“Whenever,” she said. “I’m just chopping carrots for salad. I can warm the chicken up anytime.”
“I’m hungry now,” he said.
“Then we’ll eat. Moira, set the table, please.”
A silence set in while they ate. Dinners were always like this. Elm didn’t understand why the family was reminded particularly of Ronan during dinner. They had rarely eaten together before; this was a new phenomenon. But his absence was acutely felt, his memory respected by a silence they had all tacitly agreed on.
Moira took one bite from each end of the three chicken fingers on her plate. She liked the ends, with the extra breading. She would have to be coaxed to eat the middle. Elm didn’t have the energy to fight this battle again. She was so tired that even her toes felt fatigued, as heavy as doorknobs.
As if she knew what Elm was thinking, Moira said, “Mom, do I have to eat the middle part?”
“What do you think I’m going to say?” Elm asked.
Moira didn’t answer. She took a large bite and chewed it with snarled lips.
Colin shook his head, snapping out of a daydream. “Guess what,” he said to Elm.
“What?” Moira answered automatically, looking at the three chicken fingers intently, willing them inside her stomach.
“It looks like Moore is buying Omnard’s prescription brands.”
“It’s going through, then?” Elm decided there was too much salt in the ricotta stuffing of the chicken breast. She began the delicate process of unstuffing it.
“Inked today. As of tomorrow Maxisom, Norafran, and Extardol are all ours.”
“What’s that, Daddy?” Moira had gotten down to two chicken finger middles, the point at which her mother usually gave up trying to make her eat them.
“Medicine to make people feel better.”
“And what happens to their PR departments?” Elm asked.
“They get folded into ours, I suppose. We’ll have to see how it’ll shake down.”
“Shake out.”
“Excuse me?” Colin poured them each another glass of wine.
“Shake down is extortion. Shake out is seeing how something will turn out.”
“Right,” Colin said. “Are you going to eat those, Ballyreal?”
“No,” Moira answered seriously. “I don’t think I’ll be eating these.”
“Should we be worried?” Elm asked.
“About the chicken fingers?”
Elm narrowed her eyes. “About the shakeout.”
“What good would worrying do us now?” He balled up his napkin and threw it at Moira, who squealed and jumped off her chair to pick it up.
“No good at all, which doesn’t mean I shouldn’t do it.” Elm stood up to clear the dishes. “Do you want to give M her bath?”
“No bath!” Moira screamed. “I already took a bath.”
“No, you didn’t,” Elm said.
“But I don’t want to.”
“Yeah, well, we have to do a lot of things we don’t want to do in this life, don’t we?”
“Come on.” Colin picked Moira up. “We can sing the bath time songs.”
Immediately, Elm regretted speaking so harshly to her daughter. Sometimes the little girl’s spoiled nature irked her, but if it was anyone’s fault it was Elm’s. Nannies, lessons, only-child-hood—no wonder Moira felt put out by any request that went contrary to her wishes.
That night in bed, with the rain falling heavily again and the tires sloughing off water twelve floors below on the wet streets, Colin snuggled up against Elm, breathing into the hair on the back of her neck. “Y’all gonna give us some somethin’ somethin’?” he asked.
“Who’s that voice?” Elm asked. “You sound like a deaf frog.”
“Thanks.”
There was a silence. Colin ran his hand over her stomach slowly, polishing it.
“What are we going to do this year?” Elm asked the ceiling.
“About what?”
“Ronan’s birthday.”
Colin’s hand abruptly stopped. He pulled it back to himself as though she’d bitten it. “I don’t know.”
Elm said, “Maybe we should go away.”
Colin turned, giving her his back. He was angry, hurt, Elm didn’t know which. Why could she still not read his silences after ten-plus years of marriage? Was she not allowed to talk about Ronan? “Maybe.”
After a silence Elm spoke. “I was going to say that I think I want to have another baby,” she said. Until that moment, she didn’t realize that she’d been thinking about getting pregnant, wondering if having another child might somehow ameliorate her grief.
“Really?” Colin said. “Is this the right time, do you think?”
“I’m over forty now. I don’t know how long it’ll take,” Elm said. “And I don’t want to regret not having started sooner. Or having waited too long.”
“I don’t know, Elm. Things are just so up in the air right now.”
Elm looked at the headboard. The veneer was beginning to chip away, revealing the particleboard underneath. “I just feel like I’m ready.” She shrugged. “We’re ready.”
“Let’s see how things shake down at Moore first.”
“Meaning …?”
“Meaning you can let that worry you to sleep tonight.”
His tone may have been harsh, Elm wasn’t sure. Was he angry at her for wanting another child? Because she could explain to him that she wasn’t trying to replace Ronan. Rather, she wanted the distraction of a new baby, the joy of creating a life. She would let the idea sink in and they could revisit it another time when Colin wasn’t so worried about his job. She stared at the molding where the ceiling met the wall, slippery white painted wood like waves. She willed her mind still and concentrated, concentrated, until her gaze clouded over and she slipped among them.
That Thursday night Elm and Colin were supposed to go to a party. Elm didn’t know the people and didn’t want to go. All afternoon she grew more and more angry at Colin until she erupted while they were getting ready to go out.
“I don’t know these people. You don’t even really know these people. Budokon class at the gym does not count as a place to know people from.”
“Come on,” he’d returned. “You drag me to work events all the time.”
“Yes, but you’ve met those people.” Elm stopped straightening her hair and went out to the bedroom where he was picking a tie. “And, I don’t have a choice. It’s for work.”
Colin said nothing. He tried on a jacket, then took it off and threw it on the bed. He surveyed his closet again.
“And are we tallying now?” Elm refused to let it drop. “Because I think Christmases in Galway count for a lot more than weekends at Pine Lake.”
“Drop it, Elm. If you don’t want to come, don’t. I’ll go alone.”
Now Elm looked out the window of the taxi sulkily, imagining her face illuminated in the taxi’s window as it reflected the buildings of Midtown. Why was she being so petulant? Because she was tired, she told herself. And she was too old to meet new people. The point of getting married, she argued with herself, is that you don’t have to go to parties anymore if you don’t want to. And here she was being dragged downtown to someone’s TriBeCa loft. Any normal people would live on the Upper West or Upper East Side, unless they were artists or showoffs or fake bohemians. Elm went downtown only to see art openings and to shop, and, frankly, both were better above Fiftieth Street.
She realized when they exited the cab at Duane and Church that these gym friends of Colin’s were going to be fake bohemians. The door was covered with half-scraped stickers of businesses past. Inside, Elm could see a lobby no bigger than a phone booth (she was dating herself, she knew, referencing things that no longer existed), and a small elevator that would inevitably smell of urine. Then they would get off the elevator directly into someone’s multimillion-dollar apartment with spectacular views of what used to be the Twin Towers but was now a pair of missing teeth on the horizon
and what would someday, maybe, be the Freedom Tower.
Colin was always doing this, making new friends. Part of it was his Irish accent. People thought he was friendly because he spoke with a lilt. It invited “Where are you from?” and then bred a false intimacy when they mentioned the time they’d traveled to Ireland and Colin feigned interest. And there was his smile, which, Elm admitted, was what attracted her to him in the first place. If she had to sum up Colin in one feature, it would be his mouth. A lopsided grin that made everyone else smile back, just the hint of teeth, like he was laughing because you were the funniest person on the planet. The mouth was so attractive that Elm hung out with it for weeks before she turned to him, outside a movie theater where they had seen a particularly sexy thriller, and said, “So are you going to kiss me ever?” and he looked somewhat stunned. Then he bent over to kiss her.
Ronan had inherited the same winning mouth. It made it nearly impossible for Elm to punish him, which he knew and exploited. He would smile goofily at her, and she would laugh, and his time-out would dissolve into giggles. He had a whole arsenal of expressions: the Puppy Dog, which always netted him ice cream; the Affected Pout, when he was exasperated by Elm; the Elvis, in which a curled lip meant he was humoring her attempts to cheer him; and the Toothless Glee, which, even when his teeth grew in, Elm always thought of as bare-gummed.
Elm had been wrong when she imagined that the elevator opened into the living room. Instead, there was a small mud room. They hung their coats on hooks and Colin rang the doorbell.
The door was opened by a man with a barrel chest so protuberant that Elm was reminded of a pin cushion, his arms and legs emanating like needles. His hair was long, though it only sparsely covered the putty-smooth crown of his scalp. He held a glass of champagne in his left hand. “Colin! Come in!” He swung the door wide and took a sip from his glass. Then he handed it to Colin and gestured for him to come in.
“You’re the wife,” he said.
“Elm,” she supplied her name. She held out her hand to shake, but the barrel-man leaned forward and kissed her on both cheeks quickly. Elm felt the color rise to her face.
“I’m Dick,” he said. Elm fought a juvenile urge to laugh.
Behind him, a large loft was fenced in by huge factory windows. On the walls hung several excellent pieces of modern art. Though Elm didn’t particularly care for any work completed after 1920, she had to admire the collection: Basquiat, Rothko, Dine, and a couple of artists she didn’t recognize. Guests posed on the various couches and chaises; they were universally attractive (though not prohibitively so), comfortable, well dressed.
“Ellen,” Dick called. “Colin and his wife are here.”
“Hello,” said a woman walking toward them. She was wearing black cigarette pants and a blouse made out of a sort of shimmery silk. “So glad you could come. We’ve heard so much about you.”
“Oh,” was all Elm could think of saying. Ellen’s hair was also long; it fell down her back in curls and waves. The temples were going gray. Elm disapproved of long hair on older women. So too the uncovered gray was a lie, the “I’m okay with my age” a mere front for the same insecure pore examination every woman over thirty performed every time she looked in a mirror. Anyone who pretended otherwise was a big phony.
Ellen drew Elm into the room while Dick poured Colin another drink. Elm met a few of the couples, who bore names that sounded like they’d made them up for the party: Kiki and Boris, Monique and Elvis, Geraine and Enjay. But, she reasoned, her name probably sounded ridiculous to those who didn’t know it was short for Elmira, a Tinsley family name that dated back to the seventeenth century. She felt Colin’s reassuring presence at her back and accepted the glass of red wine he proffered.
“You should see this man’s high kicks,” Dick said. “Watch out!” He swung his leg in the air, spilling some of his drink.
Elm forgave Colin immediately. She even inched toward him, as though they found themselves marooned in unexplored New Guinea being stared at by indigenous tribesmen. It reminded her of when they were first married, and right after Ronan died, when, for different reasons, they had clung to each other so tightly that the rest of the world seemed mere window dressing, incidental.
And yet Colin was in his element. He and Dick were laughing about their Budokon instructor, a muscle-bound lothario named Giorgio who would “crush ya as soon as look at ya.” Giorgio liked his class to find their “inna kick-ass” as well as their “levitational attitudes.” Originally from Queens, Giorgio was an inveterate name dropper; he had been trained by Billy Barken, who was some sort of guru, and Giorgio’s private clients included a nightclub impresario, several minor actors, and a reality television celebutante.
Elm sipped at her wine and smiled when it was appropriate. Exuberant people forced her into herself, to retreat back to her core. Colin expanded like a sponge. He did his Giorgio imitation, which Elm had never heard (had she?). All of Colin’s impressions were hilarious, if only because the accent was so ludicrous.
Elm looked over the shoulder of a short, curvy woman toward the Basquiat on the wall. It was one of his later works. Almost without realizing it, Elm left the circle, which had moved onto exercise trends of past and present—Fluidity, Jazzercise, aerobics, step aerobics, Tae Bo, Pilates—to examine it up close. It exuded a peculiar artificial lemon smell. Elm supposed it was from the cleaning supplies used in the house. Sometimes a canvas or a varnish will take on characteristics of its environment, the way people begin to look like their dogs. Elm followed a brushstroke while it dipped and whorled, then disappeared.
The curvy woman said, “Isn’t their art collection amazing? It would be easy to hate them, except they really love these paintings.”
“Well, then, I guess it’s money well spent.”
The woman extended her hand. Her nails were long and painted a bright shade of pink. “Relay,” she said.
Elm’s brow must have knit, because the woman added, “Seriously, that’s my name.”
“Elm.” The woman’s hand was warm.
“Well,” she said, as if to chide Elm for her equally preposterous name. “You want the tour?”
“Sure,” Elm said. “Are you? Do you …?”
“Art adviser.”
“Oh,” Elm said. She debated telling Relay what she did for a living. It inevitably changed the tone of the conversation. Art advisers relied on galleries for most of their purchases, since the clients were usually interested in contemporary art, but Elm’s auction house got occasional communications from those interested in the older works in which Tinsley’s specialized. If this woman knew that Elm was the specialist in Tinsley’s drawings department, she would probably butter her up in the hopes that Elm could tip her off if there was something undervalued hitting an auction, or a real find that was somehow underpublicized. Of course, this kind of insider trading was illegal but widely practiced. Elm made a habit of not consorting with the salesmen of the art world.
Relay took her into a long hallway with doors on one side. On the left was a large Pollock, an early work. She opened the last door and they entered the study. Across from a leather couch hung an enormous flat-screen television, and for a moment Elm wondered if that was the art she was supposed to see. Then Relay turned and pointed at an equally large charcoal drawing by Renoir, a study for Luncheon of the Boating Party. The table was more prominent in this sketch; it covered about 60 percent of the paper’s surface, and the “lens” was bigger, showing the table legs and feet wound around them, complete with two more Yorkshire terriers tearing at a piece of bread. A young woman who didn’t appear in the finished painting sat next to Aline Charigot, looking overwhelmed by the spectacle. In the back stood a boy whose features, blurred though they were by the wide swath of the charcoal, coalesced unmistakably into Ronan’s face. The same nose Elm had, Colin’s curly hair, the slight build, the insouciant posing. Elm gasped.
“I know,” Relay said. “It’s beautiful, right?”
&nb
sp; Elm nodded her head and forced back the lump in her throat that threatened to explode into tears.
“This is really their best piece. Very few of his sketches are still in existence. I heard he liked to burn them once the painting was complete. He felt they took the mystery out of the final product.”
Relay took her into the bedroom and showed her the Joan Mitchell triptych and Chihuli vase that stood proudly in the corner, hovering near a pair of embroidered Louis XIV chairs. Elm made all the admiring sounds she knew were appropriate to the situation, but she was still thinking about the Renoir. She was always picking Ronan out of crowds, and Colin or Ian would tell her she was imagining things. Yes, it was a boy with curly brown hair, but, really, he looked nothing like Ronan. He was obviously part Asian, or his lips were too full. She persisted, though. It gave her comfort to imagine him walking down New York streets, or little parts of him finding their way into other children.
Relay opened another door, which revealed a marble bathroom. Between the his-and-hers mirrors was an oil portrait of a Rhodesian Ridgeback. The dog was sitting stiffly in front of the Chihuli in the bedroom, head tilted quizzically at the viewer. It was a very realistic portrait, and completely devoid of any artistry whatsoever. Representational, not imaginative.
Relay said, “So many of my clients are into pet portraits these days. I have this woman on the Upper East Side who can paint from photographs if she has to. She met Dishoo before he died, though. Isn’t he adorable?”
Elm opened her mouth to say something noncommittally positive. She wondered if Colin was looking for her. They’d been gone awhile. Her empty wineglass was warm in her hand.
“They loved this dog. In fact, I was talking to Ellen and they are thinking of having him cloned.”
“What?” asked Elm. She was tired. “Cloned, like in bronze?”
“No, actually cloned.”
“We’re looking into the possibility, Relay. Don’t tell tales out of school.” Ellen stood in the doorway, silhouetted in black against the frame like a cameo.
A Nearly Perfect Copy Page 2