Olivia

by Judith Rossner

  He looked troubled.

  “I don’t know if they can do much. You know, my mother works, and my aunt has little kids at home.”

  “If I need help I can hire someone,” I assured him. “I meant, they could tell me some of the dishes from Cuba and Puerto Rico that are right for a wedding. And, of course, they have to tell us who they want to invite. I guess we’ll have to send invitations pretty soon.”

  Livvy didn’t come back out of the room. After a while, Pablo checked on her, told me she was asleep, sounding as though he’d been told to say that. He also said that his aunt was going to make Livvy’s gown for her. That way we’d only have to pay for the material.

  Leon picked up a magazine.

  I said, “Don’t answer this if you don’t want to, Pablo. When you and Olivia are with your family, is she the same as she is here?”

  “Oh, no!” he said, then flushed as he heard himself. But he decided it was just as well to go ahead with the truth. “She gets along real good with my mother, all my family. They’re all crazy about her.”

  “How nice,” I said. We had both lowered our voices.

  “She helps with the dishes.”

  I smiled. “I promise I won’t tell her you told me.”

  He nodded.

  “Is she the same to you as she is here?”

  He shook his head.

  “Why do you think that is?”

  He shrugged. “She says it’s what happens to her, you know, here. She thinks it’s because you left her when she was little.”

  “She was ten. And I wanted her to come with me.”

  He was startled. “That’s later than my father left.”

  “She wasn’t such a little kid, huh?”

  Leon’s arm came around my shoulder. He patted me, signaling that I didn’t have to defend myself, but I felt more defensive with him than with Pablo.

  “I think she felt like one,” I said. “I think she feels like one now.”

  Pablo’s eyes filled with tears. “I’ll take good care of her.”

  Leon looked up from his magazine. “You’ll take care of her, but who’ll take care of the baby?”

  Pablo was startled, even more upset. He spoke to me.

  “My aunt says lots of young girls, they don’t know what to do with a baby. And then they learn.”

  “Maybe some do,” Leon said. “Some of them never learn. They bring them to the clinic if they cry because they don’t know that if a baby cries, it usually just wants to be picked up and fed.”

  “We’ll tell her,” Pablo said, looking at me. “We’ll all help.”

  “Of course we will,” I said, uneasy because I couldn’t see Leon’s pushing getting us anyplace. “We’re just concerned. She doesn’t seem to be planning for anything to do with the baby.”

  “For instance,” Leon said, “are you planning to look for your own apartment?”

  “We’re going to,” Pablo said. “Mrs. Ferrante said we could stay here until Olivia graduates.”

  But he was uneasy; he knew as well as Leon and I that it didn’t hang together. In a city where reasonable places were nearly impossible to find, we were talking about their walking out of a half-used one in the same building as their most obvious baby-sitter, immediately before the baby’s birth.

  “Or until you find an apartment, if it takes longer,” I added.

  “Which could,” Leon said, “be years.”

  Pablo was silent.

  “What do you think’ll happen,” I asked Pablo, “if Olivia gets into Harvard?”

  He shrugged. That part was easy.

  “She can’t go. That’s just talk. Anyway, hardly anybody gets into Harvard.”

  Finally there was something he and Leon could agree on.

  “Look,” Leon said after a long time, “I hope you understand, being opposed to the marriage, the baby, it’s not about you, it’s about what we think’s best for Livvy.”

  Pablo met Leon’s glance levelly, shrugged. “It doesn’t matter what it’s about. God decided to give us a baby. We decided to get married to take care of it.”

  “Well,” I said after a long pause, “I guess it’s time to pack it in. This weekend we should have a conference. Figure out the details. The wedding. The guest list.”

  Pablo nodded. Leon stood and stretched. I thought Pablo had finally won him over a little, or just won, but at the door, he couldn’t resist one last word.

  “I just hope God decides to give you an apartment and a good baby-sitter.”

  Pablo turned away from us.

  “Let’s go,” Leon said to me, and though I was tempted not to, I followed.

  Upstairs, we prepared for bed and turned off our lights but then lay wide awake, our bodies not touching at any point. When he finally spoke, his tone was sardonic.

  “So you’re going to have a baby to take care of after all.”

  I had better be careful. No more hedging. I measured every word carefully before I let it out of my mouth.

  “Yes. At first I was so upset about Livvy, I couldn’t admit there was anything good about it. I was afraid of encouraging her if I sounded as though I’d do everything. But I’ll do whatever the baby needs that she doesn’t do. And some of it I’ll enjoy. I hope she’ll get to a point where she enjoys it. If I can get her to a therapist, maybe. And if she knows I’m right here. Backing her up.”

  Leon sat up in bed, turned on his night-table light.

  “Explain what you mean by ‘right here,’ ” he said in a neutral voice.

  I sat up, too. His totally unnecessary exit line had put me on guard and I was feeling no friendlier to him than he was to me.

  “Well, that’ll depend, I guess. On what happens between you and me. If we’re together, ‘right here’ will be up here. And I guess I’d want an intercom of some sort.” I smiled ironically. “Maybe a beeper.” He had one, though it wasn’t often used.

  “Go on.” His voice had grown chillier.

  “If things are worse, if they’re like they are at this minute, or we’ve broken up altogether, then I’ll go back to my apartment, and I guess I’ll share my room, my old room, with the baby. Until that doesn’t work anymore. I’ll probably want them to stay. If we break up, if you leave me, I’ll be pretty lonely.” My voice trembled but held. He was waiting. I took a deep breath. “And then, of course, if we decided, if you decided to get married—most of the time I already know I want to, even if right now I don’t, then we could think about other possibilities. Changes you wouldn’t want to make when everything’s temporary.”

  “You consider what we have temporary?”

  I thought carefully, finally said, “I guess I do. It’s not permanent. You were the one who talked about the final step.”

  “So, if I don’t want to take the final step, it means I might want to leave you?”

  I shrugged. “More that you want to be free to leave me. If the desire takes you at some point.”

  Was he going to bother to point out that married people left each other? And then I’d have to come up with something about intention. A ceremony lent weight to people’s intentions. I was becoming interested in life’s ceremonies. Well, in customs, anyway. Even before Livvy’s pregnancy, I’d begun to think about the matter of never knowing who would be joining me for dinner, when, where, even how. What people might expect, as opposed to what they were suddenly in the mood for. It was one thing to cook for anyone who dropped in to your restaurant, another to live your whole life, your home life, that way. Or maybe it was just about getting older. The word refuge hadn’t been in my vocabulary when I was young. Home, my parents’ refuge, was what I’d needed to escape, custom was boredom’s best friend.

  “All right,” Leon said, “so marriage would mean we intended to stay together for life. Then what would these other possibilities be?”

  There was a studied neutrality to his voice that warned me to keep my distance. Keeping it, I could more easily answer him.

  “For the apartme
nts, you mean? There’re all kinds of possibilities. If we didn’t want to think about moving if . . . when . . . my kids move out. I need a study. We could have a better kitchen. But the biggest thing in terms of money and work, if we wanted the apartments to get married . . .” I smiled timorously; he didn’t smile back. I shrugged. “The obvious thing is, if we were turning it into a duplex we’d need a staircase. Maybe one of those wrought-iron circular jobs that doesn’t take up so much space. There’re all kinds of possibilities. It depends on how far you want to go, and whether the landlord . . .”

  I stopped. On Leon’s face, neutrality had been replaced by something else that had given way to incredulity. I shouldn’t have been so straightforward. Our wavelengths were too far apart these days.

  Finally, he said, “You’ve got it all figured out, don’t you.”

  I shrugged, but my heart was racing as though I’d just run a mile.

  “I wouldn’t say that. The other night I was just lying in bed, and I couldn’t sleep, and I was thinking about the possibilities.”

  “The possibilities, indeed,” he murmured. Then, after an interminable period, he said, “I’m sorry if I sound like a bastard, but I feel as though I’m being suckered.”

  At first I didn’t quite understand. When it hit me, it did just that. For some time I couldn’t move. Or breathe. But eventually I got out of bed and went to the bathroom doorway, standing there, facing him as though he might otherwise come up from behind and hit me again.

  “I’m hell-bent on not having any more kids,” he said, “and you’re dying to have a baby, so you’ll just have to raise this baby that isn’t yours, that you’re supposedly trying to persuade your kid not to have, except you’re ready to spend a lot of money, mostly my money, I suspect, to turn this place into a duplex, so that if your daughter doesn’t happen to feel like leaving, I’m going to be living with another baby. Which is exactly what I was hell-bent on avoiding.”

  I nodded.

  Let my head hurt as much as it wants to, just let me not cry!

  In fact, I was in no danger of crying. My mouth, my head, all of me was painfully dry, as though I were having the world’s worst hangover. I wanted some water, but I couldn’t exactly remember where the water was. I wanted to be somewhere else, but I couldn’t figure out what to do about that, either. Maybe I could just find some kind of blanket, lie down on the sofa, cover myself. I couldn’t concern myself, just now, with what Leon’s kids would think if they found me there. They weren’t my family. Families weren’t just people who liked one another. They occupied the bottom line, whether you talked to them or not. Then again, I wouldn’t want to have to talk to Livvy or Pablo right now.

  “I see your point,” I managed to croak.

  “What does that mean?” Leon finally asked.

  “It means that we should forget it. Obviously. Forget about the apartments, maybe even about living together. There’s plenty of room for my family downstairs. For Pablo and Livvy and me and a baby. For as long as they need to stay. As long as it works. If Livvy and I aren’t fighting. Whatever. I’d move downstairs now if they weren’t there. It would be announcing to all the kids that something’s wrong. I mean, something is wrong, I just can’t tell how wrong, with everything else going on. I don’t know why you’d want me around at all if you’re worried about being suckered. I guess for meals and fucking. Makes sense. You like one female at a time for both.”

  “You know perfectly well that you moved up here because we were in love.” He heard the past tense, flushed. “You know what I mean.”

  I knew this and I knew that. I shook my head. At the moment all I knew was that I needed him badly and he didn’t trust me. I wanted to cry, but the dryness hadn’t loosened its grip.

  He tried out, “Am I not supposed to tell you how I feel?”

  I shook my head. “What you said wasn’t about how you feel. It was about what you think of me.”

  “All right,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

  It didn’t move me. I remained immobile in the doorway.

  He said, “It’s not what I think most of the time.” He got out of bed, came around it to embrace me. I did not respond. “I’m really sorry, Cara. I’m not just saying it.”

  “All right,” I said. “I accept your apology.” But I remained dry, wooden, as he drew me back to the bed, got into it, turned off the light, reached to embrace me, led my hand to the beginning of a hardness that just needed some small encouragement.

  He gave up quickly.

  “What I think,” he said, “is that we have to get the business with Livvy out of the way before we can think about the rest of it.”

  “The business with Livvy isn’t going to get out of the way. And even if it does, there’s always going to be some other business. With her. With your kids. Rennie and Annie thought it was okay for me to be up here, but I’d bet money they wouldn’t feel the same about your marrying me. That’s something I didn’t think about when I was arranging life and the furniture at the same time. I’m not willing to go through one tiny difficulty I don’t have to go through. I’m not even willing to go through anything nice I don’t have to go through. I just . . . I just . . .” I just wanted sleep. No sex, no talk, no warm bodies touching, no nothing, except maybe a drink of water.

  Nor did that change much in the days that followed. Leon was considerate but made no particular effort to turn me on. I was reminded of how civil Angelo and I had been during our last weeks, and I thought maybe Leon and I had come to an end, but I was too absorbed in the wedding and the show to worry a great deal. I had bad dreams but I slept through the night as long as I read in bed until my eyes wouldn’t stay open.

  Briefly Leon became Livvy’s confidante. She described her reservations about Pablo, discussed her girlfriends, continued to ask him about abortions. But at some point he realized her questions weren’t going anyplace, and after reassuring her on some point for the tenth or hundredth time, he asked her why she was letting so much time pass if she wanted to have an abortion. She’d just shrugged, he reported to me. He acknowledged for the first time that I’d been right all along, it was hopeless.

  As the time for Pablo and Livvy’s wedding drew closer, I thought I saw Leon clinging to his kids as he never had, thinking up things they could do together at times when even Annie would have been just as happy to be with her friends.

  I dreamed that Pablo and Olivia moved out with the baby because I asked them to pay the rent when I couldn’t pay it myself. I woke up as I was trying to explain how I could be so broke, promising that if only they’d stay with me, I’d try to get my classes started again.

  Bob Kupferman and I had lunch together and he told me about the ideas Rick was working on. The first was about an Italian family that leaves Sicily because the father doesn’t want to climb the Mafia ladder as had his father before him. They open a restaurant in New York, or maybe Boston, and have various adventures, some of which would sound familiar to me. I would play, depending on the mother’s age, her or the oldest daughter. This daughter cooks along with the mother but is also the one who’s learned English fastest, and serves as a bridge to the community. She might even give cooking lessons. Rick had some wonderful scenes outlined, I could see them if I liked. Bob waited for me to react. When I just kept eating, he told me the second idea, about a family that owns a California vineyard cum restaurant. That one would give you more good scenery than a PBS documentary, the problem being that scenery wasn’t as lively as the action of a big city. You’d have to find out how many people were turned on by the making of wine, as opposed to the drinking of it. Finally, there was the one they were leaning toward, about a fellow who worked for the phone company, maybe checking out computer fraud. They had a terrific actor to play the guy, whose girlfriend—that’d be me—would run a diner, a kind of rundown place close to a phone company office, like, say, the one on Eleventh Avenue, except the food in this diner is amazingly good, because I took the job when I needed one, then
got attached to everyone. The cook wouldn’t be the sole lead character in this one, but he didn’t think that should bother me because there’d be room for lots of my kind of ad lib quips and kitchen routines. Also, I was going to be crazy about this actor, a sweetheart, Alden Bells, a terrifically handsome blue-collar type, around thirty-five, Bob didn’t know if I’d seen him. Anyway, because of the cook’s personality and her food, the diner has become a magnet for men who work out of the phone company office. They were really excited about this one, Caroline. They were practically ready to bump something else from prime time if it worked out.

  He stopped talking because he noticed that I wasn’t eating anymore, and I wasn’t talking, either.

  “What is it? You’re not worried about Pablo or anything, are you? We’ll pay him a consultant’s fee if we do it. We’ll need consultants, and . . .”

  I shook my head, looked down at the table.

  “We’ve really tried to develop something you’d feel comfortable with. We think you can do any of these roles. And Rick says we can give you a lot of latitude. The diner one, especially. You can ad lib, improvise, the whole—He’s got one scene sketched out where they have a power shortage, the whole place goes out, and you figure out what you can do with what you have on hand. You’re really going to be able to use your ability, your talent for . . . You know.”

  I nodded. I knew. I also knew that if he didn’t understand by now why neither idea was for me, he never would.

  “Are you worried about Olivia? Rick’ll find a way to work her in occasionally.”

  I shook my head, looked down so he wouldn’t see my face.

  He made some sympathetic remark about the difficulties of raising children. Then, as our coffee was served, he apologized for pressing.

  “If there’s even a prayer of doing anything next fall, we have a lot of work ahead of us.”

  I nodded. “I think if you want to do a series with a cook, you should do it, Bob. But I’m a cook who talks a lot, not an actress. It just isn’t for me. Anyway, I think I’m going to have to be at home next year, with Livvy.”