The Real Liddy James (7 page)

“No, you're not,” said Liddy, her tone beginning to take on an adversarial note. “Your father and I have joint custody of you and
we worked out an arrangement in your best interests. Now that's going to change—”

“Don't be so smug!”
the boy shouted furiously.
“You think you can make everyone do what you want but you can't. I have rights!”

Liddy felt a white-hot wave of rage engulf her now, and a dismaying urge to lift the hand he had bruised and strike him pulsed through her. She managed to take a breath.

“I am going to the car now. Peter, I expect you to tell our son to join me.”

And she looked away, as she could see Peter was about to cry.

“Matty, sweetheart,” said Rose softly, “I love you so much, but you must see that your dad and I can't look after you properly for a little while. So you have to do this for me, so I won't be worried about you.”

Rose gestured for him to come close and she hugged him and stroked his hair. And now a kindly nurse appeared to check on Rose and, smiling at Matty who was lying in Rose's arms, turned to everyone and said, “Now there's a boy who loves his mother.”

Peter gently helped Matty away from Rose, and Rose was grateful that the nurse bustled around her, sticking a thermometer in her mouth, pouring her more water, as she did not wish to dwell upon the expression she had just glimpsed on Liddy's face. She was suddenly gripped by an uncomfortable feeling that Barbara was right and the cruel fates were just getting started with Liddy.

And Liddy, the real Liddy, felt something, too, the funny feeling again that brought tears to her eyes and made her vulnerable
and careless. She took a deep breath and counted to five. She lifted her phone to summon assistance.

Matty refused to get out of the car and the only person he would talk to was Vince, so Liddy left them together in earnest debate about WWE, as she and Cal ran back into the house in Carroll Gardens in search of Mr. Oz. They found him under the cushion with the red wine stain from the faculty party Liddy had hosted in 2006, and this made Liddy shudder. Tonight she had learned that the house haunted her, not Rose, and the reason Rose had never changed the furniture or painted the walls in a different color, Rose Garden Pink as Liddy had suggested, was because she did not care about such things.

Everything in it that mattered had become hers.

Quality time is as important as quantity time
, the child psychologist had said, and whenever Liddy parroted that to her clients (often when arguing for Skype access or, as she preferred to say, “virtual visitation”), she was emboldened by the fact that no one could accuse her of not practicing what she preached.

Up to now, she had even believed it.

But as she looked at Matty's back, hunched over, his shoulder blades jutting out of his black hoodie, rigid with an emotion that she knew would have unpleasant repercussions for her, it dawned on her that
she
had become Mom2, and her role in his life was to enjoy the compliments from waiting staff about his good
behavior in restaurants, work ceaselessly to provide the lifestyle he had grown accustomed to, and nag him occasionally about his math results.
How had
that happened?
She had sacrificed so much for him.

Liddy closed her eyes. She was well aware what military organization, no social life, and working late had brought her. She was a grown-up. She had made choices. And she was allergic to the whining of the privileged, or any form of self-pitying introspection, particularly her own. No, she could not think about anything now, it would drive her crazy. She decided she would think about it tomorrow.

As they turned onto Hudson Street, she finally remembered to switch on her phone and was greeted by a fanfare of pinging messages. She scrolled through quickly, ignoring all but the four from Curtis Oates, as the car pulled up outside her building. Mark the doorman came out, greeting Matty enthusiastically. But Matty ignored him and Liddy's humiliation continued. She hurried into the lobby—she had noticed Lloyd Fosco, languid in black, in front of the furniture shop opposite and did not want to discuss a dinner date in front of an audience—and Mark lifted a sleeping Cal out of the backseat and carried him inside. In the elevator, Matty started singing a song too loudly, rocking backward and forward and thumping his forehead against the steel wall every two beats, so Liddy made strained small talk about the weather until the doors opened at her apartment. She overtipped Mark so he might still like her, despite the rude, not to mention disturbing, behavior of her elder child.

Liddy hurried the boys into the perfectly proportioned white living space and escaped out of the darkness with relief. She turned and locked the apartment door behind them and for the first time in several hours felt safe. The irreplaceable Lucia was waiting in the kitchen, a plate of sandwiches, mugs of hot chocolate, and a large glass of merlot reassuringly at the ready. Cal sleepwalked into Lucia's open arms and they headed into his bedroom. Matty sat and ate with morose intent. Liddy took a large gulp of wine and checked her e-mails. Then Lucia returned and, with an affectionate pat on Matty's back, chivied him toward the shower. Liddy looked for the dog. She saw a small puddle of liquid on the stripped oak floor.

Oh, no, Coco!
She cursed silently but said nothing. She had left a note for Lucia reminding her to take the dog out at least four times a day, but Lucia was unsentimental about animal welfare and strongly disapproved of keeping animals in the city, so Liddy knew this was some sort of statement.

She grabbed a roll of paper towels and scurried over, but as she knelt down, she felt a sudden splash on the back of her neck. She looked up. A drip fell onto her face. She picked up a vase of yellow roses and stuck it under the slow stream, but before she could even ponder the implications of water leaking through the walls or ceiling or an exposed pipe, which the architect had left as an interior feature, she heard a displeased shriek from Cal.

She ran into the bedroom where Cal was standing on the bed pointing at the floor. Her nose wrinkled at the sweet, acrid smell that greeted her. She knew it could mean only one thing. Her shoe
sunk into a yellow-green turd that the dog had deposited beside the door. This time her curse was not silent.

She seized the canister of instant pet trainer, a device that shoots compressed air in the direction of an errant animal in order to discipline it, and one of which she had placed in every room in order to house-train this four-legged impulse purchase she had bought on Christopher Street when Cal pleaded. Liddy sprayed it vigorously, the loud hissing causing Cal to cry out but Coco only to yap cutely and scrabble away. She took off her shoe gingerly and took another handful of paper towels to clean up the mess from shoe and floor. She vowed that if the animal ever crapped on the cream carpet at the foot of her bed, she would pay someone to make it disappear and tell Cal it was run over. She suspected he would not even notice.

She tucked Cal into bed and came out to find Matty, the dog clutched in his arms, hot chocolate splattered around his mouth, standing in the doorway of his room staring at her. For one moment she thought,
Maybe this is conciliatory? Maybe he's decided he wants to be here?

“What about my lunch tomorrow?” he said.

“You're on the meal plan,” said Liddy.

He rolled his eyes contemptuously, put the dog down, and pointed to his chin.

“I don't eat processed foods anymore. Doctor Barbara said it might help my skin.”

“What?”

“Look at my face! It's repulsive.”

Liddy peered. Yes, there was a cluster of tiny pimples.

“Oh, I can hardly see them, but, okay, we'll stop at Subway on the way to school and buy something.”

“I told you I'm not eating processed foods. Rose makes me a salad every night. I like quinoa—”

“That's enough. Don't wake Cal. Go to bed.”

“Of course.
Don't wake Cal!
”

He turned and slammed his door behind him.

“And brush your teeth!”
shouted Liddy, although by now she didn't care whether he did or not. She took a breath.

“Good night. I love you,” she said.

“Good night to you, too!”
he shouted back and Liddy fired off another
hiss
of pet trainer, although she knew that it had no effect whatsoever on a teenage boy.

She turned to see Lucia silently wrapping the untouched sandwiches in foil. Lucia held views about everything, from the Affordable Care Act to Beyoncé, and always shared them. But not tonight.

“I'm sorry, Lucia,” said Liddy. “Thank you for coming over. I know it's very late.”

Lucia nodded but did not reply. Liddy knew well that the emphatic manner in which she moved from fridge to kitchen counter was another sort of statement, in the same way as the quiet refusal to walk the dog.

“I'd be lost without you, you know,” said Liddy. She could not bear Lucia's disapproval.

Lucia nodded. “You need to go to bed, Liddy. Two boys and a dirty dog. It's a lot.”

Suddenly Liddy's phone rang. It was Curtis, with the
admonishing tone he always took when he could not get hold of her exactly when he wanted. He asked her where she'd been, and when she said the hospital he ignored this and told her he was summoning the partners for a breakfast meeting at seven a.m. the following morning.

Liddy looked over at Lucia, who was packing up her bag in time to the steady metronome-like plopping of the water into the vase on the floor.

She braced herself to start begging.

Rose, finally alone but kept awake in the dark by the various snores and snuffles and soft footsteps of the ward, closed her eyes and imagined herself back home, where she longed to be and where, from her bedroom window, she would admire the blue and white ceramic tiles she had plastered onto the garden wall and inspect the fig tree.

When Liddy and Peter had bought the house, one of their neighbors was an elderly Sicilian man named Giovanni Matisi, who had three fig trees, and at night, lying in each others arms by candlelight, they would listen to him singing to the trees in Italian. Charmed by Liddy, whose beauty in those days could inspire poetry, Giovanni presented them with one of the trees in an earthenware pot tied with a red ribbon, and every year after that they enjoyed the late summer bounty of fresh figs and the sight of Matty toddling around on chubby legs and stuffing the plump, juicy fruit in his mouth and laughing.

Liddy loved the tree and Giovanni, and whenever Rose looked at it she was reminded that Liddy was a romantic at heart; Peter might choose not to remember now, but he had once told her the whole story and added that when Giovanni died Liddy had wept inconsolably, and every year sent a present to each one of his grandchildren now scattered along the East Coast.

When Liddy left, Peter ignored the fig tree (although he had refused to let her take it, likely because it was the only thing she had wanted), and when Rose moved in it looked shriveled and dark and almost certainly dead. But that winter Rose wrapped it in an old quilt, and even sung arias to it when she was alone in the little garden tending her lavender and rosemary, and that spring it bloomed, and then bloomed again, more than ever before.

Every summer from then on, Rose secretly sent Liddy a small basket of figs.

Neither of them ever mentioned
it.

Lydia Mary Murphy met Peter James at a storytelling salon in the Cornelia Street Café when she was twenty-five years old and impatient for the next chapter of her life to begin.

She had arrived in the city in triumph six months earlier, her choice to study law in graduate school vindicated by the competing bids to employ her from every firm to which she had applied. “Rosedale and Seldon is lucky to have you,” said Marisa Seldon, managing partner, who became, if not exactly a role model, at least a mentor for Liddy, and encouraged her to pursue her career goals in her own way. For, after all, Liddy had achieved all this with no family connections, an undergraduate degree in art
history, and summers spent working not in unpaid resumé-enhancing internships but on the production line of a plastics factory.

In her interview, Marisa had asked Liddy why she had chosen the noble profession. Liddy had looked her straight in the eye and said, “Because of the money.” When Marisa grinned, Liddy had added, “And because I want to be like Grace Van Owen in
L.A. Law
.”

Then she told Marisa about Miss Gwendolyn Harris, the teacher in eighth grade who had changed her life. Marisa listened, but she was not surprised. She knew from experience that for people like Liddy, there was always a teacher.

Miss Harris was in her midthirties, wore long suede skirts over her boots, tribal jewelry around her neck, and had long snaky blond hair like a benign Medusa. She had a boyfriend who was a musician, and occasionally he arrived on his motorbike, his guitar case strapped to the back, to pick her up after school. She would hike up her suede skirt, pull her helmet over her tresses, and clamber on behind him as he roared away.

This was an extraordinary sight outside the Sacred Heart High School.

Liddy's mother, Breda Murphy, who was also in her midthirties, wore tan hosiery, used hairspray, and sat in the front seat of her father Patrick's rusty Chevy. Breda disliked and distrusted Gwendolyn Harris, but it made no difference. Miss Harris showed fourteen-year-old Lydia Mary that there was more than one way of being a woman.

Lydia Mary followed Miss Harris around the school whenever she could and sometimes, at recess, Miss Harris would talk to her.
It doesn't matter who you are, Liddy
, Miss Harris would announce (for it was she who had first called Lydia Mary by that name),
you are allowed to be successful
. Then she would add,
As long as you work ten times harder than any man in the same job!
(This was one of Miss Harris's favorite statements. The other was
A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle
, which Liddy laughed at on cue, although she didn't understand it.)

That year was the year Liddy discovered that working harder than anyone else was one of her
things
.

At night in bed, she would pull the blankets over her head and practice her signature, which seemed an important part of her future, although she never found a way of writing
Murphy
that she liked. She fantasized that one day Miss Harris might invite her to live with her. They would read books about art together, and visit the museums in New York City, which Miss Harris said was the most wonderful place in the world. Miss Harris told Liddy that artists did not choose their subjects, their subjects chose them. She taught Liddy to see the stories hidden within pictures.

(Later in life, when family law had chosen Liddy, this skill served her well; she would find trust funds for illegitimate children concealed in the elaborate footnotes of prenuptial agreements, she soon knew more than most people should about off-shore accounts in Antigua, and she could sniff a bigamous marriage like napalm in the morning.)

But all this she kept a secret from her parents. She had to. Patrick and Breda Murphy had used all their courage to get themselves across the ocean and there was none left over for her. And how do you tell the two people who made you that your only
dream as a child is for a different life than the one you have been born into?

“They must be very proud of you, though,” said Marisa, but Liddy had said nothing, because she had not known what to say.

She had not yet learned how to make a complicated situation look simple.

Liddy had taken to her profession like a swan to water. Her formidable memory and physical stamina got her through the study and the seventy-hour weeks as an associate (for years she had worked night shifts mopping floors with disinfectant so strong it make her gag; hours spent fact checking in an air-conditioned office felt like a vacation). She took her first month's paycheck to Soho and, in the window of a gallery, saw a limited-edition print of an industrial landscape by Alfred Stieglitz, a framed black-and-white photograph of New York in 1910, the new skyscrapers rising over choppy gray water and smoke rising into the clouds. She paid too much for it, but she didn't care. It was called
City of Ambition
and it seemed the perfect image with which to start her new life.

No one had told Liddy that
nice women
never use the A-word.

Marisa's primary piece of advice to Liddy was to avoid the distractions and dramas of dating, particularly the dreaded office romances that had derailed far too many young women in her employ, and to focus on one partnership only.

“Don't marry another lawyer,” she commanded Liddy, with a confidence born of the fact that she had herself married late, to a retired and wealthy entrepreneur, efficiently producing twins
nine months later. “They'll always put their cases first, and if you have kids, you'll be the one doing the school run.”

That night in Cornelia Street Liddy arrived with a man known as Intense Rafe, a part-time artist and full-time waiter, with whom she had been set up the previous month by her roommate.

A story about ginseng picking in Appalachia, told by an enthusiastic woman with black corkscrew curls and a Hole T-shirt, was ending to considerable applause and the woman bowed happily, lifting her hand and pointing it in Liddy's direction. As Liddy had the anterior vision of a flying spider, she sensed the movement early, and with no tale to tell, she hid behind Intense Rafe, ensuring that it was another man directly in front of her who was summoned to the little space in front of the microphone. Liddy, her chin perched on Rafe's intensely bony shoulder, watched the man saunter up and tap on the microphone.

“My name is Peter James,” he said.

“Professor Peter James!” called out the very pretty young woman who had accompanied him.

Peter smiled and began to speak. His story was fluent and involving, but Liddy did not really listen. She looked at him instead.

With his messy, sandy-blond hair, his threadbare cords, and frayed Ralph Lauren shirt, Professor Peter James was shabby chic before anyone had ever thought of it; he combined this agreeably masculine disregard for grooming with the self-confidence and self-deprecation of a man who had achieved his career goals with ease.

This interested her.

Liddy guessed he was in his late thirties. He had no wedding ring on his finger, though she imagined he might be the kind of man who would not wear one, and as she looked around the room she knew she was not the only female to find him attractive. The very pretty young woman was hanging on his every word, and when he had finished she led the applause. But Peter did not hurry back to her, allowing himself to be waylaid at the bar by a tall and glamorous Slavic model in a fur hat.

Liddy spotted an opportunity. She headed over, introduced herself to both of them, and participated in their sparkling dialogue, even making a couple of jokes that caused Peter to laugh out loud. When the fur-hatted model turned away to order more drinks, Liddy looked right into Peter's eyes and handed him her business card, suggesting he call her for a date. It was the first time in her life she had ever done such a thing, she announced, confident that he would be as thrilled at her chutzpah and sophistication as she was, and that he would find her irresistible.

He didn't.

She asked around and discovered he was a well-respected professor of literature at a prestigious university downtown. She started reading
War and Peace
. Every time the phone in her office buzzed for the next two weeks, Liddy expected it to be him.

It wasn't.

She was forced to accept that Peter James had not felt the same inciting pulse of attraction as she had, and had chucked out her card with a scrunched-up tissue from the bottom of his jacket
pocket. Or he had forgotten about it and the dry cleaners had done so. (Later on, Liddy would learn that Peter was content with a life that was not plot driven. He was a bit lazy about most things apart from work, but because he was good-looking and quite brilliant, people found it charming. Except for women who dated him, that is.)

This did not suit her version of the narrative at all.

It took one phone call to a private detective on retainer at Rosedale and Seldon to get his address (the Village), marital status (single!), and criminal record (none), and despite the intoxicating feeling of self-loathing this induced, Liddy began walking down his street at every opportunity, even if it meant taking detours on the crosstown train. But still she did not “bump into” him.

And then . . .

Exactly two months later, on a sublime Saturday morning Liddy, soggy with sweat, was walking home to Murray Hill from her early step class on Sixth Avenue. She had a large cup of coffee in one hand and an enormous almond croissant in the other, and for no other reason than the sun was shining and she was young and exhilarated from exercise and life, she decided to throw the dice once more and headed toward Bedford Street. She paused for the umpteenth time outside the narrow house, number 75½, and pretended to read the red plaque about Edna St. Vincent Millay. And this day the door of the town house beside it opened.

“Hello,” said the man who emerged. In those days, Peter always said hello when he chanced upon a young woman in tight clothing.

Liddy turned around. They stared at each other.

“I know you. You're the girl from the other . . .” he said. Then he paused. “Are you stalking me?” he asked.

Liddy snorted in a “that's the most ridiculous thing I ever heard” way. She was convincing, just as she had practiced. “
Huh.
Don't kid yourself, Professor James. You must have read enough novels to believe in coincidence.”

She turned quickly and walked away, her heart seeming to thump louder than her footsteps on the pavement. She accelerated as she approached the corner, but she did not run, as she did not want to spill her coffee over herself and ruin the nonchalant effect.

“Hey!
”

She was stopped abruptly by the pressure of a hand on her right shoulder. The coffee spilled down her front anyway.

“Shit!”
she howled and, embarrassed, she did not move, so Peter James walked around in front of her.

“The readers of Victorian novels viewed coincidence as meaningful providence,” he said, smiling. “What you or I would call destiny.”

“I don't believe in that,” said Liddy, wiping her chest with her sleeve. “I believe we make our lives through force of will.”

She did not smile. She was thrilled but wary. She did not know if she would be found resistible again.

“How old are you?” he said, staring hard into her face.

“Twenty-five. How old are you?”

“I will be thirty-eight next week.”

“Is that why you didn't call me? You think I'm too young for you?”

“No,” he said, and now she smiled, remembering the very young woman she had seen with him. “I think you're too . . .
much
for me.”

“How can anyone have too much of a good thing?” she said, doing her best to affect allure despite the sogginess, sweat, and stains, and trying hard to convince him that she'd had more than three sexual encounters in her life so far, and that two out of three of them weren't bad. She suspected, however, that he had guessed this.

He laughed out loud. He rested his hand on her arm. “It must be great to be you,” he said softly.

“Are you having a birthday party?” she said. “Maybe I'll come.”

“Sure,” he replied. “Eight o'clock next Thursday. You know the address.” He pointed to the white door a little way down the street.

She nodded. She tried to think of a parting line that a professor of English literature might appreciate. She couldn't. She had spent all her time working on the introductory one.

“I'll get you a present,” she said.

That fall, Liddy said good-bye to Murray Hill and moved into the loft on Bedford Street that Peter's aunt owned. Peter was on sabbatical, writing a book on moral aestheticism, and they were happy. Most weekdays they met for a sandwich in an unprepossessing deli on Forty-third Street, equidistant from her office and
the New York Public Library, and they discussed disastrous romantic adventures, although his tales were from the pages of novels and hers were from depositions. In the evenings, when they weren't both working, they went to new restaurants they'd read about in the
New Yorker
, and plays and concerts and galleries, although Liddy always made the reservations. She took a photography course at the New School and was invited to display her work in a respected gallery downtown; she enjoyed this but did not pursue it. (The impoverished life of the struggling artist held no romance for her. She had eaten nothing but apples and baked potatoes during her time in college. Her hair and nails had never fully recovered.) Occasionally they would visit Peter's parents, and stay in the large house upstate Peter had grown up in, where there was Bach on the stereo, a library full of well-thumbed books, and a large pond full of shimmering red koi next to a tennis court. Peter's mother always urged Liddy to play doubles, but Liddy did not know how, and she did not have the time to learn. Instead, she learned about red wine, and sushi, and the opera.