Emma's Table (5 page)

The last nurse she'd seen had given her a more reasonable program, at least, one that acknowledged the facts of life. That a little girl needed a snack, for instance, if all the other kids in class were having one; that Tina couldn't afford to buy those specially packaged diet meals. She'd been following the new diet religiously: baking chicken instead of frying it, serving applesauce for dessert, and never a portion bigger than the little girl's clenched fist.

“Will you have a snack with me?” Tina asked, carrying the bright blue bowl of carrot sticks to the table.

Gracie clapped her hands, skipping in one last circle all around the room.

Tina had lost plenty of weight since they'd started the new diet. Her clothes hung loose all around her, and she hadn't needed to lose an ounce to begin with. It made her look even lovelier, though, a little haunted around the eyes—so large and liquid brown—her cheeks all hollowed out.

Gracie frisked over to the table, like an unwieldy baby animal from some nature program on TV.

She hadn't seemed to lose a pound.

Tina watched the girl's face fall when she saw the bowl of carrot sticks. She watched her pull it right back together again too—the way she always did. Sometimes she wished that Gracie would just ask for a cookie. That would make this so much easier. She'd have a right to be angry then. But the little girl never breathed a word of complaint. She just sat down at the table, looking vaguely ashamed of herself.

Tina felt another pang.

“Go ahead, sweetie,” she said, smiling at the girl.

Gracie reached for a handful of carrot sticks—just a little greedy—her chubby fingers twice as fat as any carrot in the bowl. Tina took a handful herself. She bit into one, ever hopeful, but they tasted of nothing, just like always. Still she chewed and chewed, smiling at her daughter all the while.

The little girl smiled right back.

“They're tasty,” she said. “Aren't they, Mommy?”

 

“
LOT TWELVE THIRTY-TWO
,”
BENJAMIN WHISPERED,
pronouncing it just like Emma taught him to, as two smaller numbers. “Exceptional Desk by Jean Prouvé.” He'd been murmuring the lot numbers since the auction began, the titles too. He read them off the large television screen at the front of the room—like a good-luck habit he was afraid to break.

He hoped no one heard him.

“We'll start the bidding at seventy-five hundred dollars,” the auctioneer boomed, leaning into his microphone.

Just a plain wooden top, Benjamin thought, and a pair of
black legs. It didn't look so “exceptional” to him. Seventy-five hundred dollars was a great deal of money as far as he was concerned.

He'd begun to grow nervous again, after a brief spell of relative calm. The Nakashima table was up next. His fingertips felt clammy against the fleshy heel of his hand; he squeezed the paddle tight—as if he might need to hoist it high at any second.

It's not even my turn, he thought, so annoyed with himself.

He willed his fingers to loosen their grip, felt grateful to them when they did—on command even. He wiped his sweaty palm against a corduroy thigh.

Happily for Benjamin, there was a great deal of spirited bidding on the Exceptional Prouvé Desk—a small reprieve. He dreaded the arrival of Lot 1233.

He looked back at Emma, sitting on the other side of the room. She was chatting amiably with an Asian man. Cool as a cucumber, he thought—not nervous at all. He hoped she'd be happy with his performance.

Benjamin flinched when the gavel crashed down.

Curtains, he thought—the pounding gavel like a death knell to him, the desk an oaken corpse with thin black legs, ready to be carted off to the morgue.

“Sold for nineteen thousand dollars,” the auctioneer cried. “To bidder number…,” and then he paused, waiting for the winner to hoist his paddle one last time. “Two hundred and forty-five,” the auctioneer called, closing the book on the Prouvé desk.

Benjamin gripped his paddle tight. It was his turn now.

He felt his shoulders locking into place, somewhere up
around his ears. He willed them downward—tried mightily to relax—but he was well beyond that sort of control by now.

“Lot twelve thirty-three,” he whispered, as soon as the numbers appeared on the television screen, “Nakashima Table in English Walnut.” Benjamin heard the auctioneer speaking the same words, nearly in unison.

“We'll start the bidding at fifteen thousand dollars,” the auctioneer said, leaning back into his curvy microphone, as if he were going to take a sniff—a fragrant black lily sprouting up from the oak. “Do I hear fifteen?” he asked.

Benjamin hesitated for just a second.

Emma had told him to jump in early. “And stay in too,” she'd said.

He felt a flash of heat inside his sweater, and the beginning of moisture beneath his arms. He forced himself to raise the paddle up, but he knew he'd been too slow. The auctioneer confirmed as much, nodding his head at someone behind him. “Fifteen thousand from the lady in blue,” he called, his voice a pleasant singsong. “Looking for sixteen now.”

Benjamin jerked his paddle high, nodding his head when the auctioneer looked at him. He liked the way it felt. Sixteen thousand dollars was a lot of money to him; he was proud of amassing such a sum.

“Do I hear seventeen?” the auctioneer called.

There was a brief pause.

Could it be so simple, he wondered?

“Seventeen thousand from the lady in blue,” he heard, “and eighteen from the gentleman at the back.”

He supposed not.

Benjamin raised his paddle up again, a little more smoothly that time. He was getting the hang of it. The fear that made
his movements all jerky at first seemed to have been washed away by liquid of another stripe: a sharp adrenaline flooded his system, lubricating all his joints. He wanted to win—and not just for Emma anymore.

“Nineteen thousand from the young man.”

He basked in the attention.

“And twenty from the lady.”

Then the auctioneer looked off to his left. “Twenty-one from the bidder on the phone,” he said, pointing to a young woman sitting off by herself. She had three beige telephones on the table in front of her—like birds sitting on a fence—one of the receivers up at her ear.

Emma was right: it
did
go fast.

Benjamin lifted his paddle again, unbidden this time.

“Twenty-two thousand from the young man,” the auctioneer cried quickly, squeezing the air from every syllable, from the gaps between words too. He moved right on to the lady in blue, then on to the gentleman sitting at the back. Benjamin wheeled around in his chair to take a peek at the competition—the lady in blue, who was much older than the sort of lady he expected, and the gentleman at the back: the Asian man who was sitting next to Emma.

That's a coincidence, he thought.

At thirty-four thousand, the lady dropped out. She was replaced quickly by a middle-aged man with an overtanned brow, his thin gray hair scraped into a weaselly ponytail. The auctioneer called him “Man in Vest.”

Benjamin admired the auctioneer's tact. That vest was about the last thing he would have noticed.

“Looking for thirty-six,” the auctioneer called.

Benjamin raised his paddle, but he was feeling tired—
running this race of no determined length. He didn't know whether to sprint or settle in for the long haul.

Is it me, he wondered, or is the pace slowing down?

He felt almost certain they were going to take a breather at forty-two thousand. The girl with the phone pushed up against her ear was trying to coax another increment from her bidder on the line. She was talking a great deal into the tan mouthpiece, but Benjamin couldn't make out what she was saying. Whatever it was though, it wasn't enough. He watched her shaking her head at the auctioneer, pressing her lips into a thin little line. She hung up the receiver.

Ponytail Man brought the bidding to forty-three.

Benjamin sailed past him.

Then the man with the ponytail dropped out too.

It was just him then, and the Asian man sitting next to Emma.

“Forty-five.”

“Forty-six.”

“Forty-seven.”

“Forty-eight.”

“Forty-nine.”

“The young man at fifty,” the auctioneer cried, like the title of a painting or an impressionistic poem. “Fifty-one at the back.”

Benjamin nodded.

“And fifty-two thousand from the young man,” the auctioneer called.

There was a long pause—an unnatural quiet, as if everyone in the room had decided to stop breathing.

“Any more?” the auctioneer asked, his eyes roving all around.

Benjamin turned in time to see the Asian man shaking his head. He looked defeated. Sayonara, he thought—immediately begrudging his choice of words. He tried to forgive himself. It wasn't the worst thing in the world, he thought: just the competition of the auction room leaching out—like air hissing from a punctured tire.

“Fair warning,” the auctioneer called, like a conductor on a train—his vowels starting small, then opening wide. He was looking all around for some kind of last-ditch effort.

Why won't he let me win? Benjamin wondered.

The auctioneer's vigilance hurt his feelings.

But the Asian man had made up his mind, and the girl on the phone was sitting back—all her lines vacant. The old lady in blue was at the coffee bar, pouring herself a glass of water. Benjamin couldn't find the man with the wormy ponytail anymore. Poor Loser in Vest, he thought.

It seemed a little late for someone new to be jumping in.

And still he worried.

The pounding gavel made him flinch.

“Sold,” the auctioneer cried, “for fifty-two thousand dollars, to bidder number…”

Benjamin lifted his paddle one last time.

“One hundred and sixty-eight.”

He turned around in his seat, a little-boy smile plastered on his face—as if he'd won a game of German dodgeball, or a blue ribbon at the science fair. Benjamin looked for Emma. He hoped he'd find her smiling back, clasping her hands in pleasure as she did on TV. So pleased to have won, and grateful to him for winning it. He found her in profile, a benign expression on her face. The fur was hanging off her shoulders again as she gathered up her things.

She's leaving? he thought.

Benjamin tried to catch her eye when she turned back around. He watched her ignore him. The adrenaline that had been racing through him like a car chase not five seconds earlier came to a screeching halt then. He felt his stomach lurching forward, as if some careless foot had been heavy on the brakes, his body slammed back hard against the vinyl upholstery. He hadn't understood that separate seating would extend beyond the four corners of the Nakashima table.

He watched Emma leaving, with the Asian man in tow.

Benjamin felt himself deflating, losing pressure with every second.

I guess it makes a
kind
of sense, he thought, our finishing out this charade. He'd been hoping for a little company though, to relive the thrill of the chase, and the crash of the gavel pounding down.

He turned back to the front of the room.

“Lot twelve thirty-five,” he whispered, in perfect unison with the auctioneer, “Magnificent Hanging Light by Serge Mouille.”

A Gingersnap—or Twelve

EMMA'S DAUGHTER, CASSY, ROLLED OVER IN BED.

Even with her eyes pasted shut, she knew this wasn't her room. The mattress was too soft, for starters, and the sheets too grainy. The pillowcase felt rough against her cheek.

Where in hell
am
I? she wondered.

There was an awful smell: dead cologne, she decided—a winter blanket of sickly sweet laid on top of stale air. She wiped the sleep from her eyes and let her squinting vision confirm what she already knew: not hers.

I've really got to knock this off, she thought—for about the hundredth time in as many weekends. Cassy suspected she might be the very last thirty-four-year-old on earth who was still trying to “find her way”—as her shrink so kindly put it—like this.

Whoring around's more like it, she thought.

She turned to the outsized lump on her left, staring and staring with all her might, trying to untangle the knot of blan
kets and sheets and limbs. She could scarcely make them out in the blackness of the room. There were two of them, she saw, with a smirk of disgust. A man and a woman, tangled up like a pair of earthworms in a pot of dirt, each one indistinguishable from the other, and both of them mixed up with the soil itself.

“What's your
problem
?” she asked herself, the very way her mother had a million times before. She was careful to reproduce her mother's tone—judgment masquerading as concern.

Cassy was deeply ashamed of herself, and frightened that she was doomed to repeat this scenario forever, marching ad infinitum with the ranks of the unloving and unloved.

“What's your problem?” she wondered again.

She knew already what her mother thought. Emma was prepared to blame the girl's father for the endless string of disappointments her daughter dished out. His walking out on the family when Cassy was thirteen explained just about everything in her mother's book: the lack of a stable male figure, the poor example of throwing in the towel.

“Quitters never win,” her mother told her often enough.

A drug-fueled sexcapade with a couple of perfect strangers was almost to be expected.

Cassy leaned back against the flimsy wooden headboard.

 

“What's the first thing you remember?” Dr. Winters asked her, years before. It had taken them months to get to this place.

“Today?” she asked, looking back at him in confusion.

Dr. Winters had been her mother's idea. He was much younger than the sort of shrink Emma normally turned up for her—not much older than Cassy was now.

“No,” he said, smiling back at her. “When you were a girl.”

“That's easy,” she said, without a moment's doubt. “I was sitting on my mother's lap.” She couldn't have been much older than four or five, but she remembered it as vividly as if it were yesterday. She'd been wearing short pants, she supposed, or some kind of skirt. Her legs were bare, at any rate, and Cassy felt the rough wool of her mother's slacks against the soft skin at the back of her legs. She remembered the scratchy feeling to this day, the warmth of her mother's flesh beneath: that padded perch of two long thighs, and the pillowy backrest of her mother's breasts.

Cassy exhaled softly.

“What were you just thinking?” Dr. Winters asked.

He must have seen her thoughts go roaming off. He seemed more interested in that than in the memory itself.

“She didn't like it,” Cassy told him. That's what she'd been thinking.

“How so?” he asked.

Cassy shook her head. She wasn't sure exactly.

“Did she push you away?”

“No,” she said. That wasn't it. Her mother let her stay where she was—she
tolerated
the girl sitting there—but Cassy knew she didn't like it. “You're awfully warm,” her mother might say, or “Don't squirm, sweetie.”

But Cassy never squirmed.

She'd never do a thing to jeopardize that fleeting prize—the warmth and safety of her mother's lap. The fault lay somewhere else inside her.

 

It's all ancient history now, she thought.

And as to her present predicament—waking up in that
mysterious bed—Cassy had no one to blame but herself. She was too ridiculous for words, running around on a Saturday night and picking up strangers in a crowded bar, dancing on a cloud of disco drugs. She couldn't pin that on anyone—not her father or her mother either.

Cassy stared hard at the knot of flesh beside her, until she was certain she'd counted every arm and every leg, until she was sure there wasn't another. She felt nearly vanquished by her gluey eyes and thick, parched tongue; by her shame at her behavior the night before; and now by this, her most vexing challenge of all: how to extricate herself from this crowded bed without one more second of contact with these two strangers.

The more she woke, the harder her head pounded.

It's time to step up, she thought—assume a little responsibility for herself.

Cassy swung her legs off the side of the bed, then twisted back to the couple behind her, afraid that the waves of motion might have roused them. She was safe still. They looked just as dead as before. She stood up from the mattress and aimed for the door, staggering a little with her first steps.

She found her balance soon enough.

Of course she did. Everything's going to be fine, she thought, taking the doorknob firmly in hand, its brass as cool in her sleep-warmed palm as a tumbler of ice water on a shimmering hot day. She didn't turn it, and she wouldn't let it go.

No, Cassy just held on tight.

 

To the casual observer, Cassy Sutton was every inch her mother's daughter: tall and brunette, exacting as hell. They were like topiary practically, mother and daughter—two stands
of privet pruned smooth, and not a single trace of plant life left. They were too perfect really, having locked their messy, human selves away.

Cassy went to Smith College, just like Emma had, and she'd tried her hand at decorating even—in Emma's very shop—but that hadn't worked at all. It turned out that Cassy wasn't suited to a service business: she'd already exhausted her desire to please. Still, she ended up working in her mother's organization—floating around on the business side—most recently as president of the Emma Sutton Charitable Foundation, doling out precisely as much money as her mother's new accountants told her it was tax-advantageous to do.

But that's where the resemblance between them ended.

Like mothers and daughters from the beginning of time, Emma's appetites had affected her daughter's profoundly. Cassy had watched—firsthand, after all—as her mother slaved for money and power, the admiring acknowledgment of the whole wide world; and as Emma grew in fame and prestige, her daughter couldn't help but notice how lonely it was standing off to the side.

The girl yearned for a tender touch.

So it shouldn't have come as a huge surprise that she chose a different path for herself: dialing her focus all the way down, and shrinking the world to a table for two. It was as if she were looking out through the wrong end of Emma's telescope. Cassy had no use for crowds or fans; she couldn't care less for money or fame. Nothing interested her really—except the prospect of a lover's touch.

She'd made a career of finding it.

Cassy searched for lovers high and low, in nearly every place she went. She hunted straight through her waking life.
She'd be the first to admit she hadn't gotten very far—only tricking herself again and again, confusing heat for the genuine article. Still, she took her job every bit as seriously as Emma had taken her own.

Cassy hoped for the best, and settled for much, much less.

Case in point, she thought, taking one last look around the stuffy bedroom. She shook her head. How could she ever have thought she'd find what she was looking for here? She steeled herself hard and pulled the bedroom door open, marching past the threshold and closing the door behind her.

“There!” she exclaimed, sounding triumphant, but her eyes were squinting near to blindness, her shoulders hunched up around her ears. She walked down a short hallway, past the foyer, and into a perfectly ordinary living room, in what looked to be a smallish one-bedroom apartment—somewhere in the city of New York, she hoped.

She had no memory of setting foot in this place.

She picked up a glossy magazine from the low coffee table, a generic beauty smiling up at her. “Do You Really Want Him Back?” the headline blared. She turned it sideways and read the address off the paper mailing label:

Cassy exhaled as if she'd been holding her breath.

Only downtown, she thought—not so far from her own apartment, up near Lincoln Center. It wasn't so good, of course, that she had no idea who this Karen Donaldson was, or the man in bed with her, for that matter, but Cassy was
prepared to take things one step at a time. She knew there was no alternative really, practiced as she was in these disconcerting wake-ups, somewhere far from home.

Even so, she never laid her loneliness down for long.

She could convince herself in an instant—he might be the one!—all on the strength of a stranger's glance. But strangers, she found, after a night or two more, were rarely what they seemed to be. And even with the ones who showed a hint of promise, Cassy backtracked just as fast, turning the smallest imperfection into a man's fatal flaw.

What's your problem? she wondered.

Cassy was terrified—and not of the men, who generally turned out to be harmless enough. What she feared were the imperfections beneath her own lovely shell—those ugly marks that would drive anyone away.

Who could ever deal with those?

 

Time to leave, she thought.

Cassy gazed down to her wristwatch, but it wasn't there. She hoped it wasn't gone for good. She noticed then, as if for the first time, how naked she was—like Eve in the Garden. She didn't try to hide it either—no fig leaf for her. Cassy marched to the mirror that hung above the sofa and took a long, hard look, daring herself to see a picture of debauchery, a haggard face and worn, gray skin—but somehow she looked just as beautiful as ever: long and lean, with shiny brown hair that hung straight to her shoulders and features as crisp as a lemon-lime soda. Not even a smear of dried fluid, all crusty at the top of her thigh, detracted much from the overall effect.

Lubricant, she hoped.

Cassy needed to know what time it was.

She was supposed to be at her mother's apartment by six thirty, and she had to go home still, had to shower yet and change. She walked to the DVD player in the corner: “17:06,” it flashed, in a blue fluorescent light—five o'clock in the afternoon.

That can't be right, she thought. But deep in her heart, Cassy was afraid it would be later than that. Five o'clock came as a small relief.

She'd slept through an entire day.

She looked around for her clothes and spotted a funny little gewgaw on the coffee table instead: just two or three inches tall, and shaped vaguely like a pearl onion, or an outsized teardrop in a rainbow of blues. She saw icy blue and navy blue, powder blue and teal, a trace of deep brownish blue at its base. She bent down to pick it up, admiring the smoothness of the thing in the palm of her hand. At first, she thought it was made of stone, but it was too light for that, she decided, too delicate. It was a porcelain teardrop.

She put it right back where she found it.

Cassy spotted her navy sweater, peeking out from beneath an upholstered chair. She knew she'd find her jeans and her bag in the sweater's vicinity, her silver wristwatch stowed away safely in one pocket or another. She began walking toward them, then stopped in her tracks.

She turned back to the coffee table and plucked the teardrop from its rightful place, stashing it safely in the palm of her hand.

It fit there perfectly.

She wrapped her fingers around its little body, hiding the thing completely from view. Just as she was about to spare a thought for poor Karen Donaldson—to wonder what that
teardrop might mean to her—Cassy went a different way instead: I know just where I'll put it, she thought, picturing the small table in her living room, its ebonized top and bleached mahogany legs.

Those blues would look even better against the black.

Cassy felt happy for the first time in ages.

 

BY QUARTER PAST FIVE THAT AFTERNOON, BENJAMIN
and his girlfriend, Melora, were sitting on the subway, rattling uptown toward Emma's place. Benjamin gazed across the aisle, through a window that was built into the car's sliding door. There was nothing to see but rushing motion though, all in subway-tunnel black; so he lifted his gaze a little higher, to a row of advertising placards beneath the car's domed roof. He fixed on a familiar image there: a photograph of a middle-aged man with the peachy-smooth skin of a six-year-old girl.

“Acne and blotchy patches,” he read, in tall black letters.

He was mesmerized by the man's strange hairline. It looked as if it had been drawn on with a coarse orange marker. “Skin cancers and lesions,” he read, in slightly smaller letters, on the next line down.

Emma had told him that Melora's name sounded vaguely cancerous to her, the morning after he'd first introduced them, on the sidewalk in front of her building, about three months before. “That's melanoma,” he'd replied, angrily enough, but he knew she was a little right too.

Emma had been after him to bring the girl to dinner ever since, but Benjamin knew from experience—with his own rough mother—that it wasn't out of any Welcome Wagon instinct. Emma wanted to biopsy the girl and put her cells
under a microscope. He'd managed to skirt the invitation, on Melora's behalf, up until now anyway—concocting flimsy excuses and prior engagements for his elusive girlfriend—but Emma wasn't one to relent.