by Maile Meloy
If she wasn’t made frantic by visitors, she was alone with a nervous stomach, and Gautier’s talents were wasted on unsalted oatmeal and consommé. He had begun to chafe, she knew, and to look at her with open disdain.
Gautier was French, so archness and superiority were expected, but the new Argentine maid had begun to imitate him. Josephine scolded herself for choosing the pretty one. It was always a mistake to choose the pretty one. The guests were partial to Magdalena, and the girl surely hoped that one might fall in love with her heart-shaped face and marry her. Or that someone might take her to work in a fashionable house where she would meet all of society, and there a man might marry her. But it would never happen. Josephine wanted to shake the girl and tell her it would never happen .
And then there were the guests themselves: a terribly fat man, someone’s vulgar brother, had sat on the Marie Antoinette chair and broken the leg off, sending Josephine into a rage. Another smoked in bed and burned a hole right through the new sheets. Josephine couldn’t control her anger. She shouted at Magdalena, and sometimes even shouted at the guests. Then she took to her bed out of shame, watched telenovelas on TV, and sent word downstairs that the wind was aggravating the stiffness in her neck.
The only person who didn’t enrage her was her business manager, Fauchet, who arrived in a helicopter every month like a gift from the gods. He could smoke his little cigars and tease her all he wanted, because at night he held her in his arms and let her weep about her lost memory and the chaos of her thoughts.
It had just begun, this slippage she could feel but not control, when the baby came from Romania. The reality of the child was shocking to Josephine. It arrived red-faced and screaming from the helicopter, with a full diaper. She had almost forgotten it was coming. What did she know about children? Her mind had been fine when Saffron was young, and still her daughter despised her. What made her think she could care for this child now?
But she could, of course: she had resources, she had help. Those wretched people in Romania had nothing. The child was better off here, no matter what Josephine’s memory might do. She named the boy Tomas Josef, with the vague idea that those might be Romanian names, and he became a favorite of Magdalena, who treated him as a small prince, as her own.
As Tomas learned to talk and walk, he grew round and happy and tyrannical, beloved of such a kind, pretty girl. He lived and slept in the servants’ rooms, and days went by when Josephine didn’t see him. Sometimes she requested his presence at lunch on the patio, but he smeared his food across his face and threw it to the floor. The sight annoyed and disgusted Josephine, and the boy seemed to be growing unattractively fat. So back to the servants he would go, with instructions not to give him bread or pasta for a while.
One morning when the boy was four and a half, Josephine had a particularly bad episode with her mind. She was confused about time again, and consumed with jealousy and suspicion, and she had a scene with Magdalena that sent the maid crying from the room.
When the maid was gone, Josephine called Fauchet in France. She had a dated note she had written to herself, although she didn’t remember writing it. It said that Fauchet had promised to discuss her will. Josephine told herself she was calling for that reason, but mostly she wanted comfort. It was a Saturday, so she called him at home. His wife answered, and Josephine asked for the husband.
There was a meaningful pause, and then the wife said her husband was not home. It was a second wife, Josephine remembered, and there were children of some kind. Josephine asked politely when Fauchet would return, and the wife said she didn’t know. Then Josephine heard a man’s voice in the background, asking who it was.
“C’est ta vieille,”the wife said, not bothering to cover the mouthpiece: It’s your old woman .
“Quelle vieille?”she heard Fauchet ask in the background.
“La Flynn,”the wife said. “La folle.”
Fauchet asked for the phone, and his wife told him that there wouldn’t be any money from this crazy woman, that he was wasting his time. Fauchet said he was a business manager, this was his job. The wife said that fucking the clients was not included.
Except for the expletives, they spoke elegant French, and Josephine listened for a while with a curious detachment, and then she hung up the phone. It was an ivory-colored phone with a dial on its squat base, and she watched it, wondering if Fauchet would call her back when he finished his fight. The phone remained still and quiet, crouching there on the desk.
Her daughter was her next resource, but she couldn’t risk a phone call in which Saffron, too, refused to speak to her, so she took out a piece of writing paper. “My darling,” she wrote.
I know you don’t think I have been the perfect mother to you, but I am writing to tell you that I do love you very much and I believe something is wrong with my mind. I lose track of my thoughts.
This morning, for example, I thought you were still a child, and I was still married to your father. But darling I’m not crazy. I have moments like now, also, when I see perfectly clearly who and where I am, and I understand what happens to me in these small episodes when I am disoriented, or confused.I believe
The servants take good care of the boy, but he can’t live with the servants forever, and they watch me, and see my confusion. You know that in Argentina,only the children may inherit, but I don’t remember the details of the adoption and I fear the government may not recognize the boy. I am looking into my will, and I am inquiring with Fauchet, whose wife dislikes me. I believe the child speaks no English, a further problem.You will I realize you will say I should have thought of all this before, but that is the situation now.
If you come to Buenos Aires I will arrange a car to the house. Please consider it.
All my love,
Your mother
When she had finished writing the letter, she put down her pen and looked out at her lawn, and wondered if the gardener had been paid. The green grass stretched until it reached the trees of the windbreak. The windbreak marched diagonally toward the far field, the line obedient and orderly and strong.
Josephine tried to hold on to her moment of clarity, to her thoughts marching along as obedient and sequential as the trees, but she could already feel them start to weave and scatter. She tucked the letter into an envelope and hurried it downstairs so she wouldn’t forget to put it in the mail.
26
ABBY STAYED IN HERfather’s house and made no plans to sell it. Now that she had come home, she felt his presence there, in every room. Once she left the house and let someone else move in, he would be gone.
She worked on the novel at the kitchen table, and took a job waiting tables in town. Her parents’ friends and her friends’ parents came into the restaurant. “I thought you were in college,” they said.
“I was.”
“Oh, well,” one said. “You could have been anything, you know.”
Peter had asked if he could visit, but she had dodged the question. There was nowhere for him to stay. She couldn’t have him sleep in the house, with the way her father still felt precariously there. She couldn’t put him in her mother’s house, with Del. And if he got a hotel room, she would end up staying with him, and then she would regret it and fall apart. A week later he called again.
“I try not to feel like a stalker,” he said. “It helps that you call me sometimes. But I have a question.”
“Okay.”
“A girl from the Scripps Institute gave me her phone number, and I didn’t call her, and then I was lying awake thinking, Why can’t I get laid by a hot marine chemist? Why am I being faithful to someone who had such a violent physical reaction to me that she left town ? But I liked what happened in that room, and I think you did, too, and I’d like to try again. I’ve probably said too much now, but I haven’t said enough, before.”
Abby heard herself say, “You should call the marine chemist.”
There was a long silence. “You mean that?”
“Yes.”
>
He waited, but she didn’t change the answer. “Okay,” he said finally, and hung up.
Abby lay on the couch in her father’s living room, in the empty house, wishing her father hadn’t left her alone. It had all started there, this fucking up and not knowing what to do. Peter was too smart for her. If he found out the truth about Jamie, he would be disgusted, and she would have trusted him and lost him. She had lost her father and she had lost Jamie, and that was enough.
Mornings were the best time, when she worked on the novel and didn’t think about anything else. The shifts at the restaurant were a blur. A boy from her high school had seen her there and took her out for an awkward dinner. A man her father’s age left huge tips and finally asked if she would see a production of As You Like It with him, but she said no. If she was careful not to make eye contact, most men left her alone.
Her father still got junk mail, which she threw away. A few things came for her—a letter from the university about registration, though her class had already graduated. Celebrity gossip from Miranda, who had an internship at InStyle magazine. And a letter from Gianni in England, from a life she barely remembered. It said:
Carissima,
I am getting married, I want to tell you, I think you will be happy for me.
She is english and very sexy and voluttuosa andmaterna , like a good mother. I think this is ruin for Italian men. Blonde. And she is very rich and wears the most ridiculos shoes. I dont know what she will do in my little town, in my streets, in these shoes. But its all very erotic for me, and my father is very happy.
I think you know I can’t invite you to this wedding without alot of trouble, but I send you big kisses and hope you will wish me lucky. I think of you.
Gianni xxxx
She put the letter on the refrigerator with a magnet shaped like the state of California and wished him lucky when she went for the milk.
Then a postcard came from Peter, saying, “Marine chemist total failure. I will be in the lobby of the Catalina Hotel in S.R. this Wednesday at five p.m.” On the front of the postcard was the blocky spaceship library with the basement room.
While she worked, she left the card on the kitchen table, where she could pick it up every few minutes when she lost her concentration. She wished that Wednesday would arrive and be over with, so that she could move on. The Catalina was a pretty Spanish hotel downtown; she had been to a wedding there. She tried calling Peter to tell him not to come, but he wasn’t answering the phone.
On Wednesday, she put on Miranda’s pink skirt, which she had kept because there wasn’t time to wash it before she left school. Then she took off the skirt and put on jeans. Then she took the jeans off and put the skirt back on. She still had forty minutes before she had to be there. It wasn’t fair of him to put her on the spot like this. She couldn’t have sex with him when just a postcard had thrown her off for days. But she couldn’t not go. She was brushing her hair when the doorbell rang, and she thought sadly that Peter had made a mistake. She would have met him at the hotel, but he shouldn’t have come to the house.
She opened the door, and Jamie was on the step.
“Is it safe for you to just open the door?” he asked. “What if it wasn’t me?”
“What are you doing here?” she asked.
“Visiting my favorite niece.”
“I’m your only niece,” she said, out of habit.
“You look nice.”
“I have a job interview,” she said, sure he would see she was lying.
“What job?”
“Waitressing,” she said. “Just a better restaurant. Better tips.”
He had already stepped through the door and walked into the kitchen, with its crowded table set up as a desk. “Hey, you are writing,” he said. “But there aren’t other rooms? You can’t spread out a little?”
“I like the kitchen.” She slid Peter’s postcard under her computer when Jamie wasn’t looking.
“Are you selling the house?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why aren’t you in school?”
“Too lazy.”
“You’re the opposite of lazy.”
He wandered out into the living room, and she followed him, trying to keep him from disturbing what was left of her father in the house. He dropped himself down on the couch, and she flinched.
“I’m not doing so well,” he said.
“Why not?”
“It’s a long story. I want you to go on a trip with me.”
Abby laughed with surprise.
“Why are you laughing?”
Her eyes filled up with tears. “Jamie.”
“What?”
“I’m just getting myself together again, barely, and you come back all wild-eyed and want to go on a trip ?”
“Look,” he said. “I know we shouldn’t have done what we did.”
“Okay.”
“And I really need your help.”
He seemed to be trying for a calm and reasonable tone. He told her he had gotten engaged to a woman named Saffron, but there had been problems, and he had tried to leave.
“Did you tell her about me?” Abby asked.
“That I have a lovely niece?”
“That you fucked your niece?”
“No,” he said. “I didn’t say that.”
“Good,” Abby said. “I don’t want to be part of your pillow talk. I don’t want her looking at me funny when you’re married and have six kids.”
“I don’t think that’s likely.”
“Don’t tell her anyway.”
“I won’t.”
His fiancée’s mother had adopted a Romanian baby, but she was in her sixties, and had some kind of dementia, and couldn’t take care of the little boy.
“We’ve had some problems,” he said. “I left, but then Saffron got this letter from Argentina, and she needs me, and—I don’t know. She can’t deal with her mother alone and needs a buffer. She says that spending fifteen minutes with her mother leaves her rocking like a rhesus monkey.”
“So go.”
“I want you to come, too.”
“Are you crazy?”
“You speak Spanish,” he said. “The kid’s been raised by her mother’s Argentine servants, that’s all he speaks. I don’t speak it. Saffron doesn’t really. The mother does, but she’s sort of nuts.”
Abby studied Jamie, sitting on her father’s couch. “You’re planning some weird threesome.”
“No,” he said. “I want you there because then I’ll know how I feel about her. I want that thing you get when you take someone home to your family: you see that person more objectively. Or anyway you can see if it makes sense.”
“So take her home to Yvette and Teddy.”
“I’m not ready for that.”
“Have you asked Yvette if Margot’s your mother?”
“God, no.”
Abby checked her father’s watch. She had twenty minutes to get to the hotel. “Look,” she said. “I understand I can’t be your girlfriend, but I really can’t be your chaperone.”
“I think it will work.”
“I can’t afford it.”
“Saffron will get you a ticket.”
“That’s totally weird.”
“She’s rich. She’s making the plans now. Just consider coming with me, okay?”
To get him to leave, she said, “I’ll think about it.”
“Thank you,” he said.
She waited for his car to round the end of the block and then left for the hotel.
27
THE LOBBY OF THECatalina was quiet. An older couple was checking in at the desk, and a bellboy walked through with a long stride. Peter waited in the sitting area behind a row of potted palms. He was nervous and didn’t want to go back discouraged. His father liked to quote Isaiah Berlin, who said that teaching undergraduates was like striking matches on soap. Peter had started to think courting them was the same. Then Abby came in, and he stood up, and realized he
didn’t have any choice in the matter.
“Hi,” he said.
“Hi.”
She was wearing the pink skirt she had worn in the library, which he thought must be a signal to him, and he said, “This is a nice town,” to cover how he felt about that.
She sat down in the chair opposite him, and he wondered why he hadn’t kissed her hello. But she hadn’t kissed him, either. He sat down, too.
“I’m sorry about the marine chemist,” she said, though she didn’t sound unhappy. “How’s Poe?”
“Fine,” he said. “What do you do up here?”
“I’m still waiting tables.”
There was a pause.
“And trying to write a novel.”
“Really?” He hadn’t imagined that.
“But it’s terrible,” she said. “I don’t know what I’m doing.”
“Do you want me to read it?”
“No,” she said. “You’ll see how stupid I am.”
“I’ve already made my decision about that.”
“You’ll see you were wrong.”
“Try me.”
A girl in a hotel uniform came into the sitting area. “Did you two need anything?” she asked.
Abby shook her head, and Peter thanked the girl, and she went away.
“I have a room upstairs,” he said. The fact hung in the air between them.
“This town—” Abby finally said. “People talk here. They would come into the restaurant grinning at me if I went up there. That girl went to my high school.”
“We could go up separately.”
“I can’t.”
“I really tried to be interested in the marine chemist,” he said, “but I kept thinking about you. You’re wearing your roommate’s skirt.”
She blushed.
“I’ve thought a lot about that skirt,” he said.
There was another heavy silence. He was afraid she might run away. The skirt had given him encouragement, and he didn’t want to go home without something to take with him.
“Put your foot up on that ottoman, just for a minute,” he said.