Julia had done so much analysis on her head that she was nervous about what her body might betray, so if she found herself putting her hands on her hips or slumping in a bored manner she corrected it immediately. It was exhausting and left her no time to consider what they were meant to be doing.
Ava gave them an exercise in the indoor arena. Their task was apparently straightforward. They had to get the mare, Sahara, to walk round the ring with them, but they could not touch her. This would involve teamwork. Julia, who considered herself a natural leader and was certainly the most vocal of the group, deliberately stepped back. This did not confound Ava, as she had intended, but it did disorient the others, so Lianne, anxious to impress, took charge. She had a plan. They would all walk round the arena together, and inevitably Sahara, curious, would follow them. This made perfect sense to Lianne. She never liked being on her own and always attached herself to a group whenever possible.
She headed off purposefully, motioning for the others to follow. Christy did. So did Lucy. Julia adopted a neutral lope behind them. Sahara, however, did not move. She simply stood, scratching her rump on a wooden post. Lianne quickened her pace. Then, after the second aimless circuit, she let out a sudden cry, “SAHARA! Come here!”
Unlike Nanny Marta, the tennis coach, and the massage therapists, Sahara swished her tail and took no notice.
“SAHARA! I said come here!”
Sahara whinnied tauntingly, then went back to the rump scratching. Lianne stared at her in furious disbelief. Christy, who had seen that expression before, felt very nervous and moved closer to Julia, who was calm. Julia was enjoying the fact that what was going to happen would just happen and she didn’t have to make it up. She folded her arms across her chest; then, catching Ava’s gaze, she unfolded them again, but in fact Ava was examining Christy. You didn’t have to be any sort of expert to read Christy’s body language.
After a full five minutes of stalemate, Lucy broke ranks, walked slowly up to Sahara’s head, and introduced herself. There was a moment as the two dominant mares eyed each other, but there was never doubt as to who would win. Lucy clicked her tongue against the side of her mouth, and Sahara moved. Lucy told the others to group themselves around the horse, two on each side, and to walk in step. They did so.
Christy relaxed. As long as Lucy was in charge, marching them off over the horizon, she and Julia could frolic together in her imaginary sunlit garden.
It was all going perfectly until Lianne found herself trotting at the back and demanded to know why they had to walk in that direction. Lucy was distracted, Julia stopped, Christy rolled her eyes, and Sahara ambled away.
Ava caught Sahara and led her back to the women. She wanted to know why they thought the exercise had broken down. Julia suggested that they had stopped concentrating.
“Yes, it’s all about energy,” Ava said, and nodded. “The horse responded to the breakdown in communication between you.” She paused. Turned her level gaze on Christy.
“Did I sense some irritation with Lianne on your part, Christy?”
Uh-oh, thought Christy, here we go.
“Yes, you did,” said Lianne triumphantly.
“Not that I’m conscious of,” lied Christy.
Ava looked serious.
“A horse will always discover the truth of the dynamic within a group.”
Julia was confused. Was there a right or a wrong answer to that?
Lianne gulped. “The horse ignored me.”
No one denied this. The horse had indeed ignored her.
“I can see you’re upset,” said Ava.
Lianne wiped her face with her sleeve. Ava continued.
“What are you feeling now, Lianne? What has this brought up for you?”
(Whoosh! Ava opened the door, and Lianne and her quivering lip stepped in.)
“My parents ignore me,” sobbed Lianne. “They always ignored me. My mother only had me because my father decided she had to do something apart from spend his money.”
Christy objected. There were things in Vaughn’s past, things like his cruelty and his tax avoidance, that she had never acknowledged herself. She could not have them on the record.
“Vaughn was a young man then. He had a terrible childhood himself. He has regrets—”
“Blah, blah, blah. You’re like everyone else around him, Christy. You do exactly what he wants. Because if anyone says something Dad doesn’t like, they get rejected, or pitied, or given money to shut them up. I get all three. Poor Lianne, he says, with her lunatic mother and her sad life and her terrible men. She can’t look after herself. So he’ll keep writing checks and I won’t rock the boat. He put my mother in a mental hospital, Christy. Twice. Did you know that? And he told the doctors there that I was so useless he didn’t even believe he was my father.”
Christy stopped arguing. There was nothing she could say to change Lianne’s mind, because the fact that Vaughn had been a good husband to her, and that he did treat their two young daughters differently, was the most painful thing of all for his eldest child.
Lianne lowered her head. Christy walked over and touched her shoulder.
“I want the dream, Christy. I want what you all have. I want to meet someone who loves me and make a baby. I don’t want to have a child on my own. It’s not like having your boobs done. It can’t be reversed. I wouldn’t be one of those super-capable single mothers. I can’t look after my cuticles. You and Dad only organized the sperm donation so you don’t have to deal with my abandonment issues.”
“Don’t say that,” said Christy.
“Don’t try and shut me up, Christy. I know I’m a problem. But you and Dad want me to be one. What would you talk about if I was happy and well-adjusted? All fucked-up families need a scapegoat.”
“I’m so sorry,” said Christy softly.
“I’m just telling the truth,” Lianne replied, and that, of course, was the most shocking thing of all. The thing that made everyone hate her and call her a madwoman and want to stick her in an attic or burn her at the stake.
And then a strange thing happened. From the corner of the arena, Sahara suddenly trotted over to Lianne and nudged her with her nose. Lianne turned, stroked her flank, and then, remembering the horse massage Darren had shown them the day before, by applying just the right amount of pressure, she encouraged Sahara to bow her head down and chew contentedly. Lianne smiled with delight, the hardness disappeared from her face, and the others glimpsed the fragile, hopeful child within.
Lucy and Julia looked at each other and said “Profound!” simultaneously.
And they were not being ironic. They had had an “Aha!” moment, like Mike from Millbrook.
“I think we should do this again,” announced Christy.
Lianne became Lianne again. She looked around and wrinkled her nose.
“Nah. I don’t think I’d ever get used to the smell.”
• • •
THAT EVENING, Robyn sat in Two Boots on Avenue A, sharing a large Earth Mother pizza with her two children. She had taken off her shoes and run giddily up the staircase to the apartment in anticipation of Ryan’s gratifying delight at her unexpectedly early return and the loud declarations of much missing from her children, Madison and Michael, that had followed. But when Ryan decided to head off to the Writers Room for the afternoon, she was not as disappointed as she should have been. She had wanted to take the kids out for dinner, but she knew that if Ryan came, with his cavalier ordering of extra sides and sodas and sundaes, she could not (unless they ate pasta for the next two weeks).
Michael looked up, grinning in an ecstasy of gloopy tomato. “Did you enjoy your vacation, Mom?”
Madison turned to him contemptuously.
“That wasn’t a vacation, that was a minibreak, idiot. Look it up.”
Robyn was picking her battles with Madison these days, so sh
e let this go. But Michael had been quite correct. The twenty-four hours on the horse course had been her vacation for this year, and, although it had not encompassed any of the activities usually associated with “getting away from it all,” she had got away from her life long enough to remember who she was.
Only time would tell if this was good or bad.
an englishwoman in new york
The dream took place in Central Park Zoo but did not feature many animals. One moment Lucy was standing with Max and Robbie, watching the sea lions being fed. The next she was alone, up a tree in the red panda exhibit, peering through the foliage at the throngs of visitors walking past and thinking, “Who’s in the cage?” She juddered awake at six a.m., curious. Normally her dreams required no interpretation (having sex with Brad, and once with Angelina), but this one must mean something. Am I in the cage? she wondered.
It was a perfect early-summer, crisp-cotton New York morning as she walked down West Broadway, although, as she was English, she did have a jacket tied round her waist and a small umbrella in her bag “just in case.” She was heading toward TriBeCa and the offices of a film company where Julia had organized a job interview for her. Julia had used the adjective “little” (which seemed to cover both job and interview) and emphasized that what was on offer was the opportunity to read unsolicited scripts and write brief reports on them.
Carmen Ross, a film producer who had been Julia’s first employer, and whose curiosity and capacity for reinvention had kept her at the top of her profession for many, many years, had just fired a twenty-three-year-old graduate of the film school at NYU for ambition, and had asked Julia to suggest someone “mature.” This mature person must love stories, be content with $75 a day for one day a week paid out of the petty cash, and never seek promotion. What Carmen, who shared her spectacular apartment on Greene Street with two Siamese cats and a lot of tribal art, had actually said was that “it would suit a woman with children,” and, when Julia raised one eyebrow, Carmen continued, “You know what I mean,” and Julia nodded, because Julia did. Julia had immediately thought of her, and she had immediately said yes. It had seemed like a good idea at the time.
But when she paused outside the SoHo Grand to check out her reflection in the glass doors, the black iron gates reminded her of a cage, and she knew her dream was about anxiety. Her last—in fact, only—serious job interview had been eighteen years ago, when she had followed the traditional route into a publishing house for female graduates by applying to be someone’s secretary. Despite the first-class degree in English language and literature, she found herself word-processing in the gardening books department, and spent two years stroking the egos of muddy men with spades and getting drunk at the Chelsea Flower Show. She then moved into editorial and Mind, Body, and Spirit, and quickly knew more about growing medicinal drugs in a window box than anyone ever needs to. After six years of lunches with druids and one-way phone conversations with psychics, she was about to apply for an opening in New Fiction when she got pregnant, and the rest was history. There had been no more interviews apart from the six months a few years ago when she was vetted by elite primary schools in West London. She suspected, correctly, that that would be of no help to her today.
She stood up straight and practiced an expression of competence and confidence. She did a mental inventory of the most notable films that Carmen had produced (although Julia had assured her that Carmen never missed an opportunity to mention the awards). She looked at her reflection, she saw herself, and to her own surprise, she smiled, catching the eye of a porter, who winked at her. While she had no interest in the approbation of a twenty-one-year-old wearing a checked shirt and a plastic earpiece, she knew this meant something—specifically, that she looked a lot better in New York than she did in London.
It had started with her hair. Despite her relative youth, her two back-to-back pregnancies had sucked every particle of natural color from the front section of her dark brown locks. She had not noticed this until dawn broke one day in the guest bathroom in Ladbroke Grove as she cradled croupy Robbie in the steam from the cascading hot shower. She had wiped the condensation from the mirror with her dressing gown only to see her aunt Eva staring back at her. As children, George had always referred to Eva as the Badger.
The moment her nerves and Robbie had recovered, she took herself down to Patrice at the salon in Notting Hill. Patrice spent a significant amount of time staring at her scalp with his thumbs tucked into the pockets of his leather trousers. Patrice examined strands of her hair in different types of light. Patrice told her to trust him. She then sat in the leather chair with a vibrating back-massage feature for four hours, while Patrice wove his magic with squares of tinfoil and plastic brushes. The bill was so enormous that she left her watch as security and ran to the nearest cash point. Patrice understood. There had been one unfortunate scene over a washbasin when a client’s husband appeared, brandishing a credit card bill.
She repeated this every ten weeks for the next five years, often thinking that if he ever bothered to add up the cash withdrawals on the bank statements that lay unopened in a pile next to their coffee machine, he would assume she had a cocaine problem. It would never occur to him that it was the cost of maintaining a series of nondescript brown, blonde, and iron-gray stripes through her chin-length hair with nose-length bangs.
But in New York, she faced a stark hair choice: embrace the gray like a grown-up or get down to the drugstore and buy the $7.99 mahogany dye. She chose the latter, but, after about two weeks, had to buy the “pen thing” Christy recommended and color in the white regrowth on the top of her forehead so she didn’t look like she was going bald. Then she took her dark hair to a barber on First Avenue, and a rotund man called Spiro cut it short, as short as it had been in her twenties, and suddenly people saw her cheekbones.
To match her new hair and her new cheekbones, she decided to change her appearance. For her fortieth birthday, she bought a pair of black leather biker boots and a matching peacoat, which she wore most days with a tailored white shirt and straight-leg jeans. Although it sounds a bit butch, in fact it was all very Inès de la Fressange Parisian chic, and for the first time in her life, when she saw herself in a shop window, or a car mirror, or the glass doors of the SoHo Grand, she smiled. She felt that her outside matched her inside and the rest of her life’s dressing had been a series of costume changes that didn’t quite work.
“Hey!” shouted the porter, and she snapped out of her sartorial self-congratulation. An old woman with gray hair piled vertically on her head in an elaborate series of curls, slippers under pajamas, and a sleek fur cape thrown over her shoulders despite the sunshine, had shuffled over to one of the outdoor tables and was stuffing the remains of a ten-dollar pain au chocolat into her mouth and enjoying it.
“I can’t bear the waste,” said the old woman, dismissing the porter with an extravagant wave of her hand, and who, with the towering updo and the plastic butterfly perched upon it, had a decadent aristocratic glamour and a look of Lady Somebody in a portrait by Gainsborough hanging in the dining room of the Frick Collection. Lucy decided that if she ever got that confident she would stop dyeing her hair and hurl the pen thing in the bin. But that wasn’t today.
She pulled a scrap of paper with an address on it out of her pocket and turned toward Worth Street, and the little interview for the little job.
• • •
SITTING ON an uncomfortable chrome stool next to a large bamboo plant, she peered through the foliage at the strategically jumbled framed posters on the walls, and the throngs of young people shouting things like “That’s sick!” into their phones. She consoled herself with the thought that they all looked very ambitious. Thanks to her sojourn in Mind, Body, and Spirit, she knew that the offices had once been comprehensively feng shui’d, but all that was left was a small plastic dragon sitting on a windowsill, a broken set of wind chimes lying on top of a pile of dog-eared scri
pts with felt-tip titles scrawled across their spines, and a solitary crystal hanging over the kitchen door. She was just wondering where the water feature had been placed when Carmen Ross appeared.
Julia had warned her that Carmen wore outfits, and certainly Carmen in ruby-red shoes, belt, bangles, earrings, and beret gave new meaning to the word “accessorized.” One of Julia’s jobs as Carmen’s secretary (although Julia always described her role as “executive assistant”) had been arranging the extra luggage allowance for flights to the Cannes Film Festival and ensuring that any hotel room Carmen stayed in had a full-length mirror. Underneath the beret, Carmen’s hair was blow-dried and hand-tinted black-brown, and her face a symphony of subtle makeup and full face-lift. That’s what somewhere between fifty and seventy looks like, she thought.
She had pulled together a rudimentary résumé that was tossed casually on top of the filing on Carmen’s desk. On Julia’s instructions, she had creatively constructed a series of nonprofit activities to cover the glaring gap in the employment history section (“children’s literacy volunteer” to describe reading Percy Jackson books to Max’s class, “fund-raiser” to describe begging for prizes for the PTA raffle), but Carmen breezed through this, declaring, “I admire all you stay-at-home mothers so much. After all, it’s the hardest work of all.”
She was so unprepared for this it reduced her to silence as she decided if it made her feel like a fraud or not. Fortunately, Carmen did not require noise.
“Honestly, the scripts are usually total rubbish. I only do this because I’m polite and old-fashioned and I applaud anyone who sits down and writes one hundred pages of anything.” Carmen paused. “Though I do draw the line at the handwritten ones. Those people need psychological help, not a rejection letter.”
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