by Darcy Cosper
“And you know how to tell the difference?” Charles claps vigorously.
“Hector called again.” Pete knocks on the door frame and shuffles in. “He wants to know if we’re going to do that letter to his mistress or not.”
Charles and I exchange glances. I nod.
“You sure?” Charles asks me.
“Why wouldn’t I be? Go for it,” I tell Pete. “We’ve never done infidelity before.”
Pete grins significantly at us from underneath his hair.
“She means as an organization, you little hack,” Charles says, trying to sound stern. “It’ll be a learning experience. Get to work.”
Pete bobs and shuffles out. A moment later Myrna sticks her head into our office.
“If a spurned wife brings charges against us, I sincerely hope that I will have the good grace not to say I told you so. But I doubt it very much.”
“You don’t suppose Myrna’s father cheated on her mother, do you?” Charles asks after she has disappeared, widening his eyes and putting one finger under his chin, an ersatz ingenue.
“Shut up, Vern. Personal anguish isn’t always at the heart of an ethical position.”
“Not always.” Charles looks at me hard. “But often, don’t you think, dear?”
AT A QUARTER TO ONE I leave the office and head downtown on foot. It’s a clear, cool spring day, the sky pale blue and the sunlight a watery gold on the streets and crowds. I cross through Washington Square Park, passing the corner where old men pair up at stone tables to play chess, with small groups of acolytes, still as statues, gathered around them. The park is full of tableaux like this—lovers on the benches, knots of college students tightening around earnest young men who strum guitars. Near the center of the park, a couple on Rollerblades are skating their hearts out in a fantastic duet around the broad circle of the empty fountain. I move through the shadows of the hulkingly ugly buildings of the university where James works and onto the busy sidewalks of Soho, weaving between laden shoppers and aspiring models, past shiny boutiques where bright dresses and trinkets fill the windows, tempting passersby. I turn onto a side street and nearly walk past the entrance to Boîte, the door to which is marked only by a tiny engraving of a female figure, holding in her hand a box from which a mysterious ether drifts. The door is locked. I search for and find a small buzzer to the left of the door, press, and wait. I think briefly of the Prohibition era, and the strange pleasures of exclusivity, which have never held much charm for me. The door is opened by a neat young woman in black who eyes me silently.
“I’m with James Silverman,” I tell her, and she waves me in. I follow her up a narrow set of stairs to a waterfall of velvet curtains. We push through them into a large, high-ceilinged room with a wall of windows at one end. The decor is minimalist opium den crossed with 1940s grand hotel lobby. Tall frondy plants in giant urns cast shadows on the flocked metallic wallpaper. Black velvet couches, strewn with tiny embroidered throw pillows, cluster around low, faux-Oriental tables, at which diners are forced to hunch and lurch over their meals. Along one wall stretches a long bar, painted black and lacquered to a frightening brilliance. At the center of the room are a cluster of round banquettes elevated on daises and generously draped in canopies of sheer gold fabric.
My silent escort points, and at the far side of the room, crowded with people who all look vaguely familiar, I see my brother waving at me. I often forget how oddly handsome he is—we’re both tall and slender and topped with our father’s dark red hair, but James is more elegantly arranged all around. He looks like a dethroned Russian prince. I weave between the tables toward him, noting several minor celebrities along the way.
“This is hideous.” I fall into a club chair across from him.
“I know.” James preens and looks around. “Isn’t it divine? Bad taste is in again.”
“Dare I ask about the food?”
“French-Japanese fusion. It’s awful. Look, there’s the editor of Vanity Fair.”
“You’re an academic. You’re not supposed to care about the things of this world. You’re supposed to live the life of the mind.”
“Darling, I teach American Studies. One has to keep up. Look, there’s that director everyone is calling the next Orson Welles. Isn’t he cute?”
While James is craning his neck around, I puff out my cheeks, cross my eyes, and stick the tip of my tongue out at him. He turns back, and I drop the face. He narrows his eyes at me.
“You were making the baboon face,” he accuses.
“No, I wasn’t.”
“Yes, you were. You always make it when I’m being shallow.”
“I’d have to be making it constantly.”
“I recommend that you try the cervelles de veau sushi rolls,” James tells me severely from behind his menu. “The Cornish game hen skewers braised in sake are not completely dreadful. They come with sweet little shallots.”
“Actually, I’m suddenly not so hungry.”
“Just get the vegetables Provençal tempura,” James says, and nods to a vicious-looking waiter. He slinks over, and James orders for both of us. When the waiter has gone, James turns to me. “Now, darling. Something obviously has you in a snit. Don’t bother denying it. Tell big brother what’s on your mind.”
“You’re so sensitive. Weddings are on my mind, is what.”
“God, I know. What a nightmare. Charlotte, Mom, Dad, and Josh. They must have arranged it out of spite.”
“That’s not the half of it. Charlotte will be the third of seventeen for me.”
“All this year?” James gasps.
“Between now and September. All of the girls, Gabe’s sister, one I promised to attend with Charles. A few others.”
“What were you thinking, Joy? You hate weddings.”
“I do, yes.”
“Just cancel for some of them.”
“I can’t. I’ve already promised I’d be there.”
“Oh, yes.” James rolls his eyes. “And Joy Silverman never goes back on a promise. Never breaks her word.”
“Why do you still make fun of me about that? As principles go, it’s not such a ridiculous one to have.”
“The best of positions become useless when they cease to make you happy. Right now your precious integrity is making you miserable.”
“On the contrary. Principles don’t mean anything if you abandon them when they become inconvenient or uncomfortable.”
“So you’ve said. Countless times.”
“I don’t know why it bothers you so much.” I peer out the window. In the loft across the street, a nearly naked man, sagging into his late middle age, is rubbing paint onto a giant canvas with his bare hands.
“Rigor depresses me.” James raises his glass of mineral water. “Cheers. You know, this really is a Freudian sickness.”
“How do you mean, Professor?”
“Don’t you remember when all of this started?” James squints at me. I shake my head. “When you vowed never to break a promise? No? Of course you don’t. How perfect.”
“You’re so awful when you try to be knowing. Just tell me.”
“It was just a couple of months after Dad moved out.” James swirls water around in his glass. “He was supposed to come and take us to the zoo. It was a Saturday, I believe. It was spring. You must have been nine or ten. You don’t remember this?”
I shake my head. James imitates me, making a faux-naïf expression as he shakes his head, his dark hair lashing over one eye.
“He didn’t come. He’d promised, and he just never showed up. Mom was furious. She told us that he had done it on purpose, to teach us a lesson. To teach us that you couldn’t count on anyone, and that promises meant nothing. You were sitting on the floor of the living room, very quiet. Then you stood up and announced to us that you would never break a promise, and you’d never make a promise you couldn’t keep. And Mom laughed at you, and then she started crying, and went into her bedroom, and stayed there for the rest of the day. I
can’t believe you don’t remember.”
“I can’t believe you do. I think you’re making it up. You’ve been sitting in on too many of those freshman psychology classes.”
“Your denial is embarrassing.” James glares at the waiter, who has returned with our meal. “Look, there’s Donald Trump’s new girlfriend.”
MY BROTHERS AND I grew up in New York City. Our family lived in an apartment on the Upper West Side, a nice big prewar place with too many little rooms and not enough closets, a creaky old elevator and a creaky old doorman, not too far north of Lincoln Center, and just off Central Park. All three of us kids attended some freaky experimental grade school that was part of the education program at the university where my dad was a professor. Starting in middle school we commuted to a private day school downtown, also of the alternative variety. We spent the Jewish holidays with my father’s parents, who lived out on Long Island along with most of the sprawling Silverman clan. The other holidays we spent with my Granny Celeste, a lapsed Catholic from a small town in southern France. My mother’s father died before I was born; Gran jokes that her cooking did him in, that he, a first-generation American, born to English immigrants, wasn’t man enough to eat like the French.
Anyway, after not quite sixteen years of marriage, my parents separated and then divorced—irreconcilable differences, they said. My father moved out and took a studio closer to the university, a one-room apartment so small that we couldn’t even spend the night with him there. Instead, we lived with my mother, who was granted uncontested custody of us, and had outings once or twice a month with Daddy, for whom my brothers and I had a definite preference. He was a clever, easygoing, unflappable man who seemed amused by everything. He was always laughing, always making these dry, droll, deadpan asides to us, delivered with knowing looks and conspiratorial winks. He reminded me of James Bond or Cary Grant in the old movies I saw on television, suave and cavalier, able to master any situation with cool charm and a witty comeback. When my mother or James, who both tended toward the high-strung, voluble end of the spectrum, got worked up about something, my father would chuckle, flexing his hands out in front of him as if he were smoothing wrinkles in the air, and say, “Water off a duck’s back, sweetheart.” Once, in response to the duck comment, James quacked at him and my father laughed for five minutes straight; after the divorce, whenever my mother got into one of her fits of temper (which was often), James and Josh and I would make quacking noises at one another and usually ended up giggling helplessly while Mom yelled at us. Daddy, by contrast, was rarely angry or impatient—though I can see now that this was in part because he left all household and child-rearing responsibilities to my mother and secured the Good Cop position for himself in perpetuity. At the time, though, he was our uncontested, adored favorite, and in particular during the first few years following their divorce we looked forward to his visits with the manic anticipation most kids reserve for school vacations. I honestly don’t remember the particular afternoon James mentioned, but I can imagine how wounded I would have been if he had failed to show up.
About three years after the divorce my mother got married again, to a man named Chet, a golf pro she met at someone’s country club during a weekend outing in the Hamptons. My brothers and I were not thrilled. Daddy, of course, thought it was hilarious. By that point James and I were a little too old to see Chet as anything but an interloper and a buffoon, which he kind of was, in a handsome, harmless sort of way. Only Josh, eleven at the time, was of an age to feasibly consider him a stepfather, and Josh didn’t. He was one of those old-soul kids who did everything correctly and quietly and called no attention to himself and was thus left to his own devices, which was precisely his plan. Meanwhile, I brooded in my room, and James made noisy trouble; he was coming out around that time, and he demonstrated his feelings about my mother’s marriage by staging a make-out session with a busboy at the wedding reception—on the dance floor, in full view of my mother and Chet and both extended families. James has never been all that interested in subtlety. He and Henry love each other.
Anyway, things were fine for about two years, and then they weren’t. Mom and Chet started bickering—about the usual things that aren’t the real things: who gets home when, who takes responsibility for what, who coaches too many pretty young divorcées on their putting techniques. And so on. James went off to college and, after much heated debate between my parents, Josh went to boarding school. Which meant that I was alone for the final two and really bad years of Mom’s marriage to Chet, and alone with her after their separation. I spent an inordinate amount of time being forced to listen, late into the night, to her kitchen-table tirades, during which I silently swore to myself I would grow up to be nothing remotely resembling her. If someone wants to psychoanalyze me, there are probably worse places to start.
I read somewhere that if you can’t be a positive example, you’ll just have to serve as a terrible warning, and my mother was great for that. I mean, I love her. I do. And I know she’s had a hard time. She grew up believing that marriage and motherhood were a woman’s highest calling. Then the world as she knew it was shaken and stirred by big bad Betty Friedan and Simone de Beauvoir, just a little too late for her to really join the revolution. She’s done the best she could, and I admire her for it. But as far as role models go, well-she tends to the irrational, the emotive, the clingy, the hysterical. In short, my mother is the stereotypical female, and nothing I ever wanted or want to emulate.
JAMES AND I finish lunch and are on our way out of the restaurant when I hear a voice call my name. I turn to see Luke, the bartender from Pantheon, leaning from one of the raised, lamé-swathed banquettes at the center of the room. I wave and he beckons me over.
“Hey, gal.” He hops out of the tent and kisses my cheek.
“Hey, yourself. What’s a nice guy like you doing in a dump like this?”
“Having lunch with—”
“Luke, who are your friends?” Ora Mitelman pushes aside the gold drapery and gives me an acute and very unconvincing smile.
Luke introduces me as an “old friend.” I introduce James to both of them. I don’t bother reminding Ora that we’ve met. And met. And met. I suspect she’ll remember me now that I’m the “old friend” of a new conquest. There’s never been anything more than the bar between me and Luke, but I don’t go out of my way to correct what is clearly her misconception; I do go out of my way to tender Luke a very affectionate farewell. I’m not usually like this, but Ora rubs me the wrong way. She’s such a girl.
James and I walk to Salle de Bain, where Charlotte and Burke have graced the bridal registry with their soon-to-be hyphenated names. The store is a half-block-long shrine to pewter and bath linens, lit entirely with beeswax candles that glimmer in the reflection of a hundred gilt-framed mirrors and illuminate a thousand bottles of overpriced, exotically scented bath salts.
“It’s like something out of the Brontë sisters by way of Southeast Asia,” James whispers to me, in the cathedral hush of the entrance. “Very luxe-sinister.”
“I hear their blood-of-virgins bubble bath is very popular,” I whisper back. “Why are we whispering?”
“Welcome to Salle de Bain,” a fey blonde in a white dress whispers to us. “Can I help you?”
“Bridal registry!” James shouts. I choke. The girl gives us a cool look.
“You’d like to register?”
“Yes!” James shouts.
“No,” I tell her. James drops to his knees before me and covers my hand with kisses. “There are certain conventions even I won’t flout,” I inform the salesgirl, and attempt to retrieve my hand. “Marrying my gay brother is at the top of the list. James, get up.”
“You’re no fun.” He stands and dusts off his pants.
“Charlotte Blake,” I tell the blonde. “Will you show us what she’s registered for, please?” She huffs off. James plucks three satin-wrapped lavender sachets from a large basket and juggles them. I ignore him and inspect a
nearby shelf of certified organic bath oils. The salesgirl returns with a large, leather-covered book. James catches the sachets neatly in one hand and returns them to the basket.
“Is that the Book of Souls?” he inquires politely. She gives him a blank look, and begins flipping through the pages.
“Blake.” Her voice drips contempt. “Charlotte. Yes. Towels, Turkish velour, bath sheet, standard, hand, guest, washcloth. Sheets, Sea Island cotton, king. Sheets, cashmere, king. French swansdown pillows, king. Throw pillows, ivory damask-covered. Shower curtain in sterling mesh. Bath accessories, pewter. Soap dish, toothbrush holder, lipstick organizer, tissue box cover, toothpaste tube cover, bath stop, doorstop, candelabra set. Frankincense- and myrrh-infused beeswax candles, three dozen. Electric towel-warming rack. Steam-free in-shower shaving mirror with matching silver shaving dish and silver shaving brush with hand-gathered pashmina bristles.”
“How about the matching set of eunuch servants?” James asks.
“We’ll take the towel rack,” I tell the salesgirl.
“I’ll have to see if we have any left in stock,” she says icily, and marches off with the book under her arm.
“I wanted to get the candelabras.” James pouts.
“Behave, or I’ll make you charge this to your account and then you’ll be locked up in debtors’ prison.” I march to the register.
“You may very well end up there yourself,” James says, “with seventeen wedding gifts to purchase. And presents for bridal showers. And god knows how many bridesmaid’s ensembles with dyed-to-match shoes.”
“Thank you for reminding me. What would I do without you?”
When the salesgirl returns I hand her my credit card and she rings up the towel rack.
“Didn’t you want the pewter vibrator?” James leans over my shoulder to look at the receipt. “Six hundred dollars? Are you insane?”