by Sara Gran
Two months after he left Austin still had no concrete plans for a return trip and I was through waiting I was also through with Carolyn, who was now claiming to be a former Miss USA, I was through with the constant pressure of single-handedly running a business—now that the store was up and running, Carolyn spent most of her time at kickboxing class—and I was through with Miami I had been so busy with Austin that I hadn’t made much of a life for myself there without him, and more than anything else on earth I wanted a tall gin and tonic from my favorite bar on Avenue A I gave two weeks notice to Carl, I turned off my phone so I wouldn’t have to hear any more of Austin’s messages, if there were any, I told Carolyn I would keep in touch, which I didn’t, and I bought a one-way ticket back to New York It cost fifty dollars more than a round-trip fare would have, but I knew I wasn’t coming back. My mother had married a nut and I wasn’t about to follow in her footsteps.
I never, at any time, since I first saw that photograph, did not love Austin Ellis.
Austin got my phone number in New York and called me maybe ten times in the next two years He left messages saying how sorry he was, how he had gone back into therapy, he even wrote a few letters, but I was through Once I was home and I answered the phone, not knowing it was him He said my name and I thought I would die.
“Mary? Mary, is that you?”
I hung up the phone.
Evelyn takes a cab home around midnight, tired and happy, and I walk her out to the car She’s pleased, I think, with how the night has gone—she tells me she never expected so many people to show up Inside, the party is still going strong so I return to the big white couch in the living room where Austin and I are drinking ourselves into something strange.
“You know, Austin,” I say, knocking back another gin, “I understand you much better now that I’m twenty-nine myself. Everything in Saturn Return Your sign is, let me think, you were born July sixteenth, that makes you a Cancer. Moody. Wow. No wonder you were so fucked up ”
“What on earth are you talking about?” He’s still got that voice, the everything-is-okay voice
“Astrology. It explains a lot Like why you fucked me over the way you did.”
He has that smile, that almost-smile on his face, and I can’t take it “What are you smiling about?” I ask him
“You remember my birthday,” he says
“I have a good memory Excellent. Anyway, I made your last book a feature of the month Four stars. Sales doubled. So never say I never did anything for you.”
“What exactly do you do now again?”
“Book reviews,” I tell him. “On a computer It’s not so fucking hard to remember.”
“Do you like it?”
“It’s okay I read, I write, I make more money than I’ve ever made before, which is like almost as much as a regular person my age. I get all the promotional shit from the publishers. You want any key chains? Coffee mugs? Bookmarks?”
“No thanks. You know I still miss you I wish I could—”
“You can’t So, when did you move to New York.”
“Just a few weeks ago. I’m still in a hotel now I was thinking about you, I was looking at apartments and I thought about how you helped me pick—”
“You trashed all that stuff. Every last piece Except the Le Creuset, it’s indestructible.”
“I found it when I finally got back. I still have it.”
“Does it have that nice carbon coating on the outside now?”
“Nah. I don’t use it enough Listen,” he says “I’m sorry It was harder than I thought, when my mother died ”
I’m enjoying this, him groveling and me teasing, although a part of me is taking it way too seriously. “Obviously,” I say.
“No, I mean—I didn’t deal with it very well.”
“Again, obvious.”
He puts his head in his hands, and when I see his face again he looks different, serious “I am so sorry. I am so sorry I wish I could—”
“You can’t. You just can’t ”
We spend the night together in his hotel room We’re too drunk and too hesitant to have sex so we kiss a little bit and watch cable television and steal all the amenities, shampoos and chocolates and toothbrushes, and play with the high-tech stereo and high-tech telephone and order eggs Benedict and mimosas and more amenities from room service and watch the sun rise from the terrace, an astoundingly beautiful sight After the sunrise we close the drapes and fall asleep fully dressed in each other’s arms I wake up around nine, just for a second, and he’s watching me with that almost-smile on his face, that JBF look on his face, and everything is fine
Maybe I’m dreaming
Chapter 13
When I wake up it’s noon. It’s pouring outside. Austin is awake and sitting at the little breakfast table staring at the dishes.
“Good morning.”
“Good morning ”
We’re both a little hungover but not incapacitated. We drink coffee and talk quietly about small unimportant things. Books. Weather. Real estate. I give him a few apartment-hunting tips, even though he’s got the money for whatever he wants. He asks if he can see me again.
After three years, vindication I want to throw it back in his face. I want to take the little sliver of his heart he’s offered me and chew it up and spit it out like he did to mine But I want to see him again, too, so I say, “I don’t know.”
“Are you seeing someone?” he asks.
“Yeah, I’ve been seeing someone,” I lie “Not for that long.
A month Two months I thought last night would be a little heavy for him He hasn’t met Evelyn yet.”
“Definitely. If you haven’t been together that long ”
“I thought so.”
“Is it serious?”
“I don’t know yet”
At one o’clock I leave the hotel room We fumble through a half hug and a cheek kiss He says he’ll call me and if I don’t want to talk to him I can hang up on him like I used to I turn toward the elevator and thankfully, through some kind of perfect-exit hoodoo-voodoo there’s an elevator waiting, door open, and I don’t have to turn back I step in and push L-L-L and the doors close and I feel motion and Austin is gone, again
Five o’clock and I’m home and I’m depressed as hell, eating some awful canned chicken soup for dinner I feel like I did something embarrassing last night even though I didn’t, not really. It’s still raining, and the local news is on television. The sound of the theme song, the song I used to hear every afternoon when the babysitters would turn on the evening news, is as familiar as the sound of the rain
Evelyn calls. We make a little small talk about last night We don’t seem to be remembering the same party, but I’m not too concerned We were both drunk, and I spent most of the night, maybe wasted most of the night, with Austin
“Did you see Leila Richter?” she asks. “She’s unhappy with her husband ‘Leave him already,’ I said ‘Just leave.’”
“Who’s Leila Richter?”
“You know Leila. I’m sure you know her. She lives over on Thirteenth Street, right next door to Bob Haddox I don’t know I could have sworn it was you who introduced us I swear, I’m so mixed up lately, these headaches, I don’t know if I’m coming or going Anyway, I finally went to the lawyer like you asked.”
“I asked?”
“Asked? You’ve only been nagging me about it for a year now. So I went to Allison and we made up a will, finally. Mary gets everything We put in a special clause, it says that Michael’s family doesn’t get to even see her without Allison’s permission. If anything happens to me, Allison has guardianship. Period. She said it wasn’t really necessary to specifically cut them out like that but I wanted it in there If God forbid something happens to me and Allison’s not around she goes with you or back with the Angletons She stayed with them before, when Michael died. So now it’s all spelled out and I never have to worry about it again. Whatever happens, those people will never get their hands on her ”
“Tremendously You don’t even know I have to go now. I’ve got dinner in the oven.”
She hangs up and I’m equally taken aback by the fact that Evelyn thought she was talking to an old friend, I think Erica, and by the fact that Evelyn actually thinks she has a dinner in the oven Evelyn has never had a dinner in the oven. I wait a few minutes and call her back
“Hi, Mary. I just got off the phone with Erica. Did you have fun last night?”
“Yeah, it was great. What are you doing for dinner? You want to meet somewhere, get a bite to eat?”
“I would, honey, but I’ve got some take-out from Bald-ucci’s and it’s already in the oven. How about another time?” I’m relieved—at least she doesn’t think she’s cooking—and we make plans for dinner the day after tomorrow.
I met my father’s family once, on a day trip to his parents’ house in Connecticut the year before he died. The occasion was his maternal grandmother’s—my great-grandmother’s—ninetieth birthday. She was a nice woman, who, I later learned, had been beaten every which way by her husband and tried, and failed, to prevent her daughter from marrying the same type of man.
My parents seemed to be in good spirits as we drove up, cracking jokes about fat Chub, Michael’s brother, and the blustery Colonel, his father. Now I can see that it wasn’t so much good humor as nervous hysteria As we got closer to the house the laughter slowed down, and once we passed the gates it stopped
Inside the house everyone was dressed up in suits and I was concerned about my parents, in their khakis and wrinkled Oxford shirts, but I trusted that they were right and these people were wrong about what to wear. My father picked me up and told me all these people were relatives. I found it a bit hard to swallow. Everyone wanted to meet me and a few of the women seemed concerned about my hair, which was messy
I remember a few exchanges clearly I was introduced to the Colonel, a huge man with a face that was flabby and stone at the same time. He shook my hand and said hello and turned away His wife Kate—my grandmother—gave me a hug and a kiss and looked scared when she smiled at me, like someone would catch her. A woman in a Chanel suit, I think she was a cousin of my father’s, pulled me into the hallway and asked me if my mother was a Jew. I said I didn’t know and the woman got embarrassed and said it didn’t matter anyway, in fact she hoped my mother was because she liked Jews. Later, in the kitchen, Evelyn grabbed Meredith, Chub’s wife, and said, “What the hell are you thinking? Why do you let him talk to you like that? In front of all these people, for Christ’s sake ”
Meredith was crying. “I know,” she said “It’s so awful You don’t even know the half of it ”
“So leave already,” said my mother, furious. “You know you can stay with us I told you before, you know that Anytime.”
“I know. I know.”
My great-grandmother, whose birthday it was, sat upright in the center of a beige brocade sofa in the living room. The women in suits fawned over her, but she was more interested in Michael and Evelyn. Now I see what it meant, to each of them, to see each other one last time
“Now, let me have her,” she said, and Michael picked me up and gently placed me on her lap. Virginia, I think her name was. I had never seen someone so old before, or hair pulled back so tightly, and I was a little scared. Then she held me softly and put her arms around me and whispered in my ear and I loved her.
“You’re a good girl,” she whispered in a deep old voice “What a little pussycat of a girl Good pussycat. I’m your great-grandmother and I love you very very much. I’m going to die soon, I hope, and I’ll never see you again, so be a good pussycat and always listen to your father because he’s a very smart man. You’ll turn out just fine living there in the big city with these nice people. And whatever you do, for the rest of your life, you must never ever come back to this fucking house again.”
And, for better or worse, I never did
Monday night I meet my mother for dinner at Japonica, a Japanese restaurant on Twelfth and University. One of the best places. The manager always gives us a table by the window, looking out onto University Place, and they’ll put whatever we ask for in the sushi dinner. They always have non maki, the pickled squash I like, and the fresh uni—sea urchin—that Evelyn likes
“So I was wondering,” I ask my mother, “are any of my grandparents still alive?”
“You mean Michael’s parents? Oh, they’re long gone,” she answers. “It must be ten, fifteen years I told you when they died ”
“No, you didn’t”
“Sure I did. Why, do you need money?”
“What are you talking about?”
Tomiko, the waitress, brings our dinner, gemlike little pieces of fish on black lacquered trays.
“Money,” Evelyn says. “They didn’t leave you anything.”
“I never thought about it,” I say. “Why didn’t they leave me anything? They were loaded ”
“Because they hated me, that’s why,” my mother says. “Every since the whole custody thing.”
“What?”
“You know. They tried to get custody of you When your father died.”
I’m blown away. “Mom, I did not know this.”
“Sure you did,” she says “They were horrible people, your father’s family. That’s why he had so many problems I would not let those people get their hands on you, I didn’t even want them to see you. Believe me, they wanted you. Chub and Meredith, their son had already run away—I don’t think anyone ever found him. And their daughter married one of her professors from Vassar when she was seventeen and never went home again.”
“Chub and Meredith tried to get custody of me?”
“No, no, no. Not Chub and Meredith. Your father’s parents The Colonel and Kate. Unbelievable, those people. To think I would give you up Michael was dead, Chub had died of a heart attack, his kids were long gone, Meredith was in and out of the hospital herself You were the only one left.”
“So why did they want me?” I can not keep up with this story.
“Who the hell knows? Lunatics, those people. To think I would give you up to anyone, especially those fucking monsters. You know they never looked at those kids, except to beat them.”
“You mean Kate and the Colonel?”
“Chub and Nancy, too. They did the exact same thing to their own kids. Of course, Chub always got the worst of it from the Colonel. Michael said that Chub had scars up and down his back from a belt buckle. Oh, you don’t know what I went through with them. They had no legal right, not a leg to stand on, but that didn’t stop them. They got some fancy lawyers, I guess they thought they could scare me. Go ahead, I told them. Take it to a fucking judge. You want the money back, take it. You should see how I grew up, you think I need your money Blood money All from building bombs in World War Two. That’s what paid for all those years at St. Elizabeth’s But they didn’t even want the money. They tried to make it like I was an unfit mother I was a bohemian, my first husband had been a queer, Michael had been so ill Allison found a guy for me, a hot-shot custody specialist. He told them that if they didn’t leave me alone, we would sue them for harassment.”
“And then they just gave up?”
“Eventually The lawyer took care of everything. The court appointed a guy, a shrink, you had a session with him—”
“Oh my God,” I interrupt. “Dr Fixler!”
I saw a string of psychiatrists after my father died, all useless, and Dr. Fixler, I had thought, was just another shrink. I remembered his name because it sounded like something out of one of the books I read, like twinkle or pixie, and so I thought he would be nice. He wasn’t We met in an office building downtown, instead of the usual child psychiatrist’s office full of jarring primary colors and anatomically correct dolls. Dr. Fixler was a large, bored man with a beard and a wrinkled suit We sat across from each other at a white Formica conference table Instead of asking ab
out my father, he asked about my mother This, I could handle. He asked if my mother hit me, if my mother used drugs, if she had male friends over to the house. No, no, no Did my mother ever touch me here or here, did we have bugs at the apartment, did we have mice? No, no, no. Did my mother feed me, did she wash me, did she take me to the doctor when I was sick? Yes, yes, yes
I didn’t freak out until the end of the session, when he asked, did I love my mother? Yes. YES. Why are you asking me this? YES. Who are you? Leave me alone. YES This time, it wasn’t memories that brought on the hysterics I thought he might know what I was thinking, maybe that was why the questions had changed I thought Dr. Fixler might know. Yes, I loved my mother, but I had loved my father more. And if I had had to choose, if I had been able to choose, I would have chosen the other way around. I would have kept my father.
“For Christ’s sake,” says Evelyn “Dr Fixler, that was his name. How the hell did you remember that? He said you were fine, considering, and that was pretty much the end of it”
We’ve abandoned our dinner and the sushi sits on its trays, looking less and less like food.
“Mom, why didn’t you ever tell me this?”
“I did, I-”
“No You didn’t.”
Evelyn looks a little guilty and sheepish, like she’s said something she’s not supposed to tell She picks at her dinner with chopsticks. “I guess I never wanted you to have to worry about this stuff. You had enough on your plate, with everything that’d happened. I didn’t want you to even have to think of those people. You know,” she says, suddenly intense, “I loved you more than anything in the whole world. You were everything to me, and even if it did go to court, I never would have let them take you. No matter what. You were everything to me You still are. You know that”