“We can go over there more often, too,” Jackson said, and they both held still and let the offer pass into polite, uncluttered silence.
He knew full well that she’d never ask him to do that. He’d visited with her once. Her mother had asked him not a single question, had snapped at him when he offered to help in the galley kitchen, then demanded to know why he looked so “perplexed” when he stood and watched, helpless, as she removed casserole dishes from the oven in a flurry.
Lily had known, even as they sat down to lunch, that she would not ask him to visit the apartment again. She knew he thought he was proving his own seriousness, as a man, by dating a girl who’d worked her way through the Ivy League, and that he’d been ever so slightly disappointed by the stability and self-possession of her family. He’d grown up in a perfectly unglamorous family, managing but far from comfortable, and he was the first one to go away to college. And he thought these facts nullified any differences between him and Lily’s family. But her mother saw those differences as fundamental; Lily couldn’t explain this to him. His father was a drunk and his mother was sleepwalking through her own life, and as long as he never called Pennsylvania to ask for money, they saw his decisions as entirely his own. She couldn’t explain to him, or chose not to, that her mother saw him as little more than the sum of his selfish, frivolous choices. Two Ivy League degrees so that he could be broke, writing mostly for the web, not even a “real journalist.” Always dressed like a slob. Always sponging off her hardworking daughter, a girl who—her mother still seemed convinced—had brilliance and clout in her future.
“I need to be back here by Friday night,” Lily said. “I’m sorry.”
“I’m not trying to be a dick. But you are far, far too loyal to these people. It’s getting delusional.”
“There aren’t degrees of loyalty,” she said. “That isn’t what that word means. You are loyal to someone or you aren’t.”
He said nothing.
“I just don’t even think it’s about loyalty right now,” she continued. “We aren’t even there yet. I’m just trying to get them through each successive school day.”
“Okay,” he said. “Well, I would like to see you soon, if only to discuss what’s been happening. I am very concerned that you aren’t taking this seriously.”
“I take care of two eight-year-olds who haven’t slept a full night in two months. I’m taking it seriously.”
“You know what I mean,” he said, and kept talking. She thought ahead to what still remained to be done for the weekend. Isabel had rented a limo, for tomorrow, to take the kids into the city for the weekend. They did not know this yet. Bob was, as far as Lily knew, still asleep on the couch in his study. He’d been in there, this time, for nearly forty-eight hours straight. He’d taken breaks this week only to field incoming calls from his colleagues, other men she could only assume were ignoring their own wives and families, drinking themselves into their own specific bouts of paralytic grief. In the immediate weeks after his return, Lily had been told to ignore the phone, leave it off the hook for hours at a time, but that was no longer a feasible strategy. If Bob wanted to answer it, he was going to answer it. And his infantry wanted to commiserate. They wanted their Silverback.
“I was talking to some of the DealBook guys,” Jackson said. “That one guy just left, you know, to start his own site. You remember my friend Gabe? You met him that time at the Exley. He says it’s going to get uglier. They’re saying that when they really start going through the actual records, from Weiss, your guy is going to look incredibly—”
The phone didn’t beep through right in that moment, though that would have been so much tidier. In reality, Lily had to go on listening to her boyfriend’s halting cadences, the loud chewing of his Vietnamese sandwich in between grievances. It was several minutes before the other phone call gave her a graceful out.
“Someone’s on the other line,” she said, abandoning Jackson for a few moments, without warning.
“They filed for bankruptcy,” he was saying when she clicked back over. “So there’s going to have to be an actual investigation. He can’t just clap his hands and make it go away. And neither can you, Lil.”
She tried to picture Chip Abbott, who was on the other line. The Abbott family kept to themselves; she couldn’t remember the mother’s face, which meant she wasn’t one of the group that was always arrayed around Alexandra Barker, moving with her from room to room like her own personal storm cloud. When had Madison started dating Chip?
“I have to go,” she told Jackson. “There’s a boy on the phone for Madison.”
“You aren’t doing this on purpose, are you?” Jackson said. “Like, you’re not sticking around there thinking that you can use this to your advantage, down the road? Because I could get behind that, honestly. If there was at least a strategy. But you aren’t doing that, are you?”
TWENTY-ONE
What Madison hadn’t told her mother was that she’d already spoken to her father. Had encountered him several times since Halloween, in the kitchen, late at night. Just the two of them, always the unspoken agreement to pretend it was coincidental. He’d talk to her, ramble in long streams about people she’d never met. One night, he’d made them hot toddies and cooked soup. He told her one thing, then another, all these pieces of information stacking up somewhere inside her chest, like dollar bills.
The first time had been just a coincidence, though. She was relatively sure. She’d come inside, after Halloween, after Chip and Zoë and the silent cars down by the gate. Her father had been sitting in the kitchen. Not waiting for her, maybe, but there.
WHEN SHE CAME IN, he kept his elbows down and his chin propped on his hands, moving only his eyebrows. But when he cleared his throat she saw that he was holding the pose with shaky confidence, that he must have seen her on a security screen somewhere—or possibly, she thought with distress, gotten a call from one of the men in the cars down the hill—and known she was coming.
“Hi,” she whispered.
“You’re just getting home?”
“There was a Halloween party.”
“And you’re dressed as . . .”
She held up her angel wings, which had come off after only fifteen minutes at the party, a crumpled handful of white tulle and curved wire.
“Of course. What else would you be?”
“What are you doing up?”
“Oh, I couldn’t sleep. I just came out here—I thought I might have a snack.”
They both looked down at the bare table.
“Did you have dinner with the boys?”
“No, I wasn’t hungry then.”
“Is Mom upstairs?”
“Isabel?” He said this with genuine inquiry in his voice. “Yes, she’s—she’s asleep.”
She looked at his face, the first time she’d been permitted to do so in weeks. The untamed eyebrows and the thick creases that led from his nose down to his mouth, like scores cut in wet clay. The large, jumping tendons that spanned the backs of his hands. He looked like the same man as always, but faded, rubbed with a dirty eraser.
“Would you like something to eat?”
“If you’re hungry,” she said, and he shuffled over to the refrigerator. She sat down, the alcohol hum between her ears amplifying every noise—the sucking sound the fridge made when he tugged at its door, the worn cloth of his old NYU sweatpants rustling against itself.
Her father hunched before the purring refrigerator, the Sub-Zero he loved so much. Often he would pat it as he passed through the kitchen. He took off his glasses and hooked them from each ear, letting them dangle beneath his chin. She was pretty sure this gesture had originally been an artificial one, designed to delight her when she was a toddler, when she’d loved to swipe at them, to put her fingertips to his chin. By now, though, it was a habit. He did it all the time, but she thought about how long it had been, this fall, since she’d seen him do it.
“I don’t really know what we have,” h
e said. “This is not my forte.”
“I know,” she said. “It doesn’t matter. I’ll just have some grapefruit or something. I’m sure we have fruit.”
“That’s a morning meal,” her father said, twisting his neck to see into the corners of shelves as if new food might suddenly appear there. Madison smiled in spite of herself; her father, like Nonna Concetta, always had strict guidelines as to what foods could be eaten at what times of day.
“I’m not even really hungry,” she said.
“Well, I am. Now that we’re talking about it, I’m famished.”
He looked around the room with expectant eagerness, then clapped his hands together.
“I bet I know what we have. Is there bread in that bread box?”
“Is that a serious question?”
He smiled, and she could see his embarrassment. “I don’t know, Mad. I don’t know when in the week Lily does the marketing.”
“Does the marketing? Like, to stock the ‘icebox’ with Wonder Bread and cans of Tab? I don’t know if anyone really ‘does the marketing’ in this day and age, Dad.”
“Don’t insult Tab,” he said, smiling and waving the bread knife in her general direction as he considered the various quarter loaves clustered together in the bread box. “Tab made me the man I am today.”
She was careful to breathe slowly, through her nostrils, so that it wouldn’t sound anything like a sigh.
“We’re on our way here. We’ll just do a Nonna Connie special. Just some oil, some garlic, bread crumbs, red pepper. It’s so easy, you could make it yourself.”
“Thanks for that vote of confidence,” Madison said. “So easy even a moron can master it!”
“It’s hardly your fault, princess. We haven’t taught you anything, have we? That’s my fault. Your mother’s a fantastic cook.”
“She never cooks.”
“I don’t like her having to worry when we’re entertaining.”
“She could cook for us, though.”
“Your mother has cooked for you many times.”
“I can barely even remember five times she’s cooked for me.”
“Come on, Madison. That’s not true.”
“Don’t tell me that,” she said. She could hear her tone sharpen, shimmer. “Don’t tell me what’s happened. I was there.”
Her father stood up stiffly. He’d been searching in a low corner drawer for his favorite skillet, the heavy cast iron.
“Then don’t do that,” he replied. “Don’t pretend you don’t remember our life.”
He crossed back and heaved the pan onto the stove with a clatter. Madison flinched, but there were no sounds from upstairs. Her father drizzled the oil.
“We’d cook for you out on Shelter all the time. All those times your grandparents forced me to go eat stringy chicken paillard at that godforsaken club, you were at home eating something your mother and I had sautéed with love. So don’t sit there telling me otherwise.”
She waited for him to reassure her that he wasn’t really angry, but he just put the pot of water on. Her father could be like that, though. His storms were just like real storms: they’d make themselves known in terrifying flashes, then move on to some other target and leave you cringing in a suddenly peaceful world.
It had always been him, she thought. He had always been the one to cook dinner out on Shelter. Sometimes her mother would come in for the end of his preparations, fastening an earring with one hand, reaching out to stir a pot with the other. Complimenting him on whatever he’d made. But the cooking dinner, together, had never been her mother’s idea.
“Why are you awake?” she asked again. His knife struck the wood-block cutting board.
“I haven’t been sleeping well.” He began to grind salt from a shaker, holding it in the air above the boiling water and letting the grains fall.
“You know that’s bad for the salt,” she admonished, and he made a gun shape with his thumb and forefinger, cocking it in her direction and sucking his teeth for effect.
“Good girl.”
“You’ve been sleeping in your study,” she pushed. “Maybe you can’t sleep because you’ve been on a sofa with the TV blasting all night.”
“I wouldn’t rule it out, Madison. I wouldn’t rule that out at all.”
He turned back to the pasta and she was left with her middling victory.
“Why don’t you tell me about the party,” he said.
“It was boring.”
“I doubt that.”
“Well, it took place in Suzanne Welsh’s ballroom.”
“Say no more. Why’d you go, then?” He looked over, one hand in the pocket of his sweats and the other holding the wooden spoon. “A boy, possibly?”
She said nothing.
“I wonder,” her father said, “if I might be more inclined to keep some things to myself, say the vodka on your breath, if I had a window on what you were thinking.”
“Blackmail?”
“Whatever it takes.”
“He’s no one special.”
“No one is, compared to you.” He smiled. “Everyone’s got something to work with, and that will be yours. You’ll always be holding more cards than the other guy.”
“What was yours? Your thing to work with?”
He peered over the tops of his glasses. “I was cocky. And hungry. Risky combination. You generally want more of one than the other, if you’re really ambitious you want to have that bottomless tolerance for eating shit, you know? You can’t be too high on your horse. So sometimes it took me too long to figure out what was what. When you’re living in Brooklyn with Nonna, you’ve got to keep pushing. There’s a lot you’ve got to push right past.”
“But you didn’t push past Mom.”
She felt it, then. That she was rising to his level, speaking to him the way he spoke to her. Even drunk, she knew it wasn’t parity, but it was still something very, very difficult to do with her father.
“Well that,” he said, “is my good fortune, kiddo. It’s my good luck that she didn’t always feel the way she felt about me that first night. She gave in.”
The garlic and oil were heating up, and they sat for a while in companionable silence.
“Do you think Concetta will ever sell that building?”
“Who knows,” he said. “We aren’t still sitting on that thing for my own lack of trying.” He prodded the garlic with a wooden spoon, setting it to sizzle. “Your grandmother likes any arrangement that gives her the maximum amount of power.”
“Dad,” Madison said. “Come on. Pot, kettle.”
“I didn’t say it was a bad thing. You know Nonna’s story. Her father ran a hardware store and she thought your Pop was a class act just because he had proximity to important people. Two generations later, we’ve got you. So whatever your mother may say about Nonna’s table manners, no one can say the woman isn’t impressive.”
“I wouldn’t want her as my landlord, though.”
“Having been in that exact situation until I was twenty-two, I can tell you that your instincts are correct. You’ve seen the apartment. She likes everything in its place.”
“You like everything in its place,” Madison said, gesturing vaguely out at the house, the pool, the woods.
“That’s your mother,” he said. “I know your mother acts like I forced this house down her throat, but I didn’t. She picked every single fixture. You know I didn’t have a say in anything but my own two rooms, and even for those ones, she’s credited as consigliere.”
Madison smiled.
“Maybe what we need,” she said, “is a wartime consigliere.” Her father laughed.
“Nice,” he said. “Very nice. But no, you know that isn’t what I care about. I only care that everyone knows where they are when they walk in. Which silk for the drapes—I could care less. Jesus, the drapes. I love your mother, but she thinks she’s low maintenance because her indulgences are for her, not for other women. She wants to be high maintenance, trust me
, she can be. I won’t tell you what we spent on the goddamn hardware alone, for the drapes in the den. I’d have to cry.”
“What do you mean, that everyone knows where they are?” Madison said.
“They walk into an event, here, in our home, they know who I am. That’s what I mean.”
“But then you do care how it looks.”
“No,” he said. “I don’t. It’s about other people and what they expect. I could care less.”
“I don’t care what people think of us,” Madison said, not sure if this was what he was talking about, really. “I don’t. Everyone keeps waiting for me to panic about it, or something. It doesn’t bother me.”
Her father paused, because now that she’d said something, they couldn’t just keep watching the pasta.
“Are people talking to you about our situation?”
“No,” she said. “I think they’re afraid, still.”
“So we’ve got that at least. For a bit longer.”
He was folding everything together, tossing the pasta until it was coated with the crumbs and the oil.
“I know we haven’t had much chance to talk, Mad. But I’m going to have to go to Washington again. It sounds as if that means they’re accusing me of something, but they aren’t. But it’s still something that will happen, so I wanted to warn you.”
“Who are you testifying against?”
He laughed, but didn’t answer. “The whole thing is a farce, but it’ll make everyone else feel better. Come on, sit down.”
She ate the pasta so quickly she almost choked on the half-masticated mouthfuls, having briefly forgotten she was drunk. And then her father stood and crossed to an end cabinet, the one close to the mud room where they kept things like birthday candles and an expensive ice cream maker that had never been used and the old standing mixer that had been replaced but still haunted the kitchen. He reached onto a high shelf and brought down a bottle of Laphroaig. Madison’s least favorite—the smoky smell of the peat always made her nauseous when she smelled it on him. He brought a glass over to the table and poured himself three fingers.
Our Little Racket Page 25