Stay With Me (17 page)

"It seems possible," Eamon says. "Look, why don't you come to dinner?"

I thought dinner was out of the question. Hadn't he said exactly that in the cab?

"You can meet Dad," Eamon says. "And I'll ask some other people so you aren't bored to tears."

"Really?" I ask, and then, before he can change his mind, quickly add, "Okay."

"I'm glad you're back," he says.

"Me too," I say.

We stay on the phone a bit longer than necessary, not saying anything, until one of us says goodbye.

The night before Clare leaves (and two days before my job starts), I help her pack. She has loaned me some clothes from when she was a size eight (instead of her current six) so that I can go to work looking like I belong there.

"I'll be thinking of you on your first day," she says.

"Do you know what Charlotte does?" I ask.

"No," Clare says, laughing. "Other than light cigarettes she doesn't smoke, I don't."

I pass her a small pile of stockings. We are using my bed, as she still keeps a lot of her things in here.

"You'll figure it out," Clare says, walking over to the dresser.

"Maybe," I say.

She hands me a thin silver bracelet with a pearl clasp.

"I wear this to important meetings for luck," she says. "It's yours for the summer."

It takes me about a week to discover what it is that a producer does. At the end of my fifth day, I make a list of all the people who have phoned the office. Since Charlotte is always either on the phone or in a meeting, I've taken a lot of messages. There is, in the office, both a secretary and an accountant. Even with my answering the phones and doing errands, they are both endlessly busy.

When I am done writing down the messages—union lawyer
(tell her the numbers don't work),
stage manager
(ask her what she thinks about pushing the date back),
Theodore Greyhalle's office
(Isaac's not happy
), landlord of rehearsal space
(returning her call),
the dean of Juilliard
(fundraising question),
casting director
(I think I found the
right girl),
director
(I hear Isaac's not happy)
—I have a list of all that goes on before a play can even begin to make its way to the audience.

Until now, I had believed that the invisible part of a performance was the deal between the actors and the audience. But there is a larger, even less visible part. It's the process by which the various technical crews, actors, directors, writers, and all their lawyers come together so as to allow that deal to take place. Each and every night until the play closes, the money is counted and people decide if the results were worth the effort.

"You learn a lot less from a hit," Charlotte says. "But you have a better time."

Until the next play, when everything starts again.

Eamon calls to say that dinner is taking a while to organize and that his father has a meeting with Charlotte's accountant. Would I allow him to buy me lunch on that day.

Yes, I say. I would.

I make every effort not to look forward to it so much, and when I see him, I keep my being thrilled as private as possible. While walking over from Charlotte's office to the park behind the library, I tell him my theory of what is seen and unseen in a play.

"Preproduction is the same in television too. Big and inevitable," Eamon says. "Kind of like an invisible hand. Theatrical instead of economic."

I obviously don't know so much about TV, but it is
not
like theater. However, an invisible hand is a good description. I like that.

"It's economics a little," I say. "The money is important."

"I meant, you know, Adam Smith's invisible hand theory," he says.

"Does he work in television?" I ask.

"No, he had ideas about capitalism," Eamon says. "It's not like I know what I'm talking about. Banking, markets. Not my thing."

We are eating the kind of sandwiches that really need a knife and fork. I wipe off my hands carefully before reaching into a bag borrowed from Clare (leather, silk lining, Italian label, and, I suspect, an old present from Gyula). In my notebook, I write down
Adam Smith
and ask Eamon if capitalism covers both banking and markets.

"Okay, nothing I said was interesting enough to write down," he says.

"I write down stuff I don't know," I explain. "That way I won't forget what I should know."

"What do you do, look it up?"

"Sometimes," I say.

"You're putting a lot of faith in the encyclopedia," Eamon says.

"I usually asked Rebecca when it wasn't a book thing," I say. "She knew."

"Who do you ask now?"

"I just write it down," I say. "That way I can keep an eye on it."

Eamon is looking at me somewhat more intently than he needs to in order to see.

"Okay, so maybe I didn't explain very well," I say.

"No, you explained it fine," he says. "I would suspect that most of the things you don't know come from being seventeen."

"Try from being dyslexic," I say.

"That just means you can't spell," Eamon says. "Or that you read slowly."

"How do you know?"

"I have a nephew who's dyslexic."

"You're an uncle?"

"Many times over," Eamon says.

"I kind of thought you were an only child," I say.

"My father's been married several times," he says. "I have a whole lot of brothers. And they all have kids."

I recognize the way information is being given—the specifics hidden with words like
several, whole lot, all.
Rebecca did this all the time. If you asked what she'd done the previous night, she'd say she spent the day working. This may have been accurate, but it was not the most detailed answer. She usually got around to telling me those details, but only when and how she wanted.

Eamon is claiming some privacy about his family. His father's marriages, his brothers, and their kids are off-limits for now. The trick here is to slide away from the topic without entirely leaving it.

"No sisters, huh?" I ask.

He doesn't answer right away, taking the wax paper and soda cans from our lunch and putting them into the deli bag. His face is hard to read, but he makes me think of Clare on her birthday. Before the breakup, when she was remembering the time Gyula tried to give her a necklace.

"There were stepsisters, I think," Eamon says finally. "I was in boarding school during those marriages and my brothers were in college. I'm not sure any of us knew them."

So the brothers were older. Perhaps not twenty years older like my sisters, but still.

"It was all so long ago," he says.

Decades,
I think, remembering Clare's comment about ice-skating when she was little. I put the back of my hand against his, close enough to feel his ring against my fingers. We sit there for a while, hands barely touching. This, I decide, is what I like best about him. The very full quiet. Like on the phone and on the day I fainted. Both before and then right after the kiss.

Eamon uses both arms to look at his watch—the hand of one holding and turning the wrist of the other—while saying, "Okay, bunny, let's get you back to work."

C
LARE COMES HOME FROM
S
WEDEN
and Vienna buzzing with triumph. Work went really well, and I listen to her talk about property location, investors, and exactly how one renovates a hotel in Vienna. I pay very careful attention to what Clare says about work, for there were probably important things I failed to notice when it was Rebecca's career I followed.

A career that is now finally ending, as Clare has found a buyer for the store, something she didn't ever think she could bring herself to do.

"I must be on a winning streak," she says. "I even have an idea for what to do with the money we'll get."

Rebecca left everything to Clare, so it's somewhat inaccurate to say
we
will get anything.

"Provided you approve, that is," she says. "I'm going to check with William and Raphael too."

I know Raphael loaned Rebecca money for the new space in Brooklyn, but why check with William?

"He gave her the money to start," Clare says. "When she left the hospice."

Rebecca had always told me that William disapproved of her changing careers. That he'd said no right-minded person would leave nursing to open a bakery. And yet he gave her the money to do exactly that. I ask Clare which is true.

"Both," she says. "He disapproved and he helped her do it."

"Why didn't you like him?" I ask, a question long overdue.

"She was unhappy with him," Clare says. "That's how it goes. You know, I'll only like Ben for as long as you do."

Since I don't want to think about Ben or how long Clare will like him, I ask about her plans for the money
we'll get.
There's a university in Sweden that is raising money to restore the stained glass in its library's reading room. Clare wants to give them the money they need in return for putting
In memory of Rebecca Jane Abranel, 1963—1001
on a plaque. This is such a bizarre idea that I really like it. But I agree she should check with Raphael, whom she's already set to meet with so as to keep him in the loop about the sale.

And then the one thing I was certain would never happen does. My sister goes to meet Raphael for drinks and doesn't come home until five in the morning. That's some loop, I think as I sit up in the living room, trying not to fall asleep. I'm not worried, exactly, but it's so unlike her. I think idly about calling the police, but don't.

At one in the morning, the phone finally rings. "Leila, I might run a little late."

"You're already running late," I say. "I've been worried."

I hear her whisper,
She's mad
and Raphael saying,
No, no, let me.

"
As
long as you're fine," I say, not sure what to think about all this.

When my sister finally comes home, it's impossible to be mad in any way that she didn't phone sooner.

Clare's already so horrified that they forgot to call and tell me about the sudden change in plans. She's tired. She has to go to work for an early meeting. She's also deeply, endlessly happy. More than the contract for those heated towel racks made her.

"It's the right time," she says. "We've finally found it."

"
You
found it," I say. "It's always been the right time for him."

"No," Clare says. "When I was in law school, he broke up with me."

"I don't believe you," I say. "What happened?"

A question I would never have posed to Rebecca.

"He disappeared, stopped calling," Clare says. "Poof, vanished, you know."

I don't know and hope I never do. Although if Raphael did it to Clare, chances are good someone will do it to me.

"The next time I saw him was at his parents' house," she says. "I was so mad, I wouldn't talk to him."

"For how long?"

"Oh, it went on for ages," she says. "I can really stay mad."

It's not as if he hadn't given her reason.

"Did he ever say why he'd done that?" I ask. "The poof, vanished."

"I think it was the same reason everyone does it," Clare says. "Fear, caution, second thoughts."

None of this seems like a good enough reason to disappear from someone you love.

"So why did you start talking to him again?"

"When I turned thirty, he sent Rebecca and me to Rome," Clare says. "As a present."

Okay, let's see. A trip to Europe from a man you aren't speaking to is allowed. But letting a man who is your great love invest in a hotel your family once owned? That's out of the question. I'll never understand this.

"Of course, Raphael made it seem like we'd be doing him this huge favor if we went," Clare says. "He said if I'd go to Rome, he'd try to fix what he'd done. So when I got back, he and I went out a few times."

When she was thirty, I was ten. Rebecca and William were still married. Did I know about the trip to Rome or the dates with Raphael? Probably not.

"By then, I was already dating Elias, and he was a little more aggressive," she says.

That I can easily imagine. Everyone is more aggressive than Raphael. He was probably still trying to come up with a strategy for the post-Elias Clare when Gyula swooped in.

"When Da called me in Budapest, the first person I wanted to talk to was Rebecca, which was incredibly stupid," Clare says.

It's not stupid so much as it is puzzling. We all wanted Rebecca—to see, to touch, to talk to—right after she'd made it abundantly clear that she didn't want any of us.

"The other person I wanted was Raphael," Clare says. "I didn't even tell Gyula what had happened until I was home."

I get Clare more coffee, pausing to swirl hot water through the cup just to warm it up. No matter how hot it is outside, my sister likes her coffee scalding. Maybe Gyula was. right, I think, when he blamed Rebecca for the breakup. But maybe there's a reason that when she got the worst possible news Clare wanted Raphael instead of her boyfriend.

Raphael calls me that day at Charlotte's office.

"Leila, I feel terrible we worried you," he says.

I pause, wondering if I should tell him congratulations. As happy as Clare is, he must be ten times more so.

"You have to let me buy my way out of this," he says. "I get you something hideously expensive and you forgive me."

"No, it's fine," I say. "Don't even think about it."

"I've made up my mind," he says. "Buying forgiveness is what my father would do."

"Since when do you want to be like Uncle Harold?"

A question that just slips out. Even when I'm really angry with Da, I don't want to hear anyone else criticizing him.

"It's Rebecca," Raphael says, interrupting my useless regret. "When I thought of this ever happening, I knew I would buy her the huge, happy thing I could never give Clare."

It's always Rebecca, I think. I really need to be writing Adrien Tilden.

"You can get Clare something," I say. "You're not Gyula. It's not the same."