by M. E. Kerr
“Oh, and you with Alex is easy to take.”
She had me there. I grumped around for a while as she reminded me that she was only thirty-seven, not quite dead yet, not a nun who’d taken vows of celibacy, and not averse to having a life beyond our life together.
We were in the middle of this discussion when a knock came at the door.
Huguette was standing there in these tight gray sweats that rode low on her hips, and a white half shirt that showed she’d been sunbathing at some point when she didn’t have on that outfit. There was a wide gap of white skin above her waist.
“Can you do me a favor?” she said.
“What’s that?”
“Drive me into the village?”
I opened the screen door, but she shook her head and said, “I’m not coming in. You come out.”
I walked through the door and we stood in the small yard, a few feet away from the field with the dandelions and the snakes.
“How long will this take?” I asked. “I don’t mean just this one time, either.”
“Uncle Ben says he doesn’t like me out driving around alone. Besides, he’s not sure my French license is good in the United States.”
“I was going to tell you the other night, but I forgot. He’s wise to the reason you take the Range Rover out early mornings.”
“I know. He’s forbidden me to do it. He says he wants me to have someone with me who can also drive.”
“There’s always Franklin.”
“Not Franklin! He’s Uncle Ben’s spy.”
I could see the white Aurora parked down by the gates.
“I suppose I’m supposed to sit in the car and cool my heels while you call Marten in France.”
“Do you have something against pheromones?” She dangled the car keys at me.
From the doorway, my mother called out, “Go ahead, Lang! Hello, Huguette. I’m Lang’s mother.”
I liked Huguette for saying, “Hello, Mrs. Penner.” (Nevada always referred to her as Lucy.) “Wouldn’t it be a big help to you, too, if he had the use of a car?”
Like a lot of people who live their lives in New York, my mother didn’t drive.
“A big, big help!” my mother agreed.
“It doesn’t mean I’m going to become your personal chauffeur,” I grumbled at Huguette.
She said, “What makes you think I’d want you for my personal chauffeur? You’ve got such a big face!”
“A big head!” I said, following her down toward the Aurora.
EIGHTEEN
“I NEVER KNEW CALI,” she said. “Phoenix Haun is my legal name. The Roshans always call me Huguette. They’re my family, just as Aniane is my home.”
It was her idea to take a picnic lunch days I went driving with her. We’d stop somewhere and she’d put a blanket down, and a blue-and-white-checked cloth on the ground. We’d feast on cheese and pâté and fruit: her choices. I would have packed tunafish sandwiches and Oreos.
“Uncle Ben tells me that Cali was the love of his life, but she was only with him four years. That’s so sad.”
That day we were down by the Nature Preserve, where there were ducks that would have chosen sandwich scraps over pâté too.
They padded around us as we sat there talking. There were more in the stream near us; there were all sorts of colored birds in the trees above us. People strolled by feeding the ducks, pointing at the birds, studying them with binoculars.
I don’t remember how she started on the subject of Cali. I know I didn’t bring it up. We didn’t probe; we didn’t ask leading questions. That was what I liked about our times together…that, and something else I’d noticed a few times when I was someplace with Brittany. There was not the self-conscious feeling I sometimes had when Alex and I went places together. Put a boy and a girl on a blanket in the sun and the whole world smiled at you. Put two fags there and the smiles turned crooked, the eyebrows raised, you held your breath waiting for the wisecracks.
“Tell me something,” I said. “Why did your mother always say ‘Pain over’ when she sang? Do you know?”
“Call her Cali, not my mother. My aunt is my mother,” Huguette said. “It wasn’t ‘pain over.’ Cali said, ‘Paint over it.’ It’s from a song Uncle Ben wrote. It was Cali’s favorite of all his songs. Mother said Uncle Ben never liked it, never released it.”
“What does it mean?”
“The real title is ‘How to Refurbish a Chair or a Broken Heart.’ Someday I’ll play it for you. Uncle Ben has it at Roundelay…. It isn’t about Cali, either.”
“What is it about?”
“It’s about continuing, putting the past behind you. It’s about his childhood: the death of his mother when he was very young…. He wrote it for his father.”
“The accompanist.”
“Yes. Armand Nevada was an accompanist. But he was a brilliant musician. A classical musician. He was educated, not like Uncle Ben, who pores over Harriett’s quotations so he can pretend he’s well read. ‘Paint Over It’ was the first song Uncle Ben ever wrote for his father, but the old man hated it. He called it ‘sentimental rock slop.’ My mother said it nearly killed Uncle Ben.”
“He got even with ‘Dad’s Advice.’”
“Yes. With nearly every song after that, too.”
“The old man never approved of Nevada, hmm?”
“It must have been hard to approve of Uncle Ben back then. Or Cali. They were always on drugs. I have her diary in Aniane. Part of my inheritance.” She let out a scornful laugh. “She’d write things like ‘Smoked bowls and did acid.’ That would be one day’s entry. She finally ended up in a place called Hazeldon, for rehab.”
“A lot of them did.”
“Uncle Ben and Cali got success too soon. I don’t think much of success, do you?”
“I haven’t had a taste of it.”
“I haven’t either. I don’t have any wish for it. It brings you unhappiness. Martin says happiness is a vineyard, good weather, and enough help to get the job done.”
“Where do you come in?”
“I share it with him, no?”
“So you’d settle for a life in Aniane?”
“Settle? You should see Aniane. You should see Martin. Cali settled when she got rescued by Leonard Haun. Mother says there was no way Cali could have loved a pint-sized insurance executive with an ulcer, whose idea of a good time was a round of bridge. My biological father! Cali was desperate for security!”
She looked at her watch suddenly. “Mon dieu! Look at the time, Lang! I said I’d be back by four to play tennis with Uncle Ben!”
That week, our lunches got later and later as we lingered talking.
Alex complained that I saw more of her than I did of him. Sometimes I would get back to the cottage too late to call him before he left for the theater. That had never happened until she came into my life.
Nevada was waiting for us when we arrived at Roundelay. He was sitting in the old Ford down by the gates as we pulled in.
He called out his car window, “I was going to look for you except I didn’t know where to look! It’s five o’clock, Huguette! I was worried about you!”
“You know I’m with Lang,” she answered. “No need to worry.”
“Drive on,” he told her. “I want a word with Lang.”
She said she’d see me the next day at ten A.M. I had a jitney reservation for six P.M. It was the weekend I’d go up to Nyack with Alex.
I got out of the Aurora and she went up the drive.
The rottweilers never barked when Nevada was on the scene.
I walked over to the Ford, around to the driver’s side.
“Do you feel okay about driving Huguette?” he asked.
“I have the hang of it,” I said. “She’s good company, too.”
“Has she got the hang of leaving Roundelay without stopping somewhere to phone this Le Vec?”
“She hasn’t made any calls that I know about.” It was true. But it had been only one week. He
didn’t ask me if she had made any purchases—like a man’s leather Gucci wallet and a Whitney Houston CD. (“Does Martin speak English?” I’d asked her when she bought it. She’d said that he knew the English in songs.)
Nevada said, “The Fourth of July they’re having a big celebration out in Montauk. Fireworks, rock bands, a surprise appearance by Cog Wheeler, that sort of thing. Do you know The Failures?”
“Who doesn’t? They’re opening at Sob Story the next day.”
“Huguette has never seen an American Fourth of July. I think she’d like to go.”
“Are you going to take her?” I knew he was angling for me to go along.
“I can’t go to those affairs. My presence in the audience spoils it for everyone else.”
I knew what he meant. That first weekend when Alex and I went to a movie, we saw Billy Joel get mobbed while he was in the ticket line with his daughter—and they were used to seeing Billy Joel in that town. I could imagine what would happen if Nevada showed up anywhere.
I said, “My birthday is Saturday night, the third. Alex will arrive late that night and stay till Monday.”
“I could get three tickets,” he said.
“We’ve made plans, Mr. Nevada.” We hadn’t. But neither of us liked those grungy Seattle bands, and a threesy wasn’t what we had in mind for my birthday celebration.
Nevada lit a Gitane, then said, “You’d have the use of the Aurora, of course. I’d reimburse you for any expenses the three of you incurred. It’s a hot ticket, Lang.”
“I thought I told you—”
He cut me off. “You told me. But you seem to enjoy her.”
“I do enjoy her. It isn’t that.”
“Have you told her about yourself, Lang?”
“No.”
“Why should you?” He sounded like my mother.
“Why shouldn’t I?” I shot back.
“Lang, Lang, listen to me: Someone once wrote ‘Every truth has two sides; it is well to look at both, before we commit ourselves to either.’”
I figured he’d dug that one out of Bartlett’s.
I said, “Someone else once wrote: ‘If my lies you believe, then I might let you breathe.’”
He squeezed his eyes shut for a second, then opened them and growled, “I wasn’t much older than you are when I wrote that. You’re a pain in the ass, Penner!”
He took off in the old Ford, heading through the gates of Roundelay.
That was when he first started calling me by my last name.
NINETEEN
“ALEX! OVER HERE!”
“Here’s Alex!”
“Hello, Alex!”
There were around thirty guests at the twentieth-anniversary party for Alex’s parents.
We rode up to Nyack with an aunt of Alex’s who was meeting her husband there.
There was a gingerbread house overlooking the Hudson River, high on a hill, with a yard filled with Alex’s family
I remember a Robert Frost poem I memorized in eighth grade: the one about two roads diverging in a woods, and someone taking the one less traveled by.
It was a little borrowed glory to help me through dark days when I was beginning to accept what I was.
That Sunday everyone seemed to have taken the road most traveled by. Alex and I were the odd couple. No room in the ark for the likes of us.
Peter, Alex’s twin, clapped his arm around his shoulder and called out, “Uncle Henry? Get a shot of me and Alex!”
A man pointed a camera at them as I stepped aside.
Then Peter pushed a redheaded girl in between Alex and himself, saying: “Uncle Henry?”
Uncle Henry obliged.
Peter said, “Alex, this is my girlfriend, Tina Lopez.”
“How do you do, Tina? This is my friend, Lang Penner. Peter? You remember Lang.”
“Hi.” Peter never said my name, nor met my eyes when he greeted me.
“Hello, Peter and Tina,” I said.
Tina had a camera too.
Tina said, “Alex and Peter? Hold still!”
Uncle Henry said, “Tina? Will you take a picture of me with Alex and Peter?” He handed Tina his camera.
Peter said, “Tina? Let Lang take the picture, and then you can get in here.”
I took the camera from Tina. I took the picture.
“Alex!” a woman called. “Come and see your cousin. You haven’t seen Timmy since he started walking!”
I wandered around by myself for a while. I went into the house to use the bathroom, which was adorned with photographs of Alex and Peter and Mr. and Mrs. Southgate, in all sorts of poses, in all seasons, at all ages.
I looked at the books in the shelves lining the walls, and I flipped through a copy of Time magazine. I petted the cat asleep on the couch and watched the party from the window for a while.
Then I went out in the yard to the grill, where Alex’s father was outfitted in cook’s regalia, complete with a tall, white, mushroom-shaped chef’s hat.
He was an older, heavier version of Alex, basting ribs and wiping his forehead with the back of his hand.
“I thought you were in the Hamptons, Lynn?”
I never bothered correcting him anymore.
“I am, but not all the time.”
“So I see. Well, make yourself useful. Pass that tray of ribs around.”
I went from couple to couple until I came to Alex’s mother, settled into a sling chair with a martini. She was a good-looking woman with black curly hair, feeling no pain. “Hello, Lang. I thought you were in the Hamptons this summer?”
“I am, but not all the time. Congratulations on your anniversary!”
“Thank you, dear. How’s your mother?”
“She’s fine, thank you.”
“Alex says she’s working for Ben Nevada. That couldn’t be easy, but what’s easy?”
“This is,” a woman seated beside her said, and she raised her glass to Mrs. Southgate and took a sip of her martini.
She said, “Who’s this?”—looking at me.
“Lang Penner,” said Mrs. Southgate.
“Penner?” said the woman. “Who married a Penner?”
“He’s a friend of Alex’s,” said Mrs. Southgate.
“Are you an actor?” the woman asked.
“He’s not anything,” said Mrs. Southgate. “He’s still in high school. You’re still in high school, aren’t you, Lang?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“From New York?” the woman asked.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Alex is a wonderful actor!” the woman said.
“Yes, he is,” I said.
“Peter’s here with his girlfriend,” said Mrs. Southgate. “Her father is a big film director: José Lopez.”
“Do you know Peter?” the woman asked me.
“Yes, I know him.”
“José Lopez has something to do with that new sitcom Sun Fun,” said Mrs. Southgate.
The woman said, “I never watch sitcoms.”
“I don’t either,” I said.
“I’m Dorothy Southgate,” the woman said as she stood up. “I’m Alex’s aunt.”
“Didn’t I introduce you?” Mrs. Southgate said. “I thought I introduced you.”
“I have to find my daughter,” said Dorothy Southgate.
“Did she bring the baby?” Mrs. Southgate asked.
“The baby’s with a sitter today,” said Dorothy Southgate.
Mrs. Southgate watched her leave.
She said, “Thank God I’ve got Peter! If I thought I’d have to go through life without grandchildren, I’d throw in the proverbial towel. You’re an only child, aren’t you, Lang?”
“Yes. There’s just me.”
“How does your mother feel about it?”
“How does she feel about what?”
“How does she feel about not ever having grandchildren?”
“We haven’t discussed it, Mrs. Southgate.”
“If you ever get around to disc
ussing it” she said, “take plenty of Kleenex along—she’ll appreciate it.” She took a big sip of her martini. None of the guests were hurrying our way. Alex often said that his mother, in her cups, could frighten ravenous bees away from honey.
Mrs. Southgate rested her martini on her knee. She waved one hand in a circle. “This is what it’s all about, Lang, Anniversaries, grandkids, family gatherings.” And from behind me I heard Alex add, “And Stolichnaya, Mom, with a whisper of vermouth.”
“It’s about that, too,” she said. “Find me a cigarette somewhere, honey. I never should have given up smoking entirely. There’s such a thing as being too pure, not that it’d be anything you have to worry about.”
“We’ll be right back,” said Alex.
We walked in the opposite direction, away from the party, down along the path, where there was a good view of the Hudson River from the cliff.
“How are you holding up?” he asked me.
“I’m hanging in there.”
“I don’t want to stay much longer. There’s a cousin of mine heading back to New York; he said he’d take us in.”
“It’s a shame to leave when we’re having so much fun,” I said.
“Ha ha,” he said.
“Why do you do this, Alex? Why do I have to come to these things with you?”
“Peter brings his dates.”
“What happens when Peter has children? Do we rescue some poor orphans from China?”
He wasn’t listening to me. He said, “I was basting more ribs for Dad, and he seized that opportunity to give me a lecture about AIDS. He said, ‘I mention this because I read somewhere that you people are going back to being promiscuous.’ I said, ‘This is the sixth time you’ve met Lang. Peter hasn’t shown up at these things with the same girl twice. Tell Peter about safe sex, not me.’
“So he said, ‘Why do you always compare yourself to Peter? The only way you’re like Peter is your looks!’ And I said, ‘I’m a lot prettier than Peter, wouldn’t you say?’ ‘Pretty’s the word, all right, Alex,’ he said, ‘and look where being pretty has gotten you!’”
“Why do you always compare yourself with Peter?” I said.
“Because he’s my gawdamned twin!”
We stood there looking out at the long, low-hung Tappan Zee Bridge in the distance.