by Marian Thurm
They bonded right away; Clare was a psychologist in a public middle school on First Avenue and 100th Street, and she knew plenty about dysfunctional families, plenty about fatherless children of mothers struggling with substance abuse, sexual abuse, child abuse—Clare had heard it all. She took both of Stacy’s hands warmly in her own and welcomed her into the family-sized apartment whose floor-to-ceiling windows overlooked the East River and Carl Schurz Park, and where the glass dining-room table was already set for the meal she’d been preparing for half the day, she told Stacy. Marshall appeared, with his thin head of graying hair, and offered his hand, and he was followed by Nathaniel, their eight-year-old son adopted at birth from Colombia, his eyes and hair black as could be, his skin beautifully smooth and dusky. And then there was Beverly, Roger’s mother, in her early seventies and still pretty; Stacy knew that she had once been head-turningly so—she’d seen some of the pictures that documented her beauty over the years. Her memory wasn’t quite as good as it used to be, Beverly confided in the kitchen, where she and Stacy had gone to help Clare, even though Clare assured them everything was under control, and that she needed absolutely nothing from them.
“My Walter—that was Roger’s father—used to say that getting old, and older, was no picnic,” Beverly informed Stacy. “He was afraid of it, of getting old and not being able to play a good game of tennis anymore, or parallel park his car like a young person. Maybe that’s why he died at seventy, before he was truly old,” she mused, and popped an hors d’oeuvre into her lipsticked mouth. It was a tiny, bite-sized quiche lorraine, and Beverly declared it “darling.” Which wasn’t a word Stacy would ever have used to describe a morsel of food. But since this was Roger’s mother and she wanted to make a stellar impression, or at least something approaching a stellar impression, Stacy nodded her head in agreement and echoed, Darling.
S
Clare and Marshall (whose flourishing Upper East Side orthodontics practice catered mostly to private school kids in the neighborhood) seemed enviably cozy in their marriage. Stacy could tell by the affectionate way Marshall touched Clare’s wrist from time to time as they sat at the dinner table enjoying the gourmet mushroom-and-asparagus ravioli Clare had made from scratch with the help of a pasta machine she’d seen on an episode of Martha Stewart Living.
“Did you know Martha used to babysit for Mickey Mantle and Yogi Berra?” Clare asked.
“You mean for the kids of Mickey Mantle and Yogi Berra,” Roger corrected her as he helped himself to some garlic bread that sat fragrantly in a wicker basket at the center of the table. Stacy took a small piece from the basket, figuring that if Roger was going to reek from garlic tonight, she might as well join him.
“The man was a drunk,” Beverly said. She was having trouble transferring red leaf lettuce and croutons from the salad bowl to her plate, and Clare reached over to help her mother, adding a few cherry tomatoes. “You know I don’t like tomatoes and never have,” Beverly said sharply, and Stacy took note of the worried look Clare and Roger exchanged between them.
“Mom, you love tomatoes,” Clare reminded her.
“Not only was Mickey Mantle a drunk, he was also a born-again Christian,” Beverly reported. She speared a tomato with her salad fork. “Yogi Berra I don’t know a thing about.”
Nathaniel, the eight-year-old, announced that he didn’t like the pasta or the salad, and he ate one piece of garlic bread after another until there was nothing left in the basket. And then he washed down all of it with a liter of Pepsi, which he carried to the table from the kitchen and drank straight from the bottle. Stacy wondered—not that it was any of her business, and not that she knew anything at all about the current theories of child-raising—if his parents might have reined him in a little if he’d been their biological son.
“Can I be excused?” Nathaniel asked quietly, but no one paid any attention. Stacy had heard from Roger how desperately Clare had wanted to give birth to a child of her own, and all about the costly IVF treatments she’d had, not one of which resulted in a pregnancy that lasted longer than nine or ten weeks. Then when Clare turned thirty-six, she and Marshall threw in the towel; after a three-month wait, they found themselves on a Boeing 727 to an orphanage in Colombia. Nathaniel was in third grade now in a high-profile private school where he was struggling, both socially and academically, and Roger had mentioned that his sister and Marshall were considering a different sort of school for him, perhaps one where the bar wasn’t set quite so high.
Nathaniel was handsome but sullen, Stacy thought. She’d never seen an eight-year-old so lacking in joyousness, though perhaps he was just tired; after he’d finished gobbling and gulping his ill-advised dinner of garlic bread and Pepsi, he put his head down on the linen tablecloth, dangerously close to his mother’s wine glass, and walked his fingers up the stem of the glass and back down, over and over again.
“Can I PLEASE be excused?” he yelled now, and this time, Clare said Yes, of course, sweet pea, and Stacy found herself relieved by the swiftness with which Nathaniel bolted from the table. Hate to say it, but the kid was sort of charmless, she thought. She couldn’t imagine tucking him in every night as his parents did, kissing him lovingly on his smooth dark cheek, but maybe the fault was hers and not the little boy’s, this child who’d spent the first few months of his life in an orphanage before being rescued by these good-hearted, desperate wanna-be parents. Maybe she just wasn’t the kind of person to readily appreciate whatever there was to raising a child from infancy to near adulthood; maybe she just wasn’t one of those natural-born mothers, the sort who didn’t need to be reminded to savor every last bit of her child’s growing up; the kind of mother who would nurture endless hopes for her son’s future, even if she might have been fooling herself and it had been clear all along that her child was going nowhere fast. Or maybe it was simply that Stacy wasn’t yet ready at this moment to transform herself from a relatively serious-minded thirty-something career woman (a phrase she hated—how come there weren’t career men?) to a woman willing to put her own life on hold for a bit while she nurtured someone else’s.
She took another look at Nathaniel, who was sitting upright on the living-room couch, holding one of those Nintendo Game Boys in his hands, frantically pressing two red plastic buttons with his thumbs, grunting in concentration, and, occasionally, whooping with pleasure when he scored a victory of some sort or another.
“What’s going on, Nat?” Clare asked. “Did you defeat Tatonga, the Mysterious Spaceman, and save Princess Daisy?”
“Yesss!” Nathaniel said, and you could hear in that jubilant voice what it was he lived for, Stacy thought. She felt her view of him softening; he was just a little boy enthralled by a dopey, hand-held video game. Why had she been so hard on him? Sorry, she said silently, and as Roger dropped his hand into her lap and absently rubbed his fingers across the small, bumpy field of her knuckles, she found herself hoping to fall deeper and deeper in love with him, wherever that might lead. Her parents were gone, her grandmother was old, her sister was fixed firmly in her split-level home in Connecticut with her husband and the twins; sadly, Stacy’s life and Lauren’s no longer intersected much. The truth was, she didn’t have much of a family to claim as her own.
“Dessert?” she heard Clare say. “There’s chocolate mousse, nice and soft for you, Stacy. So the root canal went okay?”
Yes, and while Stacy had been relaxing in the dental chair waiting for the Novocain to take effect, she’d overheard the endodontist’s assistant whispering to another assistant about the conspiracy charges that had been brought against the endodontist’s wife, who’d allegedly been part of a suburban drug ring specializing in the distribution of coke and amphetamines.
“No kidding!” said Marshall. “An endodontist married to a drug dealer! You know, I briefly considered specializing in endodontistry myself, but then the thought of spending my work life removing damaged pulp and cleaning and sealing the insides of one tooth after another seemed just
a little too depressing, if you know what I mean. Orthodontics, however, well, that’s another story altogether!” he said cheerfully. “Though there’s nothing harder than trying to get kids with braces to floss their teeth.”
Nothing? Actually, Stacy could think of a great many things, starting with the trauma of losing your mother in a plane crash en route to the flashy casinos of Atlantic City in the company of a guy who had only just become her boyfriend.
She liked Marshall, though, and so she said nothing, and instead, nodded and smiled, as if she knew all about those intractable kids who refused to floss. Raising her wrists to her shoulders to flip back her freshly cut and blow-dried hair with both hands—an old, old habit of hers—she set her dozens of silver bracelets ringing.
A couple of hours later, as she and Roger made out like teenagers in the front seats of the BMW he’d parked on her street in a darkened Park Slope, Stacy suspected that she would be seeing his family again. And again.
S
Now that he’s gotten official approval from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, Roger can take possession of the secondhand 9 mm Glock 26, for which he’s already paid $385 plus tax. He’s sweating here in this air-conditioned shooting range, and his heart seems to be working harder than usual. His mouth is dry as he offers the simple word “thanks” to the guy behind the counter who hands the pistol over to him; it’s been placed into a brown paper bag, the size he would get at Starbucks to take home his iced coffee and a single multigrain bagel.
The ammo is in a separate bag; both of these he stashes inside the glove compartment of the rented Toyota, which he left baking in the Florida sun.
On the way back to the condo, he stops off at a Walgreen’s and buys three souvenir T-shirts: two child-size, one adult. They are white shirts with a pink-eared rabbit on them, and underneath the rabbit are the words “Some Bunny in Fort Lauderdale Loves Me.”
The children will like them so much, they’ll throw them on over their sopping wet bathing suits the instant they climb out of the pool. Stacy will smile and say she’ll wear hers to bed tonight.
They haven’t had sex in about a month, he realizes, and it’s entirely his fault.
~ 6 ~
Roger was determined to ask Stacy to marry him, though he understood that she might say no, pointing out that they’d only known one another for five months or so, and that she was in no particular hurry to settle down. There was some competition for him to worry about as well: a guy named Rocco Bassani, who, despite his name, Stacy told him, was 100 percent Jewish. Rocco happened to call while Stacy was busy making Roger her version of Buffalo wings for dinner; when she hadn’t managed to get to the phone in time the other night, Rocco left a short but playful message on the answering machine in her modest-sized living room, a message which Roger wasn’t, of course, meant to hear. It was painfully transparent to him then that Stacy and Rocco were more than just friends; hearing his message (Say hey, good-lookin’, What ya got cookin?), Roger instantly lost his appetite, and the scent of those Buffalo wings in the oven suddenly went from mouthwatering to repellent.
“I’m so sorry,” Stacy said. Armed with a black rubber pot holder in each hand, she bent to remove the tray of wings from the oven. She dumped the tray in a hurry onto the top of the stove, her face flushed, Roger thought, with both the heat from the oven and her embarrassment at having been caught two-timing him. With someone named Rocco, for Christ’s sake. For an instant or two, he convinced himself that Rocco was a plumber, someone whose hands went down your toilet or sink or the drain in your shower, searching for whatever was clogging things up. Or, if he wasn’t a plumber, perhaps a contractor instead, a rough-hewn guy with lousy grammar, not to mention plenty of gray-green crusts of dirt under the nails of his blunt-tipped fingers. (Roger himself had dealt with many such guys in his real estate development business, and, in truth, he actually admired what they could do with their hands.)
But Rocco, it turned out, was an ophthalmologist, specializing in the treatment of glaucoma. He and Stacy had met in college back in the eighties, lived together for a few years while he was in med school at Cornell here in the city, and then split up. Afterward Rocco had fallen for someone named Isabella, a pediatric nurse with a high-pitched voice and wild, curly red hair, Stacy said.
“Isabella had a long, sad face, which probably wasn’t the best kind of face for all those sick children she was dealing with every day . . .”
Roger wasn’t the least bit interested in the nurse Rocco had fallen for after med school. Despite himself, he put his fingertip to one of the still-sizzling wings on the tray, then slipped his finger into his mouth. Excellent sauce; a little tangy, but not too hot, he thought. Just perfect.
“Well, listen, ‘Women have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them, but not for love,’ ” he heard Stacy saying now. “And that goes for men, too.”
“Says who? In any case, that’s very cynical, don’t you think?” Roger said.
“That’s Shakespeare, buddy. Or, more accurately, my version of Shakespeare.”
Even though his appetite was gone, Roger’s stomach grumbled crossly, trying to tell him something. “You’re sleeping with him?” he asked. Like a child, he clapped his hands over his ears so he wouldn’t have to hear her answer.
“Rocco? Umm, not really.”
Stacy set the table with shiny pink plastic place mats, salad-size plates rimmed with pink, and plain white dinner napkins. “The thing is, I did love him, but not, um, what I would call a full 100 percent.”
She seemed to be speaking an utterly foreign language; honestly, could you love someone 90 percent? Or 75 percent? If you loved someone, say, 45 percent, was there any hope at all for the relationship? Roger thought of his mother assuring him, when he was a child, I love you with a full heart. What if she’d said, instead, I love you with 75 percent of my heart? Would he have been smart enough to have been insulted?
Never mind about Rocco: what about Roger himself? Did Stacy love him with a full heart, i.e., 100 percent? From time to time, when she woke up in his bed, or he woke up in hers, she’d leaned toward him and murmured something about love, her face turned slightly away from his because of her morning breath, not that he would have minded.
She’d never said what, exactly, it was that she loved about Roger; he would have to ask her sometime, but not now, not when Rocco’s voice was fresh in both their minds. And what did he love about her? Well, just about everything, starting with her youth (thirty-three was, by his standards, refreshingly young), and her lively hopefulness that took him by surprise now that he had passed forty and was all-too-aware that he’d already lived out half his life—if he were lucky, that is. He loved her full (but not too-full), pretty face, her slightly pointed chin, the arch of her dark eyebrows, and the way she could illuminate a room with her passion for the clients she worked with.
“I need for you to stop seeing Rocco,” Roger said. He went to Stacy’s banged-up, mustard-colored refrigerator and poured himself a glass of OJ. “You think that no one ever died for love, but guess what, that’s just wrong,” he told her. He guzzled a mouthful of juice, but then had to spit it into the sink. “This stuff is spoiled—it’s fizzy!” he said, a little outraged. He took a look at the expiration date on the container and saw that it had come and gone nearly four weeks earlier. Oh, this girlfriend of his desperately needed someone to show her the way.
“Sorry,” Stacy said. “I guess I should have checked the date, huh?” She fooled with the napkin at his place setting, folding it back and forth until she’d made a fan.
“Come on over here, you,” Roger said, and summoned her into the galley kitchen where there was barely room for two people to stand side by side. But instead of waiting for her to come to him, he rushed to meet her at the table, and arranged his arms around her beautifully straight back. “I don’t want to know anything at all about Rocco,” he said. “Not a thing. I just want to know that he’s gone from your life. And by t
hat I mean 100 percent gone.” There was an outline of a tiny purple heart tattooed on the underside of Stacy’s wrist, and Roger raised it to his mouth and kissed it. One hundred percent, he murmured.
He saw something pass fleetingly across her face, a look of what he believed to be a lovely pure empathy, and that, at least for the moment, was enough to fill him with hope.
S
Roger has returned from doing some errands, but even though he’s vague about where he went, she doesn’t press him because Will and Olivia are so happy with those new T-shirts of theirs. After microwaved chicken nuggets are served for the kids’ lunch, they drive a half hour to Butterfly World in Coconut Creek. Southern monarchs and Emerald Swallowtails and Sara Longwings land delicately on the kids’ shoulders and on their fingertips in the Paradise Adventure Aviary, but Olivia and Will get a bigger kick from the Bug Zoo, where they’re fascinated by the exhibits of live spiders, walking sticks, and mantises, praying and otherwise. As they earnestly study a walking stick almost completely camouflaged by the branches it rests upon, Stacy can’t help but notice that Roger resembles, as he has so often these days, one of those disengaged fathers who’s cemented to his BlackBerry. She hates to see him like this, hunched against the wall in a corner of the Bug Zoo, scrolling through his e-mails and text messages so anxiously.
“It makes my stomach hurt to see you like this,” she says, whispering into his ear now.
“What?” he says, and continues to scroll.
“My stomach,” she says. She takes two caplets of Pepto-Bismol from the pink plastic bottle she carries with her everywhere these days. “Indigestion, heartburn, I don’t know. I worry about you and then my stomach hurts.”