Louisa Meets Bear (31 page)

*   *   *

At the beach, the girls slather themselves with baby oil, rubbing each other's backs and then the backs of each other's legs. Plastic shopping bag wrapped around my arm, I feel too slovenly to bother with the rituals of suntanning. Angie fiddles with her radio until she finds the rock station she wants, and Conchita stretches out with a T-shirt over her eyes. Soon she is asleep again, her mouth ajar. My own eyelids feel heavy and they too drop, the sun blazing red through the lids as I join my daughter in sleep.

When I wake, Julie and Angie and Conchita are tossing a Frisbee at the edge of the water. I watch them throw and bend and jump—Conchita wiry like a cat, Angie and Julie with bouncing breasts and full thighs. Julie makes a high soaring throw, and Conchita leaps, her black hair wild and curly from the wet and the salt. I imagine her hiss as she nabs the Frisbee between two fingers.

Lily was still a little girl when she died, still young enough to have me wash her hair in the tub, to crawl into my bed when I didn't have the door locked on account of some guy, which in those days was too frequently. I never saw her on the verge of womanhood, as Conchita is now, though I imagine she would not have been like Conchita. A dreamer, she moved at half of Conchita's speed: slow and thoughtful and careful, not like Conchita, for whom everything is absorbed in a nanosecond, her rev set high like a race car's.

Julie has left a half-drunk beer in the sand between our chairs. I gulp, the bottle damp and cool between my hands. I rub the bottle over my face and down my neck and I think of PK withered from AIDS and his parents—Conchita's grandparents—still alive and living in Queens, Tom has told me, and whether Conchita will want to meet them and, if so, whether they will welcome her, and I think of me, middle-aged and damaged, all grace washed away. And I think of our daughter, a wet, salty cat with a Frisbee curled into her arm, and then of Lily, buried now for nearly twice as many years as she lived, and how, in the end, this is everyone's fate: our remains outstrip our lives.

*   *   *

In the car on the way home, Julie tunes in an oldies-but-goodies station. She and Angie sing along with the Drifters and “Up on the Roof,” and then the Association and “Cherish.”

“Cherish,” they sing, Julie a decent alto, Angie an off-tune second soprano, “Cherish is the word I use to
descreye-ibe
, all the love I have for you
inseye-ide
…” Conchita, who has inherited her father's pure voice, joins in, lifting the song into a heavenly register. PK had liked to sing “Woodstock”—We are stardust / Billion year old carbon / We are golden / Caught in the devil's bargain—and even though I know that Joni Mitchell sang this song solo, for this moment I believe PK's claim that he'd once sung backup for her.

Julie and the girls are in the midst of assisting Paul Simon with “Mrs. Robinson” when Conchita leans forward to prop her elbows on the back of my seat. We've not touched since it happened. I stare straight ahead at the highway, watching the pattern of dashed and then long yellow lines as Conchita starts to play with my hair, twirling it between her fingers, pushing it up into a ponytail, and then letting it fall heavily down, the hairdresser's game she's played with me since she was a small girl.

“And here's to you, Mrs. Robinson,” Julie and Angie sing, “Jesus loves you more you than you can know,
wo, wo, wo
.”

“Remember squirmy little Dustin Hoffman in that scene?” I say to Julie, my scalp alert to each of Conchita's twists and twirls.

“Yeah.” Julie smiles. “And that leopard-print bra Anne Bancroft wore!”

When Conchita takes out her brush and begins to untangle my hair, I lean back so that my head rests against the top of the seat. My sandy hair drops over the back and a sigh escapes. Conchita brushes gently from my forehead to my nape, the way Louisa must have tried to do the morning of Lily's funeral, and for the first time I see that it is not only her father Conchita is missing but also her sister, who she never met but has always been with us.

On the chorus, Conchita joins Julie and Angie in the “
wo, wo, wo
.” Angie raises her Coke can with the “Here's to you” and I sit up. Soon we are four toasting Mrs. Robinson, the sun sinking low to our right, the windows open, the dusky air blowing on our faces, the golden daughters leaning over the seat, the wounded mothers sailing first into the night.

 

2003

 

Barberini Princess

For fourteen years, César Punto had cleaned Ilana Green's office on Saturday. The first weekend of each month she left him a check written in her precise handwriting, handwriting that matched her small frame and bob cut. On occasion, she left a note, a gentle reminder to vacuum under the chair cushions or dust her books. Two or three times a year, she called him to announce her absence from the office and request that he water her plants. During the first few years she'd had the office, she'd seen César often. Then, she'd still been settling in—installing shades, hanging pictures—and he'd helped her with various things. Over the past few years, she hadn't laid eyes on him at all.

Ilana Green was a psychologist and a mother. She thought of herself in that order, perhaps because she'd been a psychologist before she became a mother, perhaps because seeing patients felt entirely natural, whereas she had moments with her daughters, nine and eleven, sturdy redheaded beauties, when she felt awkward, as though she were playing the part of a mother in a stiff unbelievable manner. Her husband, Bill, was one of the alpha New York men who when they first met had still been called by his Wall Street buddies by the nickname, Bear, they'd given him when they were at Princeton together. For a while, Bill had campaigned to have her join the majority ranks of the mothers of the children who attended her daughters' private school, women who had exchanged going back to work after their second was born for the position of full-time domestic CEO and part-time school volunteer. There were former anesthesiologists and corporate tax attorneys stuffing envelopes for the spring benefit. Women who'd once managed trading offices in Singapore gave tours to kindergarten applicants.

She knew that her children would have liked to have her, rather than Nona, their housekeeper, home on the numerous days they had off from school, but it frightened Ilana to give up her professional life. It was hard enough with a doctor before her name to muster a sufficiently firm voice to address plumbers and taxicab drivers, much less her husband, who seemed to grow more remote and irritable with each passing year: the relentless strain of getting up at 3:00 a.m. for the Far East markets, the exile from an essential part of himself left long ago on a beach somewhere. Without her work, she imagined that she would be more vulnerable to Bill, he would sleep with one of the bank trainees, a girl with luminous highlights and sultry lowlights, her daughters would fight more than they already did. Most important, Ilana liked her work, which remained a never-completed puzzle. Each psychotherapy session was a one-act play that she variously directed, performed in, and observed. Each patient who got better, and most of Ilana's did, was a missive of good sent into the world. It was sacred work—an amazement to her that she, raised by a father who believed human nature could be reduced to self-interest, altruism a sentimental myth, had ended up able to give at all.

*   *   *

It was a Monday morning, the first balmy day of the year. Ilana walked across the park to work, the paths and lawns littered with the fallen petals of cherry blossoms, the air pungent with the perfume of blooms balanced between perfection and decay. As a child, she'd been terrified of anything in a state of decomposition, going blocks out of her way to avoid a dead bird or a gardener's compost or even a pile of raked leaves, each withering object bringing to mind a vision of what had happened to the remains of her mother, whose lung cancer had been mistaken for recalcitrant bronchitis so that by the time she'd been diagnosed, her demise was too far along to halt. Ilana had ridden to the cemetery with her three aunts, her face pressed against her plumpest aunt's upper arm to block glimpsing the horrid shiny casket or the horrid shiny hearse inside which her father had insisted on riding and from which he had mysteriously disappeared by the time they reached the grave site.

Arriving at her office, she listened to her messages. The last one was from César. He'd lost his set of her keys. They'd fallen out of a hole in his jacket pocket on the subway, somewhere between Columbus Circle and his stop in Queens.

He was so despondent, there was no room for her to be annoyed. “I feel terrible,” he said in the message. “All night, I cannot sleep, I feel so upset about this.”

With her first patient already waiting for her, she called César with the intention of—quickly—reassuring him that he should not worry.

“I cannot believe this could happen. I try so hard to please you, and now this.”

“I'll make you a new set and leave it with the doorman.”

“I feel so bad. I only want you to be happy with me.”

“I am happy with your work, César. I would let you know if I wasn't.”

César didn't say anything. Had he been one of her patients, Ilana would have encouraged him to unpack the silence. But he wasn't, and no benefit would come of it. She crossed her fingers, a wish that, as is the way with everything—beauty, love, hatred, even, she'd come to think, wisdom—his remorse would disintegrate.

*   *   *

The following morning, she woke thinking about César. It was strange that she had forgotten that she'd actually had quite a bit to do with him when they'd first met. Then, he'd been the boyfriend of Evelyne, the nanny who worked for the family across the hall. Ilana and her neighbor, Jen, had plunged into one of those quick, intense friendships born of the intimacy of shared circumstances and filled with the pleasure of padding in socks and pajamas in and out of each other's apartments. It was before Ilana had her own children, at the end of her fellowship and the beginning of her private practice, when she'd begun to yearn for a baby, but Bill, with his thoughts returning always, during movies, during sex, to a trading scheme he was working out, couldn't even talk about it. During the brief period of her friendship with Jen, they'd fit like lock and key. Holding Jen's baby, Ilana could taste the sensuality, the profundity of raising a child, while Jen, still carrying fifteen pounds from the pregnancy, her clothes yellowed from baby spit-up, could feel for a moment that her life was enviable, not a stupid mistake.

Every night, as Evelyne finished work, César would be in the lobby waiting for her. It was clear to anyone seeing them together that César was in love with Evelyne in a sticky, suspicious way and that it was only a matter of time before she would dump him. When she did, he became so depressed it scared Evelyne, who confided in Jen, who asked Ilana's advice. Ilana gave Jen the number for a low-fee clinic and the name of an intake worker César could contact there.

A year later, after Jen and family decamped to Westchester, the friendship unraveling as quickly as it had been knitted, Ilana bumped into Evelyne in the park with her new babysitting ward. Ilana inquired about César. They were still broken up, Evelyne said, but they remained friends. He'd gone to the clinic Ilana had recommended and he was a lot better, but the store where he'd cleaned at night had gone out of business. He'd found a few small cleaning jobs, Evelyne reported, but was looking for more work. Did Ilana know anyone?

Ilana took his number. She'd keep her ears open, she promised. A few weeks later, she signed a lease on a small suite in a building on West End Avenue. She hired a painter, picked a butter cream for the room where she would see her patients, okra for the windowless waiting room, and a silvery gray for the small patient bath and tiny kitchen. The painter did an excellent job but left a big mess. Remembering César, she called him.

“My God, I cannot believe you called me. Evelyne told me she saw you, but I never think you would really call me.”

He'd seen a social worker at the clinic for a few months and one of the doctors had given him some medicine, which he'd taken for a while. “So many times I think to write you a letter to tell you how much you help me. So many times.”

“You're most welcome. I'm glad to have been able to help.”

“You help me more than anyone ever help me.”

An uncomfortable feeling descended over Ilana. Too much was never good. When her patients went on too long about the travails of their journey to her office, she knew they were late because there was something they did not want to discuss. When, right before they got married, Bill had bought her a too-expensive watch, she'd known it was expiation. At first she'd thought he'd slept with one of the high-low-lighted trainees, but a week later he'd confessed that he'd bumped into his ex-girlfriend Louisa.

“For chrissake, it was only a drink. She was in New York to visit some guy.”

“A drink? A single drink?”

“That's not what I meant and you know it. We never left the bar. Just old friends talking over a couple of drinks.”

Once, Ilana had screwed up her courage to ask one of Bill's college buddies about Louisa. “Louisa, Louisa.” He'd laughed. “None of us knew her. Couldn't tell if she was shy or stuck-up. But man, she was good-looking. Had that sylph smoke-in-your-eyes thing going with Bear.” Ilana had left the watch on Bill's dresser with a note that if it happened again, if he saw Louisa again without telling her, she would have to leave, and although he'd pained her many times since in other ways, she'd never again had cause to suspect he'd been in touch with Louisa or that there had been a breach of fidelity of any sort.

César arrived within the hour. He cleaned the new office while she went back to the old one to finish packing. The next day, after the movers delivered her things, he helped her unpack her books and files, during which time he told her how much he still loved Evelyne but that his sister had told him to forget her, that Evelyne would never marry a guy who cleaned toilets. He thanked Ilana excessively when she paid him for the two days' work, nodded solemnly when she then offered him the Saturday cleaning job.