The Private Lives of Pippa Lee (4 page)

A little after four o'clock, Pippa meandered over to Dot's house carrying a bottle of wine she had been keeping in reserve and wondering if she could possibly be pregnant in spite of the vestigial coil still lodged in her uterus like astronaut litter abandoned on the moon. Yet, no, rare as sex with Herb was these days, precautions were still necessary; eggs were meant to be fulminating inside her in this twilight of her fertility. The thought of a new baby now seemed absurd, even suffocating, much as she had loved being pregnant, addicted as she had been to the smell of her babies' necks, the soft crowns of their heads. That room was shut and locked; she couldn't pry it open.

Herb had opted to stay home from the party. Visiting a former dentist, his wife, and their half-baked son was not his idea of a good time. Pippa walked slowly, looking up at the gnarled branches of an oak tree, dark leaves shivering against the flat, blue sky. She felt hollowed out in a pleasant, staring way. The nightmare of the videotape seemed far off, yet it had left an aftertaste: wind flattening a patch of high grass by the side of the road with a hiss, an old man straining to pedal by her on a bicycle – everything that happened around her seemed to be gathering portent, like a fluffy white cloud augmenting itself, building up into a mountainous, darkening tower that threatened aircraft and frightened house pets with its ominous rumbling. She stopped and looked at the number of the house behind her. 1675. She had overshot the Nadeaus'. She backtracked and went up their front walk, identical to her own but for a large ceramic toadstool in the center of the front lawn. It was painted glossy red, with yellow spots on it. She knocked on the metal frame of the
screen door. There was no answer, so she pushed the door open and walked into a layout just like her own but with a strikingly different décor.

The Nadeaus' living room was a visual explosion. Red ivy crawled up the wallpaper, the couch was paisley, the armchairs were various shades of pastel. A miniature Victorian town was laid out on a mahogany dresser: tiny, cast-metal buildings – dry goods store, church, train depot – lined a sinuous railroad track. A glossy red steam engine shuttled along the track in a joyless mechanical loop. Every other usable surface in the room was jammed with photographs. Faces upon faces crammed up against one another: generations of babies, schoolchildren, old people, soldiers, brides from every decade since 1910. Pippa tried to take it all in, her eyes darting around the room like an alarmed bird, seeking a place to rest. At last her gaze alighted on Dot herself, sitting stiffly in a peach silk armchair in the corner, her chartreuse blouse and white slacks ironed, her hair a single, shining blond wave. She was staring ahead with a fixed expression. Pippa came up to her.

‘Hi, Dot,' she said.

Dot looked up at her with a steady, glittering stare. ‘Everyone is out back,' she said hoarsely.

‘Is everything all right?' Pippa asked.

‘He won't come out,' Dot said.

‘Your son?'

‘He's staying in his room. Can you imagine? A man of thirty-five locks himself in his room when his parents throw him a party?' Someone laughed outside. Pippa glanced out the plate-glass window. A few people were on the patio, talking. Johnny, Dot's husband, was listening to an ancient man, a drink in his hand, his head cocked. Johnny was short, bullish, slightly bowlegged. He had rosy, healthy-looking skin.

Dot stood up unsteadily and took the wine bottle from Pippa. ‘It's cold! You shouldn't have. Let's open it.' Pippa followed Dot
into the kitchen. Dot pulled out the cork and poured them each a glass of wine. ‘To motherhood,' Dot said, knocking back half the glass.

Outside, Pippa met a few of her neighbors. There were a couple of retired dentists, a saxophonist, a former chiropractor, a tiny woman who had written a book on child psychology. The sax player, a widower, was clearly hitting on the voluptuous wife of the chiropractor. They were both in their eighties. Pippa took it all in, stored it so she could tell Herb later. Pippa was a little high from the wine. She leaned back against the Nadeaus' trellis and felt her hips loosen up, her left leg swing open. Living in Marigold Village made her feel youthful. She was once again the youngest woman around, just as she had been when she and Herb had first been together. Watching a bent old woman laugh a few feet away, she flexed the strong muscles in her calves, stood up straighter, pressing her breasts against her thin blouse. She felt the familiar arrogance of youth, as if her age made her superior, as if it were to her credit.

Johnny Nadeau ambled over to her with his stiff-legged walk. ‘Hello, Pippa, glad you could come. A little eye candy,' he said, winking.

‘Thanks for having me, Johnny.'

He leaned in to her and whispered emphatically: ‘I'd appreciate if you could keep an eye on Dot.' She could smell pretzels on his breath. ‘She's having a hard time. I know she talks to you.'

‘Sure,' said Pippa, glancing at the spot where Dot had been. ‘Where is she?'

‘She went back inside. I told her this was a bad idea,' he said, shaking his head. Pippa started walking toward the sliding door. Again, the stage whisper: ‘Get her to drink a Coca-Cola.'

Pippa walked into the living room. It was empty. She peeked into the kitchen. No Dot. She heard arguing, crying, coming from somewhere down the hall. She followed the sound, walking gingerly. Pippa imagined Dot and the half-baked son locked in a
murderous embrace, Dot trying to drag him out to the party, the doughy son resisting, squeezing the breath out of her till she hung, limp and immobile, off his pasty arm. Pippa came to a bedroom door. They were in there. She could hear them. She knocked tentatively. The voices went silent.

‘Dot?' she said.

‘Who is it?' It was a man's voice.

‘It's Pippa Lee. I … was just looking for Dot.'

There was a fumbling noise, then the door swung open. A powerfully built man in his thirties, with a thin, ashen face and broken nose, stared through Pippa with a look of blank aggression, his mind on something else. His meaty, naked torso was tattooed with an intricately painted Christ. The Lord was portrayed in color, from the waist up; he was bare-chested and had very large wings. Pippa peered behind the son and saw Dot sitting on the bed. Her eyes were red from crying.

‘Dot,' Pippa said, struggling to keep her voice even. ‘Johnny asked me to find you.'

‘Look at me,' said Dot. ‘I can't go out there.' She blew her nose into a large tissue.

Pippa gamely held out her hand to the son. ‘I'm Pippa Lee,' she said.

‘Chris,' said the son, taking her hand with a surprisingly gentle grip. ‘Pleased to meet you. I'm sorry you had to be party to our little … thing, here …' He now began rummaging through a duffel bag and pulled out a wrinkled shirt. Pippa noticed that the Christ's wings extended over the man's shoulders and partway down his back. Dot watched her decorated son with a sly expression as he tugged on the shirt, buttoned the buttons. ‘Take care of my mother,' he said, fixing Pippa with an alarmingly frank gaze and backing up toward the wall. ‘I have to go.' And with this, Chris climbed out the window and strode away. He had a rocking gait and leaned far back as he walked, chin tucked in, arms slightly curled, as though ready to be attacked. He opened
the door of the yellow truck, swung himself onto the driver's seat, and sped off.

‘He was such a sweet little boy,' said Dot helplessly, shaking her head. ‘You can't imagine.'

*

Several days passed, and, though Chris Nadeau's bright yellow truck sped by Pippa on the road a few times, she heard nothing from Dot. She thought that perhaps shame about the scene at the party had made their friendship impossible. The son was scary. Poor Dot. To her surprise, Pippa found herself missing Dot a little bit. She wondered if she should call and see if she was okay, or if that would be awkward. The sleepwalking seemed to have evaporated. No new messes had appeared in the kitchen. Pippa felt a calm wash over her. The days passed in the quietest possible way. Ben called from the city every Sunday. Grace was in Paris, recovering from two weeks photographing in Kabul.

Pippa was still baffled as to how it had happened. One minute, it seemed, Grace was photographing dog shows for the
Hartford
Courant
. The next, she was capturing horrendous images of maimed children, screaming women that showed up in
The New
York Times
. Pippa was amazed by Grace's fierce pursuit of the truth at all costs. Yet a part of her wondered, as she stared into the eyes of yet another terrified person running through a sea of dust, if there wasn't something a little bit ruthless about photographing people in such distress. She hadn't asked the question of her daughter, but there it was anyway: Was there a moment when you had to choose between photographing a person and helping them? But at least she was doing something, Pippa thought. Drawing attention to. Herself. No. Not fair. To conflicts, injustices. As opposed to Pippa. Oh well, she thought as she thumbed through a luxuriously illustrated cookbook: osso buco. Lamb Milanese. Spaghetti alle vongole. At least Herb was appreciative. He loved being taken care of.

He had found a book written by an unknown, a high school history teacher in Idaho. It had come to him in a plain manila envelope, the address typed on a manual typewriter. When he saw it, he said, This is either a lunatic or the real thing. As it turned out, the book inside was that rare beast every publishing house is always praying for: an Easy Read of Quality. It was a historical romance, told in excruciating detail. Deeply moving. Expressive language. Would make a sweeping, epic film. Herb was serious about literature. He published most of the few giants left. But he was also a businessman, and receiving a novel like this in the mail was like winning the lottery. He could publish ten poets with the money this behemoth would bring in. It needed work, sure, but Herb was confident that, with some cutting and reshaping, it could be damn strong. He read the last of twelve hundred pages, folded his hands on the manuscript, and closed his eyes. He felt Pippa leaning over him as she bent to pick up his empty glass.

‘I found a book,' he said.

‘Oh, great,' said Pippa.

‘A real cash cow,' he said.

‘Since when do you say “cash cow”?'

‘I never found one before, so I never said it.'

‘What's it about?'

‘War. Romance. Bad weather.'

‘Is it good?'

‘It's a certain kind of good. It's lowbrow for highbrows. Or highbrow for lowbrows. It's perfect summer reading for people who own multimillion-dollar beach homes.'

‘That used to be us.'

‘Not us,' he said.

Pippa brought the glass into the kitchen. It was so strange, she thought. The closer Herb got to death, the more he thought about money.

Grace's jolt into the rarefied world of reportage photographers was unforeseen by everyone in the family, especially Grace. In college, she majored in Spanish with a minor in photography. The summer after she graduated, Ben took off to backpack through Europe with his girlfriend, Stephanie, also a future lawyer. Though the twins had gone to different colleges, Grace had assumed that, when they both graduated, she and Ben would live together – at least for a summer, to recapture the gleeful conspiracy of their life at home. But Ben felt he ought to grow up, become a man, be sane, not frolic around with his sister. So off he went to Europe with Stephanie, that loyal hound. Grace knew that Ben loved Stephie for what she wasn't (neurotic, blunt, alluring, hilarious) as much as for what she was (constant, sweet, accommodating yet intelligent – a sort of modern-day Olivia de Havilland in
Gone
with the Wind
). In essence, she knew her brother had chosen a girl as unlike herself as possible.

So, after graduation, uninterested in rooming with any of her college friends who were swarming into Brooklyn, Grace rented herself a one-bedroom apartment in Spanish Harlem with high, arched windows and mucus yellow linoleum on the floors, hoping to improve her Spanish and think about what to do next. She had enough money from her parents to avoid a job, for the summer anyway, if she lived frugally. She spent the first two weeks wandering around the neighborhood, picking through tag sale items laid out on the street: used communion dresses, worn paperbacks, the occasional comb – and eating rice and beans with fried plantains at the counter of her local restaurant while reading biographies of Lee Miller and Lawrence of Arabia. She furnished her
apartment with two beanbag chairs (one maraschino red, one Fanta orange) and an ornate white wrought-iron bedstead. She didn't talk much to anyone. She enjoyed this removal from her surroundings even as she was immersed in them. She felt mute and contented, loaded with potential, yet entirely unproductive.

She came to know every nook and cranny of her block; the dusty windows of the Assembly of God meetinghouse on the second floor of number 1125, the musty used bookstore in the basement of 1130, the botanica on the corner, which advertised cures for lovesickness, homesickness, and ‘most ailments of the soul and body.' The bodega on the corner of 120th Street was run by a puffy-eyed, garrulous Dominican man and his taciturn grandson, a melancholic who moped behind the counter, his haunted, dark eyes, wasted face, and pointed goatee making him look like a figure out of an El Greco painting. The same five old men sat on folding chairs outside the bodega every day watching pedestrians, making bets on everything from the racetrack to who was going to step on a particularly large crack in the sidewalk as they passed by. Young women and girls walked proudly down the street in tight clothes, glossy hair scraped back from their exhausted faces, pushing strollers with babies or toddlers lolling inside. The wizened, high-haired lady who ran the Laundromat stood outside smoking and chatting with her neighbors when she wasn't folding sheets inside the picture window.

Grace came to think of that stretch of pavement on Lexington between East 120th and East 122nd streets as a world of its own. Though some people on the block had come to recognize Grace and said hello when they passed her or when she walked into their shops, she still felt relatively invisible. She was not a part of the life of the block; she was an accepted observer. Looking at her, you couldn't say she blended in, particularly. She had wild, blond hair that fell in angry ringlets around a pointed, intelligent face. Her body was tall, thin, and athletic, her breasts small and compact. Men always noticed her but rarely approached her; there was something mannish in her movements. From behind, with
her slim hips and muscular shoulders, her relaxed posture, she could have been mistaken for a long-haired boy.

One night late, a bottle shattered in the street and woke Grace up. A man called out in Spanish; another man answered. Their arguing voices echoed in the cavernous apartment. Grace walked barefoot across the linoleum, trying to make out what was being said. A young woman was pleading; she had tears in her voice. Grace stood inches away from the windowsill, so she could not be seen, and peered down into the street. The three protagonists of the fight were leaning against two cars parked a few yards away from each other. She recognized the El Greco grandson of the bodega owner. She had never seen him so animated. He was flailing his arms, gesturing, calling the other man, an older, stocky fellow with his feet planted very far apart, ‘a liar and a fool' in Spanish. A slight girl of around fifteen, whom Grace had seen pushing her baby up and down the block, was hanging on to the grandson's arm, trying to pull him away. Several onlookers had gathered in a semicircle to watch the proceedings.

Grace stood transfixed by this dangerous and real drama unfolding below, as though in a box at the theater. For a long time, the two men were in a stalemate, the El Greco grandson shrieking hysterically at the thickset stranger, the girl alternately trying to calm him down and yelling at him to shut up, the stranger walking up to the pair menacingly, then returning to the hood of his car, only to be pelted with a new round of insults from the El Greco grandson. In spite of this posturing, the stranger didn't seem very committed to the argument; he even looked around him a few times, as if for a more comfortable seat. But finally, the grandson said something that got his goat. Grace didn't catch the meaning, but whatever it was, it was the last straw. The stranger charged the grandson, flinging the girl aside like a doll, and laid the boy flat with one punch. Then he walked away, shaking his head. A few people gathered around the grandson, who sat up slowly and, shaking off their solicitude, limped away in the opposite direction.

The next morning Grace woke up thinking about the Minolta her parents had given her for graduation. She took the camera out of its case and loaded it with film. That was the morning she began to photograph in earnest. She spent the next two months documenting every waking hour of her block. The people already knew her, so they tolerated her lens poking at them, even invited her into their apartments occasionally. She photographed everything, everyone she could – the Assembly of God Sunday service, the affable bodega owner, the El Greco grandson, the old men sitting outside the bodega, the Laundromat lady. She built her portfolio up image by image, photographing day and night as if pursued. The resulting stack of pictures showed obsessive commitment and a sharp eye. She got an appointment with the editor of the
Hartford Courant
, a paper she had heard was open to hiring young photographers. They took her on. She spent the fall and winter chasing fire trucks and photographing orange tape stretched around suburban houses where murders had occurred; by the following summer, she was on a plane bound for Louisiana to cover Hurricane Katrina for the
Courant
with a senior colleague. She slept just a few hours a night for the entire two weeks; there wasn't a moment of that tragedy she wanted to miss. The trip was oddly blessed for her; images of horror and hopelessness spiked with humor seemed to cohere inside her lens again and again. She couldn't seem to help being at the right place at the right time. The pictures she brought back were surreal: three children wearing rubber Halloween masks of George Washington, Elvis Presley, and Chucky discover the corpse of an aged man in an alley; a shivering dog stands perched on an island of garbage, surrounded by floating dolls; a big woman dances around in the remains of her decimated living room, wallpaper hanging from the walls like shreds of skin. Grace returned to the
Courant
a star. Within two years she was on the staff of Getty Images, touching down in Kabul.

Grace was perplexed by what seemed to others to be talent yet
felt to her like something else. Her luck was uncanny to her. It was as though she herself was creating the images, dreaming them onto the emulsion. It was, perhaps, the way she was able to forget herself, to disappear, to become transparent when she photographed, that made it so hard for her to take credit for her own work. Sometimes, she was swallowed up by the experience so completely that she could not remember having taken the pictures at all. Yet she had, of course, and anything paranormal about her new chosen profession was, she knew, adolescent hokum she would never have shared with a soul, except her twin, whom she treated with the brutal frankness, the mocking acuity she reserved for her own internal life.

Ben was, for Grace, an extension of her self. Some of what she was doing by working so hard, she knew, or rather saw dimly in some back room of her mind like a mouse one perceives scurrying along a wall out of the corner of one's eye, was getting away from Ben by surpassing him. Their relationship was absolutely perfect. It was so perfect, in fact, that Grace needed no one else. She had not, as the psychotherapist she saw for a few months in college, Dr Sarah Kreutzfeldt, put it, ‘individuated completely.' Grace's chief complaint, when she first availed herself of the University Health Services, was that she couldn't fall in love. She thought there must be something wrong with her. There had been one obvious opportunity: an intelligent, interesting, funny boy with sparkling eyes and a caved-in, question mark-shaped torso. She kept teetering on the brink of love with him, and even spent blissful hours in the zone of extreme fondness. But all it took was one flabby joke, a botched allusion, a moment of strained sincerity, and she felt a leaden seal forming in her gut, cutting her off from the suddenly former object of her affection as swiftly as a pair of scissors severing two sausage links. Back to square one.

She blamed Ben for it all – smart, funny, endearing, infuriating Ben. No one would ever make her laugh so much; no one could
peer at the world with the same good-natured, even loving derision. After a couple of weeks of looking at this same observation from different angles, her sessions with Dr Kreutzfeldt were drying up. Grace was embarrassed by the triviality of her problem. She chided herself for even initiating the therapy, but now she felt obliged to keep it up. She began to resent Dr Kreutzfeldt. She became sullen and uncommunicative during the sessions, staring out the window at the students walking from the library to the dorms, the dorms to the math building.

This behavior piqued Sarah Kreutzfeldt's interest. She had always sensed some subterranean explosion in the girl, a mine going off so far inside her that even she was unaware of it. When Grace first stomped into her office, she was surprised. This girl did not seem like Larken material. A very small university, Larken catered to the privileged painters, writers, critics, poets, and performance artists of the future. The teaching was not so much rigorous as expansive, the teachers stretching their courses to the point of deformity in order to encompass the whimsy of the students. Terms like
participatory
and
student-
centered
took top billing in the school brochure. Most of the students had a vague, haunted look, like possums disturbed from their burrows in the middle of the day. They walked through campus slowly, in a haze of half-digested ideas, each convinced of his or her own inherent flair. By contrast, Grace had a sharp, intense countenance. Her eyes were very focused; her walk was a march. She seemed hyperawake.

Dr Kreutzfeldt knew there was something besides her twin at work in this girl's psyche. She wasn't sick; she was stuck. There was some knot in her that needed to be loosened. Not sure where to begin, Dr Kreutzfeldt started with the obvious: the parents. Grace shrugged and spoke of Herb with affection, Pippa with a mix of regret and disdain. This mother was clearly a doormat, Dr Kreutzfeldt thought, internally shaking her head. She never would understand some women. The kids grow up, and then what?
Yet she sensed strong emotion in Grace when she talked about her mother. Her cheeks flushed, she looked away. Kreutzfeldt sensed an emotional morass obscured by irony cool as a blanket of metal filings. Something had happened with the mother.

Over the weeks, gently, shifting her weight slightly in her armchair, her attractive, full face tilted slightly as she spoke, Dr Kreutzfeldt guided Grace back, again and again, to what she saw as a kind of crossroads of character. For the first few years of her life, Grace had been extremely close to her mother. She remembered screaming when Pippa went out to dinner, craving her smell, her embrace, treasuring the time they spent together playing on the beach or just staring out the window. Yet by the time Grace was eight or nine, a vast, arid divide had opened up between them. Dr Kreutzfeldt kept returning to the period she had come to refer to as ‘the turning point' in Grace's relationship with her mother, hoping that some illuminating memory would spring from the girl's mind. But there was nothing. And then one day, out of nowhere it seemed, after a long silence, Grace looked out the window and said softly, ‘I don't think my mother likes me very much.'

Dr Kreutzfeldt was taken aback. ‘But she seems to be almost slavishly devoted to you,' she said.

‘She is,' said Grace. ‘But there's a part of her that she always held back. Not with Ben. Just with me.'

‘And you are angry with her for rejecting you,' offered Dr Kreutzfeldt.

‘I suppose,' said Grace with a slight sneer. And then, turning, half-laughing, she said in her mocking tone, ‘Am I cured now?'

*

Pippa stared out the window of Herb's Mercedes and thought about Grace. It had been three months since she'd been to see them, before her trip to Afghanistan, her second in a year. Pippa had butterflies in her stomach. She always did, these days, when
she was going to see her daughter. Seeing Ben was like putting on your favorite old pair of jeans. Seeing Grace was like … like bumping into someone you had a crush on. No, Pippa thought, that can't be it. And yet it was, a little.

Herb had chosen the Gotham Bar and Grill so he could have a decent meal. The kids had loved to go there around Christmas when they were little. It was absurdly expensive, but there was something reassuring about the heavy cloth on the tables, the superfluous busboys, the quiet conversations, the fine silk and wool of the customers' suits. It felt like going back in time. Herb and Pippa were early, as they always were, and Pippa was teasingly trying to distance the bread basket from Herb's big hands. She saw Grace through the window as she approached. She had cut her wild blond hair short. It looked like underbrush. Her nose looked sharper somehow, a little beakish, Pippa thought, as Grace shoved the heavy door open with too much force, walked up the steps, and stood raking the room with her cool gaze. Pippa waved at her, and Grace approached with long strides, unwinding a scarlet silk scarf from around her neck. Herb stood up and hugged Grace hard. Grace then leaned across the table and brushed Pippa's cheek with her lips.