A Certain Age (31 page)

She was late. She had nothing to wear. She didn't want to go at all. In her underpants and bra she opened the bedroom closet, yanking winter and summer clothes alike off their hangers, throwing everything onto the floor until she found a full-striped cotton skirt, still in its dry cleaning bag, in shades of ochre, lemon and brown. It was tight around the waist. How could she have gained weight? She wanted to die. She hadn't been to the gym in ages, she hadn't gone running. At least the skirt wasn't fitted but ballooned out.

From a drawer she grabbed a tight mock-turtleneck with short sleeves, patterned with daisies in colors that matched the stripes of the skirt. Then she had to find different shoes—she would have worn flat white patent leather thongs, but she hadn't had a pedicure and her toenail polish was old and the wrong color; at least with the mushroom-colored sandals, the front bit covered her toes. She pulled out shoe after shoe from the closet, but there wasn't a single one that had its mate anywhere nearby.

Practically in tears she finally found a pair of dark-blue Belgian shoe-slippers she had never had properly soled, the bottom was only thin leather, not really intended for street wear. But she stuck them on her feet, grabbed a dark blue satin bag with gold-chain straps and—flinging in her keys, money, credit card, lipstick, compact and the robin's-egg-blue box from Tiffany's, tied with white ribbon and containing the silver baby-rattle—headed out the door.

5

The shower was being
held in the apartment of Victoria Ford, who lived in a Fifth Avenue building only a few blocks away. She didn't know Victoria well; and she hadn't even seen Katherine Monckton, who was having the baby, in almost a year. But in the days when she had been roommates with Allison, the three of them had spent a lot of time together. It started to rain on the way over, soft, plopping gray drops that increased in intensity; by the time she arrived her shoes were wrecked.

The doorman ushered her in with a wave of his hand—appar-

ently he knew Victoria was expecting quite a number of guests— and directed her to the elevator on the left side of the foyer, where an elevator operator closed the old-fashioned metal gate, polished brass, by hand. There was only one door in the outside hall on the fifth floor, where a coatrack and umbrella stand had been set up. A man in uniform stood by the rack, looking at her disdainfully while she dripped and squished down the hall.

She came into the party as miserable as a sparrow huddled on a branch in the driving rain. A bar, complete with bartender, had been set up in the foyer, which had been decorated to resemble a miniature library. The shelves were filled from top to bottom with what, on closer inspection, turned out to be a variety of coffee-table-type books:
America's Country Kitchens, Indian Moghul Palaces, Swimming Pools, The History of Buttons, Collecting Hats, Honky-Tonk Highway, Birds of the Serengeti
—all of them glossy, oversized, fifty-dollar books, hundred-dollar books, probably unreadable, unopened, reeking of fresh ink.

She took a glass from a tray in front of the bartender, something pale-green and repulsive in appearance, but which turned out to be delicious, limeade and vodka. There were various appetizers on the table—a huge wheel of Maytag blue cheese and water crackers, smoked salmon and cream cheese on toast points—and she grabbed a couple of these before a waitress passed, carrying a platter of grilled chicken on skewers, with some sort of dipping sauce in a bowl in the center.

She slid the chicken into her mouth and poked the skewer back into a porcupine-shaped stand. The chicken was cold and dry, but she was so hungry she could have eaten the whole platter. She followed the waitress through the living room doorway.

The party was in full swing. Twenty-five or so women had gathered in a circle, seated on chairs and sofas, around Katherine, who was unwrapping the presents. Florence put her somewhat bedraggled Tiffany box on top of the pile heaped to one side. She recognized Tracer in the group, and Allison, and a woman she had actually known and grown up with in California, who had moved to New York at about the same time as she.

Then she saw Lisa Harrison, whom she hadn't seen since Lisa's party for the Egyptian jewelry designer. She had never called to thank her. Maybe Lisa wouldn't remember. She was dressed in a baby-pink suit trimmed with what appeared to be upholstery fringe—expensive, maybe Chanel?—her hair upswept in a casually elaborate coif. On her lap was her dog—a slavering, gargoyle-faced, fawn-colored thing, with a protruding tongue that could have been mistaken for a draped strip of raw bacon. It wore a pink patent leather collar that matched Lisa's suit. She looked incredibly expensive, but at the same time wasted. For a moment Florence was relieved: here was someone even worse off, psychically, than she, until she remembered how bedraggled she must look.

She couldn't be certain, but she suspected the woman whose back was to her was Natalie de Jongh. She took a step to one side, making sure that even if the woman turned around she wouldn't see her; she wasn't certain yet what she should do. Katherine was holding up a baby's silver mug while the women surrounding her made little encouraging noises. What could a baby possibly do with a silver mug, except dent it or break its own teeth? Next came a mobile—apparently intended to be hung over the infant's bed— from which dangled large black-and-white pigs with gilded wings.

There was a minute pair of black cowboy boots; a tiny black-leather motorcycle jacket; a stuffed koala bear; a large hideous yellow plastic windup music box in the shape of a smiling crescent moon that played "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star." Each item was crooned over with sounds of hushed excitement, as if fireworks were going off. A baby's antique hairbrush of vegetable-ivory; a marquetry picture-frame. A porridge bowl decorated with Peter Rabbit was accompanied by a set of the works of Beatrix Potter. "Oh, how cute!" She tried to join in the general enthusiasm. The entire ritual seemed as odd as some ceremony performed by a Nubian village tribe or remote mountain people in Myanmar.

The formalities were over. All the presents had been unwrapped. Katherine's friends stooped to gather the shimmery piles of tissue, the pink clouds and yellow sunbursts of wrapping that

littered the floor. The mother-to-be sat on her throne, legs spread beneath her stomach, smug and regal, with the air of a princess or potentate.

Some of the women got up to inspect the presents; others headed back to the bar. The men—friends of Katherine's, husbands or boyfriends of the women—began to enter. With their advent the atmosphere began to liven up. They were all boyish stockbroker types, with sickened expressions; a cocktail party was one thing, but a baby shower was only a reminder of their imprisonment, past or future. The women were all extremely elegant. Victoria Ford, the hostess, stopped to say hello to Florence on her way to the kitchen. "How are you!"

"Fine! I can't believe the summer is practically over!"

"Oh, I know," said Victoria. "I can't believe it either!"

"Aren't you wonderful to do all this for Katherine. It's so exciting that she's having a baby! This is so nice."

"Do you like it?" Victoria seemed to think she was talking about the apartment. "We just bought the apartment next door and we're going to combine them. I've decided I really want to start having children, right away, and we'll need a lot more space."

"This place looks quite big, though."

"Does it? But it just looks that way. It's three bedrooms, but I need a study and Hank needs a study, and then we'll need a room for the baby and a room for the nanny. Excuse me a second." Florence wondered what Victoria would be doing in her study— reading the coffee-table books? She bit the inside of her cheek, trying to retrain herself not to have this sort of thought.

"Tracer!" She reached out and grabbed her by the arm. Tracer was rich, but with her big horsy face, she looked kind; she looked like someone who in the end would be her true friend. "Tracer! I didn't know you were back yet. Did you get my note?"

"Yes, thank you." Tracer swept nastily past. For a moment Florence wondered if she had actually been physically attacked. The sensation was as if she had been stabbed, liver and intestines spilling onto the floor for everyone to see. Her hands went to her stomach.

If she had done something to Tracer, couldn't she at least tell her? She tried to reshape her humiliation into fury. Perhaps she had hurt Tracer's feelings, betrayed her in some way—but she just couldn't guess what it was. People had an obligation to tell others if they were hurt or wounded. Then she could apologize. Under such circumstances, it seemed to her,
she
was the one who had the right to be angry, not Tracer.

A tall woman in a mannish gray-brown Italian suit slouched along the wall next to Florence. "Oh, God," the woman said. "I don't know whether coming to these things makes me anxious to have a baby, or anxious not to have one. All I know is, it makes me anxious."

"Mmm," said Florence noncommittally.

"I'm Anne Barrett, by the way. I think we met a few years ago, at something of Katherine's."

"Oh, yeah, yeah, right. Vaguely, vaguely. I'm Florence Collins."

"So do you have any children, Florence?"

"No. Though I'd like some. I think. You?"

"Well, my husband has custody of his kids, from his first marriage, so they live with us. We get along very well!"

"Oh? How old are they?"

"Cary is fourteen and Louise is twelve." Anne was boyishly attractive, slim; her face had good bones. Her hair was tied back, she wore very little makeup. Florence dimly remembered Anne had been in television—broadcasting, some kind of entertainment show.

"A boy and a girl?"

"No, two girls. They like me better now than their own mother. Jeremy wouldn't mind if we didn't have kids of our own. The house is so huge, in Bedford Hills, I stopped working after I got married, and I'm thinking that I'm getting to the point where I wouldn't mind either. Of course, then I'm sure I'd spend the rest of my life being even more anxious. Did you hear about Natalie and John's little girl?"

"Who?"

"Natalie and John de Jongh—you know them, don't you? Natalie's here, somewhere. I can't believe she actually came to the party. I guess she's at the point where she can't bear to stay home."

"What happened?"

"The little girl—I guess she was about eight or nine—she just died."

"Claudia? She
died?
I can't believe it! What happened?"

"You know, I'm not really sure. I just heard. She had been sick for a while, though, I think."

"Oh, God. How awful." Without excusing herself she staggered back to the bar. The bartender replenished her sticky green drink. Allison, her former roommate, came up alongside.

"Florence! Hi! How are you! I can't believe I made it back in time for this from my trip. It was unbelievable! Florence, you have got to do it—it was just so fabulous. Honestly, I'm not making this up. To spend three weeks on a canal boat through the French countryside—it was just like a dream. I feel like I've been away for ten years in a Zen monastery. Honestly, I'm just so collected now—it gave me time to think, to meditate, to really evaluate my life—and the kids loved it, of course, although thank God we had the nanny with us full-time, or I truly—"

Florence interrupted. "Allison," she said. "What happened to Claudia?"

"To who?"

"To Claudia. Natalie and John's kid?"

"Oh, my God, it's just awful, isn't it? Can you believe it?"

"What happened?"

"I don't know, exactly. Apparently it was some type of pneumonia."

She sank with disbelief. It must have been a joke, it just couldn't have been real. Children didn't die that way; they didn't die of pneumonia, except perhaps in Victorian novels. She was sickened by her own behavior. It would have been so easy to send the little girl a get-well card or a horse book. An image came to her of Claudia hauled out of the water, her fragile, pale skin

almost translucently blue, a dab of cherry jam trickling from her mouth. Even then Claudia was determined—with the determination of a far older person—to punish her mother. "Pneumonia! But people don't die nowadays from pneumonia! They have all kinds of antibiotics—"

"Well, apparently, earlier in the summer she practically drowned. They didn't realize it at the time, but some water must have gotten into her lungs. Anyway, you know how they ended up closing the beaches? The bacteria count, some kind of sewage thing? I'm not sure of all the details, but whatever she had, if it was pneumonia or whatever, didn't respond to the antibiotics. It might have been the same kind of thing that old people get, and AIDS patients, cyto- . . . cyto-something-or-other."

"I can't believe it."

"Let me tell you, I was just so relieved that we
didn't
spend the summer in the Hamptons. There was no way I would have been able to keep the kids out of the water—"

Allison was still chattering aimlessly when out of the corner of her eye Florence noticed that Natalie had spotted her. She crossed the room with a look of such pure hatred on her face Florence could feel herself shriveling, her tender flesh seared as if she were being dipped in a bucket of salt and alum.

6

"
I
want to let
you know that what you have done to me—to my family—has been indescribably cruel."