Every Day (19 page)

When he admits to the need to sit for a while, we find an umbrella’d table on a veranda, and he hands me more money to buy the obligatory coffee and some ice cream for the girls.

“We’ll stay here, Mom,” Jane says, sitting by Fowler. “You don’t have to worry.”

So I go alone to the line and stand behind an elderly couple who have been watching us assemble out here.

“You have a beautiful family,” the man says.

“And look at the little one,
connehara
,” the woman sighs. She touches my elbow. “Have more. I see all kinds of children, and some I don’t say this about. Have more. They’re
beautiful. Don’t worry your husband’s tired. Mine was too! He’s fifteen years older, and we have three girls and a boy.”

I thank her for the compliment.

“He’s a good father, I can tell,” she continues, her eyes on Fowler as he pulls the girls’ chairs close by him, his arms behaving. “He pays attention.”

Her husband pulls at her sleeve. “Sylvie, do you want cake?”

“When do I not want cake?” she says, annoyed.

I like them so much I want to invite them to join us, but I don’t for fear of disappointing Sylvie with the news that Fowler isn’t my husband or the girls’ father.

“He’s a vet, your husband?” the man asks with concern after he orders coffee and layer cake.

“Yes,” I answer automatically, because it’s true, and they don’t have to know who I’m talking about.

“Bless him,” the man says.

“Seymour,” the woman nudges. “The cake?”

“You take care,” he says.

I get us coffee and brownies with ice cream on top.

“What have you learned?” I ask the girls brightly.

Very blasé, Jane says, “That it’s more fun to sail than motor. That the doldrums are when there’s no wind, and that sailing is a gentle sport.”

“A gentleman’s sport,” Fowler corrects, laughing. “I was just going to get into schooners and yawls and gaff rigging, but here you are.”

I hear the noble fatigue in his tone, and I remember J.T. using it with Evelyn on a couple of occasions when he’d run out of love for her yammering:
Tell about the time Jimmy sailed the
Widget
right up onto the beach!
she urged, although that was the whole story right there, already told.
Tell about the first time we put him out to sea on his own
. Those were her most generous moments with me, trying to get J.T. to betray
family secrets, so she wouldn’t have to, never using my name, never thinking to tell me the story herself.

“You look like Isaac,” Jane says to Fowler.

“I do!” he cries, feigning surprise.

“Yes,” she explains. “You have the same eyes and nose and mouth. You must have looked like him when you were younger.”

He looks to me for verbal affirmation of this fact, but I can’t speak, my throat too full of this perfect day with them, my girls and this man they’ve taken in to make me happy. Instead, I open my arms to them.

•   •   •

In the car, Fowler apologizes. “I’m afraid I’m going to need an escort when we get back to my place. Any takers?”

“No sweat,” Jane says, a phrase she’s taken from Isaac.

“Friend for life,” I tell him.

He looks spent, wan. It’s hard to come down off this day, for me too.

“I’ve read a lot,” I say. “But we don’t have to talk about it.” My home schooling in neurodegenerative diseases, provided me via folder by Eliot, is something I don’t want to keep from him.

“We will,” he says quietly. “Just not now.”

“Will you just tell me when you found out?”

“A couple of years ago. I couldn’t get my hotel door open. I mean, I couldn’t turn the key in the lock. Thank God they’ve invented those braille-like cards that you just insert! Should I ever need to be in a hotel room again.”

This is the beginning: a key that won’t work. And the end? Suffocation. He’s right. It is too horrible to talk about.

“This was a good day,” I say.

“It was,” he says.

I let him get himself out of the car and ease around with the cane and one hand on the hood. Then he puts his arm
around me, and we walk slowly to the stoop and up the steps. To anyone else, it will look like we are tired lovers reluctant to part. It won’t look like most of his weight is on me, or that I’m bearing it well.

“I’ll go in with you. I can see them through the glass,” I say at the door.

“No. It’s all right.”

“But the key! What if you can’t turn it in the lock?”

“I left it open.”

He sets the cane against the building wall and takes my face in both hands and kisses me with such force that I fall back, down one step. Then he picks up the cane and leans into the door to get himself through.

In the car Jane says, “He’s nice, Mom.” And she starts about all the things we did, and all the things he told her. And when she’s run out of that to talk about and we’re on the highway yet again she says, “Is he going to die soon?”

“Yes,” I say.

“When?”

“Maybe in the winter.”

“Why?”

“He’s got a disease there’s no cure for, and it’s getting worse, and I think the winter will be too hard.”

I go on about what I’ve learned. I say the words I now know, try to get used to the sound of them, tell her what the disease is called in our country (ALS) and what it’s called in Britain (motor neurone disease), that it’s very rare, that no one is sure where Fowler got it because it’s not in his family but that the nerve cells in his spine, arms, and legs are dying because transporter proteins have been lost and can’t clean up glutamate blockage. I sound logical and calm, establishing an order to the event of Fowler’s going, but the only thing I really know is that he will die in the winter. I just know this, and then . . . then what? Then there will be other voices
to listen to, other things to say. Part of my life will be over as well.

“I can see why you love him,” Jane says.

•   •   •

Pam calls that night. I’m relieved to find out that she had no notion of Fowler’s illness.

“Are you still in love,” she says in her husky, forgivable way.

“Yes.” I don’t bother with
Are you?

“Is this going to kill you?”

“I think so.”

“I’ve wanted to call you for years, you know.”

“I know.”

“I was a real jerk back then,” she says, then adds, laughing, “Still am!”

I’m softening on her, on everyone. “My son Isaac,” I say. “It would freak you out how much he looks like Fowler. He’s so beautiful. We are
so lucky
we don’t have to go to school with him!”

Pam says she misses me, she’s still never met anyone like me, or him, for that matter. “You guys were quite a duo!”

I agree, and then we make the inevitable vague plan to meet in the fall, just us, she’ll come into Manhattan, we’ll take an afternoon, etc. It saddens me to hang up, to feel yet another dead certainty—that a life in which Pam would be a close friend is now impossible, given our stations. After I check on the girls I fly to my room, strip to nothing, and dive into bed. There’s nothing on earth that can keep me from sleep now, not even the fact that I don’t know where my son is sleeping. I trust he is in good, local hands or with Simon and that I’d have heard about it if he wasn’t.

•   •   •

Early Friday a cab pulls into the driveway and Isaac and Simon get out, slamming doors the way men seem to do, not in anger or haste, just for punctuation’s sake. We crowd the foyer to receive them. I watch Isaac just as I watched Jane a week ago,
searching for signs, but he heads for the front door neutrally, out of habit, not committed to any mood I can discern. He lugs the duffel I gave him in front of the high school, which has to be full of dirty clothes for me to wash.

“I’m out the door,” I assure them when they enter. I’ve arranged to meet Gillette and Barry for lunch, and Simon agreed this would give him some time with the girls before we all sit down for a powwow later. “You have a good day, and I’ll see you for dinner.”

I busy myself with accessories—pocketbook, briefcase, umbrella. Then I look up at Simon, who looks puzzled, as if there’s supposed to be some evidence of a change in me that will dictate our future. I return his gaze, then toss my hands outward in question. “What? I’m going to work.
Really
.”

“Good,” he says. “We’ll talk tonight. I’ll take care of things here.”

“Good,” I say, and out I go to walk to the train, one of my smoothest exits ever, so thrilled with Simon are the girls. I took in Isaac’s beeline for his sisters, his avoidance of me, and I didn’t address it.

Gillette has finally given up on fronting the work I’ve done for Barry. She told me this morning, on the phone, after my finest sleep in weeks, that she saw no reason for her to pose for Barry anymore, what had she been thinking? She was far more interested in the marketing end of things, she said, and she was going to tell him she could no longer support both sorts of efforts and that the book on cults had actually been written by me with her editorial input. I didn’t bother her about the other trash we’ve put together. Finally having a clear line to Barry would be enough, I thought. Already I’m walking more legitimately.

“You’re mellowing,” I said to her. It’s as if we’ve switched places, and she’s lost her hard edge to Latin love while I’ve absorbed that edge to negotiate the tough spots.

“Maybe so,” she admitted. “I like rolls and coffee brought
to me in the morning and movies I don’t have to watch alone. And there’s the perk of traveling with someone who can speak four languages.”

My brief view of Pasquale hadn’t allowed for the language proficiency. I congratulated her.

I spread my work out over three seats on the train, admiring my refinement of plans for the book. I think Barry will appreciate what I’ve done. The idea of economic glut as a precondition for moral collapse is compelling, but it seems obvious now and not enough of a statement. Instead, I’m proposing a collection of personal commentary by royal and aristocratic women who have found themselves on the cusp of such collapse. Liselotte will be one of them, but her view will occur rather late in the book. I’ll require time and funding, and I’ll put all of this to Barry and see what he says. I’ve got nothing to lose.

•   •   •

The way I remember Barry—loud, portly, opinionated—is not at all the way he appears now. He’s slim and suntanned, and he gestures generously at the empty seat after Gillette and I have done the hugging and exclaiming over this and that. I met Barry only once, at a party at Gillette’s after the book on cults came out. My dislike for him was affirmed within the hour. He began a conversation with me and left in the middle of it for the bar and someone in a backless dress who had left modeling for writing and Barry’s editorial tutelage. The minute I’d told him where I lived and that I was working out of my home (I’d been instructed by Gillette not to let on what the nature of that work was), he’d glazed over.

Now he’s drinking iced tea, as is Gillette. We sit, and Gillette resumes the serious face she had on when I arrived. The French place is way west on 43rd Street, Barry’s idea. Everything—the music, the menu, the Provençal decor—is relievedly understated.

I order iced coffee and the same entrée that they’re both
getting, and then, like a Renaissance king in his battle tent, I lay out the plans before them, more interested in the perfect logic of my strategy than in what they think of it.

“I’ll go back to the ancient Greeks,” I inform them, after a preliminary overview. “I’ll have to find out if there’s any documentation on the wives of the Greek leaders. So far all I know is that Sappho’s writing survives only in snippets and that there were certain strictures that women were meant to observe in the time of Homer. But if Penelope is any indication, there were ways around some of those stringencies.”

Barry looks at me, amused. “Go on.”

“There’s more on Egypt, of course, and I’m thinking Hatshepsut would be my best representative, as she was, in fact, a king.”

Gillette is wearing a long face, losing focus, her mind, I feel sure, on Pasquale. I am, comparatively, in tremendous command, which is probably why Barry, as we begin our upscale warmed salads, invites me to talk further with him at his office after lunch. Gillette applauds the idea.

“I’ve got to get back uptown anyway,” she says. “I’ll drop you.”

We have crême brulée and espresso, and I change the subject to the food, which I absolutely love. When Barry excuses himself to take care of the check, Gillette says, “Go for it! He’s totally into it. When have you had time to do all this?”

“So easy,” I lie. “I give up a few nights’ sleep per week, power nap when the kids are in front of the tube, and get the work done.”

“And you’ve got time? With all that’s going on with Simon and Fowler?”

“And Isaac and Daisy and Jane!” I laugh out loud, drawing the irritated stares of some business types. “The thing about two men,” I say with authority, “is that it gives you all kinds of time. You’re really not with either one of them, so you’ve got the same kind of time you have when you’re alone.”

Gillette shudders. She’s too far from being alone now to see that it’s bearable.

“More power,” she says. “You’re a rock.”

She drops us on a corner in the West Fifties and Barry leads me to his office in a building full of offices devoted to like causes—agents, publishers. I sit in a red leather chair while he sifts through papers to find a sheet of standard criteria for me to follow when I write up a formal book proposal, a “query,” as he’s calling it.

“Frankly, I’m glad you’ve revised the first idea,” he says. “It lacked punch, that dialectical stuff—peace begets crisis begets peace, et cetera. Get me the new proposal as soon as you can and I’ll push it. They’ll probably make an offer, and you’ll tell me what you want to do.”

We shake on this, and I thank him for the lunch.

“Thank
you
,” he says. “Gillette seemed pretty unenthused about the project. I’d rather see someone who’s charged take it on. Here’s my card. Be in touch.”