Pot of gold : a novel

by Michael, Judith

  Claire put her hand on Emma's. "You'll make new friends; it just takes a while."

  Emma shrugged again. "I'm fine. I'm really too busy for friends. Your list is longer than mine."

  "I've met a lot of people lately."

  The waiter came to take their order. "Grapefruit," Emma said, surprised at how good eversthing on the menu sounded. Suddenly, she was ravenous. "And eggs Benedict and Canadian bacon, and nut and raisin bread on the side. Oh, and the yogurt terrine, too; it's so good."

  Claire smiled. "There was a time when I could eat like that without thinking about all the reasons I shouldn't. Brioche," she

  said to the waiter, "and melon to start. Emma, are you having coffee?"

  Emma nodded; she was reading Claire's Christmas hst.

  "Two coffees. Black." She turned back to Emma, 'i thought I'd get something for some of the women who've been guiding me around for the last few months."

  "But are you still going to see them.^ I mean, aren't they Quentin's friends?"

  "I think at least two or three of them are my friends, too. I may be wrong; I'll find out pretrv' soon."

  After a moment, Emma asked, studiedly casual, "How come you're not seeing him anymore?"

  "Oh, I changed, or maybe I began to see him more clearly. Whatever it was, I didn't like the kind of person I'd have to be to stay with him."

  "What does that mean?"

  "I didn't like what he wanted from me, what he expected me to be." Claire gazed absently at the steaming coffee the waiter set before her. "I don't think, until lately, I ever really thought about what kind of person I wanted to be; I was always too busy with my work, and you, and worrying about the refrigerator compressor or the car battery or whatever was fouling up my budget that month. And then, with Quentin, I was having a good time and I guess he impressed me so much it didn't occur to me that I was adjusting my life to his. I was adjusting me to him. I suppose I took it for granted, the way a lot of women do, maybe most women; there's all that tradition behind us that says we have to please men and be ruled by them, so whatever we want has to be swept into a corner. That's changing so fast, your generation won't even think that way. At least I hope not."

  The waiter brought a tray of jams and jellies and a pot of honey, and Claire waited until he left. "Then, after a while, I started thinking about how I want to shape my life. That's one of the most important things about money, you know: it gives you freedom to decide those things."

  "Not always," Emma said in a low voice.

  "You have as much freedom as you want, and you'll use it when you're ready." Claire knew what Emma meant, but she was not ready to talk about Emma's strange subservience to Brix.

  That would come later. They were just getting used to sharing confidences again.

  "What did you decide.-^" Emma asked after a moment.

  "Oh, different things, in stages; mainly that a lot of things were missing. I think that whole time, last spring and summer, was like another childhood, or maybe adolescence: sort of an irresponsible stage that I had to go through."

  Emma was watching her mother seriously. She felt warm and happy because her mother was confiding in her and was talking about ideas that only grown women could understand. It made them close, and alike. They were two women who dated. Sometime back, Emma had thought that was unnatural and it had bothered her; it was as if her mother were trying to be a teenager. But now she liked it. They were both women, grown-up, with careers. And we're both beautiful, Emma thought, catching an admiring glance from two men at the next table. Mother isn't as beautiful as I am, but there's something about her; maybe being older and sort of. . . finished. She's elegant, and proud, and I'm not. Not yet, anyway. But we're still alike: two women who date. And go to bed with the men we date. But that thought got shoved out of sight; it wasn't something she could ask her mother about or bring up at all.

  "It shows up in sex," Claire said casually, and Emma started with surprise.

  "What does.^" She felt her face grow warm. She didn't want to know anything about her mother in bed with Quentin, and she couldn't talk about sex with Brix. She wished she could, but it was too wrapped up with other things.

  "How independent a woman is," Claire replied. "I guess sex can be terrific if one person is happy being submissive to someone who insists on dominating, but that wasn't what I wanted. I didn't think about it at first because I hadn't had any sex for so long, it was almost as if I were a virgin, and I confused dominance with strength. But after a while, it stopped being so good. I never stopped being attracted to Quentin, up to the day I told him I wouldn't see him anymore, but attraction is only a beginning. I think sex is always a mirror of a relationship, and one day I realized—Hannah helped me, in fact—that our whole relationship was exactly like what we were in bed: Quentin wanted mc docile and pliable, and he assumed that would happen with a kind of arrogance that was almost mechanical. There was no lightheart-

  edness in him. I wanted joy and lightness and I wanted a partner, not a boss. So I decided I'd been wrong: he wasn't what I wanted at all. I wanted different things."

  "What kind of different things.'"' Emma was grateful to her mother for not forcing her to talk about anything; she never even asked if she and Brix had gone to bed together. She's just putting things out there, Emma thought, and if I want to talk about them I can, and if I don't, she'll let it go. She's really so wonderful. I wish I could be honest, like she is. But I'm too confused. Maybe someday . . .

  "Work, for one," Claire replied. "Something that made me feel I was accomplishing something. I could have found it by volunteering for some organizations, and I'm still going to do that, but I wanted the discipline of doing a whole project, and I guess I wanted to prove to myself that I could do it."

  The waiter brought their grapefruit and melon, and Claire watched him arrange everything to his satisfaction. "And I wanted to have my own goals and set my own agenda for reaching them, and make my own decisions along the way."

  Emma frowned slightly. "Isn't that what you always did.'' It was just you and me, and you decided evers^thing."

  "Yes, but I didn't have a lot of choices; what I had was a salary that everything had to fit into. It was like a wall and it was always in my way. So when I won the lottery', all of a sudden the wall was gone. It was as if a blindfold was taken off and all around me were a thousand choices. Maybe a million. You felt it, too; remember the first time we went to Simone's.'*"

  "That was so much fun," Emma said wistfully.

  "Well, that was the problem with Quentin and me. Part of it was timing: I was loving all those choices and just beginning to concentrate on what I wanted to do with myself, how to live my life, and he'd already done that; he was used to money and choices, and he was used to making decisions, for himself and everone around him. So after a while I felt I had to get away, to decide for myself what I wanted to be instead of being the woman he wanted, even though that would have been the easiest way."

  "But what if you can't decide.''"

  "You can; it just takes time. You have to be able to imagine a lot of 'what ifs' and follow them through and see if they lead to a vision of the future that excites vou and makes vou feel at home.

  You have to believe in yourself, Emma; you can't make choices if you don't; you'll fail before you even begin."

  "But you didn't do it alone. You said Hannah helped you."

  "Hannah always helps. She said something about Quentin that was like a spotlight; it made everything clear for me. She's very good at that."

  "She helps everybody. I thought she was nosy and a busybody, but she's pretty good to talk to. Do you know about her daughter.''"

  "No, what about her.^"

  "She was hit by a car and killed when she was eight. It was horrible."

  "Horrible," Claire echoed. "She never told us."

  "She said it was hard to talk about. I guess. Anyway, she told the whole story and it made me think about how people have really awful things happen to them.
And I don't. Not really."

  "No, we're very lucky," said Claire almost absently; she was thinking about Hannah. "But that doesn't mean we don't have sadness in our lives. Just because other people are unhappy doesn't make our unhappiness any easier to bear,"

  Emma gave Claire a swift, grateful look. She picked up her spoon and began to eat her grapefruit. "It needs honey. I don't know why people think it's good when it's bitter; it needs to be sweet."

  Claire handed her the small pot of honey. "Does Brix make your life sweet.'"'

  Holding the pot of honey, Emma looked past Claire, to the view of Fifth Avenue. The balloon curtains were pulled high on the windows, and she could look straight across the street, into the Godiva chocolate shop. The world is full of sweet things, she thought. Wonderful, sweet things. But Brix isn't always one of them, and a lot of the time he doesn't make my life sweet at all. "Of course he does," she said, turning back. She let a golden thread of honey swirl onto her grapefruit. But then, glancing up, she saw Claire's warm eyes on hers, so full of love, and she could not leave those words out there, by themselves. "Not all the time, of course. But that's true of everybody, isn't it.^ We disappoint each other in little ways all the time."

  "Do you disappoint Brix in little ways all the time.^" Claire asked gently.

  Emma looked down, "I don't know," she said; it was almost a whisper. "I guess I do, because he doesn't want to see me a lot of the time. But then, when we're together, he can be really sweet and say such wonderful things, and when we're—" She caught herself. She had almost started talking about the free-floating nights when they used coke in his bedroom, when everything seemed so easy and beautiful, when she was sure Brix loved her more than anyone else in the world and they would always be together, when she was really happy . . . but how stupid could she be, to let herself go and almost talk about that to her mother.^

  "When you're what.^" Claire asked.

  "When we're happy together, it's the best thing in the world. But it doesn't matter what happens when things aren't perfect, because I always love him and I can't live without him."

  "Can't.?"

  Emma toyed with her spoon, thinking she was talking too much. But then the words tumbled out because they had been inside her so long and she had not been able to tell them to anybody, and she loved her mother so much she hurt inside with wanting to be close to her. "It feels like I'll die whenever I think about not seeing him again. I start feeling empty inside, hollow, and I can't breathe. I know you don't feel that way about Quen-tin—I'm glad you don't—so you can't understand how I feel, but—"

  "I felt that way about your father," Claire said quietly.

  Emma stared at her, "I never think about him."

  "Well, I do, sometimes. And I remember how much it hurt when he left. I stood in that empty apartment and ached all over. My skin felt stretched and full of pinpricks, and my head hurt, and I thought I would explode because I couldn't hold all that hurt inside me."

  Emma's eyes were wide; she had never thought of her mother going through anything like that. "What did you do.?"

  "I felt you kicking, and I knew there was more than hurt inside me; there was a baby, waiting to be born. I was so glad of that: glad I wasn't alone. I still hurt and it was awful getting through the next months, learning how to live on my own, but every time I felt you move I felt better because it gave me a reason for everything I did. I don't know why it is, but it seems

  that the worst part of agonizing over a man is having the feeling that nothing else is really important: you don't have a reason to do anything."

  "You ^now that," Emma breathed.

  "We've all been through it. I know it's hard to believe, but all of us have felt exactly the same kind of hurt and the same loss of will. Alex told me about the death of his wife; he said he felt he was being knocked around by invisible forces, malevolent and invincible, and there was nothing he could do but give in. And remember what Hannah said about the death of her daughter. It's not a unique pain, Emma; it's universal. Of course, you're not mourning a loss; you're imagining one. But sometimes the imagining is almost as bad as the real thing."

  The waiter brought their breakfast and Emma picked up her knife and fork. "I can't believe how hungr' I am."

  "You haven't eaten much for a long time."

  Emma paused in cutting her bacon, "You didn't sav anything."

  "I let Hannah say it for both of us. I thought it might make more of an impression coming from her."

  "It did, after a while. She told me she stopped eating when her daughter was killed."

  "Emma, all this unhappiness . . . you've had such a hard time, and what I wanted for you were easy times, and joy."

  Emma's eyes filled with tears. She looked again through the window, blinking her eyes dr\ "Some things are just . . . hard," she said, trying to keep her voice from choking, guarding herself so that she said nothing about sex or drugs or drinking or the memos on Brix's desk. Too many things, she thought; how can there be so many things I can't tell my mother.'' "But evervthing's fine. Really. I've got this great job—"

  "Is it a great job.'' Is it really what you want to be doing.'"'

  "It is; it is; it's the best. Even if I decide to go to college"— Emma stopped momentarily, surprised at her own words; why had she said that when she didn't even know she was thinking about college.''—"well, whatever I decide about anything, I always want to be a model, as long as somebody wants me."

  Claire nodded. She seemed to be concentrating on spreading honey on her brioche. "So you didn't lose your appetite because of problems with modeling."

  "Well, I can't get fat, you know, they'd drop me if I gain any weight. I hate it when they don't need me, though; I wish I had a lot more to do."

  "Then is it Brix.'"' Claire looked up, holding Emma's gaze.

  Emma felt helpless. They kept coming back to Brix, and she couldn't talk about him. "It's just . . . everything," she said at last. "Lots of little things. But there isn't anything to worry about; I'm really fine, and when I go back to work in January—you know, they're going to send me around to the stores, they decided to do that, just to tell people about the PK-20 line and I guess say that I use it, you know, sort of a salesperson but a model, too, and then Hale said after that I can work for other companies—not cosmetic companies, they won't let me do that, but clothes or cars or something—and still work for Eiger, so I'll be awfully busy, and I'll make a lot of money, too. And I'll be fine."

  "And where does Brix fit in that schedule.^"

  Emma tightened up inside. Why couldn't she leave it alone.^ "He can be anywhere he wants. I told you, I love him and I want to be with him, and that isn't going to change." She pushed her plate away. "I wanted to ask you about his Christmas present. There's a shearling jacket I want to get him—you know, suede with sheepskin—it's really gorgeous, but I know how you feel about him and it's awfully expensive."

  "Emma, you don't have to ask me. You have your own credit card; you buy what you want with it. Of all the things we have to talk about, money isn't one of them. If you really do know how I feel about him, then you know that I don't care how much you spend on him, I care about your seeing him at all." Claire paused. She could dredge up the story about the college student who fell through the window, but why would she do it.^ Emma would defend Brix and turn against her mother. . . just when they were rediscovering each other. And by now Emma had to know that Brix had a temper; why would she be so subservient, unless it was to keep him happy.^

  The waiter refilled their coffee cups, and when he was gone, Claire said carefully, "What I worry about is the kind of person you are with him. That's what I was talking about when I told you how I felt with Quentin. You're a strong young woman, Emma, but you turn into a little girl when you talk about Brix and when you talk to him on the telephone. You turn into a strange sort of

  wife-mistress, deferential, a little coy, working so hard to please . . . you don't sound like yourself, at least not to me�
�"

  "That's not fair!" Emma nervously pushed back her hair with both hands, putting her palms over her ears. He always calls me little girl, little country girl, babe; he calls me his little girl, his little girl, his, his . . . After a minute, she sat up straight. "His father's a tyrant; I know all about him. I think it's really smart of you not to go out with him anymore. But Brix isn't like his father; he cares about me—he was the one who got me the job as the Eiger Girl!—and he's proud of me and we love each other. If you don't like that, I ... I can move out. I thought of doing it a long time ago, but Hannah said I shouldn't. But I will, if you want me to."

  "Of course I don't want you to. What I do want, more than anything, is for you to be happy—"

  "I told you, I am!"

  "—and I don't think you will be until you take the time to find yourself; who you are all by yourself, and what you want to do with your life just for yourself, not for Brix, and not with him, either, or because of him. I want you to be your own person, Emma, not someone whose well-being depends on how much attention Brix Eiger pays to—"

  "Don't, please don't!" Emma said, her voice filled with despair. She pushed back her chair. "I can't change the way things are, and you just make them worse when you talk like that. I want Brix to love me the way I love him; what's so awful about that.'* I won't be happy without him and I can't imagine that ever changing, and if you really wanted me to be happy, you wouldn't keep running him down; you'd be on my side. I wish you were ... I wish we could be the way we used to be ... I thought we were, this morning, but I guess I was wrong, because you just won't leave it alone. I never told you what to do about Quentin! I let you live your own life; why can't you let me live mine.'"' She reached to the floor for her shoulder bag. "I'm going shopping by myself; that's the only way we're going to stop arguing."

  "No," Claire said quickly. "Please, Emma, don't go. We'll stop talking about it; I really do want us to spend the day together. I think it's important for both of us, don't you.^" Emma was looking at her lap, her mouth tight. "I've been looking forward to it and I thought maybe you had, too." She waited again and let the silence drag out until Emma gave a small, reluctant