by Jill Kargman
Thirty-five
The next day, inspired from my marathon walk with Violet, we decided to hit the West Side and visit the Natural History Museum. Violet could name every dinosaur known to man, so I thought checking out dem bones would be fun. She was overjoyed and euphoric to say the least. The exhibit was truly incredible, and we wandered the halls looking at “buggies” and “wabbits” and “fishies,” until Violet’s little gams were about to give out.
Under the big whale, a cute mom and daughter with knitted scarves looked up in wonder.
“I love dis place, Mommy!” the little girl said in awe.
“Isn’t it great?” the mom responded. “We can come here whenever you want.”
Violet sauntered up to the little girl and gave her big hug.
“Awwww, she’s so friendly!” the mom said to me sweetly. “Give her a hug, Amy!”
The girls hugged and we cooed at the cuteness factor of their embrace. The mother reminded me of a friend I’d had in grad school who had a baby and who was always very relaxed; she’d pass her baby around a party or I’d find her in the library with the baby hanging in the Baby Björn as she read. I remembered promising myself I’d be carefree and mellow like that. And this mom had that same chill vibe.
“You guys live around here?” she asked.
“Just across the park. It’s not far, though. We had such a nice walk,” I said.
“We take the cutest class ever, Broadway Babies, on the East Side. Do you guys do it?”
“No. What’s that, like, making the kids into Macaulay Culkin child stars or something?”
“No,” she laughed. “It’s so cute you want to die. It’s all Broadway actors and they do a different show every week, so it’s like world-class entertainment for the parents.”
“No way! I love the sound of that!” It sounded more rambunctious and alive than the sedate glockenspiels and triangles of Milford Prescott.
“You have to check it out. It’s amazing how talented the teachers are, and it just makes you feel so lucky to live in New York.”
“Mommy!” her daughter suddenly wailed.
“Okay, honey, we’ll go to lunch now. I’m Holly Appleton, by the way. If you guys want to join our class, just ask for Heather Stone when you call, she’s so sweet.”
“Thanks so much for the tip.”
“Your daughter’s so cute—”
“So’s yours!”
We left the museum and I called information for the Broadway Babies number and signed Violet up right then and there. They told me they had one spot left in Holly’s section and that the next class would be the show Chicago. I wondered how they would perform a show about a sex-slaughter/double homicide with imprisonment and a crooked legal system for two-year-olds, but I did know one thing: I was psyched.
Thirty-six
The next day, I was reorganizing Violet’s drawers (thanks to piles of outgrown clothes, sad!) when the doorman buzzed. Mrs. Dillingham was on her way up. Fuck, I looked like I had just come out of the ring with Mike Tyson. I tore off my grody Urban O tee and threw on a little white dress I hadn’t ever worn, ripping the tag off just as the doorbell rang. It was so contrived, I mean, I would never be just lounging around the house in the dress but I knew Lila and her cronies always were decked out and probably never even let their staff see them in something as plebeian as blue jeans.
“Lila! Hi,” I said, forcing a smile. “What a surprise.” I hoped my highlighting of the ambush factor would make her think about barrel-assing into our apartment sans phone call, but no.
“Hannah, I’m concerned,” she started, looking me over. I could detect a note of pleasant response to my outfit, though nothing was said of it. “I saw Bee this afternoon, and well, we got to talking about Violet.”
Uh-oh. Didn’t these people have better things to discuss than my daughter? Apparently not.
“And she mentioned that you…took her to the outer boroughs,” Lila choked, practically near the point of vomiting. “On the subway train.”
“Yes.” I knew where this was going. “We had a playgroup there.”
“Well, to be honest, she also mentioned Violet watches a lot of television and while I can’t say I’m happy about that—Weston watches none, you know—I am extremely distressed that you took it upon yourself to bring my grandchild underground like that on those horrible cattle cars! They are all graffiti covered and dreadful. And the people! Why, it’s the absolute dregs of society! God knows what could have happened to her. And it’s a clear terrorist target, you know. What if these crazy bombers boarded your train? It’s simply irresponsible!”
My blood boiled. I wished Josh had been there to dive in and stand up for me, but he was always at work and here I was yet again alone with his mother having to defend myself while trying to avoid confrontation.
“Lila, the trains are no longer graffiti covered—”
“No matter! I simply am not comfortable with that at all and if you truly must leave Manhattan, I will send my chauffeur.”
I was livid. But I had to take a deep breath and exhale my need to club her over the head with a Big Bertha golf wedge. I felt the ire slowly seep away and I nodded calmly, not wanting to escalate the situation by saying, for example, that she was a nosy cow who should mind her own business. So I said nothing. She made fake small talk for the ten minutes afterward (asking “the latest” on our nursery school process, blah blah blah) then announced she had to go because she had the black-tie gala for Help Foreign Frescos Ball at the Burden Mansion in three hours and she had “not a thing to wear” (apparently there were painted ceilings abroad in dire need of our aid). Hmph. When she left I was desperate to get out of the house and I decided to take Violet outside to blow off my steam. We had walked a few blocks when I heard Violet say “Mommy, dat store!” and per her wish, we ended up at famed toy emporium F.A.O. Schwarz.
A mistake. Hordes of platinum-card-swiping moms lined up at the registers with bags full of big dollies and indoor cars, though we were nowhere near Christmas, and I felt like I was moving through the store as if watching everything through a fish-eye lens. In a distorted haze, the children’s lollipops seemed warped bigger than their heads. The vroom-vrooms of the trucks seemed as noisy as the real rush hour outside, and Barbies seemed blonder than ever, and suddenly a huge clown seriously made me think it would lurch toward us and strangle me. I had to get out. I quickly took Violet and walked toward home. Maybe there would be a sweet message from Joshie, whom I was dying to talk to and regroup with.
Thirty-seven
Alas, no word from Josh save for a quick text message that he was in meetings “’til late.” But curiously, Troy Kincaid had called three times. There was a sudden private listing from a family who had to move back to Portugal in two months. The wife recently had a kidney transplant and was convalescing at home and didn’t want people traipsing through the pad. She listed it under the radar with Troy Kincaid as the exclusive broker and because it was in our budget (just barely) I jumped at the chance to see it; he asked if we could come over right then.
Having looked at dozens of hovels with Troy, I walked through and looked around, and I knew. It’s like with men: you kiss a ton of frogs and you frigging know when it’s your husband. And this place was home.
I walked the hallway, seeing what would be Violet’s room, and another little room adjacent that could be baby number two’s room one day down the road. Everything was just perfect.
“Done,” I said, resolutely. “This is it. This is home.”
But naturally, it wasn’t that easy. In New York City, the land of co-op apartments, you don’t just plonk down the dough and get handed the key. No, no, no, in the land of vertical neighbors, where stacked upon each other are twelve New Yorkers with twelve opinions, we would have to go through the infamous co-op board.
Now, on top of Violet’s schools, we also had to prep for our board package—a hundred-page application slash tome demanding all our IRS records, forms up
the wazoo, and letters of recommendation—not just financial ones from Josh’s boss and our accountants, but also social references to prove we were of good standing in the community, with friends in high places (i.e., other nice co-ops nearby).
It was a very tricky building to get into—very private with a lot of “nice” families, including a local NBC newscaster and a star trial lawyer. It wasn’t some blingy fancy address, just a quiet tree-lined street, a true “preppy” building, complete with worn-in leather chairs in the lobby and old doormen who’d worked there for forty years.
The next day, after Violet and Josh came back to the apartment to see it and we formally gave our offer, we sat down with Troy at Payard nearby and made a list of who we could approach for our letters. The financial part was easy; Josh had a great pal who was a mortgage broker so that element was a slam dunk, as were his social letters from Parker Elliott and his other old pal, Milton McDermott.
“What about you, Hannah?” Troy said. “We need to have some social references written by your friends.”
I looked at Josh nervously, not quite knowing how to tell Troy I didn’t have any in the city yet. Leigh lived in a rental downtown, hardly a glossy reference for these kinds of people. Bee, who wasn’t even my friend, wasn’t eligible because her husband was writing for Josh. “Maybe I could ask…my friend Tate Hayes. He’s a professor at Columbia, and taught me at Berkeley.”
“Okay, that will do,” Troy said. “Perfect. What about any other friends? You’ll need another, maybe a female friend?”
Shit. Zilch. I thought for a minute and guessed maybe Maggie Sinclair would write for me? All these girls knew the drill, maybe she could bluff a little and say she’d known me since Bee’s wedding? Ugh. “I think I can ask someone else, Maggie Sinclair?”
“Oh, yes, I know Maggie, she’d be perfect, just perfect.”
Great. Now all I needed to do was ask her.
AND GOOD NEWS TRAVELS…INSTANTLY
Instant Message from: BeeElliott
BeeElliott: I heard the Allens are bidding on a place.
Maggs10021: Really? That’s great!
BeeElliott: Dunno, I heard it’s—gasp—east of Third.
Maggs10021: So?
BeeElliott: Kind of a B building but whatev. Hey, did you hear about Tessa’s kid?
Maggs10021: No, what?
BeeElliott: Supposedly did badly on ERBs—Lara told me he has Homework Resistance.
Maggs10021: What’s that? He doesn’t wanna do homework?
BeeElliott: School therapist says it’s a big problem; Hallie says he’ll get rejected everywhere—sucks.
Maggs10021: Gotta sign—am feling v. tired today, baby’s kicking like crazy + have been up all night…
BeeElliott: ’K, bye!
Thirty-eight
Crazed with the newly added burden of our board package, I got Amber to play with Violet while I ran a bunch of errands (pick up tax returns, wait at Kinko’s, yawnsville). When I was done I found myself on Ninety-sixth Street and began walking up Fifth Avenue to the north of the park in Harlem. Somehow my feet walked me to the Columbia campus. The buildings were so beautiful, and I thought of Barbara Hershey in Hannah and Her Sisters making her way across the quad with a bag full of books. While Tate’s classes always excited me, I honestly loathed most of my classes, especially the piles of specific requirements, namely science, which I filled with guts like Rocks for Jocks and Nuts and Sluts. Beyond the classes in my major, which I loved, the rest just made me want to snag the sheepskin and bail, but as I walked around I suddenly found myself missing campus life terribly—not necessarily being a student cramming for a test, just being immersed in that environment. I missed the throngs of young people. I missed community. I missed belonging.
I asked a bearded crunchy dude where the art history building was, and headed where he directed me. It was different from my school—more East Coast, glam and grand, with a museumesque photo study of the images the students had to memorize for identification in exams. I peeked in a few windows—one had a lecturer with a big pointer explaining Etruscan vases, the next room a gray-haired woman discussing a flowery French Rococo painting, the next was a seminar with violent 1980s art on the screen.
And then I saw Tate through his lecture hall window. He was waving his hands while explicating the image in front of the class, a Dutch landscape. I quietly opened the door and darted into a spare seat in the back of the crowded auditorium.
“Here we have the dusty, muted topography of a plain, almost grisaille road with a simple figure walking. But look at the sky. It is alive with vigor and forcefulness; the figure is devoid of emotion, but consider this tree. It’s anthropomorphized, twisting as if agonized, screaming out of its anchoring roots.”
Forget crack: nostalgia is a true drug. Over the past months I had been dipping into the vats of memories on purpose, because they were a safe place. It was weird: before I met Josh, when I was between relationships and wallowing in loneliness, I always mentally wandered back to Tate Hayes. I used to imagine what it would be like to fully make out with him. What would have happened if he hadn’t put the brakes on our kiss? But all those reveries always took place in the past, like I was mourning something that never happened to my twenty-one-year-old self. It was like a sex dream I had once starring the actor Jim Caviezel from The Count of Monte Cristo. In my visions of him ripping my clothes off, it wasn’t about my bumping into him buying Tylenol at Duane Reade and bringing him back to my apartment. It was me in the lavish ballgown the actress opposite him wore. The fantasy existed on a plane that could never occur: we were running through the foggy moors, and he laid me down in the grass, unlacing my ribboned bodice. I wasn’t cutting and pasting him, my fantasy, into my reality, I was cutting and pasting myself into his costumed realm. And that was the scope of my scenarios.
In the single days of my mid-twenties, my thoughts of Professor Hayes involved a schoolgirl version of myself, back in time, if he hadn’t stopped kissing me that rainy afternoon. The dream was that we were lovers and traveled together and he would show me the whole world. I would be his coltish, adoring pupil who made him feel young and reborn.
“Next slide, please. Oh. This…this is a favorite.” He looked at the image as if it were an old flame that he’d bumped into in the grocery store. He had that nervous excitement of seeing something so familiar that he knew intimately but had not laid eyes on for a long time. He sounded almost turned on as he spoke. He offered the class the historical background of Vermeer’s Delft, what it had been like when the artist raised his brush to make the pearls in the picture.
“In this work by Vermeer we can feel the delicate quiet of this room as the maiden weighs the pearls in the balance. The rigidity of the moral codes reflected the essential anxiety of a culture that cherished virtue and shunned vanities, yet was swimming in spices and silks. Weighing upon every head was this burden of privilege and the quest for equilibrium in the face of a harsh dichotomy of luxuriant pleasures versus a determined lack of absorption in material things.”
I was amused to think that though centuries separated us, the Dutch and I seemed to have a bit in common, as I was also thrust into this world of material things and trying to swim upstream to groundedness. Only the terrain was chockablock with Bugaboos, not overvalued tulips.
As he continued, I became lost in his swirling words, which washed over me in the colored light of the slide. Suddenly the class was done and the bright overheads came on. While Hayes was giving instructions for finals the following week, the students were hurriedly loading their notebooks into bags and darting off in a whirl of zipping knapsacks and shuffling sneakers. I sat quietly and watched him as he gathered his notes and ran his hand through his hair. The projectionist came out from the booth, carrying the carousel of slides.
“Professor Hayes—Tate,” I called, as the last straggling lass slung her Jansport over her shoulder to leave.
“Hannah, what a lovely surprise! What are you doing
here?”
“I have a favor to ask.”
“Anything you need. Shall we go sit down and get a coffee?”
Ten minutes later we were seated in an old coffee bar with dark booths and little café tables. He was stirring his espresso as I returned with my giant frothy drink.
“What’s that?” he asked, eyeballing the enormous mug that I proceeded to douse with so much sugar it was as if the cup was on fire and the sugar dispenser was a hose. I was a total seven-year-old with my sweet vat next to his tiny cup of bitter, grown-up espresso.
“It’s a mochaccino. Grandisssssimo.”
“I suspected you’d get something foamy and fancy,” he said. “I suppose now it’s obvious—the chocolate is very you. I seem to recall scores of small foil balls amassed on my desk as you made you way through my Hershey Kiss bowl.”
Fucking great memory.
“Well, I hear there’s an enzyme in chocolate that is clinically proven to make you happier,” I said. “Nothing I didn’t already know, naturally. From my extensive research.”
“So, my dear, what big wish can I grant?”
“Ugh, this is so crazy, but we’re actually buying—well, trying to buy an apartment, and we need these, like, social recommendations—”
“Done. I do this all the time, no problem.”
Yayyyy. I was so thrilled. “Really?”
“Of course, everyone has to deal with that. I know the drill. I can get it to you by next week? Why don’t you pop by Friday after my office hours and I’ll have it ready for you.”
“Perfect, thanks so much. You are a total godsend.”
Thirty-nine