“Christy,” said Lucy suddenly, “what Julia just said. That’s how I feel when I remember I’m forty years old. It might be true, but it doesn’t feel real.”
“Oh,” said Christy, but she still didn’t quite get it.
• • •
ANOTHER MORNING, in the city, Robyn lies in bed and listens to the rumble of the subway train from beneath the foundations of the building. Someone has once told her that it makes them think of a dragon roaring from the subterranean depths, and Robyn always remembers this when summer comes, and she sees the dragon’s steamy breath rising through the sidewalks and increasing the stifling heat to unbearable. It’s seven in the morning, and already pointless to open a window, so she switches on the fan and throws back her sheet and lets the stale air beat over her as best it can.
Robyn leaves the apartment early, her bag weighed down with deodorant, foot powder, and a pair of smart shoes as she wears her Crocs to walk in. The summer is not just a challenge for childcare, but a horror for feet, and, whenever she bothers to look down, Robyn thinks, if I had a dollar for every throbbing bunion, or, for that matter, every bloodstained Band-Aid hanging off a heel. She moves briskly, but not briskly enough, it seems, for an enormous muscle-bound jogger, sweating through his Duke University sweatshirt, who lumbers toward her with the footfall of a T. rex, and who claps his hairy hands together like a gunshot an inch in front of her nose and bellows, “WAKE UP, LADY!” to get her out of his way. Shocked, she stops for a moment and notices that a small jar of petroleum jelly has fallen out of the pocket of his shorts. She picks it up and gleefully hurls it into the trash. I hope you chafe like hell, bully boy, she mutters.
In the park by Chrystie Street, she sees a few tiny children running and laughing in the water sprinklers and smiles. Ryan has taken Madison and Michael to their grandparents’ house in Anaheim for three weeks. There has been much hemming and hawing about the invitation; Michael has begged her to come with them, even for a week, but in the end common sense has prevailed. What to do with the kids for the long summer months is an annual nightmare, inevitably resolved with a patchwork of friends, work leave, any family that can be cajoled into it, and the inevitable couple of weeks at grim, inexpensive sports camps where the children cry as she leaves them because they don’t know anyone and are still crying when she returns to pick them up. This year, however, with most of July covered by the trip to California, if Robyn takes two weeks off to sit with them in front of the TV, kick a ball round Battery Park, and chase them through the water sprinklers, they are nearly at the start of the fall term again. Of course the most commonsense arrangement would be for Ryan merely to drop the kids off with his parents and pick them up, but, even as he was protesting that caring for them would be “too much” for his mother, she knew he was looking forward to lying by his parents’ pool, eating three cooked meals a day, and writing his blog about the challenges of the artistic life. It is too much, but Robyn has long known that she and her husband have different definitions of the same words. Wake up, lady.
As she approaches Grace Church, she glances at her watch. If she gets on the subway at Union Square, she can take ten minutes, and so she does, entering the church slowly by the back door and slipping into a wooden pew. The stone coldness envelops her as she examines a laminated reference guide to the church, one she has read many times before, and picks out the characters in the Pre-Raphaelite stained-glass windows. At the bottom of the guide is an italicized quote from 1869: “For many years Grace has been the center of fashionable New York.”
Robyn kneels down and prays for many things, one of which is a change in the weather.
• • •
VAUGHN HAD BUILT the barn in Bridgehampton as his first marriage was collapsing. Although “barn” might imply an Amish-style structure where the most fun you could have would be watching a chicken lay an egg, Vaughn’s barn covered five thousand square feet, and had a home cinema as well as wooden beams in the ceiling. It was his pride and joy. He had delayed its completion to try and keep it out of the divorce settlement, but in the end, a sort of time-share agreement had been reached between him and the first Mrs. Armitage II over its usage.
When he married Christy, Vaughn had been concerned whether she would feel comfortable about this, but Christy, who did not have a territorial bone in her body, loved the house as much as he did and often remarked on what exquisite taste her predecessor had. Christy was struck by the fact that the flowers in every room complemented the color scheme and, in the case of the living room, where a huge oil painting of white Madonna lilies hung over the fireplace, an enormous bouquet of matching flowers was always on the table, together with a pair of ornamental scissors to clip out the stamens and the clusters of red-brown pollen atop them. The first Mrs. Armitage II, who had a penchant for crisp white French linen, knew how to avoid a stain emergency.
Christy had the scissors in her hand when Vaughn came in and volunteered to take the girls out for a few hours. By the conspiratorial look on their faces, Christy knew that part of this excursion would involve ice cream, but she was delighted. She was planning to surprise Vaughn one day that week by making his favorite dinner, steak and kidney pie, and this was her opportunity. She put the scissors down, kissed them all good-bye, and hurried to the kitchen, where Loretta the Housekeeper had stocked the fridge according to that week’s list.
She had just lifted a handful of flour-covered meat into the sizzling casserole dish on the stove when she heard a car turning into the drive. She hid the dish in the oven and, wiping her floury and bloodstained hands on her cream apron, walked into the hall. Now she heard the insistent revving of an engine, which rose to a mechanical squeal. Christy’s father had considered it his primary parental duty to teach her and her brother basic automobile skills. She knew this was a car in pain.
Vaughn had remarked only the previous week that the unfenced ditch next to the garage was an accident waiting to happen, and, when Christy came outside, she saw that a small rental car was stuck in it, its front right wheel jutting upward and spinning as the driver continued desperately to turn the engine on.
“Stop! You’ll flood it!” she shouted, and at that moment Teddy, the gardener, appeared from the lavender beds and ambled over.
He walked to the driver’s door, opened it, and a woman got out. She was wearing a dark suit and black stockings and enormous sunglasses, and when she pulled them off she blinked in the sunlight and looked around nervously, like a goth meerkat. Against the shimmering blues and greens and soft grays of the landscape she looked ridiculous, and she knew it. She took off her jacket and threw it on the backseat. Underneath was a plum-colored silk blouse that even to Christy’s fashion-illiterate eyes looked expensive. (Lucy could have told her it was vintage; Tom Ford for Gucci from around 2001.)
“We’ll soon have you out of there,” Teddy was saying as Christy approached.
“Just need to give it a good shove.”
“I’m so sorry,” the woman replied. “I’m an idiot, I didn’t realize—”
Her voice was soft and beautiful with a musical inflection, the voice of an American who had studied in Europe—perhaps Italy?—for several years.
“Were you looking for someone?” asked Christy.
“Yes. Mr. Armitage. I have a letter for him.”
Of course, thought Christy, another upscale begging letter from some foundation or something. Lately she had noticed that such organizations were becoming more creative.
“He’s out with the kids. I’m his wife. I’ll give it to him. But let’s get you out of here first.” And Teddy and Christy clambered into the ditch and pushed up, as the woman inexpertly banged the car into first gear.
Once safe on the tarmac, the woman wound down the window. Christy guessed that she was about thirty, although she had the kind of perfect skin that would be ageless if she looked after it (unlike Christy, who had spent her teenage year
s sunbathing with olive oil), and she had an intelligent face that was also good. In short, there was a look of a younger Julia about her, and so Christy immediately warmed toward her.
“Thank you,” the woman said, reaching her hand up to give Christy a thin white envelope. “Tell Mr. Armitage I’m sorry. I missed him.”
Yes, she had definitely spent significant time outside the States. Her phrasing and the incorrect punctuation gave her away. In another woman it might have come across as affected, but in this one Christy found it charming, despite the nervousness that made her twitch a little and the sweat stains dribbling from the armpits of the vintage silk shirt.
“You look boiling,” said Christy. “Come in and have a cold drink.”
The woman hesitated.
“I will if it’s no trouble, Mrs. Armitage.”
“Christy. What’s your name?”
“Sarah.” (Something very funny going on around the r here. Perhaps it was France Sarah had lived in?)
“Who do you work for, Sarah?”
“An international foundation. We’re restoring some recently discovered Mayan temples in the Guatemalan rain forest.”
Christy glanced knowingly at her own reflection in the mirror (she realized she still had the bloodstained apron on, and, as “abattoir assistant” is not a good look, she hastily took it off) and led Sarah into the conservatory to pour her a glass of fresh lemonade. Sarah looked around with a rapt expression on her face, more like a child in sweetie land than a woman entering her fourth decade. She actually gasped when she saw the lawn leading down to the ocean.
“This is the most beautiful house I’ve even seen.”
“That’s what I thought, too, when I first saw it,” said Christy. “Mr. Armitage’s first wife decorated it.”
“It’s magnifique. Is she an interior designer?”
“Non,” said Christy, at that moment learning that while it was okay for her to be magnanimously nice about Vaughn’s ex, it was not acceptable in a stranger. She offered to give Sarah a tour to show that while she might not be magnifique as far as choosing upholstery goes, she was certainly gentille!
“The drapes! The carpets! The flowers!” Sarah exclaimed as they moved up the stairs and along the first-floor hallway, and Christy discovered a talent for real estate brokerage as she opened doors and pointed out arresting features (“The door frames are oversized to give an illusion of space”; “This bathroom is modeled on one in the Villa Cimbrone in Ravello”). Then she led Sarah into a small alcove with a narrow bookcase at the end.
“And this is the one room I did myself.”
“The girls’ bedroom?” said Sarah, and, smiling, Christy pulled at War and Peace and waved her inside the secret door with a flourish.
It was not until they were back downstairs in the living room, and Sarah was staring up close at the brushwork on the lily painting, that Christy realized something. She had not told Sarah that her children were girls and, as the first Mrs. Armitage was mentally unstable, she did not allow any pictorial evidence of their existence outside their rooms and strictly instructed them never to leave any of their things lying about. Sarah would not have had a clue unless she knew before she arrived there.
Christy flashed back to the cheap rental car in the ditch, probably rented by Sarah that morning after one more lonely night on the sofa bed in the studio apartment in Murray Hill. She saw the letter for Vaughn, probably containing some form of blackmail disguised as a declaration of undying amour. Sarah’s armpits were guiltily sweaty, indubitably revealing the no-time-for-deodorant, it’s-now-or-never haste in which she had left. It was just like the final few minutes of an episode of Murder, She Wrote.
Christy had been naive. “Tell Mr. Armitage I’m sorry. I missed him” wasn’t European punctuation, it was Exhibit A for affair.
Vaughn’s infidelity was something Christy had not known yet had always known. She loved him, that was for sure, but it was not a madly-in-love, jealous passion that meant the unexpected arrival of the woman in black could ruin her life. It was a “this is my life and I sacrificed things for it, and you, Miss, will never get the third share in the barn” kind of love. Christy knew now that there was one territorial bone in her body.
Meanwhile, Sarah was burying her nose in the Madonna lilies in the vase on the table. She seemed so young and clever and sad, and, if Sarah had been her younger sister, Christy would have said, if you waste your thirties on married men it will work out only one way and it’s bad for you. Don’t make stalking your activity of choice on a national holiday. Find a bachelor nearer your own age who will pick a daffodil for you out of someone’s plant pot on Fifth Avenue as you walk to Central Park to go boating on the lake.
But Sarah was not in the family yet, and Christy did not feel any sisterly or sister-wife loyalty to her. And when she saw the beautiful shirt moving dangerously near the lily stamens, and the red-brown pollen that she had not yet cut off quivering, ready to strike, she knew that, were it to hit that silk, there would be no amount of Sellotape could ever lift it off.
“Vaughn’s never going to leave me,” she said.
And Sarah spun round, brushing against almost every bloom in the fifty-flower bouquet.
“I can see that,” Sarah replied, no longer seeming young and clever, merely sad. “I should never have come here. I’m sorry.”
“It’s all right,” said Christy. “But you’d better go. And don’t come back.”
As Sarah scuttled past her, Christy saw, with only a little remorse, that the hand-dyed plum now had orangey-red patches all over it. And in fashion heaven, the angels wept.
But Christy did not.
She walked into the kitchen and pulled the white envelope from the pocket of her jeans. She sniffed it. It was scented, of course, Miss Dior or something similarly predictable. It did not occur to her to open it; she simply ripped it up, took the casserole out of the oven, and stuffed bits of paper with perfect black-ink pen handwriting on it and bloody, flour-covered meat into the waste disposal.
Then she went outside to find Teddy and told him to fence round the ditch and not to mention anything about the car or the woman to Mr. Armitage.
“Vaughn,” she said firmly, “is never to be enlightened.”
• • •
WHEN HER HUSBAND and the girls returned, all three tired and happy, Christy was lying on the enormous sofa, finishing The Age of Innocence. She opened her arms to hug Sorcha and Sinead, and when Vaughn leaned over she tilted her face up and kissed him on the mouth.
“How was your afternoon?” he said, and smiled.
(A young woman crashed her car into the ditch, I showed her round the house, and she turned out to be your mistress, thought Christy.)
“I didn’t feel like cooking, so I booked a table at the Meeting House,” she said.
“Perfect,” he replied. “I’ll ask Teddy to drive us, so we can have a cocktail.”
And he headed out to his office, a distinctly frisky edge to his stride.
Christy leaned back and the girls lay on top of her. She gazed upward through the golden feathery strands of their hair and looked at the top-of-the-range recessed light fittings imported from Sweden. She breathed in her daughters’ smell, felt their flesh born of her flesh, vowed that their life would always be more important than her life, and considered the events of the past three hours.
And finally she understood what Julia had meant that day on the beach. It might be true, she thought, but it doesn’t feel real.
back to school
September
The kids were all right, of course. It was Robyn, already exhausted by eight-thirty, ashamed of her five-year-old beige skirt and jacket that was the same as wearing a T-shirt reading I have to work in a badly paid boring job, who felt trepidation as she approached the school gates.
La rentrée, they call it in France, a
nd for some reason Robyn found herself thinking about chic French women, the kind who take the return to school extremely seriously, using the first few days of term as an opportunity to upgrade their wardrobes and underwear and perform essential maintenance activities on their faces and décolletage. However, Robyn was not living on the Left Bank, but in a former tenement in the Loisaida, which was far too small for the four of them, despite Ryan’s protestations that all it needed was more “storage space.” The only essential maintenance she would be performing today would be filing her corns in the bath after another day trudging round the bed shop.
Her face darkened, and she frowned. At this moment, a bouncy woman in leisurewear bounced past, grinning “Everybody happy” without waiting for a reply. Robyn realized it had not been a question, merely a statement of intent. She glanced around. Yes, everybody did seem happy. All around her, bathed in sunlight, were the shiny people of the West Village.
Maybe it was something in the soya lattes? Or maybe this particular group of adults woke up every morning celebrating the fact that, because of the zoning of their apartments, their children could go to a top public school and they could keep their summer cottages in Quogue? For a moment Robyn missed the old school, the sight of gothically gloomy Lucy Lovett peering in horror over her sunglasses at such things as a poster for A Happyness Workshop for Siblings, or the day Julia took over from Christy as Class Mom and reduced half the children to tears by answering the question “What is God?” with “God is something people invented to make themselves feel better about death.” She smiled, she couldn’t help it; then she pulled herself together. She must stop thinking about Julia.
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