And then a buyer or a broker would ask her a question about maintenance charges or the building’s pet policy and it would all evaporate. She was just herself again: a flunky who had to remember to turn off all the lights before leaving and make sure the door was locked behind her.
“What do you bet they give the older boy the biggest bedroom in the house,” Robbie said. But Maize didn’t answer.
It occurred to her that even in her most elaborate fantasies there was rarely a man there with her in those apartments, reaching for her hand or sitting across the breakfast table, waiting on the sofa or in the bedroom. And that the few times she’d tried to picture it the most she could conjure was a male body without a face, like a store mannequin or a criminal informant whose identity needed to be digitally censored on a TV news show, en route to a fake new witness-protection identity. Otherwise she was always solo in those fantasy homes—nothing except for cameo appearances by Robbie. Nothing but stirrings from an adjacent room, someone pacing or opening drawers or playing music so faint it was like a weak radio signal from another country. Surely there was something wrong with that.
“My mother’s house,” Robbie said now. He continued to stare ahead at the lighted tableau. “You know something? You know?” he said, but he didn’t elaborate and she didn’t ask him to.
Maize said, “Yes.”
“I think we’d better get going,” Robbie said. His voice had gone a bit phlegmy while he’d sat there looking at the couple and their children, but he didn’t bother to clear it. She followed his steps the same way they came. If anything Robbie was even more careful to stay far outside the light where they’d cast no scary shadows, as if he suddenly recognized the extent of the danger he’d put them in and was eager to sneak back to the car as soon as possible. But when they hopped over the fence together both Daniel and the car were missing.
* * *
Robbie didn’t talk to Daniel again that night. At first he’d had the crazy thought that the car had been hijacked before he realized that Daniel simply must have gotten impatient waiting for them. After he and Maize walked home he’d discovered Daniel upstairs in his guest room with the door ajar, asleep in the dark or pretending to be asleep, very quiet and still, his breathing shallow as he lay there with his eyes closed.
Robbie couldn’t fathom how Daniel had gotten into the house by himself without a set of keys. Had he broken in—jimmied a door with a credit card or crawled through an open window on the first floor? But Robbie’s mother never left the windows open even in daytime. They were always locked and sealed shut. How Daniel had entered his house was a mystery.
He’d backed away from Daniel’s room and headed toward his own for the night. Maize’s door was shut, too, and he resisted knocking on it at first. But then he couldn’t stop himself. Sometimes it ambushed him without warning, the desolate feeling of aloneness, the fear that his life would vanish as if it had never been there, whatever spark or brightness he’d had gone the way the night sky swallowed a dead star. The panic that he could be attacked at any moment with no one to hear him scream.
His heart was pounding. Through the door he whispered, “Maize? Maizie? Are you asleep? May I come in?” and he heard or thought he heard her say, “Of course.”
His mother woke them early the next morning. Robbie was lying next to Maize when he heard three raps on the closed door, then her calling, “Up and at ’em.” In the ebb state between sleep and waking he forgot where he was for a moment, and exactly when it was.
“Breakfast time,” his mother said through the door. “I’m making pancakes from scratch, you lucky dogs.” He heard her knock on his empty room next door.
“Oh god, no,” Robbie whispered as Maize opened her eyes. He’d meant to head back to his own bed overnight, after they’d talked, and he nearly did at 3:30 a.m. but he hadn’t managed it. “Her pancakes are leaden,” he whispered. “I’ve never had the heart to tell her. She’s so proud of them.”
“Don’t worry.” Maize yawned. “Daniel will probably do that for you.”
Robbie shot up in bed. He’d better stop his mother before she got to Daniel’s room. Daniel was grumpy enough already and, like any med student who fetishized his sleep, he could be truly surly if anybody woke him by surprise.
Robbie hopped off the mattress in his rumpled T-shirt and boxer shorts, shouting “Ow!” when he stepped on a pen lying near Maize’s bedside journal. He hopped on one foot to the door and opened it and called, “Mom, don’t!” but it was too late. His mother turned around to take in Robbie—his bleary eyes, his bed head, his disarranged underwear—while beside her Daniel stood propped against the doorframe, vectoring his gaze down the hallway toward Maize’s room and bull’s-eyeing on Robbie as he stood there barefoot and half-clothed.
“Hi,” Robbie called. “Good morning.”
Daniel merely blinked as if at excessive sunlight.
“Pancakes,” his mother said again.
Robbie said, “Be right down.”
* * *
Later that morning, in Robbie’s mother’s bedroom, Maize couldn’t suppress a frown. The first thing she noticed upon entering was a handbag lying next to a heavy dresser. It was a designer bag she’d seen a lot in the city; half the fashionable women in Manhattan seemed to carry it, though it wasn’t particularly attractive or well constructed. A lumpen duffel in a sort of rubbery, fake-looking leather (if it was leather at all) with the designer’s name emblazoned over it and superfluously bulky hardware that seemed better suited to a saddle horse than a woman.
Maize had read online that it was the It bag for summer. She’d have assumed Robbie’s mother was above caring about such things but she guessed that was unrealistic. Perhaps nobody escaped the affliction of wanting what everybody else wanted—handbags or cars or appliances or other status symbols—unless she was hopelessly out of it. Everybody got brainwashed about the goods of the Good Life. And even if you somehow escaped getting duped into wanting them, you couldn’t help knowing what they were and noticing who had them and who didn’t.
The apartments André had made Maize show were interchangeable in that way. They all had the same stainless steel refrigerators, the same stone countertops, the same silent German dishwashers and “professional” stoves nobody seemed to use, the same limestone or marble or subway tile baths, the same vintage-reproduction hardware and gooseneck faucets, the same customized closets and Italian bed linens, with only the slightest variations in color and style. If a property didn’t have all those features it would “need work on the finishes” until it looked like every other apartment the buyer had seen or might see, in person or in an ad or in a movie. Apparently people didn’t look at pictures anymore and ask if they were lifelike. They looked at their lives and compared them to images they’d seen somewhere.
Or at least André’s clients did when they said things like The finishes aren’t what I’d hoped, meaning not as expensive-looking or as precious as they required.
But really, who was Maize to judge? She herself felt attracted to certain objects not because they were beautiful but merely because she’d been overexposed to them and couldn’t afford them. Like the duffel sitting before her now. It was ugly yet enviable.
“Oh, that,” Robbie’s mother said, when she noticed Maize staring at it. “I hate that pocketbook. It weighs two tons and it has no inside compartments to store anything. My shopaholic sister-in-law gave it to me for my birthday—I think she got it at Neiman Marcus—even though I have pocketbooks coming out of my ears. It’s my sister-in-law’s personal mission to make me over into a fellow princess like herself. God only knows how much it set her back.”
“It costs thirty-nine hundred fifty dollars,” Maize said, embarrassed to know the price off the top of her head.
“You’re joking,” Robbie’s mother said. When Maize shook her head she said, “My poor brother. That sap is going to end up in the gutter. Mind you, he’ll have cashmere blankets to keep him warm in the gutter, but no
food.”
She and Maize went to work on her walk-in closet, a wide airless chamber where there were two walls of dresses and jackets and pants and blouses hanging in no particular order and a third wall piled high with boxes and shoes and smashed purses. How disorganized it was compared to Robbie’s closet, where everything was meticulously arranged and there were shoe trees, and where his least favorite items were tucked in the back so he wouldn’t be reminded of his lapses in judgment. Yet Robbie’s closet was too orderly, like one of those boutiques where the clothes are so artfully displayed you’re afraid to touch them, much less try them on. Robbie still needed to let loose—to open his arms wider and embrace the unruliness of existence. He’d been trying to do that since their senior year of college, but when you opened his closet door you could see how far he still had to go.
It took Maize and Robbie’s mother three hours just to pluck out all the jackets and blouses and determine which were keepers. In the early afternoon, when they got around to cleaning out the two bureaus in the master bedroom, Maize opened the bottom drawer and found a large white leather book—what looked like a photo album, hidden under a frilly cream nightgown with a matching jacket that had embroidery at the shoulders. It was the only ultrafeminine garment in his mother’s wardrobe, so its placement seemed intentional, as if it were put there to distract people from what lay beneath it.
“Yikes, my fairy queen outfit,” Robbie’s mother said when Maize took out the garment along with its matching satin-and-lace robe. “You’re probably too young to know this, Maizie, but they used to call these ‘peignoirs.’ Unless you were a sissy, you were only supposed to wear them on special occasions.”
“You mean like Christmas?”
“No. Like your honeymoon. What else did you dig out there?”
Maize plucked the album from the bottom drawer and brought it over to Robbie’s mother. She wanted to explain that she wasn’t snooping around but she didn’t. Robbie’s mother sat on her bed and opened it. As she turned through the first few pages she said nothing but “Yow” and “Yeesh” and gave a wistful smile, which Maize took as a cue to sit next to her as she looked.
What Maize saw was shocking—shockingly lovely: Robbie’s parents young and beaming and almost unbearably vivid in picture after picture, before their bodies and senses had gotten run down by middle age, and Robbie as a bald and cheerful baby held like a prize by one or the other of them before the camera. His father in his twenties was even handsomer than Robbie, who himself was handsomer than he realized, with his mother’s eyes and his father’s nose but also a nervousness to his looks that neither of his parents had. Robbie’s nervousness was like a recessive gene that had skipped generations.
“You were a knockout,” Maize said as his mother flipped the pages. “You looked happy.” As she spoke she recalled Eli saying the same thing to her on her front stoop—You look happy—and she realized that she had been despite her fear and stiltedness.
“Maybe yes, maybe no. I don’t remember. People look that way in snapshots because they’re always told to smile,” Robbie’s mother said. “But who knows.”
She grinned to herself, then looked at Maize for a long moment and splayed her hand over the next page so that Maize couldn’t see it. “My husband was a looker. I’ll give him that. Funny thing,” she said and turned the page. “You know when I got that it was curtains for us? Everybody thinks it was when he left with what’s-her-name. But it hit me when he didn’t like my roast chicken anymore. I had my own recipe and he’d always scarfed it down. Second and third helpings. Toward the end he’d complain it was too salty or tough although I made it exactly the same. He just pushed it around his plate.” She looked at Maize and laughed. “That must make me sound nuts.”
“No, it doesn’t. Really.” Maize herself had been starting to notice, more and more, that meaningful changes didn’t happen when you expected and that you didn’t graduate when everybody else claimed you did, with ceremonies and celebrations and moving vans, with diplomas and severed ribbons cut to applause. Those turned out to be nothing more than suggestions. The big changes came mostly at odd, unexpected moments and often in private, delayed or speeded up or beyond the last minute, during ordinary conversations instead of speeches, half hidden like a mole on the back of someone you mistakenly thought you loved but in fact didn’t, or in sentences you might tune out on another day in another mood in another light, or in all variety of unplanned meetings. And while you were waiting for them to occur things got taken—not just from you but by you, though you hardly noticed until it was over.
She had to admit to herself that André wasn’t the only thief in the office. She could see that now. She’d taken things from André, too—not only his abrasive phone manner but his deep cynicism about people in general and about men in particular, as if she’d had André’s life experiences when she hadn’t. She’d been borrowing from André out of sheer ignorance of the world, and before that she’d been taking whatever she could from other people—her peers and her teachers and more distant figures—from fear that if left to herself there’d be nothing of great interest or almost nothing, because she was young.
“No,” she said again to Robbie’s mother. “It’s not insane. I understand.”
She leaned toward his mother. She wanted to put her arm around her shoulder but was afraid she would recoil.
“Honestly? You’re not just humoring an old bat? You were always a smart kid,” his mother said. Then she shook her head briskly as though clearing space for another topic. “Enough about me already. What about you?”
Maize blinked at her. “Me?”
“Yeah you, toots. For instance, any boys these days besides my son?”
“No. Not really.” Maize leaned back a bit as if shrinking from inadequacy. She felt herself blush. Much as she liked Robbie’s mother, she wasn’t going to talk about hookups—not to a woman who probably hadn’t had sex in years—and the thought of addressing anything else made her cringe.
“A gorgeous chickie like you?” his mother said. “I don’t buy that. You’re holding out on me.” She raked her hand through her hair. “Unless what I hear is true and boys are even worse dogs than they were in my day.”
“No, not all of them,” Maize said. “There was a guy from work who was … nice,” she said, although nice seemed a pallid way to describe Eli. “But we stopped talking after I got fired.”
She didn’t know what shocked her more—her impulse to defend heterosexual men or to invoke Eli after a month of denying his existence. She’d mentioned him fleetingly to Robbie the same night they’d gone out—not revealing their awkward kiss on the stoop—but she hadn’t spoken another word about him since.
“How long were you dating this boy?” Robbie’s mother said.
“Dating?” That sounded so old-fashioned. “No, it was just one night.”
“Got it. Nice guy, but dull.”
“No. Really. He was smart and talented. And he was attractive.”
“Then why aren’t you in touch with him?” Robbie’s mother stood and stretched herself and looked down at Maize. “Obviously I’m missing something here.”
Maize shrugged. “I don’t know. He’s called but I haven’t gotten back to him.”
“Why?”
Maize shrugged again and looked at the scalloped bedroom carpet. She was tempted to say something innocuous like “I’ve been busy” but she realized how dysfunctional that would sound coming from an unemployed person.
“I guess I’ve been sort of rude,” she said.
“Get back to him.”
“Maybe I should.”
“Not maybe, Maize. If he’s a good egg get back to him. Call him. Or e-mail him or text-message him or send a smoke signal or whatever you kids do these days.” When Maize looked up at her wide-eyed, Robbie’s mother said, “What—you want to end up like me?”
There was no right way to answer that question; either a yes or a no would cause equal offense, so Maize sai
d nothing. She’d always considered Robbie’s mother unassailable—armored against the doubts and regrets that plagued Maize on a daily basis—yet perhaps that shallow admiration was a kind of disrespect. In the muggy closeness of this woman’s bedroom she could see, for a moment, that they were more alike than they seemed and she could let her question reverberate in the silence.
Why hadn’t she called Eli? Why had she dragged the figment of Hal along on her dates and her hookups like an invisible chaperone who’d prevent her from doing anything rash, or anything much at all? She had no idea. She could be insightful about other people, but she was pretty much an idiot about herself.
“I’ve squawked enough,” Robbie’s mother said. “You’ll do whatever’s best. You’ve always understood things.” She sighed. “I wish I could say the same for my son.”
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