Luke and Corrine stopped just inside the gate to observe and marvel at this manifestation of the season, watching in silence as the herd of Santas turned up Sixth Avenue and disappeared around the corner. They followed, closing the gate behind them, but by the time they reached Sixth Avenue, there wasn’t a single Santa in sight.
“Can you believe that?” she said.
“Never seen anything quite like it in my life.”
Seeing Famous Ray’s on the corner of Eleventh Street, she realized she was ravenous and asked if he would buy her a slice. Somehow, she wasn’t quite ready for the afternoon to end.
“God, I haven’t been here in twenty years,” she said as they stood at the counter, waiting for their slices to warm.
“My first time, I’m afraid.”
“You’ve never been here?” she said, astonished.
“I’ve been to other establishments bearing the name.”
“No, no, this is the real Ray’s. Forget about all those Original Ray’s. I can’t believe you’ve never been here. You haven’t seen much, have you? What the hell have you been doing the last twenty years?”
“I was working.”
“And eating at ‘Twenty-one’ and Le Cirque.”
“Actually, I was looking for you.”
“No wonder. You needed me.”
He walked her to the subway, past St. Vincent’s Hospital with its wailing wall of MISSING posters. She looked down at her feet, dazzled by the whiteness of the sidewalk, spangled in the sunlight. It had been years since she’d noticed the way that, on certain winter days, the sidewalks are bedizened as if studded with diamonds.
Already she felt herself separating from him, unable to keep herself from lifting away, making the transition to her other life, a process that accelerated when she saw a boy about Jeremy’s age in a puffy blue parka slip on a patch of ice and fall to the ground, his bare head hitting the salt-stained sidewalk, and though he recovered quickly from his fright, his mother lifting him upright and dusting him off, she couldn’t help worrying about his head, imagining the shock of the impact and thinking of her own children, in whom she would sometimes see the ghostly image of their newborn eggshell skulls, remembering how she had cried when she’d first seen them, intubated under glass, their tiny writhing bodies and their translucent pink skulls veined with blue, blaming herself for the precariousness of their existence, guilty about the lengths she’d gone to in order to satisfy her craving for offspring when nature had demurred, despairing of her ability to protect them from pain and harm.
She had hoped that someday she might take their existence for granted, and this afternoon she’d been lulled into believing that she could live for her own desires, but now she worried that this anxiety was a permanent condition, that she would never know the untroubled sleep of youth, that she would always be hovering near the surface of consciousness in the perpetual light of the restless city, alert to the sound of a cough, the thump of a falling body, the drone of a plane overhead.
32
Luke?” “Earth to Dad. Hello?” They were in a Town Car, assailed by faux balsam air freshener, crossing through the park to the West Side: the family, he and his wife and daughter—of this much he was certain. He tried to recall if some fragment of current conversation had filtered through the reverie of his afternoon idyll with Corrine. “Sorry,” he said. “What was the question?”
“Sometimes,” Sasha said, “I think you got hit on the head or something back in September.”
“In a sense,” he said, “I did.”
“Well, maybe it’s time to move on.”
“Mom was just talking about next semester,” Ashley prompted, pinching him on the thigh.
“I was saying to Ashley,” Sasha said, “what I just said to you—that it’s time to get back to normal. Move on.”
“That depends,” Luke said, “on what you think is normal.”
“We can’t run and hide from our problems forever. Ashley’s place is open at Sprague—we paid the tuition in full. And it’s not as if we’re going to pick up and move to Tennessee, for God’s sake.”
“Why not?”
“Ashley, puh-lease.”
“There’s life outside of New York, Mom.”
“There’s life on the bottom of the ocean, Ashley, but fortunately for us, our ancestors crawled up on the beach and developed lungs and feet, not to mention hand-stitched Italian footwear.”
Ashley turned to face her mother. “You know,” she said, “last year, I used to think that having the right Steve Madden shoes and shopping at Infinity for baby tees and teddy-bear backpacks and knowing a tenth-grade boy at Collegiate, that those were the only really important things. But you know what? I grew out of it.”
“Girls,” Luke pleaded. Torn between loyalty to his daughter’s wishes and his own desire to set up house with Corrine, he found himself arguing Ashley’s case against his wife. “Have you forgotten,” he said, “that our daughter was hospitalized for a drug overdose last month?”
“Of course I haven’t forgotten. But she can get treatment in New York. I mean, if anything, she can get far better treatment here than she can down there in Dollywood.”
“You’re both aware, right, that I understand English and that I’m sitting directly between you?”
“This is kind of a huge discussion,” Luke said. “Maybe we can finish it after the ballet.”
The annual trip to The Nutcracker had for many years been a highlight of the holidays for Ashley, until last year, when she’d attended under duress, declaring The Nutcracker childish and the ballet elitist. But when he broached the subject the week before, she’d surprised him by embracing the outing, deciding that it would be “kind of cool, like old times,” as if childhood was now distant enough to have taken on a rosy, nostalgic glow. He wasn’t sure how she had so quickly reconciled herself to the taint of elitism, the very quality that in her mind defined her mother—a charge against which Luke had defended her. The fact that Sasha was a snob didn’t negate her genuine passion and connoisseurship; she’d been on the board for a decade and she was furious when, two weeks before, Luke had declined to fly back from Tennessee to attend the opening-night performance of Stars and Stripes, chosen as the season opener more or less at the last minute in deference to the national mood of patriotic mourning. Somehow, Luke felt he owed it to her to follow through on The Nutcracker. She in turn had helped him put together the memorial service for Guillermo two days hence.
Their car having finally pulled to the curb amid a school of lumpish yellow cabs, they disembarked and strolled up the long plaza toward the theater. Luke took Ashley’s hand as they pressed into the crowd, which coagulated as they approached the doors.
“Where’s Mom?”
“I don’t know, pressing the flesh.”
Standing on his toes he surveyed the throng of dark coats and bright holiday faces, finally spotting Sasha in the middle of the plaza, smoking with Biff and Mimi Pulver. Not five feet to her left, Corrine was striding toward him with a seraphic towheaded child and waving at him—or so it seemed until he saw the couple off to his right, a black man and a white woman with two caf au lait children, waving back in Corrine’s direction.
Properly, almost primly, attired and groomed after the shambolic dishevelment of the afternoon, she was buttoned into a tailored Black Watch tartan coat, her coppery mane brushed back and tamed by a black velvet headband—a preppy princess. Disoriented and nervous as he was, it struck him as odd that she hadn’t specified the nature of the engagement that had foreshortened their afternoon assignation. But neither, he realized, had he. It was as if they’d both observed some scrupulous interpretation of a boundary between lust and its biological raison d’tre. “Some friends coming over,” she’d said, looking him in the eyes. And he’d likewise dodged the question. Even as he was about to dissolve his family, he’d felt, it seemed in retrospect, protective of its rituals, reluctant to mention it; she must have felt even less inclined to le
t these two worlds interpenetrate.
She paused and looked behind her, awaiting her husband, for such he clearly was, carrying a second child as he fumbled with his coat pocket. Russell Calloway lowered the little boy to his feet beside the girl, his twin, the two standing at attention in their double-breasted navy coats, with their flaxen hair and matching expressions of cautious bedazzlement. Storey and Jeremy. He’d known their names for months, but until this moment their existence had been somewhat theoretical. The girl reached over and took the boy’s hand; his expression, the exasperated moue with which he reacted to this gesture, suggested that he did not in general approve of holding hands with a girl, especially if she was his sister, but he grudgingly acquiesced with an air of making an exception just this once, indulging his sister amid this surging crowd of tall strangers—or so it seemed to Luke from his vantage across the plaza. Studying their half-formed faces, he told himself the twins favored Corrine, even as he scrutinized Russell, who was searching the inside pockets of his overcoat.
Luke had to admit this man was not an entirely unworthy rival in the physical sense—tall and commanding, if a little lumpy in the middle. His hair could be criticized as unfashionably long, almost foppishly so for a man his age. And strictly speaking, his tweed overcoat was unsuitable for evening. Luke might have discerned additional individual faults, but his critical focus kept shifting to the group portrait: Russell leaning over to brush his son’s hair away from his eyes as Corrine held out to him the tickets she’d pulled from her purse, these overlapping gestures creating a harmonic composition around the still center of the luminous twins.
If there was any constraint between the parents, he was unable to detect it as they started up the plaza with the solemn twins between them, an enviably handsome family that appeared, from this distance, to illustrate some cosmopolitan ideal. Luke watched, transfixed by the children, searching their excited faces for traces of their mother.
Seeing Corrine in this context reminded him of something his mother had said—that if love is something more than wanting, it involves putting someone else’s well-being ahead of your own inclinations and desires.
“What’s up, Dad?” Ashley was regarding him with skeptical curiosity.
“Nothing,” he said, just as it occurred to him that they should move out of the path of the approaching Calloways.
Sasha had extracted herself from the Pulvers and started toward them, tossing away her cigarette and falling into step just behind Corrine. Spotting Luke, she waved and walked the fingers of one hand across the palm of the other to signal her good intentions.
Luke raised his hand dutifully, waving back, his gesture drawing Corrine’s attention. She blanched at the sight of him, pausing in midstep, upsetting the delicate rhythm of the familial quadriga, the twins stumbling into her as she recovered herself, helping them to right themselves and making a clownish face of self-reproach.
Luke found himself standing beside the mixed couple with their two stunning bronze children—apparently the Calloways’ friends. He knew he should move, but he felt paralyzed as he watched Sasha and the Calloways converging, Corrine directing her attention ostentatiously toward the children as she advanced, smoothing her son’s hair, performing a methodical and unnecessary adjustment of her daughter’s overcoat, just as Sasha drew abreast of her, brushing up against her shoulder as she pressed her way forward, an entitled New Yorker in a hurry.
“The Pulvers send their love,” Sasha announced, cutting in front of Corrine and nearly colliding with the children as she reached for Luke’s arm, simultaneously looking down. “Oh, I’m so sorry. Look at these little angels…. I almost stepped on you.” She touched Storey’s head as if for luck, to the obvious horror of her mother. “Oh my God, they’re gorgeous,” she said to Corrine. “They are just to die. Twins? In their little matching Bonpoint coats. To die!”
Corrine managed to nod and shape a facsimile of a smile as the other couple called out greetings, Russell waving to his friends even as he paused to check out the attractive and imperious stranger who was fawning over his children, who looked frightened, especially Storey.
Corrine knelt beside her daughter. “What’s wrong, honey?”
She seemed on the verge of tears. “That lady said we’re going to die.”
“No, honey, it’s just an expression.”
Sasha crouched down, bringing herself face-to-face with the girl while Corrine sneaked a helpless, frightened glance at Luke.
“Oh, sweetie, I just meant you were beyond.”
“Beyond what?” the boy said, showing his courage.
“How old are you two little angels?” Sasha asked in an exaggerated singsong tone.
Storey looked up at her mother for guidance.
“They’re six,” Corrine said.
“Almost seven.”
“In Feb’uary.”
“Such a brilliant age.” She stood and turned to Luke. “Don’t you miss it, honey?”
He nodded skeptically; something in his expression caused his wife to turn her attention back to Corrine just when she might’ve let the encounter die a natural death.
“We haven’t met… have we?” she said, looking back and forth between Corrine and Luke.
Russell extended his hand. “Russell Calloway. And this is my wife, Corrine.”
“Sasha and Luke McGavock. And this is our daughter, Ashley.”
“Actually,” Corrine said, smiling at Luke as if she’d almost failed to recognize him, “Luke and I worked at the soup kitchen together this past fall.”
“So you were the one keeping my wife out all night,” Russell said cheerfully.
“Well, it was all for charity,” Sasha said in a crisp, icy tone, the import of which was lost on Russell, if not on his wife.
Luke and Corrine exchanged a glance freighted on both sides with recognition and loss. He felt as if he were watching her disappear. Almost from the start, they’d had a kind of transparency to each other. Now he saw only sadness, and her embarrassed recognition of what had just happened—an event that in its outward aspect was as subtle as a shift in the breeze, but which was even now carrying them away from each other like two small craft on separate currents.
“You’ll excuse us,” Russell said. “Our friends are waiting.”
Her lips drawn and quivering, Corrine gathered her children around her as she greeted the other couple. In her wake, Luke caught a faint trace of the sunny coconut perfume of her hair, and it carried him back to the first time he’d smelled it, infused with the acrid scent of death, kissing her as dawn broke over the harbor.
In that moment, the nighttime plaza with all its swirling throng blurred and faded as if engulfed in a sudden storm of sand or snow. Even as she glared at him, Sasha’s features grew fainter and less distinct, perhaps a preview of a future when her image would be hard to conjure except in a general way, like the graduation-day and prom-night faces staring out from telephone poles, from the walls outside hospitals and fire stations. What he would remember, picturing it again and again over the years, was Corrine’s stricken face turning away, like a door closing on the last of his youthful ideals and illusions.
He stood there under the scrutiny of his wife and daughter, struggling to maintain his balance and composure against a wave of vertigo, as if he’d found himself standing on some precipitous slope, having crested a summit somewhere back there without quite realizing it at the time—sharing a bench in the singed morning air of October or a four-poster bed on Nantucket—and looking down now into an abyss. Everything hereafter would be a gradual descent, faster or slower, from regret to oblivion.
She was his lost twin, his sundered other half, and after half a lifetime he had found her, and now would let her go. Of course they would speak again, tomorrow or the next day, in the park or on the brown lawn under the bare trees of Bowling Green, if only to try to comfort each other and flagellate themselves. And perhaps they would meet again, in the years to come, randomly, as one do
es in New York, on a midtown sidewalk or at the bar of a restaurant in the Village—or, rather, as one used to, before the idea of the protean city as eternal and indestructible had been called into doubt. It seemed to him both hopeful that he could once again imagine the city as a backdrop to the dramas of daily life and sad that the satori flash of acute wakefulness and connectedness that had followed the initial confrontation with mortality in September was already fading behind them. For a few weeks, they had all found it impossible to believe that anything would ever be the same again. As he sat beside his daughter and watched the “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairies” for the tenth or twelfth time, he took comfort in that vision of the city as the setting for a future encounter with Corrine, and in the fact that he could imagine it now. He was grateful, sitting there in the theater, to be participating in this ritual of family and community, if possibly for the last time. And even in the slough of his sadness, he found himself conjuring brighter scenarios, and seeing his virtuous renunciation rewarded in the end.
How are you? he would say after they’d expressed surprise at their chance encounter and he had told her she looked beautiful and she’d squinted at him and complained about how her hair frizzed in the rain.
And when he politely inquired after Russell, she would admit she was separated, or divorced, or widowed. She would recount sadly the emotional withdrawal, the habitual lying, the ugly affair; or the slow wasting as the cancer spread outward from the lungs, or what was known of the unexplained plane crash. He would tell her how sorry he was as they stood on the sidewalk, oblivious to the fine mist of rain and the hiss of car tires on the avenue. I thought about calling you, she would say, her coppery hair glistening, spangled with tiny droplets of rain.
The Good Life Page 35
