Annabel’s smile, slow and finite, suggested that she was not surprised by her daughter’s arrival. Marina looked back at the sleeping house. “It’s beautiful here, Mama.”
“Always.”
“Actually, in the winter, it was pretty creepy. Cold and isolated.”
“That can be beautiful, too.”
“I imagined a sniper hiding out here, night after night, spying on me.” Marina ran her hand over the slatted bench, brushing away the dust and leaf droppings before she sat.
“My silly girl.”
“It seems such a long time ago.”
“March?”
“So much has changed.”
“Ludovic.”
“Ludo, the magazine, even the book. I’m going to finish it, you know. It’s basically done.”
“I know.”
“You say that as if it had always been perfectly clear, but it wasn’t. In March it wasn’t.”
“Ludovic,” her mother said again.
“Mama, I’m going to marry him.”
Annabel sipped her tea.
“You don’t say anything?”
“I’m thrilled for you, baby doll.”
“But?”
“No ‘but.’ You believe in him—”
“He believes in me.”
“It’s mutual, then. It’s very thrilling. But you mustn’t—”
“I knew there was a ‘but.’”
“You mustn’t idealize, that’s all. That’s all I wanted to say. You’ll marry a man, not an idea of one.”
“Of course. I know it’s been quick, but I’m not a fool.”
“Far from it.” Annabel stroked Marina’s cheek, and her fingers were warm from cupping her tea. “You’re still my little girl and I want to protect you. It’s allowed. It’s my job.”
“Ludo protects me, more than anyone. You don’t like him, do you?
“He reminds me, in some ways, of your father.”
“Daddy doesn’t like him.”
“I don’t suppose he does. But that’s not the point.”
“What has Daddy said to you?”
Annabel’s eyes flickered with reproach. Marina was reminded, as she had been periodically and exasperatingly throughout her life, that there were times when her parents’ relationship superceded her, was closed to her.
“It’s just that, you know, that’s so important to me, about Ludo. We’re completely transparent and honest with each other. Not like our house, where we all pretend that we’re honest but actually it’s all bullshit.”
Annabel gazed intently at the lawn, sipped her tea.
“I’m sorry. You came out here for the peace of it, and I’ve spoiled things. But I want you to be happy for me.”
“Of course I’m happy for you, darling. You’re alight with it. You’re beautifully alive.”
“But what?”
“When are you thinking to marry?”
“Labor Day weekend, we thought. The magazine launches about ten days after that, and it would feel different—right—for us to be formally together before then.”
“That’s soon. A bit like getting married before the baby is born?”
“Like that.”
Annabel set her mug down on the bench, crossed her arms. She was still watching the house, its half-pulled blinds. She didn’t look at Marina. “You know how I adore your father,” she said.
“Never a cross word,” Marina repeated an old family line; but it was true. They never did argue. She spoke sharply to him on occasion, when he indulged in some particularly tyrannical rant or bluster; and then he might sulk, vaguely, or bolt, even, for a short while; and then it would pass. But they didn’t argue. Now that Marina thought about it, this was her mother’s doing, wholly, as Murray Thwaite could be querulous, even petulant. Danielle had long ago joked—to Marina’s abiding annoyance—that Annabel seemed, sometimes, like Murray’s mother. The unspoken corollary to which was, of course, that Marina seemed like his lover. It had annoyed her because it seemed on the one hand right, a private familial delight, for Marina if not for her mother; and at the same time, unspeakable, totally private. She’d been annoyed because Danielle seemed at once to expose and to sully a truth held secretly dear.
“So keep in mind,” Annabel was saying, “that it’s different, in time.”
“Sorry? I’m sorry, Mama. I was just thinking.”
“It doesn’t matter. You’ll have to see for yourself. But I loved him for his mind, for his ideals—oh, of course for his looks, too, all that, he was to die for, and a bit older, so all the more dashing—but you have to see, he was someone extraordinary and I loved him already for what he wrote and said and did; and it would have been enough for me, then, to love him from afar.” She laughed. “Or almost enough. Okay, not really. But you understand what I’m saying?”
“I guess.”
“I’m saying that although I thought I knew him well when we married, my picture was colored by what I believed him to be.”
“Mm-hmm.”
“He didn’t make any false promises. He was never other than who he is. But I had to learn to see him clearly, and learn not to be disappointed.”
Marina felt her mother was trying to convey something in particular. She did not want to have this conversation. “I don’t think Ludo is some comic book hero, you know.”
“I’m sure not. I’m sure not.” Annabel stood and put her arms around Marina, holding until her daughter softened, like a child, in her embrace. “I want my baby doll to be very happy. Will you be married here, maybe?”
“Yes, please.”
“In this very pergola. With flowers in your hair.”
“On the Saturday of Labor Day weekend. The end of summer and the beginning of the rest of our lives. What do you think?”
“It’ll be beautiful. Is his family coming?”
“Just his mother. I mean, there is just his mother. He’s got a younger brother, but they don’t get on. He doesn’t think Darius will come.”
“Darius? That’s the brother?”
“He’s a journalist in Sydney. Not as successful as Ludo. I think it’s awkward.”
“Mm-hmm.”
They were silent for a few moments, listening to the morning birdsong and the rustling leaves as the heat began to rise. There were faint sounds, as of banging, from the house.
“Someone’s up,” Annabel observed.
“Not Ludo, I don’t think.”
“Who’ll be your bridesmaids?”
“Just Danielle.” Marina bit her fingernail. “It’s weird, though. She basically set us up, Ludo and me, but she’s been very strange about it all. About us.”
“In what way?”
“Snippy. As if she’s envious, or as if she doesn’t like him. Or both. I don’t know.”
“Maybe it is both. Why don’t you ask her?”
“I’m not twenty-one, Mama. We don’t have time in life to start that kind of endless conversation. Besides, I don’t know if I want to know. All my life people have been jealous of me for one thing or another, and I’m tired of pretending that I don’t notice, and I’m tired of feeling guilty about it. And the whole point about Danielle was that I never had to pretend before. I don’t want to be pretending.”
“Do you think she wants to get married herself?”
“Of course she does. We’re thirty, for God’s sake. And I feel bad that she’s on her own, but it’s not my fault.”
“No.”
“It isn’t, is it?”
“No.”
“And I think she’s sorry that I have a job, and a good job, too; and I think she’s sorry that I’m going to finish my book. She’s sorry. Can you believe that?”
“Maybe she shouldn’t be your bridesmaid.”
“There’s nobody else I’d want. She’s my best friend.”
“Well, I’m sure it will all pass. These things do.”
“But you know I invited her to come now, for the holiday. And she said no.”
“Just because she’s come three summers in a row doesn’t make her automatically free the fourth.”
“But I’m pretty sure she is free, that’s the thing. She wasn’t going to her mom’s, or her dad’s, and she doesn’t have a boyfriend—I mean, maybe she’s working, but then she chose work over us, you know? I’m a little bit hurt. More than a little bit. She knew it was important.”
“Does she know about you and Ludovic?”
“About getting married? Not yet.” Marina scrunched up her face. “You’re the first person I’ve told. I haven’t even told Daddy yet.”
Annabel nodded toward the house, where a large robed shape was visible in the shadow of the French doors. “He’s just coming now, so you can if you want.”
Marina pulled close to her mother’s side, took her arm. “But I want him to be happy about it. Like I want Danielle to be happy about it. You’d think the people who love you best could behave a little less selfishly, wouldn’t you? Like you, I mean. Why can’t they behave like you, and be genuinely happy for me?
“Try them. Try him.”
“Not right now, Mama.” Marina unfurled herself, tiptoed out onto the lawn with her arms akimbo. “Morning, lazybones.”
“Not as lazy as your young man, it seems.”
“But he doesn’t know, yet, what it’s like to wake up here, and you do.”
“I do.” Murray stretched, bearish in the bulky robe, for all he was a lean man. “If I were a believer, I’d call it a blessing. But as it is, I’ll just say it’s damn nice.”
“Ah, my wordsmith,” Annabel spoke lazily, without moving from her bench. “Is that the best you can do?”
Murray took the pergola steps in one and zealously embraced his wife. “Actions,” he said. “Actions speak louder.”
Annabel giggled. Marina watched them for a moment with the strange old sensation of envy, that feeling of childhood, and then turned and ran back to the house, aware that the grass was already dry and warming beneath her feet. When she reached the door, she heard her father calling, “Hey! Hey, missy! Where’d you go?” But she didn’t turn around.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Fireworks in Stockbridge
Danielle spent Sunday morning in her office, sweating because the a/c was off, looking through a file of color photographs showing the bottoms and thighs of botched liposuction recipients. The photographs mostly did not show faces, just endless angles of lumpen, bulging, purpled limbs, limbs with strange indentations, limbs that looked like badly stuffed pillows. Buttocks protruded at implausible angles, or sagged without delineation into legs. But above all the distress was of texture and color. Danielle had brought breakfast—a cranberry muffin in a waxed paper bag—but found she couldn’t eat it. Even her water, fizzy, made her gag a little. She knew that at the bottom of the file were pictures of the patient who had subsequently died, an only moderately plump mother of three from Tampa. Mid-forties. Her husband had agreed to talk. So had several of the women whose rear ends Danielle was ogling. Nicky was into this story. It was a good one. Danielle had known it before, but looking through the pictures, sickened and compelled, sullied but unable to turn away, Danielle felt certain, almost triumphant. If she did this well, if the ratings were good, Nicky would let her have any story she wanted: reparations for Aborigines; nihilist revolution in the media; heck, why not a full hour on something crazy, like women terrorists?
She should have been in Stockbridge. Only in flashes—or were they waves?—was she aware of the enormity of what she had embarked upon, and the impossibility of it ending well. She’d unthinkingly imagined that she’d spend every Fourth of July with Marina, waking in the blue and white bedroom under the eaves that Marina actually referred to as Danny’s room, to the sound of blackbirds and cicadas and the kiss of the hot, grassy air among the maples. And of course it was different this year because of Seeley, and perhaps on his account she might have stayed away (not that she felt any regret or residual attraction for him—no, quite the opposite—but because she’d been used by him, and falsely; and because she suspected him of using Marina, although she couldn’t have said what for); but in the event there had been no question of her going, and she realized, in some horror, that she’d probably never spend that holiday in that place again.
In years past, Murray and Annabel had been elsewhere in July—California, Tuscany, hiking in Canada—but even had they not been at the house, Danielle wasn’t sure she could have wandered happily among their joint belongings. Everything had a different color, now. Given that they were there, it was naturally out of the question. Rationally, she marveled that a few unexpected turns should so thoroughly have upended her life—had the Chinese dinner at the Thwaites’ apartment been a mere four months ago?—but she was not, mostly, rational.
Like an addict—no, she was an addict. She thought about him all the time, or else thought about thinking about him, and the fact that she shouldn’t. She smelled him on her clothes, the biscuity waft of cigarettes that now permeated her once-clean studio and all its contents. Sitting at her desk, or on the subway, she recalled, beneath her fingers, the texture of his skin, its poignant sag, its aged coarsening. She prickled at the sound, or the thought of the sound, of his voice. She, who had scoffed at cell phones, now took no step without hers charged and at the ready for his unexpected call. She had endured the exquisite torture of hearing the phone ring in her bag while she walked idly up Hudson with Marina on a syrupy Thursday afternoon, as a thunderstorm gathered; of knowing, without checking, that it was Murray; and of leaving the apparatus to tinkle and whimper in her bag, her heart to thump treacherously at her ribs, while she rolled her eyes and drawled, “Nicky seems to think he can bug me about anything, anytime, these days. It’s so annoying.” She checked her e-mail as she might worry a chipped tooth. And when the contact finally came, she feigned nonchalance, near indifference; just as she dressed three times each morning, as she used to do in high school, in a meticulous effort to project the right tone: I look great but I’m not dressed up. I’m not dressed as though I expected to see you; I’m so casually, so naturally, stylish simply because it’s my way.
The photographs, sickening, had taken her mind off him for a time; and yet, even knowing that he would not ring, could not ring, she found herself listening to the silence, hoping. There was nobody else in the office on this Sunday morning, no buzz of machines, no chatter, simply the airless, sticky quiet into which his silence, deepening, fell. When she was at home, even the Rothkos seemed to wait for him. She kept the fancy sheets on her bed all the time (so this was why she’d bought them!); and the apartment’s tidiness no longer presaged a meditative solitude, speaking, instead, anticipation of her visitor. It was a different, slightly more studied tidiness. Her apartment now struck her as the stage set for a play, a site awaiting action. As if it weren’t quite real on its own any longer. She now kept a bottle of Lagavulin in the cupboard over the fridge and behind it, hidden, a symbolic, as yet unopened, carton of Marlboros. She kept on hand packets of heavily salted pretzels, which she was beginning herself to appreciate, and Altoids, for which he had a weakness. She felt simultaneously proud and ashamed of these accommodations.
Sometimes, she worried that she bored him. She worried that she seemed to him young, insignificant, ignorant, naïve. At other times, she worried that she didn’t bore him, worried that this signified a lowering of his standards, that his oft-voiced appreciation of her breasts, her hair, her wrists, stood in the way; that she, least likely candidate, was being objectified, diminished: just a woman, and a young one, and available. She wasn’t a complete ninny, didn’t flatter herself that Murray had been an adultery virgin. Alternately, she longed to hear about his other conquests in order to rank herself among them; and longed to shut out all intimation of their existence. She was jealous of them as she could not be jealous of Annabel, nor even of Marina, and she, like he himself, insisted that they speak quite normally about these two, that they not shunt them artifi
cially to the periphery. To her surprise, Danielle found this, most of the time, peculiarly supportable, as if these two, her ultimate rivals, dear friends and nemeses, were so far to the fore in life’s picture that they might have been anyone, dissolved into an undistinguished blur. Far more disturbing were his evasions when she asked, “Have there been many?” and “Am I the youngest?” and “How long did the longest last?” She wanted, of course, to ask, “Did you love her?” In spite of its predictability. In spite of the horror she would feel at any possible reply. But she was learning the limits, knew not to ask this. He had—was this not part of the appeal?—a mania for honesty as he saw it. (Which was not to be confused with allowable delusion: he really believed that a cup of coffee at the end of a night’s booze could sober you up for the drive.) If she were to ask him even the most outré of questions (for example, and impossible, “Do you love me?”), he would reply without regard for her brittle heart, her tender ears. So that she must, in this love, be her own guardian. She did not stop to question this, which seemed to her a lesson for her own maturity rather than any possible selfishness on his part.
She considered all these things, she considered him, all the time. Every possible waking moment. And they waited for her, like patient wounds, when she was in meetings, or society, waited to assail her as soon as she was again free. She wanted to be free of this dis-ease; and yet she loved it, yes, like an addict.
Marina hadn’t believed her when she’d said she had too much work to do. Danielle knew that Marina thought it was all about Seeley.
“They can’t ask you to work on this weekend out of all weekends. It’s practically the biggest holiday of the year.”
“They’re not asking me to. It’s not kindergarten.”
“So?”
“So, I haven’t managed to get a film idea into production all year. And I’m supposed to pitch in a week. It’s important.”
“You wouldn’t be left on your own, you know.”
“I know.”
“It’s the chance for you and Ludo to get to know each other. My two MIs.”
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