The Love Book

by Nina Solomon

  Duncan had never mentioned Astrid’s existence. Naturally, Emily was curious to know who this little girl’s mother was, but she also wanted to know what the deal was with all these “fillettes.” Willing herself to remain poised and calm, she smiled when Duncan appeared, his shirt buttoned up wrong.

  “I see you’ve already met my darling Astrid.”

  “Yes, she’s adorable. I didn’t know you had children.”

  “As far as I know, she’s the only one.”

  “How old is she?”

  “She’ll be six in March.”

  “I would have thought she was older.”

  He laughed. “Typical American. In Europe parents believe in exposing children to real life, not mollycoddling them.”

  Emily’s throat felt tight. “When did she arrive?”

  “She and Petra flew in yesterday.”

  Thoughts were swirling in her head. She looked around the apartment for signs of the Guggenheim grant–receiving, vörtbröd-making Petra. Finding none, she relaxed slightly.

  “Petra is in Princeton at a symposium,” he explained. “In case you were wondering.”

  “I wasn’t—”

  “You’re transparent. I can read you like a book.”

  She wasn’t going to let her insecurities get the better of her. She’d been doing that too often recently. “I’m really glad you called.”

  She and Duncan hadn’t seen each other since last week, on Halloween.

  “Well, as you can see I have a slight encumbrance,” he said. “You know how that is.”

  “Your daughter is hardly an encumbrance,” she replied, ignoring his tone.

  “It’s a legal term of art. Don’t be so literal.” Duncan rebuttoned his shirt and then bent down to kiss Astrid on the forehead. “Papa will be home soon. Be a good girl for Emily.”

  “You’re going out?” Emily asked.

  “I shouldn’t be too late.”

  “Weren’t we having dinner?”

  “Oh, yes. I’m glad you reminded me. I told Astrid she could order whatever she likes. It’s on me. I left twenty dollars on the mantle.”

  There was no question in Emily’s mind that she and Duncan had a date tonight. And here he was expecting that she’d babysit for a kid she didn’t know about instead, and worse, without even asking her. She was about to voice her concerns when he leaned in close and whispered, “I have plans for you when I get back,” and all of her indignation flew out the window.

  * * *

  Astrid fell asleep in Duncan’s bed watching Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Duncan should have been home an hour ago. Emily tried his cell, but from somewhere under the piles of papers on his desk came the “Flight of the Valkyries” ringtone. Tonight none of the books on the shelves beckoned. The only thing she noticed was dust, everywhere, copious amounts of it, on the mantelpiece, along the baseboards, picture frames—the same dust that had looked almost charmingly insouciant the first time she was here. Now it just looked grungy. Crumbs, dirty plates, and junk mail covered the dining room table.

  Emily saw a stack of yellow Kodak envelopes with a rubber band around them. She told herself she wasn’t snooping, she was just passing the time, as she opened envelope after envelope. There were dozens of photographs of beautiful and exotic women, some topless, with Duncan on adventures in places just as beautiful and exotic.

  She heard soft footsteps from the hallway. One of the photographs slipped to the floor. Astrid, wearing one of her father’s T-shirts, which on her was as long as a dress, sat down and looked at it.

  “Here, let me put that back,” Emily said.

  Astrid rubbed her eyes. “You don’t look like one of Papa’s fillettes.”

  Emily glanced at her reflection in the darkened window.

  As this little girl stared at her with her clear blue eyes, Emily felt a terrible emptiness. She didn’t want to be one of many. With Charles she’d never doubted that she was the most important person in the world to him. She thought about her twenty-ninth birthday. Her parents had made reservations at their favorite Italian restaurant. The four of them shared a tiramisu with long silver spoons, no champagne, because Emily was eight months pregnant. Charles had made a toast. Here’s to the most beautiful pregnant woman in the world. Reflexively, Emily hid her hands in her lap as though she was a child about to be reprimanded, and looked at her mother. The lines between her brows had deepened as if drawn with charcoal. Her father took his wife’s hand. No one is as beautiful as you, my dear. Charles had been overjoyed to find out they were having a boy. Emily was too, though she never told anyone the real reason was that she didn’t know if she could be a good mother to a girl, another thing she had in common with Emma Bovary.

  Astrid tugged at Emily’s arm. “Can we watch Chitty Chitty Bang Bang again?” She was holding the DVD.

  “Sure,” Emily said, but she was barely listening.

  * * *

  An hour later, the buzzer rang, bringing Emily back to reality. The movie was already half over and Astrid was curled up beside her on the couch, sucking her thumb. For the first time that evening Emily noticed how dirty the little girl’s fingers were and she felt a pang of guilt. She paid the delivery guy and set the containers of food and paper plates on the coffee table.

  “Come, Astrid,” she said, gently removing the girl’s thumb from her mouth. “Let’s go wash up for dinner.”

  Astrid stood on a stool so she could reach the sink. Her hands felt so tiny in Emily’s as she washed them with warm soapy water. After drying them with a dark blue towel, Emily searched in the medicine cabinet for a brush. The sliding mirror was covered with fingerprints and splattered with toothpaste. The only brush was a dusty Mason Pearson. As tangled as Astrid’s hair was, she couldn’t allow it to touch the girl’s golden hair.

  “I want to be Truly Scrumptious when I grow up,” Astrid said as they settled back on the couch after eating, to resume watching the movie.

  “Why?” Emily asked.

  “Because then I would be beautiful and everyone would want to pick me first,” she replied matter-of-factly.

  “Pick you first for what?”

  Astrid looked up at Emily, her eyes wide. “Don’t you want to be picked first?”

  Emily considered the depth and meaning of the girl’s words. She thought about Charles and Nick and the strange triangle she was in now.

  “Why are you sad?” Astrid asked.

  “I’m not sad. Maybe a little. Sometimes.”

  The girl leaned her head on Emily and closed her eyes. “I pick you,” she said.

  Emily softly stroked Astrid’s cheek. “And I pick you.”

  * * *

  Around midnight the front door opened. Without even taking off his coat Duncan retreated to the bedroom to make a phone call. Astrid, still awake, picked up her doll and followed him. Emily could only hear Duncan’s muffled voice. After waiting for twenty minutes, she considered leaving, but his words had been so seductive. I have plans for you when I get back. Hearing no sounds coming from the other room, she tapped gently on the bedroom door, then peeked in. Duncan was fast asleep next to a sleeping Astrid.

  He opened his eyes, blinking in the light. “Emily, I forgot you were still here.” His voice was gravely. “Call you tomorrow. Thanks for pitching in.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  ON THIN ICE

  IT WAS 11/11/11, the auspicious once-in-a-century date that Cathy had chosen for the Soul Mate Soirée. Beatrice couldn’t remember if this was Cathy’s second or third attempt to marshal all the members of the Soul Mate Soirée—a skating party—but it looked like it was going to come off without a hitch, until Max called and canceled at the last minute, off to some exotic place, maybe Peru, with her oceanographer boyfriend. The bus ride from Albany had been more trying than usual. Beatrice had sat next to a teenager listening to some sort of rap music on his iPod. Even with his headphones, she could hear every word: Girl drop it to the floor, I love the way yo booty go . . . By the
time she arrived at Port Authority, she had a colossal headache but could freestyle with the best of them.

  Emily and Cathy were skating on the rink in Bryant Park. To Beatrice, Bryant Park was still a vast but seedy patch of grass behind the library that attracted drug dealers and homeless people, a former potter’s field. She and Libby had attended a rally to end the Vietnam War on the green and listened to Judy Collins with 40,000 other protesters. Who would have guessed that in a few decades, with the help of generous donors, it would be turned into a French-inspired tourist trap. Sure, it had been cleaned up, glammed up, and sanitized like Times Square, and walking through it at two in the morning no longer posed a threat, but something was lost in the process of trying to whitewash the past. It always was.

  Beatrice had brought her skates and her rabbit-lined skating jacket, and had been looking forward to practicing her three-turns and backward crossovers, but after lacing up her skates, when push came to shove and it was time to venture out onto the ice, she couldn’t do it. She held onto the guardrail, teetering on her white figure skates, and watched Cathy as she awkwardly made her way around the perimeter of the ring. Beatrice only left to give Freddy a call once the girl had found her balance and didn’t look like she was about to face-plant.

  When Cathy told her they were meeting at Lily O’Brien’s, Beatrice had been thrilled. Finally, a place with pub food and a liquor license! What she found instead was a glorified and overpriced candy store. And the snooty waitress had the nerve to offer her a senior discount! She wasn’t out to pasture yet. In fact just last week, at a Code Pink rally, one of the members had asked her if she’d be willing to offer her legal services for the Albany affiliate of Women Against War. She’d helped organize the Grannies for Peace Valentine’s Day “Reverse the Surge” demonstration, for which she had been remunerated with a hot pink tote bag. A year ago she would have jumped at the opportunity, but since reconnecting with Freddy, her life had taken a different turn. How could she possibly commit to anything when she didn’t know if she would be in Italy or Istanbul come February?

  She sipped her scalding hot chocolate, a fancy-schmancy concoction called a Lily Vanili. Emily and Cathy were still at the counter trying to decide what to order. She removed the pink satin beauty queen sash Cathy had presented to her emblazoned with the words: Bride-to-be! She was still pretty steamed by Freddy’s reaction when she called and told him about Rob Roy’s seventieth birthday bash in Montana next week. You’re not going, are you? he asked in that hushed, judgmental tone of his. You bet your boots I am, she’d answered. Give me one reason why I shouldn’t. I won’t dignify that with a response. You know very well why not. Freddy, it’s been fifty years, for heaven’s sake. I had lots of beaux. Get over it.

  She regretted neither her tone nor her answer and still didn’t, but maybe telling him to “cram it, jam it,” one of the rap lyrics she’d picked up on the bus ride from Albany, had been a bit much. After all, he was recuperating from a heart attack.

  Cathy handed out pieces of poster board divided into what looked like wedges of a pie, along with magazines, scissors, and glue sticks. Several other patrons looked on with curiosity at this giant art project. Cathy explained the meaning of each of the eight sectors of the treasure map. Something about trigrams each corresponding to one aspect of life: career, spirituality, family and friends, wealth, fame, love, creativity, travel, and an empty yellow circle in the center representing balance and peace.

  Beatrice was flipping through an issue of The New Yorker when she came upon an amusing Victoria Roberts cartoon of a miniature husband in a fishbowl on a desert island. The caption summed up perfectly her feelings about marriage after the call with Freddy: He’s the cutest thing, and when you get tired of him you just flush him down the toilet. She grabbed a pair of scissors and glued the cartoon right in the center of the poster board. Cathy, who’d appointed herself Max’s manifestor ad litem, was putting the finishing touches on Max’s treasure map, positioning an image of a woman at the top of Mt. Everest “just so” before applying adhesive, the ultimate commitment. She glanced up to see how her other students were progressing, took one look at Emily’s treasure map, and gasped. “You don’t have a single image of partnership or a loving happy union!”

  “Sure she does.” Beatrice pointed. “Right there. See? Nothing says marital bliss like Vera Wang.”

  “The woman’s alone, staring at the waves as if her betrothed was away at sea. That’s not union, that’s longing.”

  “Same difference,” Beatrice said. “It’s implied.”

  “You don’t want to play around with the law of attraction,” Cathy warned. “I should know. It’s quantum physics. Vibrationally speaking, this woman says alone forever.”

  “Vibrationally?” Beatrice laughed. “I don’t know how cutting out and gluing a picture of Brad and Angelina onto a piece of poster board will tell the universe anything about you except that you subscribe to Us magazine.”

  “Brad is very family-oriented. And if I were you I’d take off that cartoon.”

  Treasure maps complete, Cathy pulled out a can of pink glitter spray from her Mary Poppins bag. She gave the can a shake. “Now for the magic!” She was about to press the nozzle when the waitress told her that glitter was not allowed in the establishment. Cathy explained that it was nonaerosol, nonflammable, and nontoxic, but it was clear that this waitress was not going to budge, even where the law of attraction was concerned. Emily understood. In preschool, whenever Zach brought home an art project with glitter, she’d find sparkles all over the house for months afterward, once even right on Charles’s nose during couples’ therapy, which amused her and which she didn’t feel the need to mention. Cathy obediently put away the spray can, but as soon as the waitress was out of sight, each treasure map got a quick dusting.

  For Emily, the effect of a little bit of sparkle was startling. What had previously been a nondescript 22-by-28-inch piece of poster board with a hodgepodge of generic images from Martha Stewart Living, Modern Bride, and Redbook suddenly seemed to shimmer with possibilities. Her treasure map was a glittery enchanted path through the Candy Cane Forest and over Gum Drop Mountain leading to her perfect life. She’d caved to Cathy’s pressure and glued on a photograph of a bride and groom hailing a yellow taxicab. She wished she had a reset button. If she had the chance she’d do so many things differently. Surprisingly, none of the images seemed out of reach, none of them except the New York Times best-seller list she’d cut out then crumpled up and stuffed in her pocket—too much of a stretch, even in fantasy. Her coat pocket began to vibrate, a karmic warning sign. She hoped it was Duncan calling to apologize for the babysitting incident the other night, but it was Clarissa. All the ebullience she’d felt about the future drained out of her. Candy Land quickly turned into a game of Chutes and Ladders, sucking her into a dark abyss. She ignored the call and the two after that.

  “Cruella?” Beatrice asked.

  Emily nodded.

  “You need to stick up for yourself. Don’t take any guff from that gold digger. Bitches ain’t shit but hoes and tricks.”

  Emily laughed. “I’d never have pegged you to be a Dr. Dre fan.”

  “You have to stay current,” Beatrice said.

  After settling the bill, Cathy handed out laminated instruction manuals. “Remember, at exactly eleven minutes and eleven seconds after eleven, make a wish—soul mate related, of course.”

  “And what, pray tell, are you going to wish for, Cathy?” Beatrice asked, wrapping a purple plaid scarf around her neck.

  Oblivious to the sarcasm, Cathy answered, “To be engaged to my soul mate by Valentine’s Day.”

  “That’s less than three months from now. Be realistic.”

  “The universe doesn’t differentiate between a button and a castle,” Cathy said.

  “Huh?”

  “I knew it!”

  “Knew what?” Beatrice asked.

  “You didn’t read the chapter. Now that you’re e
ngaged, the worst thing you can do is get complacent.”

  They left Lily O’Brien’s and walked across Bryant Park. The skating rink had just been freshly Zambonied. The ice glistened, untouched, no trace of the countless crisscrossing paths. The three women looked at each other. Without a word, they laced up their skates, even Beatrice, linked arms, and glided out onto the ice. At precisely eleven minutes and eleven seconds after eleven, they stood in the center of the rink and made their wishes.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  LOVE PULSE

  THEY’D BEEN AIRBORNE less than twenty minutes and already Beatrice was second-guessing herself. Maybe inviting Cathy to go with her to Rob Roy’s seventieth birthday bash had been a mistake. But the ticket was nonrefundable and she wasn’t about to give Freddy the satisfaction of not going. Cathy was doing one of her kooky love quizzes, deliberating before filling in each answer as if she were taking an exam. Sure, it was harmless enough, until Cathy suggested for the third time that Beatrice take her own Self-Love Pulse.

  “Ask me again and I’m changing seats,” she said, getting up to go to the lavatory.

  A bunch of rowdy NRA-card-carrying types were hooting and making raunchy comments to the flight attendant. Beatrice had never liked being ogled, and she’d turned many a head in her day, but she didn’t like not being ogled even more. She returned to her seat and reclined her chair. She needed a drink like nobody’s business. Finally, the flight attendant arrived with the drink cart. She handed Cathy a ginger ale and a cocktail napkin then asked Beatrice what she’d like.

  “A bloody mary, no ice, with a twist.”

  “I’m sorry, I can’t do that,” the flight attendant said.

  “I have cash.”

  “We’re not permitted to serve alcohol in economy. Only in first class.”

  “They can get sloshed if they’re filthy rich but not back here?”