Payback

by Mary Gordon

  “We’re only doing finger food,” Jo says. “Everything you like best. Everything everyone likes best, if they’re honest. Pigs in blankets. Meatballs. Grape leaves. Taramasalata…and for dessert…miniature cream puffs.”

  “And most important,” Christina says, waving a wooden spoon over her head, “using the last of the season’s mint…my very own mojitos.”

  She wishes she didn’t have to go into the living room. The room that Heidi Stolz has spoiled.

  It is only four o’clock in the afternoon, but the new drapes—the fig-colored drapes, or is it blackberry?—are closed for the day. Marcus—she assumes it’s Marcus—has lit a fire, so the tonality of the room is far from grim; she remembers how vain her father was about his ability to light a fire quickly and efficiently; she never lit a fire when she was on her own. Now, she resolves, she’ll do it regularly.

  Christina hands her a drink. Leo passes pigs in blankets. Maeve and Marcus pass other trays.

  “Did you see the trees?” he says proudly.

  “No,” Agnes says; even just a sip of the mojito makes her feel free in her speech. “I was afraid to look at anything.”

  “Don’t be a wimp, Mom,” Maeve says. “Marcus has done a wonderful job.”

  My daughter is happy, she thinks. My daughter loves her husband.

  She follows Marcus out the front door. Abutting the road there is a feathery screen, the trees are thin, the leaves sparse, but they have been planted close together so that nothing in front of them is visible.

  The young trees are lovely and hopeful. She can’t see the stumps. There is nothing she need be afraid of looking at. The ugliness has been taken away. By people who did it for love…or to bleach out the trace of hate.

  It is not possible to thank them sufficiently. They love her; they are intelligent and gifted. They had summoned loveliness, and it had taken root.

  Christina is telling a story about the man who runs the fruit and vegetable stand whom they all call Eeyore…because his predictions are always dire. “There will be no strawberries this year,” he said, before Agnes left, “because of something called a wet drought…the plants were ruined, ruined.” It had, in fact, been a bumper crop. “There’ll be no beans at all to speak of. No melons, no peaches worth a damn.” Jeanne Larkin is, for some reason, his confidante in the area of romance. He has never married.

  “His dog died while you were away,” Jeanne says.

  “And so,” Christina says, “he told Jeanne the story of the latest woman throwing herself at him. ‘She sent me a condolence card when the dog died. But I wasn’t falling for that one. I’ve been around the block a few too many times for that.’ ”

  “There’s one woman who seems to have taken his fancy,” Christina says. “What did he tell you about her, Jeanne?”

  “He said, ‘At my age, it’s about going on drives and finding a good place for dinner.’ ”

  They’re working hard to amuse her, and she pretends to be amused. She goes into the kitchen to feed the dog and give her water. She is pleased by the sight of her bowls, her pitchers, her platters, chaste and orderly on the white-painted shelves. Opening a drawer, she lifts the salad servers, a gift from her mother-in-law, enjoying their silver heft, the ice cream scoop that was her father’s, the napkin rings with their painted blue, red, and purple flowers. She stoops to put the dog’s food on the floor, and, rising up, feels a lightness in her head: she wonders if it’s the mojitos.

  The windows over the sink show that the sun is setting fast. What an unsettled and unsettling month October is, she thinks, this morning the sun shot all the colors through with the greatest possible brilliance, but now, in the time it took her to spoon the dog’s food into her dish, put it down, and rise again to standing, the sky has turned indigo, the last light disappearing, swallowed whole, as if some shade or curtain had been roughly, angrily, pulled down.

  Her sense of well-being is entirely gone now, the disappearing light has snatched it clean away. She tells herself there is no reason for what she’s feeling, nothing has changed; everyone is as they were, my daughter, my son-in-law, my grandson, my friends, my dog, my bowls, my pitchers, my silver, my napkin rings. My and my and my and my. She has always known her range was very small. But is there nothing larger, nothing so capacious that there is no place for it following the word my? It frightens her to keep saying my: to say my is to call up a web of lucky accident, of a good fortune so capricious that it could be taken away in a moment, as if it had never been.

  Maeve comes into the kitchen. “Don’t stay out here brooding. Come into the living room, come on, Mama,” she says. “Let’s enjoy what’s there to enjoy.”

  Her daughter has seen the shade pulled down, the curtain drawn. She takes Agnes’s hand and then pushes her, almost roughly, into the living room, then takes her hand again, walking her to the couch, pulling her mother down, sitting beside her.

  “Leo,” Maeve says. “Now you must play us something wonderful.”

  “Sure,” Leo says, picking up his violin case.

  A jet of love for him rushes up, like the water in her beloved Roman fountains, arching and then returning to its base or basin, endlessly replenishing, endlessly refreshed. “Sure,” he says, but, she wonders, what is there to be sure of? Nothing. He doesn’t know that yet; she doesn’t know if she wants to be on earth when the time comes that he does know…she will be able to do nothing to help him…she will only be an encumbrance. We are not safe, she thinks…no one is ever safe. From what she saw when Quin cut down the trees. Hatred and ugliness. Hatred and ugliness. Perhaps nothing can keep them back. Even here, in this small house, on this small street, in this small town, what they have done will be only partially effective. Whatever they do, they cannot keep Quin away. She will come back whenever she wants; she will do whatever she needs to do.

  “This is the Schubert Sonatina in A Minor,” Leo says. He begins to play.

  Agnes stops thinking about Heidi, about the fate of the earth, even about her love for Leo, and allows the music to wash over her, to penetrate her, to allow her, for a moment, a sense of something beyond destruction, some place where these notes are housed and preserved, a shelter that will, despite everything, and in some way she can’t fathom or name, endure. But even if there is, even if it does endure, she thinks, it cannot keep us safe. The distance is too great, no one could span it, it is much too far, remote, and inaccessible.

  It is what it is. Not keeping us safe, but keeping something. Something. Somewhere. Those words, she thinks, vague and imprecise, are what we have.

  Leo puts down his violin. The music ends. Her love for him flares; a gold light rims the room.

  “Please, play some more,” his mother says.

  Once again, he picks up his violin, puts the handkerchief on his shoulder, places his violin on top of it, rests his chin against the instrument’s dark wood. He raises his bow.

  And, once again, there is music.

  PART IX

  Brimston, Arizona

  February 2019

  The women meet for lunch, after hot yoga, at Brimston’s newest restaurant. SloCoLoSo, named for its principles: Slow Cooked, Locally Sourced. They feel fortunate to have gotten a table, knowing that they needed to reserve a week in advance.

  The menu provides two choices, each accompanied by a narrative.

  “Cauliflower nest. Poached egg (from our own hens, living behind the restaurant…The gift of Polly and Molly, our star layers).”

  “In a nest of cauliflower grown down the road at one of our dear providers: Willow Moonstone, organic farmer extraordinaire and star of Valerie Singleton’s Morning Circle.”

  “Our vegan option: Celeriac soup, lovingly slow cooked by our own Traci Windsor, grown a quarter mile down the road by our treasured Mike and Cissy Lloyd. Rumor has it that the avocados they are growing in their greenhouse will b
e available within a month or two.”

  The women do not balk at the price of each entrée: twenty-four dollars. They call this “splurge day,” and they know that they deserve it: they have been good wives, good mothers, and they fear the day (later, they hope, rather than sooner) when their husbands retire; they have been warned: “Might be some belt tightening.” But there will be no belt tightening, rather belt loosening, if they have to cut down their classes at the gym…and can no longer lunch at places like SloCoLoSo, which tend to be pricy.

  “It’s great to see that Willow’s farm is working out,” one of the women says. “And that she and Valerie and Alison are still with us. I still can’t believe that PAYBACK’s been canceled.”

  “You could see it coming. She was losing her edge…it seemed to be the same thing all the time, money and sex, money and sex, and then she really blew it with the show about herself and her teacher. I mean, come on, the teacher seemed like a nice lady, she was sorry, she really was, you could tell, and Quin had made such a point of not being a victim, buying the house across the street from the teacher, well, it just seemed over the top, just a spoiled brat acting out. And she really had to stop wearing those sleeveless sheaths: I mean, maybe you can’t be too thin or too rich, but those arms were really looking ropy.”

  “I wonder what they’re going to replace her with.”

  “There was some talk of The Real Housewives of Phoenix, but I don’t think it went anywhere.”

  “Yeah, well, whatever it is, it damn well better be entertaining.”

  Acknowledgments

  My deep thanks to Professor Michele Marincola of New York University, who generously gave me the benefit of her expertise on the restoration of wooden polychrome sculpture. And to Irene MacDonald, honorary goddaughter and lawyer to the stars, for her advice about the ins and outs of reality TV. And master proofreaders Jonah and Max Mirer.

  A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Mary Gordon is the author of seven novels, including Final Payments, Pearl, and The Love of My Youth; six works of nonfiction, including the memoirs The Shadow Man and Circling My Mother; and three collections of short fiction, including The Stories of Mary Gordon, which was awarded the Story Prize. She has received many other honors, including a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and an Academy Award for Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in New York City.

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