The prospect of opening her laptop and typing on a keyboard when her wobbly body and woozy brain are so out of sync looms like Mount Everest. “Not now,” she says. “Maybe tomorrow when I have a little more energy and my head isn’t so fuzzy.” She drops her fuzzy head into the down cloud and shuts her eyes. During the days before surgery, she emailed Sam frequent tourist reports along with selfies of her and Ursula against a backdrop of skyscrapers and traffic, labeled We’re not in Passamaquoddy anymore and illustrated with winking, smiling emoticons. Now that she’s returned from the hospital, however, the pinging computer and ringing phone stab like yet another surgical slash, oozing guilt and signaling a to-do list beyond her current capacity to do. What to say, how to explain, pose even more difficult challenges than the torturous exercises—reaching, stretching, bending, deep breathing—the nurse printed out for her on discharge. Still, even Ursula, the queen of little—and not so little—lies, has had a hard time inventing excuses: She’s out. She just stepped into the shower. She’s at the theater. She popped over to the Met. I sent her on an errand to Saks. Oh dear, you just missed her. She’s getting her hair done.
As a result of Annie’s failure to return his calls, Sam’s messages on her cell, Ursula’s cell, and Ursula’s answering service have become increasingly anxious and annoyed. She can hardly blame him. Still, she can’t call him back; her sore, constricted throat and labored breaths are too much of a giveaway. Hearing her, he’ll be on the next plane. And then what? He’ll see her in all her postsurgical collapse, the bedridden proof of her—and now Ursula’s—subterfuge. His predictable sense of betrayal and his hypochondriacal catastrophizing will set back both of them.
Ursula promises to coach her, has suggested diaphragm-expanding exercises followed by the arpeggios that opera singers use to warm up. She has offered to hire the vocal therapist who helped Julie Andrews speak again. Because of her not-yet-healed lung, Annie is sure the calisthenics won’t work. They’ve tried cough syrup and prescription-strength lozenges to mask her hoarseness, but she still doesn’t sound remotely like herself. “You need to answer Sam,” Ursula says.
“Not like this,” Annie croaks.
“Tell him the truth.”
“That I lied? He’ll never forgive me.”
“Once he realizes you’ve returned from the valley of the shadow of death …”
“I will, when we’re face-to-face, when I figure out the right way …”
“Here’s the plan: as a temporary stopgap, why not explain you caught a bad cold. And now have laryngitis. From which you are, in fact, truly suffering. Airplanes are notorious, even in first class, for the bad quality of the air, for spreading germs. Many actors actually choose to wear a mask during flight to protect their voices for upcoming performances. Frankly, I am running out of pretexts to offer up to him.”
“Will you do it?” Annie asks with John Smith/Miles Standish cowardice, dismayed at how quick she is to toss the hot potato to Ursula. “Email him that my cold’s so bad I can’t talk? That I’ll call as soon as my voice permits?”
“Is there anything I wouldn’t for you, darling? And I assume”—she places a pledge-of-allegiance hand over her heart—“you want me also to send your love and add that you miss him?”
“Please.” Of course Annie misses Sam. But in an abstract way, as through a haze. From here on her sickbed, from here with the lights of Manhattan twinkling outside her window, from here with Ursula exuding maternal concern—real or staged—Sam belongs to another world. “Out of sight, out of mind,” she sighs.
“Nonsense,” Ursula remonstrates. “It’s more likely you are out of your mind.” She frowns. “Perhaps James missed your lungs and sliced into your brain.”
“Ha,” Annie says. “Very funny.”
Right now she’s focused only on her immediate concerns: sleep, pain, how rubbery her limbs seem, the steady stream of soothing cups of tea with honey that Ursula tips to her mouth when her hands are too weak to hold them, her struggle to speak without a rasp, her total exhaustion. Even following the birth of Baby Girl Stevens-Strauss, when she fell into a black hole, when the world swallowed her up, she never felt such fatigue, fatigue that, at the moment, leaves little room for Sam.
Yet, she reminds herself, how lucky that through her present fog shines a future bright and hopeful enough to offer—knock on wood; she bangs the bedpost—a normal life-span’s worth of years with him.
* * *
The phone rings. Not Sam this time, but Ambrose. After the initial medical explanations, Ambrose’s apologies, and Ursula’s insistence—with Annie’s full consent—that nothing was Dr. Buckley’s fault, Ursula and Ambrose’s conversations have become less health related and more personal. This afternoon, Annie falls asleep listening to her mother whisper “J’adore” and “Bisous” in a throaty Marlene Dietrich voice.
* * *
When she wakes again, it’s dark; she’s been asleep for six straight hours. Ursula is curled into a wing chair across from her daughter’s bed, reading a script illuminated by one of those miniature book lights advertised in the back pages of the New Yorker. In the big chair, Ursula looks tiny, like a Tennant illustration of a shrunken Alice.
“Can you actually see?” Annie asks.
“Oh, you’re up.” Ursula clicks off the light, shuts her script, turns on the lamp next to her. “These little devices are devilishly clever. You can read in bed while your inamorato is snoring away … How are you feeling, Arabella?”
“Better.”
“Your color appears much improved. I must confess you looked paler than my whitest linens. I was quite alarmed.” Ursula moves closer to Annie; she adjusts the pillows behind Annie’s head. She sits on the bed. Annie smells all her lovely, expensive Ursula creams and perfumes and is grateful for their proximity. “Would you care for more tea? Perrier? I have some divine—soft—biscuits from Fauchon. Dinner will be delivered in an hour.”
“I’m fine,” Annie says. She studies her mother, who has been at her side since before the surgery and all these days after, now a week and a half. “It must be so boring for you, stuck home with me like this.”
“Not at all,” says Ursula. “Pas du tout.” She squeezes Annie’s knee underneath its layers of sky-high-thread-count Egyptian cotton bedding made in Italy. “For the first time in ages and ages, I’ve got my little girl all to myself.”
Considering what she owes her mother—her life, her happiness, a Manhattan idyll, her five-star recuperation, a Bergdorf wardrobe, newly revealed cheekbones, food of the gods—it seems crass to point out that she is no longer a little girl, let alone that, in fact, it is the first time ever that Ursula has had her to herself.
“Are you up to a little chat, darling?” Ursula asks now.
Actually, no, Annie wants to reply. Her mother’s “little chat” will not be so little, she realizes. She’d rather watch Top Chef followed by Kitchen Nightmares, followed by another nap. Still, because she knows Ursula will do most of the talking, she answers with a grateful “Sure.”
Her mother folds her hands in her lap and crosses her legs at the ankle, her prim The Country Girl stance belied by her glittering cocktail ring, a gift from a departed/deported Brazilian lover who had something to do with mines. “While you were asleep, I’ve used the time for reflection …”
“About?”
“About Sam.”
“Not again.”
“There are other issues. Besides the increasingly arduous burden of keeping the facts from him.” She pauses. “Even more serious ones.”
“Such as …?”
“I worry you take him—his loyalty—for granted.”
Annie groans. “You don’t need to worry. As I’ve already pointed out, I know my own husband.”
“I’m sure you think you do.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“One can claim one knows somebody, Arabella, but one can never really know another person, deep down.”
“Excep
t for Sam.”
Ursula reaches for her hand. Though the Brazilian lover’s ring digs into her palm, Annie’s instincts warn her not to pull away. “As your mother, I have my concerns. Let me remind you, darling, I read your manual.”
“Which was not meant for your eyes. Let me remind you.”
“Water over the bridge.” Ursula cocks her chin. “Or is it water under the bridge? I am never sure.” She folds her fingers over Annie’s. “But I’m very glad I did. Otherwise …”
“And I am indebted to you for the result,” Annie concedes, “though not the method you used to achieve it.”
Ursula lets that go; she has more important things to discuss. “Sam …” she says.
“Yes?”
“It seems to me that, when you thought you were going to die—oh, the tears I shed at those passages, darling; I was a veritable Trevi of despair—you determined to throw Rachel in your husband’s path.”
“That’s true …”
“For the noblest and most unselfish and purest of reasons. And out of profound love. But now?”
“Ah, you’re afraid Rachel and Sam are having a tryst behind the Amanas and Sub-Zeros?”
“That’s not quite …”
“Or at Rachel’s house. Or in the back row of the movie theater? Or”—she curls her finger into quote marks—“in my own marital bed?”
“You certainly are direct, Arabella. I myself would not have been so blunt. Nevertheless, even without showing Sam the manual, you’ve set particular things into motion.”
“What are you getting at, Ursula?”
“Your suggestion of concert dates, of dinner, and yes, buying that refrigerator …”
“So, you’ve been listening to my phone calls too?’
“One’s voice carries, darling. You get that from me.”
Annie doesn’t bother to argue that at the moment her voice can barely project across a breakfast tray. Instead she says, “There is nothing wrong with friends of the opposite sex sharing a movie or a dinner. Platonically. Whatever I planned was supposed to happen while I was dying and after I was dead. When Sam was widowed and free. Now he’s not. Now I’m not dying …”
“Which is certainly a marvelous outcome,” Ursula interjects.
“… thus, I can’t conceive in this short time of anything …”
“One person’s short time is another person’s eternity, believe me. You’ve been in New York for what Sam must view as frivolous reasons. And for far too long. Not to mention incommunicado. No doubt he feels abandoned and angry. He’s handsome and charming and somewhat naïve. The perfect combination. When the cat’s away …”
“Not Sam! And not Rachel—she’s my best friend.”
Ursula raises her chin. “Ha.”
“Trust me, if a woman flirted with Sam, he would never act on it. His only response, if someone came too close, would be a fear of germs.”
“Don’t be so sure. Rachel is divorced. Sam is alone and, may I point out, somewhat helpless. You had to leave instructions about dry cleaners and the washing machine and a million domestic details any other grown man would be completely capable of handling.”
“You don’t know how to handle such things.”
“I pay people to do them for me. Sam doesn’t. And Rachel is attractive and competent”—she nods at her daughter—“though not as attractive and competent as you, of course.”
“More attractive and more competent,” corrects Annie, “but Sam wouldn’t notice that either.”
“Don’t be so sure,” Ursula repeats. “You are not setting up a playdate for a child.”
“You’re just jaded by the life you lead, Ursula. Which is not my life. I have complete faith that Sam would never do anything behind my back, even if he’s a little pissed at me.”
“You cannot possibly comprehend what is going through his mind.”
“I do. He’s dreaming of sandwiches, and espresso machines, and how to expand the shop.”
“The temptations …”
“I hate to disagree with you, but there are no temptations. No X-rated scenarios. Except for a touch of hypochondria and a tendency toward cluelessness, Sam’s a rock. Like Daddy.”
“Like your father?” Ursula’s eyes widen. Her brows arch. “You have no idea.”
“What do you mean?”
Ursula adjusts an earring, fluffs her hair—stage business to draw out a dramatic pause. She clears her throat. “Maybe now is the time to express to you some hard truths, Arabella.”
“About your lovers? Your husbands? Your own infidelities? Your inconvenient pregnancies? The way you treated my father? The way you were never there?” The words spew out. Shocked at her own nerve, ashamed of her ingratitude, Annie gasps. Her incision starts to pull.
Underneath her expertly applied makeup, Ursula’s face grows ashen; her mouth forms a sad downturned crescent. “Mea culpa. Mea culpa,” she confesses. “But that’s not the whole story.” She stands up, teetering on her I-could-have-danced-all-night stilettos. “I fear I’m upsetting you. It can’t be good for your recovery.”
“I’m fine. Finish what you started.”
Ursula clip-clops across the room and stops at the door. “First, let me get us a little something.”
Annie hears glasses rattle, the slamming of a cabinet, the squeak of a drawer. Ursula returns carrying two snifters and a bottle of Courvoisier. She pours a small shot of brandy for Annie and a larger one for herself. She drains her glass in one gulp, refills it, and resumes her seat on the bed. “Where was I?” she asks.
Annie realizes it’s a rhetorical question; she’s sure Ursula can pinpoint the precise syllable where she left off. She’s stalling. Annie sips her own brandy and holds the warm liquid on her tongue. “My father,” she prompts.
Her mother twists the cocktail ring round and round her finger. “As I stated before, darling, you can never really know someone …”
“Shall we agree to disagree?”
Ursula taps the end of Annie’s bed as if she’s punctuating a sentence. “Let me start by saying that your father was the love of my life. So much the love of my life that I agreed to move to Passamaquoddy to be with him. Though it was a struggle. I still had to work.”
“You mean you wanted to. You mean the theater was your life. You mean you couldn’t wait to get out of Dodge.”
“No, I had to. I was the breadwinner.”
“That’s not true. Daddy held an important job.”
“He ran that business into the ground.”
“I don’t believe you. His office was huge and gorgeous …”
“I flew in my decorator. Your father chose items from the Sotheby’s catalog. He had good taste. Expensive good taste.” She pauses. “Didn’t you ever wonder why he employed no assistants, no secretary?”
“Because he was a perfectionist. Because he liked to do everything himself.”
“No! Because he couldn’t afford it, because there was hardly enough work for a secretary, because we had to draw the line somewhere. His job”—she sketches quote marks in the air—“was all smoke and mirrors, darling.”
Annie remembers as a child visiting her father’s office downtown; he’d set her up at an ornate desk, give her scissors and paper, point out the sharpened pencils in their silver cup. “You can be my secretary,” he’d say. She’d stare at somber oil portraits of other people’s ancestors, old county deeds framed behind wavy glass, her father’s diplomas and civic awards lined up in a neat row, her own baby photos scattered on tables, the Al Hirschfeld cartoon of Ursula—nine Ninas hidden in her hair and chinchilla collar—the first thing you saw when you opened the door. She’d wait for the phone to ring, practicing in a somber voice, “Henry Stevens Insurance. May I help you?”
But the phone rarely rung, and when it did, it would be her father calling from the inner office to ask if she was ready to go out for a father-daughter lunch.
Her mother’s eyes mist. “In fact, I was so much in love that he was
the only person with whom I actually considered having a child.”
Annie stays silent. She knows Ursula didn’t want her, that when she discovered she was pregnant it was too late to do anything about it, that she despaired over her burgeoning stomach, the potential loss of any ingenue part, that she worried about the ugliness of maternity clothes and how to lose the post-delivery fat and remained convinced that her job was the most important thing to her. Not that her father ever came right out and said all of this. Yet, if her mother was an expert at reading lines, Annie, the only child of a mismatched couple, learned at an early age how to read between those lines.
“I was worried about being a mother, worried whether I was good enough, worried that I’d have to be away from my baby. After all, my only experience as a mother of children was playing one—in aging makeup, of course. And the mothers I played—Gertrude, Medea, Amanda Wingfield, Mary Tyrone—were hardly role models. All of this colored my, well, my earlier decisions. A gypsy life was not for a child, especially with my other—how should I put it?—more iffy relationships. Until I met your father, who represented the rock I spent my whole life searching for.”
Yes, Annie agrees, her father was a rock, a stable, reliable parent, the only constant in an ever-changing, unpredictable, foundationless household.
“When at last you were born,” Ursula goes on, “the most beautiful baby on earth, a miracle, you wrapped your little fingers around mine and held on for dear life. I was over the moon.” Ursula pulls a handkerchief from her pocket and wipes away a tear. “Henry wanted to call you Abigail, which means a father’s joy. But I insisted on Arabella—a Dutch name signifying beautiful—since, in all fairness, you were your mother’s joy too. Then the nurse put you in your father’s arms; you had your father’s eyes. You looked at him; he looked at you. That was it. I was the third wheel, the uninvited guest.”
“Because you were away, always traveling, always working.”
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