by Susan Isaacs
“Aunt Linda, you know it’s not that easy.”
“You only think that because you think too much. There are thousands of guys who’d jump at the chance to marry you! Just go eeny-meeny-miney-mo with the best ones and pick somebody.”
“You know, I never thought of marriage that way.”
“It works, lovie. All over the world, what do you see?”
“Women without money or power dependent on men.”
“No, Amy. You see arranged marriages. And you know what? When the husband dies, the wife cries.”
Despite two mugs of Aunt Linda’s killer coffee, I fell asleep the moment she left. I woke up a couple of hours later feeling so drugged that for a minute I had no idea what time it was or why breathing hurt. Recalling offered no particular consolation, so I trudged back to the computer. I had a vague notion I needed to dig deeper into the degree of John Kerry’s commitment to marine ecosystems, but instead I watched my screen saver, a bunch of baby robins breaking out of their blue eggs.
God knows how many times I watched them. The room was dark except for the light of the screen, so until the phone rang that nest was all that existed. “Amy Lincoln?”
It was who I thought it was. “Dr. Shea D’Alessandro. How are you feeling?”
“Not too bad.” My keyboard was almost noiseless, so I went online and started checking out old Kerry marine ecology stories in the Boston Globe.
“Not too bad considering three broken ribs.” He chuckled. “I’d like to see you in the office early next week, check how you’re doing.”
“Okay. I’ll call Monday and make an appointment.” I book-marked two articles, then moved on to the Cape Cod Times.
“By the way, I looked through a couple of old issues of In Depth. You’re a political writer.”
“Right.” A piece written in 2000 began Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., has become the point man in championing a fishery management program that some compare to the fencing-off of the prairies and others hope will help end overfishing. “Forgive me if I sound drugged, but I am.”
“That’s okay. If the pain eases, two or three ibuprofen should do the trick. That’s like Advil, Motrin. But I guess you know what ibuprofen is.”
I went back to Google and typed Véronique Hochberg. “Yes.” I always hated it when guys didn’t say anything—whether out of shyness or arrogance—and I wound up struggling to make conversation. Still, I added: “But you’re right to be specific.”
“Did you major in journalism at college?”
“No.” I pressed Enter. “I got a master’s in it at Columbia.”
“Where did you do your undergraduate work?” he asked.
There it was. I double-clicked. A squib in Newsday: Group to Restore Theater. A group of Shorehaven residents ... former home of the Bard’s Company ... for years a movie house ... Bring Back the Bard is headed by Janice Asher. Its members include Barbara Kiprik, Ken Warner, Véronique Hochberg. “I’m sorry. I didn’t hear what you said, Dr. D’Alessandro.”
“Please, call me Shea. I asked where you went to college.”
“Harvard.”
“Oh. Now I’m doubly impressed.”
There was a tiny photo with the article, the Bring Back the Bard committee. She was on the left. I copied the photo, then pasted and enlarged it. “Oh, sorry, Shea. My call waiting. Thanks so much for checking up on me. I’ll see you early next week.” If he said good-bye as I hung up, I didn’t hear it.
It was the second picture I’d ever seen of my mother, the first without sunglasses. She was the shortest person in the group. She must have had long hair, because it was pinned on top of her head, although the photo was so indistinct it could have been a large sponge. She was wearing a tank top, a long skirt, and had on a bunch of necklaces. She looked casual and chic and so petite that the rest of the group looked like Goliaths. Smiling Goliaths. Everyone in the photo was smiling. Except for my mother.
Chapter Ten
I GOT TO my office by seven Monday morning, because I guessed—correctly—that my eleven-thirty appointment with Dr. D’Alessandro would be no ten-second poke ribs/You’re coming along nicely. Sure enough, I had almost an hour to check out the waiting room.
Right away I spotted a copy of In Depth there, along with a slew of high-end magazines. By merely hanging around to see one of the doctors at Park Avenue Orthopedic Associates, the average upper-middle-class New Yorker could gain such advantageous knowledge as why the director Aki Kaurismäki should have won the Palme d’Or for The Man Without a Past and in what sort of a mold to bake game pâtés.
From the look of the waiting room, Shea D’A and his partners were devotees of the Bauhaus aesthetic. Or perhaps they’d simply given a blank check to a decorator and said, We want a guy office. The waiting space was a long rectangle with six black Mies van der Rohe–style chrome-and-leather chairs. There was also a square-armed couch, dark red, that looked displeased with its color. The rug, with its quadrilateral shapes, was also red and black. The space was cold, bringing to mind more “Nazi” than “Stendhal.”
In Depth and the other magazines hung from the rungs of a narrow chrome ladder on a wall to the left of the receptionists’ desk. With only a little shelf of mints, gum, and a couple of bags of stale nuts, they could have had a concession. The receptionists, three of them, were white-, black-, and brown-skinned, but all had black hair to coordinate with the decor.
I skimmed Architectural Digest for a couple of minutes and spotted a cappuccino maker that probably cost more than my net worth. Reluctantly, I put the magazine aside and spent the time reading the pile of material for my next article: where the candidates stood on environmental issues. I had to get beyond the customary Democratic stance: We’ll-fight-polluters-and-all-those-who-don’t-give-a-damn-about-the-Chittenango-ovate-amber-snail. I highlighted quotes and votes until a technician took me in for more X-rays.
When I was finally led back to the waiting room, I tried to get back to work. But my mother kept intruding. Same old story, latest revision of the one I’d been telling myself since I was a kid. In this most recent version, she was age seventeen, telling her ten-month-old daughter, See you later, sweets, knowing, even at that moment, there would be no “later,” that she wasn’t coming back. She probably didn’t wait for the elevator—just ran down the stairs. Out!
I let myself experience her relief. Freedom! It was like being illuminated from within. Thank God, no more terror-filled nights listening for the scratchings of rats’ feet. No more worrying about what will happen when Chicky gets out of prison. He could kill me. Or worse, want me back. Freedom! No more wiping dribbles and shit off a still-bald baby. No more listening to dribbles and shit spewing forth from an imbecile mother-in-law whose IQ is half of mine.
The story then skipped ahead, a few days, a few weeks. Phyllis was suddenly feeling low, realizing she was aching for the velvet of her baby’s cheek. How can I get her back? Sneak into the project at three in the morning, past sleeping cops in a squad car, open stupid Lil’s door with my key and snatch Amy? Except what if I’m caught, charged with abandonment or something, thrown into jail? Calm down. Think. All right, I could get a lawyer, get him to do something for me, so I could keep her. Except a lawyer: His eyes would be filled with contempt for me. Abandoned her baby. Spoiled Brooklyn bitch. Maybe, being a lawyer, he’d even figure out that I should be the one in prison for snatching that diamond ring, not Chicky. He’d report it to the DA. But I want Amy back.
The conflict in the Phyllis/Véronique story was always the same, her desire versus her dread. But there could be—was—only one way to finish the story, the true one. Dread always triumphed. The End. I lowered my head, closed my eyes.
When I opened them, I saw the stack of papers in my lap. For the five thousandth time in my career I wished that instead of being a writer at In Depth, I could be something else, something with emotion: an orthopedist (Scalpel! Saw!), a pollster (Up four percentage points in Delaware!), a soccer coach, the requis
ite short girl in the chorus line of a Broadway musical, tip-tapping and singing her little heart out.
Another fifteen minutes went by until one of the black-haired, white-bloused receptionists at the desk ushered me into Shea D’A’s office. More black leather. In back of him, a black-and-white Ansel Adams poster of a desolate tree. The doctor sat behind a sleek black desk with curved sides, twirling a pen between his thumbs and forefingers. He gave me a blue-eyed glance, then looked off to the side, to a light box displaying two X-rays of ribs, presumably mine.
“They’re what I expected,” he said to the X-rays.
“Any restrictions on activity?” I inquired.
He turned back. Under yet another double-breasted jacket, he wore a blue shirt one shade darker than the hue of his eyes. Blue eyes had never done it for me. Growing up on the Lower East, I’d known mostly dark-eyed people. While I understood how some women could find light eyes appealing, I could never be drawn to a man from a culture that valued reticence and sweaters with snowflakes.
“Long walks are fine,” he told me. “No weight training. No—”
“I run three to four miles a day.”
“How does it feel now when you walk?”
“Now? It hurts a little.”
“Wellll,” he said, too patiently for my taste, “don’t you think the jarring of running would make it hurt more than just a little?” I’d always made it a point not to respond in any way to condescending rhetorical questions. “Walk your route for the next six weeks. But build up to it slowly.” He was still twirling his pen, either a nervous habit or a display of some trendoid writing instrument that made a Mont Blanc look like a Bic.
“What about travel?” I asked. “Flying?”
“Following the candidates?”
“I have to get down to Florida.”
“Same as the running. Well, I’ll let you decide: four to six weeks. If there’s a problem with air pressure on a plane ...”
I’d implode or explode. My ribs would crack into shards and stab me in the pericardium. But I said, “I fly all the time. I’ve never been in a situation where there’s been a problem with air pressure.”
“Amy Lincoln, you are a very determined woman.” He did that nodding-smiling thing, a display of amused tolerance that works in George Clooney movies but not in life. He glanced at his watch. “I’ve got to grab lunch. I’m in surgery all afternoon.” I realized his last sentence was, according to tradition, music to female Jewish ears, but for me it might as well have been Mahler. “Interested in grabbing a quick bite?” he asked.
A quick bite? Imagine a chorus of every woman in New York, from Tatty to Aunt Linda to Senator Clinton. They’d have sung out in a single voice: What have you got to lose? It’s a half hour and a tuna sandwich.
So I was on the verge of saying Sure when suddenly John popped into my head. Not the notion of John. Not a vision of John at lunch, halfway through an overketchuped burger, but John as I’d seen him that night at the concert, smiling and gazing with such pleasure at La Belleza. It should have been all the incentive I needed to say yes to Shea D’A. Instead I mumbled, “Sorry, I’ve got a deadline,” and I was back at my desk before my next coherent thought. Of course that thought was of John.
I left the office around seven feeling as low as I could go. I was one of those season/weather/mood people: summer good, winter bad. Yet even though we’d just gone over to daylight savings time and the sun was doing its damnedest to brighten the cold dusk, all I could see was the coming dark.
I considered calling Tatty for a bracing You’ll meet someone and be happy in no time pep talk. For her, all a person had to do to get rid of the miseries was snap out of it. Psycho plus pharmacology equaled a word that was hard to spell and a waste of time.
For serious blues, her prescription was lightening your hair a couple of shades and getting a deluxe manicure. Since I was okay with my hair and could not afford to have my nails done in one of those pricey places that employed breasty women named Svetlana, I stopped in at my usual, Jane Nails, around the halfway point of my nightly walk home.
The owner, Jane, greeted me with her usual “Amy!” Genuinely happy to see me, though appropriately short of ecstatic. Other than my teachers, the only other person in my life who had visibly brightened upon seeing me was John. Even when I was beginning to sense Uh-oh, maybe this relationship isn’t going to be the one and it’s not only me thinking it, I’d return to a restaurant table from the ladies’ room anticipating the polite hoisting of cheek muscles that creates the dating smile. Instead, he’d light up. Hey! he’d say, with a genuine smile. Then he’d lean forward a bit, the vestigial remains of the old etiquette: a gentleman standing when a lady approaches a table.
Jane said, “Five minutes,” while holding up five fingers. I sat in a plasticized version of a leather tycoon chair, set down my backpack, and pulled out my cell phone. I also dry-swallowed a Percocet because my ribs were hurting so much I was actually contemplating spending money on a taxi to get home.
I cradled the phone in my left hand and did that staring-at-keypad thing, trying to decide whom to call. I’d noticed that people like me, who lived alone, tended to fondle cell phones in those tough moments when it hit them that not only did they live alone, they were alone. Any human voice would do at such a moment—a friend, a relative, a Time Warner Cable rep.
Well, I needed a less-than-five-minutes person, so I decided on Freddy Carrasco. The last I’d spoken to him, I’d broken my ribs. Why had he called that night? Oh, about his meeting with Mickey Maller, the lawyer I’d set him up with. He’d been planning to spend the weekend with his girlfriend going through his mother’s papers, looking for something that might tie her to Thom Bowles or to Bowles’s father, William Bryson Bowles.
Freddy’s “Hello” sounded upbeat. Had he actually found out something that linked his mother to either of the Bowleses?
“Hi. It’s Amy Lincoln.” No response. “Freddy?”
“Yeah. Hi.”
“How are things going?”
“Not bad.”
“Did you and your girlfriend find anything about—”
“Listen, can I call you later this week? I have a class tonight and I’m already late for it.”
“Sure. I’ll speak to you—” But that was the end of the conversation.
Had Freddy been in that much of a rush to get to class? I didn’t think so. In fact, I was thinking he couldn’t wait to get off the phone with me.
It was still cold enough for my nails to dry to diamondlike hardness by the time I got home. Ergo, I was unable to avoid opening my mailbox. I extracted a few envelopes that looked like actual mail along with catalogues offering such life-enhancing objects as an American flag copper weather vane.
Actual mail was a MasterCard bill, two invitations, and a pink-and-white gingham cutout of a butterfly announcing the birth of Zoë Hannah Duckworth Levine. It took me a few seconds, until I got to the elevator, but then I remembered Zoë’s father was an astronomy major I’d gone out with briefly in college, a man with as many flakes of dandruff on his shirts as there were stars in the sky. All I could now envision of him were white specks on green flannel.
In the elevator, whose fine brass buttons had been replaced with a fingerprint-streaked digital pad, I opened a brunch invitation from Bunny Morales and David Vale. They’d both lived in my building in the project and Bunny and I had kept in touch. When I got to my floor, I opened the second invitation. It was from a Democratic pollster and a Chicago Tribune reporter I’d met at the conventions in 1996 and 2000 and spent-tops—twenty minutes each talking to them about subjects non-Democratic. I had no clue they knew each other, much less loved each other. I also drew a blank as to why they wanted me at their nuptials in Sonoma Valley, at Gray Acres, which sounded like a graveyard but was probably a winery. Since I’d no doubt see them again in 2004, I had to send a gift.
I let myself into my apartment and took out two slices of pizza from the back of the fr
idge, then threw them out, uncertain whether the randomly placed convex white circles were icy pepperoni slices or fungal growths.
Each birth announcement, whether a mini–Sports Illustrated cover spotlighting seven-pound, eight-ounce Max beside an actual football, or something pink and cherubic on vellum regarding the arrival of eight-pound, fourteen-ounce Jordana, was a reminder that the father of the child I was determined to have was most likely going to be an anonymous sperm donor-some medical student whacking off for a hundred bucks to thoughts of getting blown by Reese Witherspoon. Every wedding invitation made me feel as if eligible men were evanescing at an exponential rate instead of a merely arithmetical one.
I wound up drinking a glass of milk and eating a bagful of sugared almonds I’d gotten at a friend’s wedding a half year earlier. An excellent custom, Italian. I’d been invited with a date, and naturally asked John. When the band leader called on all the single girls to catch the bouquet, I held back. “You’re not going to join them?” John asked casually. I looked over at the gaggle of squealing, giggling women, muscles taut, ready to leap, as if in the final game of an Olympic volleyball match. Not wanting him to think of me as one of those shameless, desperate gigglers, I’d merely shaken my head and stood my ground, which was beside him.
I heard a sharp crack: an almond and not a tooth. But it was one of those instants when not only do you become hyper-aware—suddenly tuned in to every atom of nut and grain of sugar sticking to your gums—but also farsighted. You not only look at that particular moment with especial clarity, you observe your life. Okay, maybe there was no actual panorama, Desertion by Mother leading directly to Me on the Couch with Three Remaining Almonds and a Quarter-glass of Milk. But I found myself re-viewing that wedding to which I’d taken John.
Maybe my refusal to join the gleeful female New York twenty-somethings elbowing one another aside to catch that bouquet of peach and white roses hadn’t demonstrated to John how cool I was, how not-desperate. “You’re not going to join them?” he’d asked. Instead of a casual inquiry, might he have meant Are you going to be one of those women, ready to declare herself for marriage? When I stood my ground in my pale blue silk slip dress, my hair held up by two silvery combs, thinking how cool I seemed, did John see a woman who was interested neither in marriage nor in him?