The Paper Palace

by Miranda Cowley Heller

  Now that my grandfather has died, my father and the Bitch have decided to move Granny Myrtle from her Connecticut farmhouse into a nursing home. Not a nice one, with a big circular driveway lined in sweet-smelling privet and reassuring nurses who tuck you in with a bowl of hot soup and read to you. Just some shithole in Danbury that smells of urinals, with a bunch of underpaid nurse’s aides—cinder-block institutional, dirty floors, windowless puce hallways.

  I’ve given her my word that I won’t let it happen. She will stay in her own house. She’s already told my father and Mary that they won’t have to pay for round-the-clock nurses, if it comes to that. She’s fit as a fiddle. She can look after herself. There’s a local girl who can bring groceries in, do light cleaning, carry the mail in from the box at the bottom of the hill. She’ll manage. Because that’s what the Bitch is worried about: spending any of their potential inheritance on private nurses. My father has promised me they won’t move her if I can figure out a solution that makes everyone comfortable. They are worried that she will fall, he says, and unless I’m willing to spend every weekend with her to spell the girl. “I’ll do whatever it takes,” I say.

  “Eleanor,” she says now, her voice quivering. “Is that you?”

  “It’s me, Granny.”

  “I’m frightened.” She is crying. I have never heard her cry before.

  “Granny, what is it? What’s happened?”

  “I don’t know where I am.” She starts to sob.

  “Don’t cry, Granny, please don’t cry.”

  “They’ve put me in this place. It’s cold here. I can’t find my reading light. Where is everyone? I’m scared, Elle. Please come get me.”

  A rage rushes through me, crimson-red fury. “Wait. Where are you, Granny? Who moved you?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know. They came and brought me here.” Her voice is frail, childlike.

  “Who came?”

  “Mary and her friend. She said my blood pressure had spiked. She said I had a doctor’s appointment at the hospital. I called Henry. He told me to go with her. I don’t know what to do. Where are my blankets?”

  “Granny, I need to call Dad. I’ll sort this out. You’ll be out of there by tonight. Don’t worry.”

  “It’s dark here. There’s no window. I can’t breathe. You must come now!” She sounds confused, panicked, like a tethered horse in a burning barn.

  All I want to do is hug her frail, bony Granny self. “I’m going to fix this. I’m coming to get you.”

  “Who’s there?” she says.

  “I’ll be there in a few hours. Just try to stay calm.”

  “I don’t know you,” she says.

  “It’s me. It’s Eleanor. I’m calling the nurses’ station right now. I’ll make sure they move you to a room with a window.”

  “I don’t know you,” she says again.

  Now I hear a man’s voice in the background, telling her to stay still. The phone drops, but I can hear her thrashing in her bed. “Get away from me,” she screams. Whoever it is hangs up the phone.

  When I get to Avis, there’s a line. The woman behind the counter seems to think she works at the post office. A manager wanders in from a back office and we all breathe a collective sigh of relief. But instead of opening up a second line, he taps some override code into her computer, says something that makes her give a nice, round fake laugh, and then disappears into the back.

  “Excuse me?” I call out. “Can you get someone else to help?”

  “Ma’am, I’m working as fast as I can.” As if to underline this point, she gets off her stool and, slow as mud, walks over to the printer. Waits for a contract to spool out.

  “Sorry,” I say, hoping to get back on her good side. “I need to get to my grandmother in the hospital. I don’t mean to make a fuss.”

  “We all have places we need to be.” She turns to the man in front of her and gives him a long-suffering smile, rolls her eyes. She’s on his side, she wants him to know, just not on mine.

  * * *

  —

  I arrive at the nursing home with fifteen minutes to spare, grab my purse, and run. I’m breathless when I get to reception.

  “I’m here to see my grandmother.”

  The woman behind the counter stares at me blankly, as if she has never seen a visitor before. She looks at her watch. “Visiting hours are over.”

  “No. I still have fifteen minutes. Myrtle Bishop?”

  She sighs. They don’t pay her enough to deal with this crap. “Sorry,” she says. “You’re too late.”

  I practically stamp my foot. “I just drove up from New York. It was bumper-to-bumper traffic. She’s old and frail, and she’s waiting for me. Can you just be nice?”

  “Ma’am,” she says, “Mrs. Bishop passed away an hour ago.”

  * * *

  —

  Granny is buried next to my grandfather in the old cemetery across the road. It occurs to me that she spent most of her life looking out at the place where her body will rot. We stand under a threatening sky next to a raw hole in the ground. The graveyard has expanded up the hill. The old suicide grave where Anna and I used to play is now surrounded by the tombstones of nice, normal people. Anna stands beside me, looking elegant and thin in a black wool dress. Granny would approve. She squeezes my hand tight as the first shovel of dirt thuds heavily on ebonized wood. Rain begins to fall, tat-tatting the coffin like an accompaniment. My father stands across the grave from me, shoulders heaving with tears. His umbrella lists away from him. Raindrops land on his black felt hat. I have been sick at heart since Granny died, my mind stuck in a loop of regret and self-recrimination. Why didn’t I act sooner, rush to protect her the minute my father and Mary threatened to move her? She was the one person in my life who made me feel safe when I was a child, who protected me from ghosts, read me to sleep, fed me protein and a vegetable, whose love never wavered. And I failed her. She was, literally, scared to death.

  The minister closes his dog-eared Book of Common Prayer. My father’s sobs have turned desperate, guttural. He stumbles toward Mary. She opens her arms wide to embrace him, but he passes her by and throws his arms around me instead. I feel a momentary triumph when I see her red-slash lips tighten in humiliation.

  I hold my father close, feel the sodden chill of his trench coat against my cheek. “You have no right to cry,” I whisper in his ear.

  After the funeral, we all walk across the road, up the steep driveway to the house. The rain has let up, but the trees in the orchard—the crabapples and plums still heavy with unpicked fruit—weep into the tall grasses under their boughs.

  I leave Anna and Peter mixing drinks in the living room, discussing the case Anna is working on. Anna is a litigator at a fancy law firm in downtown L.A. “Well, I would have preferred you did something in the arts, but I suppose it’s good you found a way to put that frightful argumentative streak of yours to work,” was Mum’s congratulations when Anna first called to tell her she’d gotten the job. I wander down the hallway to our old bedroom off the kitchen. It is exactly as it has always been: our twin beds made, our favorite children’s books still on the shelf, a red tobacco tin filled with crayon stubs. I know if I go into the guest bathroom and reach up blindly onto the top shelf above the toilet I will find a pack of menthol cigarettes, hidden where she thinks no one will find them. The most wonderful thing about my grandmother, among many wonderful things, is that everything is always the same. The lovely lemon-wood smell of the house, the little bottles of ginger ale pushed to the back of the icebox for hot days. The silver thimble her mother gave her when she was a girl, nestled in a lavender box on her bureau.

  I open the cupboard in our room. As far as I’m concerned, my father and the Bitch can have everything. They’ll take it anyway. Anna can fight them for the four-poster bed and the first edition of Gatsby. There’s only one thing
I want to keep. I reach back behind the dusty pile of board games—the old Scrabble box and Chinese checkers. The Game of Life. My hand searches for our treasure box filled with the paper dolls Anna and I made. But the box isn’t there. I take everything out of the cupboard and pile it on the floor in a heap. Check the closets, under the bed. Nothing.

  Anna is in the dining room on her cell phone. “No. You stay on the 22. Past Pawling,” I hear her say as I walk past. Her new boyfriend Jeremy has just flown in from L.A. “And don’t rush. The roads are wet and you’ve already missed the funeral.”

  In the living room, mourners are eating Triscuits and Brie, stiff drinks in their hands. My father sits alone on the sofa, staring into space. There’s a streak of mud on one of his polished black leather shoes. He looks perplexed, as if he’s waiting for his mother to appear from the kitchen, apron still tied around her waist, holding a plate of sugar cookies.

  “Dad.” I sit down next to him. “I’ve been looking for a brass box that lives in our bedroom cupboard. It was there last time I looked. Can you think where Granny might have put it?”

  “The paper dolls?” he says.

  “Yes,” I say. “I looked everywhere.”

  “Mary’s niece was here with us a few weeks ago. She liked them. Mary said she could take them home with her when she left.”

  I stand up. “Well, I should go. The sooner everyone’s out of the house, the sooner you can sell it.”

  I reach over to the bookcase behind his head, pull my grandfather’s treasured first edition of The Great Gatsby off the shelf. “I’m taking this for Anna.”

  * * *

  —

  Peter drives us home, taking the slick curves of the blacktop roadway too fast. Our high beams cut a path through the rainy night. Ahead of us, trees lean in on either side like massive shadow puppets. The radio is off. I close my eyes. Listen to the windshield wipers back-and-forth-ing. I cannot speak. I cannot even cry. We hydroplane around a steep S curve, but Peter pulls us back to center, accelerates. I don’t tell him to slow down. I am grateful for the distance he is putting between my past and the present.

  “I hate him,” I say finally.

  “Then I hate him, too.” Peter takes a hand off the wheel, puts his arm around me. “Scooch over,” he says, and pulls me tight to his side.

  The car swerves slightly, but I don’t mind.

  25

  1994. April, New York.

  I push my chair back from my desk, stretch my back. I’ve been correcting papers for what feels like ten hours. I pick up the phone and call Peter at the office.

  He answers after one ring. “Hello, gorgeous. I’m missing you.”

  “Well then, it’s a good thing you’re seeing me very soon. I’m done here. If I have to read another obvious undergraduate essay on ‘Feminism and Colette’ or ‘Homosexual Apologism in Gide,’ I may have to shoot myself. Do you want me to come up to your office and we can go together?”

  “I have to finish this piece. Best meet there in case I get stuck.”

  “Don’t get stuck. I hate these things.” Crowds of art-parasites pretending the emperor is wearing clothes. Peter’s parents are flying into town for the opening of the Whitney Biennial, and we’re meeting them there.

  I hear him light a cigarette, inhale. “Just because you don’t like conceptual art doesn’t mean the rest of the world is wrong.”

  “Three words: Michael. Jackson. Bubbles.”

  “My mother says the show is meant to be very ‘political’ this year.”

  “Where are they taking us for dinner?”

  “Somewhere nice. They’re looking forward to seeing you.”

  “They’re looking forward to seeing you. I’m the woman who kidnapped their son and brought him to live amongst the savages.”

  Peter laughs. “I’ll be there as soon as I can. Promise.”

  * * *

  —

  I get off the local train at Seventy-seventh and Lex. It’s a perfect spring evening—the golden smell of honey locust, brownstones taking in the last of the sun. Around the corner from the Whitney, I sit on a stoop and change my running shoes for a pair of flats, put on some red lipstick, adjust my boobs up and out a bit. I’m wearing my favorite pale blue linen cocktail dress, but the neckline is a hair too low, and if I don’t lift and separate, my boobs end up looking like a baby’s bottom.

  The Whitney is a madhouse, the concrete bridge to the entryway thick with bodies, an express train at rush hour. I’m not even inside, and already I’m pissed off. At the door, a woman hands me a button that reads I can’t imagine ever wanting to be white. I grab a glass of wine from a passing tray and head into the crowd. If there’s a fire, I will be trampled to death.

  We’ve arranged to meet Peter’s parents at the elevator bank, but they aren’t here yet. I find a bit of open space on the wall and lean against it, slug down my wine, watch the beautiful people shoving their way across the room. A dark-haired waiter carrying a tray of champagne moves away from me into the throng.

  “Can I grab one of those?” I say, but he doesn’t hear me above the noise. I tug his sleeve to get his attention before he is swallowed up. The tray slaloms in his hand, and for a second it looks like he will lose control of it, but he manages to follow its sway, keeping all of the full flutes upright. Not even a slosh.

  “Idiot,” I hear him mutter as he presses forward without letting me take a glass of champagne from his tray.

  I know this voice. “Jonas?”

  The waiter turns, scowls at me. It’s not Jonas.

  As I watch him walk away, a sadness comes over me, a disappointment I didn’t know was there, a gut-punched feeling—as if I’ve been given a pardon on my death sentence and then, seconds later, been told it was a mistake. It’s been four years since the coffee shop. Since Jonas kissed me that way. Since I ignored the message he left on my mother’s answering machine the next day, knowing—as I erased it, as I toasted a bagel, as I brought Peter coffee in bed—that Jonas was what might have been. Maybe even what should have been. Knowing it was too late.

  Peter is what is. Our life together is good. Great. In love with the realness of each other—with toilet plungers and morning breath and running to the bodega to get me Tampax, falling asleep to Letterman, yelping at wasabi. But none of that matters right now. I reach into my bag and pull out my wallet, thick with receipts I need to throw away— taxi drivers’ cards I take rather than hurt their feelings and admit I’ll never call, a few old photos, a maxed-out credit card. My fingers feel around the recesses behind the window pocket where my hideous license photo stares out at me. I pull out the folded paper napkin. His number is faded but still legible.

  There’s a pay phone in the lobby corner near the gift shop. Jonas answers on the fourth ring, and this time I know the voice is his.

  “It’s me,” I say.

  Silence. The din of the lobby behind me is deafening. I press the telephone receiver hard against my ear, plug my other ear with my index finger, trying to create a bubble of silence. “It’s me,” I say again, louder this time. A man enters the Whitney wearing a pink vinyl suit; the woman on his arm is a head taller, dressed in a Chanel jacket and sheer stockings that do nothing to hide her nakedness underneath. I watch them air-kiss their way across the lobby.

  “Jonas? Are you there? It’s Elle.”

  I hear him sigh. “I know who it is. Are you drunk-dialing me?”

  “Of course not. I’m at the Whitney.”

  “Ahh,” he says. “I thought you were in London.”

  “We moved back. I thought I saw you just now. There was a waiter. I was so sure it was you.”

  “No.”

  “I know. You’re there.”

  He waits for me to say more.

  “Anyway, I was standing by myself in this crowd of assholes in vintage Fiorucci, waiting for
Peter, and I thought—”

  “—you thought: assholes . . . Jonas. I never returned his call, but I’m sure he’ll be happy to hear from me in the five minutes before my boyfriend arrives.”

  “Don’t be an asshole,” I say. “I’m calling you now.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know.”

  He is quiet on the other end of the phone.

  Behind me, there is a cloud of sound.

  “Fine,” he says.

  “Thank god. I was worried you were going to keep sulking.”

  “I was. But apparently I have the backbone of a snake. How are you?”

  “I’m good. We came back last year. I was homesick. It rains in London.”

  “I’ve heard that.”

  “Peter got a job at The Wall Street Journal. We live on Tompkins Square Park, so I look out at green. And junkies.” I pause. “I wanted to call you back.”

  “Then why didn’t you?”

  “You asked me to choose,” I say.

  Jonas sighs. “I asked you to choose me.”

  The operator interrupts, asking me to please deposit ten cents for the next three minutes. I feed a dime into the slot, wait for the reassuring chunking.

  “Anyway,” Jonas says in an “I want to get off the phone now” voice, “I’m working, so I’d better get back to it.”

  “Can I see you?”

  “Sure. You have my number.” There’s a retreat, a coolness in his voice, and I feel a sudden acute panic. I haven’t lost him yet, but I know in every atom of my body that he’s about to shut the door.

  “How about tomorrow?”

  “Week after next is better,” he says.

  Across the room, I see Peter and his parents pushing through the crowd, heading for the elevator bank. I turn my back, so he can’t see me. “For what it’s worth, I called because I was so excited when I thought that waiter was you. I was so happy. Then he wasn’t you, and I couldn’t think of anything else except I needed to see you right that second. It couldn’t wait. I couldn’t breathe if I didn’t hear your voice immediately. I still had your number in my wallet. I walked over to the pay phone. I dialed.”