Laura & Emma

by Kate Greathead

  She knew it wasn’t like this for everyone. Those plucky, brave souls who moved to New York City on their own and had to start a life from scratch.

  Laura recalled telling her parents she’d been taken off the wait list for Barnard. “That’s terrific,” her father had said, while her mother had groaned, “I suppose this means we’ll have to have what’s-his-face and his dreadful wife over for dinner.”

  Laura was envious of others’ accounts of struggle, which were recalled with a certain fondness. It had been an adventure, the thrill of the hustle; they’d chased a dream against the odds, and now they were living it. She could only imagine the pride of being personally responsible for everything one had—professional success, friends, apartment—and being able to trace all this back to hard work. Knowing that everything in their lives wasn’t a given, that it could have all gone a very different way.

  Laura had never even read the classifieds. There’d been no reason. Everything came to her through direct channels, and if her immediate network didn’t provide it, someone knew someone who could help. When deadlines were missed or obstacles encountered, a person of power or influence intervened on her behalf. Often this person didn’t know Laura: it was a friend of the family, a former classmate’s neighbor, the stepfather of a cousin-in-law—it didn’t matter. Phone calls were made; exceptions were granted; she was put on the top of the list.

  Many of the brides Laura worked with were unaware of her personal affiliation with the Library, and she preferred it that way. Nepotism aside, Laura was ashamed of her great-grandfather, whose legacy of shrewd business dealings earned him a full page in her tenth-grade American history book in the section Robber Barons. Her mother bemoaned the fact that she hadn’t inherited a dime of his money (everything had gone to her uncle, his firstborn son), but Laura was glad this was the case. She did not want to be the beneficiary of the man who’d founded a bank in his name and had once been photographed with a dwarf on his lap.

  And yet she was aware of experiencing a flush of something resembling pride upon hearing his name invoked by people who had no idea she was his great-granddaughter—the pride of moral superiority, suspecting that were they to share her ancestry (which also included the mayor of the original Mayflower community and the founder of the country’s first insurance company), they would seize every opportunity to let it be known.

  * * *

  LAURA DIDN’T LIKE VACATIONS OR travel, though come August she often relocated to 136, the four-story brownstone on East Sixty-fifth Street where she’d grown up. Her parents spent the month in Europe, so she had the place to herself.

  There was a garden out back where she could lie in her bikini, something she’d never felt comfortable doing in Central Park. Laura loved sunbathing. She knew about the studies saying it was dangerous, but she kept doing it anyway. She wasn’t a drinker, a smoker, an overeater, or a consumer, but she was a sunbather; this was her one vice, and she’d made peace with it.

  One Sunday night, after a weekend of reading and sunbathing at 136, Laura lay in bed on the verge of sleep when she heard the carpeted creak of someone coming up the stairs. There had been a string of burglaries on the block that summer, and she’d half been expecting this. She lay still as a corpse, which is what she’d heard you were supposed to do in these situations. So long as the intruder didn’t think you’d seen him, he had no reason to kill you.

  To mitigate the terror she made a mental inventory of all the people she’d known who’d lived through these situations to tell the story at a dinner party. Then she started imagining how she would narrate her own story of surviving a break-in. Typically Laura became nervous when telling an anecdote to a group, and often held back for this reason, but this would be too good not to relay. She was at the part of the story that coincided with the present, and was waiting for what happened next, when she heard the toilet flush, followed by the sound of an electric toothbrush, and she realized that it was just another one of Nicholas’s friends.

  Her brother, Nicholas, occasionally let out-of-town friends stay there. Laura didn’t mind; she felt safer knowing another person was sleeping in the house—but it would’ve been nice for Nicholas to have called to let her know of his guest in advance.

  * * *

  THEY CROSSED PATHS IN THE kitchen the next morning.

  “Jefferson,” he said, offering his hand.

  “Laura,” she said, shaking it.

  She made herself a cup of tea and sat down to read the Times. There was apparently a new kind of cancer that, for reasons that remained a mystery to the medical community, afflicted only New Yorkers and people who lived in San Francisco. The article made her anxious, and she was relieved when she got to the end and it said that no cases had been reported outside the homosexual community or in women. She was annoyed the journalist hadn’t thought to put this fact in the beginning.

  After making some eggs, Jefferson joined her at the table and took a section of the paper. At one point he spoke: “Evolution is happening, and I’m excited about where it’s taking us.” Laura didn’t know what to say to this, so she made a concentrating expression and pretended not to hear.

  * * *

  JEFFERSON DIDN’T INITIALLY STRIKE LAURA as handsome, but she saw how women might find him attractive. He had charisma and swagger and joie de vivre. Though he was not especially large in stature, there was something substantial about his build. He had a certain density that gave the impression of bearing more weight than the space he took up. He moved through the rooms with proprietary ease and had no qualms helping himself to anything he wanted. That his comfort in the house she’d grown up in surpassed her own might have irked her had she not found him so amusing.

  When asked how he knew her brother—they’d been roommates at St. George’s—Jefferson seemed momentarily taken aback, perhaps mildly hurt to realize that Nicholas had never mentioned him. Hoping to spare his feelings, Laura explained that Nicholas rarely volunteered anything about that chapter of his life.

  Over the course of the week they spent cohabitating, Jefferson regaled Laura with descriptions of pranks the two boys had undertaken at St. George’s: short-sheeting their dorm mother’s bed, covering the headmaster’s car with shaving cream, releasing a box of crickets in the chapel during morning prayers. “We had the best time,” Jefferson punctuated each account. Laura was surprised and relieved to hear this.

  Five years older, Laura had been a mother figure to Nicholas when he was little, reading books to him, teaching him how to spell his name, tie his shoes—how to identify the different kinds of birds that passed through their back garden. As a child, Nicholas suffered from a terrible case of eczema and a mild but pesky stutter, which had made things difficult for him at school. To make up for it, Laura would always intentionally lose at pick-up sticks and jacks and checkers—which they played a lot. For the first decade of his life Laura had tended to Nicholas’s needs, and he had basked in her attention and gestures of affection without any embarrassment. If he’d had a bad dream, it was Laura’s bed he came to in the middle of the night.

  When it was time for Laura to apply to college, the prospect of abandoning Nicholas at 136 made her feel so guilty that she decided to forgo her dream of a quaint New England campus and chose a school in New York City. This had been for naught, however, as Nicholas ended up being sent off to boarding school. It would toughen him up, had been their parents’ reasoning.

  The sensitive boy who had turned to Laura for everything came back from his first year at St. George’s a remote and surly adolescent. He did not want to visit the Natural History Museum, go to the movies, get a hamburger at Jackson Hole, or do any of the things the two of them used to do together. Laura’s attempts to rekindle their closeness continued to be rebuffed in the ensuing years. Even their mother had noticed the change, grimly speculating to Laura and her father that something must have happened to Nicholas at school.

  “You think he’s being teased or bullied?” Laura had asked.<
br />
  “Everyone gets a bit of that at boarding school,” her father responded.

  “I mean something worse than that,” Laura’s mother said. “A sexual violation of some sort.”

  Jefferson’s jolly narrative of her brother’s life at boarding school put such sinister fears to rest. It was a comfort to know that Nicholas had been one of the boys, making mischief, having a good time.

  * * *

  THE EVENING SHADOWS OF THE trees outside danced across the walls with the languid quiver of plants in a fish tank. Laura lay supine on the ancient sofa by the window. With each breath she sank deeper into the silky give of its bosomy cushions, once rose-colored, now faded to a pearly pink. She was reading an advance copy of a book that a friend who worked in publishing had sent, thinking it would be up her alley. It was actually the kind of book Laura avoided, pure fodder for insomnia, but now that she’d begun it, she felt obligated to finish. Between turning pages her free hand absently stroked the distinctly distressed spot by her side, where Mr. Baggins, a beloved childhood corgi, had once nestled.

  When Jefferson came into the room she sat up, scooched to the far end of the sofa, and drew her knees to her chest. Now her free hand rested on the arm, plucking and strumming the strings of its threadbare surface, releasing a homey musk of aging upholstery, her father’s pipe tobacco, and subtle undertones of other dearly loved, long-deceased pets.

  After a few minutes of silence, Jefferson made a pssst sound, as one would do trying to get someone’s attention in a library. He lay on the chaise perpendicular to Laura, ankles crossed, hands clasped behind his head.

  “Have I told you lately that you’re beautiful?”

  “Thank you,” Laura responded, attempting to hold the book in a way that obstructed her face from his gaze. She could feel the corners of her mouth twitching; it was such a silly thing to say to someone you’d known for a week.

  “I wouldn’t have thought something called The Fate of the Earth was a funny book,” Jefferson said.

  Laura ignored his comment and drew the book even closer to her face.

  This worked; Jefferson stopped talking. But she had trouble regaining focus, too aware of his presence in the room. And then of his absence.

  After listening to his footsteps bounce down the stairs, Laura tried to imagine what he was doing in the basement. Eventually he trotted back up with a bottle of red wine from her father’s collection. She agreed to share it with him.

  She wondered why she didn’t drink more often; she was less shy, and it was a wonderful feeling.

  “You have a nice figure,” Jefferson said, pouring her a second glass. Laura was often told this, and normally her response was to complain about her height—five-foot-two—and say she wished she were taller, but tonight, she said, “I know,” and fingered the stem of her glass.

  “You don’t act like it,” he said.

  Laura shrugged and leaned over to pluck a sprig of dried lavender out of the arrangement on the table. After discovering it had no scent, she twirled it in her fingers for a bit, then tucked it behind her ear and pretended to go back to her book—knowing that Jefferson knew she was pretending and would remain there staring at her for as long as it took for her to give up the act.

  It wasn’t lust, but rather vanity that made her agree to take her clothes off, and from there on it was a feeling of obligation that made her carry through with the rest of it.

  What transpired was not unlike all the other times, and it did not undo Laura’s conviction that something was different about her, that her experience of sex wasn’t what it was for others. But as she lay there afterward, his arms tethered around her as though she were a precious thing he’d just caught and now might run away—“Soft little fucker,” he’d murmured, stroking her shoulder—that part she liked very much.

  * * *

  SHE HADN’T BEEN PREPARED FOR this, and the next morning Laura went back to her apartment to retrieve her diaphragm, then she made an appointment to get her legs waxed, and then she found herself circulating the aisles of Bloomingdale’s, trying on different scents.

  Laura had slipped out before Jefferson had woken up that morning and hadn’t left a note; she liked the idea of his waiting and wondering when she’d come back. By the time she set out to return to 136 it was already evening. The sky was a benign shade of lavender, but soon it would erupt into a violent riot of pinks and reds.

  August in New York often gave Laura a sad, left-out feeling, but this evening she felt different. It was a time of day, during a time of year, when no one was in a rush. The sidewalks belonged to a procession of couples gratuitously strolling. Men took off their jackets and held them with two fingers behind their backs, the other arm draped around the waists of their companions.

  At one point Laura got caught behind a couple with a young child who walked between them, one hand in the mother’s, the other in the father’s. The trio took up the width of the sidewalk, and every few steps the parents would chant, “One, two, three, wheeee!” and swing the child up off the ground. The child loved this and would laugh with excitement each time, and upon being set back down would immediately demand to be swung again. “More! More!” it would plead.

  Jefferson did not come running to the door after Laura let herself in. She called his name but he didn’t answer. She went upstairs and he wasn’t in any of the bedrooms. The kitchen and living room were also empty, as was the dining room. He wasn’t in the garden or basement either.

  She called Nicholas.

  “Who’s Jefferson?” he asked.

  When she reminded him Jefferson had been his roommate at St. George’s, Nicholas said, “I lived in a single.”

  * * *

  THE WHOLE THING LEFT LAURA perplexed—and ashamed. Not only did she have no idea who he really was, but who was she, to have been so easily seduced? Soft little fucker—it made her shudder. She vacated 136 after the episode, and spent the remaining days of summer in her own apartment.

  * * *

  LAURA AND NICHOLAS SAT ON a bench outside the restaurant waiting for their parents, who had returned from Europe that morning. A reservation had been made for seven. At seven-twenty, Laura speculated that perhaps they’d lain down for a nap and hadn’t woken up.

  “So you think they’re dead,” Nicholas said dryly.

  “Of course not,” Laura said, though she knew he was kidding. “I mean maybe they were so exhausted from the trip that they slept through their alarm.”

  Finally, a cab pulled up. “Yoo-hoo!” trilled their mother’s voice through the back window. Their father emerged from the other side of the vehicle and walked around to open the door for her. Bibs wore a lime-green shift dress and her hair pulled back in a headband in a way that looked French. She accepted Douglas’s hand when climbing out of the cab, but once on both feet, she batted it away, making a dramatic show of struggling to maintain her balance as she headed toward the curb.

  “Don’t worry, I’m not tipsy,” she said giddily. “I’m feeling the swells from the boat! Everything’s still rocking!”

  Upon reaching her children, Bibs clutched Laura by the shoulders like a rag doll, kissed her firmly on each cheek, then turned and did the same with Nicholas.

  “Good to see you kids,” Douglas said, giving Laura a single kiss on the cheek and patting Nicholas on the back as he ushered them into Claude’s.

  A mirror hung on the wall behind their table. Catching a glimpse of herself, Bibs straightened her shoulders and elongated her neck. “Thank goodness for dim lighting,” she said to no one in particular.

  A busboy materialized and filled their water glasses. Bibs dabbed the corner of her napkin into hers and used it to wipe her husband’s brows.

  “This is a new routine we have,” Douglas said, when Laura asked what she was doing. “Apparently, there’s a problem with my eyebrows.”

  “They’re going rogue,” Bibs said gravely. “It happens to men in old age.”

  “I don’t know what she’s
talking about.” Laura smiled at her father.

  “I’m talking about how a bird could lay an egg in them,” said Bibs.

  Nicholas lowered his menu to have a look.

  “I discovered my first few gray hairs,” Laura volunteered, wanting to take the heat off Douglas.

  “Oh, don’t worry about that,” Bibs said. “Jean-Paul will take care of it. Let me make you an appointment with Jean-Paul. I’ll be seeing him first thing in the morning.”

  “I’m not coloring my hair,” Laura said. “It’s only a few, but if they start to proliferate, I’m going to let it happen.”

  “But you’re too young for that, darling. Much, much too young.” Bibs looked at Douglas for support. “Don’t you agree, dear? Don’t you think she’s too beautiful to let that happen?”

  Douglas, who looked embarrassed by the question, ignored it. “Nicholas just told me he’s getting a promotion.”

  “That’s exciting,” Laura said. “What does your new position entail?”

  Nicholas addressed his father while delivering a long-winded, tangential explanation. Douglas sat listening with his hands clasped, periodically lowering his eyelids and nodding rapidly to indicate he understood—no need for Nicholas to elaborate in such detail. It was a counterproductive gesture, as each time he did this, Nicholas, who was very sensitive to their father’s opinion, experienced a momentary relapse of his childhood stutter, and it took him that much longer to wrap up his point and move on to the next. Laura knew her father wasn’t a cruel man, but she couldn’t understand how he could be so clueless. Nicholas had not inherited their father’s unflappable confidence and placid demeanor, but he strived to project such an image, and it was painful to see him unravel before the person he most wanted to impress.

  Their food arrived, and as Nicholas paused to catch his breath and take a bite of pork chop, Douglas said, “And when do you start?”