“Leo FM Grater,” I replied, “the pride of the Yankees.” When he hugged me, I felt small. He is the only person who has ever made me feel that way. I don’t know why I love that so.
“What are you doing here?” he asked, letting me go, looking around, searching the crowd. I felt a surge of rage at both Meghan and Evan. Then Leo grinned and pointed. To one side of the crowd was a limo driver in a dark suit holding a sign. WELCOME HOME, LEO! it said.
“That’s not our driver,” I said.
“No, that’s the guy Mom sent. She called me in Spain and set it all up last week. I told her I couldn’t stick around because of a big comp lit paper I’ve got to crash overnight. So she said she’d send a car to drive me right up to school. Beats the train.” Leo chuckled drily. “Crossed signals?” he said. “Miscommunication? Duplication of effort? All of the above? Or are you just so happy to see me that you had to drive all the way out to Queens? We can get dinner, anyhow, and then I’ll get the guy to drive me to school. But if I bomb on this paper, I’m blaming you, and you know your sister will be pissed. And when Mom is pissed, watch out.”
The other boys eddied around us, some to cabs at the curb, others nodding to drivers and handing over bags, a few to their parents. “You want to offer anybody a ride?” I murmured against his boy-fragrant shoulder.
He pulled back and looked at me, his mouth up at one corner with what would be a smile if you were a person with a perpetual sense of irony. His nanny had always said Leo was an old soul. At the very least, he has eyes that will not lie no matter how much he bids them try. If Leo loves you, they are like lights behind copper-colored glass. If he disapproves they go flat as a mud puddle.
“I think just us, Bride.” And I knew he knew about what had happened on the show.
“You guys all thought I was on a farm farm,” he said when I’d sheepishly sent Meghan’s car away and we’d climbed into the one Evan had insisted on sending for me. “But it was a farm like the Holdernesses’ farm, or the Beltons’.” Both were families who lived near Meghan and Evan’s country place, and the closest they came to farming was that occasionally the wives would pick chives to throw into the eggs on Sunday morning, feeling extraordinarily domestic. I liked Vannie Holderness, who always acted as though Meghan was just another guest, but when she waxed poetic about how uppity and arriviste the Hamptons are, it was hard not to crack wise about her garden, which was planted with nothing but white flowers.
In the backseat, Leo cracked open a bottle of spring water. “These people had about three thousand acres and a whole stable full of horses. Really, really nice, though. The mom was great. She just raises the horses, does stud stuff, shows them sometimes. He’s in the government, but I think he must have done something else before. Or maybe she did. All I know is they have a Picasso over the fireplace.” Leo looked out the window. “Like Mrs. Booth would say, a big Picasso. Not an etching.”
Peter Booth is Leo’s best friend. The fact that he is a great kid who wants to become a pediatric oncologist proves that it’s nature, not nurture, that makes the man. His mother is one of the most loathsome climbers in all of New York, which is a little like saying someone is the chicest person in Paris. Hadley Booth was incapable of mentioning Leo without mentioning Meghan, which was why Leo and Peter spent most of their time at Leo’s house.
“Anyhow, the señora is really smart and interesting, but just like you she’s got her weird gossipy things she’s interested in. And one of them is this magazine called Olé! which is filled with movie star stuff and the royal family and all that. And last week she’s reading Olé! in the den, and she suddenly looks up as though she got bit by a bee. She goes into the kitchen and starts talking very quietly in French to Georges. The dad.”
“French?”
“They speak German, too. English. Americans are so bad. They think one language is enough. It was kind of embarrassing to only speak two. I think I’m gonna take Chinese next semester. Anyway, their kid, who’s another Georges, only they call him Googy, he’s like, What’s up? I said maybe one of their friends was in the magazine, but he said they don’t have those kinds of friends. So we have a normal night, the parents go out but they’re still acting wack, so we find the magazine in the trash and we’re paging through it and there’s a big story. Big story. Not as big as the one about the Spanish soap star and the soccer player, but still pretty big. You want to know how they say ‘fucking asshole’ in Spanish?”
“Watch your mouth.”
“You’re talking to the wrong person.” It’s true. Leo has been notoriously abstemious in the matter of profanity since he grew out of the purely imitative toddler phase. It is as though he feels one sewer mouth in the family is enough. “How’s Mom, anyhow? Are the picture guys all over her?”
“She’s away, hon. She left early for Grosvenor’s Cove. Did she tell you about that?”
“Yeah yeah yeah, that’s right. They’re gone, huh? Yeah, she made this big thing about how they were supposed to leave just when I was coming back and how they would postpone so we could all be together, and I was, like, I’m not going to be there anyhow, save it until after this term’s finally over and we can all hang out. How’s Dad holding up? I bet he’s digging this a little bit. He’s been telling her for years that her mouth was going to get her in trouble.”
“He’s in Tokyo. He and I were both a little shaky on your travel plans. We should have known your mom had it all down.”
“She went to Jamaica alone?”
I nodded. The car veered sharply around a cab on the highway with its hood thrown up and smoke rising from the engine, a man with a white turban kicking its side. A parabola of gray sleet spray rose and fell with a sound like gravel onto Leo’s window.
“Weather sucks here,” he said idly. “How’s Irving?”
I leaned against him, and he put his arm around my shoulder. The rocking of the closed car made me feel sick to my stomach; that, and the dread. I had a little sign I put up during parenting classes: PARENTS ARE THE BEDROCK ON WHICH A CHILD BUILDS HIS HOUSE. I also had one that said “God couldn’t be everywhere so he created mothers,” and “Any man can be a father, but it takes someone special to be a Dad.” They all felt like treacly clichés, and they were all true. The women in the class loved them.
I leaned harder into Leo. “Aren’t you cold?” I said. He was still wearing just a T-shirt. Inside it said FIGHT THE POWER, but it was turned inside out so he could get a second day of wear out of it.
“Man, I missed New York,” he said as the skyline rose on the other side of the tunnel.
“Yeah, but you’ve got a month more of clean air and green grass to look forward to.”
“Way overrated,” he said.
“Welcome home!” cried Rafael as he reached for the door of the car. But Leo had it open before he did. “Mr. Sanchez,” Leo said. My nephew is a prince. The doormen at expensive New York buildings are ritualistically stripped of their names the moment they put on the ridiculous faux-military coats that go with the job. Like the nannies and the housekeepers, they are reduced to first names, never mind honorifics. But Leo told me once he found that disrespectful.
The apartment occupies the entire eighth floor of the building, with the obligatory umbrella stand, hall mirror, and half-moon table (“The new money girls call it a demilune,” Meghan said) to hold mail and keys and spare change just opposite the elevator. One of the doormen had thoughtfully provided a large basket to hold the mail, which looked as though it had piled up over the course of a year, not a week. Most of it was the usual: catalogs, magazines, engraved invitations to dinners and parties. Mailed, perhaps, before Ben Greenstreet and his surrogate had made the mistake of taking their love story to the unblinking eye of Rise and Shine.
“I thought Mom just left,” Leo said, looking at the pile of mail, dumping his backpack on the black-and-white tiled floor, and peering at his own face in the mirror.
I opened the door. The place was even stuffier than it h
ad been when I’d packed for my sister, and dust motes glistened in the half-light coming through the windows. I jumped at a faint staccato tapping sound and then realized it had started sleeting and the sharp little shards of ice were hitting the living room window.
Why is it that in horror stories they make a point of having pictures with eyes that follow you around the room? Don’t they all do that? All the faces in all the silver frames filled with Meghan’s utterly charmed life, Meghan and Evan in their wedding clothes, black and white; Meghan and Evan with Leo between them, left and right; Meghan and the princess of Wales, Meghan and the president, Meghan and the Dalai Lama. Meghan holding Leo. Meghan standing behind Leo. Leo standing behind Meghan. I looked out the window at the cars on Central Park West, the faint pinpoints of their headlights blurring in the sleet storm. A hansom-cab horse strained against his bit at the curb as motorists edged around him carelessly. Rafael the doorman stepped off the curb with a whistle in his mouth, and he must have blown it, because a cab veered toward the awning. But there was no sound through the triple-glazed panes except the sleet hitting the glass and falling.
I turned and Leo was gone. I walked down the long corridor to the bedrooms and found him standing by his desk, haphazardly handling things, picking up a book, putting down a pencil. The room of a boy who has left home is a sad and empty place. The pens in the mug are dried out, the clothes left in the drawers those that have been outgrown or never really suited in the first place, the photographs on the bulletin board dull and dusty and curled at the edges. I hoped Meghan stayed away from this corner of the apartment.
Framed on the bureau was a photograph of Meghan and Evan. They were cutting a cake, a five-tier monstrosity with overblown roses made of icing and a cheap plastic bride and groom on the top. In a cloak-and-dagger fashion that he’d obviously enjoyed, Leo had thrown his parents a surprise party two years ago, for their twentieth anniversary. While the customary caterers had produced the food, Leo had insisted we go to an ancient bakery on upper Amsterdam Avenue and get the most flamboyant and old-fashioned wedding cake imaginable, with icing that tasted like sugar and shortening. In the photograph, Meghan and Evan are grinning and holding an ivory-handled knife, her hand atop his. I no longer trusted their smiles. The invitation to the party had had a photo from their wedding, with the line “And they said it wouldn’t last….” above.
“So, okay,” Leo said, not turning around. “My dad is in, what, Japan?”
“Tokyo,” I said. “On business.”
“On business. Right. And my mom is in Jamaica.”
“On vacation.”
“Right. Alone on vacation.”
“At Grosvenor’s Cove.”
“Right.” He turned and looked at me, his eyes narrowed. “What’s going on, Bridey?”
“Things are weird around here, honey.”
“Yeah. Yeah, I got that.” Leo looked back down at his desk. Then he mumbled something. It almost sounded as though he was just clearing his throat.
“What?” I said.
He jammed his hands into his pants pockets without looking up and stared down at the snow globe on his desk, the one he used for a paperweight. Inside was the spiky skyline of New York. He didn’t speak for a long time. I waited, and finally he said, a little louder, “Split?”
“It seems that way, sweetheart. I think you need to talk to your father about it. I feel like I’m as much in the dark as you are. I’m sorry. I don’t get it, either.”
“Oh, Bridey,” he said softly. “You’re too much. There’s nothing to get. It just happens. People are married, then they’re not married. You go away and come back and call a guy to hang out and, it’s like, Oh, different apartment. My mom’s apartment, my dad’s apartment, my mom’s new boyfriend’s apartment. It happens all the time. All the time. Except…except I guess I just thought we were different.” He kicked at the Oriental rug with his big shoes. “Stupid,” he said. “Stupid.”
One by one, tears began to fall on the toes of his walking shoes, staining them. Leo wears these white leather walking shoes, the kind designed for old men. He has about six pairs, and he somehow keeps them very clean. I wrapped my arms around him, and for a moment he shook all over and it was just like holding Meghan except that she is small and Leo is big, bigger than me now. But for both of them it was as though an earthquake was passing through their bodies, as though there had been a seismic shift in the plates of the sternum that protect the heart.
“Bridey, I can’t stay here one more minute,” he finally said.
“That’s okay. Want to go out to eat somewhere?”
“Nah. Nah, let’s go to your house. Is that all right? Maybe get some pizza.”
“What about your paper?” I started to say, and then stopped.
By the time we got back downstairs, the sleet had turned to snow and it was beginning to stick to the tree branches angling across the stone wall from Central Park and to the back of that poor horse, whose driver was smoking a cigarette. But Rafael got us a cab.
“Thanks, Mr. Sanchez,” Leo said as he got in.
“Vaya con Dios, Señor Leo,” Rafael said, and when I looked up into the man’s black eyes, they were so full of affection and sympathy that I shifted sideways in the backseat of the car so Leo would not see it. The door slammed, the windows clouded with condensation, and we drove off with a spray of salted slush.
THE MOST COMMON misconception about New York City is that you can lose yourself there. You can understand why people from Ames, Iowa, or Eugene, Oregon, might think this. There are apartment buildings that hold as many people vertically as many small towns do horizontally, and if you ride the elevators, you often get the sense not only that none of those people have ever spoken to one another but that none of them have ever made eye contact.
But New Yorkers know one another. Some of them know one another in the fashion of a man I once met at a cocktail party, whose sister was married to the younger brother of the first guy I dated when I moved to New York, which I suppose is the way people know one another in Savannah or San Francisco, too. But there is another way in which we know one another as well, as familiar strangers. I know the family who lives in the duplex apartment in the brownstone behind mine. The girl has a desk that looks out the window directly across from mine. She is a studious child who sits reading, taking notes, long after the light has turned from ash to slate gray. Her brother is older, and he pulls his blinds down often now, which probably means he is lying on his bed with the door locked and a skin magazine next to him. Unlike so many people in my neighborhood, the parents actually seem to use their kitchen for cooking on many nights, and sometimes when it is warm enough to have windows open but not warm enough to have the air-conditioning on, I can smell the sharp, savory aroma of a stew drifting from their windows.
It is like the smell of family life, a life I have known mainly secondhand. Our mother didn’t cook, and the black woman who tended house, and us, made casseroles or desserts at her own home and then brought them to our kitchen to be reheated. Our mother and father ate at the club or at restaurants four or five evenings a week. “Now you girls eat something,” our mother would say vaguely, waving a hand with a sapphire ring that looked like a cold blue eye. That’s one of the few things I can remember her saying, that and “I couldn’t be more exhausted,” which she seemed to breathe into the phone no matter who was on the other end. (Later I realized that if that plaint was followed by an irate “You have no idea!” it probably meant she was talking to our aunt Maureen, who worked as a surgical nurse and so knew exactly what real exhaustion felt like.) More often than not, Meghan and I would make peanut butter sandwiches and put the food back in the fridge. “Oh, we went out to eat with our parents,” Meghan said when Nelly asked. Even then she was inventing a facsimile for public consumption, so much better than the original. I learned early to keep quiet about the lies that made us sound like more than we really were.
I know at least a dozen people on my block b
y sight, and occasionally I will learn enough about them to give them names as well as faces. Not proper names, but classifications. There is the professor at Columbia—every block seems to have one of those—and the poetry editor. There is the mother of the three teenage girls and the mother of the badly behaved boys. There is the old man who is an improbable wizard on the computer and spends his days trading stocks online. And I am an amateur compared with Tequila. Sometimes we walk through the neighborhood around the office and she keeps up a commentary as though she is Thornton Wilder and this is a ghetto version of Our Town: this girl getting with a married man from work, that boy going to Bronx Community because he failed the firefighters’ exam, this one pregnant, that one selling dope. “I hear stuff,” she says to explain how she knows the backstory of every life that crosses her path on Mount Morris Avenue. That’s why she’s good at her job, too, because she hears stuff: a family who needs a housekeeper that might hire one of our women, an apartment opening up where one of our families might be able to live. If Tequila lived in Bees Knees, North Dakota, it would be impossible for her to know more about her neighbors than she does just by keeping her ears open while she pushes her cart at the C-Town or stands in line to register her son for the subsidized day camp at Fordham.
But more than that, it is impossible to get lost in New York because, by some defiance of the law of averages, you keep running into people you know on the street, on the subways, and in restaurants. Meghan has a name for this; she calls it the “boomerang effect,” and she always says that it is those you least want to see whom you will run into unexpectedly. “For instance,” she once said, “if I have a terrible assistant and I fire her, she will be in the ladies’ at the University Club when I’m meeting someone for lunch, visiting someone in the same building when I’m going to dinner, or shopping at Saks when I’m on my way to buy a coat.”
“You haven’t been in Saks in years. They send clothes to the house for you.”
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