Back when I began to fall for Victor, I thought that the few stilted and awkward conversations Mr. Pershing and I had had on the subject revealed him to be bigoted. Now, with a little more maturity under my belt, I see that he was only trying to help me in his own, convoluted way.
It was never easy to walk the line between Victor and Mr. Pershing. V complained that the old man was homophobic, that his wealth was ostentatious. Mr. Pershing said that Victor was a fool to follow his musical dreams instead of a lucrative career path. He always said that if V ever found success as a rock star, he’d leave me.
So it’s very odd, when I reflect upon it, to think that Mr. Pershing actually brought Victor and me together.
“I decided something,” Mr. Pershing said to me one day, five years ago.
“What’s that?”
“I decided that I can love argyle and you can love stripes, and we can still think very highly of each other…which doesn’t mean that we have to necessarily wear our argyle with our stripes or that either of us should wear leather pants to the club if it makes the other one uncomfortable. Now does it?” he said in his infuriatingly cryptic way.
“May I ask what in the hell you’re talking about?” I respectfully inquired.
“I asked that young fellow to tea,” he said, evidently quite proud of himself.
“Who?” I demanded.
“That fellow you watch through the window every afternoon when you sit in the parlor pretending to read.”
I blushed because it was all too true.
Victor and his mother lived in a rented flat in the house across the way. The revolving residents of that particular house were a bone of contention to our neighbors, who all lived in posh, single-family homes. The house in which Victor dwelled had been divided into four units some hundred years ago, and though you couldn’t tell that fact from the front, and though the parking access was from an alleyway behind, the neighbors on our street still found it abominable. Whether there was any evidence without or no, they knew there were altogether too many persons within that domicile.
Every afternoon, Clarisse, Victor’s mother, brought out her easel or her drawing things and worked in the open air. And every afternoon, Victor followed.
I sat inside our home with the window open and a book or newspaper in my hands. I watched them and caught whatever snatches of French or laughter came through the window from their direction.
“Why did you invite him to tea?” I asked Mr. Pershing on that particular morning five years ago.
“Would you like me to cancel?” he asked smugly, knowing full well that I didn’t want him to do any such thing.
I shouldn’t have been surprised about his intervention because he always stuck his nose in my business. Whether it was arranging internships with his legal colleagues, or talking me up to the mothers of pretty girls, or a million other instances.
When I complained about it, sometimes rather loudly, and once with the added emphasis of a vase thrown down the stairs, my mother invariably pointed out that Mr. Pershing was only trying to help me and that I should be grateful.
Often I was, genuinely so. But at other times, like that which led to my pocket money being docked for a month to pay for the vase, I rather wished he’d keep his nose out. In the case of Victor, of course, I was, and am, sincerely appreciative of his meddling.
From that first stilted tea, to a quiet dinner with just Victor and me, to a heady, intoxicating affair took very little time. If Mr. Pershing regretted extending the invitation in the first place, which I have to guess he did at times, he never said so to me.
When Clarisse moved on from their flat in London to paint in other settings, first in Tuscany and more recently in Amsterdam, Victor stayed behind. He moved from their two-bedroom, second-floor apartment to the attic studio where he still lives.
By the time Clarisse departed, Victor had already assembled his Bandmaidens, and Cryptodynamite played enough bars in the vicinity to keep him fed. There have been months when I know full well that he’s had trouble making rent, but he never lets me help him financially. Victor is very proud. As he likes to point out to me, he grew up without servants and elegant surroundings, and he can do very well without them. I have to remind Victor that my mother was Mr. Pershing’s maid because when he introduces me to people after a few drinks, he makes it sound like I was Mr. Pershing’s son instead.
Victor and I have discussed moving in together. Rather, I discuss it, and V says we need to wait until we’re on equal terms. I insist he’s too fixated on financial differences and that I wouldn’t mind paying more to keep our household running. I point out that we’d be a team: our resources would be one and the same, and it wouldn’t matter who brought in however much money.
More than anything, I want him to marry me.
When my mother grew ill, she continued on at Mr. Pershing’s house, which had been her home for decades by then. He insisted she stay. I remember he was appalled when she suggested she should move out when she knew she would soon become too weak to cook and clean for him. Mum hadn’t been gone long when Mr. Pershing was diagnosed with cancer himself. He said he needed me by his side, so of course I stayed.
When this project is finished, I’ll have to let the bare-bones staff that remains at the London house go. I’ll have to sell the place, ensure that the proceeds go where Mr. Pershing decreed, and move out. Maybe Victor and I can get a larger apartment in his building. I would sorely hate to leave that street altogether.
All this digression brings me back to Mr. Pershing’s long habit of orchestrating my affairs, which is really nothing compared to what I’m attempting to do on his behalf.
Merry is cleaning the oven when I reach the kitchen again, task in hand. I motion for her to join me in the living room. She sits in the hideous companion chair beside the dozing old man, and I sit opposite them on the sofa. She smiles when I hand her the paper.
She reads it silently.
Hello again, Merry.
Because this document has reached you, it is manifestly evident that you have wisely taken me up on my posthumous offer and arrived safely at the beach house.
I hope that you find my beloved ocean and home to your liking. I further hope that my most honorable and trusted barrister, Fritz Forth, isn’t proving himself to be too much of an inconvenient pain in your ass. If he is, I apologize. Let me assure you that however annoying he may be, I am convinced that he will also prove helpful to you in many ways, which should balance things out.
Remember to keep your eyes toward the goal my dear, trust Fritz to help you, and be sure to earn your inheritance so that my impossible old goat of a brother can’t get it.
You’ll be surprised to learn that Fritz actually advised me against writing introductory notes to each task. The audacious upstart even suggested that my initial letters might better have been shorter and more to the point!
Not because I concede that Fritz was in any way correct in his assessment, but because I am now ready to present you with it, here is your second task.
Task # 2: Take stock and get on your own two feet. You must do more than earn your keep; you must begin to build a career. You must make a profit.
Maintain patience with Fritz and allow him to help you, if for no other reason than the fact that he can kick you out at any time.
Best of luck to you, Merry, my dear. I remain (which is all I can do now),
Sincerely and belatedly yours,
Claude Pershing (a.k.a. your father)
I watch her read it three times, with her lips moving. I fear a fourth.
“All right then,” I say.
“I don’t know what it means,” she says.
The old man wakes up with a start. He is disheveled from his nap, and his hands tremble as he reaches for a cigarette. He lights it.
“Can I get you anything, Uncle Max?” she asks.
I hear myself mocking her without really meaning to. It’s honestly too easy to resist, though I admit I co
uld try a bit harder. She follows the old man’s example and ignores me anyway.
“What’s going on here?” he asks, after filling his lungs with poison and releasing some back for our edification.
“I was just reading my second task,” she tells him.
“You may as well read it to me, too.”
Merry, always eager to please, a regular perfect little Pollyanna, immediately complies with his request:
“Task number two: Take stock and get on your own two feet. You must do more than earn your keep; you must begin to build a career. You must make a profit.”
“It seems perfectly clear to me,” he says, after taking another drag and clearing his lungs by blowing smoke in my direction. “My brother was always remarkably clever with riddles,” he adds.
“Is it a riddle?” Merry asks, staring down at the paper hard, as if she believes the confounding words are written in magic ink and will rearrange themselves into an answer. “What does it mean?” she asks, looking as innocently stupid as a kitten.
“It means you’ve got to make a career. It couldn’t be clearer on that point,” the old man says. He waves me away dismissively and leans toward Merry.
“What kind of a career?” she asks.
“‘Take stock’: that means you’re supposed to figure out what you’d like to do, if I read my brother’s words correctly.”
“Gosh. I don’t know…”
“Poppycock! I thought you had the blood of a Pershing in your veins, child!”
Merry stares at the old man. “But that doesn’t mean anything about who I am, really. It’s just blood.”
“Pershing blood!” he shouts.
“You want me to fail so that the house will be yours. So what do you care?” she asks.
I look to the old man with my eyebrows raised, certainly curious as to what he’ll answer.
“I do want you to fail, ultimately. But I see no reason why it should be so soon. Or that you should give up without a fight. I rather like getting to know my niece, who is so pretty and such an excellent cook,” he says between long drags on his cigarette.
Merry stares down at the paper again.
The old man takes it from her hands and reads it quietly, moving his lips.
“I thought Fritz told me you had a business degree,” he finally says.
“I do. And that, along with a dollar ninety-five, will buy me a scoop of peach ice cream down at the corner store.”
“What are you saying?” he demands.
“My degree hasn’t meant much to me, unless you count rejection and failure. I couldn’t get a job with it, not even close.”
“Why not?” the old man asks, in a let’s get to the bottom of this manner. “The recession?”
“My mom and grandma blame the economy, and so does my Aunt Betty. But I don’t know if that’s all there is to it. I had a few classmates with lower GPAs who still landed career-track jobs. I suppose interviewers might have been able to tell that I didn’t have a fire in my belly for business.”
“What do you like to do?” he asks, clearly growing impatient.
Merry shrugs her shoulders.
He turns his face away and stares at the ocean.
She looks out, too.
What a pair they make. I wish I could fly back home to London now and let the two of them figure everything out.
“See the pelicans?” The old man points and Merry looks up.
“Wow! I thought they were gangly when I just saw pictures. Look how elegant they really are, gliding along right above the water,” she says breathlessly. “They change direction with what looks like no effort at all.”
“In their proper context, they really are quite gorgeous,” the old man says. “Once you find a place where you belong, everything is easier, Merry.”
She looks at him like he’s a brilliant sage she walked barefoot for hundreds of miles to hear.
He notices and tries to deliver in style. He clears his throat and sits up taller in his ugly chair.
“A butterfly underwater is nothing; it’s dead and doesn’t possess even an echo of its former beauty. A whale on the beach is a municipal logistical nightmare, with stench that long outlasts the mourning. But in their proper contexts, in their natural environments, they are something else altogether. They are sublime, surreally beautiful, amazingly and wholly resplendent.”
I roll my eyes at the superlatives, but Merry nods in mute agreement as she watches the pelicans soar away in perfect unison.
“Maybe this place is my ‘proper context,’ where I really belong,” she finally says. “It feels like it.”
“You worked in a restaurant, right?” the old man asks when the birds have traveled so far away that they are only dots on the horizon.
“Not just one; I’ve worked in a bunch over the years.”
“And you like to cook? You said you did, and you’re clearly wonderful at it.”
“I love to cook more than anything. But I don’t think working in a restaurant will count as completing my task. It says I need to make a career for myself.”
The old man becomes impatient all at once. He grinds out one cigarette, grabs his pack, and shakes out another. He tamps it down on the table three times and lights it.
“I just don’t see how working in a restaurant would count as making a career,” Merry continues. “I’m sure there’s not enough money set aside to open a café of my own. And I don’t have enough experience anyway, even if there was.”
“Are those the only choices?” the old man asks after a few long drags.
“No?” Merry asks.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake, child, you’ve got to learn to help yourself!”
He gets up and stomps off to his room.
Merry and I are left behind, breathing the smoke that trails after him. She stares at the sea again.
“I’m trying to memorize it,” she says. “In case you kick me out and it has to last me forever.”
“What on earth do you see out there?” I ask. For the life of me, all I see is water.
“Like my dad said in that letter: no two seconds are the same. The ocean changes and moves constantly, along with the clouds above it, passing over like so many blessings. It’s wonderful to watch. It’s so surprising and so pretty.”
I shake my head.
“No, really, Fritz,” she says, looking at me earnestly. “I feel what he felt. I know that we never met, but I feel connected to him when I look out there.”
Her eyes actually fill with tears. Good God.
“My dad used to sit in this room and look through these windows at this same ocean. He really did. And I might have gone my whole life without even a hint of who he was. Thank you for bringing me here.”
Before I can defend myself against it, she’s got her arms around my neck in another one of her sudden hugs. I peel her off and push her back toward her chair, where she smiles at me like I just gave her a purdy birthday balloon. I rub my eyes. I think perhaps I’ve developed an allergy to smoke. Or sand. Or this whole damn project.
The old man, apparently finished with his temper tantrum, comes back out and sits down.
“Any inspirations come to you?” he asks.
Merry’s face lights up. “What about a catering service? Just a small one, set out of this house.”
“If you really don’t want to do something with your business degree, which I think is a pity, I suppose your idea isn’t so bad. What’ll you make?”
“Whatever people will buy,” she says.
“What’ll you call it?”
She furrows her brow in concentration for a minute. “Maybe I’ll use what you said to me. Maybe I’ll call it ‘Help Yourself.’”
The old man smiles like the cat that just ate the canary.
Merry smiles, too. She becomes serious again quickly, though, pointing to the ashes that hang from the end of his cigarette.
“I have a deal for you, Uncle Max: I’ll feed you delicious food every day, but in r
eturn, you can’t smoke in the house. If I’m going to use the kitchen for catering, you can’t ever smoke in the house. Period.”
“And where am I going to smoke?” he asks, outraged.
“The deck. Or one of the covered balconies on the intracoastal side—you can even smoke in bad weather.”
“What if I say no? I shouldn’t be helping you anyway. If you meet all your goals, you’ll get the house and I won’t.”
“OK,” she says, shrugging her shoulders. “If you’re going to be stubborn about it, I won’t make you any more meals. Fritz can cook for you again.”
The old man makes a disgusted face and snorts, like I’m not even in the room.
“What’s your very favorite thing in the whole world to eat?” Merry asks, leaning in close to him.
He answers right away. “Chocolate cake. I have my mother’s old recipe memorized, but no one ever makes it quite right.”
“Maybe I can,” Merry says.
He looks at her hard for a few seconds.
“Maybe you can.”
Chapter Nine
IN WHICH MERRY WORKS VERY HARD
As told by our very hardworking Merry
I try not to waste any time today. After preparing, serving, and cleaning up from breakfast, I go right down to my room. The very first thing I do is shut the curtains: there’s no way I’ll get anything done if I stare at the ocean. The second thing I do is dust off my laptop.
I see right away that Phil hasn’t limited himself to voice messages. There are twenty-three e-mails from him in my inbox. I tell myself that I should just delete them all without reading a single one—I can’t get distracted by Phil and still reach my goal. But I don’t have the willpower.
I had forgotten that Phil can write a nice love letter when he wants to. Or twenty-three. He claims that my leaving made him see the light—that, as well as long chats with Amy Jo. He says he knows now that he’s been a bully, and a hothead, and he wants to change his ways. He keeps mentioning marriage.
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