Solos (13 page)

Emily surveys all this while she waits. The music stops abruptly, and Anstice opens the door a crack, showing her right eye, which is light blue and suffering. “Well, look what the cat dragged in.”

“I've been working like a dog in my darkroom, and I thought I'd take a break and pay my rent,” Emily says. “How are you?”

“These damned migraines really get my goat, but aside from that I'm fine.”

Emily and Anstice have an unspoken agreement to trade a few animal clichés when they get together. “It's a dog's life.”

“You said it.” Anstice opens the door wider. “Come on in. The damned thing is winding down, actually. They're so predictable. They're like farmers—up with the birds, to bed with the chickens.”

Emily holds out the rent check. “It's late, of course. Sorry to be so hare-brained.”

“Late? It's early. It's only the end of October, ducky.”

“This is the October rent, Anstice.” She wonders what it must be like not to bother keeping track of such things—
six hundred here, six hundred there, late, early, what did it matter
. She says, “Now I'm going to owe you November. But I promise it won't take me so long.”

“I'm okay with it, Emily,” Anstice says. “I always get it eventually.”

She takes the check over to her desk, which is a dainty antique with a white cat asleep on it. Anstice tucks the check into one of the pigeonholes and scratches the cat behind the ears. Emily sits in the striped wing chair, Anstice stretches out on the overstuffed couch by the window and sighs. “I haven't been out of this damned house all day.”

“Well, it wasn't very nice out. Chilly. Damp. It wanted to rain all afternoon but it could only squeeze out a bit of a drizzle.”

Emily is embarrassed at having to pay her rent so late, and she is, as always, a little intimidated by the tasteful luxury of Anstice's loft. The chair she is sitting on probably cost the equivalent of two Dr. Demand sales, maybe three. The cashmere robe in which Anstice endures her migraines cost at least one. The cute little mug on the coffee table, which Emily knows holds the dregs of the one kind of herbal tea that doesn't aggravate the headache, was probably a cool twenty bucks at one of those design places on Mercer Street. Emily hates herself for thinking about such things, but she has been more broke than usual lately, and money is on her mind. She looks out the window and sees that it's almost dark, and that the overcast sky is beginning, belatedly, to break up, with a narrow window of rosy light between two gray clouds.

“So talk to me,” Anstice says. “What's new in the world? Had any photography adventures?”

Emily tells her about the trip to Long Island with dog and bird. “I found a beautiful
TIME
on a billboard.”

“Context?”

“
THIS IS A GOOD TIME TO CONSOLIDATE YOUR DEBTS
. I cropped it to
GOOD TIME TO CON
. It looks wonderful.”

“I can't wait to see it.”

Anstice always checks out Emily's photographs with enthusiasm, but she has yet to buy one. Emily is hoping Anstice is afraid if she buys one she'll get addicted, like Dr. Demand, and she awaits the day Anstice succumbs to a
TIME
or a
DOG
and will be unable to stop, and then the money will flow in. Anstice doesn't like
BREAD
: she says the
BREAD
photographs make her crave carbohydrates, which she is always trying, and failing, to avoid. She calls herself “unpleasantly plump,” but her plumpness is actually very pleasant. She has a thin face surrounded by a straight bob of hair with the color and shine of an onion skin, but the rest of her is as rounded and soft-looking as the sofa she sits on, right down to her fluffy red slippers. Anstice always wears a touch of red, even when she has a migraine.

“Maybe Dr. Demand will buy it,” Anstice says. “I ran into him yesterday. He was having lunch at the Busy Corner.”

“Don't tell me. A container of those little mozzarella balls with parsley and stuff?”

“
Bocconcini!
Right.”

“And a Dr. Pepper.”

“How well you know the dear man.”

“Was he wearing his divine dentist whites?”

“He certainly was. Over a pale blue shirt with a red plaid tie. Gorgeous.”

“What's new with him?”

“He said, ‘Hi Anstice, you're due for a cleaning.' How does he know that? I mean, he has like twenty million patients.”

“He follows your teeth closely. He's got a crush on you.”

“He does not.”

“Does too. He thinks you're the cat's pajamas.”

“Jeez, Em. Puppy love?”

“Exactly.”

“How do you know this?”

“Um—a little bird told me?”

“You're making this up to distract me from my migraine.”

“Maybe,” Emily says, “and maybe not.”

“Well, it's working. I feel a whole lot better. Want some real tea? A cookie? I made Grandma's molasses ones yesterday. I can't seem to stop baking, don't ask me why.”

“You don't have to make excuses for molasses cookies,” Emily says. “Lay 'em on me.”

Anstice's late Grandma Mullen's late cook, Agnes, is legendary throughout the building for her recipes, which Anstice executes frequently and which tend toward the homey: hearty soups and flaky piecrusts and big fat cookies. The molasses ones are the best, and with them Anstice serves tea the proper way: a loose English blend in the Mullen family pot, with a supply of extra hot water on the side and a silver pitcher of cold milk.

With their second round of tea and cookies, they reach the subject of Marcus, as Emily was pretty sure they would. Anstice is the only person in the world to whom she has ever confided her inconvenient love for Marcus Mead. She told Anstice because she had to tell someone, and Anstice is safe because she is not in the Trollope group, nor does she hire Marcus to sit her cats, so she and he don't know each other very well. Anstice is fascinated by Emily's passion for a twenty-one-year-old. Emily hasn't told Anstice that Marcus is Hart's son, however. She hasn't told anyone that, and she wasn't really sure of it herself until the night of the last Trollope meeting.

Until then, her only evidence was the envelope Hart left behind.

He'd been gone a week when she found it. It was in the big closet, on what used to be Hart's side, where Emily was moving some of her clothes. On the closet floor there was a pair of his old sneakers that she threw into the trash, and when she stood on a chair to check the shelf, she saw an ancient Jets T-shirt and a manila envelope. In four years of marriage, she never knew that Hart kept a manila envelope on the top shelf of his side of the closet. She tossed the shirt and took down the envelope to look inside.

It contained three photographs. The first was a black-and-white snapshot of a woman posed in the doorway of a hotel or an apartment house. She was wearing white ankle-boots and an oversized mod-style cap and a very short skirt—an Audrey Hepburn kind of outfit. She seemed beautiful, with generous but chiseled features and, under the hat, masses of dark hair. She had small, girlish breasts. One hand was on her hip, the other hung straight down. She was not smiling. Emily turned the photo over:
Marge '64
.

Well. In 1964, Hart would have been ten years old. He was the middle child, he said, so at least his three older siblings were already in existence, plus, probably, a younger one or two. Emily looked again at the photograph.
This
was the famous Marge Hartwell, the brutal, unstable, and ignorant woman who had given birth to seven children somewhere out in Wisconsin and mothered them so inadequately that Hart in desperation had to leave home at sixteen?
This
the woman who sent her children to school without books and gloves and warm hats? Who locked little Tab in the cellar for an entire twenty-four hours because he wouldn't finish his dinner? Who so henpecked and browbeat her husband that Hart could barely remember the old man uttering a dozen sober words the whole time he was growing up? Emily had pictured a schlumpy, drab woman in a house dress. Who was this glamorous mom with the funny hat and the sad eyes?

She picked up the next photo, another snapshot, in color this time, and unidentified, of a child who was undeniably Hart at the age of seven or eight—a handsome, robust little boy dressed in shorts and a T-shirt. He was standing with a red bicycle on what looked like a suburban street—sidewalks, lawns, neat houses set back. Hart was smiling widely—a smug, happy sort of
I've got a brand-new bike
smile—and the bike did indeed look shiny and new, and it was summer, and Hart's birthday was in August. But Marge Hartwell never sounded like a bicycle-giving sort of mother. And his father, Hart said, old Jim Hartwell, had never come out of his alcoholic funk long enough to give his kids anything but a slap. And hadn't Hart specifically told her that he'd always longed for a bicycle but never got one?

Who could have known this cute little boy with the appealing grin would grow up to be a liar and a sleazebag, a man who would order Thai food and then not pick it up?

The third picture, also in color, appeared to be of one of Hart's brothers. He had either three or four, Emily couldn't keep them straight, and Hart never said much about them. She couldn't even remember their names. Pete? Paul? Phil? Anyway, this one was small, thin, altogether inconspicuous. He was sitting on the front steps of an old house, squinting a little into the camera, not exactly smiling but looking hopeful and expectant. He was holding a thick book, like a telephone directory, on his knees. He wore jeans and a sweatshirt with a large 7 on it. The front end of a dog was visible lying at his feet, head on paws, tail outside the photograph. Emily turned it over and was surprised to see
July 1991
. Not a brother, then—too recent.
It must be Hart's son
, she had thought with a shock. “Yeah, I've got a kid somewhere,” he had told her casually one day, and when Emily pressed him for more, he said, “He lives with his mother, and his mother's none too fond of me, and that's all I want to say about that. Okay? It was a long time ago.” He would never say any more about the boy.
Total estrangement
, he'd said.
A couple of wackos. Get off my back with the family stuff
.

Hart's son. He looked like Hart, but Hart reduced, thinned down, made wispy somehow. A shadow Hart. But the resemblance was there.

Emily still has the photograph. And she remembers when she first met Marcus, and how, slowly, she began to think that he was who he was. It was the phone book that made her suspect, and things he has said over the last year have almost confirmed it. And every once in a while, when he raises his head and the light catches his greenish eyes …

“It's funny,” Anstice is saying, “because your father died when you were fifteen.” Her mouth is full of cookie, and she chews and swallows before she goes on. “Women who lose their fathers so young usually seek out father figures. And here you are in love with a son figure.”

“Go figure,” Emily says.

“Of course, you probably did the father figure thing already, with Hart.”

“Was that what it was?” Emily chews pensively, then pours herself another cup of tea. She often tries to reconstruct her marriage to Hart—not its details, but its rationale.
Why did I marry him?
She has asked herself the question over and over again, and has come up with a number of answers.
He was there, he said he adored me, he was cute, it was what people did, Mom was thrilled, I was lonely
. Sometimes she thinks it was just that she felt sorry for him because no one seemed to like him much except for his friend Joe Whack—that maybe if someone cared about him he could change and become nicer. None of these answers were enough, but there it was: four years of marriage like four years of a strange dream. “I don't know, Anstice,” she said. “I'm not crazy about the marrying-your-father theory. Hart had nothing in common with my father except that he was older than me.”

“He was one weird guy,” Anstice says.

“Still is, probably,” she says cheerfully. “Weirder.”

“He always kind of reminded me of Bugsy at the Pet Pound, yelling his own name but with no one really paying much attention.”

“Yeah. Hart's life was pretty much all about Hart.”

“And what about Marcus?”

“Marcus?”

“I mean, is he like your father?”

“Oh. No, not a bit. Marcus is strange and intense and brooding and obsessive, and my father was one of those fun guys who fit in anywhere. He was always joking. He and my mother both. They were always in a good mood.”

“Parent-wise, they sound great. It's so crazy you had a happy childhood.”

“As H. L. Mencken said, ‘My early life was placid, secure, uneventful, and happy.' I guess that is a little odd.” Emily ponders the adjectives for a moment:
uneventful?
Yes,
uneventful
is exactly what children want. Let nothing happen except what always happens: Mom and Dad there when you get up in the morning, pizza after the movies, school letting out in June, “Silent Night” and “Jingle Bells” at Christmas, your old green blanket. She sighs. “Until my father died. Then things weren't so great.”

They eat in silence, thinking of how Emily's father dropped dead of a heart attack while ordering a hot dog at a county fair. Emily remembers her mother's grief, how she sobbed in the night, and how she said that she used to think time went by so fast and now without Theo it was so slow, so slow.…

Two of Anstice's cats join them; the gray tabby sits on the arm of Emily's chair, looking intently at her cookie. Emily holds out a crumb and the cat eats it. Emily is remembering the game called Worm Words that she used to play with Milo and Laurie, how they used to turn
Mom
into
law
in five steps
(Mom-mop-lop-lap-law)
and how she once sent her brother to hell
(Milo-mill-hill-hell)
in four.
Marcus Mead. Lime to Mead
. She thinks hard:
Lime-line-lane-land-lend-lead-Mead
, she comes up with, and smiles.