“You get what I mean.”
I got what she meant. When I was twenty-five and working as a potter, I began a relationship, if you can call a relationship something that consists of little more than sex and takeout—which is, by the way, the ruling principle of many New York relationships—with a guy named Ken who ran a shop called Potpourri. It was one of eleven unrelated shops in the Manhattan phone book by that name, which should have told me something about Ken’s powers of imagination. He had a beard, which I found increasingly irritating, and a habit of striking yoga poses with no provocation, so that sometimes he would leap from bed and, rather than go to the bathroom, do the Crow or the Heron. A response seemed to be required, and my response, after four weeks, was to tell him that I wanted to move on.
“I think you’ll regret this,” he said. “I want to leave the door open.”
In the weeks that followed, I saw Ken at Shanghai Palace in Chinatown, at a bank in Chelsea, on Eighth Avenue after the theater had let out one night, and at a party given by a friend I didn’t even know knew him. In fact he didn’t; Ken was there with his new girlfriend, a yoga instructor who, for some reason, called him Kenyon. The door was closed.
So I was not at all surprised when I took Aunt Maureen out to lunch for her birthday and we found ourselves in a restaurant in midtown a few tables away from Kate Borows. At some level, of course, it was inevitable; the restaurant was a brand-new Asian fusion place (which meant that everything on the menu, including the desserts, had either tamari sauce or ginger), and Kate, in pursuit of the Borows Book on New York City Dining, was frequently one of the earliest diners at any new place in town. When she waved at me from beneath what appeared to be a batik bridal canopy strung with Christmas lights, I scarcely blinked.
“There’s someone I have to say hello to,” I said to Maureen.
“Of course there is,” she said with a smile. “You two girls know everyone. And I have to use the facilities. Take your time. I’m going to celebrate and order a drink with lunch.”
“There are chocolate martinis on this menu,” Kate said indignantly when I sat down next to her. “I don’t even want to see the words chocolate and martini in the same sentence.”
“You can’t be eating alone,” I said.
“I’m early. I’m so glad I ran into you. I was going to call you anyhow. I just wanted to let you know that I hear Meghan is fine. Sam was talking to Edward Prevaricator, who’s on the museum board with him, and Edward saw her at Grosvenor’s Cove. Playing golf, swimming. Apparently she killed him in a tennis match.”
“That’s my girl,” I said.
“Anyhow, she wound up sitting with him and some other people at dinner one night and acted as though everything was fine, nothing had happened, vacation was great, life was great, blah blah blah. She talked about Leo, about you. I gather she talked about everything and everyone except Evan and Ben Greenstreet.”
I sighed. “So you know. It’s out, I guess. About Meghan and Evan, I mean.”
“It’s out, but she told me before she left. You know, the producers are morons, she can’t find her gold flat sandals, oh, and that jerk she didn’t really want to be married to in the first place doesn’t want to be married to her.”
“Business as usual,” I said. “That’s her area of expertise.”
“I know. I remember when she had that last miscarriage. I was so shocked when she went to work the next day, but what was worse was that they had a segment on baby care with a couple of babies. She could have had one of the guys do it, or asked them to reschedule. Instead there she was comparing cloth and disposable diapers as though nothing had happened. She’s one of my closest friends, and I still feel like there’s a level I can’t penetrate. I guess because you were kids together you get the full monty. Have you talked to Evan?”
“Yeah. We were kids together, too. I’m trying not to feel like he left me.”
“He did leave you. That’s what guys don’t seem to get. They think they’re leaving a woman, but they’re really leaving a life. The jerk. There’s someone else, isn’t there?”
“He says not.”
“Someday I’m going to meet a man who leaves his wife out of a deep sense of ennui and a feeling that there’s something more out there for him. But I haven’t yet. You know Carrie Dwyer.” I nodded. She’d lived on the same hall as Meghan in college. “Her husband left her for their daughter’s college roommate.”
“Wow.” Nearly everyone I meet expresses deep sympathy about the fact that I have never married. Sometimes I wonder why.
“I think Meghan will be fine,” Kate added. “I think she just wants to pretend for a couple of days that nothing happened. She can pretend that she didn’t blow up on the air, the network’s not really giving her hell, and her husband had some business deal and couldn’t get away or he’d be right there in Jamaica with her. It’s a good time for her to be away for a week or two, anyway. This town is so savage. When Sam left, there were people who asked him to dinner and put him between two single women the following week.”
“Sam left you?”
Kate leaned in and looked into my eyes. She has the sort of pale equine face that was fashionable during the Renaissance, and the ability to look right through you as though you were plate glass. “Don’t pretend you didn’t know. God, you and your sister are a matched set. Salt and pepper. Yin and yang. Mutt and Jeff. You can’t lie worth a damn, and she’s so opaque I can never tell what’s really happening in her head. Anyhow, it was years ago, between the second and third baby. He lost his mind. I think he was just sleep-deprived. But there were a couple of women who turned him into an extra man the moment he started packing his shaving kit. I keep a mental list. You don’t want to be on my mental list.”
“I absolutely don’t.”
My aunt was threading her way between the tables toward us. She’d just had her hair done, and it glowed silver in the silly little white lights strung above the table. Kate rose to shake her hand, but Maureen kissed her on the cheek. “We’ve met before,” she said, “at that nice party the network gave when Meghan had been doing the show for five years.”
“I’m so sorry.” Kate groaned. “My mind is a sieve.”
“Don’t worry, it will come back later on,” Maureen said. “I remember everything now clear as a bell. I think it’s because now that I’m retired I don’t have all the clutter up there, whether this patient needed more morphine or that one should have had oxygen and so on. And all the household things are easier when you’re shopping for one.” She put her hand over mine. “I still can’t find my keys half the time, but I can remember everything about this little girl. She was quite a cook, you know, on a little stool helping me make pastry. She stuck to me like glue whenever her sister was out of the house, and that’s how we’d pass the time.”
We went back to our table when Kate’s lunch date arrived. It was not another woman, as I had assumed, but a man about my age with black hair and the kind of glasses that mean to call attention to themselves. Kate offered only my first name, bless her, so there would be no whispered questions about whether I was related to. Not for nothing has she known Meghan and me forever.
Kate introduced her luncheon companion as the architect who was putting an addition on the country house, but I did wonder. I wondered about everyone now. I’d even rifled through Irving’s wallet one night while he slept. There were the business cards of several reporters, some lawyers, and a guy who apparently sold guns. There was a picture of his niece that was at least ten years out of date and a newspaper clipping about his nephew, whose Little League team won a county championship several years ago. And there was a small napkin with what looked like a soy sauce stain and the words “Where have you been all my life?” written on it. I’d written it drunkenly two or three years ago when I’d had to leave the apartment at three in the morning to deal with a water-main break at our shelter. Seeing it sandwiched next to a wad of twenty-dollar bills made me feel ashamed and triumphan
t.
Across the room I saw that the waitstaff had begun to drop tiny tasting dishes all over Kate’s table like falling leaves, and I watched her wince slightly. They knew who she was, and the meal she was about to get would be appreciably better than that of the average diner. By association, we got the same treatment on the other side of the room. “Now, we didn’t order this, did we?” Maureen kept saying, dipping in with her fork. “I’m not sure what it is, but it certainly tastes good. I like that woman. She and her husband do the food guide, don’t they? She seems like a nice person.”
“She’s a good friend to Meghan. Sometimes I feel as though she knows her better than I do. I think I take Meghan too much at face value. Or too little. I was so angry at her when I went to get Leo at the airport, and then it turned out she’d made provisions for him herself very nicely, thank you very much, and I was only coming in as the second string. I guess I sell her short sometimes.”
“Oh, I don’t think that’s the problem at all. I think sometimes the both of you just get a little stuck, if you know what I mean. Sisters tend to get stuck in their roles and they don’t always know how to get out of them. The pretty one. The practical one. That’s a hard row to hoe.”
“So you think I let Meghan be the competent one? That’s what Irving thinks, too.”
My aunt shook her head slowly and took a sip of her wine. “That’s a very simplistic way of looking at it, not like Irving at all. Meghan wants the world to be safe as houses. To do that she has to always be sure of herself.”
“But she is always sure of herself! It’s not a façade.”
“Sometimes the façade becomes the building,” Maureen said a little sadly. “I said something like that once to my sister. I needed her help making some decisions when our mother died. ‘You’re so good at those kinds of things,’ she said. And I was. Sometimes we just wind up doing the things of which we’re capable, whether we like them or not.”
Ineffectual. That was the word Meghan used when she was trying to describe our mother, the pretty plump woman who’d made an entire world out of her mahogany bed, her lilac counterpane, her skirted bedside table, and her nearby bathroom. Perhaps it was all those consonants, but Meghan made the word ineffectual sound like a curse.
“I know it might be unfair to ask you of all people this, but was she really as bad as Meghan makes her sound?”
Maureen frowned at a scrap of scallop on her fork. “She didn’t spend quite as much time in bed as your sister likes to suggest. I think a lot of that is Meghan’s own metabolism talking. On the other hand, she was always a girl who liked her breakfast on a tray. She had certain privileges when she was younger. Our mother believed she had asthma, although I can’t recall a doctor ever confirming the diagnosis. And she was the kind of person who didn’t care to be seen unless she was wearing something nice and new.”
“That sounds like half the women in New York.”
“Oh, she would have been right at home here,” Maureen said. “Not in the circles you girls travel in, but with some of those other women. You know what I mean.”
“You two must have been an odd pair.”
“My sister was not a strong person,” Maureen said. “But that’s no concern of yours. It’s no great thing if a strong woman has two strong daughters. But if two strong women grow from weakness, that’s a glorious thing. That means you made something out of yourself.”
“Well, I had Meghan,” I said.
“And Meghan had you.”
“And we both had you.”
Maureen waved her hand in the air. It had always suited her to suggest that she and her husband had done very little by uprooting themselves and taking in two young children, one standoffish and truculent, the other clingy and befuddled. She seemed to prefer the Greek myth approach, that both of us had sprung fully formed and functional into the world.
“My mind is a sieve, too,” I said. “I hardly remember all that with the pastry making. Most of my childhood stories I know because Meghan told them to me. I can’t remember much of the past, and now with everything that’s going on, I’m beginning to think I really didn’t know squat about what was happening in the present.”
“Well, that’s what the future’s for, isn’t it, dear heart?” My aunt patted my hand again. “And the future’s always right around the corner. I don’t know about you, but I intend to have dessert. How’s Irving?”
“Same as always.”
“That’s good to hear.” My aunt Maureen has always liked Irving. “That’s probably because he’s more her generation than yours,” Meghan said once.
Here’s the thing my sister doesn’t understand about Irving Lefkowitz: he makes a girl feel like a million bucks. He is not a new man. He is a really really old man in the best possible way. Irving remembers a time when girls wore girdles and garter belts, when their dresses had belts and complicated buttons, when even those who were willing had learned a baroque fan dance of demurral and denial and so required six months of foreplay that crept ever southward. He remembers pregnancy scares and guilty tears and marriage plans based not on a proposal but on a lost hymen.
And then one morning he awoke, after wife number two had told him she preferred the weather in California, and found himself in a world in which the hymen was an anachronism, perhaps overtaken by evolution as the dentist said wisdom teeth would soon prove to be, a biological artifact. T-shirts slid easily up, sweatpants down. You could follow a girl into her apartment and before you’d had a chance to register the color of the couch and the posters on the wall she would have her clothes on the floor. Once he got over the shock, Irving wedded the hunger of a man long denied to the happiness of a man suddenly fulfilled. Instead of the casual clinical detachment of younger guys—“There. No, there. Is that good? What about this?”—he was a study in lust. Even after a year I would sometimes get into bed naked and see a look on Irving’s face like the look Leo had had at his first birthday party, when he jammed a fistful of double chocolate cake into his mouth after a year of breast milk and pureed spinach. I still have the photograph somewhere. It might as well have a caption that reads “Amazement and Joy.”
Irving threw back the covers and looked down. “Yum,” he said.
Like that.
You have to love a man who acts as though you’re ice cream and he’s five, even if he is—as my sister has told me at least as often as she’s told America about national defense, the nutritional pyramid, and the need to spay your pets—old enough to be my father.
Except that our father was apparently a fraud, as we discovered early on when the house was sold, the furniture sent to the consignment house, the will probated, the bills toted up.
Irving, by contrast, was completely authentic. His parents had been Communists, his grandparents itinerant illiterate Eastern European peddlers. He was a brilliant dyslexic who had flunked out of Brooklyn College, married a coffee shop waitress, left her for a bookstore owner who left him for California. He was carelessly flatulent and occasionally priapic, and in conversation he sometimes seemed to be a bigot, which proved to be completely inaccurate when you actually saw him with people who were black or gay or disabled. He didn’t want to marry again, and he never wanted to have children, whom he said he found terrifying and boring in equal measure, except for Leo, whom he said didn’t count as a child.
If I were ten years younger, I would have been concerned that I was sleeping with Irving and that my period was a week late. But a forty-three-year-old woman with a reasonably new diaphragm knows what that means, and I didn’t want to tell him that I thought I was menopausal lest he leap into the air and yell “yippee.” I was not one of those little girls who lovingly tended her dolls, but I had always imagined that someday I would have children. Of course I had also imagined I would have a husband, a home I owned, and disposable income.
“Relax,” he said, kneading my shoulders after he was done with my breasts.
“You smell,” I replied. We certainly sounded lik
e married people.
“Hah. You love it.”
He was right. That busy man with the wine bottle under his arm, the one hurrying from his plastic surgery practice or the office with the panoramic view of the Chrysler Building: he never smelled of anything but shaving soap from Boyd’s or the starch the Chinese laundry used on his cotton shirts, their thread count as high as that of his sheets. The men of my generation had become as careful of their skin and dress and hygiene and hair as young women, and it had emasculated them in my eyes. I vaguely recalled my father as a man who paid an inordinate amount of attention to his suits and his shoes and who smelled always of a combination of lemon, wintergreen, and Scotch. Meghan may have thought Irving was a daddy substitute, but when I sat at dinner parties and smelled those sharp, fresh scents mingled on some young investment banker, it occurred to me that he was exactly the opposite.
That was another thing Irving hated, dinner parties. Once a month he had dinner at a red sauce place downtown with a bunch of older cops who had come up in the department together, and once a month he had dinner with his aunt at the nursing home in Elizabeth, and several times a week he didn’t have dinner at all because he was on the way to a triple homicide in Staten Island or just reaming some reporter out on the phone. He’d have his car screech to a halt in front of Gray’s Papaya and he’d get three dogs and call it a day. Or he would come to my place and eat chicken with three nuts. Heh heh heh, as Irving liked to say. I went to dinner parties alone, although I frequently had to cancel because of a catastrophe. And not the catastrophe of having a sister on the cover of the National Enquirer.
On Tuesday, both Irving and I had been awakened from sleep—“Hotcha” is how the festivities had commenced that night—by the sounds of our cell phones. My first thought was that it was my sister, awake in the middle of the night, looking for someone to talk to. But then I heard Irving’s phone ringing, too, and heard him groan, “A doubleheader.” It happened only on occasion, signaling a disaster in the Bronx, like the one at which we’d met, bad enough to constitute an emergency for both the police and our shelter. The only upside is that with a doubleheader I can hitch a ride with Irving and don’t have to persuade a Pakistani cabbie that it is possible to go to the Bronx in the middle of the night and survive to tell the tale at the hack garage next morning.
Rise and Shine Page 13
