Open Doors

by Gloria Goldreich

  Lauren’s own days were chiseled into carefully measured segments, every minute and hour accounted for. She spoke worriedly of carving out time for her surgery which had been postponed for a week or more. “Thank goodness,” she had said, when the doctor’s secretary called. “I hardly have time to breathe this week.”

  “But don’t you want to get the surgery over with?” Elaine had asked.

  “It’s elective surgery. Routine. No biggie.” Lauren had shrugged, crossed out one date on her calendar and penned in another. But Elaine had noticed that her hand trembled as she wrote and when she had finished she had set the pen down and closed her eyes, her head turned upward to the warmth of the blazing sun.

  Mornings Lauren played tennis at the Hillcrest Country Club, her regular doubles game followed by meetings of the various committees on which she served. Often she stayed for lunch at the club and then worked on plans for the spring gala which she was chairing. She typed up the minutes of the Canyon Drive Civic Association, all the while fielding phone calls, scheduling and rescheduling playdates, talking to a contractor who would be renovating the kitchen and a designer who had some interesting ideas for the upstairs bathrooms. In the afternoons she was once again behind the wheel of the SUV. Renée and Eric had to be driven to Hebrew school, to music lessons, to dance class, to soccer practice, to tutoring sessions—math for Renée, reading for Eric—to playdates in Balboa Park, in Van Nuys. There was food shopping and clothing shopping and invitations to reply to and invitations to be extended. She belonged to a book club, attended a yoga class, volunteered in the guidance department of an inner-city school. She was trying to complete her graduate work in psychology but given her obligations she could manage only one course a semester. If Peter’s schedule dizzied Elaine, Lauren’s exhausted her.

  “It’s such a frenetic life,” she told Herb Glasser with whom she had lunch at the club while Lauren played a doubles match. “Peter and Lauren. Always rushing madly about, always on the go.”

  They sat at a shaded table on the patio, at a remove from the golden-limbed, shiny-haired young women in pastel-colored tennis outfits who picked carefully through green salads dotted with alfalfa sprouts, avoiding croutons in which an excess calorie might lurk. Elaine, wearing a loose dress in a geometric pattern of Sarah’s design, her curling dark hair now silver-streaked and tucked into a loose bun, felt herself an aging trespasser among the young on this isle of ease and unending sunlight. Ponce de Leon, she decided, should have gone west to California rather than south to Florida in his search for the fountain of youth. She noticed that Herb concentrated on his half-eaten sandwich and barely raised his eyes. She would have thought that his long residency in California would have exempted him from the unease she felt.

  “Too much on the go,” he agreed. “And it’s not a life they live together.”

  She looked at him sharply. He, too, had sensed the unease in the marriage, the miasma of discontent that lingered in the Canyon Drive home.

  “We lived very differently, Neil and I,” she said.

  “We, too. Quiet, maybe too quiet, but always with each other. Especially after our Donny died. All that was important to us was each other and, of course, Lauren. We didn’t want her to be unhappy ever, not even for a minute. She wanted horseback riding lessons so there were horseback riding lessons. A trip to Europe right after high school. So there was a trip to Europe. Marriage right after college—a big wedding, a new house. When she told us she wanted to get married we thought she was too young, we thought they should wait a year, two years, but we didn’t say anything so there was the wedding, the house. And then Gertrude and I were alone. Together but alone.” Herb Glasser looked beyond her toward the Santa Monica mountains.

  Elaine leaned forward and touched his hand. She was surprised to find his fingers cold to her touch although the day was warm.

  “I know,” she said. “I understand how it was with you and Gertrude. Just as it was with Neil and myself. We each had our own work, of course. Neil in his office, me in my studio. But even when we were apart we were a presence in each other’s life. Sometimes I would call him in the middle of the day because I knew he was between patients and I just wanted to hear his voice. Sometimes when he had a cancellation, he would drive home for lunch and surprise me. I always thought such an hour of sharing a sandwich and sipping coffee was a gift. Now—now there are no more surprises, no gifts. Alone is alone. The phone doesn’t ring. The door doesn’t open.” Elaine spoke with a muted sadness.

  He nodded. He spoke very softly.

  “Gertrude and I spent maybe ten nights apart, through all the years of our marriage. Maybe when she had the babies and had to be in the hospital two or three nights, once or twice when I had to go east for business. And dinners we always ate together, at home, at a restaurant but always across the table from each other. I’ll tell you a secret, Elaine. Even now, if I’m eating alone at home, I set a place for her across the table, everything, silverware, a plate, a napkin, a glass of water. I fill the glass to the top, the way she liked it. If I go to eat in a restaurant and the table is set for two, I tell them to leave the extra place setting, I ask the waiter to fill both water glasses. And then I don’t feel so alone. And then I can eat. Not much, but something. Do you think that’s crazy?” He flushed, as though shamed by his own revelation.

  “No. I don’t think that’s crazy,” she replied. “I understand about dinners. I think maybe that’s what I miss the most—the dinners we shared when the day’s work was done but it wasn’t yet night. We’d sit at a small table in the half darkness, a table so small that if we reached our hands across it our fingers touched. We would talk very quietly then and if the phone rang we didn’t answer it. Sometimes, at that hour I forget that Neil is dead and I talk to him. Quietly, very quietly. I wonder what he would say about something that happened during the day, if he’ll be able to explain something I didn’t understand. And then I realize that he’s gone and I can’t ask him, not for his opinion, not for his explanation. Not ever again.”

  Her eyes filled and she wondered anew why the finality of death still overwhelmed her. Her grandmother, whom she had loved dearly, had died when she was a small girl, six years old or perhaps seven, and she had trailed after her mother, her grieving mother, stupid child that she had been, asking over and over again when the old woman was coming back. But now she was a grown woman, not a small girl; she had attended countless funerals, mourned her parents and her husband, and she still found the very concept of death incomprehensible. Surely, those who had gone would return. How could it be that breath was stilled, that beloved faces drifted through dreams and gentle voices lingered only in memory? It was no wonder that the faces of mourners were masks of misery and disbelief. How could they conceive of the terrible finality to which they were asked to bear witness? She knew that Herb Glasser, who had buried a son who had never grown to manhood, and a wife whose place he still set for dinner, shared her bewilderment. She moved her chair closer to his so that they sat together in an arc of sunlight.

  “Lauren and Peter, they don’t often have dinner together,” Herb Glasser said sadly.

  “I know. Their crazy schedules. Peter works late, travels. And of course Lauren has her class, meetings,” Elaine countered.

  She was fair. She distributed the blame equally. Lauren and Peter were both overloaded, prisoners of their own affluence. He worked long hours but his work, his income, made their lifestyle possible. The house, the cars, the tuitions, the memberships in clubs and synagogue, dinner parties and gardeners and maids and pool boys, all demanded a payout at the end of the day. They had to keep running just to stay in place—Peter earning, Lauren spending, the symbols of their success essential to both of them.

  “Peter doesn’t call Lauren during the day. Just to hear her voice.” Herb looked up, waved to his daughter who walked toward them, swinging her tennis racket, a smile frozen on her lips, her eyes concealed by oversize sunglasses.

  “And Laur
en wouldn’t be home if he did,” Elaine added defensively.

  “Theirs is not marriage as we knew it, you and I,” he said and they fell silent as Lauren approached.

  He rose from his seat to kiss his daughter, to take her tennis racket and pull out her chair, filling her water glass to the brim because she was her mother’s daughter and he knew that was how she liked it. He looked at Elaine, inviting her into a complicity of silence, and she nodded. What could they do, she and Lauren’s father? Their children were adults, childish adults playing a dangerous game. Elaine was grateful to Herb Glasser who shared her apprehensions, who acknowledged his powerlessness and her own.

  What was it Moshe had said—“you can’t protect your children but you can prepare them.” In Jerusalem, she had thought his words wise, even profound, but now they sounded naive, perhaps even foolish. She and Neil had cautioned Peter against marrying when he was so young, but they could not have prepared him for the hectic pace of the life he himself had chosen, for the recognition that the girl he loved might change over the years into a woman he might not even like. And how could Herb Glasser have prepared Lauren for empty evenings, for meals too often eaten alone and too many nights without touch and tenderness? It was Neil’s mother, that wise old Yiddish-speaking woman, who had said, “When children are little they sit on your lap, when children are older they sit on your heart.” Elaine sitting opposite her daughter-in-law on the club terrace, felt the heaviness of her son’s sadness on her heart. Herb looked at her and Elaine turned away from the worry in his eyes.

  Mimi Armstrong called from New York that night, exultant because all of Elaine’s ceramic pieces had sold at her last gallery show.

  “Even those womb-shaped ashtrays I wasn’t so crazy about,” she reported. “Some young couple bought them for their second home, or maybe their third home. You’re hot, Elaine, but hot goes cold pretty quickly in the art world.”

  Elaine smiled. Mimi was coarse, hardened by her messy and expensive divorce, but she was an honest and shrewd businesswoman.

  “That’s good news, Mimi. I’m glad you were able to sell everything,” Elaine said carefully, ignoring the gallery owner’s sly warning.

  But Mimi, as always, was persistent.

  “You’ll have to get some new work together for display soon. Maybe even a small show. Boutiques are the thing now. Lots of ceramicists are doing boutique exhibits. The magazines love them. House and Garden, Real Simple, even Vogue. But I can’t promote your work if I don’t have a damn thing for a photo op.”

  “Mimi, I’m at my son’s house in L.A. You know that. I don’t have access to a studio or a kiln. No equipment. And frankly, not too many ideas.”

  “You’ll get ideas. As for studio space and a kiln, I spoke to my friend, Renee Evers. She has a gallery on Rodeo Drive and another one in Santa Monica. Real big-time. She knows all about studio space, kiln shares—she shows the work of a couple of ceramicists who work together, communal studios, communal kilns. That could work for you while you’re on the coast. And she wants to meet you. She’s a big fan of your work. She has one of your tile tables in her home—she lives in some big spread up in Sherman Oaks. Très posh. You’d be working with someone who’s cutting edge.” Mimi was talking breathlessly now, racing against possible protests.

  “Everyone in L.A. has a big spread,” Elaine managed to say. “And everyone is cutting edge,” she added.

  She moved to the window. Lauren, in white slacks and a white sweater, walked beside the pool. Peter was home, the door to his office closed. A citrus-scented breeze cooled the air but Lauren remained alone in the gathering darkness. Elaine’s heart turned.

  “Okay. Whatever,” Mimi continued. “But it’s fantastic that a dealer of Renee’s stature is interested in your work. I gave her your son’s number. She’s going to call you, to have lunch, to talk and I want you to meet her, to hear her out. Will you do that, Elaine?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Remember, Elaine, you owe me.” Mimi’s voice hardened.

  She was right, Elaine knew. She did owe her. It was Mimi who had mounted her first show and kept the commissions coming in so that Elaine could work quietly at home. It was because of Mimi that she had never had to dash around Soho networking, carrying photos and samples of her work in and out of galleries and interior decorator shops as so many other artists and craftspeople did. She could remain in her studio, always available when Neil called, when he popped in for an unexpected lunch.

  And Mimi had been kind after Neil’s death. She had invited Elaine to have dinner with her, accompanied her to the theater, to concerts, urged her to stay over in the city and avoid the vast island of the double bed, one side of which would now forever be undisturbed. For all her brashness, Mimi understood the dangers nighttime held for the newly alone. Mimi was right. Elaine did owe her. If she worked out a deal with Renee Evers, Mimi would probably get a slice of the commission.

  “All right. I’ll meet her,” Elaine agreed.

  Renee Evers called the next morning and Elaine agreed to meet her for lunch at a French restaurant in Santa Monica.

  Elaine was relieved to spend the day on her own, away from the unease in her son’s home, and she sensed that Lauren, too, welcomed the time apart.

  “I was going to ask if you wanted to sit in on my psych seminar, but a day in Santa Monica will be a lot more fun,” she said.

  Elaine nodded, touched that Lauren had worried about her. As the days passed she found herself growing fonder of the daughter-in-law she had never really liked. She thought it touching that Lauren called her father daily, that he had an open invitation to dinner on Canyon Drive.

  “He and my mother were so close,” she explained to Elaine. “I hate to think of him being alone.” And then she had blushed, remembering that Elaine who had been so close to Neil was also alone.

  “My dad’s coming for dinner tonight,” she added, as she rummaged for the keys to the car Elaine would drive. “I did tell you that Peter and I are having some friends over, didn’t I?”

  “Yes. You did,” Elaine assured her.

  Twice that morning Lauren had reminded Peter to be home by eight. Twice she had told Maria to give the children an early dinner, to set the table for ten. Twice she had asked the Japanese gardener to bring bouquets of yellow roses into the kitchen. Lauren’s unease puzzled Elaine but Peter’s indifference to his wife’s anxiety angered her.

  She had watched as the family left the house, Renée and Eric darting too quickly into the SUV, Lauren tight-lipped and pale. Peter, dressed in full L.A. uniform—a mustard-colored shirt with a polka-dotted ascot tucked jauntily into its monogrammed pocket, a navy blue knit tie that exactly matched his lightweight blazer—talked on his cell phone even as he lowered himself into the small red Porsche. He and Lauren did not wave to each other. They did not say goodbye. Elaine watched the two cars speed down the circular driveway and remembered that Neil had never left the house without kissing her goodbye, on the lips, on the cheek. He had sought her out in the kitchen, in her studio, in her bath, each small leave-taking an affectionate exchange. Didn’t Peter remember that? What, after all, had his parents’ marriage taught him?

  She shook her head wearily and dressed for her meeting with Renee Evers, remembering to tuck Mimi’s last catalog and some photos of her recent work into her bag. She felt a new optimism, a gathering enthusiasm. It would be good to discuss her work, to perhaps contemplate new projects, to give voice to the ideas that had teased her in Jerusalem. She wanted to continue work on the mosaic. She had some completed sketches and itched to begin work on new tiles. She hoped that Renee Evers had a sympathetic ear.

  It was still midmorning when she arrived in Santa Monica, enough time to wander about before the luncheon meeting. Like a tourist on holiday she strolled down the pier, delighting in the clarity of the air, washed free of the ashen smog by the seaborne Pacific wind. She had entered a vast playland where men threw softballs at weighted bottles and grown wom
en wore necklaces of paper flowers. She smiled at the children on the carousel, their pudgy sunburned arms outstretched to grasp at the dangling golden rings. They were small apprentices, early initiates into the California way; they too, she supposed, would strive after the elusive gold of success and accomplishment, the bigger house, the deeper pool, the A-list friends—all life’s golden rings scavenged and held too close, all of them tarnished when looked at too carefully. Peter’s merry-go-round, Elaine thought sadly. The whirling ride no longer enticed, but he could not afford to abandon it.

  She shaded her eyes and stared at the swimmers who allowed the gentle wavelets to propel them farther and farther from shore and then floated on their backs, their faces shimmering with the brightness of sunlight beaming on water. Surfers rode the waves, soaring as they crested and disappearing behind the scrim of falling water. She walked past the huge waterfront hotels on Ocean Avenue, their sparkling glass frontage reflecting the foam-fringed breakers. There was a new lightness to her step and she smiled as two couples on Rollerblades glided toward her, dropping their linked hands so that she might pass. Their verve and ease energized her. She could, she told herself, despite all her reservations about the materialism and the pace of life, grow used to the verve of California life, its warmth and excitement. Like Herb Glasser, she could revel in the nearness of her grandchildren, her loneliness obviated by Renée’s sweetness, Eric’s energy, their swift embraces and joyous laughter. It would be wonderful to be a constant presence in their lives, at least for part of the year or perhaps for longer than that. She had, after all, the rest of her life to consider.

  She would not miss the chilly winds of winter or the long days and nights of falling snow that streaked the windows of her silent house and left ice patches on her rural road. Her life could be divided up, she thought and imagined herself spending the winter months in a bright sunlit studio high in the California hills. Here, there would be no irreconcilable ideological divide. She thought, with renewed sadness, but without regret, of her outburst on the night of the seder and promised herself that she would call Sarah as soon as she returned to Canyon Drive.