No One Could Have Guessed the Weather

by Anne-Marie Casey

  Carmen stood up, picked up a pile of ten scripts, and handed them across the desk, saying, “I only ever got one good thing off the slush pile,” and pointing a bony red-nailed finger at the corner of the room. She, Lucy, looked. And looked again. There was an Oscar, a studded cat’s collar around it, on the shelf next to a photo gallery of Siamese and one of Carmen in the eighties in an outfit that would have put the cast of Dynasty to shame.

  “Do you want to hold him?” said Carmen. She should probably have played it cool, but she didn’t want to. She picked Oscar up. He was surprisingly heavy.

  “Next time you can take him into the bathroom, look in the mirror and deliver the speech you imagined when you were about thirteen.”

  “Read it and weep, Patsy Michaels,” she said, and Carmen laughed.

  “You’re English? An Englishwoman in New York. I like that. It’s a twist on that song. Who sang that song?”

  And Carmen started to trill the opening lines of “Englishman in New York” before forgetting the words and trailing off.

  “It’s a good title for something,” Carmen mused. “Not sure what.”

  This musical interlude was interrupted by a disembodied voice from the telephone.

  “Carmen, it’s Bruce on line two.”

  Carmen groaned and counted to three.

  “My new boss. He’s thirty-one and says he has the utmost respect for my experience, but one day he’s going to call and fire me for age.”

  Carmen picked up her phone with two fingers.

  “Put him through. It’s been a pleasure to meet you, Lucy. I have a good feeling. I hope this works out.” And Carmen raised her hand and wiggled her fingers good-bye.

  Outside on the street, she clutched the scripts to her chest. She knew it had gone well, although she had said only about fifteen words. These words included “hello,” “Patsy Michaels” (the first-form bully at Sunnylawn Senior School for Girls), and “Sting.”

  • • •

  THAT NIGHT, she attempted to describe Carmen to him, beginning with “She’s a force of nature,” though somehow that didn’t feel right, as it implied that Carmen had sprung fully Carmen-like into the world, and she felt sure that the persona had been more artfully constructed than that.

  “Is she married? Does she have kids?” he asked.

  “No,” she said, walking into the bathroom. “Carmen has an Oscar and a loft on Greene Street.”

  “I wonder if it was worth it,” he said.

  As she was fishing a clump of rotting, soggy hairs out of the plug hole, she decided to ignore this because she adored him and she knew that for him, these days, a life without her and his sons was unthinkable.

  The buzzer sounded; she cleaned her hands under the cold tap, but when she came into the corridor, he was already in the open doorway, shouting instructions down the stairs. Something was to be “brought up carefully,” but what it was she had no idea.

  “Into the bathroom!” he said, so forcefully that she turned to see which of the boys had come bleary-eyed out of their bedroom, pajama trousers round their knees. But he meant her. She obeyed and sat on the toilet, listening to an intriguing soundscape of heavy bootsteps and hammering and Richard-style swearing, “Fuck them all bar Nelson,” until he opened the door with a flourish and led her the four paces into the main room, where, in the corner, was a new desk and chair. Her pile of scripts had been lovingly placed on the right-hand side.

  “I can’t get you a room of your own yet,” he said. “But I did get you this.”

  She rested her head on his shoulder for a moment, and then she walked over and sat down. The desk was reclaimed and had been painted in French country style: a white base, with leaves growing up the legs and meeting in a delicate pattern of foliage and flowers on the top.

  “I saw it in the window of the shop round the corner and I thought of you.”

  Lucy and Richard occasionally experienced love so transcendental that they could communicate their feelings without words. This was useful at this moment, as she could not speak. She looked over at him, and he knew that there would be no gift at a specific moment in her life that she would ever value more.

  • • •

  EVERY MONDAY MORNING from then on, she sat at her desk and read and wrote. The scripts encompassed everything from the high-concept “Tudor zombies take Manhattan and joust in Central Park” to the low-budget “Unhappy couple argue for ninety minutes.” Because she had taken to the art of pithy précis like a duck to water, Carmen, who usually listened to script reports over the phone, insisted that they meet, and they enjoyed their weekly chats in cafés downtown about the romantic comedy with minimal comedy or romance, or the Scandi genre script with much snow and sexual violence. And soon she started to understand what made dialogue work, what a “pinch scene” was, or indeed an “inciting incident.”

  Although Julia said that the only things she had learned off Carmen were that “the time to slow down is when you’re most in a hurry” (something Julia wished she had done more often in her life) and that “white, as in white jeans, is a wardrobe basic,” she discovered that Carmen was a sort of Yoda of cinema and, as they shared an obsession with the films of the seventies, she was delighted to sit at Carmen’s feet and talk about Star Wars or The Godfather or Annie Hall or Badlands.

  Inevitably, as they were women and they liked each other, they also talked about life.

  In Tea and Sympathy, over beans on toast and a stiff Earl Grey, she explained that she had never felt English until she came to New York. When Carmen asked her what she meant, she explained that the broad American definition of “Englishness,” as something to do with British bands, or aristocrats, or Windsor Castle, was not something that would ever be applied to her with her nondescript suburban upbringing when she was actually in England.

  In Tartine, over milky coffee and a toasted baguette, Carmen explained that Little Carmen had never felt any sense of who or what she was until the 1970s. When Lucy asked her what this meant, Carmen explained that it was not until then that a girl might realize there was a choice about how to be a woman.

  “I was a sixteen-year-old in a print dress and pointy shoes, thinking of a future with The I Hate to Cook Book (which, by the way, is hilarious), when I read Betty Friedan,” Carmen said, “and Betty changed my life. I came to New York and I dared to be different, although, as I’m sure I would have found out eventually, it was the only way I could be.”

  She remembered his question “Was it worth it?” but said nothing. The next time she met Carmen, however (they were in the spectacular loft on Greene Street, as one of the Siamese had hypoglycemia), Carmen appeared to have been considering it.

  “You know, Lucy, I used to say to Julia that I lived my life so women like her, and you, didn’t have to. You can engage with the magnificence of your own potential in the way a man can, see what the options are, and decide for yourselves whether the sacrifices are worth it.”

  A silence fell. Lucy walked over to the floor-to-ceiling windows and looked down onto the cobblestone street, then across at the cast-iron façades and felt the ghosts of SoHo: the bohemians, the sweatshop workers, the artists. How many of them had come to this city wild with hope? How many had found the magnificence of their potential?

  “When did you buy the apartment?” she asked.

  “In 1986. Off an actual artist who painted wall-size canvases in drip style and had no heating. Took me ten years to do the renovation. Every time a film got a distribution deal in Korea I thought, There’s another window.”

  The sickly Siamese cleared his throat and crawled listlessly onto Carmen’s lap, and they were all conscious of his sour breath.

  “I only ever had passionate affairs with married alcoholics so, with hindsight and therapy, I know that I did not want the picket-fence-and-rose-garden fantasy. But I have friends who deeply regret some choices
they made for political reasons.”

  She turned to look at Carmen, whose bony-red fingernails were caressing the cat’s head.

  “Oh, no. Not me,” said Carmen. “I don’t think I ever wanted children, really.”

  On the far wall hung a huge wooden carving of four female warriors, arms inextricably linked, breasts proudly jutting toward the enemy, brandishing spears and raising their muscular legs in a war dance.

  “Sometimes when I think of all the time I’ve wasted, I feel so sad I don’t know what to do with myself,” Lucy said suddenly.

  Carmen did not agree or disagree, but simply said, “Maybe you’re a late developer?”

  She looked unconvinced.

  “Lucy. I long for the certainty I had when I was twenty, it makes life so much easier if there’s only one road to travel, but now I’m older, I think there are as many shades of women as . . .”

  Carmen paused, and so she piped up, “. . . drugstore hair color to cover gray. Everything from ash-blond warrior to raven-black homemaker.”

  And the melancholy mood in the loft lifted, although the smell of sick cat did not.

  “I’m obsessed with hair color at the moment,” she confessed. “I don’t know what to do with mine, what with the regrowth and the frizzing.”

  “Every woman has a bad-hair decade,” said Carmen firmly. “The important thing is, once you find your style, to wear it well.”

  “Because I’m worth it,” she said, with a knowing wink to an imaginary camera, and they both laughed. But then Carmen got serious.

  “You are, Lucy. Believe me, you are.”

  • • •

  AS CARMEN HAD PREDICTED, one day Bruce, the baby boss, did call and fire her, but it was a confusing experience because he had done a management course on effective dismissal and spent ten minutes out of twelve on “positive focusing.” Carmen made three subsequent phone calls: the first was to a lawyer to ensure that the settlement included health insurance for life; the second to a man Carmen had met while shooting a movie in Argentina five years ago, who immediately issued an invitation to stay at his estancia and learn how to play polo; the third to Lucy, to say that from now on the company would be shredding unsolicited scripts, and so she was unemployed, too.

  She was sanguine, and Carmen, who was sanguine, too, appreciated this and quoted lines from Tennyson’s Le Morte d’Arthur about how “the old order changeth, yielding place to new.” Then Carmen invited her to come to the opera that Friday night and say farewell or, rather, “adios.”

  “It’s a date,” she said, and they agreed to meet by the fountain.

  She deliberately came out of the subway onto Columbus Avenue so she could savor every step she took toward the Met. As she approached, the early-evening sunlight hit the sparkling sprays of water and a series of rainbows danced across the magnificent façade, and she laughed at the absurd beauty of it all.

  Carmen emerged from behind the fountain, ever youthful in leather jeans, a poncho, and a green felt gaucho hat.

  “I left the spurs at home,” Carmen said. “I thought they were a bit too Magnificent Seven.”

  They air-kissed with real affection and then headed inside, where she spent her last day’s wages on champagne, and they marveled at the Chagalls and the chandeliers. Then they took Carmen’s usual seats in the very front row of the stalls, where they could practically feel the air move as the conductor lifted his arms, the curtain rose, and suddenly they were in a darkened church in Rome as the painter Cavaradossi finishes his portrait of Mary Magdalene and awaits the arrival of his lover, the diva Floria Tosca.

  When she was ten, before she had any idea what opera was, she had listened to the twenty most beloved arias as her father drove her to school. He had bought a limited-edition box set of two cassettes, a special offer from the TV Guide, and one day, stuck in traffic, through the tinny car speakers, Maria Callas had sung “Vissi d’Arte” from Tosca, and her father had started to cry.

  “What does it mean?” she had asked, but her father said he didn’t have a clue, there was just something about the voice of Callas that had affected him.

  In the first interval, Carmen took out an embroidered handkerchief in preparation for this, and when the magnificent soprano began to sing “Vissi d’arte, vissi d’amore,” Carmen, too, started to cry.

  I have lived for art.

  The English surtitles were projected overhead.

  I have lived for love.

  She smiled at Carmen, and squeezed her hand.

  “Thank you. For everything,” she said.

  Carmen nodded, wiping her cheeks, as one bulging tear sat on her right eyelash like dew on a strand of grass.

  “Green shoots are growing, Lucy,” she said enigmatically, and Lucy felt a shiver of anticipation.

  it might be true, but it doesn’t feel real

  When Lucy was living in London she had longed to go to the Hamptons, so when Julia and Christy mentioned they would both be there over the Fourth of July weekend, Christy in the barn in Bridgehampton and Julia in a rental in Amagansett, she thought, “At last!” Sitting in her library in Ladbroke Grove, Lucy had spent many happy hours researching houses and reading about the Jitney. She knew in topographical detail which bit of East Hampton was actually in East Hampton and not buried in woodland where you could find deer lactating in your driveway or be bitten by Lyme disease–ridden ticks.

  None of this information was of any use in her present accommodation, however, a budget motel with pink-and-green bedspreads that smelled of cooking oil and a shower that Janet Leigh would have refused to enter, and where they were lulled to sleep at night not by waves rolling along the shore but by trucks rolling along the Montauk Highway.

  It didn’t matter that Lucy remembered trips to five-star hotels in paradisaical locations round the globe where she and Richard had bickered and complained, and twice he had remembered urgent business in the office and left a week early, chatting to the boys at the infinity pool via Skype as Lucy resentfully sipped the first of her afternoon cocktails. No, she had a nasty little secret. In her hotel bathroom she expected Aveda toiletries at the very least, was pleasantly surprised by Bliss, and once, in Florence, had been delighted by Santa Maria Novella. In the motel on the highway, she had gingerly picked up a yellowing bar of used soap from behind the toilet to examine the thumbprint in its center.

  “OCEAN! Don’t be such a girl!”

  Lucy looked up from her soggy towel and reverie to see two children, a boy and a girl, arguing on the beach because the boy called Ocean didn’t want to go into the water. After glancing over to check that Max and Robbie were still happily splashing with Richard in the shallows nearby, she nudged Julia, who in turn nudged Christy, who reluctantly put her iPad down and listened.

  “Leave me alone, Harmony!” the boy shouted, and stuck his nose in the sand and his butt in the air and beat his fists and feet in the distinctive rhythm of tantrum as the girl called Harmony started kicking sand over his Saint Tropez–style shorts.

  “Poor Ocean,” whispered Christy.

  “Poor Harmony,” said Julia. “Who’d be a girl in that house?”

  “Houses, I suspect,” said Lucy, as a man and woman marched barefoot toward them past a tower of Boogie Boards. They were clearly the parents of Harmony and Ocean (like the Hapsburgs, father and children had very distinctive chins), and they were arguing.

  “He said he wanted to do surf camp,” the mother pleaded, her fashion-forward caftan that had seemed like such a good idea in Bergdorf’s wilting around her.

  “No. You just wanted to stop me from using the beach pass,” retorted the father, taking exaggerated steps through the sand.

  “Talk about dis-harmony and ocean,” Christy said to Julia, once the unhappy couple was out of earshot. “That’s one for the writer’s notebook.”

  “I couldn’t use it,” r
eplied Julia.

  “What? Not even the beach pass?” said Lucy. “That was funny. Getting a beach pass here is a nightmare.”

  “Nope.” Julia shook her head.

  Lucy and Christy looked at her.

  “If you saw it in film you wouldn’t believe it. You’d dismiss it as unconvincing social satire about the kind of people who summer in the Hamptons and call their kids Harmony and Ocean. It might be true, but it doesn’t feel real.”

  And with that, Julia jumped to her feet, brushed the sand off her legs, and expertly zipped up her wet suit, her right arm angled awkwardly behind her. She pulled a small tube out of Romy’s backpack and smeared the zinc cream across her nose, cheeks, and the backs of her hands. It was bright blue and, as she ran to join the surf class on the beach, with her absurdly elegant limbs, her long graceful feet, and her turquoise face, she looked like one of the Na’vi in Avatar.

  Lucy closed her eyes and took a moment to consider their conversation, but Christy settled herself down again, waved at Sinead and Sorcha, who were happily digging a moat around a palace of sandcastles, and eagerly pulled her iPad back out of her beach bag. She had reached the second part of The Age of Innocence, and, as for some reason she had never seen the film, she was engrossed in the twists of the plot. Passionate but too proper Newland Archer had actually married quietly scheming May Welland, but now he was in Newport, staring at the distant figure of his true love, the Countess Olenska, who stood at the end of the pier, watching sailboats go by. Newland, engulfed in the tragic contemplation of his loss, was wondering if she could sense his presence. “Shouldn’t I know if she came up behind me?” he mused.

  Christy stopped reading and looked up across the waves of Ditch Plains. She thought about Newland’s self-righteous irritation and wanted to shout at him.

  “You got married to someone you didn’t love! Of course Olenska doesn’t want to see you.” She shook her hair back and stared moodily over the sea, her perfect profile framed beneath her straw panama. She considered a world where the biggest emotions were expressed in the smallest gestures, where a declaration of love was turning to look at someone, where the bitterest betrayal might come on a scented visiting card, where the wave of a white-gloved hand meant good-bye forever. She wondered why, although she wanted to identify with the mesmerizing Countess who trailed her tragedy and the whiff of old Europe behind her, she felt a sneaking admiration for May.