The limo rolls slowly down from the house, proceeds along Agapanthus Lane at a stately, processional pace, and then attains a smooth speed on Ramon Drive, and Harry tries calming the rapid beating of his heart, certain his family must hear the blood racing in his chest, spiraling through his veins. The air-conditioning, reviving at first, makes him shiver, and then conversation springs up, and he misses whatever they’re talking about, but he hears clearly when Roma, smiling hugely, says, “Who’s ready for this experience? For this once-in-a-lifetime night?”
THIRTY
THE STARLIGHT TERRACE IS a voluminous open-air expanse shimmering under intricate strands of golden twinkle lights, perfumed by bounteous arrangements of cut flowers, aurally enhanced by an orchestra playing violins, violas, cellos, basses, and flutes. Already crowded with men in black tie, and women gowned and bejeweled, milling and sipping as young waiters glide through the gathered, proffering icy uncorked bottles of champagne wrapped in fine white linen or swaying glasses on silver trays. Under the feet of the cocktailing denizens, a gleaming stretch of black dance floor, and beyond, tables set in platinum and gold, silvered desert ferns as centerpieces.
Harry hears the titillating hum of hundreds of excited conversations, spies an enormous photograph of himself on a golden easel, a life-size image of his personage displayed like precious fine art. And he falters. The aroma of the flowers is suddenly too cloying, too pungent, nearly putrid; his smile at those shaking his hands, clapping his shoulders, congratulating him on this honor, is counterfeit. The salutations being offered him are kind and sincere, but he deserves none of it. He, who caused the devastation of another’s future, of Max Stern’s future, deserves not champagne, not an extravagant meal prepared by one of the top chefs in the city, not this dramatic location, not this endless stream of compliments, not the evocative music penned centuries ago by a famous composer, not the laudatory speeches to come, not the eventual dancing, but a dry piece of bread in a cell. Are there any words he might speak that will not increase the breadth and depth and scope of the false life he had not known he was living? Is there any way for him to say anything in light of what he has learned about his commission of ghastly actions, his express utterances that contained only lies, all these unbearable truths about himself?
He reaches for Roma’s hand, then stashes his fist in his trouser pocket, and hopes she didn’t notice. He is no longer entitled to her comfort, or to their hallowed connection, for he has fooled her, too, made her an unwitting dupe who has believed in a promise he hadn’t remembered making and never kept, hiding from her the unknown realities of the man with whom she’s shared her life happily. A brimming glass is thrust at him, his fingers automatically closing around the stem, the tiny bubbles somehow loud over the din, and it feels like sacrilege, as if he will be struck down, perhaps by God himself, if he were to lift the crystal to his lips, if he were to take even the slightest of sips.
The rolling sea of bodies, the grinning faces of all these celebrants, Roma’s dark eyes holding in abeyance questions he can see she’s not sure how to formulate—he must look away from it all and he stares up at the darkening sky, at the ribbons of fiery red dressing the mountains, at the white stars above starting to shine, at the blinking blue lights of a climbing plane. Palm Springs International Airport is nearby, but far enough away that the plane makes no sound at all, and Harry wonders where that soaring jet, that cylindrical tin balanced high up in the cold, dry stratosphere, is headed, who on board is happy, and who is not, who is heading toward something, and who is escaping, who, at the other end, will be greeted upon their arrival, and who will feel the solitariness of their lone and echoing footsteps.
And he thinks: Dear God, tell me what I should do.
And at the commencement of this evening, this blasphemous honorific evening set to cap off this monstrously strange day of emotional hurricanes, here is another one: that in calling out to God, he, Harry Tabor, is praying a third time. He is aware of that fact, aware he has just done that which he has long thought he does not believe in—but if not God, whose voice has been entering his head at will all of this day?
And now that he has beseeched, now that he has called out for aid, now that it feels impossible for him to take any volitional action, not even one more step, without some semblance of guidance, will the voice, whoever’s voice it might be, come to him?
“Darling,” Roma says, holding up her phone, “the mother of the little girl who’s stopped eating is calling. Stay where you are so I can find you again,” and Harry nods once, his eyes never leaving the jet in the sky that is moving in a way that seems to him both swift and as slow as an inching snail, unaware when Roma disappears from his side.
And then he hears that dry voice now familiar, that could belong to the God he implored, and he waits for what it might say, the knowledge it might impart, and his heart clamps tight, fizzles up, then releases, the blood flowing fast when the voice says, You already know what to do, Harry. I know that you do.
THIRTY-ONE
MOM AND DAD GOT swallowed up fast,” Camille says, hating the shakiness she hears in her voice. She used to like big parties where she didn’t know anyone, where she could figure out, first from afar and then closer up, the leaders, the satellites, the contingents on the fringes, the connections and disconnections, the similarities and dissimilarities, the various motivations and ethos at play. Perhaps it’s the huge crowd, in noisy constant movement. Perhaps it’s that she’s out of practice, her sorting abilities rusted from those months of isolation in her apartment, and not fully exercised in her one-on-one interactions at Lilac Love.
She would like to be back in Phoebe’s room, in the chair at the vanity, with her sister’s hands gently cradling her face. She had known Phoebe was going to offer to “make things pop,” and she had steeled herself to refuse, to fend Phoebe off, but then something in her relented.
Camille hadn’t expected that Phoebe’s steadiness, their sudden intimacy, would bolster her from the inside, but it did, and she surprised herself by willingly following Phoebe’s directions.
Phoebe told her to relax and trust her, and Camille relaxed and trusted her, and what calming solace that had provided.
Phoebe had said, “Pucker,” and Camille hadn’t felt foolish puckering up, her sister leaning close, gliding the lipstick on.
Phoebe had said, “Close your eyes,” and Camille had done so, and her sister was careful with the mascara, the liner, the way she delicately blended shadow with the pad of her pinky.
When Phoebe said, “What do you think?” Camille had opened her eyes and Phoebe’s beauty was right in front of her; then Phoebe stepped aside, and her own was reflected in the mirror. Her eyes mesmerized her, seeing within them the trust she had just given to her sister and the trust the Trobrianders had given to her. And she understood that she needed to trust herself again, and in that moment, she was thoroughly convinced she would pull herself out of her morass.
The crowd is ahead of Camille. Her sister and brother and Elena are next to her, but she is wavering, would like to reverse course, find that limo driver, go back home, climb into the bed in her childhood room and sleep, find herself in the surf of those islands in her dreams.
“Camille and I are going to wander and assess who we might choose as our minions. This is our night to be the princesses of the king,” Phoebe says, and though it sounds idiotic to Camille, her sister’s voice settles her, and though it surprises Camille, she’s the one to take her sister’s hand and hold on tight, surprised when Phoebe holds on just as tight.
“I think that makes you the royal couple in waiting,” Phoebe says to Simon and Elena. “So off with you. Accept the adulation, as we will. See you later at the table.”
Simon doesn’t know what Phoebe is talking about—princesses and minions and royal couples in waiting—but he wants his sisters to stay. If his sisters abandon him, then what he fears is happening between him and Elena might actually be happening, but then Phoebe,
a knockout in a gown the color of blued ice, and Camille, a beacon in heavenly white, vanish into the crowd.
His breath catches when Elena permits him to take her cool hand, lets him lead her in a different direction. He’s not sure where he’s heading, but so long as they are joined in this smallest of ways, perhaps he can turn this evening around.
“Simon Tabor, is that you?” and Simon finds himself clasped in a bear hug by a thick man with a shiny face and nearly no hair left on his head, and although he is still holding Elena’s hand, can feel its coolness giving way to incipient warmth, she pulls free. Pulls free of him, from him, on this terrace where they married.
“Oh, boychik, I’ve startled you. Apologies. It’s me, Levitt, your father’s pal and tennis competitor. Let me look at you. No fattening at the trough of marriage, I see. My first marriage, I gained a quick thirty in no time flat. But not you, lean as a racehorse. I hear you have two daughters now. Mazel and all. So where’s your gorgeous bride?”
Levitt has Simon enveloped in a hard embrace, and Elena looks back at him, just once, before sweeping away.
THIRTY-TWO
IN A TERRACE CORNER, under a halo of golden lights, watching her husband gazing intensely up at the sky, mindless of the horde swirling around him, Roma answers her phone. “It’s Dr. Tabor, Jeanine. Is everything all right?”
“She’s eating,” Jeanine says. “Exactly the meals on the menu, but she cries with each bite she takes, her eyes shooting daggers at us. At dinner yesterday, she screamed at us before putting the food to her mouth. But we stayed firm. And it was the same this morning at breakfast and again at lunch, but she’s stopped talking to us entirely, hasn’t said a word since this afternoon. We want to know she’s okay, but she refuses to look at us. Just now, she ate her dinner slowly, head down, one arm limp in her lap, then she dropped the plate into the sink, marched away and slammed her bedroom door.”
“Has she eaten all the food she agreed to eat at each meal?”
“Yes.”
“And do you and Steve sit with her while she eats? Talk to her even if she doesn’t respond?”
“Yes.”
“And are you doing what I suggested, telling her how much you love her, that her health requires that she eat, that you are doing this to help her, not harm her?”
“Yes.”
“I know it’s difficult, and heart-wrenching, but you’re doing well. It will take time. I’d like you to call me again tomorrow. Will you do that?”
“Yes, of course, and Steve would like to meet with you. The two of us coming in to see you together. We’re hoping Monday, Dr. Tabor.”
“When we speak tomorrow, we’ll arrange a time. Stay strong, Jeanine.”
Roma is pleased by the McCaddens’ courage, by Jeanine’s call, and she turns around, looking for Harry in the spot where she left him, but her husband is no longer there.
THIRTY-THREE
FOR YEARS, CAMILLE HAS indicted her sister for her perfection, but now she finds warm security in that perfection.
Phoebe is charismatic and engaging, and sincerely interested in everyone they talk with: “Are you still involved with that charity?” “How is business treating you?” “You haven’t aged at all!” “I’m so glad they stayed together, it’s inspiring when couples can make it work.” “We’re so pleased you could be here to celebrate him.” “My whole family agrees, what our father has accomplished in his life is incredible!” “Yes, Simon and I are lawyers, lovely of you to remember, but it’s Camille who’s the special one. Oh, you don’t know, she’s a social anthropologist, spent years in Melanesia. She’s writing the most brilliant book about her experiences there. Camille, this is—”
And Camille is saying hello, and hello, and hello to people she doesn’t know, or to people she vaguely recalls from childhood, thinking, Does Phoebe really see me this way? She had no idea.
When there is a conversational lull, when Phoebe is leading her forward to the next well-wishing group, Camille whispers, “I’m not writing a brilliant book. I only wrote a dissertation.” And Phoebe whispers back, “But you will write a brilliant book. If not about your islands, then about some other magical place you’ll go and about the fascinating people you’ll meet there.”
An ancient man, with the faintest of stoops and a deep desert tan, wraps an arm around Phoebe’s bare shoulders.
“Hello, lovely Tabor daughters. The successful lawyer I know, but not the famous social anthropologist.”
Phoebe’s certainty has bucked Camille up, and with a fullness to her voice, she says, “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Baruch. Yes, I’m Camille.”
“If I could begin life over, I’d want to do what you do,” he says, then turns to Phoebe. “You understand your sister has the right idea, to find worlds beyond what we can imagine.”
“I know,” Phoebe says. “I’ve always known it.”
“So, Phoebe,” the old man says, “by any chance are you still single?”
Phoebe can’t hide her confusion.
“Oh, not me, sweetheart, but I have a very handsome grandson named Aaron, just your age, I think.”
For a splendid moment, Phoebe imagines herself a double conjurer: Her pretend lover at last drawing into her orbit a potential soul mate and beshert, justifying all her lying by manifesting the man of her dreams, serendipitously also named Aaron. She wants to say, “Yes, Baruch, introduce me to your grandson! And here are all the ways I can be reached!” but of course she can’t.
“What a coincidence. Phoebe’s dating an Aaron,” Camille says.
Ancient Baruch pushes back his silver swoop of hair, and says, “Wouldn’t that be a hoot if my Aaron was already your Aaron. It could be, he lives in Los Angeles, too. Aaron Gold?”
“Not Gold, but Green, Aaron Green,” says Camille, smiling as if she’s saved Phoebe. The last time Camille saved Phoebe, they were kids, sisters on the same side, in each other’s corner.
Phoebe thinks, Damn you, Camille, and says, “I’m so flattered you would think of setting me up, but my sister’s right, I am committed,” and Camille takes Phoebe’s hand again and squeezes tightly.
THIRTY-FOUR
WHAT ARE THESE PEOPLE’S names? And what have they been talking about? Elena has lost track of everything and she needs to track everything because she is one of her father-in-law’s representatives tonight. The foursome surrounding her is nodding, and Elena follows suit, nodding along, waiting for a conversational pause, and here it is, and she smiles and says warmly, “It was lovely to meet you all, but will you excuse me? I should find my husband.”
There’s no should about it. Walking away from Simon as she did, pulling her hand from his, it’s something Lucy might have done, but she can’t face him yet. In the distance, at the edge of the terrace, that’s where she wants to be. A new glass from a passing waiter, and she is sidling through the crowd, then away entirely, settling down in an orphaned chair, the heated air a little cooler here, the lingering taste of champagne on her tongue, her mind puzzling the tangents.
It isn’t completely true what she said to Simon in the car this morning. Yes, she considered marrying Jesus when she was a girl, but only in the beginning had she thought of becoming a nun, when marrying the Son of God seemed far more intriguing than marrying a regular man. But then that secret lesson imparted by one of the nuns, that Elena didn’t have to marry at all, not ephemeral Jesus, and not an earthbound version either, and that knowledge had unleashed and untied her, given her the courage to dream of a traveling life. And she’d pursued it, earning serious journalism degrees. It wasn’t domestic or international politics, or the intrigues at the Vatican, or serial killers and crime sprees, or personal interest stories that interested her, but where to go, what to see, what to experience, that absorbed her attention. It was always about travel. She imagined being alone in foreign locales, languages she didn’t speak singing past her ears, and she making her way armed with a few linguistic basics in whatever native tongue was required: P
lease. Thank you. Where is the bathroom? How do I get to—
What she had also yearned for were the hotel rooms. Trawling through expensive pages of travel magazines late at night, she stared at those rooms. Whether cut-rate or costly, they all had big, clear windows letting in the sun, highlighting the whites, the creams, the occasional pale grays of the walls, and the furnishings in those same relaxing palettes. So vacantly inviting. Her family home, purchased before she was born, recalled Salamanca for her mamá and papá and her abuelitos—walls of roughened stucco, thick-leaded windows, subdued interior light, not anything like the houses of friends she visited growing up, or later the hotels in the glossy guides, or still later the hotel rooms she temporarily inhabited. Her in-laws’ house is like a series of massive hotel suites, lustrous perfection, palely luxurious. The house she and Simon bought, though small and in need of repair, has many windows, and every wall, at her insistence, was painted cloud-white. But she misses, longs for hotel rooms, where she was whomever she wanted to be.
Over the last year, she’s thought that if she could begin traveling again, living out of those pristine hotel rooms, writing articles about what she experiences far from home, she’d bounce back. Bounce back from the truth of their marriage, likely any marriage—the way the deep and resonant timbre of love alters with the daily ordinariness of it all. She knows from her parents, from both sets of grandparents, from the Bible, that all marriages have a meandering course, slipping down into troughs before rising up once again and finding a high spot on a hill with a splendid view. But it’s hard being literally grounded and raising their children mostly on her own. When they married, Simon traveled maybe four weeks a year, but now so much more. Really, she and the girls don’t see him all that often. Really, she’s nearly a single parent. This last year, she determined that if both of them were working, traveling for work, it would reset them, require them to find parity—both making sacrifices to love their children while they pursued their careers. Of course she understands the importance of what Simon does, his work is consequential, significant, impressively humanistic, and she can’t compete with that, but her own work used to matter on a small scale, and disappearing from home for a little while to ply her dormant talents, earning money they could use, would remind him that when they married he was the one left behind while she was gone for weeks, traveling a large part of the year. She wouldn’t want to leave the girls for too long, just a few days every several months so she could reengage in the outside world, beyond the caring and feeding and loving of their young.
The Family Tabor Page 22