“But they’ve had so little experience,” Elaine had murmured.
“So they’ll find experience together.” Gertrude Glasser’s voice had been soft but her tone had been firm, her meaning clear. If this marriage was what her daughter wanted, then her daughter would have it.
Elaine and Neil had dinner alone with Peter. They had presented him with all their carefully rehearsed arguments. He was so young. He had never traveled. Unlike his sisters, he had never even studied abroad. So much lay ahead of him.
“What’s your hurry?” Neil had asked in the gentle, reasonable voice that calmed his patients, caused them to contemplate new vistas, different options.
Peter’s answer had shocked and wounded them.
“I want a family,” he had said sullenly.
“You have a family.” Elaine had spoken swiftly, harshly, because she had seen the hurt and bewilderment in Neil’s eyes. “We are your family.”
“Look,” he had said, “I love Lauren. I think about her when I wake up in the morning. I think about her when I go to sleep at night. And she loves me. I’m the most important person in her life. Just like Mom’s the most important person in your life, Dad. And you’re the most important person in hers. So you can understand that. I want what you have. I need what you have. And Lauren gives it to me.”
He had looked at Neil, looked at Elaine, as though inviting them to challenge him, but they had remained silent. Peter’s words had struck a vein of truth which they could not deny. Sadly, they recognized that he had felt himself locked out of their lives. However inadvertently, their very closeness had caused him to feel isolated and alone.
“She gives him what he needs,” Neil had said sadly that night. “It will be all right.”
In tacit agreement then, they had raised no other objections to the marriage but smilingly, they had agreed with the Glassers that Lauren and Peter made a beautiful couple and they would surely be happy.
And that prediction had seemed to hold over the years. Lauren remained a stranger to them, their relationship correct although devoid of intimacy, but the marriage seemed to be a happy one. The children, Eric and Renée, were bright and attractive and, during their brief visits to L.A., Neil and Elaine saw that Lauren was an involved and devoted mother. Peter was successful in the career that his parents still had difficulty understanding and he and Lauren moved from one home to another. They abandoned the stucco bungalow with its red-tile roof that had been the Glassers’ generous wedding gift to them, for the larger house, a comfortable ranch encircled by patios, when Renée was born. They had moved to an even larger home with a small pool when Eric was four months old until at last they had settled in the huge sprawling Encino Hills white wedding cake of a house on Canyon Drive with its tennis court, a kidney-shaped pool and a garden replete with persimmon, avocado and citrus trees.
“Their last stop?” Neil had asked wryly, after their visit to Canyon Drive, but by that time he and Elaine had understood that their elder son had been assimilated into an L.A. culture wedded to mobility and constant change.
The constant moves, they knew, were a California pattern but still it bewildered Neil and Elaine who had lived in their Westchester home for so many years. They had blamed Lauren for the restiveness, for the steady climb upward. She was, they thought, socially ambitious, materialistic, but they had masked their disapproval and visited infrequently, although Peter constantly urged them to spend more time in California. They offered excuses and knew them to be feeble. Neil had his obligations to his patients, they explained and Elaine had her commissions to complete.
“You haven’t seen the house since we had it redecorated, have you, Mom?” Peter asked as he swerved off the freeway and onto the residential avenues. His cell phone rang and he glanced at its screen but made no move to answer it. “The office,” he explained. “Some deal I’m working on. It can wait.”
“You remember that your father and I had planned to come last year but something always came up. A conference, patients’ schedules, my deadlines. And then…” Her voice trailed off. The sentence would have to end with and then he died and she could not bring herself to say the words. “And then there was no time,” she said at last, staring out the window at the huge pseudo-Spanish mansions, white columned and red roofed, at the palm trees that shaded verandas studded with wrought-iron chairs on which no one sat.
“No time,” he repeated. “I was going to come east last year, you know. I wanted to talk to Dad. To get his advice. We had even made a tentative date and then…”
Now it was Peter who was silent and she touched his arm gently. How was she to comfort this son who had sprinted so swiftly into manhood, who lived in a world she did not understand?
“What did you want to talk to him about?” she asked.
Something was troubling Peter. She had sensed it even when he was in New York. She had heard the tension in his voice during their phone conversations, taken note of the new worry lines etched around his eyes when he embraced her at the airport. “Is everything all right?”
“Everything’s great,” he said and flashed her a smile, a smoothly rehearsed California smile that never reached his eyes. “We’re here,” he said, pulling into the circular driveway, its pink flagstone ribbed with sunlight. He helped Elaine out of the car and called to his son.
“Hey, Eric, come say hello to your grandma.”
The small boy hurtled down the broad redbrick steps and hurled himself into Elaine’s outstretched arms. She held him close, kissed his bright freckled face and looked beyond him, at Lauren, elegant in a tailored pale-blue pantsuit. Her daughter-in-law leaned against the wrought-iron rail, her fair hair caping her shoulders, staring sadly out at them. And then, catching Elaine’s glance, she forced a smile and hurried toward her, brushing her mother-in-law’s cheek with lips that were too cool, her hand reaching out to smooth Eric’s hair into place even as she called softly to Renée who emerged from the car, cringing against the sun’s fierce brightness. It was only Peter whom she ignored and who, in turn, only nodded as he walked past her, carrying his mother’s bags up to the guest room.
Dinner that night was carefully choreographed. Herb Glasser arrived early and he and Elaine sat on the patio, sipping their white wine. She had always liked Lauren’s soft-spoken, silver-haired father. He was a self-made man who, years ago, had understood Los Angeles and anticipated its expansion. He had quietly acquired plots of land, predicting that the chapparal-studded fields and wild meadowlands would be valuable acreage as the development of the city accelerated. He belonged to the new group of Jewish entrepreneurs, the builders and developers who had replaced the movie moguls of another era. He was unsurprised by his success but he had never flaunted it. It was important to him only because it enabled him to offer his family a comfortable life. But there were other things that were more important, much more important, he had told Elaine and Neil all those years ago and they had known that he was thinking of the boy who had died, Lauren’s unknown brother. Donny had been his name and his passing had cast a long and impenetrable shadow across their lives. Herb Glasser was not a man who reconciled himself easily to loss. And now he had lost both his son and his wife. Lauren’s family, Lauren’s happiness, was his only comfort.
Elaine had seen him rarely since Gertrude Glasser’s funeral and she was saddened to see how much he had changed. He was too thin, his eyes deeply sunk into a face that seemed beveled with sorrow, his light linen suit hanging too loosely on his much diminished body. He found it difficult to eat alone, he said and he stared without appetite at microwaved meals and filled his supermarket cart with frozen dinners that would remain in the freezer well past their due date. He had, he confessed with typical self-deprecation, only learned how to turn the oven on after his wife’s death.
“And you, Elaine,” he asked gently, as they watched the pink evening primroses blossom for their brief journey into life. “How are you coping?”
Unexpectedly, her eyes filled with te
ars.
“It’s hard,” she said and it occurred to her that she was weeping for his loss as well as her own.
“I know.”
They were not unlike two invalids, slowly recuperating from the devastating effects of the same disease.
They sat quietly then, cocooned by their sadness, and breathed in the scent of the citrus trees that bordered the pool, the lemons and oranges glistening amid the dark green leaves.
“But the children, my Lauren, your Peter, they are happy,” he said and she nodded.
“I think so,” she said and wondered why his voice rose slightly, as though he were asking a question rather than making a statement.
Still, the dinner was pleasant, the table beautifully set with sparkling crystal and highly polished silver, the earth-colored ceramic dishes splashed with blue, a glaze that Elaine studied and admired.
“They’re new,” Renée reported proudly. “Mommy thought that you would like them. She bought them especially for you.”
Elaine smiled at her daughter-in-law, touched that Lauren had thought to please her, touched that she was so welcome in this house. Perhaps during this visit she would learn to understand her son’s wife. She looked at her grandchildren, their hair damp from the quick showers they had taken after their afternoon swims, their skin golden, their faces shining with happiness and health, delighted to be allowed to stay up so late, to have dinner with their parents and their grandparents. And Peter, circling the table, filling their wineglasses, exuded proprietary pride in his home, his family, his success so evident, his life so clearly enviable.
Elaine felt a surge of contentment. It was good to be with Peter’s family, to listen to her grandchildren’s soft voices, their sweet and sudden laughter.
“I bet this is different from dinnertime at Sandy’s—oops—Sarah’s,” Peter said.
His words surprised Elaine and she did not reply.
He smiled at Lauren as he tasted her delicious cassoulet and lifted his glass.
“I want to toast my wife who is responsible for this wonderful dinner,” he said. “And my mother who traveled so far to get here.”
The children glowed. Elaine and Herb Glasser clicked their glasses and Elaine saw that Lauren had blushed with pleasure at Peter’s words. A wave of relief washed over her. Her premonitions were misplaced. She was just tired, her perceptions shadowed by her own grief, her own uncertainty. Everything would be all right. Swiftly, she corrected herself. Everything was all right.
ten
Within days, Elaine grew accustomed to the rhythms of her son’s household. The mornings were a flurry of activity. Because she’d slept badly during those first days in California she heard the jangle of phones that rang before daybreak and listened as Peter spoke to a scout searching for a location in Japan, a banker in England, a disconsolate actress in New York. He paced nervously up and down the hallway, juggling the phone and his razor, lowering his voice as he passed the guest room.
“Why can’t they call you at the office?” Lauren’s irritable protest was repeated daily as she passed him and before she knocked at the children’s doors. She had already completed her morning jog and she hurried authoritatively through the house in her very white sneakers, her shorts and Tshirts damp with sweat.
“Renée! Eric! You’ll be late. Very late.”
The children scurried from bedroom to bathroom, quarreled briefly, searched for missing sneakers, wept because homework assignments were misplaced, struggled with elaborate monogrammed backpacks that did not zip properly.
Maria, the Mexican maid, padded her way into the kitchen to start breakfast. She glided across the terrazzo floor, singing softly to herself in Spanish as she poured orange juice into the pitcher, reached for milk and eggs, the yogurt that Lauren bought at the Gelson’s dairy counter that sold only organic products. The refrigerator door opened and closed with the eerie silence peculiar to expensive appliances. Elaine watched as Maria plucked cereal boxes from pantry shelves that slid soundlessly open, and flicked on the coffeemaker precisely as a car sped up the circular driveway and the daily newspapers landed at the door with a heavy thud. The Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal, Variety, the New York Times. The small mountain of print stood precariously beside Peter’s coffee mug at the breakfast table. Elaine noted with odd satisfaction that he always read the New York Times first, the east coast of his birth taking precedence over his adopted city, so precariously balanced at the edge of the Pacific Ocean.
On alternate days a team of Japanese gardeners arrived, small-boned men in bright blue jumpsuits who scurried across the property with shining implements, trowels and rakes, hoes and scythes scraped clean, ready to plant and weed, to control the luxuriant foliage and replace any languishing shrubbery. The air vibrated with the clack of pruning shears as the bougainvillea was clipped back. Sprinklers hissed as sprays were trained on the apricot and peach saplings, their dark leaves already interspersed with pink-and-white blossoms. Often, Lauren rose from the breakfast table, coffee mug in hand, and hurried to the gardeners to discuss the quality of the mulch used in the herb garden, the need to uproot one or another of the dwarf trees and replace it with topiary she had admired at someone’s home.
“My wife missed her calling,” Peter said wryly one morning, looking up from the newspaper. “She should have been a horticulturist.”
“It’s wonderful that she enjoys the garden,” Elaine said carefully.
“I don’t know what she enjoys anymore,” he replied curtly and he listened without interest as Lauren returned to the table and explained an idea she had for a herb garden. Tarragon. Rosemary. Sage. A lot of her friends were growing their own herbs.
“Marjoram and thyme grow wild in Sarah’s garden,” Elaine contributed and Peter glanced at her sharply.
“I don’t think you can compare Sarah’s garden to ours,” he said and that familiar edge in his voice surprised Elaine. It was puzzling, that Peter saw himself competing with his sister whose life and aspirations were so different from his own. Neil, astute analyst that he was, would comprehend the hidden meaning of Peter’s words—sibling rivalry perhaps, a struggle for position, a need for validation. She imagined his soft voice weighing the choices and then realized, with resurgent sorrow, that Neil was dead and she could not share her puzzlement about their elder son with him.
“Middle child syndrome,” Lauren murmured. “Still competing with his big sister.”
She smiled but Peter flushed angrily. Lauren shrugged and searched for her car keys as the children shouldered their backpacks.
Lauren drove Renée and Eric to school each morning in the huge cream-colored SUV that joined the caravan of other oversize cars, driven by the young mothers whose children stared glumly through car windows sealed against the encroaching heat. They too had left homes where maids cleared away breakfast dishes and pool boys busied themselves checking filters and skimming leaves. All the young women drove with the ease of those for whom cars have always been an extension of their lives, mindlessly braking and accelerating, waving to each other, now talking on their cell phones, now swiveling their heads to talk to a child sulking in the rear seat. They moved steadily down the broad avenue lined with date palms that led to the Redwood Academy. It was, Lauren had told Elaine proudly, the best private school in the area.
“Expensive but worth it,” she had added. “It feeds into the most prestigious high schools, most of their grads going Ivy.”
“Renée is only ten years old,” Elaine had said mildly and immediately regretted her words as Lauren’s face tightened.
“There’s nothing wrong with planning ahead,” she had retorted. “These kids are going to face a very competitive world and it matters a lot where they go to school.”
Elaine had swiftly nodded, signifying an agreement she did not feel.
Peter left for work each day, lowering himself into his own small red sports car, his laptop and cell phone on the seat beside him. When traffic slowed to a halt
on the freeway, as it so often did, he caught up on phone calls and e-mails, he explained to his mother. He was a Los Angelino and knew the hazards of time wasted, of deals left undone because a message had been left too long unanswered, a call had been unreturned.
“A Porsche,” he told Elaine when she admired the car. “It’s great for weaving in and out of freeway traffic when you’re in a hurry.”
“And are you always in a hurry?” she asked.
“Hey, this is California. Everyone’s in a hurry. That’s why we have these freeways. We’re the happening state, Mom.”
His office was on Sepuvelda Boulevard, close to the action, he explained. That was what his business was all about—the action. To be an independent producer he had to be everywhere at once. It was, he said, a twenty-four-seven deal.
His schedule dizzied Elaine. There were evening meetings, business conducted over dinner and drinks, all-nighters when a film had to be viewed, edited and then reviewed and reedited. There were unexpected flights to distant locales to deal with unexpected problems. Phone calls of explanation to Lauren. He would not be home at all. He would be home late. He would try to make it home the next night. Three times during that first week of Elaine’s stay, he made such calls.
Lauren pursed her lips, checked a calendar crowded with notes and reminders. Her voice rose plaintively.
“Don’t forget, we have the dinner at the club.”
“You’ll miss Renée’s dance recital.”
“But you promised to be at that committee meeting.”
She and Elaine had dinner with the children, pizzas ordered in, Maria’s overly spiced fried chicken, macaroni and cheese. Comfort food that did little to comfort, eaten with the television on, Eric and Renée staring at the screen, Lauren on the phone scheduling visits to the dentist, the dermatologist, the hairdresser.
Open Doors Page 15