Gunner howls at the sight of her. Howls and cries at his saviour. Reenacting, as he always does during any reunion, his memory of despair in the sad, deserted, below-Canal-Street lot: Tossed from a luxury vehicle and abandoned! Until Lucy found him! And gave him her home!
And Lucy howls back, adjusts two slipping embossed circlets on her forearm and croons. Philip doesn’t need to turn his head to gauge the rapt attention of the lunch crowd. He can feel it soak into his bandanna neckerchief along with the fish fry. He examines with care the way the salt air is drying up his cuticles, so quickly! while Lucy hefts her load onto the boiling pavement. Clearing the way for Edith. His little girl. Here she is. Dressed in a darling pink gingham dress and Philip’s brand new three-hundred-dollar UVB-screening sunglasses. No wonder he couldn’t find them. Edith presses into his arms for a hug, her cheek against his chest, and to his credit he never once thinks: Contagious.
Pure luck squeezes them onto the ferry at the last second before the chain gets dragged across the aft deck. The ferry groans away from the dock while a string of black and silver and white German-made cars rev along the shoreline. Nothing for them but the stink of fuel in the breeze. Philip was right to buy American. When his partner found that old Porsche— so cheap, such low mileage, no rust!—his partner said, Let’s make it the Official Vehicle. What better way to say form and function?
He pronounced it foam auction. Some lack of emphasis or articulation. This, like so much else, bugged Philip. But by the time Philip was through with him, he’d be living in the rust-free collectible. His artist wife will really get into that. Philip laughs out loud.
Lucy turns to see what the hell could be so funny. Edith is doubled over, head between her adorable sunburned knees. Sea-sick? Philip mouths. They’ve barely left the cove.
Lucy’s eyes looks grave. Here’s Philip enjoying a private joke, and now from the back of the Voyager, Gunner warms up for a croon.
Gunner, please, I’m begging you, whispers Lucy. And Gunner lifts his muzzle, laps back the yelp.
Good boy, Lucy sighs, leaning back. Good, good boy.
Edith folds into Lucy’s lap, her delicate shoulder blades heave convincingly, authentically, under the pink and white checks of her sundress. Lucy strokes the pale tips of Edith’s braids. Philip hopes she won’t vomit on his sunglasses. And instantly hates himself: he’s a horrible person, unworthy of all his good fortune and talent. Just a total crap of a human being. Fatty always said so, but that was in jest, back when Fatty had a sense of humor. And only after Philip had plied him with too much food and drink. Like at the end of the nice farewell to Sag Harbor dinner.
You’re a dick, Fatty raised a tumbler of vodka and lime. To the biggest dick of them all. Fatty had crab meat stuck in his teeth.
But who was Fatty to be casting any big stones? Hadn’t it all been his idea? Look at the lease, said Fatty, like an oracle. Just look at the lease! And he had, they both had, and they thought hard about Edith’s unexpected crawl. Straight over the “patio” and into the square of cement they euphemistically called the “lily-pond” but which could readily be reinterpreted as the “pool.”
What a scene! His darling, barely nine months old, tumbling forward into a miniature, but still watery expanse unprotected by a fence. That Lucy pounced on Edith in a heartbeat was beside the point. Fatty negotiated the settlement and the transfer of title. And Philip became a homeowner with his very first summer rental. A fabulous coup just when Philip was considering his options. It was a dry spell for architects; several colleagues were already waiting tables. The house was a bomb, but a lousy house on a desirable block. Where better to turn his talent and attention? Really an astonishing bit of luck.
But that was before Fatty became a purist. Philip hadn’t been called a dick for a while now. He misses all that. He should call Fatty, today, without delay. Because Fatty is depressed and losing focus. And if they’re not careful the rewards of partnership dissolution may slip away. Yes, Fatty is preoccupied. But he does have Philip’s sympathy in what sounds like a big mix-up.
Tunisian, they are Tunisian. Tunisian-American. Fatty and Philip both born in Jersey City. But when the second roundup happened, something abstract and surprising, something buried deep in the newspaper, Fatty’s own son, Jamal, was stopped by a classmate, an ROTC recruit, and escorted to the Student Life Office. A small tired man asked to see Jamal’s identification. Jamal, a spoiled boy, really a worry to his mother, chuckled. His birthday was soon. The man with the sad gray eyes had been hired by his friends to tease him.
The man asked again. Jamal offered a defunct Blockbuster Video card, playing along. Since that day the college has been very accommodating. There’s even an offer on the table to overlook a poor showing in macroeconomics. A new beginning. His parents have been told that Jamal was very, very helpful the two weeks he was detained. Something that surprises them, that gives them a peculiar disembodied hope, like a dream under sedation. But nothing can shake the disturbance of the strange interlude— it’s physical now, Fatty says, in the esophagus, he can’t swallow— in which their deeply unfocused, undisciplined boy was held just in case he might participate in something intricately organized.
Can’t swallow. That’s what Fatty says every time Philip calls. He needs to call Fatty today. He will. And now it looks like Edith has fallen asleep. And if he soaks the sunglasses in ammonia, it will clean them better than new. What was he worried about? He’s sorry. And moves closer to his wife and child. Curls over them on the wooden bench. Should he fetch some water?
Lucy shakes her head. Right away Philip can tell Edith knows, subconsciously, that her father is on the job. All difficulties are behind them, left on shore. Her heaving shoulders— tiny fluttering tips of angel’s wings—have slowed to a gentle rise and fall. A sleeping girl in her mother’s lap. Lucy closes her eyes like she might doze now as well, her hand cups lightly over the lacy bow of Edith’s dress. She tips her own face up into the breeze. Philip will find some water anyway, just in case.
Back at the house, Lucy gently pries Edith, fast asleep, from beneath the seat belt. She slings their daughter over one shoulder, smiles to Philip to communicate the delicious heaviness of their delicate child. But the heat pouring from Edith’s skin worries her, cancels the smile. Lucy fans Edith with her free hand, elbows open the screen door, and makes it inside. Philip lets Gunner go. Gunner circles up to bump against the screen door then back down and around until his hind side disappears into the Hendersons’s azalea. Philip decides to assess the newspaper after all, on the cool of the porch.
Minutes later, Lucy has changed her clothes. I have a present for you, she smiles. She rocks one hip against the screen door, makes it squeak. Her linen pants, cropped to reveal thin ankles, are a spider web of wrinkles from being crammed into a hat case. But the color is as pale as the blue of her eyes and in this springtime afternoon light her skin looks soft and pretty. Pretty girl, Philip hums. Come ’ere pretty girl, and hollows out his lap, moves the paper to the floor.
Right here, you. He eases off his reading glasses and glances around for the case. Lucy stays where she is, both hands, he notices, tucked behind her back. Whatcha got there, vixen-bride?
A present.
A present, eh? Well, check out this present. In truth, there isn’t much for her to check out, but he shifts around as if there is and she laughs and looks over her shoulder into the house, blushes, and shrugs. The shrug that says Edith will sleep fitfully and be upon them. By Philip’s reckoning Edith has been sleeping fitfully for a decade now.
He nods, grins, Whatcha got? And crosses his legs slowly, tightly, sexily, he thinks, and Lucy teeters in the doorway, pink with pleasure. They can make each other happy this way, just making believe. Well?
This. Lucy tugs at something in a big Gristedes bag. Don’t freak out, she says.
Who’s freaking out? But then he spots what she has in her hand. It’s the painting! That weird, sick painting he’s forced to look at whene
ver he stops by the office. His partner hung it up right after Philip’s “resignation.” (Don’t ever, ever say that word out loud, Fatty said.) And there it was—bugged maybe? —each time Philip went in to the office at night to check up. To read things, to watch for new invoices, new proposals, to make sure the equipment was still there, to download new designs onto his laptop. He couldn’t, obviously, take sets of drawings, but who needed to? He’d found the original lease, and the corporation issuance. It was his right. He could take anything he wanted until the corporation was dissolved. With Fatty’s checklist, he’d found it all, easily. His partner is an idiot who doesn’t know what to hide. For a long time, the dope didn’t even get his own lawyer. When Fatty said, don’t worry, he’d act as “mediator” for the breakup, Philip’s partner failed to understand that was just a colloquial expression.
And the painting. That strange blob on the wall reminded him of why it was good to be doing what he was doing. What people got famous for these days. Fame used to mean something. But the artist wife wasn’t rich and she wasn’t pretty, and apparently, Lucy whispered, she was having a rough time getting pregnant. Good thing she has her art, Lucy laughed, but only a little because Edith’s conception hadn’t been all that easy.
Fuck, Lucy.
What?
You know what.
But she doesn’t, and he doesn’t either, entirely. Though he suspects this is a big problem and needs to get a hold of Fatty right away for damage control. Just wrap it up. Don’t break it whatever you do.
Me? Break it?
Yes, you, Miss Two Left Hands. Just put it down. Find me the phone.
That painting, that blob, was worth twenty thousand at least. He’d attended the wife’s last opening, when things were still cordial, when she wore a support stocking as a dress and refused to speak English. He remembered all the nonsense about the personal painting, something too intimate to be sold. That small blue mess had required safekeeping from all the waving checkbooks. And sure enough there it was in Lucy’s unreliable grasp. Maybe if Philip left right away, he could return it to the office wall before anyone was the wiser. Lucy! Wake up! Go, go, go!
All the happy flush gone, Lucy sets the painting down then slinks out into the long grass following Gunner’s trail. He notices her posture isn’t all it once was and that makes him sad on top of everything else.
Daddy, what’s Mummy doing?
She’s getting the phone, princess.
The phone is in the pond?
Yes, darling, that’s where Gunner put it.
Oh, Gunner.
Umm. Let me see you. Did you sleep in those sunglasses? Philip thinks the left side stem looks bent. Edith’s crumpled dress, the haywire sunglasses, her high blonde braids frayed like rope. Sweetie, what have you done with yourself?
Maybe Mummy needs some help? Edith sticks out a shockingly filthy finger, as if she, too, has been raiding the Hendersons’s garbage. She plunges this brownish finger behind the tilted lens of Philip’s sunglasses and rubs vigorously.
Stop! Stop!
The finger freezes. Her whole body freezes in its gentle collapse against the door frame. Philip takes a moment to observe: if she continues this way she’ll end up like her mother, stooped and prone to excess.
Give me your hand, he says, and feels good about the tone: light, but in command. He’ll have her dimpled fist away from the infection and dipped in something antibacterial in no time. He’ll fix her hair and her dress while he’s at it. But just as he’s lifting himself out of the captain’s chair, Edith shrieks, finger ricocheting away from her—now Philip can see— pustulant eye. His three-hundred-dollar sunglasses fly into the gravel.
Mummy’s drowning! Mummy’s drowning! Edith is hysterical. She leaps off the porch, lands in the white gravel with a crunch, and speeds through the long grass, off into the low azalea to the Hendersons’s fetid pond. Philip hears the crackle, of course, of his sunglasses beneath her foot. Why even bother to look.
He makes his way, casually, behind her. Freaking out; his girls are on constant high alert. And he is just their slave boy, following along to do their dirty work, to clean up the daily mess: emotionally, mentally (Lucy could barely get through Chicken Soup for the Soul without his exegesis), physically—here he comes—and spiritually, his taming influence was evanescent and constant. The Hendersons’s pond was two feet deep. The frogs couldn’t get enough depth to spawn.
Sweetheart, he calls. Honey bun, he sings out tiredly, Mummy’s fine. He kicks aside the azalea and makes the turn on the path to the pond. Love bug? His forward foot snags, catches him in a tangle of cattails, and there, just ahead, is Lucy facedown in the water and motionless.
Oh my god, oh my god, and if he could run he certainly would. He thinks, many times, a stuck and flickering reel in his tired head, I’m coming. But it is Edith who pounces on her mother, straddles Lucy’s back like a tiny fierce boxer, yanks her mother’s head, nose, and mouth above the surface, and slams her fist hard between the shoulder blades to strike out the suffocating water.
And in this way, hair held in her daughter’s fist, neck arched, Lucy chokes on the first renewed breath. She heaves and chokes. Edith lets go. Lucy’s head lurches forward into the water again. Face under, with some strength somewhere, she tries to shake her daughter off her back. But Edith presses a cheek down hard against her mother’s in tandem. If Lucy insists on drowning, Edith is going to too.
* * *
Later, Jack Henderson tells Philip he lifted up the phone without thinking, before putting on his glasses to really make sense of the scene from his second story study. He tries to link this reflex to a brief patch with the Navy SEALs after Harvard, but no one is listening. Long before Philip untangled himself, the plaintive squeal of the ambulance was getting louder, coming to them.
Now Lucy and Edith sit entwined on the Hendersons’s antique rattan recliner. Lucy wears Nonnie Henderson’s tennis sweater over snug pink sweat pants. And Edith is wrapped like an enormous infant in a blue down comforter. The police are long gone. And the emergency team. Lucy fainted, nothing more. She, too, has something vaguely viral, that and forgetting to eat, or sleep. She just fainted, face down, in the water.
There’d been a hammy round of applause for Edith, whose timing, it turned out, had been miraculous. Now the heroine shivers against her mother’s sporty chest, while Nonnie Henderson fusses with the teapot. Philip isn’t even thinking about suing over this, he still feels a clammy sweat behind the ears, between his shoulder blades, and he’s pretty sure Jack Henderson won’t sue, either. He seems relieved, not litigious. In fact, this might give Gunner a free ride, too. They can all start fresh as neighbors. What a good idea.
* * *
For a tiny, happy moment, amnesty and forgiveness seem to glow around the painting as well. Maybe Philip can forget he ever saw it, leave it to his partner to sort out. Who knows who goes in and out of that office? But Fatty is emphatic: Are you crazy? Take it back. Now. This minute.
Fatty’s one to be talking about minutes. All afternoon and all evening Philip left messages with Jamal, who still hasn’t gone back to college. (A disgrace, his mother is destroying his character.) And when Fatty finally decides to lift up the phone he can’t stop yelling. You’ve lost your senses! Entirely! I mean completely! This is an enormous problem, Fatty shouts. And Philip understands.
The family never criticizes Lucy directly, but never praises her, either. Jealousy, Philip has always believed. Lucy’s family came over on the Mayflower or some related vessel very soon after; Fatty’s and Philip’s papas flew over on Pan Am. But now he wonders, as he aims the Voyager through the hot sticky night down I-95. He wonders if they are right to think what they never say about Lucy.
Philip never wanted his own practice. Never wanted a partner. Never, now that he thinks about it, wanted to be an architect. Long, long ago, he did want to fuck Lucy Twitchell. And that small, simple, natural desire had led to so many half-choices guided by her mindless hal
f-notions. Here he is, careening over the Triboro Bridge to undo, once again, some tangled mess generated by his overzealous wife. Maybe Fatty is right. Certainly Fatty was right about one thing: the Quoin house, like nearly everything they own, is in Philip’s name. Lucy can hurl her entire inheritance at it, she’ll never get it.
Just before midnight, Philip circles down into the spiral entrance to the garage beneath their apartment building. He wakes Jesus, flat out in a deep snooze on a cot in the underground cubicle. Jesus, it turns out, has “sublet” Philip’s private parking space. But Philip will take anything now and tosses the keys. As a goodwill gesture, he tells Jesus he won’t report him, and starts the climb back up the ramp. The office is right around the corner. Something Lucy pleaded for; she wanted him close to home. What if Philip had to work nights and weekends?
But as it happened he never did work nights, or weekends either. He was fixing up the house in Quoin. He only had two hands! And early on, after the first month or so, he explained to his partner, fairly patiently, that what Philip did wasn’t about time spent, it was about the quality of his input. And he got Fatty’s accountant to explain the same thing. Intellectual property. Philip had the brains, the influence, the connections; his partner did the grunt work: designs, drawings, proposals, and such, which took a lot of time no matter how you sliced it. And Philip put up the larger share of the start money. Nearly three thousand dollars! To his partner’s lousy two grand. And when his partner said “sweat equity,” Fatty made a good joke, said, Let him sweat before a judge. Basically, his partner was an employee whom Philip had made the crazy mistake of treating as an equal.
It happens, Fatty had sighed, and now he’ll buy you a swimming pool. Yes, it looked entirely possible that for all his pain and suffering Philip would be rewarded with the inground kidney-shaped pool he’d always dreamed of, in Quoin, Connecticut, right beneath the apple trees. Fatty was a genius, back when he could still focus.
The painting isn’t big but it’s heavy. Philip adjusts the frame under his arm as he rounds the corner. He fingers the backing, just to check. Maybe there really is a surveillance device. He nudges a gallery sticker. In fact, there’s a museum tag, too. Couldn’t off-load this pooch, he’s thinking when, in his peripheral vision, he catches sight of something that makes his heart lurch. The Porsche! And worse, worse, much worse, the wife sitting in it! He can see her pointy head in the wash of light from the police cruiser pulled in right in front of her.
Double Happiness Page 5