CHAPTER 4
Claire closed the good green door. She padded the chamomile-riddled path down to the sidewalk with mounting excitement on soft Pakistani slippers. She used to wear them all the time, and so they were as comfortable as fancy shoes could be. Only recently, as more and more people would stop her to ask where she’d bought them, had it occurred to her to conserve them. She would never find their like again, that was for sure. How often did one get to the Khyber Pass, after all?
It would do her good to be out and about. Johnny and she had fought before, during, and after supper. A hurling of words and recriminations, then again some just-thought-of slight seeing its opportunity now and grabbing it. It had all started when Claire noticed the pile of bills, stamped and completed, still sitting in their pile in the hallway.
“Yeah, so?” he had said.
“And what does that mean, ‘yeah, so’? It’s the nineteenth and you still haven’t sent out the bills!”
“I haven’t got any money to cover them.” He’d shrugged.
“Honey, all the money’s in the account. All you have to do is send—Johnny, you don’t mean to tell me you spent—how on earth could you have spent all—”
With that, Johnny had flung his great self onto the sofa and shut his eyes.
“Don’t you pretend to be going to sleep, you big fake!” she’d shouted.
Anthony stood, legs planted far apart, in the nearby room only halfway lit up by the dusk. He’d been through plenty of brawls, had Anthony, was even now gauging how bad it would be from the decibel level. Just when everyone thought, Oh good Lord, that was it and surely one of them would be out the door with a suitcase, they would instead heave and collapse, spent, on opposite easy chairs and Daddy would say, stupidly, “Okay, enough’s enough. Friends again?” And what would Mommy do? She would laugh!
Anthony shivered and went off in search of Michaelaen, who would be one of two places: under the porch or upstairs in the closet. He wasn’t one for the fights. On second thought, he would leave him alone. Michaelaen had called him a pest. Dharma was back in her house. Anthony was glad, because he didn’t really want to listen to her cry anymore. And all the time she was here she would hog Floozie. When she was gone home he got a chance to look over her jewels. He knew where she kept them, har-har-har, inside her little sewing basket. Dharma put a lot of stock in her jewels. She would close the door—what a dope, there was always the keyhole—and then she would touch them and look at them like Daddy would look when he held Mommy’s hair in his hands. Anthony schmoozled his face down into the dog’s fluffy fur. He had his old soft green baby blanket, the one grandma had knit him, cozy around her. He fussed and clucked and tucked her in and whispered secrets to her till both of them were flaccid with love and asleep.
Claire stood at the end of her walk and wondered briefly if she should take the keys with her. Why bother, she decided against it, retracing her steps and putting the lot into the pot of still bright-red geranium. She looked left and right but no one had seen her. There wasn’t a soul on the block but old Mr. Kinkaid coming down from Park Lane South with his mean bag of groceries. She hastened her step so as to be able to greet him. Her motives, unclear to herself, moved quickly, and she realized as she sorted them with her steps that she was only doing this to get him out of her way. If she dealt with him now, she told herself, he would have no excuse to show up tomorrow. But even as he neared, she knew her reasoning to be ridiculously reasonable—and Mr. Kinkaid was not. He was like some cloying twenty-four-hour virus, oozing toward you with a psychic antenna, his power being your politeness, his inevitable stay up to his own languishing whim. Claire strode purposefully up to him, distributing her white light around herself comfortably, then put on a happy face.
“Got yourself all rigged up for somethin’, eh?” he said accusingly. “What’s doin’? Boss ain’t home?” he cackled unpleasantly.
He reminded her of her disparaging Polish great-aunts. Her mother always said they weren’t happy unless they were miserable. She and Claire would lock sparkling, collusive eyes across the room. And that reminded Claire. If Johnny had spent all the money this month already, how would they ever put the required thirty bucks into their piano fund? She better speak to him about that. That was one thing she had to have. A grand piano. There would be no getting around that. Anthony would play, even if she had to go to work in the five-and-ten to pay for his lessons. He would play if for no other reason than to show up those Polish aunts now making life miserable for the dead souls over in hell, for that was no doubt where they were.
Mr. Kinkaid hadn’t shaved for a couple of days, Claire noticed. How men hated to shave! Once they did it, they felt so happy, but they always needed a reason, or a wife, to get in there and make them do it. “… And,” Kinkaid sucked an incisor for emphasis, “didn’t I tell you to watch out for those Murdochs?”
“Murdochs?”
“Those Murdochs in the yellow house down the block there. Down there.”
“Oh … What about them?”
“Well, you can see for yourself. They put that ‘For Sale’ sign out there for the whole world to see. Not nice and confidential like I did. Putting it in the Tablet for my own kind. These type of people, they’ll just sell to anyone, anyone walks in off the street. Blacks. Injuns. Sheeks. They don’t give a damn.” He noticed Claire made no rejoinder. She was remembering earlier on in the week when indeed she’d seen a family of Punjabis streaming from the Murdoch house. If only there hadn’t been so many of them, perhaps the residents up and down the block wouldn’t have been so frightened. But they were frightened. You could tell, the way they came out with red little eyes and arms folded across their chests, scowling frantically at the likes of the strangers. They didn’t see the graceful beauty of the ladies’ saris floating in the end-of-summer wind; they smelled the threat of curry and a town that was no longer Mayberry. You couldn’t console them with the news that most of these people moving in around here were socially upscale of them, teachers and doctors and lawyers in their own countries, because this would surely complicate their rage. “That, that,” they would sputter, “… is because our hard-earned tax dollars get sent over there and they got nothin’ better to do than go to them lousy schools we paid for.”
“What the hell,” Mr. Kinkaid said, “it’s not my problem anymore. You’re the ones got to deal with them good-for-nothin’s. You mark my words, you won’t recognize this street one year from today. This whole block will be in shreds.”
“Surely not in shreds, Mr. Kinkaid.” Claire smiled.
“Graffiti all over your fresh-painted garage there. You’ll see what I mean. You’ll lose that holier-than-thou attitude real quick when it starts costin’ you in your pretty little pocketbook.”
“Good thing you’ll be leaving town soon, then.”
“What’s that?”
“Just kidding. A touch of levity.”
Kinkaid ignored her. “And you heard what they did now? They discontinued the Q-ten!”
“What’s that, the Q-ten?”
“The bus line that goes up and down Lefferts Boulevard to Union Turnpike.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, they’re getting rid of the buses and putting on a couple of elephants instead.”
“Good night, Mr. Kinkaid.”
“Just a joke. You remember jokes?”
Claire made a face not unlike Kali, the Indian goddess whose tongue sticks out all of the way and reaches right down to her horrible chin. She boggled her eyes and rattled them round in their sockets. She was quite good at this.
Mr. Kinkaid ducked appreciatively away, shielding his rear end with one plastic bag of white bread and a Budweiser beer.
Claire breathed in the cool, now familiar, Richmond Hill night air and continued on her way. She passed Iris von Lillienfeld’s, a gracious lady in a gracious old house. She must go visit her this week. They had been through quite a bit together some years ago, when Claire had first returned to Am
erica. Iris had known her when she was a wee girl, one of a pair of rambunctious, then-redheaded twins. She even still called Claire “Red.” She was, Claire fingered her long dark hair reminiscently, the only one who did. Claire couldn’t help remembering four years ago, give or take a month, when she’d been up this same hill with both sisters, Carmela and Zinnie dressed up and in tow, only it was she who had had her eye on Stefan—and her sisters were along for the ride. Interesting the way things turn out when you stick around long enough to find out, Claire mulled. Stefan and Carmela’s house stood finally, majestically, there, with its parapets and whatnots, its roof of slates and its oval-topped windows all set for Rapunzel. A calliope of Bavarian blue-and-white awning tents were on the lawns, gazebos of charm (and just in case of rain) for the evening. A stately if not homey place.
Zinnie, the youngest, the undercover, the spunky blond, had met a guy here last time, a handsome doctor at that, but it hadn’t worked out. Zinnie wasn’t one to stay home and play do-as-you’re-told. “He wanted,” you would often overhear Zinnie say, “a floor monitor, not a partner.” For someone as independent and “in charge” as Zinnie was, this was not the right man. She was so used to calling the shots that once, when Zinnie had heard him say, “Hon, would you take off work this Thursday? That’s the only day they can deliver my couch,” she had looked at him for a moment with her mouth open, decided not to take offense, and had nicely explained to him that she would probably have a collar on Wednesday and have to be in court all day Thursday.
“Yes, but I still don’t see why you can’t take off Thursday,” he’d persisted.
“But I just explained to you—” Zinnie started to say, until he interrupted her.
“Zin, sweetheart, the court system in New York is so backed up as it is, one day more or less isn’t going to make a hell of a whole lot of difference.”
“It’s not, heh?” Zinnie shot back. “What about the perp sittin’ in the can waiting to go up? I mean, he or she might not be a person to you, but to her kids holding up day after day in a foster center, or his wife—or the other arresting officers’ families who have better things to do, it is their time—what I mean is, a whole lot of people are involved in any bust. You don’t just put their lives on hold because some department store finds it more convenient to deliver from nine to five, Monday to Friday.”
“But I want this couch!” he’d almost shouted. “Stop being such an idiot!” People at the surrounding tables stopped talking and looked at each other with eyebrows up.
“Hey.” Zinnie remained deliberately calm, the way she always would do with psychos and irate personalities. “All I’m asking you to do is rethink your request. There is no reason I can see for getting insulting. Maybe you could take off, yourself.”
“That’s a little ridiculous, don’t you think?”
“What is?”
“I mean, I’m a professional.”
“Yeah? So what, nonprofessionals don’t have rights? And by the way,” she’d added. “I consider myself a professional.”
He’d burst out laughing.
“That’s it.” Zinnie put down the fork she’d been twirling round and round her pink spaghetti. She stood up slowly, her eyes always on his, watching them change from annoyance that she was off to the ladies’ room when she still hadn’t committed to Thursday, to bewilderment when she laid out a trio of tens on the table, to real shock when she turned and left them looking at her back and the beautiful head of flotsam, thick blond curls he’d never get his effing fingers through again. For Zinnie it was that simple. She might spend weeks sitting around her apartment wrapped up in a horse blanket, snivelling into aloe-laden tissues, but he’d never know. And it’s better than spending the rest of your life apologizing to yourself for giving up your dignity for a permanent toss in the hay and a hand to hold onto, she would later say, detoxed of this guy. Cured. “So I guess I really didn’t love him, anyway. Just the idea that he was the perfect catch. So I’m no better than he is, right? Go figure.”
Claire huffed and puffed up the hill. She made sure she walked across the road from the woods, not just in it. There were so many loose dogs around lately. Big fellas too. They gave you the creeps. What were people doing—sending their dogs out on their own because they didn’t want to be bothered carrying around pooper-scooper bags? Here she was at the private hedge border of the other happy couple, Carmela and Stefan. At least they’d stuck it out, got to know each other and still they stayed together. So something worked.
Now what the heck? Someone was checking her out from across the street? Don’t be silly, she scoffed. Some weirdo jumping back behind a tree was as normal as apple pie in this park. Probably just another yanker. Most of them were harmless, she knew, but shivered all the same. Ominous feelings were not foreign to her, and she’d learned they were, some of them, false. She was glad she hadn’t brought the car. The guy could well be a car thief. This was grandstand auto-thief country here. That is, if you could find a parking spot anywhere. With all Stefan’s money, he’d never be able to buy spaces up here. Even his enormous driveway out back would be filled by now. No, Claire’s good old car was snug in its own handy spot right in front of the house. The sound of tinkling piano drifted across the lawn. French doors opened and Nick and Nora Charles flitted across the patio.
I am dressed, she instantly knew, completely wrong. She had half a mind to turn around and hightail home, but just then Carmela spotted her, looked her condescendingly up and down, then rushed with open arms to enfold (cover?) her.
“Carmela. I just saw you this afternoon.”
“Ah-ha-ha-ha.” Carmela’s was a belly laugh. “Everyone!” she called out. “Everyone! This is my dear little sister, Claire. Come! Come and meet Claire. Richard! Oliver! Darlings! Come meet my famous-photographer, world-traveler, guru-groupie, deluded and now retired-and-living-as-a-recluse in Richmond Hill North, sister, Claire Breslinsky.”
“Benedetto,” Claire corrected, sore. She used her maiden name herself but she didn’t like anyone else to do it for her. From Carmela especially, it smacked of disrespect to Johnny.
“Why so frosty?” Carmela smiled into her ear.
“Guru-groupie?” muttered Claire.
“Now, now,” Carmela laughed at the room, then snarled into Claire’s ear, “This is your coming-out party, doll. Let’s not be unappreciative.”
“Remember who you are,” Claire heard dear Swamiji’s caring words caress her through the moment. So she wasn’t good at parties. So what? She could leave whenever she chose. What was that, French-aproned help? And each carrying glittering round trays of what was surely white and costly Californian. One thing about these two, they knew their wine.
She saw, across the towering room among well-dressed minor players, the short but perilous Jupiter Dodd, bon vivant, cause of all the commotion and, as usual, enjoying it. Their eyes crossed but did not meet. They would get to each other later, after they’d sorted out what else was going on. They would be each other’s just desserts. Claire snatched a glass of wine from a costumed lizard gliding by. She only took three sips, but that heady glow registered with an almost audible click. Ay-ay-ay-ay, thought Claire, settling into its loveliness. What was that they had on? Some sultry samba thing. Shades of Rio de Janeiro. There was a disc jockey, Claire noticed. He wore the required one earring, one pony tail, one silk T-shirt, and a Mano suit. Last time Stefan had hired a tuxedoed quartet, but this was nice. She perched on something that would in someone else’s home have been a radiator. It was an encasement wrapped around the entire room, latticed and painted white. The whole floor was of varying shades of white. That would change quickly enough if they ever decided to have kids, she thought wryly. It was all certainly opulent. Somber, though. Taking itself pretty seriously, with lilies from Holland in great cut-glass vases. There was, somewhere up there in the sky, a chandelier to warm any Mediterranean’s heart.
Standing elegantly tall alongside the burled-walnut Biedermeier highboy
was Freddy, Zinnie’s ex and Michaelaen’s father. Claire didn’t know why she was so surprised to see him here. This was his territory now, wasn’t it? There was no reason for her to dislike Freddy. He was sharp, entertaining, good to his own, talented, and reliable. Still, there was something stilted in their communication. He always made her feel as though she had no sense of humor. You could put him anywhere, sit him down or stand him up or turn him upside down, and you’d still have your full frontal for the men’s fashion section of the Sunday Times. Nothing matched, but everything blended together in muted years-ago Abercrombie and Fitch.
“Hello,” he said, and shook her hand while he kissed her cheek. “I’ve been trying to get hold of you.”
“Really?” She was the least hard-to-reach person she knew.
“I had three of my waiters drop a rug off at your house.”
“Not the famous Dhera Gaz?”
He looked taken aback. “What are you, a witch?”
Oh, how tempting it was to let him think just that. She smiled something inscrutable and said nothing. And, on second thought, even a well-intended admission would let him know she knew how the dog had ruined it for his fastidious specifications and the gift was somehow left-handed, something less than perfect.
“I didn’t want you to feel unrecompensed for housing Zinnie and Michaelaen,” he said.
“Hey. Quit it. They’re my family, too.”
“Dear Claire. You are so good.”
She eyed him suspiciously. “Well, so are you.”
“Michaelaen asleep?”
“In Zinnie’s closet.”
“That’s good. Then he’s asleep by now. So. That means you and Johnny are fighting.”
“That’s true,” Claire admitted. No use denying it. Everyone knew Michaelaen hid from the first barks of hollering. No one knew it better than Fred. And she and Zinnie never fought. Whereas she and Johnny were becoming quite famous.
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