Olivia

by Judith Rossner

  “I didn’t have time before,” Sheldon said, afraid that the recorder of deeds was listening.

  “It was a real test,” Perry said, “and you passed it with flying colors.”

  In spite of myself, I was mollified. Flattered.

  “I thought you worked for an ad agency,” I said to Perry.

  He smiled. “I do. Ad agencies and poll takers are what television’s about.”

  Livvy came home, hesitated, as though in fear, asked whether it was okay to come in.

  “Certainly,” I said stiffly. I introduced her to the two men. She nodded and went to her bedroom as we sat in silence.

  Sheldon said, “So, that’s the kid.”

  “That’s the kid,” I repeated.

  Perry spoke into the ensuing silence.

  “There are a few things we, Sheldon, has to know, do, before he begins to think seriously about a show. Even if you’re willing to fake getting mad again, he has to get a feeling for things you might be able to talk about, besides Italian food, which there’s been a lot of.”

  “I don’t know what’s been done,” I pointed out. “I’ve never seen Julia or the others on TV.” Nor did I really think of what I cooked as Italian Food, but just as food.

  “Well, that could be an advantage. That you’re fresh.”

  “In the meantime,” Sheldon said, restless with no crisis to amuse him, “can you do it again? For a tape?”

  I smiled. “Maybe you’ll have to be the one to make me mad.”

  “You get mad pretty easily,” he said. “You were mad at me, anyway, and you got madder when the kid walked in.”

  “That’s not true!” I said, stung. “If I was in a bad mood it was bee—”

  “Don’t waste it on me, sweetheart,” Sheldon said. “I have four of ’em.”

  “You mean everything that goes on with everyone’s kids is the same?”

  “The shit’s the same.”

  Perry laughed. “He’s been reading Dostoyevski.”

  “I never read Dusty Anything,” Sheldon said. “I’m not like you guys. I was a dropout. I didn’t learn what I know in school.”

  I was about to tell him he wasn’t the only dropout in the room but stopped myself because it sounded competitive.

  “All right,” I said. “So she gets me mad. So, now what?”

  “So now maybe you wanna do the pasta lesson for me?”

  “Are you kidding?” It was almost ten o’clock.

  He shrugged. “Only if you feel like it.”

  Perry laughed, got his coat from the end of the sofa.

  “I’m going to say good night. I can tell that you two’ll be able to carry on without me.”

  Sheldon barely nodded but I thanked Perry, said I’d love to talk to him during the week.

  “You don’t have to thank him for anything,” Sheldon assured me. “Fate would’ve arranged for us to meet, one way or the other.”

  With an embarrassed laugh, I waved good night to Perry.

  “I know we’re supposed to be tolerant of fags now,” were Sheldon’s first words when the door had closed behind Perry. “But every time I think of what they’re into, I wanna throw up.”

  I was silent, wondering how I would be able to deal with this man even if he could make something wonderful happen. Then I asked myself if I thought I was kidding me; Sheldon Halstead might be pointing to a way out of almost everything that was difficult or inadequate in my life, while allowing me to keep the life, the cooking life, itself.

  “All right,” Sheldon said, pouring the last couple of ounces of coffee. “So here’s what we’ll do. I’ll come back tomorrow afternoon with a cameraman, and you’ll talk to us. Talk about yourself, talk about your life, how you got to Italy, and then you’ll work up to, you know . . .”

  “I have a class tomorrow afternoon.”

  I had to be careful not to throw away my real life while daydreaming about a better one.

  “You can’t cancel it?”

  I shook my head. “I’m sorry. I could do tomorrow morning. Or the foll—”

  “Oh, shit. All right. I’ll wake up in the morning. Ten A.M. That’s my final offer.”

  Perry would tell me later on that Sheldon’s Julia Child story had been fabricated, there’d never been any mention of a cooking show until Perry dragged him to my class. If I didn’t know that, and if I was much too excited by the prospect Sheldon offered to dwell on his objectionable personality, that didn’t prevent me from being leery of the man, the aggressive gloss on his deficiencies, his awful speech, his prejudices, so much less understandable than my own.

  I would do bread instead of pasta. One of my Westport ladies had called me in tears because just as she’d mastered the pasta machine, a store selling fresh pasta had opened a block from her husband’s office. They were all over the place now. Soon pasta machines would join espresso makers and the various other items that people used two or three times, then set on a high shelf for display (Cuisinarts being the known exception). Bread dough had at least as many possibilities as pasta, more interesting variations. And you could tell people about the wonderful smells they’d be missing if they never baked their own bread. I’d do bread.

  Settled. But I wasn’t satisfied.

  If Sheldon had perceived that I was an entertainer, my subject food as another’s might be sex, race, or his mother-in-law, if my spontaneity had been my attraction, then surely he was going to have to allow me to get happy instead of mad. Surely one could attract people with humor. Surely . . . No. I stopped myself. Something in the way I sounded reminded me of the old days, when, as soon as my parents had an idea for something I should do, a reason for doing something different had presented itself. I hadn’t wanted to be in school then, but I would most certainly love to find fame and fortune as a TV chef now.

  I was going to have to get mad again.

  I could. I did. I made bread, instead of pasta, having promised Sheldon that bread dough required the same kind of pounding as pasta dough did. And when it was time, I worked myself into another mad frenzy by thinking of how, if I didn’t put on a good show, I was going to spend a lot of my life teaching cooking to six or eight people at a time and fighting with my daughter about money. When it was over, I collapsed in the chair facing Sheldon’s. He was staring at me in a way I couldn’t interpret. Selena, his attractive young Chinese-American camerawoman, was folding up her equipment to prepare for takeoff. But Sheldon wasn’t going anyplace.

  “I can’t believe you,” he said, having already made it clear that he’d gone through life until this day not understanding that anyone actually baked bread. “I have found a new star in the cuisinary firmament.”

  “Culinary firmament,” Selena said as she joined us at the table.

  “The culinary firmament,” Sheldon repeated, unfazed. “We’re going all the way, kiddies. Take my word for it.”

  By a month later, my contracts with Sheldon were signed, I had inherited Larry’s computer (they’d bought a laptop they could move between Westport and New York), and I’d begun entering my class outlines as well as anything else I thought might be interesting for a TV program. I never wanted to leave the apartment for fear I’d miss Sheldon’s call. He didn’t call. The summer was approaching, and not only had his initial enthusiasm diminished, but another show of his, “Joy Beach,” had been picked up as a summer replacement by one of the networks and required a lot of attention. He assured me (for the first time) that nothing was going to happen so fast, anyway, it was too late for the coming season. But when I told him I would be teaching in Westport all summer, he became concerned about being able to reach me at all times. I told him we had a telephone. He wasn’t offended—or amused.

  It was as I was telling myself to come down to earth and start outlining Westport’s and next fall’s classes that Leon called to invite me out for a quiet dinner so we could talk without the kids around “before we all disappear for the summer.”

  I was so excited that I phoned Bea
trice at her office. She decided to tease me about the kosher chickens coming home to roost. I was annoyed. She’d been dubious that anything would happen with Sheldon, she knew too much about the way the TV world worked, and now . . . Why couldn’t she just be happy for me? Leon was a pleasant and intelligent man I liked, and to whose children I was already attached. A nice-looking man of average height and build, with brown hair, lovely eyes, and, under a small, trim mustache, full lips that one could think of as being sensual, particularly if one was already having se(x)nsual fantasies about him. Until now I had curbed such fantasies because of Christina, and surely I still had to keep some rein on them. But to think of having a boyfriend who lived upstairs, and had children who were already attached to me, was better than any dream I might have come up with. I had to calm myself with a reminder that however impossible my daughter’s behavior was now, a romance with this man who’d been involved in her humiliation might make it worse.

  We were seated in the Tiger’s Eye, a comfortable Village bistro Leon liked because it wasn’t frequented by anyone from the hospital. We’d had more than half a bottle of wine and I’d explained how I had been able to leave Livvy in Rome, thinking that she’d never miss me because of her attachment to Mirella. But whether or not she’d missed me, it appeared she couldn’t forgive me for going.

  “I guess you know,” he said, “Rennie’s pretty difficult.”

  “I couldn’t tell for sure. She doesn’t come down with the other two”—I shrugged, smiled—“but that could just mean she doesn’t like me.” One day that week I’d heard Annie and Ovvy talk about a fight between Rennie and Mrs. Borelli. They hadn’t begun to confide in me yet, but they’d become less cautious about what they said to each other in my presence.

  “She’s impossible. With everyone. Including me. When there’s no reason, she finds one. They say thats about first kids in general, but she also . . . She was the one who suffered the most with her mother. She was the most attached to her, the most jealous, the most . . .” He smiled. “The most everything. Including intelligent, probably.”

  I nodded. None of us had mentioned his wife since that first day.

  He laughed. “There you go again, not asking the obvious questions. Joanna, she wasn’t clinically crazy, but she gave neurosis a new meaning. She had no interest in men or sex, or in taking care of children once they were born, for that matter. She just liked being pregnant, having babies, naming them. She didn’t tell me right away when she was pregnant with Ovvy, she was afraid I’d insist on an abortion. I would have, even if I’m glad I didn’t get to. It’s nice to have another male in the house. Anyway, a few months after Ovvy was born, she took a female lover. A year later, they moved to California. A year after that, she left the woman very briefly for a man, but if my information’s correct, she’s gone on to another woman since then.”

  “It would be almost funny, if it weren’t for the kids,” I finally said.

  “It was pretty rough. I had a series of people. Mrs. Borelli came when Ovvy was two. She cooked in those days. Nothing like you, but . . . If she hadn’t stayed, I couldn’t have remained at the hospital. I’d be practicing out of an office in a real apartment someplace. We’d have had to move. Being in this neighborhood was tied up with Joanna’s idea that if you lived in a loft, you became an artist. Once or twice I’ve talked to them about moving to a real neighborhood—the Village, Gramercy Park, whatever, someplace where I could have a practice—and the girls objected violently. Rennie’s shrink said there was some very primitive notion that if we moved their mother wouldn’t be able to find them if she ever decided to look.” He smiled. “Anyway, Christina says I’d have gone nuts in about two weeks if I’d tried to practice out of an apartment. As it is, the girls were always calling me at the hospital with something they thought they were dying from.”

  Christina says. Present tense. So much for my lovely romance with a man whose wife was permanently AWOL, and whose children were already filling a large part of the gaping hole Livvy had left in my heart.

  Our dinners were served. They were pleasant. He asked if I minded eating in a place like this. I said it was just fine. He described his gruesome (hot dogs, potato chips, and so on) eating habits when he was working. I told him I didn’t remember what kind of doctor he was.

  “A pediatrician.” He smiled. “What do you think of that?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know yet.”

  “No wonder I like you,” he said, laughing. “You’re the first woman who ever didn’t tell me how great it was.” Then he grew embarrassed at what he said, tried to cover by telling me stories about various women he’d dated, including one who had treated him to a lengthy discourse on how much money a family could save with a doctor around.

  I said, “I hardly ever go to doctors.”

  He said, “And you’re trying to make me believe you’re Jewish!”

  “One of those half-assed Jews. No religion. No doctors.”

  “What about your parents?” he asked.

  “Not religious. They’re academics. They both teach at Columbia.”

  “You’re kidding!” He appeared to be genuinely startled.

  I shook my head. “My sister and brother’re teachers, too.”

  “That’s not the picture I had of you,” he said.

  “It’s not the picture I have of myself,” I assured him.

  He fell silent.

  “What about you?” I asked. “What do you come out of?”

  “The Bronx,” he said. “The Amalgamated. Do you know what that is?”

  I confessed I didn’t.

  “Union housing. Amalgamated Clothing Workers Union. My father worked in the Garment Center, my mother was in the post office. My full name is Leon Nikolai Klein. Does that suggest anything to you?”

  “Nikolai sounds Russian.”

  “You bet it sounds Russian. Leon is for Trotsky, Nikolai’s for Lenin. I can’t believe this. You now know a secret only my best friends know. I must trust you.”

  “Well,” I said, at once pleased and discomfited, “I guess anyone who makes chicken soup can’t be all bad.”

  “You betcha. I’ve never known a woman who could cook.”

  “Oh, c’mon,” I said. “What about your mother?”

  “My mother not only didn’t cook, she disapproved of women who did. Said it was a form of slavery. She was the first woman in the Bronx to do takeout. I think she invented it. The only place I ever had a home-cooked meal was at my grandparents’, her parents, and we didn’t go there very often because they didn’t get along. Politics. My grandparents were just these sweet old Jews who thought the United States was wonderful because it was better to the Jews than anyplace else’d ever been.”

  I said that my parents hadn’t been hostile to religion but there hadn’t been any in the household, either. By this time we’d each had a couple of glasses of Chianti and I found myself telling him about my belated discovery of Angelo’s anti-Semitism. He said he wasn’t surprised. On the rare occasion when he left New York, he was aware of being a Jew in a way that he never was when he was here.

  The dinner proceeded pleasantly, and when we’d reached home, Leon said we’d have to do this more often, maybe some time he’d even take me for a decent meal. I told him he shouldn’t worry about it, that, as he might have gathered, I enjoyed preparing food, even if it was fun to go out. He said good night and quickly went upstairs, leaving me to wonder whether my use of the suggestive phrase “go out” had left him concerned that I was, after all, trying to compete with his girlfriend.

  Whether or not this was the case, the summer was almost upon us. I would be in Westport giving classes. At a time when Livvy was complaining about having to be there just because I was, my parents had saved the day by finding her a live-in baby-sitter’s job that was an easy bike ride from our house. This was particularly helpful because the work on the house they’d talked about, turning a semi-finished basement into two more bedrooms and a bath, was final
ly being done and there was going to be chaos. In fact, I’d arranged with two women to alternate my classes between their large, well-equipped kitchens rather than doing them out of my parents’.

  Leon and two friends from the hospital always rented a house in Southampton, to which he went whenever he had two days in a row when he wasn’t working, and where the kids spent what they called their “real vacation” when camp ended. I wouldn’t see any of them for more than two months. I had a new fantasy: A restless, sort-of divorced, heterosexual male doctor—you know he’s heterosexual because he’s engaged in the revolting male activity known as channel-surfing, scrolling through TV channels to glimpse what’s playing—is doing same. His attention is caught by an attractive, youngish woman, standing over a stove. She wears an apron and a peasanty sort of dress. Her hair is in a braided crown so it won’t get into her way. She is giggling over . . . over . . . He loves this woman’s laugh. Wait a minute! Isn’t that the woman who lives downstairs? How come he never noticed that laugh? Perhaps he hasn’t been funny enough. He determines to find out if this lovely creature giggles in bed the way she does on her cooking show.

  I’d been in Westport for a few weeks when the leading man in my daydream called to ask whether I would by any chance be in the city that weekend and, if so, whether I’d like to have dinner with him on Saturday night. He was working Sunday and had decided not to bother driving to the beach for one day. I was even more startled than pleased. I didn’t ask where Christina was, but I hesitated for so long that he told me that if this Saturday wasn’t good, we could make it another time, and I had to assure him that it was fine. In fact, weekends were easier for me, because I had no classes.

  My sister teased me about waiting “years” until this man decided to extend an invitation, and then running in to meet him the moment he asked. Her teasing had gotten rougher since the very possibility of a TV show had been raised. But Saturday morning I took the train into a hot, stuffy city, and late Saturday afternoon I showered, washed and dried my hair, then took a nap with the fan aimed at my naked body. For all’ the heat, my apartment felt wonderful when I knew that a hostile Livvy wasn’t going to storm in at any moment.