But the next morning, she woke up tired. Cold weather had returned, and overnight a sheet-metal gray had dropped over the city. Lydia got up, made herself a cup of coffee, and reread her note to Norm several times. It seemed too serious, too flirty, too strained, too playful, a little desperate, and somehow just wrong. She tried recasting the note entirely but only made it worse. She felt embarrassed by last night's fantasies. So, for the rest of the day, and through the next, she told herself to forget about Norm.
Thursday she awoke to the fourth straight morning of gray weather and made up her mind to deal with the task she'd been looking forward to least: calling the Spiveys.
"Bonjour," answered a woman in a throaty voice.
"Is it too early?" Lydia glanced at the clock: eight-thirty.
"Depends on who you are, my darling. If you're wondering whether I'm happy with my long distance, yes it is too early."
"This is not the phone company."
"Good. On the other hand, my long-distance bills are about to go up."
"This is Lydia Modine."
Just then, another voice came on the line. "Hello." It was a soft-spoken man.
"You're five minutes late, Casper. Pardon my husband. He's stuck in a lower gear."
"Goodbye." The phone clicked as the man hung up.
"Now what did you say your name was, again?"
"Lydia Modine. I'm Cy's ex-wife."
"I see." Ellen's mother seemed at a loss for words, which Lydia guessed did not happen often.
"Cy told me to call you."
"He did?"
"I'm sorry. I thought you knew."
"No, this is the first I've heard of it. What did he want you to call me about?"
"That's a fine question," Lydia said. "This is awkward. I honestly thought he had told you."
"It seems that my daughter and your ex-husband have made surprises a hallmark of their new marriage. Did it come as a surprise to you, too, that they were moving to Arizona?"
"As a matter of fact, yes."
"So this is very much in keeping with their style. It's nice of us to accommodate them, don't you think?"
Actually, Lydia was thinking that she'd like the Arizona earth to open its dry mouth and swallow the city of Phoenix.
"I have an idea," the woman continued. "Let's meet for lunch today. My name is Marie Jeanette, but please call me M.J. My husband is Casper. You can call him what you'd like."
Lydia had not expected to meet so soon, if at all. She had only been following up on a promise. "I'm not sure. I've only just—"
"Come on, it'll be good to talk."
"Well—" Lydia hesitated.
"Where do you go for lunch?"
"I don't usually."
"How about a for-instance? Where was your last lunch out?"
Lydia thought of Arby's and could almost feel the bile rise in her stomach. "The café at the DIA. I work nearby."
"Casper, pickup the phone," M.J. yelled. "Casper!"
After a moment Ellen's father was on the line again. "Hello," he said. "Make up your mind. Do you want me or not?"
"Better leave that one alone," M.J. said. "We're going to the DIA for lunch. Now be a good boy and dig up the exhibition schedule."
"Right away." Casper fumbled the phone.
M.J. continued. "We're lifetime members. We have three permanent tickets to special exhibitions. Me, Casper, and Ellen. We were about to buy a fourth for Cy, but I guess that's no longer necessary."
"Probably not." Lydia tried to sound as if she didn't care.
"Remind us and we'll lend you two of our tickets. Maybe you can take a friend. Are you seeing someone?"
This conversation was growing more personal by the minute. "Me?" Lydia said. "No, I don't think so."
Casper got back on the line. "So here's what's showing: it's called 'Abelardo Morell and Camera Eye.'"
"Yes, tell us about it, dear."
"It says here, 'Abelardo Morell explores the basic principles of photography and human vision.'" Casper read slowly. '"His subjects are familiar—ordinary domestic objects and interiors, illustrated books and maps, children's toys—yet his photographs reveal the extraordinary found in the commonplace.'"
"Well there we have it," M.J. said. "How does that sound, Lydia?"
"Okay, I guess." Actually, it seemed pretty interesting. "Lunch would be fine."
"How's noon?"
"Shall I pick you up?"
"How about we get you?" M.J. asked.
And because Lydia was not about to be her ex-husband's new in-laws' keeper, she said, "Sure." She gave M.J. directions to Franklin Street, adding with a certain pride in her voice, "My house is the only one on the block with a front porch."
"Au revoir," M.J. said and hung up.
Oddly enough, Lydia found that her spirits had lifted. She signed on to her e-mail account and sent her reply to Norm.
The Spiveys arrived in a long black Town Car, promptly at noon, and Lydia climbed into the squeaky back seat.
"Is that the zoo over there?" Casper nodded in its direction.
"Your old home, dear," M.J. said before Lydia could reply. "My husband is a fugitive—broke out of his cage."
Casper looked over his shoulder. "Hardly a fugitive. I live with the zookeeper."
"A left turn will do now." M.J. made a motion like steering, as if by doing this she could keep the car steady. Casper turned left, then followed his wife's direction—she seemed compelled to narrate the drive—turning right at Lincoln, then right again onto Woodward and down from there, somewhat precariously, to the DIA.
It turned out, though, that Casper had read the exhibition dates wrong. The Abelardo Morell photographs would not be shown for another month. When M.J. scolded him, he said, "You should have looked it up yourself."
"I'm not your seeing-eye wife. Can't you tell May from June?"
"You pressured me. I don't do well under pressure."
"Oh, for God's sake. I ask so little."
Lydia quickly said, "It doesn't matter. I love the permanent collection."
And so they spent more than an hour wandering the cool halls of the museum. M.J. took Lydia to her favorite places: the sixteenth-century chapel from Chateau de Lannoy, with its flamelike window tracery; the French Impressionist room with Seurat's View of Le Crotoy, Upstream, and to the Thomas Germain silver collection, once the table settings for eighteenth-century French royalty.
"What period do you like?" M.J. asked Lydia, and she told them about the Detroit Industry Frescoes, how the Rivera room had become her sanctuary.
"I haven't been there in a while," Casper said. "All I remember are these great machines and a lot of gray, yellow, and blue."
When they entered the room, Casper squinted up close to the main mural and walked from factory worker to factory worker, as if he were the foreman scrutinizing their productivity. He stepped back and faced the north wall. "So what's going on here? Describe it to me," he said.
Lydia thought of her father, who had been so proud of these murals because Ford had commissioned them around the time he had been working there.
"Yes, Lydia, tell us what we're looking at," M.J. said. "We understand you're the resident authority."
Lydia did not wish to say anything critical about cars, just as she had kept quiet when her father brought her here. Diego Rivera was a Marxist, so of course he had been fascinated by machines, seeing technology as a way of freeing the working class from exhausting menial labor. It was the most unlikely partnership: Edsel Ford, the son of the twentieth century's great industrialist, calling upon a Communist to render the assembly line.
As Lydia described the harmony between worker and machine, she couldn't help being amazed all over again by the frescoes. As often as she came here, the power of this room's idealism never diminished for her. Where else could the world's conflicting ideologies come together to make something beautiful? Where else could a believer in the commune, like herself, stand next to a Ford pensioner, like Casper Sp
ivey, and be equally moved? Here was Detroit as it might once have been—Ford Rouge, 1932—but also Detroit as it could become again. Like the Renaissance art that inspired the frescoes, like the renaissance that Detroit was forever promising, this was a celebration of both the past and the future.
"It's really something how those images have come back to me," Casper said.
Above and set away from the main walls were the smaller panels, the green-hued warning signs: syringes and skeletons, warplanes next to predatory birds, scientists working on a chemical bomb, an embryo suffocating in clouds of poisonous gas. Even Rivera had to concede that as progress created, it also destroyed.
"So—" Casper interrupted her thoughts as they walked out of the room. "Where did your interest in cars begin? The second I get started on the subject, M.J.'s eyes glaze over."
"Like this?" M.J. tilted her head back and demonstrated.
Casper peered closely at her. "That's it," he said.
Lydia explained who her father had worked for. As an only child of one designer, she said, and the granddaughter of another, she'd grown up with gasoline in her blood.
"What was your father's name?" Casper asked.
"Gilbert Warren."
He put his hand on his cheek, and an odd look crossed his face.
"He was at Ford for a while, but probably before you got there," Lydia added. "He worked for Preston Tucker, then he went to GM."
"The name does sound familiar." Casper fiddled with a button on his shirt. "Small world, isn't it?"
They had lunch in the DIA's Gothic courtyard. Casper chose a Salisbury steak, M.J. a fruit cup and a bowl of cottage cheese. Lydia had a salad and a cup of tired-looking minestrone.
"You know why I like you," M.J. said all of a sudden. "You've raised good children. I had a nice time with Jessica. She's a gem."
"So people tell me."
"She gives you a hard time?"
"She's twenty-seven, still finding herself." Lydia opened a package of Italian dressing and drizzled it on her salad.
"There's no end to people finding themselves. The shame of it is, they'll keep searching, and one day they'll look up and what they thought they had, what they took for granted for so long—you, me—we'll be gone." M.J. looked up toward the ceiling for a moment, then down again. "What I'm wondering is, why now? I honestly thought we'd never lose Ellen. Foolish me," she said. "So, why is your daughter angry with you?"
Lydia was taken aback by M.J.'s bluntness. She was still plenty wary to be having such a conversation with these people whom she didn't know. Still, she answered the question. "I think she's just angry, and here I am."
"Angry with her father, I assume."
"She wouldn't admit it, but you're probably right. There's plenty of rage headed Cy's way already. Ivan has that territory well occupied, so I guess Jessica has to look for other battles."
"So it's misdirected?"
"For the most part, yes," Lydia said, though she hadn't considered it in quite this way. "Maybe she wishes that I had taken Cy on."
"What do you mean?"
M.J. had an almost eerie way of putting her at ease, and Lydia wondered how many jobs Cy had gone through since they'd been together. Twelve? Fifteen? More? Bringing up such details with his new mother-in-law hardly seemed fair, though. "I put too much time into my work," Lydia offered instead.
"There's always a reason for not wanting to fight for your marriage." M.J. dug her spoon into the cottage cheese and took a large bite. "I don't mean to pry. I'm trying to figure out why Jessica would be angry with you."
"You and me both," Lydia said and laughed a little.
"Do you want my theory?"
"Sure."
"Be a dear, dear," M.J. said to Casper. "Grab me a cheap white wine and maybe a sandwich. Who am I, pretending to have no appetite?"
Casper stood up and made his way back to the food line, as though accustomed to taking such orders.
"Should I give him a hand?" Lydia asked.
"He sees much better than you'd think." M.J. finished the cottage cheese and scraped the bowl with her spoon. "You and your daughter are too much alike, that would be my guess. Granted, I've known you all of a couple hours, but my intuition has been hailed as legendary from here to Montreal."
"I might have said we were too much alike when Jessica was a girl, but not anymore. I can hardly get in a word without her taking me to task."
"That's because she's patently antagonistic where you're concerned. You could tell her the sky is blue and she'll say red, just to choose a different color. People should always come back to who they were as children. And as a child, like you said, she was mother's helper."
M.J. theorized that people came up against a few crises in life, and those who made it through preserved their true identity. "Everyone comes up against something," she said. "The ones who make it, who find some measure of happiness in the world, don't run away. I worry for my daughter. I don't think she realizes what a major step she's taking."
Lydia wanted to ask, What's the crisis? But she could just as easily guess. Ellen, the only child, had not left gracefully. She had lingered around home for thirty-five years and her parents had grown used to her company—so settled into the habit of having her nearby that this departure must have felt like a desertion. Ellen had waited too long, until her parents could no longer imagine life without her. Lydia's children had left one by one. When Ivan went off to college, two kids remained in the house, which made the separation bearable. When Jessica left, Davy was always around to help out. And by the time her youngest was gone, Lydia had grown to expect that her children would split off in all directions for a while. But they would come back. They had to come back sometime.
Lydia told M.J. about the ersatz Buddhist who rolled into Royal Oak one day and slid open the door to his van. "Just like the sixties," she said. "And she followed him to the coast."
"She's waiting for a test, something to challenge her," M.J. said.
"The divorce has been a test."
"Yes and no. It's a late divorce, so she probably feels awkward raising a fuss about it." M.J. polished off the fruit cup. "She needs a bigger test, I think, something that pits her against her own resistance."
Casper returned with two mini-bottles of wine, plastic cups, and a turkey sandwich.
"I think I will have a glass of wine, after all," Lydia said, and began to get up from the table.
"Here, have mine," Casper offered.
Again M.J. saw through Lydia's motives. "You're right," she said. "We can't have him drink and drive." She poured wine for herself and Lydia. "Just as well. This means more for us."
"So what did I miss?" Casper asked.
"The eternal mystery of mothers and daughters," Lydia said.
"Parents and children should aim for zero friction. It's impossible, of course, but this should be the goal." M.J. bit into her turkey sandwich and continued talking. "In a marriage, on the other hand, friction is essential. Isn't that right, mon cheri?"
"I suppose you'd like me to disagree," Casper said.
"Exactly. We agree to disagree, and therein lies the secret. This turkey sandwich you brought me, for example, is wretched. Processed within an inch of its life. Soggy bread, lettuce from last week's salad bar. Is this the best you can offer? Is this what forty-five years of marriage has come to?"
"You are what you eat," Casper said.
"So tell us, Lydia, about this man you're seeing?" M.J. asked.
"Did I say I was seeing someone?"
"That's one of her old tricks." Casper laughed. "I knew you wouldn't fall for it."
"Well, it does so happen that I've been corresponding with a man through the Internet," Lydia found herself saying. She didn't know whether she was sharing this because the Spiveys had a way of drawing her out or, just as likely, in the hope that the news would reach Cy.
"The Internet? How terribly modern you are," M.J. said. "Tell us about him."
Lydia took them back to fi
ve days ago, when she had seen Norm at the museum, then visited the message board and sent him a note. His response, she said, had in its tone more than a small hint of the possible. She recounted from memory, almost to the word because she had read the note over so many times, the reply letter she had sent earlier that morning.
"It was a little forward, I have to admit," Lydia explained.
"You don't know what forward is," M.J. said. "If you think that's forward, you'll be alone for the rest of your life."
"But I asked him where he lives, what his work is. I pretty much said I was lonely."
"He started it, darling. You gave him far less than you think you did. I think we should write your new friend a spicier note."
"Oh, no—"
"I think it would be a marvelous way to spend an afternoon. We're done here. Casper, why don't you ask the lady at the register where we can use a computer."
"The library has computers," Lydia said, before she could stop herself.
M.J. lowered her head and leveled her eyes at Lydia. "I'm beginning to think you like my idea of sending your boy a note."
"I didn't say that."
M.J. smiled. "Oh, but you did."
12
JESSICA STOOD on the fourth-floor deck of her apartment in Eugene, just back from a long walk with the dog up Hilyard to Alton Baker Park. They'd strolled along the Willamette River through the bright, clear morning. As usual, Bedlam had flown off the path, found the nastiest muck by the riverbank, and dug in with his paws and snout. Now he slumped at her feet languorously cleaning his long fur.
Today was her day off and she wanted to get out of town, leave her tiny apartment, just go somewhere. She lived in one of the most beautiful states in the country, but since Blane had left with the van, she'd been more or less stranded in Eugene. She rode the bus to work, relied on friends to shuttle her around. But nearly all of them, graduate students at the University of Oregon, had gone home for the summer. She wished she had a car, but she couldn't afford one.
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