The O. Henry Prize Stories 2005

by Laura Furman

  Caitlin Macy

  Christie

  from The New Yorker

  WHEN YOU met Christie for the first time, it took only minutes to learn that she was from Greenwich, Connecticut, but months could go by before you got another solid fact out of her. After a couple of years in New York, she realized that she had to give people a little more information to stop them wondering, so once she’d mentioned Greenwich she would quickly add that she’d gone to “the high school,” meaning the public one. The first time she said this, you’d find her forthrightness refreshing—disarming, even, in the midst of so many pretenders. You’d be prompted, perhaps, to admit something about yourself—the fact that you were doing Jenny Craig, for instance, and had to sneak the packaged food into your office microwave when no one was paying attention. But then you’d overhear Christie making the same confession to someone else, and it would lose its charm. It was just Fact No. 2, which, added to Fact No. 1—her childhood in Greenwich—represented the sum total of what could be stated about Christie Thorn's background, about her entire life before college and New York.

  Plus, you couldn’t help being suspicious of her motives in revealing Fact No. 2. If, at a party, a group of people were standing around, sharing a corner of the room, and someone made an opening bid—mentioning Hotchkiss or St. George’s, say—Christie would always pointedly interject, “Oh, I wouldn’t know. I went to public school. Greenwich High. That's right—I was a good old suburban kid.” Of course, Christie and the person who had mentioned boarding school were doing the same thing—preemptively defending themselves against attack—and yet you were tempted to give the Hotchkiss guy a free pass. With him, you could figure that his parents had divorced badly, or his mother was an alcoholic, or his brother had committed suicide (or perhaps it really had been an accidental overdose), or that in keeping with the family tradition Dad had gone crazy and now spent his days in slippers and a robe shooting intricate, archaic forms of pool. On account of one or more of these family problems, the young man felt insecure about himself as an individual, and so, in situations of social challenge, he mentioned boarding school a little too early, and a little unnaturally, to shore up his resolve. Still, whatever his problem, whatever the big bad family secret, it was just the slightly burned edge on a cake that everyone still wanted to eat. How bad could those family problems really be, you’d asked yourself more than once, if, at the same time, you had a house on the Vineyard? How bad—if you had the gray shingles, the weathered shutters, the slanting attic roof, the iron bedstead, the needlepoint pillows proclaiming, “A woman's place is on the tennis court!,” the batterie de cuisine of lobster pots and potato mashers from the forties, and the octagonal kitchen window, through which you could glimpse the dunes and smell the salt air—could anything really be?

  Meanwhile, you’d assume that Christie had more to protect, that her history was more embarrassing, somehow: a chronological downsizing of suburban homes (all of them, albeit, technically still in Greenwich), a cheapness in things like bedding and glassware, or four people sharing one bathroom with a stand-up shower. And you wouldn’t be wrong. The real story was simple, of course, simple and unnecessarily sad. Christie's father had gone into business for himself and had cash-flow problems. That was all. No one had murdered anyone; there wasn’t a whiff of incest or abuse, embezzlement or even tax fraud. Mr. Thorn had owed money his whole life, but he paid his bills more or less on time, and, when he died, his life-insurance policy would pay off the mortgage on the house. He was an honest man with a clean conscience.

  Yet Christie's conscience was not clean, and seemed never to have been. In a typical scenario from her adolescence, her father would plan a nice vacation for the family, then wouldn’t have enough cash to cover it, Christie would throw a tantrum, and her mother, who spoiled her, would somehow find the money to appease her. Christie would go on the vacation, but she would go alone, with a similarly spoiled friend. She and the friend would go helling around Key West, say, or Miami Beach, feeling worse and worse and worse and laughing harder and harder. And then, and this was the kicker, Christies mother would pick them up at LaGuardia (the friend's mother could never be bothered) and would want to know— would have been anxious about, primordially concerned about—whether they’d had a good time.

  On the way back from one of these vacations when she was sixteen or seventeen, Christie and her friend checked in late and were bumped up to first class. They were separated, and Christie was seated next to a distinguished-looking older man. He drank Scotches and read a golf magazine, and, when the flight was delayed, the two became partners in peevish complaint, the man turning to Christie to include her in his “Can you believe this?” glare. Eventually, he asked her where she was from, and when she said, “Greenwich,” he looked at her with a kind of absolute approval that she couldn’t recall ever having inspired before. After that, whenever a flight of hers was delayed she’d shake her head and say, “Time to spare, go by air,” as the Scotch-drinking man had, and when she met people she liked to make sure that they knew where she was from.

  After college, after a prolonged phase of running around New York while drifting through a series of support jobs at big firms, and after she had slept with, I think, either fifty-five or sixty-five men, Christie found someone to marry. We spent a lot of time speculating as to who would be invited to the wedding (only a strange, angry girl named Mary McLean, who had made some Faustian bargain with Christie long before any of us met her, considered herself one of Christie's real friends), but in the end everyone was invited—and to the Pierre, no less. Throughout the evening, Christie wore a look of incurable dissatisfaction. Her face was gaudily made up, as if for a school play or an ice-skating competition. At the reception, her parents seemed frightened. It was as if they had been instructed to keep their mouths shut at all costs. A guest would shake Mrs. Thorn's hand in the receiving line and say, “Hi, I’m Jen Ryan. Christie and I were roommates at Trinity?” and Mrs. Thorn would nod, grim-faced, and say—literally—nothing. The groom's name was Thomas Bruewald, and he was gawky and tall, with an oversize head and a unibrow. His par- ents were never identified. Apparently they were foreign. He had grown up half over here and half over there—in Bavaria, was it? Or Croatia? At any rate, it wasn’t Umbria or Aix or anywhere worth trying to lock in an invitation for. Bruewald had gone to one of those Euro institutes with the word “polytechnical” in the name. The champagne at the reception was a little too good, and some people had more than their fill and, by the end of the night, were making rude remarks. One guy said that Christie's parents must have taken out a second mortgage to pay for the wedding. “Didn’t know you could get a second mortgage on a trailer,” somebody else said. And then, of course, you got “Hey, wait a minute! There are no trailers”—the crowd in unison—“in Greenwich, Connecticut!” But nobody said that the groom was funny-looking. You could pick on Christie for trying too hard, you could note the moment when Mr. Thorn took off his tuxedo jacket and started doing body shots with the bridesmaids, but you didn’t pick on the groom's looks. You just didn’t go there.

  Christie herself was quite pretty. She had large, unflawed features and blond hair that was only a shade or two lighter than her natural color. She was also thin. And, in an age when Manhattan had been overrun by the kind of chain stores you’d find at a suburban mall, these attributes had kept her in dates for a decade and the word “beautiful” had been lobbed over her head with surprising—to some of us, disturbing—frequency.

  The groom had some kind of science-related job—engineering or drug research—that required a reverse commute to New Jersey. And, once the wedding was over, once the gifts had been ordered (they had registered for everything but the kitchen sink, in anticipation, evidently, of dinners for sixteen at which oysters would be served and finger bowls required), once the thank-you note from Christie—Christie Bruewald now—had arrived, it seemed that only the sparsest smattering of social interactions was indicated, coffee or a dri
nk twice a year. There was even some thought that the newlyweds would move out of the city. Christie had always talked nonstop about children (little trophies, one presumed, to fill up that bottomless pit of dissatisfaction), and the suburbs had been mentioned more than once.

  Christie's new thing, at our biannual meetings, was to brag about her visits to Thomas's family in Europe. It was mystifying—one would not have thought an “in” in the former East Germany particularly brag-worthy, and, in any case, everyone at the wedding had seen how cowed the guy was, how classic the trade they had made. Did she think we didn’t see her boasts for what they were? She started to slip into conversation the fact that Thomas's uncle had a title, or had had one—she was vague on the details—and she mentioned that there was a castle in the family. Her Christmas card (sent yearly to all of us, even though we had not sent one to her in years) introduced the Bruewald family crest. It was all so ludicrous and pathetic, really, when they were living in a studio in a high-rise on York Avenue.

  “So why do you even see her?” my husband would ask. (I was married now, too.) “If she's so awful, why don’t you dump her? Just don’t call back.” Like most men, he had no patience with these pseudo-friendships between women that drag on for years. The question bothered me, and in my head I came up with three reasons that I continued to see Christie Bruewald, née Thorn, at six-month intervals. First, I enjoyed taking note of her pretensions. I enjoyed seeing how far she would go. In a way, I had exulted in the family-crest Christmas card. I had put it up on the refrigerator and shown it to everyone who came over. I was dying, now, to see what would follow. When I met her for coffee, I went prepared with a mental tape recorder to catch her appalling lapses in taste—not so much for myself as to pass on to everyone else. Second, there were, I have to admit, sparks of humanity in Christie's pretensions, and in her desires, that I felt were missing in the rest of my life. She had coveted a huge diamond ring. She had hoped to land a guy with money. She had wanted her wedding to be an extravaganza, a day she’d remember for the rest of her life. She wasn’t “over it.” She wasn’t over anything. She knew what she wanted, and she wanted the kinds of things that the marketers of luxury goods describe as “the best”—Jacuzzis, chandeliers, access to the tropics in the middle of winter. Third, and finally, what got me, I suppose, were the indications of humanity in Christie's life that had nothing to do with her pretensions. The family crest on the Christmas card had been embossed onto a picture of the Bruewalds and their new baby in matching red-and-green velvet outfits. The little girl looked exactly like Thomas—an odd-featured brown-haired old man. She wouldn’t have the advantage of Christie's looks, and, for someone as entranced by the superficial as Christie was, that must have been hard to take. You could say that I felt sorry for her.

  Still, despite my three reasons, a year or so after my own wedding I went through a period when I felt it was important to burn the fat from my life.

  Christie had begun to represent all that was wrong with New York— which, as usual, meant what I was tired of in myself. I wrote “Seeing people like Christie Thorn” on a list of things that were a waste of time, and when she called and left a message to start the back-and-forth that would culminate in our having lunch a few weeks later, I didn’t call back.

  Perhaps I ended it then simply because the interesting part appeared to be over. Though my own life still seemed to me a fount of infinite promise, hers felt blandly curtailed. I realized that there was a part of me that had almost wanted her to make it, on her own terms, whatever they might be. The sad thing about Christies wedding was that it hadn’t been outrageous at all; it had been just another overpriced New York wedding spearheaded by a bride with too much makeup on. I found it all too easy to imagine how her story would continue, how, inevitably, it would end. I lived with that story, kept the thread going in my mind, and added to it from time to time, when some event in my own life recalled Christie's unhappy mixture of envy and drive, of self-promotion and apology.

  My version (wholly fictional) went something like this: Having married for money, Christie quickly discovers that she hasn’t married for enough. Realizing her mistake only deepens the dissatisfaction she feels with her life, and, in order to convince herself that things can still change, she has an innocuous little affair in the first six months of her marriage. The second affair, a year later, is not so innocuous. Thomas is doing as well as he ever has, but this is New York, and after their second child the Bruewalds are unable to afford a big enough apartment in the city and they make the move to the suburbs. (For Christie, Brooklyn, or a bohemian setup with the baby in the living room, has never been an option.) They buy a starter house in one of the less well-known towns of Westchester. They socialize a lot and their favorite friends are people like themselves, but who make a little less than they do, and are jealous of them for some other reason as well—Christie's having lost the weight after her pregnancies, say. The kids are the usual product of a marriage like the Bruewalds’. They suffer from Christie's frustrated ambition and their father's subservience to it, and they end up angry and self-hating beneath a surface of entitlement. But the European influence helps to normalize them somewhat, and at least they know how to ski. When the children are grown and out of the house, Christie starts spending most of her time down at the time-share in Cancún, befriending other “party people,” whose spouses turn a blind eye. But she and Thomas never divorce because she's afraid to be alone.

  That would be about the size of it. It would end in a sorry, grasping old age, marked by an incivility to service people (flight attendants, doctors’ secretaries) and a dye job that wasn’t what it used to be.

  It was what she deserved, wasn’t it? There is order in things, and people who spend a hundred grand on a wedding they can’t afford simply not to lose face should pay in some way. Who was she kidding?

  It will be clear from my iteration of Christie's excesses that, as a couple, my husband and I have always prided ourselves on living within our means. When the time comes for us to move into a bigger apartment, we understand that staying in the city will mean living at the back of a building, in interior rooms that open onto shaftways. So it's only for kicks, just to see what we’re missing, that we ask our broker to show us something fancy. We go prepared to look, to smile wistfully, and to depart, understanding that by any reasonable standards we have more than enough, and by any other standards we simply don’t measure ourselves. When, high up in Carnegie Hill, on our way into one of those hushed old buildings that face the Park, our two-year-old daughter falls in love with the doorman, we take it, laughing, with endless hope for the future, as a sign that the girl knows quality when she sees it. “You can see him on the way out,” we promise. “He’ll still be there.” Yet, when we fall in love with the apartment itself, we cannot take it as a sign of anything at all. It is smaller by a room than the others we’ve looked at; and costs more by… oh, about a hundred grand. Where are our wistful smiles now? Where is our comfort in reasonable standards? It is clear that we—and only we—are capable of fully appreciating the charm of this place. Who but we would actually enjoy the fact that the stove and the refrigerator appear, like the building, to be prewar? Who but we would keep the sixties-style wallpaper in the maid's room? (The ghost of Christie Thorn shakes her head in annoyance at the broker: “Total gut job in the kitchen!” “No closet space!” “No wet bar!”) And then there is our daughter and the doorman, who is pretending to play hide-and-seek with her, while we stand wordless in the marble lobby, looking out at the green of the Park, doing sums in our head, reconsidering decisions of the past, decisions that might have netted us this apartment, pure and simple.

  Because now nothing else will do.

  The apartment is at the breaking point of our price range, and though on paper we can swing it, our broker calls that night with bad news: he's shopped us to the board, and they are reluctant to consider anyone whose liquid assets are as low as ours. That fast, it's over. We have been slotted
into position. We know—and can laugh bitterly at the notion that this knowledge, in other circumstances, is supposed to be comforting—exactly where we are.

  A week after the bad news, I walk by the building, daughterless this time. A man emerges, then two schoolgirls in uniform. I put my sunglasses on to hide the fact that I am staring in an ugly, covetous way. How tortured and unpleasant I must look compared with the woman my age who comes out next, well dressed, well coiffed, followed by two children, a girl and a boy, who are followed in turn by two nannies. For an incredible moment, I mistake the woman for an older, more sophisticated Christie Thorn. Out of habit I am pretending not to see even this twin of hers (the way you ignore a man in a bar who resembles your ex-boyfriend), when the doorman's greeting rings out—yes, as if in a dream—“Mrs. Brue-wald.” “Hi, Lester.” He asks how long she will be, and the woman says, “Oh, an hour or two. We’re just going to go to the Park and do some shopping before Daddy gets home.”

  In a vile moment of Darwinian survival, I paste a smile on my face, and I call out, “Christie?”

  We went to an Italian restaurant on Madison. Kids and nannies were dispatched to the Park. It was an off hour, three or four o’clock, and I remember I almost hated to dirty one of the white linen tablecloths, which were already set for dinner. We started with cappuccinos, then moved on to glasses of the house white. Later, when we got hungry, the waiter brought antipasto and some bread, and to wash it down I had another glass of white wine and Christie switched to red. I was longing for a cigarette, and eventually I asked her, “Do you still smoke?” “My God, I’m dying for one,” she said, and took a pack out of her purse. We each smoked two.