back of my jeans, and head down to the front door, taking with me the faint smell of onions and bacon through the factory, past the doors to the furnaces where Penrose’s iridescent glass used to be blown, past the rooms where the stained-glass windows were assembled and the loading docks where the crated windows once waited to be taken down to the city by train. Sometimes when I imagine the factory in full swing it’s hard to understand why it couldn’t be like that again.
When I open the door no one’s there. I’d forgotten to mention that it takes about five minutes for me to get down from the loft to the front entrance, but surely Neil wouldn’t ju
st leave. I step out into the wet street—the rain’s stopped, but water is still running in the gutters, and the air is saturated with moisture—and look right and left. There’s an old VW Bug with a sticker for Greenpeace on it that I suspect is Neil’s, but it’s empty. I’m going back in when I hear a voice from above.
“Vito’s is brief,” the voice says in a deep, rumbly bass, “but Art’s is longer.”
He’s sitting on the ledge beneath the inscription, about fifteen feet above the sidewalk, dangling his legs over the side. I can see the soles of his red canvas high-tops.
“So who would you rather date?”
“Very funny. You never were very good at Latin.”
“No, I’m far better at the Romance languages.” He turns around and starts climbing down, his fingers finding handholds between the old, cracked bricks until he’s five or six feet off the ground. Then he pushes off the wall and lands, knees slightly bent, light as a cat by my side. He’s got all his grace back. The last time I saw him at Briarwood—thirteen years ago—he was so dosed up on lithium he could barely walk down the hall without falling on his face.
“Hey,” he says, shaking brick dust off his hands, “I like your place so far.”
“Well, do you want to go in the traditional route,” I ask, indicating the door, “or are you planning to scale the battlements?”
“Not if the lady of the keep is willing to let down the drawbridge.” He sweeps down into a deep bow with a flourish of his hand and I try to keep from laughing.
“It’s hardly a castle, but wipe your feet,” I say walking in ahead of him. “These floor are hell to clean.”
I can hear him stop behind me at just the same spot where Christine paused when I brought her here—in the middle of the room in front of the wall of windows facing west. The sky is still overcast out on the street, but to the west a thin band of sunlight has appeared above the hills, enough to light up the heavy blue-gray clouds as if from inside. Furrowed with bands of copper, they look like another set of ridges above the Hudson Highlands. When I turn to Neil I see that his face is bathed in that eerie after-rain glow.
“It’s as if the room were a vessel to hold the light,” he says. “It should be a museum.”
“Penrose wanted only natural light in his studios and workshops. Come on, I’ll show you the rest.”
When I open the door to the annex the dogs are waiting there. They take one look at Neil and lift up their long, thin noses and howl.
“They’re a little skittish,” I explain, although truthfully I’ve never heard them howl before. “They were trained to race and kept in these awful cramped crates. They’re still not used to being loose.”
“Yeah, I know how they feel.” Neil puts out his hand, palm up and the dogs stretch their long necks toward him without taking a step forward. He scratches Francesca behind the ear and she leans her whole head into his hand, rolling her eyes back. Paolo still eyes him suspiciously.
“Something smells great,” Neil says.
“I’m making spaghetti carbonara. I hope you haven’t become a vegetarian.”
“Nope, still a meat eater … is this your studio?”
“This is McKay Glass. I’d show you the Lady window but the power is out so I can’t turn on the light table.” Neil doesn’t seem interested in the window, though; he’s squinting at the spiral staircase and looking up at the skylights in the loft above as if trying to remember something. “Hey, didn’t we break in here once?”
“I was wondering if you’d remember.” Neil and I—and sometimes Christine—had broken into several old abandoned mansions along the Hudson and a couple of old warehouses and factories. It was a sort of hobby of Neil’s. We’d seen far more spectacular places—ruined ballrooms with grass growing up in between the marble floors and indoor pools turned into underground lakes—than this little factory and so I’d thought he might have forgotten it. “We didn’t get far and this area looked different. It was originally Penrose’s private office and studio, but then it was used for storage after his death—”
“And there was broken glass all over the place.” Neil reaches out, takes my hand, and turns it over. I hope he doesn’t feel the tremor that runs through me when he traces the little crescent-shaped scar at the base of my right thumb. “You cut yourself on some broken glass that was on the floor.…”
His voice trails off and I know he’s remembering how I cut my hand. We’d been making love and I had reached out across the floor—for what? to grab onto something? I can’t remember, only that I’d felt something slice into my hand and screamed, but Neil hadn’t realized I was hurt until later.
“Come upstairs,” I say, wishing my voice didn’t sound so gravelly. “I’ll show you something.”
On the window ledges the shards of glass are glowing in the last sunlight, copper and violet, citrine green and gold-flecked rose—like peacock feathers or dragonfly wings.
“They’re from Penrose’s opalescent vases done during his art nouveau stage when he was copying Tiffany’s Favrile glass. I found shattered pieces all over the floor in here, as if someone had smashed a hundred vases. We’re lucky we didn’t get torn to shreds.”
Neil’s looking around the loft. Of all the guests I’ve had here recently—Christine, Kyle, Detective Falco—none of them saw it the way Neil can, with the image of the present loft superimposed on how it looked that night when we climbed up to the roof from the railroad tracks and came in through a broken skylight that had been overgrown with vines. The moonlight cast the shadows of the vines onto the floor, turning the loft into a shadow jungle, and lit up the crushed iridescent glass like sand from a tropical beach. Neil looks up at the stained-glass panels in the skylight—at the pattern of leaf and vine I’ve set into them—and then down at the tiles on the floor, which I glazed in a swirl of iridescent colors that I copied from the glass shards I found here.
“You’ve made it the way it looked that night,” he says.
“Remember what you said? That you wanted us to live in a ruin—”
“And you said only if there was adequate plumbing and heating. You’ve done it, Juno, you’ve made a livable ruin.” He smiles the way I remember—an upward lift of the left corner of his mouth that seems to tug at some corresponding muscle deep inside me.
I turn away and pull out the plates of food and put them on the counter for him to snack on while I cook, then turn on the burner underneath the iron skillet (which still has a little bacon fat in it) and under the pot of water. Neil nibbles at the the prosciutto and melon while wandering around the loft, stopping to look at pictures of Bea and asking me how old she is in each one and the occasion of the photo. Fifth grade graduation, third grade play, her bunkmates at the Adirondack camp she went to for five years—a compendium of life events he’s missed. It must get depressing for him because he stops asking until he gets to a shot of Bea and Christine taken last year in front of the Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center.
“Christine said she was grateful for the time she got to spend with Bea,” he says, “that it made up a little for not having her own child.”
“Really?” I look up from the bowl of eggs I’m beating. “I never realized until the last time we talked that she missed not having a kid. She was always so independent.”
Neil comes over to the counter and picks up the knife from the chopping board and starts mincing the onions that I’ve already cut into finer pieces. When we used to cook together he always did the chopping because he thought I wasn’t thorough enough. I’d have to stop him sometimes from pulverizing the vegetables.
“I think she had always been afraid of having a kid because of the bouts she’d had with depression. She thought it would make her a bad mother. I think she was afraid, too, that there was something wrong with her that she’d pass on.”
I think of how horrible it must have been for her to find out that her baby had Tay-Sachs. “She was pregnant when she died,” I say, turning to Neil to take the onions from him
so that he can’t help but meet my gaze. His eyes widen, but whether from surprise or the onion fumes I’m not sure. I slide the onions into the skillet. The crackle they make in the hot grease is the only sound for a few minutes.
“I thought maybe there was something like that going on,” Neil finally says, “from the questions she asked me.” He picks up a chunk of parmesan and grates it into the eggs while I sauté the onions. How easily we’ve fallen into the old patterns, I think, watching the white flesh of the onions turn translucent in the skillet. This was a dish we often cooked together. Neil loved that it was a recipe that I’d gotten from my mother and the story that it was a dish that coal carriers ate in Rome.
“I thought you said she mostly asked you questions about Clare Barovier?”
“Should I put the pasta in?” he asks because the water’s come to a boil. I tell him yes and he adds a pinch of salt without asking whether I’ve salted the water yet because I’d told him once that it was an old Italian superstition that it was bad luck to salt the water before it boiled. “It was the kind of questions she asked about Clare,” he continues, stirring the spaghetti noodles into the boiling water. “Had she recovered her sanity in her last years? Could she have done all those paintings if she were still crazy? And then she started asking about my recovery. How long had I been taking the Pieridine? Were there any side effects? How widely had it been tested? What would I do if the drug stopped working? Mostly she seemed interested in figuring out if a person could truly recover from mental illness. I thought she might be asking for herself. It was her biggest fear I think—that she was unbalanced and she might someday go insane.”
“And what were your answers?”
“To which questions? The ones about Clare or the ones about me?”
The pot of boiling water I’m carrying to the sink is heavy, but still I pause for a moment. I’m not sure myself what I want to know anymore. My interest has shifted suddenly from Christine to Neil.
The Drowning Tree Page 27
