“Oh, yeah?” he turned to Hamish. “Well, you a cheap motherfucker—”
“Yo!” the leader barked from the center. “Shut the fuck up over there.”
The robber took the handbag and the earrings and moved on, leaving Maggie her keys. Shortly, the gang reassembled at center.
“The Businessmen’s Lunch Posse would like to thank y’all for your cooperation,” the leader said. “Remain seated and nobody will get hurt. Have a nice day.” He fired a dozen rounds into the ceiling as punctuation and the quartet departed while everyone’s stunned attention was focused overhead on the falling ceiling debris. The entire operation took under ninety seconds. When the patrons realized that the robbers had indeed gone, the room swelled with astonished voices and a good deal of nervous laughter too. To Maggie, whose ears still rang from the gunfire, it seemed eerily as if a party had resumed.
“Were you trying to get us killed?” Hamish asked.
“Hal, I absolutely have to be at Kennedy Airport at three-thirty to pick up a dear friend who is in the midst of personal crisis of the gravest kind.”
“Maggie, you do not try to reason with armed robbers.”
“All right. Next time I won’t say a word.”
“Next time! If there is a next time, I’m moving to Switzerland.”
A waiter brought out their meal at that moment, apologizing on behalf of the management for the terrible inconvenience of the robbery and saying that their lunch was on the house. Then the police arrived. The patrons were asked to remain until an officer came around to interview them. In the meantime, Maggie dug into her shrimp and corn cakes while Hamish, still smoldering, barely pushed the food around on his plate.
“I’m going to buy a pistol,” he announced gloomily.
“Oh, I see. Trying to reason with them is stupid, but pulling a pistol on four men with machine guns is smart.”
Hamish glared at Maggie as though from the entrance to some dark bunker where all the entitlements of manhood were stored.
“Can I taste your venison?” Maggie asked and went prospecting on his plate without waiting for an answer. “Hmmm. Fabulous! They have a way with game here.”
The two set off for Hamish’s office barely fifteen minutes later. His mood improved along the way, and upon arrival he began spouting a play-by-play of the brazen robbery for every editor and coffee girl on the third floor. While he held forth, Maggie called in to report her credit cards stolen. Finally, she got Hamish to extract a hundred dollars from petty cash to cover the parking lot bill at the airport and the bridge tolls home.
3
A Most Soulful Reunion
Lindy Hagan emerged from the jetway looking wan but beautiful in black silk cords by Stephano Guglianni tucked into bloodred Luchese cowboy boots and a black cowl-necked cashmere sweater by Deiter Hunsbacher. In one hand she carried a burnished leather satchel of a type that Ernest Hemingway might have lugged through the Spanish civil war, and over her other arm hung a black wool riding cape. Anxiety clouded her heart-shaped face as she scanned the large, busy concourse, until Maggie shouted, “Here, Lindy! Over here!” and then both of them erupted in a fit of squealing and hopping up and down that had the other travelers turning their heads.
The squealing fit was a throwback to their years at Smith College. It had been their signature greeting, whenever they reunited after a Christmas break or a summer vacation. (There was even a brief period of infantile regression in the fall of their sophomore year when they squealed every time they crossed paths on a quad.) Since people began recognizing her in public, Maggie had avoided anything that might make herself conspicuous, but the sight of Lindy projected her instantly back to those wonderful college days when the world was new and they were a pair of gorgeous nobodies with a golden future before them.
When they were done hopping and squealing, Maggie squeezed Lindy and, feeling her ribs through the cashmere sweater, exclaimed, “Darling, you’re practically a skeleton!” Lindy appeared to take this as a compliment, for she’d ridden the diet roller coaster much of her life.
“God help me around you then,” Lindy said, with a hint of her trademark lopsided smile, as she led the way to the luggage carousel. “You’ll be force-feeding me strudels and foie gras and God-knows-what chazzerai, and I’ll be as big as a mobile home in a week!”
“Don’t worry. We have enough exercise equipment at home to open a spa.”
“Can you get the Foodstuf line of products here in the East?” Lindy asked. “They make these simply fabulous nutrition-free foods. Mayonnaise, crackers, cottage cheese, this frozen shit that tastes just like ice cream—I think they hang some extra carbon atoms on the molecules so they’re too big to be absorbed through your stomach lining.”
“What happens to it in your body?”
“It just passes through, like the Lexington Avenue express. Nobody eats real food in L.A. anymore—ah, here are my things.”
In the car—a one-year-old luxury-equipped Toyota Land Cruiser—Maggie began to spin the incredible tale of the holdup at the Four Seasons as Lindy listened in rapt astonishment. The Van Wyck Expressway ran through the grittier neighborhoods of Queens—Ozone Park, Jamaica, Richmond Hill—where the shop fronts proclaimed their wares and services in a dozen different alphabets. On every other corner, it seemed, groups of hump-shouldered men stood around fifty-gallon steel drums warming their hands over burning rubbish. The expressway itself, especially the median strip with its beleaguered plantings of yew and juniper, was littered with a stupendous amount of windblown plastic trash. These images of squalor and disorder streaked by in strange contrast to the recording of Handel’s stately Water Music playing on the Toyota’s splendid stereo system.
“It’s great to be back in the real world,” Lindy said quietly.
Just after turning off the Van Wyck onto the Whitestone Expressway, they observed two figures in hooded sweatshirts drop a concrete block from an overpass a quarter mile ahead. The block struck the roof of an Oldsmobile, then bounced off the car’s trunk onto the road. The Oldsmobile fishtailed wildly for several hundred yards before the driver regained control. Maggie swerved to avoid hitting the concrete block, which had come to rest in her lane, and in swerving almost careened into a white Jeep racing to pass on her right. The Jeep’s driver blared his horn. They could feel vibrations from the rap music roaring out of his speakers. Maggie swerved back into the left lane. Lindy wheeled around in her seat to see the two hooded figures on the overpass running away.
Emitting little gerbil-like squeaks of fright, Maggie struggled to steer while Lindy sank back in numb disbelief. Seconds later, they were soaring up the approach ramp onto the Whitestone Bridge. Lindy opened the window, stuck her head out, and shrieked. Maggie opened hers and did the same. All it took was a glance between them to establish that this was a variation on the squealing game. They shrieked their way across the entire bridge, the sodden gray wintry expanse of Long Island Sound below. At the tollbooth on the other side, Maggie implored the toll taker to call the police about the boys on the overpass, but he only retorted in some foreign gibberish and angrily waved them on. Lindy dove into her leather satchel and extracted a bottle of Stolichnaya vodka that already had a pretty good dent in it. She gulped down a martini’s worth before passing the bottle to Maggie who, with still-trembling hands, gratefully took a healthy swig.
“I think they’re trying to kill people out of sheer boredom now,” Lindy said as the claustrophobic streets of bombed-out tenements in the Bronx gave way to the more open, strip-mall ambience of lower Westchester. “That could easily have been the end of us.”
“The most unspeakable things happen every day in New York,” Maggie said. “Babies left to die in gym bags. Homeless people set afire just for the fun of it. Schoolgirls killed by stray bullets. Girlfriends dissected by their ex-lovers. The sheer volume of mayhem boggles the mind. Funny, though,” she halted in reflection, “it’s just a story in the newspaper until something happens to you.”
<
br /> “We tolerate the intolerable in this fucking country,” Lindy said, fairly spitting out the words. “What’s happening to us, Maggie? What’s happening to America?”
“I don’t know,” Maggie said with sigh. “The future is what’s happening, I guess.”
“If this is the future, then maybe I’d be better off dead.”
“Oh, darling, don’t say that. There’s so much to live for, even with all the bad people and terrible things in the world.”
4
Home at Last
Silence enveloped them as they crossed the state line into Connecticut and left the last ragged edges of the wounded metropolis behind. Large fluffy snowflakes began to bounce off the windshield. Maggie turned off the Merritt Parkway at the Wilton exit and proceeded north toward Rumford along a series of increasingly rural county roads. Large old houses could occasionally be glimpsed through the woods, their distant lights aglow in the gathering purple twilight, nestled securely in the gentle snow-mantled landscape like children tucked in warm beds.
“It’s like being home again, the metaphorical home that the heart ever yearns for,” Lindy said softly, though the Connecticut countryside was far different from the raucous suburb of Great Neck, Long Island, where she grew up. “This is what I dreamed about all those nights alone in bed after Buddy moved out. The not-L.A. world. The world of real snow and real, old houses and pumpkin soup and autumn leaves and children skating on ponds and families with dogs and long walks on country lanes all bundled up in sweaters and mufflers.” She paused to gulp from the vodka bottle and proffered it to Maggie, who was slightly woozy from the first snort. “I guess it all boils down to a return to basic values,” Lindy continued histrionically. “In L.A. nothing matters and anything goes. I want to purge all that from the depths of my soul and be clean again.”
“Dear heart, I’m afraid there’s something I must tell you,” Maggie said carefully, as though defusing a bomb. “It doesn’t alter a thing between us or your staying here, but it’s been extremely upsetting.”
“Oh, Maggie, I’m so sorry. I’m such a hateful self-absorbed pig,” Lindy said, tears leaving sooty mascara trails down her gaunt cheeks. “I’m so ashamed of myself. Please forgive me. Here I am acting like the only person in the world who’s got problems. I’m disgusting. You should let me die.”
“Lindy! How on earth did your ego get so tattered?”
“I guess that’s what happens when your husband turns gay on you. I must have been repulsive to him.”
“You are not repulsive. You’re lovely and sweet and clever and talented and fine.”
“That’s somebody else you once knew.”
“Lindy, you’ve never looked more beautiful. Maybe you’re going through a rough patch and struggling to figure out what’s important, but I can’t stand to hear you run yourself down.”
“I was his wife, okay? And now he hates girls. Connect the dots.”
“I’m sure it’s nothing you did. You don’t catch homosexuality like the flu. Poor Buddy’s probably been all torn up and confused inside since his first pimple in high school.”
“Do me a favor, okay? Don’t go feeling sorry for the bastard. I might die fifty years before my time because of him. My nana lived to be ninety-eight years old, okay? I’m genetically programmed for the long haul. And now … this! This fucking disease!” At this, Lindy’s tears escalated into outright bawling.
“Oh, dear heart, oh poor Lindy, we don’t know that yet—”
“Look, here I go again! You start to tell me [snuffle] something important about your life and [snuffle] all of sudden the spotlight’s back on me and my stupid problems. I’m such a hopeless egomaniac. If I had a gun, I’d shoot myself.”
“Did you have a therapist in L.A.?”
“Maggie, if there’s a single human being in L.A. who doesn’t have a therapist, they’d have to put him in a raree-show. L.A. is an endless chain of therapy.”
“Maybe you ought to see somebody here.”
“Lenny—uh, Dr. Gorshak, my shrink—gave me a whole list of names in your area. Who’s your shrink, by the way. Maybe he’s on the list.”
“Haven’t been going for quite a few years.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know. I wasn’t miserable. I was coping with life well enough, though at times I was far from happy. The house was an enormous distraction. And the garden was an even more colossal project. The catering company took a lot of energy, of course. Then the books happened and the videos. I really didn’t have time for therapy.”
“I’ve been seeing Gorshak three times a week for years.”
“Do you think he’s helped you?”
“Oh, absolutely. Incredibly. If nothing else, I haven’t been fat since 1992. I’m much more together. I mean, you might not know it because of this mess I’m in. But thinking you may die a horrible premature death is not exactly conducive to good mental hygiene, okay? It’s really set me back.”
They drove past the quaint village center of West Rumford with its general store, Olde Post Road Inn (now a bed and breakfast), Unitarian church, post office, liquor store, pizzeria, garden center, and French auberge (a dreadful place run by a vile Luxembourgoise who was once caught pouring bleach into Blodgett Brook in order to bring up trout for his kitchen).
“It’s so darling!” Lindy exclaimed. “So Our Town!”
Maggie turned onto winding Kettle Hill Road—which they had fought aggressively and successfully to keep unpaved for fifteen years— and then turned through the familiar brick gateposts to her own long gravel driveway.
“Stop the car!” Lindy said.
“Huh?”
“I want to get the full effect.”
Little daylight remained. Just enough to make out the snowcapped sentinels of the bundled rosebushes, the various outbuildings, trellises, arbors, fruit trees, and other features of the extensive grounds. The handsome old white clapboard house stood sheltered in its grove of towering sycamores, planted the same year as Cornwallis’s surrender at Yorktown. The house itself was even older, pre–Revolutionary War, though Maggie’s rehab of the interior had been a veritable gut job clear down to the bare beams. Electric Christmas candles still glowed at every window and an evergreen wreath five feet in diameter hung across the second-floor Palladian window.
“This,” Lindy intoned, “is a picture I could happily carry in my head to the grave.”
“Dear heart, please! Stop being so morbid.”
“It’s perfect, though. It’s everything that L.A. isn’t.” Lindy resumed weeping, softly this time, into a wad of tissue paper. Maggie proceeded down the driveway. Hooper’s Saab sat in the oval turnaround and Maggie explained that he was home for the holidays.
“He’s driving already!” Lindy exclaimed. She remembered him as a towheaded twelve-year-old riding a surf skimmer on the beach at Malibu one spring when the Darlings flew out to visit. (In truth Maggie went to attend a party, where the guests included Michael Caine, Harrison Ford, and Gene Hackman.)
“And screwing girls,” Maggie added grumpily.
“He must be quite the hunk now,” Lindy remarked, “if he’s anything like his old man. Oh, God! There I go again! In all this time I haven’t even asked you how Kenneth is. I’m so embarrassed. My egotism is simply mortifying. How can you ever forgive me?”
“Well, I’m afraid there is some news about Kenneth, actually.”
Lindy seized Maggie’s upper arm. “He’s okay, isn’t he? I know about this absolute genius of a cardiologist—”
“No, no, no, he’s perfectly all right—physically. It’s just that I, uh, threw him out of the house on Christmas Eve. Kenneth doesn’t live here anymore.”
5
The Fateful Call
Lindy fairly reeled into the house, punchy with shock, despair, psychic dislocation, self-loathing, anxiety, hunger, travel fatigue, and the effects of roughly five ounces of 100-proof vodka. Florence, one of the maids, had readied the Shaker gues
t room—so named for its austere furnishings—and Maggie installed Lindy there directly for a nap. The fateful phone call to Lindy’s Los Angeles doctor had been set in advance for seven o’clock Eastern time.
Hooper and Alison were deconstructing a take-out pizza in a remote part of the house called the game room because it contained a Ping-Pong table. Its chief attraction, however, was a television projection system Kenneth had acquired in order to watch the Olympics at nearly life-size scale—only now, MTV blared on it. Ghetto youths in hooded sweatshirts were extemporizing in rhyme about the need to kill policemen. The room stank of cigarettes. An aluminum pie tin full of butts sat on the carpet to the side of the pizza box.
“Hi, Mom.”
“Hi, Maggie.”
“Hi, gang,” Maggie replied listlessly. “Turn it down some, huh? Someone’s trying to sleep upstairs.”
“Huh? Is Dad back?”
“No. Aunt Lindy.”
“Really? What’s she doing here?”
“Don’t ask.”
Back in Maggie’s kitchen, the Center of the Universe, messages galore waited, from Nina concerning the Founders’ Day brunch that Maggie’s company, Good Taste, was catering on Saturday for the Hartford Arboretum; from Harold Hamish saying he would be quoted in the Times tomorrow about their luncheon adventure; from Della Montaigne of Good Morning America about a February guest shot; from Hattie Moile and various other concerned friends inquiring carefully and confidentially about rumors of a split with Kenneth; from employees, purveyors, antique brokers, manufacturers of cooking equipment, sundry pests soliciting services and charitable causes, and two hangers-up whom Maggie suspected might be Kenneth. Reviewing all the messages gave her a headache.
At quarter to seven, she made a pot of her favorite gunpowder tea and brought up a tray with some edibles to the sewing room. Little sewing actually got done here—there were seamstresses for that. Rather it served as an intimate refuge, a place where Maggie retreated those evenings when Kenneth was being insufferable, particularly during his cocaine years. Here she perused seed catalogs on winter evenings, plotted revisions and additions to the gardens, composed recipes on a laptop computer, wrote notes to far-flung correspondents, including a clutch of literary personages and admirers from around the world.
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