No One Could Have Guessed the Weather

by Anne-Marie Casey

  So this was it. Christy had had a premonition that day at the Met, but it was not her own death she had foreseen. And at that moment she knew that her ridiculous fantasies meant nothing, and the appalling reality of this was worse than she could ever have imagined. Bizarrely, her first thought was how awful Julia would feel about the “croaking” joke. Then she was all alone with the blackness and the shock and the truth. Her knees buckled beneath her. She collapsed onto the floor. Lianne looked at her in horror.

  “Dad’s not dead, Christy. He’s had a heart attack.”

  Lianne made a mental note to herself. She had overdone the preamble. She would have to do better next time, when it counted.

  • • •

  THE FIRST THING Vaughn said when she arrived at the hospital was “I love you.” Christy burst into tears. Lying in the bed, various plastic leads looping around his arms and chest, it was no longer only in his sleep that Vaughn looked like an old man. He would have to stay there for three weeks, charming the nurses and halfheartedly torturing the doctors by insisting on second and third opinions on Skype from cardiac experts around the globe. His white roots appeared; his muscles weakened. He didn’t want the girls to see him, but he insisted on Christy’s presence and had a bed made up for her in his room, laughing and calling it their “heart attack honeymoon,” but they both knew that really was a joke. When a decision had to be made, even what he should eat, he looked at Christy and said, “You’re the boss.”

  And then she had a call from his lawyer, Myron Schulberg. Myron wanted her to know that Vaughn had changed his will. He had voided the prenup; she would get what she would get, and the absurd clause about her losing her home if she remarried was gone.

  “We were only winging that one, anyway,” Myron intoned. “Vaughn wants you to know that whatever happens to him, and that includes being put in sheltered accommodation in the event of another more debilitating attack, diabetes, or Alzheimer’s, he wants your life to go on.”

  She put the phone down quickly, as she half expected him to burst into song, and she smiled. How like Vaughn to deliver such a piece of news like that. She was no longer trapped in the Temple. She could have a different life if she wanted.

  Christy had rung her mother to tell her what had happened, as it seemed like that was what she should do, and her mother had caught her off guard by announcing that she and Ron, Christy’s father, would fly to the city immediately to take care of their granddaughters, leaving Christy free to minister to her recuperating husband. And so Felicia and Ronald Mahon traveled economy on American Airlines to take up residence in the guest room of their daughter’s multimillion-dollar penthouse. It was unusually warm for April, so they poured their ample frames into matching shorts and print shirts and huffed and puffed the girls to school and back, after which Ron sat and watched sports in the den, and Felicia chatted to Loretta the Housekeeper.

  Fortunately, Christy was so consumed with the new helpless Vaughn that she had no time to worry about dealing with her parents. After the first few testy exchanges with her mother (Christy knew Felicia would not be able to resist a couple of comments about Vaughn’s age, she hadn’t wanted to say anything, of course, and how all the money in the world can’t buy you your health), Christy decided that she would get through all this by repeating the mantra of that meditation class. Life gives you exactly what you need. And certainly the girls adored their grandparents, and they did not seem to care about their irritating corpulence, their devotion to the tabloids, and their refusal to ever validate Christy for her choices, her struggles, and her achievements.

  And then one evening, Christy dropped back home unexpectedly. To her relief, the lobby was unattended (too much had happened for her to even know what she would say to John Paul when she saw him again), but Mrs. Sorenson was complaining loudly and, just as if she was an observer to the situation, Christy hoped for his own sake that John Paul’s lovesickness wasn’t affecting his duties as doorman. Because, although she was as sure as she could be that they did love each other, it would feel too weird appealing to Vaughn to save his job, should he lose it through negligence.

  The apartment was quiet, and the peace made her feel quiet, too. She found herself creeping along the corridor, where she bumped into Loretta the Housekeeper, who pointed her toward the den. She walked slowly up to the door and was greeted by the extraordinary sight of herself, aged about ten, on the enormous flat screen. It was an old video recording made by her father at a ballet competition, which he had had transferred onto DVD. Little Christy, skinny and blond, pointed and frappéed and pirouetted for the judges as her girls clapped admiringly and her parents bickered about what prize she had won but agreed that she had been robbed and that no one had shown promise like Christy.

  “If she hadn’t grown so tall, she could have been a professional,” they said.

  There it was, proof that her memories of her childhood were unreliable and the story of little Christy, the changeling, who had been swapped at birth and was never truly loved, was not her parents’ truth, but the narrative she had constructed to allow her to leave them. She had been a happy, confident, beautiful girl, a girl who could also have been a high school teacher, or the manager of the local bank in Thousand Oaks. She felt her parents’ pride and her daughters’ admiration, and that moment changed her view of herself forever.

  No longer would she be a person to whom life happened. It could happen because of her. She made a mental note, as she so often did, that she must tell Julia about this.

  Suddenly she felt very grown up. And that was good, because as she jetéed into the room she heard her father ask John Paul to switch off the TV.

  From their body language (the shoulder clasp, the rugged bonhomie) she knew that Ron and John Paul had become mates. She suspected Ron would treat John Paul like a son he never had, instantly bonding over the Irish connection. (Her brother, Jake, had not amounted to much. They had poured all their parental aspiration into the wrong avatar.) It made perfect sense, of course. Once Ron tired of watching sports all day, he would have gone looking to do odd jobs round the building and come across John Paul in the lobby. John Paul, desperate to know what was going on with Christy, would have cultivated this assiduously, and so here she was, standing with her daughters, her parents, and the man she had sucked face illicitly with on the Ghost Train at Coney Island. When her parents saw her they emphasized how helpful John Paul had been to them, that nothing was too much trouble for him, and, without looking at Christy, Felicia remarked that “the girls say you all go on little outings together.”

  Now Loretta the Housekeeper announced there was some dinner ready. Fish pie. John Paul looked up greedily; he was starving, he said.

  Felicia beamed approvingly. She liked a man who ate and had never trusted Vaughn’s calorie-controlled attitude to life.

  “What about the lobby?” said Christy. “You can’t leave the lobby unattended.” Everyone looked at her in horror; she half expected booing and hissing as if she were a pantomime villain. She tried again, modulating her voice, adding a gentler inflection. “It’s just I heard Mrs. Sorenson going on. You could get in trouble. Lose your job.”

  Her parents closed ranks with John Paul.

  “What would you know about a job, Christy?” said her father.

  “Nothing,” she replied, and patted his arm kindly, for at that moment she shared his disappointment in her.

  So John Paul got what he wanted. They had their evening and he did not have to sell his soul. He had his dinner in his magnificent apartment with his beautiful “wife,” his stepchildren, and his in-laws. He handled it with grace, the perfect host, grateful but not patronizing to Loretta the Housekeeper. Christy was struck by the fact that he was a very good actor. Julia was right. It was a dreadful profession, all about luck and nothing about talent. But she played her part well, too.

  When they had carried the girls to bed, and her parent
s disappeared discreetly to their room, they walked onto the balcony. There was a mist over the city, and the tops of the buildings poked through it, as if the skyline were floating. They allowed themselves one chaste kiss. If there had been a sound track it would not have been Céline Dion singing her heart out, but rather discreet, poignant strings. She told him that nothing else was going to happen between them, there was no future, she was going to do the right thing, for, after all, she had chosen her life for better or worse. What would they do, anyway, the two of them? They were too similar, two drifters, but they were too old to go off to see the world. He wiped the tear away from her left eye with his thumb. He held her hand, very still and sad. Then he decided to make things easy.

  “I suppose it’s a relief,” he said. “I’d never be able to say no to you, but what would I tell my girlfriend?”

  She would never know whether it was a joke or not. Three days later, John Paul quit. She heard from the French teenagers that he had gone back to L.A., but from him she never heard anything again. For the next few years she would go to any movie with Colin Farrell in it to see if he was in the background.

  Vaughn was discharged from the hospital with orders to retire, and they started dividing their time between the city and Bridgehampton.

  Although she asked the girls to delete the clips of them all in Coney Island, they didn’t know how to, so sometimes, if she pressed the wrong combination of buttons, her phone would spontaneously burst to life and replay five seconds of her and John Paul fighting over some cotton candy.

  It always gave her a strange feeling. Sometimes she remembered this was happiness.

  • • •

  JULIA CAME back from the month in Connecticut a new woman and, as so often happened with Julia, a catastrophic event in her personal life had vastly improved her professional one. In group therapy she had met a producer she had been pursuing on a networking site for ages and, to cut a long story short, she had pitched him her rom-com idea starring the Christy character. He had negotiated a deal with her agent secretly (phones were, strictly speaking, not permitted, but they made exceptions for Academy Award nominees) and, as Julia told Christy over lunch, “I just have to write it. So, tell me more I can use.”

  “Well, actually,” said Christy, “I had an idea for the story. I thought I could fall in love with the doorman.”

  Julia looked at her admiringly. “That’s genius! What would happen?”

  So Christy told her the story, embellishing it in key areas. She was particularly keen on her ending, involving the lovers standing by the ocean, staring out at a moon river, as one of them remarked that it was as if they could walk across it except they would surely drown. It was bittersweet, poetic; she would cry if she saw it in a movie. The only bit she left out was the kissing in the Ghost Train, which was just too personal.

  Julia wrote quickly in shorthand until Christy stopped.

  “It’s brilliant,” she said, not taking her eyes off the page. “Two things I’d have to change. I don’t believe you wouldn’t have sex. There’ll have to be skirts up in act two. And the ending. The ending is dreadful. It simply couldn’t end like that.”

  Oh, yes, thought Christy, it could.

  equine-assisted learning

  It was Lianne’s idea to do the horse course in New Jersey, and she decided that Christy would do it with her. She engineered this by ringing her father, Vaughn, on his private line and suggesting he give a place to Christy for her birthday. It would be nice for her to spend some time with her stepmother, she said, for, unlike Cinderella, it was her own mother who was wicked, and that Christy must be exhausted from the demands of looking after him and the girls. Vaughn had some vague memory of Christy wanting a pony when she was a child, and, as he was tired of buying her expensive jewelry that she never wore (it infuriated him that she had let her ear piercings grow over when there were three sets of diamond studs in the safe), he told Lianne to book the course, whatever it cost, and he would add the money to her monthly allowance.

  Christy found out a week later when Loretta the Housekeeper announced that she was looking after the girls for the weekend of May 25 and 26 while Christy was away. Christy was confused and immediately went to the kitchen to check the year planner on the wall. Armed with the knowledge that the days were empty, she found Vaughn in his study, where he put on his calculatedly distracted face and told her that it was a surprise for her and it was all Lianne’s idea.

  Uh-oh, thought Christy.

  Lianne had Vaughn in a headlock of guilt and recrimination; “she imbibed it with her mother’s milk,” he would joke, although Lianne had been exclusively bottle-fed by Nanny Marta while her mother chain-smoked and got her thighs back into her Pucci slacks.

  It was an old, old story. The savage emotional deprivations of his own youth had made Vaughn incapable of two things: denying his daughter anything material and being even a halfway decent father to her. These, added to the fact that the first Mrs. Vaughn Armitage II was mentally unstable, ensured that Lianne had the kind of spoiled but unhappy childhood that inevitably creates a spoiled and unhappy adult. So while Vaughn might say after the fraught family gatherings that happened every five years, “My money may not have bought her happiness, but she has a better quality of misery,” it seemed too late now to buy her either a personality or a man, as even the most abject gold digger had been put off eventually by Myron Schulberg’s prenuptial demands and . . . well . . . Lianne herself.

  “She wants to spend some time with you,” he responded limply. “You’re a role model for her.”

  “I’m only four years older,” she said, but she knew she shouldn’t have, because Vaughn never wished to be reminded of the age difference between them, particularly since the heart attack had slowed his pace from hare to tortoise, and sometimes Christy heard him saying to people that she was more tired these days, or her ankles were hurting her, or “Christy doesn’t like traveling as much as she used to,” to explain why his racing-around days were over.

  Vaughn fiddled with his wedding ring, a sure sign the conversation was over. Resistance was useless. Christy knew she was going on the horse course, but, to her surprise, she noticed a glimmer of uncertainty in his expression.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “The minimum number for a group is five, so Lianne wants to bring a couple of friends with her. I said you’d be fine with that.”

  Uh-oh again, thought Christy.

  The last time Lianne had brought her friends to the apartment, one had found a magnum of vintage champagne that Vaughn was saving for his seventy-fifth birthday and drunk it out of the bottle. Another had pissed upward onto the intaglio etchings of lilacs in the guest bathroom.

  Christy remembered that she was no longer living her life in the passive form.

  “I’ll find three others,” she said.

  • • •

  “EQUINE-ASSISTED LEARNING. I’VE heard about it,” said Julia as they power-walked the High Line. “It’s incredible for children with special needs. And adults with back problems. There’s pretty much nothing a horse can’t help you with. As Catherine the Great used to say. Baboom CRASH.”

  “Oh, please. The point is I can’t do it on my own with Lianne, and even if I could, I would need you there to stop me from strangling her. When I rang to ask her if I needed to bring jodhpurs, she said ‘No, all you need is an emotional dilemma the horse can help you solve.’ Hers is ‘Should I break up with this new guy I’ve just met because he’s got genital warts from visiting prostitutes in the Far East?’ She needs help. I mean, what’s Black Beauty going to say about that?”

  Julia wanted to interject the obvious here, but—

  “You have to come, and you owe me. Remember when I had to play Woman with Bruises at two hours’ notice for you on the show and the Asshole hit me with the plastic coffee cup?”

  “I don’t remember that
.”

  “Maybe we’ll all find it healing. Lianne’s convinced it will be therapeutic, you know, for her abandonment issues. And you always have emotional dilemmas.”

  Julia ignored this.

  “You told me Lianne was trying to have a baby.”

  “Don’t talk to me about that. Vaughn paid for her to have her eggs harvested, and I set her up at the clinic. But when I asked her when she was going to be implanted, she looked at me with this petulant expression on her face and said, ‘Do you really think I need to be pregnant right now?’ And I said yes, if you want a child.”

  Christy was acting out the exchange, imitating the high-pitched monotone of Lianne’s voice. Julia knew that this was a bad sign in anyone and realized that she must be compassionate.

  “Stop, stop there. I’m coming. This is going to be good. I’m always open to a new experience. I wanted to do EAL in Connecticut, but they suggested Jungian sand play instead. And I like to see you and Lianne snarling at each other. It reassures me that you’re not perfect. She drives you crazy.”

  Christy stopped and regarded her friend haughtily. “She doesn’t drive me crazy, apart from when she calls me ‘Mom’!”

  Julia checked the new diary app her kids had loaded on her phone. This took some time, for she had only just got her head around texting. Christy’s agitation was fermented by impatience and then bubbled into annoyance when she discovered that Julia had arranged to spend the Saturday, May 25, with her new friend Lucy Lovett. She tried to conceal it, but Julia knew her well enough to know what she was thinking, which was I thought I was your best friend, so Julia volunteered to invite Lucy to come, too. They were all Mothers at the School, after all, and, more important, Julia was integrity filled and didn’t stiff people when she had a better offer. Usually Christy admired this trait. Not today.