Christy herself had not seen John Paul O’Sullivan (the girls met him every Saturday morning when Vaughn took them for breakfast and quality time), although she had once glimpsed a muscular bejeaned leg sticking out from the store cupboard and heard Oh Holy Mother of God in manly Celtic tones emanating from the laundry area. She figured that she would have to wait until teatime, when the two fantastically french French teenage girls living on the fourth floor had to eat some steak, and Miss Sorenson, the octogenarian former ballet dancer from the ground-floor garden apartment, usually had him rescuing Mikhail, her corpulent tabby, who often got stuck on the window ledge outside the French family’s kitchen, looking for gristle.
And so it was that at five o’clock the reception area was empty. Vaughn would consider that a sacking offense, but Christy was delighted. She hurried straight over to the desk, pulled open the top drawer, and put the card in, but she was distracted momentarily by a gaudy leprechaun key ring. She picked it up and held it to the light. That was the moment he returned.
“Are you rifling through my drawers, Mrs. Armitage?” he said, and stopped, embarrassed when she didn’t laugh.
She decided to get the whole exchange over with quickly—Valentine’s card, little girls, pinkie promise—and even managed to hand him the pink envelope without looking into his face, a habit she had practiced because she had never been able to get comfortable with the idea of staff.
She was almost at the elevator when she heard his soft chuckle. Sorcha and Sinead, Sorcha and Sinead. She paused. The words did sound different in his musical brogue, and so she looked at him. His eyes were blue, his hair was dark, he was handsome, but it was his voice that was beautiful.
“It’s nice to hear you say their names,” she said.
“Are you or your husband Irish? Why are they called that?”
Of course she should have remembered to say that her father was second-generation Irish, his grandfather had come over on the boat and her maiden name, another quaint expression, was Mahon, but she didn’t. She made the mistake of telling the truth.
“Our egg donor was an Irish student, and we decided it would be good for the twins to honor their culture.”
(In fact, “we” hadn’t decided at all. Christy had insisted in the middle of another burst of morning, noon, and night sickness and had prevailed, the first instance of this, which was the reason for Vaughn’s froideur around all things Irish.)
The conversation ended there and then. That had shut up his blarney. But as she rode back up to the penthouse, Christy thought, not for the first time, how far she had come from her upbringing in rural Southern California and how out of touch she now was with anything that could remotely be described as normal. It was nearly as excruciating as when she had tried to commiserate with one of the Mothers at the School, whose husband had just been made redundant, by saying that she had decided to stop using a driver for errands. But, as Julia always said to her, at least you know this, at least you attempt an “examined life.”
She thought this could be the only reason Julia was her friend.
• • •
VAUGHN HAD TAKEN a two-week break from work in early March (he had been planning a discreet ribbon lift on his neck, but now that Christy was baking cookies and having play dates and had even joined the reading group at the independent bookstore on Prince Street, she had reverted to her former self with no interest in grooming, and he didn’t feel the need to keep up), so he decided to spend the time rereading The Diary of Samuel Pepys, letting his daughters crawl all over him, and patrolling the apartment block to see what sort of a job the new doorman was doing.
He was impressed. Although Mr. O’Sullivan appeared pretty useless at anything beyond keeping the lobby tiles clean, he was brilliant at exuding a professional air, always had an umbrella ready for the female residents, and seemed to have a vast network of Irish plumbers, builders, and electricians who materialized in a minute and were reasonably priced.
Julia, who had actually had a proper conversation with him, had learned he was an actor, or rather had spent ten years in L.A. trying to be an actor. Her theory was that he was “playing” being a doorman. Christy found this very interesting. It had sometimes occurred to her that she was “playing” being a mother.
“Action is character, Christy,” said Julia.
Julia was absolutely thrilled by Christy’s transformation. And it wasn’t just because of her friend’s increased happiness. Julia’s original screenplay was taking shape.
“It starts with the scene in the Temple of Dendur. Very New York. Very Nora Ephron. You’re my heroine. You’ve been obsessing about death, or rather the death of your personality to your alpha-male husband—that’s the interpretation, right?—but you’ve broken out of the pyramid.”
Christy told her it was more literal than that. It was a condition of her prenup that in the event of Vaughn’s death, she could live in their properties only if she remained single.
“Is that legal?” said Julia, scribbling in her notebook again, as she knew well that you could not make this stuff up. Christy shrugged.
“I just signed it. I knew everything would be fine. And it is.”
“That’s good,” Julia replied. “I’m only writing happy endings these days.”
Christy was indeed chuffed by her story so far. She was even beginning to consider the vague but tantalizing possibility that she might get a proper job one day, although Vaughn would probably draw the line at that. But despite Julia’s protests, these developments didn’t seem very dramatic or “Hollywood” enough. She asked Julia whether a movie could really end with a woman talking about Edith Wharton at a reading group.
“Of course not,” replied Julia. “This is only the first ten pages. It’ll be a romantic comedy; you’ll meet a guy somewhere in act one and fall in lurve.”
Christy was horrified. “I couldn’t do that to Vaughn. You can’t have the heroine of a romantic comedy abandon her husband and children.”
There was a terrible pause as she realized what she had just said, but Julia didn’t take it personally.
“You’re right. What a monster you are! Vaughn will have to croak first—”
Some time later, Christy was still tittering in a disturbed way about this conversation when the handle of the fridge came off in her hand. She turned around a little helplessly, looking for Loretta the Housekeeper, but she had gone to collect dry cleaning (the only staff member allowed to do it these days) and Vaughn was having his constitutional nap, so Christy, after ineffectually hitting the handle with a hammer a couple of times, knew that she would have to summon the doorman. She felt a bit weird about it—it was the Irish egg conversation—but she had no choice. Vaughn did not tolerate anything broken around him, particularly kitchen appliances.
In fact, it all went very smoothly. After three minutes’ chat about the size of the fridge, John Paul was able to fix the handle, although he decided to call his second cousin Patrick, who was really the man for the big fridges, to check it over later. And then she made him a cup of tea and decided to prove to him that she was not the person he imagined her to be. She asked him about being an actor, and he told her he had spent several years in L.A. with moderate to poor success. He had stood behind Colin Farrell a few times, had a few one-liners in episodes of daytime drama, done a washing powder commercial once. He grinned slightly manically and riffed on about the power of a white wash, but she did not laugh, and he was glad. She mentioned that she herself had been a pair of legs in a pantyhose commercial, and he didn’t laugh, either. In that moment, they understood each other perfectly. They had both walked along the boulevard of broken dreams and ended up in the same apartment block, although one of them was at the top, and the other at the bottom.
Vaughn came in looking for coffee, bleary-eyed and uncharacteristically crumpled after sleep. He eyeballed the doorman, and then, without a word, formed
a question mark on his face to her.
“The fridge handle came off,” she said. “John Paul fixed it, though his second cousin Patrick, who’s the man for the big fridges, is coming back tomorrow to check it.”
John Paul seemed to shrink in the laser beam of Vaughn’s silence. So this was Vaughn’s choice of weapon today, she thought; he would be the dominant lion of the pride by whatever means necessary. John Paul, by contrast, was a beta male, a sort of handsome adjunct, who might be stroked occasionally by a sickly lioness, but he would never father the Lion King. Christy sighed to herself and wondered what it would be like to be married to a beta male. She imagined she wouldn’t really mind, though it had proved very difficult for Julia. In the middle of a vision of herself walking down the aisle with the doorman, Vaughn said something. Both John Paul and Christy were surprised.
“I said, Will you be here to supervise this Patrick, your second cousin?”
John Paul shook his head. He told them he had a day off; it was Saint Patrick’s Day, and as he’d never been in New York on March 17 before, he was going to the parade.
“Christy,” said Vaughn, about to surprise her again (it was happening a lot these days), “you and the girls should go to the parade, too. You can take them, can’t you, Mr. O’Sullivan? The girls have Irish DNA in them.”
John Paul shuddered involuntarily. Christy knew he did not want any more information about their reproductive adventures, but Vaughn kept to the party line.
“Christy’s grandfather was from County Limerick. He came over on the boat, died three years later.”
Vaughn could not understand why the doorman had laughed. Strange people, he thought, and hoped the guy was not a drinker.
• • •
THE GIRLS WORE green, white, and orange hats, tried to copy a troop of flame-haired children reeling, and sang along at the top of their voices to “Beautiful Day.” After a couple of hours they were all frozen, so they went to a pub he knew in Greenwich Village where the owner turned a blind eye to children and they sat in the back by a fire, as Gaelic football played on a small television above the bar, and John Paul told Sorcha and Sinead stories about Ireland, about the faeries and the hill of Tara.
“That’s why the recession came to Ireland, you know. Because they tried to put a motorway through Tara.”
He made the story of the Celtic tiger sound like an Irish myth.
“After the gold came to Ireland, the people became greedy,” he said. “They learned to love their home improvements, and their clothes, and their handbags, and they forgot about the things in their past that were good. And that’s why they tried to build the motorway through Tara and the ancient land punished them.”
For that was the truth about Ireland, he said. “You don’t own the land, the land owns you.” Then he bought Christy a half of green Guinness. To the girls’ amazement, as she was a pinot noir woman exclusively, she sipped it.
“It doesn’t taste too bad.” She smiled. There was froth on her upper lip. Without thinking, he wiped it away with his thumb. She had often wondered what the word “frisson” meant. Now she knew.
After that, John Paul always seemed to be around when she was coming in and out of the lobby. He hand-delivered packages to the penthouse and, once Vaughn was back in the office, swept outside their door several times a day. She thought it must be exhausting for him, because he had to do the same for everyone, in case anyone noticed. For her part, she usually managed to do her morning errands at precisely the time he took a coffee break, and he would often fall into step beside her as she bought flowers, had a coffee, or, if she was desperate to see him, collected the dry cleaning instead of Loretta the Housekeeper. They found they were able to continue conversations across days or even a whole week when they talked about their childhoods. She supposed this was what it must be like when you met someone you really wanted to be with. She finally understood what all the fuss was about.
After she collected Sorcha and Sinead from school, if it was nice outside, they would sit in the small patio garden and he would throw tennis balls to the girls, who ran about and caught them. Miss Sorenson would sit next to her, and they talked about Elizabeth Street in the 1960s and how she had known Rudolf Nureyev. Everyone was happy, apart from the French teenage girls, who were incredibly sulky, and raised an eyebrow only when John Paul took off his sweater and exposed a thin line of black hair running down his torso.
And the amazing thing for Christy was that she never once lied to Vaughn about anything. She would say she had bumped into the doorman in the street, or he helped carry up the groceries, and soon Vaughn had decided to recommend they make him permanent at the next co-op board meeting. She was delighted. She had convinced herself that she had made a new friend, and she needed a new friend, as Julia was going through a difficult time again, and had become hypomanic, staying up all night writing and occasionally ringing her, sobbing, saying she hated herself, she missed Kristian and the children, what sort of a woman was she? Christy did what she always did and took her to the doctor, who immediately signed the insurance forms and sent her to a residential therapy hotel in Connecticut, where he hoped she might find the answer to this question. It crossed Christy’s mind that perhaps she should go, too. And then it was spring break, and she told Vaughn she didn’t want to go to Turks and Caicos; she would take the girls for day trips instead. And Sinead invited the doorman to come to Coney Island.
• • •
JOHN PAUL LOVED CHILDREN. He had a niece he doted on, a champion Irish dancer, and he had a relaxed, easy manner with the girls, chased them, teased them, but always with a lightness of spirit. Christy could see people staring at the four of them as they played on the beach. What a perfect family, she knew they were thinking. She watched the sand running through her fingers, and allowed herself six hours to think it, too.
Of course, the loss of Vaughn would be devastating. How would she react? She realized her only knowledge of how to deal with death had come from films. She imagined herself being told the tragic news. Would she fall to her knees? Howl at the sky like Sally Field in Steel Magnolias? Or would she be impassive, think only of the children, people murmuring “She’s been a tower of strength” as she, the tragic young widow in designer black, led the children, a tableau of perfectly realized grief, behind the coffin out of Saint John the Divine. Where did you find caterers for wakes? Did you pay a funeral organizer like you did for a wedding? She was reassured by the idea that although there was no one in her family she could turn to, Julia either would know how to do this sort of thing or would certainly know someone who did. And then things got more difficult. She realized she had no idea what music Vaughn would want, what his favorite religious readings were, or where he wished to be buried.
She refused to admit to herself that she had little or no sense of what her husband was like at all, whereas she knew already that John Paul wanted to be laid to rest in the family plot in County Galway, his favorite song was “A Stór Mo Chroí,” the Bonnie Raitt version, and, though people made fun of it, he loved The Prophet. She started to panic. She would have to fast-forward through this sequence.
After an appropriate period of time, John Paul could move into the penthouse with her (if he was still the doorman, no one need ever know, which would circumvent the prenup) and they would raise the girls together. If it happened soon enough, maybe she could have another baby, naturally this time, a black-haired son with his blue eyes and her tanned skin. She saw herself giving birth, at home maybe, moving between the bath and her bedroom, screaming with pain maybe, no, breathing deeply, radiating empowerment, discovering that her peasant stock stood her in good stead. She could have had ten children in a field, should life have thrown that at her. John Paul handed her their son, blue and red, wide mouth gaping, crying, and she felt herself start to cry, too.
“The girls want to go on the rides.” He was standing in front of her, his hand
outstretched. She took it and stood up, still shocked by her inability to control her own thoughts. There were tears on her cheeks. He looked at her tenderly and didn’t say a word. Was it possible he knew what she was thinking?
The girls, who had been skiing in Aspen, had gone on a VIP trip to Euro Disney, and had their birthday parties in a private room at the Plaza Hotel, were shrieking with unadulterated joy at playing the slot machines and eating the dirty-water hot dogs, and they took turns recording snatches of video on Christy’s phone. Christy and John Paul took them on the bumper cars, where they put a girl each in the seat beside them and vented their sexual frustration by crashing into each other as Sorcha shouted “Harder! Harder!” And then, as the afternoon light faded and they knew the day would soon be over, the girls insisted on going on the Ghost Train and jumped into the first carriage together. Without a word, Christy and John Paul got into the next one, and the moment they crashed through the bloodred doors he put his hand on her thigh and kissed her, neither moving until they burst through the cobwebs back into the dusk light.
The girls demanded to go round again, and John Paul quickly paid for five goes each for the four of them. On the third time it occurred to Christy that although she had never been a good swimmer, it was amazing for how long you could actually breathe through your nose if you tried.
Her stepdaughter Lianne was in the lobby with Loretta the Housekeeper when they returned. John Paul was carrying sleeping Sinead, Sorcha was saying over and over again that it was “the best day EVER” as she invited him up to have dinner with them, and John Paul had just whispered in Christy’s ear that he would sell his very soul to the devil to spend one evening with her. Christy was laughing loudly. Any other time, Lianne might have raised a perfectly threaded eyebrow at such an extraordinary spectacle, but today, very pale, her lower lip trembling, her fingers clutching Loretta the Housekeeper’s, she was oblivious. There could be no doubt she was about to deliver a momentous piece of dialogue. Loretta the Housekeeper was not so absorbed in the plot. She seized Sorcha’s hand and bustled a very anxious John Paul and Sinead into the elevator, just as Lianne was quivering. “I’m so sorry, Christy.”
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