“I do.”
“Yeah, but you only watch because you know what I’m really thinking. Now that would be great television, if it had subtitles and what was really going through my mind was at the bottom of the screen.”
That would be an easy job for me. I’ve been a potter, a paralegal, a waitress, an art framer, and a social worker. I’m pretty sure that last one is the one that will stick, but if I ever decide the job of helping those who can’t help themselves has lost its charm, I can always do Rise and Shine with subtitles.
Meghan to the bestselling mystery writer thumping his eleventh book: How would you compare this to your last?
Translated: Everything you write sounds exactly the same.
Meghan to the secretary of defense: I’ve been told you meet with the president every morning. How did that routine get started?
Translated: We all know the guy doesn’t know anything about foreign policy and you make all the decisions.
Meghan to the actress thumping her new movie, in which she appears nude and during which she was sleeping with her costar, a married Catholic with five children: Talk a little bit about the atmosphere on location.
Translated: Whore.
My sister has a filthy mouth in private, although she has a reputation as one of the most eloquent public speakers in America. The first word Leo said was shit, although he couldn’t articulate the sh sound terribly well. Luckily, New York City playgrounds have heard many a toddler use the kind of language the FCC bans on television. Often in Spanish, too.
“It’s how I let off steam,” Meghan once said. “I know it sounds ridiculous, but to be charming for two hours a day in front of millions of people—it’s a lot more exhausting than it looks. And before you start, I know how much money I make.”
My sister liked the fact that I watched every morning. “What do you think?” she’ll say when she calls at 11:30, after she’s wiped off all the eyeliner and the lip gloss and done a postmortem with the production staff. “Was I too hard on the first lady?” I am the Rise and Shine target audience. “Oh, Jesus,” a producer once said when he met me at a dinner at Meghan’s apartment. “You’re the sister? God, if I hear one more word about how the sister hated the supermodel segment, or the sister thought we should have Philip Roth on after Bellow died, or the sister hates the upholstery on the new chairs.”
The sister ought to have looked at her calendar before Meghan left for Jamaica. When I saw the notation about Leo’s return, I tried to call her on the new cell number her assistant had given Tequila. After ten rings, a mechanized message answered. I sighed and called Evan. A secretary made me spell my last name, which seemed harsh, and put me on hold for a very long time. I hoped she was a temp.
After a few minutes he came on. “What now?” he said in a thin, slightly shaky voice.
“Ev?”
“Oh, God, Bridget, it’s you. This new woman said it was Miss Fitzmaurice and I thought it was Meghan.”
“A week ago I watched you steer my sister around a black-tie event with your arm around her waist and now you’re making her sound like Eva Braun.”
“I’m sorry, but I can’t reach her and when she reaches me she starts slicing me to ribbons. I appreciate that this came as a surprise to her, but for God’s sake, Bridge, she’s making it a million times worse than it needs to be. She knows it’s not as if we had this idyllic marriage and, bam! I pulled the rug out from under.”
“Actually, Ev, that’s exactly what you did.”
“That’s what I did from where you’re sitting. If you’d been with us day after day, year after year, you’d know I’m right.”
“Evan, I practically live at your house half the time. I don’t want this to turn into the fighting Fitzmaurices, but you did a pretty credible imitation of a happily married man.”
“Exactly. An imitation.”
“How’s your new girlfriend?”
“What? What?”
“I know there’s got to be someone.”
“Do the two of you think with one mind? Speak with one mouth? Jesus. I have to go here.”
“That’s fine, I don’t want to talk about this anyway. I just wanted to ask about Sunday.”
“Sunday?”
“My day planner says Leo gets into Kennedy from Barcelona. Are you picking him up?”
“I thought Meghan took care of that. She always takes care of those things.”
“Meghan has left for vacation. Remember? The two of you were going to go together to Jamaica on Monday morning for a week. She went early. I don’t know what the plan was for Leo.”
“She told me he wasn’t even coming home. At least I think that’s what she said. I think that’s why we were going to Jamaica even though he was on the way back from Spain. I think she said he wasn’t going to stop back home before he went up to school. I could be wrong, though. I’m so tired, what with the travel and the work and everything else. Maybe I got it wrong. Should I send a car?”
“A car? A car? Are you serious? Call me old-fashioned, but I don’t think the proper response to welcoming back your son whose entire world has been blown up while he’s been gone is to have the official greeter be some stranger in a black suit holding up a sign. Particularly when his mother may be on the covers of the magazines in the airport newsstand. Oh, and then there’s your little piece of news. You want to have the driver break your news to him, too? I’ll tell you what, Evan, you’d better get your ass out to Kennedy Airport on Sunday.”
“I’m in Tokyo.”
“What?”
“Didn’t she tell you when she put you through? I’m in Tokyo for the next week on this deal. I went because I thought Meghan said Leo was going right from Spain back to school without stopping at home. I also thought Meghan wasn’t going to Jamaica until Monday. I’m totally confused. Help me out here, Bridge.”
Help me out here, Bridge. It should be programmed into their computers, left as part of the message on their machine. But it was always about Leo, and that had made all the difference.
“I’ll pick him up. That’s it. As for the timing, yours has really been off here. With everything that’s going on, you could have backtracked on this separation stuff a bit and decided to let this whole thing ride for a couple of months, just to get over the publicity hump.”
“You’re going after the wrong person here. I suggested that to Meghan the last time we talked. So that the publicity could die down and we could find a good time to talk to Leo together.”
“And?”
“Let’s just say that Ben Greenstreet got off easy. Meghan was the one who said it was out of the question. Or words to that effect. Mostly obscenities.”
“Okay, I’m just not going to discuss my sister with you at this point. Just tell me where I should take Leo after I pick him up.”
“What do you mean? Take him home. He probably has to be back at school Monday, anyway. I think spring break is over. Take him to the apartment.”
“There’s no one there. I think Mercedes had the week off because you guys were going away. Is there even food in the fridge?”
“I can’t tell you that. Meghan had the locks changed. She told the doorman someone had stolen our keys. I felt like a damn fool when I went to pick up my suits. I’ve been wearing the same two ties all week.”
“Paul Stuart.”
“No, they’re both Zegna.”
“Go to Paul Stuart. Buy new ties. Get over yourself. How the hell am I supposed to get in the apartment?”
“She said you had keys.”
I looked into my purse. Meghan had sent me to her apartment to pick up the things for her trip as though she was afraid to go, afraid that the ghosts of a happy past would rise from the Oriental rugs and strangle her with memory. Or maybe it was the ghosts of the unhappy past. There were four photographers on Meghan watch outside, but apparently none of them knew about the side entrance. One of the doormen, Rafael, nodded at me solemnly. “Tell Ms. F hello for me,” he said formally
. The doormen liked Meghan because, unlike the jokey rich guys, she never pretended they were her friends. And unlike the jokey rich guys, she tipped big at Christmas.
I’d thought she was silly when she gave me the packing list—“white bikini, red bikini, black tank, navy tank, running shoes, running shorts, three prs. white pants, three white T-shirts, flip-flops, gold sandals, gold halter dress”—the packing list of a woman who planned to swim and eat expensive. But once inside the apartment, I was glad she’d asked me to do it instead of doing it herself. The air was so silent and still that it had mass. The weight of the past: The sleigh bed in which Leo had been conceived. The desk that had once been in Evan’s father’s den, with its green leather inlay. The detritus of various decorators: the chintz period, the Biedermeier period, the white period, the red period. Like most Manhattan apartments, it looked less like a life than a stage set for a production of a Noël Coward play. Meghan is not a slave to fashion, but various rooms had been made over at various times even though they’d looked perfectly fine. Leo had once told me that the words that struck fear into the hearts of private school boys in New York were “Why don’t we look at wallpaper for your new room?” Trains. Soccer balls. Street scenes. Stripes. Plaids. Those poor boys had seen it all.
In my purse were two loose Tylenol, five credit card slips, a tube of Chap Stick without a lid, a very expensive wallet that Meghan had given me for my birthday, and Meghan’s ring of keys. I wanted to think she’d given them to me because she’d remembered about Leo and knew he wouldn’t be able to get in with his old set, or my old set. I couldn’t bear to consider that she’d forgotten about her son, that she’d been so addled by adversity she’d overlooked the only person she’d ever loved in an unselfish and uncomplicated way. What a terrible feeling it would have been for my sweet boy, to come home and find the locks changed. And I say that as someone who sees kids every day who’ve been sleeping on the subway. Everything is relative, as Meghan liked to say sometimes when she’d throw her arm around me after a dinner party.
“Bridget?” Evan said. “Do you have the new keys to the apartment?”
“Yeah.” I swallowed. “I do. You can’t have one.”
IN EVERY CITY in the world, the airport offers a disinclination to visit. It’s not what they look like inside necessarily; in a couple of the southern cities they’ve got rocking chairs tucked into every alcove on the concourse, I guess so you can sit there and imagine you’re on a front porch as the Airbuses lumber onto the runway. The problem is where the complex is located in the first place. No one wants to waste prime real estate on runways and hangars, so most airports are in the part of town that looks most like the place you’d least like to visit. In warm-weather countries, you’re looking forward to a piña colada and water clear down to your toes, and you look out at disintegrating cinder-block buildings, ramshackle houses with no windows, and sometimes even the wreckage of a past plane. Irving and I went to Mexico together once, a big mistake since for Irving a real vacation is a shooting under the boardwalk in Coney Island in July. He’s the kind of guy who starts checking his messages the moment the landing gear hits the tarmac. In Mexico there was a half-finished hangar with no roof just off the left wing of the plane. Someone had scrawled a sentence on it in Spanish with black spray paint. Irving, who has learned Spanish by osmosis after years of being a cop, said the sentence was “You should die, you scum.”
“We should feel right at home here,” he said. And he did when he paid a courtesy call on the chief of police, who let him go along while they rousted a gang selling bootleg phone cards. I went snorkeling and took a Pilates class and threw out my back.
But as far as I can tell, there is on the face of the earth no airport to compare with John F. Kennedy Airport in New York. Every kid who passes through our shelters and transitional housing has at one time or another had to go on a field trip to Ellis Island, which has now been retrofitted so that the early immigrant experience seems like a cross between a trip on a cruise ship and a celebration of diversity. (“Jesus, if it had been like this, they wouldn’t have sent my father home with the typhoid,” I heard an old man say once when I took the tour.) Our kids miss the irony of all the “give me your tired, your poor” stuff they’re fed by the guides on these trips; they’re kids, so they haven’t entirely tumbled to the fact that they are the tired and the poor of this generation. Maybe a generation from now someone will open a homeless shelter museum and it will look like the floors were waxed and there were comfortable cots.
The modern incarnation of Ellis Island is instead JFK. First you fly into Queens, over attached brick houses and small apartment buildings. The water landing is over a stretch of ocean as gray as a battleship, the sort of sea that looks utterly impenetrable, as though it would close over anything that touched down there so convincingly that it would be as if the thing never existed at all.
But it is the insides of the terminals that really say it all. Dun-colored, dirty, with winding corridors that seem to go nowhere, then suddenly give out onto vast open spaces of dark flooring and multilingual din. Elsewhere in America, airports have begun to sprout day spas, Calder mobiles, historical murals, indoor playgrounds, shoe stores, jewelry stores, cosmetics stores, museum stores. Not JFK. Its arriving passengers from other countries must wonder, just as those at Ellis Island once did, what in the world they were thinking when they decided to come here. Those returning to their own countries know the answer. Czech Airlines, Korean Air Lines, Varig, Aerocaribe: the lines snake between the faded ropes, people traveling as companions to their packing boxes. New microwaves, DVD players, flat-screen TVs, air conditioners, even Lava lamps. They came, they drove through the single-family sprawl of Queens to the Emerald City, they shopped at a favorable exchange rate, and they went home.
“Tourists,” we mutter when we’re trying to hotfoot it through Columbus Circle and there is a family in shorts and “I (heart) NY” T-shirts walking at a normal pace in front of us.
No one escapes the drab and hostile monotony of JFK. I know this from experience. Meghan and I have gone on several trips together: the spa, the think tank conference, the five days at the Ritz in Paris. We arrive at the airport in the way the rich and famous do. The black car pulls up at a prearranged location. A woman from the airline is there in a blazer and a colorful matching scarf. She holds a clipboard. She directs someone who disappears with the luggage, which we will not see again until it appears, a tiny islet of home, in the middle of the carpet in our hotel suite. (Once, Meghan said, she never saw her luggage for an entire trip. She was staying at a castle in Scotland, doing a story on the son of a bus driver who had become the wealthiest man in England. The luggage had gone from the plane to the castle in a separate car, up a separate staircase, unpacked by the maids, and then stored in a separate room. “Beam me up, Scotty!” Meghan had said of the experience. On the air.) We are taken down a secret corridor into a special room and from there down another corridor that suddenly opens onto the boarding area. We are boarded last, and when we sit down there is a sound like bees swarming, which is the sound of everyone in First Class turning to their seatmates to whisper, “Meghan Fitzmaurice.” It’s that zzz in the middle that makes the noise.
There are two sorts of children of this sort of privilege: the little brats who embrace it wholeheartedly, who order room service waiters around and complain that the spa doesn’t have good shorts for sale, and the other kind. Leo is, of course, the other kind. He and I went together to visit Stanford, a visit he had arranged for a weekend when Meghan was speaking to a cybertech brain trust gathering in Seattle. I am never sure how much of this is deliberate on Leo’s part. I do know that Meghan is a major distraction. Brides whose fiancés are up-and-coming network reporters or business associates of Evan’s are always dazzled by the idea of having her at their weddings. But the brides who are network reporters themselves never are. They know that no matter what they are wearing, who has done the flowers, how good the food, or how bea
utiful the room, the guests will care only that Meghan Fitzmaurice is sitting at table number 3. At Stanford, Leo would have had a different sort of tour with his mother, the tour that included a meeting with the president of the university, a walk through the campus with the valedictorian and the head of PR, the avuncular calls afterward from alums who just happen to be studio heads or name partners in law firms.
With me he got the information session with a hundred people so nervous that the whole room turned clammy. With me he got the airport line and the security check and the inattentive flight attendant. Or as inattentive as the flight attendant ever is in First Class.
And with his friends he even got coach, and a lost duffel bag, and the security drone who pulled them out of line and patted them down. When he came down the long corridor with his headphones hanging around his neck, carrying only a single large bag and yelling, “Dude! Dude! Dude!” at another kid who was getting his yayas out by leaping into the air to skim the pocked ceiling tiles with his fingers, I felt a surge of happiness, and then of fear. I wondered if Meghan had felt it when we were children: No, Bridget, they’re not coming back. No, we can’t stay here. No, we can’t have our own rooms. Meghan was a practiced bearer of bad news, especially now that she had been doing it for a living for so long. It didn’t catch in her throat the way it did in mine. Meghan could tell you seven miners had been killed in a shaft collapse in Monongahela, Pennsylvania, without even stumbling over the name of the town.
Which comes first, I thought as I watched Leo hitch the ubiquitous backpack on his shoulder, his red head shining in the dull fluorescence that was part of the hideous Kennedy ambience. Which comes first, his mother’s foul mouth on national television or his father’s determination to leave? Which comes first, disgrace or divorce? The first he would laugh off. The second would break his heart.
“Bridey,” he cried, “you irascible daughter of St. Patrick!”
Rise and Shine Page 11
