by Maile Meloy
“Oh—” Abby said.
“My friends left, and I took the train home to my parents’ house in Philadelphia, where I was living in my old room. It was hot out, and humid. I remember sitting on the train by myself, with these two bags at my feet, with my friends going off without me. I had a Walkman, and I was listening to something classical, I don’t remember what, but it was like a movie soundtrack in my head. It felt like the big music-swelling moment in a movie about failure, about a guy with no job, slumped and sweaty in a train, going back to his parents’ house with two shopping bags full of porn.”
Abby laughed. “I wish I’d known you then.”
He shook his head. “You’d have run screaming,” he said. “Anyway, you were ten. You know the rest. I got a job doing deliveries for a dry cleaner. I started reading books again and realized that was what I cared about. I finished college and applied to the graduate schools that were farthest away from where I’d been.”
“I’m glad you ended up here,” she said.
“I am, too. Now you have to tell me a story about shame.”
Her eyes narrowed imperceptibly, and she shook her head.
“I told you one,” he said.
“It wasn’t supposed to be a trade.”
“What were you seeing the shrink about?”
“My father’s death.”
“Is that all?”
“That isn’t enough?”
“You’re really different now from the girl who showed up in my section, who was absent and silent and kind of a wreck. And I wondered if you had done it all yourself, or if you did it by writing the novel, or if maybe going to see her helped.”
“I was a wreck?”
“Weren’t you? Your roommate said I was attracted to craziness.”
“I don’t really remember,” she said, getting vague. He thought of Eurydice, how she vanished when Orpheus looked at her.
“Tell me about the uncle and niece in the novel,” he said.
She pulled one of the pillows on his bed under her arm. The underwear she was wearing were made of mesh, transparent pink, with string sides: one of his favorites. “Are you going to come over here?” she asked.
“See, this makes me think you’d rather have sex with a teacher than answer a hard question. So you’re sleeping with me only because I once called on you in class.”
“That’s not true.”
“No?”
“No!”
“What did your Italian gold digger say,” he asked, “who wanted you to make yourself come?”
“That I couldn’t always have men do it for me.”
“And you said, ‘Why not?’ ”
“No, I didn’t.”
“But you thought it.”
“Men do it better.”
“I’ll give you a choice. You can do it now, or you can answer my question about the incest plot.”
“Is this Truth or Dare?”
“Yes,” he said. “People in the English Department are always talking about agency . You should be able to do it yourself.”
“It isn’t about my agency if it’s for you to watch.”
“I’m just the facilitator.”
“I’m too shy.”
“Other people might buy that. Take off your underwear.”
Abby sighed and rolled off the pillow. She lifted her hips off the bed and slipped the mesh underwear down, then shimmied them off her legs and kicked them off one ankle. He made himself stay where he was. The T-shirt had ridden up over her rib cage, and her stomach looked exposed and pale. She hesitated.
“What if I need help?”
“I’m standing by.”
She tapped a thumb against her thigh, contemplatively, and then she drew her knees up, tugged her T-shirt down, and said, “I did.”
“Did what?”
“With Jamie.” She took a deep breath and ran the words together: “It wasn’t at a reunion, like in the book, and it wasn’t a one-night stand. It was more than once.”
There was a moment of disappointment that she wasn’t going to perform, and then he felt he had passed to the other side of something. He wasn’t shocked, but he was surprised it had been more than once.
“How many times?”
“I think eight.”
“Oh, my God.”
“I can’t really explain it, it was after my father died. It’s not like Jamie was around all the time, when I was growing up, but he was very cool and funny, and he wasn’t that much older. So he was sort of this romantic crush I’d always had, he was like a rock star. I know you’re supposed to have those crushes and not have sex, but then he was there and I was twenty and I really wanted it. I think I started it.” Her voice had faded so he could barely hear it.
“I can’t hear you.”
“It’s so embarrassing.”
“Don’t be embarrassed. You should never be embarrassed.”
Her breathing seemed uneven, too. “Are you going to come over here now? I answered the question, I told you the truth.”
“Will you do the dare later?”
“Yes.”
“I can’t hear you.”
“Yes,”she said, and by the time he had moved to the bed, he was shaking with desire. He hadn’t been so overcome since he was seventeen.
“You’re not disappointed with me?” she whispered, close to his face.
“No,” he whispered back.
“I can’t hear you,” she said.
“No.”
47
ABBY SAT AT LUNCH in New York with her editor, feeling like she was in a different world. Everyone in the restaurant wore a suit, and the hum of their voices was different from California voices. They looked polished and knowing. Abby felt scruffy and naïve, intimidated even by Diana’s warmth.
Diana was in her fifties, tall and slim, with shiny dark hair, expensively cut. She had brought a description of the book for the catalog, and Abby skimmed it. The last sentence read:
This remarkable family, undermined by their own secrets and by the changes of half a century in America, comes back together only after the tragic death of the matriarch in Rome.
Abby put the piece of paper aside. It made her feel sick.
“I’m not sure who wrote it,” Diana said. “We can change it.”
Abby nodded. They ordered a lunch she didn’t want to eat.
“I love the dance teacher becoming a crazy healer,” Diana said. “They’re a very fertile family, aren’t they? I mean, it takes one time with the dance teacher and one time with the uncle, to knock those girls up.”
Abby blushed.
“I’m not saying you should change it,” Diana said. “You know who I really like? I like the high school sweetheart the uncle finally ends up with, with his little boy. She’s such a breath of fresh air—she’s secular, she’s sexual, she’s candid, she likes her work, she’s childless and okay with it. The book needed that, I have to tell you. I would have gotten impatient, without her.”
Abby didn’t know whether to thank her or apologize. “Do you have children?” she asked.
“No,” Diana said. “I know—that’s why I root for the happy childless woman. I get so tired of people insisting that kids are the best thing, the only thing. It’s true for some people. But women will marry the guy standing next to them on their thirty-seventh birthday, just to get a baby.” She smiled. “Listen to me yak. What are you working on now? Where are you living?”
“I’m not sure,” Abby said. Her duffel bag was still in Peter’s hallway, and when she washed her clothes she returned them folded to the bag.
“I was curious about you, I couldn’t figure out where you were in the book. Can I ask—are you a lesbian?”
Abby felt herself blush. “No.”
“Is your mother?”
Her face got hotter. “I don’t know.”
Diana nodded, studying her. “I’m sorry. I have to learn not to ask every question that comes into my head.”
“It
’s okay.”
“Have I upset you?”
She shook her head again.
“People will be interested because you’re so young, but I don’t think you want to be interviewed much, do you? You really turn an amazing shade of red.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Are you going to eat that salad?”
Abby shook her head.
“There’s no hidden baby, is there? I mean, it didn’t happen? There’s no baby with an uncle?”
“Of course not,” Abby said.
Diana folded her napkin and looked around the restaurant. “Oh, good.”
48
THE FIRST TIME YVETTE and Teddy went to San Francisco to see Jamie’s wife and child, the little family had seemed dazed but generally happy. The second time, Katya was snappish and sullen, and T.J. was having stomachaches at school. The third time, Yvette flew up alone. Teddy couldn’t stand to go, but Yvette worried about T.J. He was a good boy, he was only having some trouble adjusting to a new country and a new language and new parents.
Jamie had made an appointment with a marriage counselor, and Yvette stayed home reading books with T.J. She read him Abby’s old copy of The Missing Piece, in which a circle with a pie-shaped slice missing goes looking all over the world for it, rolling and singing as he goes. He finds missing pieces that are wrong, and don’t fit, and when he finally finds the perfect one, and fits it in place, he discovers that his mouth is sealed by it; he can’t sing. So he goes back to living happily incomplete and alone. Yvette thought about what Shel Silverstein meant by that. It seemed like an allegory of love, but a strange one, and it disturbed Yvette. She wondered if growing up with the book had made it hard for Abby to find a match.
T.J. had fallen asleep on the couch, and Yvette pulled a blanket over him. She put The Missing Piece away backward, so it was less likely to be spotted and pulled out.
Jamie’s books were on the upper shelves, and Yvette scanned them, looking for one for herself. There was his old, dog-eared paperback copy of Dune, some John Le Carré, and a lot of nonfiction: A Bridge Too Far, Seven Men at Daybreak, Cockleshell Heroes . Then she came upon a narrow paperback with her granddaughter’s name on the spine. She pulled it off the shelf. Abby Collins might be a common name, but on the back it said that the author was from Santa Rosa. The book had a glossy paper cover and said on the front,ADVANCE UNCORRECTED PROOF. NOT FOR SALE.
Yvette carried the book to the kitchen and sat down at the table. It began, “They were married during the war, after Mass one morning in a church looking over the sea.” It was about a Canadian woman who moves to California to marry a pilot. Yvette felt her heart start to race. There was an incident with a photographer who was nothing like that man who had come to the house. There was a paragraph about the bride’s father’s jaundice—about Yvette’s father’s jaundice—that made her smart with pain because it was true. And then there were many things that simply weren’t true at all, and she found herself saying, aloud at the kitchen table, “That didn’t happen!”
She had read about forty pages when Jamie came in and said, “Oh, shit, Ma, what are you doing?”
She looked up at him. “You knew about this?”
Katya disappeared into the back bedroom.
“Abby wanted to tell you herself,” Jamie said. “I begged for it early, and I promised I’d put it away. So I’m screwed if you tell her you read it here.”
“Where did she get those stories? Why did you tell them to her?”
“I didn’t tell them to her, Ma,” he said. “ Youtold her. You’ve told that bootlegging story a hundred times.”
“Is this going to be in bookstores?”
“I think that’s the idea.”
Yvette stared at him, horrified. “Can we stop it?”
“Why would we?”
“Because it’s private!”
“It’s fiction.”
“But why would anyone want to read it?”
“I thought it was great,” he said. “It’s all about me having adventures.”
“It is?”
“You’ll see,” he said. “It’s all made up. I’m Margot’s kid in it, like I thought I might be.”
“Oh, that crazy idea.”
“You’re not going to tell her you saw it here, right?”
“Why are you defending her?”
“Let me have the book back.”
She gave it to him and sat at the kitchen table, thinking about her father. She didn’t remember the Americans who had come to buy whiskey out of the basement, during Prohibition, and shot him in the liver. She remembered only the yellowness of his face afterward, and the way he would take an egg in his beer, to keep up his strength. That was in the book. It was so strange. What wasn’t in the book was how he would pull her onto his lap and make her feel like the prettiest and smartest and most important girl in the world, even though they had moved to a tiny house where she had to share a dingy room with her sister, and where the nailheads popped up on the floorboards, and the kitchen smelled strange. On her father’s lap, none of that mattered.
She had thought she could leave her attachment to him behind, when the war began and she moved to California. She was so young then, even younger than Abby. And then she had children and time passed so quickly and her father died of the old wound. She had missed so many years of his life, and he had missed so many of hers. It was her war injury, like the shrapnel that some men carried with them all their lives, and it had worked its way out a little, in her heart. If she sat very still, it might not do any more damage. She didn’t even dare to breathe deeply but sat looking at her hands on the table, waiting for the sharp thing to settle back into place.
49
WHEN MARGOT HEARD that Abby had written a novel about a Catholic family keeping secrets from each other, she broke out in a sweat at the idea that Abby knew . Abby sent her a copy, and the back of the jacket said it was “carefully observed.” Margot couldn’t open it; the headache that had been coming on all morning split across her forehead like lightning and stayed all afternoon.
Abby had come to Louisiana during Clarissa’s divorce, flying alone to Baton Rouge, and she had been a strange child, hanging back in corners. She made Margot feel she was being watched, which she guessed she was. Abby was trying, at seven, to learn all the things Clarissa hadn’t taught her: to put her seat belt on in the car, put her napkin in her lap, ask who’s calling when answering the phone, and pull a skirt up in a public rest room, not down so the hem hangs on the floor.
Or, Margot thought now, Abby might have been trying to understand all the things she had learned too soon.
She was distracted when the child arrived and resented the extra burden. Owen was working all the time then, at a new job with a different pharmaceutical company. Margot had dinner parties for his clients and colleagues, but they bored her, and she was restless. There was a young man training to be a Jesuit brother, whose name was Dominick Jay. He wasn’t a priest, though he would take a vow of celibacy when he officially joined the Society. He was a lawyer, doing work for the parish and living with a local order. The other Jesuits were older than Dominick, and Margot saw him one day, shopping for them at the grocery store. He compared the contents of their shopping carts—fresh greens and red potatoes and flank steak in hers, boxes of cereal and TV dinners in his—and begged her to come cook for them.
“You’d be like Wendy in Peter Pan, ” he said. “We’re like the Lost Boys over there.”
She couldn’t be their Wendy, so she invited him to dinner instead. Her mother had always had priests and nuns home to dinner in Hermosa Beach; it was a perfectly natural thing.
But she was nervous, the night he came: her pulse raced as she braised the meat and made the vinaigrette for the salad. She had gotten over her insecurity among the pharmaceutical executives and their debutante wives, but it was resurfacing, oddly, with this shy young man who had devoted his life and his income to the church.
Ben and Danny we
re on good behavior during dinner, chatting to Dominick about baseball and school, and Owen was vaguely friendly, his mind on something else. When they disappeared after dessert to watch a game on TV, Dominick came to help Margot with the dishes and hung his blue blazer over the back of a chair. He told her about a traveling exhibition of Whistler paintings, and they made plans to go.
An innocent social engagement: a cultural outing with a celibate man. So why, as she got ready to go out, was she being so careful with her makeup? Why had she chosen her simplest, most flattering dress?
Dominick was already at the museum when she arrived, waiting outside the main entrance. He looked so eager and childlike when he saw her walking up that she wondered briefly how old he was. Only a few years younger than she—but she felt old because her children grew so fast. He touched her back to lead her into the building, and she clutched her handbag to keep her hands steady.
The Whistler exhibition was deserted on a weekday morning. As they wandered through it, Margot felt her heart swell with the beauty of the paintings. Life was beautiful like that, it was supposed to be beautiful like that. It wasn’t supposed to be all dirty Jockey shorts and rushed dinners after baseball practice, and reassuring her husband about corporate politics and the future of brand-name drugs. It was supposed to be clear sunlight and elegant lines and mysterious shadows, and that feeling of expansion she had when she looked at the beautiful women in the paintings.
Finally they sat on a leather bench in one of the galleries, facing a painting of a nude girl in a long blue robe, and Margot realized they were alone. The security guard was in the next room. Her heart started to pound, and she turned to see if she was alone in her panic, and Dominick kissed her. The kiss was so sweet, it was like looking at the paintings: she felt lifted up, and released.
Then he touched her face and said, “Sweet Margot,” and looked unbearably sad, and she kissed him again to make the sad look go away.
