“I don’t trust her,” he says. I’m surprised. Billy so rarely gets personal about anyone, but he’s uncomfortable, noticeably so.
“Why not?” I wonder if it’s because she’s cheating on Lars. I should never have told Billy that, now he’ll hold it against her. I should never have told him that she said, “Divorced people are the only people with grown-up lives.” Maybe, despite the fact that we had sex last week, and I’m weaning Charlie, he’s still considering it.
“Forget I said anything. She’s your oldest friend. You have feelings for her. Just forget it.”
“You always flirt with her,” I say. I’m teasing him, of course, but he does. I like it. Mary Beth is a flirt, and Billy, like any man, flirts with her. It makes me jealous, of course. The attention of another woman always brings out the best and worst in a wife. We always used to have sex after seeing Mary Beth.
“I do not,” he said. “And what do you two even have to talk about anymore? I mean, she’s become even more of a caricature of herself, with the darling this, darling that. She’s turning into Truman Capote.”
“We have the past,” I said. “That’s something.”
Mary Beth had met my father when we were in college, and though she didn’t know him well, how could she, she had known him. I know she’ll let me rattle on about him if I want to.
This time we aren’t going to go out for lunch, we are going to have tea at my house. The last time we’d gone to a local Brooklyn bistro and at one point I thought Mary Beth might fall off her chair when a surly four-year-old wrestled her sobbing toddler brother out from under Mom’s tap and took his place. The mother barely looked up from her Holistic Root Vegetables cookbook.
Then Charlie, who was wearing the incredibly expensive French-made sailor suit Mary Beth had given him last year for his birthday, clambered out of his stroller and climbed into my lap. “Noonie na nas!” he demanded.
“Cookie?” she said, and began to summon the waiter to bring Charlie a sweet.
“No, no,” I said.
“Oh, heavens, I let Ondine eat those chocolate Snackwells like mad.”
“Na na na nas!” Charlie chanted, pawing at my blouse.
“Excuse us, just a minute,” I said, and swatted Charlie’s fingers from my buttons. That invariably caused eyebrows to raise, the unbuttoning of the shirt, as though he were a randy teenager and not a hungry toddler.
Mary Beth blanched.
“I’m sorry,” I said, and halfheartedly made to pull Charlie from my breast.
“No, it’s fine, really.”
Charlie sucked, peeping out from under my shirt at Mary Beth, who gamely wiggled her fingers in his face like a giant squid preparing to suck his face off.
“You were saying.”
“God, they’re like Mormons the way they lurk around, watching your every move. Waiting for any opening: Does your child have earaches? Look at that poor woman, she has no chance! She’s absolutely destroyed. Sleep-deprived, insane…Oh, honey, I’m sorry. You know I’m just being bad. I’m sorry. You’re different,” she said, looking suddenly stricken with embarrassment. “You’re you.”
Today Mary Beth and Ondine are going to take a taxi from the Upper East Side out to Park Slope, and while the kids play, the two of us are going to sit on my little deck and drink tea like civilized people. If she leaves early enough, I’ll race over to the rally with Charlie and nurse. Surely, that was okay. I mean, this was a political statement. Surely, that wasn’t breaking the pact I’d made with Billy.
I wake up Charlie from his nap with a kiss.
I wonder, Who will steal you away from me?
No. Who will try?
Mary Beth and Ondine are right on time. Ondine is in a feather boa, Dorothy’s ruby slippers, a long gold lamé gown, and a tiara. She looks like a tiny drag queen.
“My name has an umlaut,” she says, stalking into the living room. “And who is that creature?” Instead of her usual Caribbean accent, which she’d picked up from her nanny, she sounds like a jaded thirty-something Manhattanite.
Charlie grins at her and beats his chest like a gorilla. Then he grabs his radio and shuts himself under the sink. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him move so fast.
Roadrunner, roadrunner, running faster miles an hour, gonna drive past the Stop and Shop…
“I’m bored,” Ondine moans, and collapses on the floor. She lifts her head dramatically. “Do you have any windowpane?”
“She means Windex, not blotter acid, and incidentally, ignore her,” Mary Beth says, taking me by the arm. “You look thin,” she says, kissing my cheek.
“You too,” I say. This is the way women tell each other “I’m happy to see you.” It’s code.
“No cleaning, Ondine. Annabelle will be home soon, and then you two can disappear and do whatever it is you little people do behind closed doors. No,” she says, holding up a hand, festooned with her acorn-size diamond wedding ring. “Don’t tell me, I don’t want to know.”
Mary Beth and I retire to the deck with iced tea, improved by a shot of rum and some lime. Inside, Charlie creeps out and spies on Ondine who is polishing our small and motley collection of silver. She’s very meticulous, dipping the flatware into the pink goo, rubbing it, rinsing.
“Come on out here, baby,” I call to him, but he ignores me; he has a good view from his cabinet.
“So,” I say.
“So,” she says, sipping her drink. “I quit smoking, it’s been three months. Aren’t you proud?”
“Bravo,” I say.
“This is the longest I’ve ever gone. And I think it’s going to stick.”
“Good for you.”
“I do miss those pretty little tubes, oh, and those divine and stinky Gitanes,” she says. “I smoked those like a demon. Remember?”
Mary Beth and I talk about family the way old friends do. A little awkwardly, spilling all the intimate details in a newsy, slightly canned voice. I tell her my sister is going to be made a partner in her law firm, that she’s going to marry her boyfriend this fall, and that we talk on the phone a lot. I miss her. I tell her how my mother is in Tibet this summer with a women’s group and writes me weekly. Mary Beth tells me how her mother has stopped drinking and married a Belgian man who imports ceramics. Her father is on his fourth wife, and just got a neck job.
“He looks about forty,” she says, and rolls her eyes. “I think he’s finally happy.”
Maybe it’s the cocktail, or the rush of well-being that comes with seeing an old friend who you believe knows the real you, a friend who knew you before you became who you are. Maybe it’s that Mary Beth talks so easily about her marital troubles with Lars, and how she fears Ondine picks up on the stress between them. In any case, I am just about to tell Mary Beth all about how it is with me and Billy—how he had been having an affair with that other woman for almost a year, and how I knew, but I didn’t let myself really know it. How it was over, but I was just realizing how scared I was of him leaving me.
Instead I say, “Well, don’t even ask about my father. We are completely out of touch. He never writes, he doesn’t call.”
Mary Beth frowns, then her expression shifts to one of pity.
“You know, I remember the first time I met your father, I liked him straightaway,” she says. “Of course, your mother is wonderful too.”
“Of course,” I say. “When was this?”
“Some parents’ cocktail thing. Neither of mine were there, so I glommed onto yours, remember? We went to that Tahitian place with the parrot noises and the waterfall; they float your pupu platter out on a little raft.”
“Didn’t we go there once before for some awful pre-fraternity gala thing?”
Mary Beth shrugs. “Probably. Lovely bathrooms, too. Big clamshell sinks.”
Mary Beth always remembers the bathrooms.
“Your father was so funny,” she says, and though it is a familiar refrain, I never get tired of hearing it.
“I know. I don’t
laugh like that, or rather in that way, anymore.”
“Do you know, I remember him telling about his first trip to New York City, and how he was terrified to leave his hotel because he’d never seen so many people and cars in his whole life.”
“Really? I didn’t know that.” I laugh, though I don’t think it’s funny. And I don’t like Mary Beth laughing like that, as though my father had been some kind of rube. I didn’t believe her.
“Can you imagine?” She laughs. “Your father?”
“My father?” I say. “No.”
She looks surprised.
“I’m sure he didn’t say that,” I say. “That’s bullshit. I mean, my father wasn’t afraid of anything—I mean, nothing like that. That’s just stupid,” I say, surprised at the edge in my voice.
“He did. It was at our graduation brunch, at the house, remember? We were out by the keg. I clearly recall drinking champagne out of one of those glass boots we got from the cowboy bar. If memory serves, I rode that bull longer than any of you girls,” she says proudly.
“He wasn’t afraid of anything,” I say. I can’t remember my father ever admitting he was afraid—no, that’s not true, there was the first time he saw a shark while scuba diving.
“I nearly shit my wet suit,” he’d said, laughing. Still. I could allow that.
“I’m sure you misunderstood,” I say.
Then I remember him after the last set of test results, a profusion of cancer cells tripping across a glass slide.
Of course I’m scared, damn it.
“Oh,” Mary Beth says, as though I’d insulted her.
“Can I get you another?” I ask her, getting up to refill my drink.
“Dreamy,” she says. “How’s Billy doing?” she calls into the kitchen. “Has he made his first million yet?”
Digging into the freezer, my hands are shaking. Why do I care what she says? Why did I even ask? No one knew my father like I did, no one. Why did I even ask?
I watch Charlie sitting cross-legged next to Ondine. He’s watching with solemn intensity as she polishes my fish forks and sings what sounds like some kind of calypso music. After she cleans each one, she hands it to Charlie, who lays them in a row.
I take a deep breath, then head back out to the porch. Mary Beth has kicked off her shoes and is resting her feet on the railing.
“Are they playing nice?” she asks.
“I think so,” I say. I don’t know if I really want to sit back down.
Mary Beth takes a long sip of her drink. “Then there was Amsterdam,” she says. “Oh my God.” She pauses. “I don’t think I ever told you this.”
I sit. Charlie appears and tugs on my pant leg. “Up,” he says.
“What?” I say, annoyed at his pulling on me. Suddenly, the sky seems too close to the ground. I ignore my son.
“Tell me,” I say. “What is it?” I can feel my entire body get hard, like glass. Don’t break me. Don’t hurt me, I think. Don’t.
“Oh, it’s nothing, really, it’s almost next to nothing, I don’t even know why I’m telling you. Oh, Ondine, darling, no, I don’t think Evie wants you to straighten up her spice cabinet.”
“I don’t care,” I said. “It’s fine. Go on.”
“No,” Mary Beth says, shaking her head. “Ondine, be a dear and take baby Charlie outside, run around, be a child, for heaven’s sake.”
Ondine skulks over and grabs Charlie round the waist. He holds on tight to my leg.
“Come here, child,” she whispers in her Caribbean accent. I make like I’m going to peel his fingers loose, but I don’t. I wouldn’t.
Who do you love best? No one but me.
Charlie lets go and wraps his arms around Ondine’s waist, and allows her to drag him back inside. “Can you believe this cleaning obsession?” Mary Beth laughs. “I actually have to tell her the vacuum cleaner is asleep. At least the accent, that dreadful accent she picked up from Philomene, is gone. Firing her nanny was the smartest thing I could have done. Can you imagine her going off to Sacred Virgin Academy saying, ‘Hey don’t you know that I love the sour sop!’ We spent thousands of dollars getting her to say th, instead of t. Remember, she’d trill, ‘Don’t you know I’m trrrreee…’”
“Finish what you were saying,” I say.
I watch through the window as Charlie follows Ondine out the front door, stopping only to pick up his bucket of chalk.
“Stay on the stoop!” I yell. “Keep the gate closed.” Though I don’t have to worry about Charlie going anywhere.
“Go on,” I say, though I wonder why. Obviously there’s nothing she can tell me I don’t know. I just want to hear anything and everything. I want for a moment to feel like he’s here.
She looks at me. “Are you all right, darling?”
“I’m fine.”
“Well,” she says with a big sigh, as though this is going to be a long story. “You remember how we all went out for dinner—we drank bottle after bottle of wine, you had just fallen ass over teacups in love with Billy, he was always coming in through the fire escape day and night—”
“We went out,” I say. I don’t remember too much of the rest. “The restaurant had views of the canals.”
“I can’t recall,” Mary Beth says. “It was a wild night, you were drunk too.”
I nod. I remember. My father had just had lung surgery. He looked pale, but fine. Every time we spoke on the phone that summer it seemed he’d make some joke about how he was getting old, or needed glasses, there was always something. It bugged the crap out of me. I remember he’d traveled all the way from London just to have dinner with me.
“God, how do I put this?” she says, pausing for a long moment. “We kissed. There, I’ve said it.” She cringes, and covers her face as though she’s afraid I might hit her. She’s grinning. For a moment it occurs to me that she’s talking about the two of us, that we kissed, we fooled around in some drunken stupor and I didn’t remember it. It’s so funny, I nearly laugh.
“What?”
“I kissed him, your father.”
Silence.
I think, This is just like when he died. That moment when all the air got sucked out of the world, and it was just a vacuum, a howling hole. I wish I could fall down, but I can’t move.
“It was a huge mistake,” she says. Two bright spots of color rise up on her cheeks, and her hands fly up to her throat. “Oh God, you’re mad, aren’t you?”
Vacuum, I think, there are two u’s in vacuum, you and you. Them.
I stare at her. I think I must have misunderstood, but I look at her face. Her mouth is loose like a rubber band. I have never seen her cry.
The truth settles down around me like fog. I don’t want to talk. I don’t want to listen. I want to close my eyes, but I can’t do that. I think, This is just like what happened with Billy. How can this be? No one can be trusted. My men don’t love me. They can never love me enough. Everyone leaves.
“Oh God,” Mary Beth says. She wipes the back of her hand across her eyes. “I am so embarrassed. Why did I do this? It’s this liquor. You know I didn’t mean it. It was a bad time for me. You know. I was drunk. He was drunk. It was a mistake. You know what, much like now.” She laughed, a little hysterically. “Perhaps, it’s best if I go, I think.”
She starts to stand up.
“How?” I say. I feel retarded trying to make sense of it. I don’t want to know, but I have to know.
“What do you mean?” Her hands are in her hair, pulling it into her face, she sits down on the edge of her chair.
“Did he kiss you back?”
“Oh, Ev,” she says, then, “Listen, I’m far too blasted to sit here and…Don’t hate me, darling. Don’t hate me, please. I couldn’t stand that.”
“Answer me,” I say.
“Don’t,” she says.
“How many times?”
She laughs. “Oh, honey, it’s not like that…”
That is enough.
“You should go,” I
say, nodding. It is wise. I wonder what my mother is doing right now. Did she know about this? Had he told her? Had he told her after they saw Mary Beth at the silly little art show in the Village? Had he mentioned it to her when I told him Mary Beth had assisted me in the buying of chemo weed for his nausea? Did my mother know when Mary Beth took the train down for the funeral? Or was it my father’s secret? Death made us know things we never needed or wanted to know.
Everything is wrong. Even the air feels wrong. It’s as though my molecules have been scrambled. I don’t know what I know anymore. I do know that tonight when Billy comes home tonight I will crawl into his arms. I will give myself to him. I will make promises to make him happy, to keep him, to keep us all together.
“You should go,” I say again. “Now.”
“You know, Ev, your father thought you were just great, he loved you,” she says, her voice breaking. “You’re lucky.”
“Why would you say that?” I ask, hating her, hating her so much.
She hunches her shoulders, and twists the bit of paper napkin in her hands. She looks down in her lap. Her nose is starting to run. She licks her upper lip, then brushes her bangs back from her eyes.
“It was a mistake,” she says. “Everybody makes mistakes,” she says. “He was a human being, Ev.”
“Don’t talk to me,” I snap. “You don’t know one goddamn thing about me or him.”
I close my eyes. I’m afraid I’m going to cry too and I don’t want to give her the satisfaction. Then, for the first time since my father died, I can feel him. I can see him in my mind, unfrozen, breathing. Alive. I’ve watched him on videotape, but this is different. He is alive in my mind, just for a moment, but I can see him standing there, he’s healthy, his hair is dark, his eyes full of spark, his hands are in his jeans pockets, and he’s got on his red work shirt, his watch is glinting on his wrist, and he’s moving to some music in his head, waiting, waiting for me to do something. But I don’t know what I am supposed to do.
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