Jacob's Folly (19 page)

“Miss Gory needs a new orchid. In a pot. Every morning. Yes, a fresh orchid. And a plate of ripe mango. Never use the word ‘ready' when you talk to her either, by the way. Say ‘are you okay to come to set.' Never ‘ready.' I'm warning you, now …”

He stayed awake in his office for three twenty-four-hour cycles, shaving and changing his shirt each morning so no one would suspect, which of course they did, until there was an intervention. Six talent agents, accompanied by two drug counselors and Derbhan's own therapist, swooped down on him one Thursday morning and told him he needed to take a break. Somebody who didn't like him very much must have called the papers, because there was a bank of photographers
ready when he was escorted into the back of a Subaru belonging to the detox facility already booked by the agency. His fall from the golden chair was documented in all the major U.S. papers, then syndicated worldwide. Bridget Mooney read of his humiliation over her morning coffee, her shapely nails glinting in the morning light, green eyes narrowed with pain for a man she had once loved but now only pitied.

Though the Subaru brought him to a large, hushed mansion in the French Provincial style haunted by rich housewives coming off barbiturates, and, of course, celebrities, several of whom Derbhan had once represented, his stay there didn't really do the trick, because, as well as being an addict, he was having a psychic breakdown that none of the experts seemed to register, they were so focused on getting him clean. The fact that he barricaded himself in his room for much of the day when he wasn't in group therapy was considered problematic but not psychotic. He was released after three months. So Derbhan left the Waynsedale Clinic straight, but crazy. He returned to his palatial home in Beverly Hills and made it through seventy-two sober, friendless hours convinced that his neighbors had all decided to get together, tie him up, and slit his throat like a pig. Then, on the fourth day, he caved, called his old dealer, bought a little Kilimanjaro of cocaine, dumped it on his coffee table, and lived off it for a month. His savings, already thin on the ground from his extravagant habit, his sudden trips to Europe with very young women he hoped to impress, and his loyal subsidizing of his mother's gambling habit back in Queens, had wrought havoc on his finances. In short, Derbhan was broke. He had to drain his pool, sell his house, release his birds, fire his housekeeper, and move to a halfway house, where he promised not to do any drugs in exchange for a bed and a roof and the privilege of not living on the street or going back to his mother. In the end, he did go straight, and his mind eased up, but he had to move back in, at the age of sixty, with Silvia Nevsky, his alpha and omega. It would have been depressing if
Nevsky hadn't felt so maniacally happy at the moment. Finding Bridget Mooney again had given him a sense of continuity, safety, hope. Crippled as she was, that woman was solid as an oak tree. And he, shimmering and rustling in the unpredictable wind that was his destiny, would be her foliage.

I
t's okay, I'll walk from here,” Masha said, planting her feet on the sidewalk fifty yards from her front door. “I need to think a little.”

“About me?” asked Eli, looking up at her from under the brim of his black felt hat.

“Maybe,” she said, starting to smile.

“My parents … my parents are a little worried about you,” he said. “Yeah? How come?”

“They think you … I don't know, maybe they think you're too pretty or somethin'. It's okay with me, though,” he said.

“Yeah?” she said.

“Yeah.” He looked into her eyes.

“Thanks for lunch, Eli. I had fun,” she said.

“We always have fun,” he said. “I'll call you tomorrow.”

“'Bye,” she said.

“'Bye.” He turned and walked down the block, looking down at his shoes. Once, he swung around to see her, his hands in his pockets, black hat set back on his head. Then he turned a corner and he was gone. This was it, she thought. She married him or she never saw him again. He had decided, she could feel it.

She walked to her own door, but she couldn't get herself to go in,
even though it was cold out. She needed to think. She should really go home and help with Shabbat preparations. Yet she found herself meandering past her house, down the block, past the synagogue, to the railroad station, her demon hiding under her belt loop. She had never been on the train by herself. Dreamily, she walked a few steps and stood on the open-air platform.

There were only two people waiting for the train: a woman in a long down parka, and a man in a suit and coat, reading the paper. The woman looked professional. Masha wondered what her job was. The train came. The doors opened. The woman stepped into the train. Masha followed her, and sat down beside her. It took a few minutes for the woman to get settled in her window seat. She took off her parka, set it on the empty seat between herself and Masha, then took out some papers to read. She looked like she was Pearl's age. The conductor strode down the aisle, asking for tickets. The woman handed him hers.

“Change at Jamaica for Penn Station,” he told her. He looked down at Masha.

“Round trip to Penn Station,” she said.

“You coming back off-peak?”

“I don't know,” Masha said.

“I'll sell you off-peak. You can pay the conductor the difference if you change your mind,” he said. “Thirteen seventy-five.” Masha gave him a twenty. She took the ticket from the conductor and stowed it in a zip pocket of her purse. It took forty minutes to get to Jamaica. Masha stared out the window, watching the houses blur by, wondering about the people who lived in there, the details of their lives. She wished she could pry the doors open and peer inside.

When they reached Jamaica, she followed the professional woman in the parka across the platform, and got onto the Manhattan-bound train. They were there in minutes. At first she tried to follow the woman out of Penn Station, but she walked so fast, she got swallowed up in the crowd.

Masha stepped onto an escalator, followed the light up to the street. She had no idea where she was going. It was almost two. She figured she had an hour before she had to start back home. It would be dark around five. She was fine. I crawled inside the lining of her coat to avoid the cold as she walked along the street. The pale, congested sky seemed very close, bearing down. She felt a raindrop prick her lip. A few people glanced at her long gray skirt peeking out from her red coat. But nobody knew what she was. She passed a few men in black hats or yarmulkes hurrying to the train station to be back in time for Shabbos. They couldn't get on a train after sundown. Neither could she. It felt odd to be moving in the other direction from them.

She walked down Sixth Avenue to Twenty-third Street. It started to snow. Dopey fat snowflakes sifted through the air, interspersed with glistening needles of rain. Masha stopped in the middle of the street and stared, taking in the strange precipitation. Snowflakes on her eyelashes blurred and magnified the flashing orange, yellow, green lights of store signs and traffic lights, made them seem like glowing jewels. People on the street rushed by her, huddled, frowning, some glancing at her curiously—a young woman with no hat on, coat open, standing in the street, her face wet, mascara running. The neon light of a bar flashed in reflection on the wet pavement at her feet. She turned to look up at it and saw warm light through a window, shadowy forms inside. She walked through the door and into the small brown-paneled place, shrugged off her coat, and scrunched it onto her lap, perching on a stool. Her muscles relaxed in the warmth. She ordered a Coke from the indifferent barman, brushing the dark wet strands of hair from her forehead, and looked around her. A longtime drinker was hunched over his glass at the end of the bar, his toothless mouth collapsed like sunken, parched ground; a group of young men in suits exploded in laughter at a table in the corner. One of them glanced at her pointedly. She turned her back to him. She liked being alone like this, nobody knowing a thing about her, in a strange neighborhood. She could be anyone. She took a sip of Coke.

“Masha?” She turned. It was Hugh Crosby. The black eye was healed. “What are you doing here?” he drawled.

“I was just moseying around Manhattan,” she said.

“In this weather?”

Masha shrugged.

“I can't believe it's April.” He sat on the stool beside her, setting his amber-colored drink down on the bar.

“What about you?” she asked.

“I live over on Tenth Avenue,” he said.

“I thought you lived in Queens.”

“No, I just go out there for Bridget's class.”

“Wow.”

He shrugged. “I started with her in Manhattan eight years ago. I suppose there's a kind of security in coming home to Bridget. Oh, hey, guess what?” he said, turning to her.

“What?”

“I'm gonna be a doctor.”

“No way. You got it?”

“I sure did. Dr. Darling. That is the actual name.”

“So they decided to go Southern,” she said.

“No, I played it East Coast,” he said.

“Congratulations.” She raised her glass to him.

He took a sip of his drink. “So,” he said. “What's new?”

“I might be getting married soon,” she said. There was a breath of silence.

“I didn't know you had a fella.”

“We don't date like you, we date to get married.”

“Have you been dating?”

“I've gone on six dates with one man. I need to decide soon.”

“How can you know so fast?”

“My sisters say you just know. But I … I really don't.”

“Masha,” he said, and then nothing.

“What?” she said. He squinted, took a breath, then shook his head and went quiet.

“What were you going to say?” she asked.

“I have met a lot of people, but I've never met any other woman with your particular combination of … attributes.”

She looked up at him out of the corner of her glimmering onyx eyes. “No?”

“No,” he said. She finished her Coke. He offered to buy her a glass of wine. “If you're gonna play Carol Cutrere, you need to know what a little wine feels like.”

Hugh seemed untethered, loose on the world. Being with him in this bar, Masha felt time and the facts of her life disappear. Everything was melting into sheer, freewheeling possibility. “I can't have wine that isn't kosher,” she said. He ordered her a whiskey and ginger ale. She took a sip of the drink. It burned her throat. They talked more, and they laughed. Glancing out the window, she lurched forward, checking Hugh's watch, then turned to look outside again. It was dark. Her hand flew to her mouth.

“What?”

“It's Shabbos.”

“You need to be somewhere?”

“Home. I'm—I can't go on the train anymore. The sun set early,” she said, as if the sun had tricked her.

“Not even if it's an emergency?”

She shook her head. “Only to save a life.”

“How long does Shabbos last?”

“Tomorrow sunset,” she said, her head in her hands.

“No transportation. Well, you are going to have to stay in Manhattan,” he said.

“My mother will die.” She slipped off the stool and stood at the door of the bar, looking helplessly into the street through the glass, her thoughts muddled by the alcohol.

He walked up to her. “You better call your family,” he said.

“I can't use the phone after sunset.”

“I'll call.”

“They won't answer.”

“If they're worried about you they will.”

“But … they don't know about the class or anything. If you call, they'll freak out.”

“How about if I dial your phone and you talk into it? Surely these are extenuating circumstances?”

“Okay,” she said. They walked back to the bar and sat down. She leaned in to the phone while he held it up to her ear.

Pearl answered, hushed, after the first ring. “Where are you?”

“Mommy, I'm sorry,” said Masha. “I'm in town. In Manhattan.”

“What? Why? How did you get there? I've been on the phone to Eli, I— Did someone—” Pearl thought she'd been kidnapped.

“I took the train. I don't know. I just needed to think. I just … I got on the train and walked around and now it's too late, I can't get back.”

“Okay, honey—let me ask your father what you should do. Maybe he knows someone there. Hang on.” Pearl was trying for her calmest voice, the one she reserved for total inner hysteria.

Masha took a sip of her drink and whispered, “They might know someone I could stay with.”

“You could stay with us,” said Hugh.

Masha heard her mother's voice whispering on the other end. “How can we not know one person …”

“Mommy? Mommy, don't worry, there's—a lady here, a friend of—of—a lady I met here that will let me, um, stay with her. She's holding my phone, I was so worried about Shabbos and she dialed for me. I'm sorry, Mommy. But I'll be okay and I'll see you tomorrow night. Don't worry about me. I'm fine. I just made a mistake, that's all. 'Night.”

“Will you pay for my Coke?” she asked as he hung up, nodding to
her purse on the bar. “There's a twenty in the wallet. I can't touch money on Shabbos.”

He pushed the purse back to her and paid the bill.

She stared at her bag. “Would you mind carrying it?” she asked.

Hugh couldn't help laughing. “I'd be delighted,” he said.

Hugh lived in a big old building on Tenth Avenue. The elevator was broken, so they walked up five flights of stairs, Masha's purse slung over Hugh's shoulder. The stairwell smelled of Indian food. Masha was quiet on the way up. She felt a kind of compression on the top of her head as she trudged up the marble steps, her hand on the broad metal banister—as though she were being shrunk. Hugh opened the heavy door and let her in, flipping on the light.

The door opened onto a large room furnished with a Weimaraner-silver plush couch and several green reclining plastic lawn chairs. A triptych of large windows dominated the space; walls and wooden floor were painted brownish red. A galley kitchen was nestled into a nook in the wall on the right. Dishes had been washed and neatly stacked on a rack. Masha sat down on the only real chair she could see, an office chair on wheels. Hugh found a bottle with a finger of whiskey in it and poured it out for himself.

“We have another bottle, if you would like a cocktail,” he said.

Masha was eyeing the shut front door. He opened it a crack.

“That better?” he asked. She nodded. “Are you worried?” he asked her.

“Yeah,” she said.

“Because you're staying here, or because you feel bad you forgot to go home?”

“Because I forgot,” she said softly.

“Well, it's done now, you might as well relax. You hungry?”

“A little.”

“There's a Chinese restaurant on this block. They serve kosher food. You eat kosher, right?”

No real kosher restaurant would serve after sunset on Shabbos. Masha shook her head. “I'm okay,” she said.

“Or how about I make pasta?”

They ate at a small card table. He found the other bottle of whiskey in a cabinet in the kitchen, poured out some in a glass of ginger ale, and drank it with his meal. She just had ginger ale.

Hugh's skin was stretched very taut over his face, Masha noticed. When he chewed, a web of muscles stood out under the skin of his jaw.

“Hey, how about we rehearse our scene?” Hugh drawled, letting his fork clatter onto the table. Masha pushed herself back in the wheeled chair, reversing a couple of feet, and turned, scuttling crabwise, starting to negotiate the room.

“I don't feel like it.” she said. “It's nice here.”

“It'll be better with real furniture,” said Hugh. “I'm going to change my life shortly, and that'll make all the difference.”

“What's wrong with your life?” asked Masha.

Hugh walked over to the window, opened it wide, and lit a cigarette. Placing himself on the sill gingerly, as if worried he might fall off, he rested his forehead on the glass and looked down onto the street.

“I'm at what I'm hoping is the tail end of a long fiesta, but it just keeps going on. I have been warned of ruinous consequences to do with my liver and career. Doctors, agents, and relations are of one mind in this regard. I guess it's easy to see that people are wasting themselves when you look at them from the outside. Take you, for instance,” he said, turning to her.

“What about me?” she asked.

“You want my opinion?” His voice sounded different, she noticed. Coated.

“You have an opinion?”

“Yes, I do.”

“I don't know if I want it, though,” she said, coasting by him on the office chair.