Maggie Darling

by James Howard Kunstler

  “Just a little fashion experiment,” the girl answered guilelessly, ignoring the mistaken name.

  “What if the fashions change, dear?”

  “I’ll just take it out and the hole will eventually close.”

  “But it could leave a spot. A spot on your nose.”

  “Then she’ll have plastic surgery, Grandma,” Hooper said, hacking off an inch-thick slab of pâté. “They take a little laser and it’s over in a second.”

  “But why disfigure yourself in the first place?” Charlie said.

  “In my day, you only saw that sort of thing in the National Geographic,” Georgia said.

  “Your colored don’t even do this to themselves. It’s only the white kids. Ever notice?” Charlie said. “What is it with them? What is it with you, Heather?”

  “Charlie, chill out. Her own parents aren’t as tough on her as you guys are,” Hooper said. “And it’s Alison, everybody, not Heather. Think you can remember?” Maggie rather admired the way her son stood up to the elders.

  “Did you ever hear of showers, young man?” Irene asked.

  “Sure. Why?”

  “Why?” Irene echoed him. “You smell like a gym bag.”

  Hooper and Alison swapped a glance and he made a face.

  “This is a decadent generation,” Charlie said. “I thought the sixties were bad, but now I don’t know if today’s not worse. You see those whaddayacallem groups on the MTV? The rapsters? They’re like monkeys. And the white kids want to be like them. What I want to know is, why is it mandatory to wear a hat backwards or sideways? What’s wrong with wearing it the way it was designed to be worn, with the peak in the front?”

  “It’s just a style thing,” Hooper said.

  “Style, schmyle,” Irene said, using one of the Yiddishisms she borrowed from Charlie. “At least he could take it off in the house!”

  Hooper took it off and hung it from the pot rack above the table. “Happy, Grandma?”

  “Will everybody please stop picking on everybody!” Maggie said. “Alison, be a dear and help me set the table. You’ll find everything you need in the pantry.”

  “Sure.”

  “Where the hell is that boy of mine?” Georgia asked.

  “Yeah, where is Dad?”

  “God, there are so many sets of plates in here!” Alison said. “Which ones should I use?”

  “The pearlescent hobnail ones. And the pale-blue damask napkins,” Maggie said, beginning to cook a frittata in an enormous copper sauté pan. “And use the good silver. Hooper, go show her.”

  “Where in hell is your help, Maggie,” Georgia croaked.

  “It’s Christmas, for goodness sake, Georgia,” Maggie said, pulling the sheet of scones from the oven. “They’re in their own homes with their loved ones.”

  “And where in hell did you send my son, anyway? To Philadelphia?”

  Maggie directed Alison toward the dining room, where the young woman began distributing plates and silverware as though she were dealing a poker hand. She was quite unsure about the placement of forks in relation to knives and spoons, having grown up in a household where each member individually prepared his or her own meals in a microwave oven whenever the mood struck and then ate in front of the television.

  “Okay, everybody,” Maggie said. “Luncheon is served.” Maggie brought the frittata in on an enormous blue and white Canton platter. It was cut into manageable wedges. The scones followed in a silver wire basket. There was a green salad dressed in lemon juice with hazelnut oil, and a salver of Maggie’s own pickled onions, grown on the premises and doused in her own sherry vinegar. When Maggie observed how Alison had set the table, her heart sank.

  “Are we going to start without Kenneth?” Irene asked. His empty chair was suddenly the most conspicuous place at the table.

  “I think we should,” Maggie said quietly. “It’s apt to be a long time before he returns.”

  Georgia, who had fairly wobbled into the dining room, now threw down her napkin, saying, “Where in hell is he? What did you send him out for? This is altogether irregular!”

  “Yeah, Mom, what’s going on?”

  “Well,” Maggie began, a lump the size of a damson plum massing in her larynx, “I sent him away.”

  “We know that!” Georgia crowed. “I want to know where and what for!”

  “He did a bad thing and I asked him to leave.”

  “Did you say ‘a bad thing’?”

  “A very bad thing,” Maggie replied.

  “You asked him to leave?”

  “I told him to pack his bags, yes, and go.”

  At this Alison burst into tears.

  “You threw my boy out?”

  “I did.” Daintily, Maggie speared a chunk of potato and ate it. The others set their forks down.

  “Did you call a lawyer?” Irene asked dryly. Then her voice rose an octave: “Charlie, call Bob Markowitz! This minute.” He was their lawyer.

  “I’m not going to call Bob on Christmas,” Charlie said.

  “He’s Jewish! What does he care about Christmas?”

  “I’m Jewish and I care about it,” Charlie said.

  “Okay, fine. Then I’ll call him.”

  “Uh, Mother—”

  “This is an emergency,” Irene said.

  “This is not that kind of emergency,” Charlie said. “And Bob Markowitz isn’t a goddamn plumber, so just sit down.”

  “This is so sad! I’m sorry, excuse me,” Alison sobbed, and ran, weeping, from the room.

  Hooper rose from his seat but did not follow her. “This is too weird,” he muttered.

  “Did he hit you?” Irene asked in the manner of a private investigator.

  “As a matter of fact, I hit him,” Maggie said.

  “You hit my son!” Georgia screeched. “You trashy thing!”

  “What did he do to you, Mom?”

  “I’d rather not say.”

  “You hit my son and had the gall to throw him out of his own house! Where’s the phone. I want a phone.”

  “Don’t let her use the phone, Maggie,” Irene said. “She’ll call a lawyer. She’ll call a whole squadron of lawyers and a judge too!”

  “I’m calling my chauffeur, you tramp.”

  “There’s a phone right around the corner in the library,” Maggie said, splitting a scone.

  Georgia struggled in her chair. “Help me up, goddamnit!”

  “Sure, Grandma,” Hooper said and led her from the room.

  “You watch,” Irene said. “She’ll call the FBI. They’re connected, all these old Connecticut biddies. Everybody knows everybody clear up to the top.”

  “Mother, please!”

  “How can you sit there and eat?”

  “I’m hungry. And life must go on.”

  “This is a helluva note,” Charlie said, glancing around the room at the sideboards and the paintings on the wall, as though he were taking an inventory of Maggie’s and Kenneth’s joint possessions. “A helluva note! Sheesh.”

  “I have called the beeper service and Humberto will be here to pick me up in five minutes,” Georgia declared. “How could you snooker me into this … this meal! After what you’ve done!”

  “Kenneth did it to himself, Georgia. And, you know, he could have called you and told you not to come over today. That’s what a considerate man your son is.”

  “You might have called us!” Irene chimed in. “Did we need to drive all the way up here from the city for this? You might have considered our feelings too.”

  “In the rush of things I just forgot,” Maggie admitted. She now put down the scone, her appetite finally quashed.

  “I suppose you think you’re going to soak my boy,” Georgia said.

  “She’s not just going to soak him, you old bat, she’s going to take him to the cleaners and have him Martinized,” Irene retorted. Then, to Maggie: “What was it anyway, honey? Adultery. Did he have a bimbo?”

  “You’re the bimbo,” Georgia shrieked
at Irene. “And you,” she turned to Maggie, “are nothing more than a gold-digging scullery maid.” The blasts of a car horn resounded from without. “Hooper! Help me to my car.”

  “Sure, Grandma,”

  When she was gone, Irene said, “Well, are you going to tell us about it?”

  Maggie sighed and said tonelessly, “He did it here, right under our roof.”

  “With a girl?”

  “Of course with a girl,” Maggie said. “Kenneth is not homosexual.”

  “You never know these days,” her mother said.

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake, Irene. Ken’s as straight as a Doberman pinscher,” said Charlie, who was the only person who ever called Kenneth “Ken.”

  “Why are you defending him?”

  “I’m not defending him.”

  “Of course you are.”

  “Look, there’s no point in slinging mud,” Charlie said. “Saying the guy’s a pansy—”

  “Don’t be so naive,” Irene said, her eyes narrowing like gunports in an armored war vehicle. “There’s gonna be plenty of mud slung around before this thing is over.”

  “Believe it or not, I really don’t want to talk about this now,” Maggie said, pushing fragments of frittata to and fro on her plate.

  “Well, we’re only trying help,” Irene said.

  “I’m sure, Mother, but I wouldn’t mind being alone just now.”

  “As you please,” Irene said coolly. “Charlie, let’s go.”

  Charlie snagged a couple of scones for the drive back. Irene departed under a cloud of wrath mingled with Chanel No. 5 and with barely a word of farewell. Charlie kissed Maggie paternally and whispered in her ear, “If you need anything, anything, call me at the office.” Then they were gone and she was alone with Hooper.

  6

  The Good Son

  He helped with the dishes. There were not enough to run the big restaurant-grade dishwasher, so they did them by hand, Hooper drying. Hooper, of course, asked what was going on between his father and mother, and Maggie gave him an edited, sanitized version of the Laura Wilkie incident. Hooper absorbed it thoughtfully and, after an awkward pause, said, “Maybe sometime you’ll be able to forgive him.”

  “Maybe,” Maggie said, without conviction. She couldn’t stand another quarrel today, not even a difference of opinion.

  “Anyway, I’ll be around for a while,” Hooper said.

  “Oh?”

  “I’m taking a break from school.”

  “A break? You’re dropping out?”

  “I’m taking a semester off. I know this guy who graduated ahead of me who’s got this, like, internship at MTV. He says there might be something for me there too.”

  “Would you live in the city?”

  “I thought we might commute from here. Hey, under the circumstances it’d probably be good for you to have us around.”

  “Us?”

  “Yeah, Alison and me.”

  “She’s dropping out too?”

  “Well, we’re, like, a unit, Mom.”

  “And what’s she going to do?”

  “She has this friend who works for Calvin Klein. We need some real-life experience in the real world, Mom. That’s not such a bad thing.” He put one large, sodden hand on her shoulder and gently took her chin between his thumb and index finger and made her look at him. “Don’t worry,” he added. “We won’t get in your way.”

  “She doesn’t even know how to set a table,” Maggie said as she broke down and blubbered.

  “She’ll learn, Mom. You’ll teach her.” Hooper let his mother bawl on his shoulder. “I’d better go see about Alison,” he eventually said. “Her family’s a mess. She had this image of ours being this absolutely perfect all-American unit, like the way it is in your books. I think this pulled the rug out from under her a little, psychologically.”

  “Tell her she’s welcome to stay and that I apologize for all this … unpleasantness,” Maggie said. “Do you mind if we postpone presents until tomorrow?”

  “Naw. Get a good night’s sleep.”

  “Thanks. I’ll try. You turned out well, Hooper. I’m glad you’re going to stay around for a while.” He tossed the dishtowel manfully onto the counter, pecked her on the cheek, and departed.

  Maggie was determined to make the day after Christmas as normal as possible. Normality, she decided, would be her refuge against the pitiless storms of life. So she drew up a to-do list, posted it on the refrigerator door, and retreated to her bedroom.

  It made her sick to be there. Kenneth had left drawers open and a lot of miscellaneous crap on the surfaces of things. Maggie collected the items—an ivory box full of cuff links and collar stays, his cummerbund, some paperback books, a nasal spray, a travel alarm, sunglasses— and put them in a couple of shoe boxes. She felt as though she were collecting the effects of a dead person. After that, she moved the furniture around the room so that it bore no resemblance to the place where she and this person had shared an intimate life for so many years. But that didn’t help much either. The room still bore a kind of psychic stench that only two fresh coats of paint and a complete redecoration job might eradicate. So she took her reading (Austen’s Mansfield Park, Menendez y Vega’s Cuisine of the Andes, and the latest biography of Vita Sackville-West) into the north guest room, as she called it, which was decorated in the manner of a timberland adventure, with Hudson Bay trade blankets on the double bed, a fishing creel casually hung off the birchwood armoire, snowshoes leaning in the corner, a stuffed muskellunge grinning on the wall, and other trappings of the North Woods. In bed, at last, the day’s traumas and rigors began to loosen their grip, and she drifted off into an exotic world of Andean recipes: blue potatoes in groundnut sauce; loin of llama with pigeon peas; salad of cactus pads and squash blossoms …

  7

  Nearly Sisters

  Sometime before midnight, the phone rang. Maggie held the opinion that people who phoned after ten o’clock were a lower life-form, but she was not the kind of person who could lie there and ignore a ringing phone, even if the caller was apt to be the unspeakable pig who had until lately shared her bed.

  “Do you have any idea what time it is,” she barked into the hand-set, which had been cunningly embedded in a little section of birch log.

  “Maggie, never mind that. It’s me, Lindy.” This was Lindy Hagan, formerly Lindy Katz, Maggie’s roommate at Smith. Lindy was married to Buddy Hagan, the extremely successful producer (A Woman Scorned, Dreadnought, A Kind and Restless Heart, Second Chance), and lived in Los Angeles. Lindy and Maggie had not talked in perhaps a year. Once they’d been as close as sisters. Closer, really, for there were no sibling resentments. Lindy had an actress’s husky voice, though she hadn’t worked professionally since the eighties.

  “I have to get out of here,” she said without any small talk. Lindy’s manic edge—the quality that always made her so fascinating to be around—seemed more like sheer panic now. “I hate everyone and everything in L.A., okay, and I can’t handle being here another day. Not another second.”

  “What on earth is going on?”

  “So I find out last week that Buddy is gay, okay—”

  Maggie sat up and gasped. Buddy Hagan, gay? A series of snapshots flashed through her mind: Buddy Hagan waxing a surfboard on the beach at East Hampton, 1983 (the summer that she and Kenneth had the old windmill house on Rum Road), all the media wives, art groupies, and starlet wanna-bes tripping over one another to get a look at him; Buddy in his tuxedo at the Academy Awards with his face as golden as the statuette’s, hoisting his Best Picture Oscar in triumph; Buddy relaxing under a linden tree in the Place Dauphine in Paris one Easter in the nineties when the four of them took the Concorde over on a lark. She never would have suspected …

  “Did you catch him in the act?”

  “Are you kidding? I’d be a fugitive on a murder warrant in Paraguay by now. No, no, no, no, no. He announced it, just like that. We’re at Bagatelle on Melrose, okay? Little pink
tables. Fresh poppies. Nicholson is sitting across the room. Geffen, Katzenberg, Whoopie Goldberg, George Clooney. Julia Roberts. The Boss and Patti. It’s like goddamn Entertainment Tonight in there, which I realize is very shrewd on Buddy’s part because he knows I won’t throw a shit fit in front of this crowd, okay? ‘There’s something I’d like to share with you,’ he goes. You like that part? ‘Share with me’? Ha! You get the close shot? The rugged face, the slitty Clint Eastwood eyes, the Ralph Lauren western casual wear. Is this too much? So I go, ‘Share away, pal,’ which, okay, sounds a little snotty, but I’m not into this New Age, kiss-my-crystal, sugar-coat-the-bad-news bullshit, which I can see coming about thirty miles away, only me, dumb bunny, I think he’s lost another twenty mil or something on some stupid development deal that’s gone into turnaround for the third time. Only he goes, ‘I’ve become acquainted with a side of myself that lay buried for years.’ This sounds like dialogue from one of his shitty movies, okay? ‘Speak English,’ I go. ‘Okay,’ he goes. ‘I’m bisexual.’ Okay, reaction shot— me with my jaw bouncing off the tablecloth. Got it? So I go, ‘Am I supposed to congratulate you, like this is some kind of achievement in life?’ ‘No,’ he goes, ‘I just want you to know, because I’m being blackmailed by someone, and I’d rather share it with you myself than have you see it on the news.’ Tell me something, Maggie, what is it with men and their pricks? Why do they have to stick them in every hole—?”

  “What on earth did you say to him?” Maggie asked, refusing to be sidetracked by cosmic questions.

  “Well, I go, ‘How long has this been going on?’ What I’m thinking right now is about maybe gouging both his eyes out with my demitasse spoon, okay. And he goes, ‘Some time now.’ And I go, ‘Is he the only one, this blackmailer?’ And he goes, ‘No, there’ve been others.’ So I go, ‘Can we leave or do I throw up right here in the persimmon clafouti?’ So, like nine minutes later we’re in the car driving over Mulholland, and I go, ‘Will you take an AIDS test?’ and he goes, ‘Don’t be silly.’ And I’m thinking, if he wasn’t behind the wheel I’d ram my nail file into his brain stem, okay? Just put him out of his misery right there. So the next day I go into Dr. Eugene Brill’s office for an AIDS test. That was ten days ago. The results come back tomorrow.” At this, Lindy broke down sobbing.