by MB Caschetta
“He said one of the other kids tried to drown him. Garrison something.”
“Garrison Foley,” Lorena swings back in her lawn chair, “a real little bastard. Well, no wonder. He probably did. The kids around here are privileged little brats, but they’re rough. I’ve seen them reduce grown-ups to tears. Just like their fathers. They’re the products of an unbelievable life.”
They are silent for a minute, listening to the sound of the crickets. Lorena thinks she has been too forceful about the neighbors’ children. She tries to think of a thing softer to say, some way to take it back.
“It was strange though,” Allison says. “No one saw anything. All the kids were on the other side of the pool, and even Garrison Foley was standing on the diving board.”
“That’s not good.” Lorena hears her own voice far away in the night.
“It’s like he has hurt feelings,” Allison says. “And doesn’t know how else to express them. So, he makes up these little scenes.”
“You think he makes things up?” Lorena sips her wine casually.
But Allison merely repeats herself. “Yeah, but as an expression of pain. Not exactly real, but not exactly not-real, either.”
Lorena stretches in the dark, listening to the reassuring chirp of crickets. Maybe he does make it all up, she thinks. “I need to take him to a neurologist about that obsessive finger-tapping. It wasn’t so bad when he only did it on top of his own desk. Now, he reaches right out and touches people like that. I swear he’s going to come home with a black eye one day.”
In the dark, Lorena admires Allison’s red hair, her decisiveness and obvious intelligence.
“I think it’s going to be a good summer, after all,” she says.
When Lorena first accepted that Babe had chosen her, she moved into the Midtown Sheraton Hotel without telling her roommate, or her husband, who was in the middle of divorcing her. Babe lived in Lyme, Connecticut with his wife at the time. The wife was a woman somehow named Bridey, who was ill in ways Babe never could actually explain. He was lonely and wanted Lorena whenever he could get her, whenever he could escape and spend an hour, an evening, the night. He wanted her all the time, he said. And she didn’t mind the luxury that came with it. Maids to make her bed, dry cleaning service at the door, all meals delivered. She liked that no one lived in a hotel, not even her, though for a solid year, it’s where she spent her time. Every so often, she returned to her own apartment near Prospect Park; her husband had just finished medical school and moved to the country. He’d taken Aaron with him, except for the summers when she got him.
“A lot of traveling,” she’d say to Sylvia, her roommate, a strange woman with a lisp. For some reason, Lorena felt compelled to haul an empty suitcase home, shower and catch up on sleep, then haul it back into a cab heading uptown.
“Market research,” she told the woman, who wouldn’t probably have cared either way.
Babe teased her mercilessly about the pretense. “What do you care what other people think?” he wanted to know. But she didn’t like being the other woman.
And now here she is again.
Perhaps she ought to have expected it, coming home early from tennis and finding him there like that with Allison. She ought to have anticipated the pattern, the familiar circadian rhythm of Babe Spencer and his predictable conquests. Now, Lorena chastises herself for being surprised. What has happened could be written in a tawdry novel: Babe returning home from abroad in August, unexpectedly early, dampening everyone’s spirits, though not Allison’s, Lorena notices. The observation stings her to numbness with rejection, though she knows she’s acting foolish, like a young lover who hasn’t yet known passion. Still she recognizes that something has been taken away. To keep her mind off it, she keeps herself busy with Josh’s doctor’s appointments, psychiatrists, and trips to the pharmacy for Ritalin. She books tennis games in the middle of the day.
“I see you’re really taking advantage of the new girl,” her friends say.
Is she?
She can’t help the constant feeling that she should be home with her fingers on the pulse of the life being lived there. She makes elaborate family dinners, enlisting Allison’s help, trying to keep her attention. Babe sinks into bad moods, snarls at the children, grumbles around the house. In the morning, he refuses to let Joshy take the sheet off the birdcage until he has gone to work.
“Can’t stand that racket,” he says.
Joshy acts as if he doesn’t care. “It’s still dark out, in bird world.”
Lorena can’t blame Babe, exactly. He’s lost two major deals in Germany, and there are snags in a third. These are harsh blows coming on the heels of his latest venture, a novel start-up company to sell medicine directly to patients. The FDA closed the operation down, a year after incorporation. Lorena has gotten used to hearing him begin all phone conversations with the same old line, “Let me tell you a story, Bob.” The saga is about a little guy with a big idea, who is so down and out, trying to get his business up and running that he goes to Las Vegas to gamble payroll and wins big. “Ever heard of a little place called IBM,” Babe says, reeling in the fish. It’s hard to know anymore if the story is even true. Babe lies to win, a principle applicable in all situations.
To make life easier, Lorena simply steers clear, avoiding all but the most circumspect contact, except for the night of his return. They made love on the sofa, during which she found herself silently disappointed. She had to look away from his soft white mounds of flesh rising symmetrically to nipples, forced herself to concentrate on the wiry silver hair of his beard mixed with black in order to come. She’s not sure how things have evolved to this point, but she knows making love with Babe in their home in Connecticut is nothing like making love in a hotel. She toys with the idea of taking him away for a weekend. Maybe even booking a suite at the Sheraton, but she seems to have no energy. Isn’t interested, in fact. She spends a lot of time reading about parakeets and talking to Josh, who finally picks the perfectly colored bird, blue-green azure, which they buy in the pet store. She thinks it might help him to have something to care for.
She likes how the children have taken to Allison. Eric, in particular. Even Josh sometimes responds to her. He let her name the new parakeet: Cloud. Now that school has started, they seem to rely on her even more, and Lorena likes how she is with the baby.
In the back yard, after a tennis cancellation, Lorena watches Allison help Eric take black and white photographs with his new camera.
From behind a tree, Babe appears as if from nowhere. He’s not at work, Lorena thinks, trying to remember the last time she’s seen him in broad daylight. He’s helping Eric. But something about the equation doesn’t match up, and she feels compelled to follow quietly into the yard, leaving Josh alone, where she can see him through the window watching TV in the living room with the baby playing quietly in his pen.
She slips out the back porch and down the path toward the creek, glancing nervously toward the house, as if watching the back door will keep something bad from happening. No one catches sight of her out of the corner of an eye as she approaches, moving from one birch tree to the next, remaining hidden. They are helping Eric set up leaves and some stones for a still life. The air is chilly for October.
“It looks dumb,” Eric complains. There’s a pile of jackets—Allison’s, Joshy’s, Eric’s—on the woodsy ground to her left.
“Your father will fix it.” Allison looks up in Babe’s direction, pointing with her chin.
“Daddy, please!” Eric wheels around. “Will you? Will you help me?”
Babe steps out from behind the tree: “Keep your voice down.”
It is strange to see Babe behind the house, his sleeves rolled up, his suit jacket—where? Lorena looks around, spots it hanging from a tree branch; all day Lorena has been aware of a faint buzzing behind her skin. All day, she’s felt a certain presence like something electrical, pressing into her stomach.
Babe fusses with the camera.
“Go back and get the pod for this in my office.”
Eric takes off like a colt. “Be right back. Don’t start without me!”
Babe fidgets with the camera, focusing in on Allison. “Want to pose?” he says. He pulls the camera away from his face. “Do you know who Emma Goldman is?”
Allison looks at him. (Lorena takes a deep breath.) “Of course I do.”
“Well, at the end of her life, Emma Goldman, a confirmed revolutionary, conceded that reform had a place in the world. Do you know why?”
Allison shakes her head.
Lorena knows; it’s a story she’s heard a million times, a story he uses when he’s closing a deal.
“She was visiting America one last time toward the end of her life, and she went to a factory, here, where she observed the incredibly abhorrent conditions of children working. This was before child-labor laws of course.”
“And?”
And you son of a bitch, Lorena thinks.
“And it was extremely wise of her to change her mind like that, to realize that there are merits to improving a bad situation. Even an impossible situation. In her case, it was capitalism, for which the only true solution would be a social revolution. Still, she realized once and for all that improvement matters. Quality of life. You mustn’t be rigid.”
“Bread and roses,” Allison says.
“Very good,” Babe Spencer smiles.
“My great-aunt led that strike,” Allison says. (I’m sure she did, Lorena thinks.)
“But what does this have to do with anything?”
“Given the impossible situation,” Babe Spencer says, “I’d say it has to do with everything.”
He stares at her—long, hard, piercing. Lorena shifts her position, crouches down now, puts her head in her hand and tries to think.
“Allison?” Babe says.
“What?”
Lorena looks up.
“Unbutton your blouse.” He is focusing the camera on her.
“Wait,” he says. “First, undo your braid.”
She moves her hands through her hair, then to the metal buttons of her chambray shirt, unbuttoning slowly.
Don’t do it, Lorena thinks. Over her shoulder, she can see the house, but none of her boys.
She wonders if Allison is thinking the same thing.
“He’ll be back,” Allison says.
“Pull up that T-shirt,” he says. “I want to look at you.”
When she lifts her shirt to the brisk air, he snaps three quick biting photos, without saying a word.
“Beauty matters,” he says.
It does, Lorena thinks, captivated as much by the dreadful situation as she is by Allison, who stands mannequin-like, lifting her shirt and showing off her porcelain skin, her delicate nipples puckered in the cold.
She can hear the sound of her own breath speeding up.
Letting the camera hang around his neck, Babe moves in for the kill. He jams his torso against her, pulling her in, slipping his hand quickly into the place where her jeans gap away from her flat stomach. He sucks on her lips, and she responds.
Oh, Allison, Lorena thinks, knowing he has slipped his finger inside her, where by now for certain she is wet and warm.
“Did you know this was going to happen?” he says, barely pulling away. “Did you know from the moment you saw me? The moment you knew my favorite author was your favorite author. Doctorow. And Marxism? Did you think you could ignore such a connection? I knew. I could see it in your eyes the first time. It was inevitable. You knew it, didn’t you?”
Say no, Lorena thinks, as she watches.
But Allison cannot answer.
“Doctorow said that we need writers as witnesses to this terrifying century. Are you terrified, Allison? Because I am.”
Allison pulls away and quickly tucks in her shirt, searching for something to say. “I never heard that quote before.”
It is just like Babe to research these things, or more accurately to have his secretary find these things out. Everyone saw Allison reading the Doctorow book; her school textbook on Marxism has been on the kitchen table all month. It’s how Babe manages to seduce the world with his world-class advertising campaigns. Lorena wants to scream and warn the girl. She is breathing so hard in the cold that she has a headache.
Babe pulls out the film with the photos he’s just snapped and tosses it in the air for Allison to catch. She puts it in her pocket, looking over her shoulder. Lorena watches Josh, not Eric, loping unevenly through the leaves. She wants to stand up and throw herself at his mercy, to tackle him to the ground, and cover his eyes. She wants to save him from everything, to make him stop twitching.
“What’s the matter?” Allison asks shouting across a very short distance to Josh. Lorena recognizes the sound of panic rising in her throat.
He stands there without his jacket, trembling.
“Well, Josh?” Babe said, coolly, “What is it?”
Eric shows up, behind him, carrying the baby over one arm and the tripod for his camera over the other.
“Hey,” he says to Josh, “Why’d you leave Baby Jake alone in there? He was bawling.”
The baby is wet-eyed, shivery in the cold; Eric hands him over to Allison.
Lorena makes her escape, down toward the creek and circling back up on the other side of the house, so she can slide by the van, as if she’s just arrived home.
She stands in the garage listening for a moment.
“Did you remember your medicine today?” she hears Babe saying as he stomps his feet at the back porch, cuffing Josh lightly on the ear. “You got to remember it, son. It’ll help you focus.”
Josh doesn’t answer.
“Lets get you inside before we freeze.” Allison wraps the baby in her coat, and reaches out for Josh’s hand.
“Now I’m sick,” Josh whines. “You made me sick.”
All evening Josh complains to Lorena about his fever, saying it is Allison’s fault. Allison responds, apologizing profusely, until Lorena shows her the thermometer fresh from Josh’s mouth. 98.6.
Lorena should fire the girl, though she did nearly the exact same thing to Babe’s third wife, though not in the woman’s house, the woman’s bed. She wondered if given the opportunity, she would have.
At dinner, Babe’s teasing grows tense. A sign Lorena recognizes that he perhaps believes himself to be in love and cannot bear the humiliation of the weakened state. He stretches, reaching for the salt.
“You have dandruff?” he asks Allison, “Don’t you use a conditioner?”
He keeps his blue eyes steadily on target. Lorena notices Allison flinch. Perhaps she can save her from this sort of thing. She sympathizes. It’s not so bad to be someone’s secret protector.
“Babe!” she reaches across and slaps his arm. “She does not have dandruff! Why would you say such a thing?”
A minute passes before Babe releases the girl from his barbed-wire gaze. Lorena snaps a cloth napkin from her lap into the air.
Lorena remembers what it’s like to be caught off guard, when, accustomed to Babe’s secret tenderness, one is ambushed by his public rage. In Lorena’s case the affection was bestowed in the restroom at business luncheons, at her office after dark, and once in the hallway before the morning staff arrived. She wonders where it was offered to Allison. Maybe in the attic or in his office upstairs on the Berber rug, out back in the woods, after sending the boys on ahead to the little stream behind the house. Maybe Babe sneaks home in the middle of the day, pressing her up against the bookshelf in the baby’s room, while the boys are down the hall. Maybe her own little Jake sleeps through the urgency of their sweaty motions.
“What’s the matter with you?” Babe asks Josh. Lorena turns to see Josh’s mouth falling open, mute. Everyone tenses, even Eric, as if sniffing the air for danger. Josh’s hands move slowly like flies in winter. “A bus could come crashing through the kitchen, and you’d miss it!” Babe says. “Straighten up.”
Eric
stares at Allison’s shoulder, but she’s brushed it clear of the invisible white flakes, Lorena notices. Excusing herself from the table, she stands in the enormous, glinting stainless steel kitchen, looking around carefully, as if trying to regain her bearings.
*
After dinner, Allison goes to her room. A little reading to stay caught up on for school, she says, perhaps eager for her return spring semester.
The baby starts to cry. “I’ve got him,” Lorena says. “You go.” She rocks her son, her baby boy, in little half circles, and smiles.
Overhead, she can hear Allison putting the boys to sleep, and Babe in his office. When the baby is asleep, she puts him in his crib and tiptoes down the long hall back to Allison’s room. The maid’s quarters, Lorena reminds herself.
Lorena peeks her head in the room, not sure of what she’s going to say. “You can’t take Babe seriously.”
Allison nods, staring at an open textbook on her desk. Lorena sits on the corner of the bed, within arm’s length of Allison. Lorena sighs, picking up a brush and running it through Allison’s auburn hair.
“Such a beautiful color,” she murmurs.
“Dandruff,” Allison says.
“Of course not.” Lorena puts her arms around Allison. “Please don’t leave us. You’re the best thing that’s happened to me in a long time.”
“You know, one time I brought this woman home from school for Sunday dinner,” Allison says in a slightly confessional tone, “and she helped get my nephew into Princeton, which is where she went to undergrad. And my brother said to her, I was wondering why you were here all the time.”
Lorena squints trying to follow the thread. “That sounds rude. Why was she there all the time? A friend, or more than that?”
“Well, that’s the thing. He didn’t want to know. He never asked the real question. And no one gets invited to the family dinner, unless they’re really family.”
“Well was she? Was she your family?”
Allison leans back slightly, almost imperceptibly, into Lorena’s beating heart. I forgive you, Lorena thinks, remembering how the meanness of others can be a mystery when you’re young. The heat of Allison’s body reminds Lorena of something. Allison turns slightly in Lorena’s arms, parts her lips to speak; their faces are alarmingly close. “She was important to me,” Allison says.