by Lisa Zeidner
They needed to be, because every inch that your eye traveled upward from the feet, past the exquisite armor of her clothes to her face, you watched her lose the smooth élan. Her face was pure, naked anxiety. Please, please, please, this face said. Don’t hurt me.
Zach’s Mom, Marjorie. Who went by the more dignified, Continental, hopeful Margot. (“As in escargot,” Zachary would later offer.) Mar to her friends.
Marred, unmarried Mar.
“Very pleased to meet you,” she said, proffering a tiny, nervous hand.
I gave her a certain salesman’s handshake—fast motion, but incongruously light pressure—to register respectful curiosity.
She would never get over the divorce.
All those years ago but she was right, there was no cure, nothing would work: she would never recover.
Because I found myself nonplussed by the force of my own knowledge (this was the second time in a day, after all, that I’d felt almost omniscient), I reminded myself that I was, probably, not clairvoyant. Just a salesman. A salesman can speed-read not only the walk, the voice, the clothes, and gestures—all of the loudspeaker announcements of identity and aspiration—but the aura of a customer’s need. No one can hide from a good salesman. It’s less true in pushing medical equipment than it is for cars or face creams, but it is the same principle. Although this is not the conventional wisdom, I believe that the salesman’s instinct is kind. Even altruistic. Like priests, we find the ache and aim for solace.
Zachary in a tie and jacket. How cute!
His ponytail, still damp from the shower, pulled back smooth as a ballerina’s.
He’d tacked on an expression of patrician Swiss neutrality. He looked almost as formal as the maître d’ who seated us.
Two middle-aged women and a teenage boy. The maître d’ tried to look noncommittal but he’d already taken our measure, dismissed us, ushered us to a table against the wall with “We have no bad tables” defensiveness, and within minutes the efficient waiter (“Ladies? Gentleman?”) had taken our drink orders, dismissed us as well. If salesmen read the soul, waiters scan right through you—their eyes like the cameras airports use to X-ray luggage—right to the contents of your wallet.
Which reminded me of my cash-flow problem.
Why it hadn’t occurred to me before I agreed to meet people at the most expensive restaurant in town is not quite clear.
(On hotel voice mail, when I returned from the pool to dress for this rendezvous: the Four Seasons desk, politely noting that they’d need my credit card now, if I was planning to stay on. How long, if they might ask, was I planning to stay on?)
The waiter had given Zach the wine list. Zach was reading it the way you’d read the back of a cereal box, because it was there.
“Shall I do the honors?” I asked.
Zach slipped the wine list to me low. Locked eyes with me over his domestic beer as his mother fluttered at the menu. Beamed me a “Don’t Tread on Me” glare, tight-jawed. I returned an ingenue smile.
“Oh everything looks so yummy,” Mar said. “So where’s your boy now? I hear he’s on the swim team too.”
So he hadn’t told her. Or hadn’t heard me. Or had simply forgotten. I looked at him, trying to determine which, but he was now surveying the room, diligently avoiding eye contact. “Red or white?” I asked brightly.
Mother: “White.” Son: “Red.”
They laughed the same volcanic, barking laugh. I’d assumed his laugh was the father’s, but it came out of her like she was belching up a poltergeist. It made me feel a rush of warmth toward her.
Even before the compromise rosé arrived (the sommelier opening it with the grave ceremony of a bomb defuser), the starched tablecloths, the flowers glinting in candlelight, were beginning to work on me. Why pay this kind of money for dinner otherwise? To see your own flushed face in a mirror across the room. To see yourself register in a stranger’s eyes, or register anew in your spouse’s.
Ken and I hadn’t gone out much. Without discussion, it had been clear to both of us that it was pointless, too trashy a consolation. Nothing like grief to turn to dust the dry, weightless world of things. Vases, cars, clothes? All husks. Exotic fish and game in ambrosial sauces, baby greens and out-of-season fruit flown in with the kind of care reserved for donated organs? Who cares. Who cares.
For almost three years I had eaten mechanically, for survival only, like people in the cafeterias of hospitals. I’d gone out; I’d drunk with clients. Even good wine tasted like NyQuil.
But it was lifting. It was lifting and it was somehow because of Zach, and his mother. I felt protected and protective at once—a golden mean, like the rosé. As the waiter recited the epic poem of the specials, I breathed in food from the tables around me and realized, no question, I was getting excited; I felt animated, inhabited.
I felt like a baby bird, neck raised, mouth open.
Which is interesting because there was something avian about Marjorie’s pinched, pointy face, her flittery movements. (Zach got her mouth. But that appeared to be it. Face shape, skin color, eyes, body—all from absent Dad.)
“As I told Zach, I was very surprised by your specialty,” she said, ordering accomplished. “In all my years I’ve never heard of a single woman in cardiothoracic surgery.”
“There are a couple of us. Have you spent a lot of time around physicians?”
“Oh, I’ve done my time. Is your boy premed too?”
“Yup. Leaning toward orthopedic. Sports medicine.”
“They sure do warm to the idea of breaking those bones. I keep telling Zachary, forget surgery. Do something that requires a brain, like endocrinology.”
She didn’t seem to realize that this could be construed as a derogatory comment. “Endocrinology’s good,” I agreed.
“Right,” Zach said, sighing. “Diabetes is a blast.”
“It’s true you got diabetes and thyroid as your bread-and-butter,” I said. (Convenient if random, almost certainly inaccurate memories from double dates during Ken’s residency.) “But most of your diseases are interesting. You get weird things: Dwarfs. Sex hormones. Pheochromocytoma!”
Mother and son both looked at me, impressed.
“Then again, you need endurance for surgery,” I merrily prattled. “Which I guess is why so many of us swim.”
This was the perfect moment to ’fess up. I should tell you, my husband’s the surgeon. And my boy—but why would I be here with them, if it weren’t for Brown and swimming and medicine? To expose the lie now would be to expose the hotel sex to Zach’s mother. Although why would they think I’d choose their company, a physician in town for a convention, was a question, too.
“I dated a pediatrician once,” Mar offered, and before we knew it, just like that, we were back to her central sadness and subject: how singlehood was hurled like a massive boulder on her road to happiness. How she could never trust anyone again. How men were all alike. How badly she wanted to be held by any one of them, even bald or potbellied or poor if only kind, with a mind.
She didn’t say any of this directly, but over her salad (of course salad: she had to keep thin for the man who didn’t exist), she made it clear to me by implication that it was hopeless, and she still couldn’t help but hope. Zachary, who knew this tape loop, concentrated on his ridiculously rich crab cakes, tried to stifle his contempt. I admired him for that. She didn’t need his contempt as well. It occurred to me that he was unusually mature, to not give his mother the grief that any mother should expect from a teenage boy—playing loud music in his room and staying out late with his chums. Instead he was in the world, acting out with his cock, like an adult male. The thing is, he’d chosen me. Or allowed himself to be chosen by me. Or who he thought I was. Not only an MD, but a confident, strong MD in a male-dominated field. He wanted me to know, too, that he knew the difference between me and his mother.
So when Mom launched into a mini-tirade about doctors and lawyers (“Yes, they’re selfish, but at least it’s up front”), he all
owed our eyes to meet in a way that said, Let’s ditch her here and meet in the alley.
Not that he wanted to, really.
But I did appreciate the thought.
“Are you sure you really want to mix wine and beer?” Mar interrupted herself to ask her son. He was gulping it, Gatorade-style. Any male would feel parched listening to her, even a fledgling one.
“‘Mix’?” he scoffed. “Wine, beer, and tequila—that’s mixing, Mom. Wine, beer, tequila, and Black Russians.”
“I certainly hope you have more sense than to drive under such combinations,” she said, with what I’m sure she considered restrained concern.
“‘Drive’?” he said.
“Drugs, too, probably,” she pointed out to me, complicitly.
“‘Drugs’?” he said.
What was he doing? He sounded eleven.
At this point she got off Man-as-Beast, onto The Trials of the Single Mother. Which was, I guess, the very point of his behavior. Unsticking her. Fast-forwarding the tape. “Don’t get the wrong idea. Compared to most, Zachary’s a good kid,” she informed me. He batted his eyelashes, mock-appreciatively. And we both let her go on, rearing back so the busboy could remove our appetizer plates, rearing back again for the flourish of the entrées.
“Oh my! How lovely! How many gazillion calories do you think this sauce has? Pure cellulite! On me it goes straight to my hips. Straight. How do you keep so slim, Claire?”
A competitive weight conversation. Right in time for dinner.
I managed to get out a sentence or two about the relaxing, centering properties of swimming laps.
“Of course,” Mar said, “at our age you can’t win. If you manage to stay thin you get these.” She jabbed with her fork near her crow’s feet, her mouth. The one advantage of being fat, she remarked: smooth, flushed skin. Have you noticed how beautiful fat women’s hands are?
We might have been able to drift on to how hard chlorine is on the hair, but I had been with this woman less than an hour and I hated her. Hated her.
I didn’t manage to suppress a look to Zachary that meant, Is there any way to turn her off?
The look he shot me back said, laconically, I told you so.
We had this exchange fairly openly, since she didn’t seem to be paying any attention. But she noticed immediately. It is always surprising how quick oblivious narcissists can be to catch a slight. Mar sighed, hurt. Even this nice dinner, the sigh said. I can’t even have one nice dinner with my son. What I said next surprised even me.
“Mar. May I offer a piece of advice? As a still-married woman? If what you want, more than anything in the world, is to be tenderly held, I can tell you that you’re going about it the wrong way. Entirely the wrong way.”
She audibly gasped.
How easy it still is to shock people with the truth. Any truth. Well, she asked to be hurt. Here was her self-fulfilling prophecy.
“Certainly you must know that,” I went on. “Talking so much is one thing—Christ, read Cosmo. But the neediness! It’s stultifying! Where do you expect to get, presenting yourself like this? If you think the problem is your body—your thighs, your wrinkles—then work on your body. Lift weights. Do some low-rep sets two, three times a week. Build bone density. Build confidence. Exercise is good. But come on! Your gestures! They’re anti-sexy! Start with stillness. Stillness and concentration. Yoga—that’s what I recommend for you. Not weights. You don’t need to become a grand master. Just learn the basics. Lie down, close your eyes, and feel the muscles in your body that are tensed, which on you is just about every single one of the available six hundred. Learn to untense them. Your eyelids, your neck, your knees. Learn how to be slack. Then maybe you can start to uncoil your mind, which is so knotted-up you can’t hope to feel love, or peace, or just about anything else but futile anxiety.”
“Who are you to—” she stammered as I began, but then she just listened, helpless. As did Zach. Neither of them was eating. I was, though. Thoughtfully, talking in between, so this speech took a fairly long time to deliver.
“I’m not trying to be unkind,” I went on. “I’m trying to help, really. Stillness is the key. What are you rushing on to? Death? Stop. Let’s have a lesson. Look around. If you could fuck anyone here, who would it be?”
Zach pointed a cocked finger toward the cleavage of a babe in a push-up bra. “Not you.” I smiled. He shrugged, enjoying this despite himself.
“I—” she said. “I—”
“Not ‘you.’ That’s the point. Just look around and try to be open. Try to pretend that anything can happen to you, at any moment.”
“They’re all married,” she objected. “Married or with their mistresses. They’re all with someone. It’s easy for you to talk. You don’t have—”
“Watch,” I said. “Say I like that man over there—no! For God’s sake, guys, subtlety please!”
(They’d both swiveled so violently to stare that the prosperous-looking fellow in question, though halfway across the restaurant, looked up sharply.)
“Okay. Let’s start over. I won’t tell you which one this time. Watch.”
I admit I was tipsy. I folded my hands under my chin and fixed my gaze on a middle distance in which Margot and Zachary didn’t exist, just the flowers and the candles, the restaurant’s lavish haze. Let my eyes go out of focus. When I zoomed in again I was staring at the profile of our waiter, bent slightly at the table beside us and stacking someone else’s used plates up his arm. He was a career waiter in his early thirties, sculpturally handsome enough that I’d taken him for gay. He returned my gaze. His posture shifted, so the plates seemed to be better balanced, almost floating on the arm, and he moved toward me, lips slightly parted.
“Do you—need something?” he almost whispered.
“Oh,” I said. Giving each word a little smoothness, a little burn, like a bite from a crème brûlée. “No. Thanks. It was—great.”
“I’ll be right back,” he said. “To take your plates.” And he was, too, beelining.
“Thank you!” I said.
“See?” I asked Mar, when he’d left.
“Cool party trick,” Zach said. “Can you make glasses rattle too, like in Carrie?”
“What’s the big deal?” Mar said roughly. “You flirted with a waiter.”
“No. Not at all. I just acknowledged him as an actual human being. If you give attention, you might get some back.”
“Are you suggesting that the best I can do is to pick up waiters?”
She hadn’t heard a word I’d said. I tried to proceed without rancor or condescension.
“Well, you just delivered a speech about how much you hated mercenary doctors and lawyers. Maybe you should give waiters a chance. Writers, actors. Car mechanics. Carpenters. Just think, Mar, if you’d married Harrison Ford while he was a humble carpenter, you’d be married to Harrison Ford now.”
She couldn’t help but smile. Now that’s what she had in mind, in a man pushing sixty years old. Her eyes softened for long enough to imagine them on their Montana ranch.
“How long have you been alone now?” I asked. “Well, alone with this charming boy.” (Zachary mock-bowed, accepting the compliment.) “All that time treating your singlehood like a prison sentence for a bum rap, rattling the bars, carving knives out of soap. So he left you! So what! You must have had some therapy after the divorce, but even if you didn’t, come on, this is standard pop-psych shit. The only prison is self. Self itself. All that time, but you can’t act like it was time wasted, you can’t act like it’s too late. Because here is your boy, all grown up, and here is your life.”
When I finished she was fighting back tears. The look she gave me meant I was right, of course I was right, but it was hopeless; she not only couldn’t change her attitude, she couldn’t even keep herself from openly weeping at Le Bec Fin.
“Hey Mom!” Zachary said.
She looked at him, trembling.
“Mom! Gimme a hand!”
She moved the hand toward him. He picked it up by the wrist and shook it vigorously, as a wet dog would shake itself off. Then let it go, tossed her arm in the air, caught it. Worked the hand into some kind of elaborate locker-room high five, thumbs battling.
“Remember this?” he asked, still working her palm and thumb.
“Margot, Margot,
Eating escargot!
Throwing the shells
Straight into hell,
Be you friend or foe
Your garlic farts
I will forgo!”
Mother and son jointly laughed their Vesuvius laugh. She grabbed her hand back from him and clutched her stomach. She did cry now, but they were socially acceptable tears of deep hilarity.
“Back, Zach!” she said.
“Don’t gimme any flak
Don’t get me off track
Or I’ll have a heart attack!
Alas, alack, fair Zach!”
Astonishing. He had cured her. “Oh, my,” she said.
“There aren’t really any rhymes for Zachary,” he explained to me.
“‘He explained to me,’” I suggested. “‘Rosary. Had to be. Set me free.’”
“Hey! Not bad. Next time, you can play too.”
Margot wiped mascara off with the back of her hand. Then she looked at her boy, happy. She hadn’t totally thrown away her life, and here was the proof. For a moment she looked at her boy the way I’d seen other mothers look at other sons, a look so imperceptible that maybe only someone who has mourned the death of a child, or someone who couldn’t have children and desperately wanted to, might register. Others could dismiss it as ordinary pride. But it’s more complicated. Head pushed slightly back on their necks, as if they’re trying to get the proper distance, to view whole what they have made. As if they’re feeling, “Here is a life not flashing before my eyes but staying there, continuing to unfold and surprise, if I can only continue to observe this subtly, without being noticed.” Very specifically a mother-son thing, because of the cheerful detachment. The most decided asexuality: a woman viewing a man she loves, but will not make love to. (With women and their daughters, there’s pride and pleasure too, but also the wistful sense of the grown woman being shoved aside, replaced by the nubile and new.)