“He can’t deal with this until Lauren is stabilized. He needs all his energy for her and for his children. He has to be there for Renée and Eric. You must know that they are the center of his life,” Elaine said.
“And Lauren, his wife, their mother, is she, too, the center of his life?” Karina asked caustically, her question a challenge. She, after all, had been his lover. She had slept beside him on nights when his wife had slept alone. She wanted his mother to recognize that, to understand that. “I am important to him. That much I know. He and I can do wonderful things together. But first we must complete this project. He must meet with the camera crew tonight, tomorrow morning at the latest.”
“I see. You say that you are important to him, Karina. And that may well be. But I know that he is very important to you for different reasons. You need him so that you can make your film, make your mark.”
“I care about him.” Karina blushed hotly. Her hand trembled, causing her spoon to rattle against the thick coffee cup.
“If you care about him, you will let him concentrate on his family now,” Elaine replied coldly. “I would not want him to know that while his wife was fighting for her life, you were worried about your documentary.”
“Are you blackmailing me, Elaine?” Karina asked defiantly.
“I am thinking about my son and his family,” she replied.
“You didn’t answer my question.” Karina stared at her.
“That’s right. I didn’t. Probably you know the answer.”
She left then but glanced back when she reached the doorway. Karina stared after her, gripping her cell phone, her finger nervously twirling a tendril of fiery hair.
Elaine drove back to Canyon Drive feeling strangely calm. She had done what she could for her son, for Lauren and for her grandchildren. She had been surprised by Karina. She had thought to meet a softer woman but she understood that it was that very ambition, that determination that had attracted Peter to her. And it was that same ambition, that same determination that would, in the end, ruin his life. She knew this with an intuitive certainty. Like her mother, she had an obligation to intervene on behalf of her child.
Peter knocked at her bedroom door when he came home and she followed him downstairs and brewed tea for both of them.
“No change,” he said as he cradled the cup. “But they say there is a change in her respiratory pattern. Which is good. They’re going to give it a couple of more hours and then do a CAT scan, whatever the hell that is. If she doesn’t wake up.”
“I think she will,” Elaine said. “Lisa thinks she will.”
“You know what I was remembering, sitting by her bed this afternoon, tonight?” Peter asked. “I was remembering how we met, Lauren and I. She sat in front of me in a humanities lecture and when she leaned back her hair brushed my hand. I’ll never forget the feel of it, like a piece of silk against my skin. Then she turned around and I thought that I was looking at an angel. We talked after class and from that first minute, that first conversation, I felt as though all the loneliness of my life had drifted away. It was as though I had found my other half. We couldn’t stand being apart after that first week together. We’d wait for each other between classes, have lunch together, dinner, phone calls every night before we went to sleep. Her voice was the last sound I heard, her face lighting up my dreams. I remembered, tonight, how we’d go down to Little Tokyo on weekend nights, always to the same restaurant, always sitting in the same booth, our hands across the table…” His voice drifted off.
“We went to that restaurant, Lauren and I. She showed me that booth,” Elaine said.
“She remembered.” Sadness and regret rimmed his voice.
“She remembered. How could she forget?”
“I did. Or I thought I did. So much drifted away from me, from us. I thought that we had lost each other, Lauren and I, that we’d been ambushed by carpools and schedules, by a calendar so crowded with what we were doing that we had no time for being what we were. Until today. When everything came rushing back to me and I thought that I would drown. Wave after wave of memories washing over me, bringing me back to how she was, how I was, how we were together. I looked at Lauren today and I remembered her face when Renée was born, when Eric was born. Did I ever tell you that both our babies were born at daybreak? Beautiful sunrises on both those days. I held her hand and we looked at them, at those perfect little beings, those beautiful tiny lives arrived in the world because we loved each other. And then we both looked through the window at the same time and watched the sun begin to climb, watched that honey-colored light of dawn brush the fronds of the palm trees, those same fronds that shivered in the wind today. Pale as she was today, Lauren’s face glowed on those miracle mornings and I thought then that we were both bathed not in sunlight but in joy. We were blessed. She told me, the morning that Eric was born, that I was her life. And I told her that she was mine.” His voice broke. “That’s what I remembered when I sat beside her and watched her sleep and sleep and sleep.”
Tears slid down his cheeks but he did not wipe them away.
“She’ll wake up,” Elaine said very softly.
Her own voice broke. She was moved by her son’s eloquence, by the depth of his feeling.
“But what if she doesn’t? What if she doesn’t wake up because she doesn’t want to? Oh Mom, she knew something was wrong between us. She didn’t know about Karina. I didn’t tell her. But she sensed that there was someone else. She asked me, that day in the hospital, the day before her surgery. And I—I didn’t say yes. I didn’t say no. I took her life away.” His voice faded into a whisper. He gripped his mug so tightly that his knuckles paled.
“You didn’t take her life away,” Elaine said fiercely. “You said nothing that would hurt her. Yes, you made a mistake when you got involved with Karina. But mistakes are made and they’re repaired and life goes on.” She looked at her son. “Do you love Lauren?”
“God, yes. More than I realized.”
“And what about Karina?”
“Karina. She seems like a dream. A fading dream. A fantasy. What we had together was an interlude I might have imagined. When I tried to call her today I couldn’t remember her phone number. When I tried to think about her I couldn’t remember her face. She seemed unreal. All those years I shared with Lauren are my reality. We were lovers, Lauren and I. For years and years we were each other’s world. We were so young when we met that we actually grew up together. And then we were husband and wife and mother and father to our children. How could I have forgotten that moment of first light, her glow when she looked at our babies? I forgot how precious she was to me then, and sitting beside her bed today I realized how precious she is to me now. Our lives are bound up together. All those memories.”
“Marriages are like that,” Elaine said. “A mountain of memories. Daybreak after daybreak.” And heartbreak after heartbreak until the last and final heartbreak. The thought overtook her, unbidden.
“Karina called,” he said, staring down at the dregs in his teacup. “I spoke to her as I was driving home.”
“Oh?”
Elaine remembered Karina reaching for her cell phone as she left the café. She wondered, dispassionately, if she had told Peter about their meeting.
“She was concerned about the documentary. She asked about Lauren, of course, but she was really worried about the production schedule. I told her that I couldn’t be involved in it with everything that was going on and I had turned everything over to my assistant. She asked if that meant that I couldn’t be involved with her. I didn’t answer. I think she began to cry. At least I heard her gasp and then she hung up and I didn’t try to call her back. I feel guilty as hell but it was what I had to do.” He bit his lips, clasped and unclasped his hands.
“You did the right thing, Peter,” Elaine said.
It occurred to her, with relief and sadness, that she too had done the right thing. She had gambled and the stakes had been high. She had risked Peter’s futur
e, his family’s future. But she had no regrets. That risk, uncalculated as it was, had been well taken. Peter would never know of her meeting with Karina. In that, at least, she and the young Russian woman would be complicit.
They mounted the stairs together, mother and son, holding hands, as though to support each other. He leaned toward her and she felt the weight of his body, the weight of his fear.
“It will be all right.” She spoke the reassuring words but her own heart hammered heavily and rapidly and her hands trembled.
fifteen
The phone rang early the next morning. It was Elaine who answered, her heart hammering, her body tensed as though to ward off the impact of the ominous. But it was Herb, who roared his news, his voice elated. Unable to sleep, he had gone to the hospital at first light. Lauren had awakened, bewildered but fully conscious. The neurologist assured him that there had been no impairment. She was asking for Peter, asking about the children. Peter seized the phone atremble with relief and excitement.
“I’m on my way,” he told his father-in-law.
He embraced his mother and then he took her hands and, in the remembered celebratory rite of his boyhood, he whirled her about the room.
“Us, too. Us, too.”
Renée and Eric, barefoot and in pajamas, still flushed with sleep, burst out of their bedrooms and joined them. They circled the room, sunlight spattering their upturned faces, hands tightly clasped, unwilling to relinquish the soaring excitement of joy reclaimed, of life renewed.
Lauren returned from the hospital at the end of the week and slowly the daily routines were resumed. But Elaine noticed small and subtle changes. Peter was home every night, sometimes arriving late but always in time to see the children before they went to bed, to share a late dinner with his wife. Elaine, who ate with her grandchildren, who relished their talk and laughter, glanced at her son and his wife as they ate in the sunroom and remembered the intimate dinners she and Neil had delighted in. She was no longer overwhelmed with sadness when such memories visited her. Like Lauren, she, too, was a convalescent, nursing herself back from grief.
Lauren curtailed her own schedule. Less driving, fewer manic races down the freeway. Lessons and appointments cancelled. Eric and Renée did not seem to miss the steady round of playdates, did not mind missing music lessons and tutoring sessions. They were, parents and children alike, in a silent agreement, at a new beginning. The pace of their lives was slowed. There was time, each morning, to sip a second cup of coffee, time each evening to watch the moonlight silver the verdant lawn and streak the blue waters of the pool.
Lauren was newly relaxed, newly quiescent, Peter newly contented. They recognized that they had survived a dangerous time and they worked carefully, quietly, to avoid future hazards.
They spent weekend evenings wandering through Little Tokyo because Peter was considering a documentary on the colorful Los Angeles Japanese community. Elaine imagined them eating sushi in the booth they called their own, their hands now and again touching, their eyes meeting, their togetherness reclaimed.
The days passed into weeks. She herself went to dinner, to concerts and to the opera with Herb. They were comfortable with each other. It pleased her when he lightly stroked her hair, her cheek, when his lips brushed her own. She had not realized how much she had missed the tenderness of touch, a hand upon her own, an admiring gaze across the dinner table.
“Mom, you really like it out here, don’t you?” Peter asked. “Why not stay longer?”
“I’m waiting to hear from Lisa,” she replied. “There’s our trip to Russia, things to take care of in Westchester. I’m really not ready to make any long-range plans. But I’ll be here for another month at least. I’ve promised Renee Evers enough pieces for an exhibit.”
“Perhaps you’d think of living here for at least part of the year. You could buy or rent a small studio, sort of a pied-à-terre,” Lauren suggested, echoing Sarah’s words.
Elaine smiled. How easily her children proposed a scenario for the rest of her life. Did they think that the days of her year could be divided into equal segments, that she could travel with such ease from Los Angeles to Jerusalem, from the east coast to the west, seamlessly adjusting her life to their own?
“We’ll see,” she said simply, in answer to Lauren’s suggestion, closing all further discussion.
Reading the Los Angeles Times one morning, Elaine found herself looking at Karina’s photograph. The caption read Karina Mendelowitz Whose Memoir Russian Odyssey Will Be Published In The Fall. The accompanying story described the documentary based on the memoir which was currently in production under the aegis of a British film company.
She passed the newspaper to Peter. He scanned the story and nodded.
“Yes. I arranged the British deal. It was profitable for me and very good for her. Closure of a kind. A relief to both of us.”
And to me, Elaine thought as she ripped the page out of the newspaper and carefully shredded it. She would no longer have to feel guilty about Karina who had, after all, achieved exactly what she wanted.
She drove to Renee Evers’s studio each day. Renee had become her friend, a woman whose experience matched her own, who was, at once, wise and cynical. Renee had friends and lovers. She dressed with a bohemian flair, applied makeup with an artist’s skill, mauve eye shadow, apricot blush. Her hands moved nervously and her laughter came easily. She spoke of weekends in Palm Springs and Malibu.
“It’s okay for widows to have a sex life,” she told Elaine. “It was our husbands who died, not us.” But the laughter that followed was threaded with pain.
Elaine understood Renee’s words, her pleasure and her pain. She thought of the warmth she felt at the touch of Herb’s hand, at the admiration in his eyes. That sufficed. For the moment. She dared not venture further. She was too new to loss to think or feel otherwise. Work was her anodyne, the mural a milestone marking Neil’s life and her own reluctant acceptance of the sad and terrible finality of his death.
She completed two more tiles for the mosaic which was slowly taking shape, the enamel satin smooth and shimmering with color. Neil and his grandchildren. The maple tree in their garden that he had watched with such delight—its branches thick with leaves, then skeletal and snow-laden. Passing seasons, passing lives.
“You miss him very much?” Renee asked when Elaine explained the tiles to her.
The question neither offended nor pained her.
“Yes. I miss him every day.” His loss, like his love, had been woven into the fabric of her life.
She did several sets of bookends, alternating in size, then nests of bowls in warm earth colors, tints of amber and gold in each distinctive glaze. She fashioned deep bowls of an aqueous blue and filled them with ceramic lemons and citrons. Renee scheduled a show at her Santa Monica gallery. Herb accompanied her to the opening and stood beside her as she discussed her work with one critic, then another.
Had her stay in California influenced the texture and color of her work? Did she anticipate working on larger projects geared to the Los Angeles sensibility, the more casual Californian lifestyle? Did she plan on opening her own studio in the hills?
Interior design and crafts were important to the California public. Every newspaper and glossy magazine featured articles on new trends in the field. With the exception of Hollywood, Los Angelinos entertained at home and their furnishings, down to the smallest objects that they placed in their kitchens, were important to them. They embraced the culture of personality and it seemed as natural to them to know as much about the artists whose work they purchased as they knew about the movie stars they watched on the screen. They spoke knowledgeably, authoritatively, about the vases and bowls they placed on their low tables, the wind chimes that dangled in their doorways. They recognized the names of ceramicists and weavers, of glass blowers and woodworkers. Elaine knew that her work would not have attracted similar attention in New York.
Herb said as much as they sat across from each othe
r at dinner.
“You could have a wonderful life here, Elaine. You have a constituency in Los Angeles, clients who will look for your work. And you have your family here, Peter and Lauren, Renée and Eric.”
Elaine smiled.
“And you, Herb,” she said slyly.
“Yes. And me. The two of us can share in our grandchildren’s lives. We can take them on trips, celebrate holidays with them. I am not asking you for more than that. You are not Gertrude and I am not Neil but together, even living our separate lives but in close touch, we can cancel out each other’s loneliness.”
He fell silent then, his cheeks flushed, his eyes bright with hope. She thought of how kind he was, how gentle, how deeply he cared for his daughter and how sensitive he had been toward Peter, containing his anger and anxiety. He was a good man, a very good man.
She reached across the table and touched his hand.
“I’m grateful to you, Herb. We will always be friends, very good friends. But I have to figure out my own life. I don’t want to be defined by my children, their needs, their concern about me. I have to find my own strength. This is not the time for me to make decisions. There are things I must do, things I must understand.”
She paused. She could not tell him that she wanted to understand her children; she wanted to balance the ledger of their resentments and their love, to understand the lives they had chosen and where she herself fit into those lives.
“Lisa called last night,” she continued. “We leave for Russia next month and I want to spend a few weeks in my own home, to work in my own studio. Of course I’ll come back to L.A. and of course we’ll do a great many things together, you and I, Peter and Lauren. Our grandkids.”
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