“What’s with the groceries?” Maggie asked.
“I thought I’d make supper for us,” Hooper said.
“That’s an interesting idea. What’s the occasion?”
“A farewell supper.”
“Farewell to whom? This thing with Lindy is no cause for celebration.”
“No. Me. I’m going away, Mom.”
Maggie felt another little stab to the heart, though she knew perfectly well that it was mere maternal reflex. For practical purposes, the nest was already empty. She crossed the darkened space to the center island.
“What’s for supper, then?” she asked.
“Smoked duck salad,” he said, looking down at the various deli packets and little heads of endive and radicchio.
“Oh … ?”
“With a lime chilpotle dressing.”
“You don’t say?” Maggie exclaimed. “I had the very same dish this afternoon at …”
He finally looked up and their eyes met. There were the brown-flecked hazel irises she knew so intimately. A steely shiver ran down her spine. Time felt stretched out between them, an awful crevice in reality into which one could accidentally fall and disappear forever.
“Wait a minnute. I don’t even want to ask,” Maggie said.
“Don’t then, Mom. Don’t ask.”
“It was you.”
“Don’t ask, Mom.”
“I’m saying, not asking.”
“Don’t even say it.”
“Do you know what kind of trouble you might be in?”
“All you need to know is that I’m leaving the country. I’m leaving all this insanity behind me for a while. No one will ever have to find out I was involved. Please, let’s not talk about it.”
It took a mighty effort for Maggie to drop it.
“All right, then,” she finally said. “How about a drink. I could use one.”
“Sure,” he said.
Maggie fetched a bottle of unbelievably expensive 1974 Margeaux that she’d been saving for some celebration. Now that all her prospects and her only child’s future seemed utterly hopeless, there seemed no reason to put off drinking it. She decanted it into a glass pitcher for a hasty aeration and then filled two crystal goblets. What a splendid wine, she thought, sloshing a sip over her teeth and palate. It left a tingly afterglow on her tongue. Big, lusty, and dark, it seized her senses like an animus out of the best erotic dream.
“Shall we make supper together?” she asked.
“Okay,” Hooper agreed.
5
Family Matters
They worked silently. Maggie sliced the duck breasts and fanned them over the washed lettuces. Hooper, who had absorbed many of his famous mother’s teachings by osmosis, simmered a dried chilpotle pepper in an inch of white vermouth until the essential smoky flavor was extracted. Meanwhile, he made a lime juice and olive oil mayonnaise in the food processor. When the vermouth was reduced to about a tablespoon of syrup, he discarded the brown chilpotle pod and combined the sepia liquid with the mayonnaise. Maggie garnished the two salad plates with a tangle of the thinnest raw Vidalia onion rings and a sprinkling of scarlet pomegranate seeds. She lit the four-taper candelabra on the farm table and they sat down to their supper of duck salad, a fresh baguette, and the superb red wine.
“This is somewhat better than Tontine’s, I’d say,” Maggie remarked.
Hooper only nodded.
“Better bread, for one thing. Where are you going, then?”
“France.”
“When are you leaving?”
“Tomorrow.”
“What’ll you do there?”
“I want to paint and draw for a while.”
“When did you take up art?”
“I’m taking it up now.”
“Are you serious?”
“Yes, Mom. Don’t look so shocked.”
“I had no idea.”
“Gauguin worked in a bank until he was thirty-five.”
“You don’t work in a bank.”
“What I’ve been doing is just as pointless.”
“I just never knew you were that interested in art.”
“Maybe there’s a lot you don’t know about me.”
“Apparently there is,” Maggie retorted, and regrettably so, because Hooper clammed up again. She refilled their wineglasses and they both addressed their plates sullenly. “What are you going to use for money?” she ventured after a while.
“I have money,” Hooper said.
“Did your father give you money?”
Hooper smiled for the first time since he’d entered the house that night.
“What’s so funny?” Maggie asked.
“I think Dad’s broke,” he said.
“You think that’s funny?”
“Actually, yes, I do. Imagine Dad with no money. It’s hysterical.”
“Where did you hear this?”
“The gossip guy at MTV heard it from a guy at Forbes. Forbes is going to run a piece about how Dad ruined himself.”
“Isn’t that lovely …”
“Well, you had your turn in People, Mom.”
Maggie stifled an impulse to reach across the table and smack him on the head.
“What happened to me is hardly comparable,” was all she could say in her defense. “I hardly ruined myself.”
“I just don’t think anybody in this family is in a position to cast stones,” Hooper said. When Maggie looked at him now, she had the strange impression that she was seeing another sovereign adult. Her little boy had vanished. “Anyway, you’re doing all right financially, aren’t you, Mom, with all your books and business ventures?”
“How much do you need for this trip?”
“I’m not hitting you up for money,” Hooper said. “I just want to make sure that you’re okay, since Dad’s tanked.”
“Oh?” she said, a little nonplussed by his solicitude. “Gosh. Well, I’ll be okay.”
“You could always sell the house,” Hooper said.
Maggie almost choked on a piece of duck. He suddenly looked like a boy again, callow, naive.
“What makes you think I’d ever sell this house?”
“I’m not saying you should. I’m just saying you could if you had to, that’s all.”
“I’m not selling this house,” Maggie insisted nevertheless.
“Fine. Don’t. You shouldn’t.”
“I can’t believe you said that.”
“Forget I said that, Mom. Okay? I know you love this place.”
“Europe’s very expensive these days, you know,” she said with mounting anxiety. “The dollar doesn’t go very far.”
“I’ll be all right,” Hooper said. “I’ve got … resources.”
“From robbing all those restaurants?” she blurted out.
“No,” he said almost inaudibly.
“How’d you get it, then? From a minimum-wage internship at MTV?”
He glared across the table like a rabbit caught in headlights. “I told you not to ask.”
“But I’m asking anyway. Just explain it to me so I don’t think the whole world has gone mad.”
“If I talk to you about this, will you promise not to ever mention it again, to me or anybody else?”
“Yes.”
“All right,” he said. “Go ahead and ask me whatever you want to.”
She worked her thumb along the fine edge of her wine goblet.
“Those boys you robbed with—they were the boys in the band, weren’t they? The ones who were here the night I returned from Venice?”
“Yes. Chill Az Def.”
“You said they were making a fortune with their recordings.”
“Yes. They’re all millionaires.”
“Then why on earth rob restaurants?”
“To keep it real, be genuine, authentic,” Hooper said. “To represent. To live up to their public image. I know it sounds absurd, but they’re actually pretty nice, normal guys when you get to know them.”
“And they find it necessary to steal from defenseless people?”
“It’s just theater, Mom. You of all people should understand that.”
She tried to understand. She really did.
“The world has gone mad,” she eventually said with resignation.
“This country certainly has,” Hooper said. “That’s why I’m leaving.”
That was when Maggie started to blubber, right there at the table over the remains of her duck salad with chilpotle lime dressing. Hooper came around to her side and tried to comfort her. Indeed, she allowed him to shelter her in his arms, thinking all the while that her baby would be a fugitive from justice in a foreign land and that, unless he was rather lucky, the law would sooner or later pluck him from hiding and subject him to the grossest imaginable indignities and terrors.
“Look, Mom, I only went out with them on two jobs. This one today and Aureole months ago.”
“Why?”
“To feel what it was like.”
“Oh, dearest one,” Maggie wept.
“Nobody got hurt. Nobody got caught. They’ll never implicate me, even if they get caught. I helped make them stars by getting their video on MTV. They owe me everything.”
“Oh, my darling Hooper. The world has gone absolutely mad.”
6
Always Room for More Madness
She went to bed not long after that with a raging headache and a heart that felt like a sash weight and CNN Headline News playing lowly in the background to keep her company until she slid down the slippery slope of dreams. She was asleep, therefore, when CNN returned to the top of their news cycle at half past midnight, and she was dreaming something not quite coherent about a mountain of chocolate ganache when the newscaster led off the broadcast with a story about the decapitation of supermodel Christy Chauvin by an apparently deranged homeless man while returning to her apartment at Central Park West and Seventy-seventh Street.
Part Ten
Climactic
1
The Burden of Memory
She woke up to the thunk of yet another car door shutting, unaware that it was the taxicab bearing Hooper to the Westport Train Station and ultimately to Kennedy Airport. A note scrawled on a sheet of her own letterhead lay on the carpet in the hall right outside her bedroom door:
Dear Mom,
I couldn’t face a tearful farewell so I am leaving early for the city and will catch a cab to the airport. Don’t worry about me. Everything will work out just fine. I’ll let you know how I am doing when I get settled somewhere (not sure whether France will work out or not). Everything is going to be all right, though. You’ll see. I love you.
Your son,
Hooper
PS Am just leaving the Saab here. Don’t sell it. I shall return!
She loved the “your son” part, as though there were another Hooper with whom this one might be confused. It almost made her forget for a moment the gravity of his situation. A mental film clip of an Easter egg lawn party, 1988, suddenly played across the cinema of her mind: little Hooper in his first blazer and tie, one shirttail out, of course, grass stains on the knees of his linen trousers, and her friends’ little girl children in their white dresses, perfect little ladies except for the ice-cream smudges around their mouths that gave them an antic look of angels playing minstrels. Wasn’t 1988 the year of cilantro and gravlax? Was that the same spring she discovered natural herbal dyes for the Easter eggs? Lovely mauves, pale gray-greens, straw yellow, and true indigo? The past was becoming cluttered like an attic that needed a thorough cleaning.
Her new constant companion, Monsieur le Anomie—a foreign gentleman in a dark suit who could be glimpsed (and then partially so) at the peripheral margins of vision—took his place at her side, right there in the upstairs hallway, and threatened to overwhelm Maggie with his eager solicitude. A deep instinct told her that the best way to shake him would be to immerse herself in some kind of purposeful activity, even if it felt at first as though she were going through the motions. Motion itself, she well knew, often magically transposed itself into purpose. Thank God for the upcoming Fairfield County League of Women Voters board of directors luncheon, she now recalled, only three days away!
She hurriedly navigated the gloomy, unpopulated hallway and stairs down to the kitchen. There she checked the catering manifest on the wall for a head count: thirteen hungry Women Voters board members. (Nevermind the ominous numerology, she paused to reflect; this was no time for side trips into the occult.) She could easily handle lunch for thirteen without assistance. It would be like the early days when she did it all herself—if not exactly fun then at least absorbing. In any case, the prospect of being saved from madness and despair by the challenges of cookery gave her sufficient reason to live for more than another twenty minutes. A menu took shape in her mind even as she put Johann Christian Bach on the stereo, switched off the monitor on the telephone answering machine, and made a pot of inky Irish tea. She even compelled herself to eat a ginger scone for energy and mental acuity, being a strong believer in, if lately not much of a practitioner of, breakfast.
She took her tea to the window. The sky outside was extraordinarily dark for a June morning. Gray-yellow clouds raced over the treetops like malicious wraiths hurrying to bring woe to the virtuous yeomen of southwestern Connecticut. The warm mug of tea clutched between her hands offered the only comforting counterpoint to these doomful intimations. Beneath this portentous sky, Walter Fayerwether just then stepped into view in the allée between the rose garden and the brick wall of espaliered plums. His crew of four followed and assembled around him. Fayerwether’s blue denim shirt, buff khakis, and silver hair glowed against the darker background of green foliage. He stood with military aplomb, clipboard in hand, like a bomber pilot in a World War II movie, briefing the boys about their morning mission. The sight of him, so obviously capable, dedicated, and reliable both reassured and unnerved Maggie to such a confounding degree that she couldn’t bear to gaze at him another moment. She therefore turned away from the window and fled into the alternate universe of cooking.
There were pâtés to make: a layered tricolor vegetarian affair constructed of beet, kale, and carrot—bound with white bean puree, gelatin, and egg—and a sturdy pork, duck, truffle, and prune composition she had first encountered in that wonderful little market street, the rue de Buci in St. Severin (the Eighth Arrondissement), that time she and Kenneth took the fast train from Paris to Lyon and brought the most extravagant picnic along (including, she now remembered with uncanny precision, a fantastic bottle of 1974 Château Lafitte). By the time she spooned the forcemeat into the prepared pans, draped with strips of Flag Harbor organic peppered Virginia bacon, her spirits had begun to lift. If M. Anomie was still in the room, then he was off in a corner absorbed in an activity of his own—perhaps a crossword puzzle titled “Hopeless Diphthongs.”
2
Just Gossip
There were, next, the individual capon and chanterelle pies to prepare, including the laborious puff pastry caps for each ramekin. She had just finished the velouté when the doorbell sounded. It was Robert Twelvetrees, as promised. He had several cardboard cartons stacked beside the welcome mat.
“Thank you for coming,” she said, feeling some regret over her treatment of him the day before, and hoping to palliate his obvious humiliation.
“Oh, I’m pleased and honored to be of service, madame,” Twelvetrees retorted with unctuous, smiling sarcasm, and Maggie was at once sorry she had even attempted to be nice to the malicious old queen. “Ahem,” he said, clearing his throat theatrically. “I’ve made every effort to account for each piece. Here’s the list and the prices I paid to the, er, lady in question.” He presented the document with a sinister flourish, reminiscent of Basil Rathbone playing Sir Guy of Gisborne.
“Is this all you paid?” Maggie said, gaping at the bill. The total came to $1,150.
“I should have thought you’d be pleased,” Twelvetrees said.<
br />
“I’m shocked that you paid so little for all this. My ruby ewer alone was worth a thousand.”
“I can revise the tally upward if it will make you happy, Mrs. Darling.”
She squinted at him with loathing and wonder. “Wait here.” She returned minutes later with a yellow bank check. The sight of it seemed to perk up Twelvetrees.
“I trust that there will be no further … uh, ramifications,” he averred. “All this talk of the authorities and so forth makes a fellow feel less than entirely at ease.”
“I just wanted my stuff back,” Maggie told him wearily.
“Well then,” he said, shifting swiftly into a cheerful gossiping mode while pocketing the check, “how about that fashion model?”
“Huh? What about whom?”
“The model who lost her head.”
“Models are always losing their heads,” Maggie said with eroding patience.
“No, this one really lost hers. And apparently it was quite a doozy. I guess you haven’t seen today’s papers.”
“Actually, I haven’t.”
“Oh,” Twelvetrees said, shifting into storytelling mode, “well, she was literally beheaded by a homeless man with a sword.”
“A sword?” Maggie yelped, her stomach clenching.
“Yes, an 1861 U.S. Army dragoon’s saber, to be precise. Said so in the Post. On Seventy-seventh Street right in front of that sunken entrance to the Museum of Natural History. He was a known character in the neighborhood. Fond of military garb, apparently. Called himself the ‘Emperor of the New Age.’”
“Sounds like a lunatic.”
“Oh, certifiable. He’d been hospitalized more than once. But you know how that works. Garbage in, garbage out. Anyway, he up and kills this poor young girl, carries the head three blocks to a sushi bar on Amsterdam Avenue in broad daylight, and sets it right there on a chair next to him. Can you imagine?”
“No. It’s too horrible.”
“And he just sits there with this head, as prim as a schoolboy, until the fellows in blue show up. What is this world coming to, Mrs. Darling?”
Maggie Darling Page 24