Ten seasons of expanding success. The apartment’s structural remodel had come after season two, and the color scheme back then … what had it been? Pale blue and lavender with light woods? Or was that the following incarnation? She could no longer recall. Only that the décor had been updated four times—every two years, the way some people traded up vehicles. The apartment needed to be current, Marcy said, because Blue sometimes entertained there. Marcy handled it all just the way she handled most of the other details of Blue’s life. Saint Marcy, Blue often called her, and Marcy would say, “Ha! Not after the life I’ve led.”
It was all talk, though, had always been all talk with her. The worst Marcy had done was what they were all doing that year they’d shared the dilapidated house. Taking on new names—Blue had tried out Skye, after the heroine of a book she’d read, but became Bubble when her belly began to round—inventing themselves, dabbling with drugs, with sex (though she’d quit both when her periods quit) … and while some people might consider them hell-bound for their behaviors, Blue wasn’t convinced. She and Marcy and their various housemates had been young, rudderless, sure of their invincibility and the idea that they had so much time ahead of them that they could waste it freely, using homemade bongs and listening to Prince. So much time that even the biggest of mistakes would sooner or later melt away and be forgotten, like tonight’s snow after tomorrow’s sun.
The apartment was newly decorated in what Blue thought of as Twenty-first Century Lodge style. Though the work was completed weeks ago, the scent of fresh paint and new wool rugs persisted, in a pleasant, low-key way. The place looked marvelous, all warm woods and natural stone and leafy plants throughout the wide-open space. Marvelous and unused. Marvelous and bereft. An Architectural Digest spread, after the magazine’s crew had gone.
In her bathroom she pulled off the elastic that bound her hair. Highlighted chestnut, her stylist called the color, with hints of honey and cinnamon, as if her head were a pastry. “Wholesome” was the word the media often used to describe her, suggesting that somehow her nut-honey-cinnamon hair and her long-legged tomboyish build explained her success. They’d changed their tune a bit when she made it onto the Forbes list. Now she was wholesome and driven, wholesome and savvy, wholesome and well connected and well dressed.
Style and substance, how surprising, how unusual!
A woman who made her living on TV did not, strictly speaking, have to be attractive to succeed, but if she wasn’t, the media loved to say so. Hence the hour she’d just spent at the gym, an hour for which she paid a ridiculous amount of money in order to get exclusive time with Jeremy. An effective hour, though, repeated five times each week (up from the three that used to do the trick); she was in top physical form. If while doing stretches, crunches, leg lifts, she sometimes thought of Jeremy’s sculpted body making better use of hers, where was the harm in that?
Her bathroom’s new wallpaper, an amber grass-textured weave, kept bringing to mind a Hemingway story—not one of the novels they would be promoting on the show next week, but another, about Mt. Kilimanjaro and a couple waiting for rescue at a nearby camp. The short story, a tale of regret, had been a favorite of Mitch Forrester’s … and Mitch had been a favorite of hers.
As she washed her face she recalled Mitch reading her the story one evening, early in their short-lived relationship. He’d been pensive—something to do with his ex-wife and the difficulty he was having in getting to see his son. “There are only so many chances to get things right,” he’d said, but she hadn’t understood very well at the time. She’d been barely nineteen, sure that life was a broad and endless series of chances. After all, didn’t they live in the land of opportunity, where success in business, in life, in love, was no accident of birth but could be made? Wasn’t Mitch in charge of his own destiny? What was there to regret at his age, twenty-seven? He could have a new wife. (Her.) He could have new children. (Hers.) For two promising months she had done a very effective job of ignoring anything that contradicted her vision, and then he’d set her straight. And then … then, he’d set her free.
Less easy to ignore, these days, were the lines in her forehead and the tiny sunbursts spreading, now, from the corners of her eyes. Her softening jawline. Thinner lips. Less easy to ignore was her makeup artist’s insistence that the miracle of Botox was her salvation. Easier, though, if she quit looking in the mirror. She pressed the light switch and left the room.
She now had the entire sixth floor of this historic art deco building. It was more space than she needed, by far—as if that mattered; what did need have to do with her life anymore? Here it was just her and Peep, her tabby Maine Coon cat. He slept most of the time, and she was gone most of the time, so their pairing worked out well.
With the apartment’s lights still off, the falling snow looked like a shimmering veil outside the east-facing windows. In daytime, that view included Lake Michigan as seen between downtown’s towers. Out the north side was a view of slightly lesser buildings, one of which housed the studio. The apartment was swept and dusted and vacuumed weekly, the floors polished monthly—and before and after every cocktail party. The refrigerator was stocked, the wine bottles circulated, all by a Marcy-directed staff that Blue never saw.
She went barefoot down the hallway to the kitchen on marble floors the color of bitter chocolate. Why colors seemed so often to be named for food she wasn’t sure. Her kitchen cabinets were crème brûlée, and her granite countertop was confetti orzo. The wall color throughout all the main rooms was something to do with squash: pale summer squash? Light butternut puree? Whatever. She wasn’t Martha Stewart.
There was time, yet, for Froot Loops before her mother and Calvin arrived. She poured a bowl and ate it standing at the counter, Peep lurking at her ankles until she put the milk dregs down for him to finish. Ten ’til eight. She had better put some socks on; her toenails were ragged, and who knew what kind of garbage this Calvin guy might decide to report to Perez or TMZ?
She could hear her mother’s voice chastising, telling her to relax already. Right, relax. Re-lax. “Chill,” she said, heading back down the hallway. That her mother wanted to introduce this latest companion suggested he was, in Nancy’s estimation, higher caliber than most. Even so, after years of exposure to the public’s appetite for gossip—guilty, herself, of spreading it now and then—Blue preferred to be overly cautious. Live by the sword, die by it.
alvin K., as he was introduced to Blue, was in every visible way her mother’s counterpart. Silver hair, pierced ears, rangy and kind-looking. According to her mother’s earlier account, they’d met at the co-op on Lake Park one Saturday morning, buying organic vegetables. Calvin had an endearing passion for rutabaga.
“Calvin, meet my oldest, Harmony Blue—or just Blue, if she prefers.”
“She prefers,” Blue said. “Is it Calvin Kay, K-a-y?” She’d need to know in order to have him checked out. Her practice of getting background checks on her mother’s companions was another of the subjects neither of them spoke of, or not to one another at any rate.
“No, it’s the letter K, for K-r-z-y-z-e-w-s-k-i,” he spelled it out, then told her it was pronounced sha-sheff-ski. “Like Coach K, at Duke? It’s Polish. Ya’d think someone would anglicize it, but there you go.”
“Well,” she said, taking her mother’s coat, and his, “Good to meet you, Calvin K.”
“Hard to beat Kucharski, huh?” her mother said.
Which was why Blue had chosen Reynolds.
Though Calvin’s accent had already answered her next question, she needed something with which to make conversation. She did not, after all, know a single thing about rutabaga. She said, “Are you a Chicago native?”
“Nah, Winnebago. I came here in ninety-seven, I guess it was, to run a bookstore in Hyde Park—my brother’s. He had colon cancer.”
“Oh, I’m sorry. Is he—”
“Gone? Yeah. Saw that special you did on it, though. I appreciate that.”
Her
mother, hair down, wearing a formfitting Impressionist print top and jeans, told Blue, “We watched the show today. Calvin’s been a fan for years. What was with the tears? Do you have a cold?”
“A cold?” Blue closed the closet door and led them into the living room. “No, I’m not sick.”
“When you were little, I would always know when you were coming down with something because your emotions would be all over the map. Could be early menopause—are your periods irregular? Are you having hot flashes?”
“No! Really, Mom, it’s nothing,” she lied. “I’m tired is all. Hey, I have some of that red wine you like; can I pour you a glass? Calvin?”
After they’d settled onto the L-shaped sectional, Blue listened while her mother brought her up to date on her sister Melody’s latest. For as intertwined as their lives had been as children, she and Mel had a tenuous connection as adults. Blue relied on their mother to keep her current about Mel, while Mel had their mother and the tabloids to keep her updated on Blue, either of which she seemed willing to regard as reasonably authoritative. The question now was whether their mother or the media would be first to alert Mel to her on-air outburst.
Currently, Blue’s mother was saying, Mel and her husband Jeff were leasing out two hundred tillable acres of their central Wisconsin farm to Green Giant and, using the rent income, intended to buy themselves an RV. With their sons both grown and out of the house for the first time, they were planning to spend the coming summer touring the country, one KOA campground after another until they’d crossed off all twenty-nine of their sightseeing goals. “They’ve never traveled; Jeff refuses to fly.”
“So they’re gonna knock ’em all out at once, eh? Carpe diem,” Calvin said.
“I can’t get over how differently you and Mel turned out,” her mother went on. “No way can I see you in an RV—or on a farm, for that matter.” She told Calvin, “She’s never been one to settle for what’s ordinary.”
Blue shook her head. “That’s not true.”
“No?”
“No.” She craved ordinary. Grocery shopping. An afternoon in the park with a blanket and a book. “If you mean my career, you know that a lot of my success is owed to luck.”
Calvin chuckled. “A pretty good run of luck, then.”
“You laugh, but I’m sincere. I started out as a production assistant. I never saw myself hosting a talk show; I wanted to do the news.” If she threw herself into her work as though it was a life raft, if she appeared to be far more dedicated than her cohorts, that was only because she’d used work to fill the empty spaces that others filled with spouses or children, with bar-hopping or hobbies or sports.
In her defense she added, “I had Froot Loops for dinner.”
“You just made my point,” her mother laughed. “How many times have you been there, to the farm?”
“I don’t know—three?” She knew exactly. Each exhausting visit had seen her treading the narrow line between tolerance and envy. In spite of Blue’s support of her sister’s choices and admiration for everything Mel and Jeff had accomplished, Mel was still inclined to defensiveness. It seemed her every sentence began with a version of, “I know it isn’t as glamorous as your life, but…” Blue hadn’t been there in years. She’d wanted to attend the boys’ high school graduation ceremonies but Mel insisted her presence would detract from the events. “No offense, but we just don’t want it to turn into Blue Reynolds Day.” The sad thing was, Blue couldn’t fight the logic. She’d sent each boy a generous check and invited them to visit her at will.
“You know,” her mother said, “we should all get together soon. Then Calvin can see for himself what I mean.” She turned to Calvin. “My girls don’t think alike, and they don’t look a bit alike, either. Melody’s taller, kind of stocky, with wide blue eyes and a little bit of a cleft chin. She’s been blond since she was a toddler.”
“My oldest son’s my ex-wife’s spitting image—well, bigger nose and more facial hair now, ya’ know—while my daughter’s me to a tee. Could be true for yours—one like you, one like their dad.”
“Not that we’d know if that was the case,” Blue said. She hadn’t meant to sound bitter but the words, once out, had an edge. “We don’t know anything about him.”
Her mother looked at her over the top of her wineglass, then finished her sip and said, “For your own good, and what difference would it make if I’d told you every detail? He was gone even when he was in this world, no practical use to me and none to either of you.”
Which Blue was sure was true, but she had been there on those long Sunday afternoons when her mother played Fleetwood Mac’s “Go Your Own Way” over and over again on the console stereo. (Loving you isn’t the right thing to do / How can I ever change things that I feel?) Watching her mother towel off after a shower, she’d stared at the black script on her mother’s right hip and wondered, Lou? Leonard? Larry? Lance? The absent presence of in their lives had gnawed at them all.
“I did the best I could with you; God knows I wasn’t very sensible in my younger years.”
Calvin said, “Who is? All I got to show for my early adulthood is five years’ experience driving a fuel-oil truck, and a perfect memory of the words to every Crosby, Stills, and Nash song there was at the time.”
Her mother started singing “Teach Your Children” and Calvin joined in. Blue shook her head, but a part of her, a reluctant, soft part that she liked to forget she had, was captivated. That her mother sang well was no surprise; her singing had always been the cue that Blue and Mel could ask for bubble gum money or, later, new jeans. The surprise was in how her mother and Calvin harmonized so well, and with such obvious mutual pleasure, and in exactly the manner Blue had wished for as a child when she’d watched The Sound of Music and imagined that for her mother there could be an add-on father. Their Maria would be a long-haired, soft-souled Peter Fonda sort of guy.
If the likes of Calvin had come along back then, everything would have turned out so differently … There would be no past to hide away, no lost son to track down.
Branford has a lead.
But she could not think about that right now.
“Something to eat?” she asked, heading to the kitchen without waiting for an answer.
Through the kitchen window, Blue saw that the snow was slowing and, out against the dark horizon, whole floors of lights still glowed in the skyscrapers that separated her from the vast black of Lake Michigan. Who was working this late? Who, like her, had little reason not to work any and all hours, or was so disconnected from those reasons that getting home at nine o’clock, ten, had become par?
She refilled wineglasses and brought out another bottle, along with cheese, bread, olives. Her mother was in the middle of a tale from Blue’s childhood.
“Now this would’ve been around the time Mom died,” she was saying, “so who knows what those girls were thinking, we were all such a mess, but I came home from work—was it the Laundry, then? No, no, I remember, I was cleaning houses in this snotty part of Milwaukee, for women who filled their days getting their poodles groomed. Anyway, I finally got home and there were the girls, in the kitchen, very serious-looking, water and flour and paper towels spread everywhere.”
Blue remembered too; she’d been ten, Melody nine. A spring evening shortly after they’d moved to Jackson Park, on the south side of Milwaukee, when Mel, on a let’s-test-the-new-kid dare, had climbed their new school’s flagpole just after school let out. She was already near the top when Blue came outside—not that Blue’s protests would have stopped her—knees wrapped around the pole, one arm waving to the growing crowd of kids below. Blue’s mouth was just opening to yell, “Be careful!” when Mel lost her grip and fell backward, skimming partway down the pole and then landing hard on her right side. The school nurse—Blue couldn’t recall her name or even quite what she looked like—thought the arm was probably broken. But when she failed to reach anyone at Nancy’s work number, she had reluctantly let Blue persuade he
r to take Mel home.
Blue remembered how grown-up she’d felt, how capable, standing there somberly in front of the nurse, Mel equally somber, not even crying. If Mel had been hysterical, the nurse would never have let them leave. But faced with two little girls who swore their mother was going to be home soon, was probably on her way that minute and that was why the nurse couldn’t reach her, the nurse let them go. “You tell your mother Melody needs to see a doctor today,” the nurse had said, making Blue promise.
“I was thinking that Mel’s arm was broken,” Blue said now. “So I was making a cast.”
“Oh, the two of you,” her mother laughed, “with wet flour clumped in your hair and Melody practically mummified.”
“Cute kids,” Calvin said. “Resourceful.”
And Mel’s arm was broken, and needed surgery, and their mother had been forced to take a second job to pay off the hospital bills.
“Resourceful—oh, you don’t know the half of it!” her mother said, pouring herself another glass of wine. “There was one year when Miss Harmony Blue here was so determined that I should have a cake for my birthday that she took Mom’s old car while I was gone—oh my God, she couldn’t have been fourteen—so that she could get the cake mix and be back home in time to surprise me with it already made, frosted, everything.”
This was after they’d moved to Homewood, outside Chicago, where a friend had offered her mother a job at a florist’s—a good fit, finally, for her mother’s earthiness, but their apartment had no grocery store in close walking distance. Blue had driven that car, a worthless Chevelle with rusting, busted-out floorboards, quite a few times before she was licensed to drive. To buy peanut butter and saltines when there was nothing left in the house to eat. To track down her sister, times when Mel failed to come straight home from school.
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