“Well, I’m really glad Mickey was around to hear you say that, Shay. We don’t often have witnesses to see or hear the real you. And that was such a you thing you said: ‘Eat shit and die.’ You’ve got a lovely bride here,” I say, turning toward Mickey with a vicious smile.
And that’s when the doorbell rings.
Loud and long.
Standing in a little huddle in the middle of the kitchen floor, we look at each other helplessly. Finally Mickey walks down the hallway. Shay opens her purse and takes out her hair brush. I get a glass of water, although I’d really prefer wine. Mickey returns with Bo and Chuck Connors. Shay is still brushing her hair; she doesn’t stop. I have watched my sister brush her hair while speaking to a Supreme Court justice at a cocktail party, sitting in a synagogue, and eating in a four-star restaurant.
Mickey introduces everyone.
Shay becomes busy as a bartender carding the men. She gives Chuck Connors a once-over-lightly, then turns her attention to Bo. So this is the detective, I can see her thinking. Hmmmm. Interesting. So this is the big black hunk Natalie’s been running around the country with. Not bad. Maybe Miss Goody Two-Shoes isn’t as gooney as she looks. She begins back-brushing her curls.
I watch my sister brushing her hair.
Mickey watches my sister brushing her hair.
Chuck Connors watches my sister brushing her hair.
But Bo is watching me.
He has a complicated smile on his face that I can’t immediately decipher.
“So this is the famous Shay Karavan,” Chuck Connors croons. “It’s a real pleasure to meet you. We were just cruising past and decided we would offer you folks some free delivery service. We can run those papers over to Señor Ocheros for you, Ms. Myers. Looks like you’ve got enough to do around here.”
“Oh, that’d be very convenient,” Shay says with one of her more glamorous smiles.
Instinctively, Shay takes anything that’s offered to anyone in her presence.
No flies on my sister!
I look at Bo, who dons another demismile and shrugs.
“As a matter of fact; I was just leaving to do it myself,” I say in a chilly voice. “I really don’t need any help.”
The three men all back off, alarmed by my show of anger. Shay’s eyes narrow suspiciously as she watches me prepare to leave. Both Chuck Connors and Bo are eager to leave now and they let themselves out through the front. I pick up my purse and walk toward the back door.
“This won’t take me but half an hour,” I say.
“Should I go with you?” Mickey asks.
“No. But I’d appreciate it if you’d bring in my luggage from the trunk.”
“Sure.” He follows me outside. “Everything happened so fast, Nat,” he says as soon as we hit the gravel driveway and he knows the crunch will cotton his words. “She came at me …”
“You sure know how to hurt a girl,” I say in a teasing, old-fashioned tone of voice. But then the lightness I’d wanted to project evaporates. An enormous, raw, ragged-edged hurt rises up within me. “Why’d you do me like that, Mickey?”
“Whaddaya mean?” he mumbles, flushing.
“Was there some reason you wanted to make me feel lower than whaleshit? I mean, did you have to fuck me over like that? Fuck with my head? I mean, how did you think I’d feel, hearing you got engaged just one day after … yesterday?”
“Hey! You’re giving me more credit than I deserve, babe. I didn’t know it was going to happen. How ’bout that? It happened all of a sudden. I didn’t orchestrate it.”
“You orchestrated yesterday afternoon.”
“That wasn’t so hard; you wanted it too.”
I flinch.
He leans up against the door of my car so I can’t escape. After a few seconds the metallic heat must have penetrated his clothing because he suddenly jerks away.
“Hey, we didn’t meet in that bar at the Hilton. We knew we had some unfinished business from out at the beach. You’re a very attractive woman, Nat. More attractive than Shay in lots of ways. So at least we got it over with. At least it didn’t happen after the wedding, right? That’s good. We wanted it and we did it and now it’s over, finished. I wasn’t trying to fuck you over. Believe me.”
“But how do you think I feel now? Tell me that. Or don’t you care at all?”
“I’m sorry,” he says miserably. “I’m sorry. It must feel shitty. I even feel shitty about it. But didn’t Shay sleep with Eli before you married him? All you did was even up the score. Try to look at it that way. We were both a little lonely.”
“I was fine.”
“Fine? You were terrific. You were fabulous.”
“Oh, God.” I begin to laugh. “You really are something. You’re really full of shit.”
“Now why’d you want to go ahead and say something like that?”
“Doesn’t matter.” I shrug. “You’ll get yours.”
A look of uncertainty wings across his face. He knows I’m referring to Shay but he hasn’t got the nerve to ask specifically what I mean. A moment later he takes a deep breath, straightens his shoulders and accepts the challenge of a future life with Shay Karavan.
I get into my car, flip open the trunk and watch him collect my luggage. When he starts carrying it toward the house, I back out of the driveway and pull onto Adams Mill Road.
Shay and I are up in my bedroom folding clothes to put back into the drawers. By the time she and Mickey returned from their celebratory lunch, the bride-to-be was inebriated and ebullient once again. She insisted upon helping me clean my bedroom even though she was “exhausted.”
“Oh, I’m so happy, Nat,” she says in her breathy baby voice, carefully creasing Eli’s boxer shorts. “And I’m so glad you had a chance to get to know Mickey a little this week. Don’t you think he’s great?”
“Really,” I murmur. “He’s really great.”
“And he’s so rich. Nat! I’m going to be the wife of a multimultimultimillionaire! He might even be a demibillionaire for all I know. I’ll be the new Ivana Trump. Of course I’ll have to sign some sort of prenuptial agreement. He says his lawyer will insist on that, but anyway, even if it doesn’t last forever it will be fabulous while it does. I’ll be able to buy Mom and you and Steven a lot of stuff. And I’ll take Amelia to F.A.O. Schwarz and let her go crazy.”
I can almost guess which picture Shay will send to The New York Times—a close-up Dad took of her a few years ago. In it her hair is pulled back very tight, showing off her razor-sharp cheekbones. Her eyes look light and provocative because her face is, as usual, tan, and she is wearing a shirt with the first three buttons open so that a slight swell of bosom is visible in the V below the mandatory premarital pearls.
I could write the story:
SHAY KARAVAN WEDS
Stephanie Ann (Shay) Karavan, 40, a freelance journalist, was married yesterday to Michael A. Teardash, 38, in a private ceremony in East Hampton, L.I. Ms. Karavan, the daughter of Marjorie Karavan and the late Morton Karavan of Minneapolis, married Mr. Teardash, Chairman and Chief Financial Executive Officer of Communications USA Corporation and a Manhattan real estate developer. Ms. Karavan will keep her own name. It was the third marriage for each.
Mr. Teardash is the son of Nathan Teardash, partner in the firm of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton &Garrison, and an overseer of the Harvard Corporation. His mother is Cynthia Paisley, children’s book illustrator of Greenwich, Connecticut, and Kennebunk, Maine. The groom’s stepfather, Dr. Reynolds Paisley, retired as the Chief of Pediatrics at Yale University Hospital last year.
Mr. Teardash is a grandson of the late Edgar Teardash, a member of the New York Stock Exchange and senior partner in the New York brokerage firm of Baker, Weeks & Company, and Amanda Teardash Twomey of Manhattan and Southampton. His maternal grandparents were former Massachusetts Senator William O’Reilly of Boston and Wellfleet and the late Louise O’Reilly Goldman of New York and Hollywood, Florida.
Mr. Teardash
graduated from Swarthmore College, where he was a member of Phi Beta Kappa, Fordham University School of Law and Harvard Business School, where he received an M.B.A. His marriage to Anita Louise Barker, who was presented at the Assembly Ball in Greenville, South Carolina, and is a member of the Junior Leagues of Memphis and Manhattan, ended in divorce, as did his marriage to New York Times Living Section editor Demi Martin, former Editor and Chief of Correspondents at Newsweek magazine.
Ms. Karavan attended the University of Minnesota and did graduate work at the University of California at Berkeley. At the request of the Vietnamese government, she brought back to the United States the ashes of MIA American pilot Warren Carmino. Her marriages to Barney Yellen, 1960s political activist and Washington D.C. attorney, and Christopher Edmonds, former Legal Counsel to the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee and currently a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Institute of the Smithsonian Institution and a 1988 winner of a MacArthur Fellowship, both ended in divorce.
A reception for 1,000 people is scheduled to be held at the Plaza Hotel early in October. Honored guests will be the son of Ms. Karavan, Steven Yellen, 19, a premedieal student at McGill University, his daughter, Amelia Yellen, 3, and the three children of Mr. Teardash: Emily Teardash, 15, by his first wife; Maggie Teardash, 12, and Zachary Teardash, 5, by his second wife. Until then the couple will reside in the seafront home of Mr. Teardash in East Hampton, Long Island.
More wretched excess.
Will Entertainment Tonight have to cover Shay’s reception because of its glitzy guest list? Will news helicopters have to hover overhead taking aerial shots à la Madonna’s wedding? Will People magazine have to use a telephoto lens to get a cover shot of the new fun couple at the East Hampton Writers and Artists’ Labor Day baseball game, which Shay hasn’t missed in six years? Will Baba Wawa have to do a duo interview with the new lovebirds in their fabulous house with its wraparound porch full of white wicker furniture?
Will Mr. and Mrs. Teardash take a honeymoon at some fashionable spa where everything costs 40 percent more than it does ten miles away because getting rooked makes Shay feel rich? Or will my sister, the surf Nazi, the sun-and-fun fanatic, visit some foreign country she views as a duty-free specialty shop: Mexico=silver and turquoise, Spain=leather goods, Morocco=djellabas for loungewear. To Shay, Ireland is a cable-knit fisherman’s sweater outlet, France a huge perfumery. Now the world will really become my sister’s boutique.
“Do you still have the key to Christopher’s place, Shay?” I ask. “I wouldn’t mind having it in case I decide not to sleep here. And it’d be nice to be able to take a swim.”
“Oh, of course, honey,” she purrs.
Shay darts for her purse. She is genuinely thrilled to provide me with a little luxury. Although she’s greedy, she’s not selfish.
“Nat, I’m so glad you returned the papers and everything is going back to normal now. This was a terrible week and I really mean it when I say thank you for doing everything you did. I’m terribly sorry about what happened to the house.” She pauses briefly, to look around regretfully. “Anyway, here’s the plan we worked out at lunch. Mickey and I are flying out to Minneapolis tonight, spending a little time with Mom and then bringing Amelia back to New York. I’m sure I can find someplace to leave her while I work on my article.”
The sleaze factor has just kicked in. My sister is probably going to spend one night with our mother. My sister the scuzz ball is looking to unload Amelia even before she picks her up. My sister the scum bag has absolutely no shame at all.
“Maybe Yvonne’s folks up in Vermont would enjoy having Amelia during the summertime for once, instead of always at Christmas,” she says. “I think I’ll give them a call.”
“They live in New Hampshire, Shay.”
“Oh, right. Anyway,” she sighs, closing Eli’s top drawer and ignoring the rest of the clothing still on the floor, “I’ve got a shitload of stuff to take care of so I think I’ll just sit in the kitchen and make my phone calls. Is that okay?”
“Shay, why did you tell Mom about my abortion?”
She flinches, pales, begins talking too fast:
“Because she couldn’t understand why you never had any kids.”
“There’s a lot of reasons women can’t get pregnant. She didn’t even ask you. You just volunteered it. You just wanted to tell Mom the worst thing you knew about me. Why are you so destructive? You know how rough it’s been for her since Daddy died.”
“Listen, Nat.” Shay is rushing to find a cigarette, a match, a prop. “I know you hold me responsible for what happened at your damn abortion, but that’s just because you’re such a blamer. First you thank me a million times for arranging everything and then, when you find out they’ve botched it, you blame me. Is that fair, Natalie? First I’m the good guy and then I’m the fall guy?”
“I don’t blame you for what happened, Shay. All I want to know is why you had to tell Mom about it. Two decades later.”
“I told you—because she couldn’t figure out why you never had any kids.”
“Shay, you told her because you’re jealous of how close we are. That’s the real reason. You wanted to turn her against me.”
“Okay, I’ll tell you how it happened,” Shay says. “I was talking to Mother on the phone a couple weeks ago about the abortion issue. Not your abortion issue, Nat. The abortion issue. And I just happened to mention some of the medical consequences of illegal abortions. And I guess that’s when the cat slipped out of the bag.”
“You’re sick, Shay. You’re a bad seed.” Bitterness hardens my words like heat caramelizing sugar. Raw rage pumps through my system. “You were always competing with Mom for Dad’s attention. All you ever wanted was to have Dad to yourself. That’s why you kept getting into trouble, so he had to deal with you all the time. And you’re still doing the same damn thing. Making trouble so people will notice you.”
“Oh, stuff it, Natalie.”
“And that’s probably why you can’t maintain any real relationships now, either. Not with your son or your daughter-in-law or me or Mom. Or anyone. Except men. You’d ball anybody just to get them to pay attention to you.”
For one dizzying moment I think of screaming out that I’d slept with Mickey to finally repay her for every wrong she’s done me. But then I realize that she is close to hysteria. I can sense her upset percolating dark and strong and pungent within her.
Turning, she runs toward the stairs.
I lie down on my bed and stare up at the bullet holes in my ceiling.
Although the sheer membrane separating us often clouds my reason, I think some of what I said to Shay sank in this time. In real life it’s often hard to identify watersheds or Waterloos. They come and go too quickly, and most relationships are as absorbent as cat litter when it comes to ruptures. But my sister and I are fast approaching a turning point. This time Shay has gone too far. I cannot let her get away with her current destructiveness much longer. Hopefully, this fight will finally lance our abscessed relationship. Hopefully, it will cauterize the source of our sickness and let some of the infectious poison drain away.
I fall asleep and don’t wake up until Shay walks back into my bedroom.
“So listen,” she says, shaking my shoulder until I open my eyes. “We’re leaving.”
“Oh.”
It’s as if the abortion issue had never come up.
“I’ve called almost everybody in the Western world, so just save your phone bill and I’ll pay you for all my calls. I made our plane reservations and spoke to Mother. She’s going to bring Amelia to the airport to meet us since it’s an hour earlier out there and it won’t be too late. Then I called Steven and we talked for a long time. I mean, I told him I was going to marry Mickey and move to New York and we discussed whether he wanted Amelia to live in Manhattan. Actually, I’ve been thinking I might go visit Yvonne at Hazelden when I’m in Minneapolis. Steven thought that’d be a good idea.”
For a moment I wonder if Amelia
could live with me for a while in some nice clean apartment near Columbia Road. That should please Steven more than having Shay drag her up to New York, where she’d quickly be turned over to hired help. Quietly, I deposit this thought in my mental hope chest.
“Anyway, we’re ready to leave,” Shay says.
I walk downstairs with her. I see the yellow cab in front of the house. Mickey embraces me with a tenderness that almost makes me cry. My sister kisses me with a chilliness that makes me want to die. The cab driver comes inside to carry some of their luggage. After they’re gone I walk around my house, feeling more alone than I’ve ever felt before. Eventually I end up in Eli’s study, where I use his telephone to call the Omni. Eli answers his extension on the first ring.
“Hi,” I say. “I just called to get your flight number so I can pick you up at the airport tonight.”
“Honey, I was just about to call you. It’s weird—I had my hand on the phone. They want me to stay down here one more day to do a big wrap-up. An Atlanta-after-the-convention takeout. You know? Delegate feelings … all that kind of shit.”
I am too tired to manufacture any light response.
“Now don’t start thinking the worst, Nat. This doesn’t mean a thing. It’s just that I’m the only one down here who can do it.”
“Eli, call them back. Tell them there’s a huge story waiting for you in Washington. A great big scoop with your name on it.”
“Whaddya mean?”
“It’s the Fawn Hall interview, Eli. Shay doesn’t want to do it anymore. She’s just going to chuck it. But since I’ve taken all the heat for it, I decided it belongs to us now. I mean, to you. I’ve also learned a lot about the drug scene in D.C. and there’s a huge crack-cocaine-contra connection. It’s a big story, Eli. I mean it. It could win you another Pulitzer.”
“Natalie, we’re right smack in the middle of a presidential election campaign. Nobody’s interested in the drug stories right now. Besides, didn’t you return it last night? Over at that nightclub?”
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