She Is Me
Page 25
“Are you happy now?” Elizabeth asked.
“Yes.”
“You better be,” Elizabeth said. “After all the trouble you caused.”
“I’m especially happy today.”
Elizabeth smiled, in spite of herself.
She looks so beautiful when she smiles, Greta thought. My heart still soars when she smiles, just the way it did when she was a baby. She looked at her daughter, an adult in a wedding dress—simple but elegant, Lotte would have said. Over Elizabeth’s shoulder Greta could see Josh and Daisy dancing. In her wallet she kept a fortune she’d gotten a year ago in a fortune cookie. “Your family is one of nature’s masterpieces,” it said. Then it listed her lucky numbers: “17, 28, 32, 34, 38, 43.”
“I miss Grandma Lotte,” Elizabeth said.
“Yes,” Greta said. “I wish she had lived to see this day. Well, perhaps not all of it,” she added, nodding toward Daisy.
Elizabeth watched her brother and her mother’s girlfriend dance. She watched her father cut in. She sighed. “You never complained or anything,” she said.
“I was saving up for a rainy day.”
“I’ll never forgive you for breaking up our family,” Elizabeth said. She watched Tony and Daisy dancing comfortably together. “I will never forgive you.”
Then, seeing her mother’s face, feeling her mother’s hand in her own, seeing her husband approach her, her own husband, realizing that love and passion and adultery—and marriage and family, too—were farcical only from the outside and tragic only when they ended, and that hers had just begun, she did.
Volfmann stood on the beach in front of his house. A wave arched and crashed to the sand, foamed gently around his feet, then disappeared. Then another. And another.
The Pacific Ocean, he thought. Big deal.
The next wave hit the shore, enormous and loud.
Such a fuss, Volfmann thought. And then, nothing.
The dog snapped at the foam. He splashed toward the next curling wave, then splashed frantically away as the water broke. Then he snapped, ever diligent, at the line of white foam.
Volfmann headed back to the house. He rinsed his feet with the hose. What the hell did he need a dog for? Two houses wasn’t enough? He was never even home, for Christ’s sake. He had to fly to New York tomorrow, then to London. A week later, he would be in China. Chasing markets. Instead of waves.
But how could he let the poor bastard be put to sleep? Okay, so the dog was a little nuts. True, true, he had a temper. He had some anger issues. You couldn’t deny it. But, so what? So fucking what? I mean, how does that make the little cur any different from me? Volfmann thought.
“Temple is very unhappy,” Elizabeth had said one afternoon. “He growls all day long. I can’t leave him alone. If I do, he bites his back feet.” She had dragged the dog in to a meeting. “Look.”
Volfmann and Daisy and Elliot and his two young assistants had dutifully examined the dog’s back paws. They were raw and bloody.
“And he bites children, too,” she said. “And men in uniforms. Men in general, actually. And women, of course.”
Temple was on the same antianxiety drug that Volfmann took.
“If it doesn’t start working, I have to put him to sleep,” she said.
“It doesn’t work for me,” Volfmann said.
Then the script for Mrs. B did not turn out to be all that Volfmann had hoped it would. “So, look, I’ll take the dog instead,” he said. “What the hell.”
“Another pet project,” Elliot grumbled.
“The script is not bad,” Volfmann continued. “Don’t get me wrong. But now I want something, I don’t know, meatier. So . . . I’ve been thinking . . .”
Temple, sitting in his lap, curled his lip at Elizabeth and snarled. Volfmann gently stroked the dog.
“Anna Karenina,” he said softly. “Anna fucking Karenina.”
Volfmann stood on his deck above the beach, his cell phone to his ear.
“What am I?” he yelled. “Public television?”
He watched as his fabulous new assistant, hired for just this purpose, followed his new dog in and out of the foam. He sighed with contentment at the sight: Temple, frantically charging the waves; Kougi, placid and unruffled, holding the long, wet leash.
And there, beyond them both, rising, retreating, and endlessly rising again, was the vast Pacific Ocean, which, Volfmann noted with satisfaction, with all its noise and nonsense, never once lost its enthusiasm.
About the author
Cathleen Schine is the author of five novels—Alice in Bed, To the Birdhouse, The Evolution of Jane, and the international bestsellers Rameau’s Niece and The Love Letter, both of which were made into feature films. She divides her time between New York City and Los Angeles.
Copyright acknowledgments
One haiku from The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson & Issa, edited and with an introduction by Robert Hass. Introduction and selection copyright © 1994 by Robert Hass. Unless otherwise noted, all translations © 1994 by Robert Hass. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.
“From Alpha to Omega” by Cole Porter, 1938 Chappell & Co. © renewed, assigned to John F. Wharton, trustee of the Cole Porter Musical & Literary Property Trusts. Chappell & Co. owner of publication and allied rights throughout the world. All rights reserved. Used by permission. Warner Bros. Publications U.S. Inc., Miami, FL 33014.
“Knees” by Lorenz Hart and Richard Rodgers, 1929 (renewed) Warner Bros. Inc. Rights for extended renewal term in U.S. controlled by the Estate of Lorenz Hart (administered by WB Music Corp.) and the Family Trust U/W Richard Rodgers and the Family Trust U/W Dorothy F. Rodgers (administered by Williamson Music). All rights outside U.S. controlled by Warner Bros. Inc. All rights reserved. Used by permission. Warner Bros. Publications U.S. Inc., Miami, FL 33014.
“Sunny Disposish” by Ira Gershwin and Philip Charig, 1926 (renewed) WB Music Corp. All rights reserved. Used by permission. Warner Bros. Publications U.S. Inc., Miami, FL 33014.
“I Won’t Dance” by Dorothy Fields, Jerome Kern, Otto Harbach, Oscar Hammerstein II, and Jimmy McHugh. 1934 Universal-PolyGram International Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved. Used by permission.