Babylon and Other Stories (15 page)

Penny left before he knew she was there.

A few months afterwards she saw Irene, too, at the grocery store. Their carts almost collided in the cereal aisle. It was early spring but still cold, and Irene was wearing a long padded jacket and white boots; her eyes widened as she took in the sight of Penny's pregnant belly, bulging through her unbuttoned coat. When Penny said her name, the landlady looked up at her.

“When are you due, dear?” she said.

“At the end of May.”

“Are you getting lots of rest? Rest is important, you know.”

“I'm doing fine,” Penny said. She put a hand on her stomach, a gesture that had grown quickly habitual with her, a means of instant comfort. Watching tension twist the muscles of Irene's face, she knew what must be going through her mind: all the advice, the recommendations and recipes, suggested names, tips on feeding and baby furniture, the knowledge of years. The older woman's face was almost pulsing with the longing to share it. Penny steeled herself to receive the onslaught, balancing her weight on both feet, knowing she might be standing there in the aisle for a while. But Irene just stood there, smiling thinly, fixed to the linoleum.

“How's Henry?” Penny finally asked.

“He's been fitted for a new aid,” Irene said. “But he won't hardly wear it. He says he's gotten used to the silence. He says he likes the peace and quiet. Well, good luck, dear.” And with a pivot of her grocery cart she turned around and walked away. Penny
was left looking after her, then gazing up at the rows of cereals and granola bars. She'd forgotten what she came into this section to buy.

After this encounter, Irene did not call or visit. She must have thought about it, though. In fact she must've thought about it a great deal. Because in June, after the baby was born, she could not stay away. Penny was sitting by the window, enjoying the first warm breeze of summer while she nursed the baby, when a car pulled up in the driveway. She heard a door slam shut, and saw Irene coming up the driveway, carrying one of her baked goods, the sun reflecting brilliantly off the silver foil. Her shiny face was set in determination as she came to confront the unceasing wonders, the mysteries of sex and circumstance, that had brought her to the house again.

Leda calls on a Saturday afternoon to announce she's getting married the following Thursday night. “Can you come?” she asks, her voice as innocent as milk.

Cordless in hand, Nathalie moves over to the garage, where Nick is thrashing away at a rocking chair with a piece of sandpaper. He refuses to use the electric sander because he says he can't really
feel
the wood. He's turning into the Michelangelo of home improvement. When he sees her come in, he raises his eyebrows and puts up his palm in the standard I'm-not-here gesture he uses whenever his mother's on the phone.

“We wouldn't miss it,” Nathalie says.

“We are very, very pleased,” Leda says, making this “we” sound royal. Nick, whacking at the chair, keeps almost missing the arm of it, threatening to take off a layer of his own skin instead. “Martin will be thrilled.”

“How is Martin?”

“A prouder bridegroom you never saw,” Leda says.

Nathalie smiles at this; she likes Martin. He's a retired medical instrument salesman who wears threadbare cardigans and tells old-fashioned, sexist jokes. The last one she heard involved three women together in a jail cell—a Navajo, an Arapaho and a “regular
ho, from Dallas.” It's the “from Dallas” that makes her like him. Martin will be Leda's fourth husband, and coincidentally he was also her second. They were married on a whim, by a captain on a cruise ship, and divorced six months later after an argument at a party.

“Can we, you know, do anything?” Nathalie says.

“You're a dear,” Leda says, “but I'll go over this with my darling son. Could you put him on?” Nathalie holds the phone out to Nick, who shakes his head. They pantomine this back and forth—her holding, him shaking—until she hears Leda sigh pointedly on the other end. Then she drops the phone into Nick's dust-covered lap and goes back into the house.

Leda was married to Nick's father for twenty-seven years. Since he died, she's taken up marrying the way some women take up art classes or volunteer work. First it was Martin, then it was her ob-gyn—Rupert Thorne, whom everybody called by both names, including Leda, even after they were married—and now it's Martin again. For each of the weddings so far, Leda has gone whole hog, without regard for the fact that she is neither a first-time nor a youthful bride. (On the cruise ship she managed to rustle up a long white dress and a headdress made of orchids, which they apparently sold in the onboard boutique to people given to just such marital whims, and she'd browbeaten the ship's yoga instructor into serving as the maid of honor.) Each time, she says that when she was younger she didn't appreciate her wedding, and she might as well enjoy it now. This drives Nick insane. He says she's gone off the edge. Nathalie wonders, never out loud, if Nick's the best judge of the edge's location. He lost his consulting job a year ago and hasn't been able to find new work; for the past few months, instead of looking, he has been
gutting their entire house and its contents. He's into stripping things down: walls, chairs, floors. He wants everything to be authentic and unadorned. Their house, he says, has a skeletal identity that has been wrongfully and deliberately obscured over the years of its inhabitation. At Home Depot, the clerks call him by name.

When he comes out of the garage his face is dark with annoyance. He sits down on the couch in their living room, which was once wallpapered and carpeted and now is fully exposed, down to a brick wall on one side and the bare pine boards beneath their feet. At least the upholstery's still on the furniture, though Nathalie doesn't count on it sticking around for long. She wouldn't be surprised to come home and find it all reduced to wire and string.

“You won't believe what she wants,” he says. “A full-on church wedding, just like the last two. I don't even know where she found a place this fast.”

“It's the off-season, I guess,” Nathalie says.

“And you know what else? She wants me to
give her away.
I said, ‘Mom, I think you're old enough by now to give yourself away.’ ”

“What did she say?”

“She said, ‘I know, Nicholas’ ”—here he shifts into a disturbingly accurate falsetto imitation of Leda's sweetest tone of voice—“ ‘but it would mean a lot to me.’ ”

“So you're going to do it.”

“Of course I am,” he says. “She'd kill me if I didn't.”

The next few days are an avalanche of last-minute activity, Leda calling Nathalie every twenty minutes at work, Nick calling every ten to complain about Leda. He and his mother bicker constantly,
being so much alike, each of them obsessed with detail, having infinite attention spans for logistics. Whenever Leda comes over, Nick parades her through the house, talking about joists and finishes, and his mother not only nods but asks questions that make it clear she's
processing
the information. This is when Nathalie retreats to the kitchen—as yet untouched, thank God—and listens to Martin tell jokes about ho's.

When Nick and Nathalie got married, he and Leda took charge of everything: the flower arrangements, the invitations, the seating arrangements, the music. At first none of this bothered Nathalie; work was hectic, she wasn't a party organizer by nature, and she was relieved to have met a man so unconcerned with gender stereotypes that he could throw himself into wedding planning with abandon. The one thing she cared about was her dress, and she and her mother found the one whose simple straight lines and elegant drape suited her perfectly. She thought walking into the church in it—into the ceremony her husband had lovingly designed for her, for them—would feel like crossing a threshold into their life together, a border crossing to a new world. Instead, as she walked down the aisle, she felt separate and alone: the only self-contained element of the entire event.

Leda will have no such problems. She's arranging all the details and drawing everybody else in with her. She summons Nathalie on her lunch hour to help her choose a dress from the off-the-rack options at a store called Better Bridal Bargains. She sweeps out of the fitting room, all sixty years of her, in organza concoctions with full skirts, in beaded bodices and empire waistlines. She looks like a princess who's fallen victim to an evil aging spell.

“Honestly, I've always wanted to be married in a tiara,” she says. “Haven't you?”

“I guess,” Nathalie says, stealing a look at her watch. She has to be back at the office by one.

“You probably haven't,” Leda says pityingly. “You're so practical, so lawyerly. I was almost expecting you to walk down the aisle in a navy blue power suit.”

That is what Nathalie is wearing right now. She doesn't use clothes to draw attention to herself. Her outfit, like a doctor's coat or a mortician's black, enables a client to look past her, the individual woman, to the expertise she represents. Leda has never worked, having married Nick's father when she was still in college, so it would be unreasonable to expect her to understand. Nathalie looks Leda up and down. The bodice of the current dress is tight, clenching her torso into several horizontal rolls of fat.

“I'd have to vote against this one,” she says. “It's not the most flattering.”

“But it's the most
romantic,
” Leda says. “It's like Martin's proposal. He said we should just do it, life is too short, we shouldn't wait. ‘Let's get married this week,’ he said, and you know what I said, dear?”

Nathalie waits.

“I said ‘Martin Horst, when you're right, you're right.’ This dress is like a fairy tale. I'm going to take it.” She spreads the skirt out on either side, folds of fabric frothing like egg whites in her arms, and grins at herself in the mirror. Her short white hair matches the gown. She looks like she feels adored.

At home that night, Nathalie finds her husband sanding the chair again. It's a rocking chair that belonged to her grandparents, and over many years it has been painted successive layers of white, red, and green—most of which have been removed and now lie
scattered in particles around the garage floor. It's less like he's sanding the chair than pulverizing it. In fact it looks noticeably smaller, the runners spindly and weak. She worries that by the time he gets through with it, there won't be any chair left.

“Hey, look,” he says. “I'm finally down to the real color.” He points to a spot, a nondescript light brown, on the arm.

“Okay,” Nathalie says. She used to be more enthusiastic about these things before the house smelled permanently of paint stripper. “Have you taken care of the flowers?”

“Done.”

“Called everybody on the list?”

“Done.”

“Ordered the catering?”

“Done.”

“Figured out what you're going to do for Martin's bachelor party?”

This makes him look up from the light brown spot. “You're joking, right?”

“Leda was hinting that he'd enjoy having one. She said maybe you and Michael Thomas could take him out.”

Nick lowers his eyes to the light brown spot, squints at it, then bangs his head against it several times in succession. Michael Thomas is Rupert Thorne's son. He still insists on referring to himself as Leda's stepson, even though she divorced his father two years ago. (Rupert Thorne was having an affair with another patient, and apparently was always having affairs with patients.) A thin, jittery, forty-year computer programmer, Michael Thomas lives alone in an enormous house he bought early on in the tech boom. He adores Leda and took her side, one hundred percent, when his father told him about the divorce. Leda generously continues to invite him to family functions, which he always attends
bearing tasteful but extravagant gifts: fine wines, tropical flower arrangements, fruit baskets. Like most very enthusiastic people, he seems a little unbalanced.

Without answering her question, Nick goes back to sanding. He's been doing this more and more the past few months: checking out of conversations and turning instead to the project at hand. What's disturbing to Nathalie is that she doesn't even necessarily mind. After all, she already knows where the conversation would go. In the first months after the layoff she kept trying to get Nick to talk, kept trying to boost his spirits, kept trying everything she could think of.

All it accomplished was to make him mad; he said he felt like a child, like her own project to fix. It reinforced his sense that she had her life together and he didn't. “The best thing you can do,” he said, “is to leave me alone.”

Nathalie is good at leaving things alone; she doesn't like to intervene. Her work involves labor disputes, and in conference rooms she often faces clients staring at her beseechingly, begging to be told what to do next with disgruntled former employees or tough-negotiating union representatives. She always lays out options and consequences rather than recommending any one course of action. She explains their liability, the strong and weak points of the case, and that is as far as she will go. The lighter the touch, she believes, the better. But at home these days she thinks maybe she isn't just leaving things alone; maybe she's on the way to leaving.

Martin and Leda are as giddy as kids. They show up at the rehearsal dinner, at Nathalie and Nick's house, holding hands and blushing. They keep turning around and smooching and pinching each other's sagging cheeks. There is a lot of eyerolling
going on in Nick's corner of the room. Michael Thomas, who arrived staggering beneath a present the size of an oven, keeps crossing and uncrossing his arms and saying loudly, “Aw.” He says it every time they kiss, which means at least five times so far.

“She and my dad were never like this,” he says to Nathalie in the kitchen. “He was a cold bastard with her like he was with everybody else. Once he got them into bed it was all over. Conquest was the name of his game. Frankly, I never understood what she saw in him.”

Nathalie nods. After that divorce she and Nick had Leda over for dinner, and she got tipsy and confided that she'd married Rupert Thorne “for the sex.”