The Three Weissmanns of Westport (12 page)

When Kit arrived, he brought a bottle of Maker's Mark and, on the basis of his many years as an unemployed thespian bartender, made them Manhattans. Miranda sucked on the Maraschino cherry. He had actually brought a bottle of them. The resplendent red, the sweet unreal flavor, reminded her momentarily of Josie, of special nights out and tall glasses of Shirley Temple cocktails.

Henry sat on the floor with a plastic cow and a robot. The cow and the robot danced. Or wrestled. Miranda could not tell which.

Now Kit was talking. But,
mirabile dictu
, instead of telling her his stories, Kit was asking about her own. He wanted to know what she thought about before she went to sleep when she was a child. Did she have wallpaper in her room? What teachers had she loved and why? What was the first pair of shoes she remembered? She sometimes felt that he was rummaging through her life as if it were an attic full of musty antique treasures, but his curiosity was warm and detailed and domestic and endless, and Miranda, so accustomed to listening and waiting and pouncing on the sordid details of others' lives, found herself almost delirious at the intoxicating novelty of hearing her own voice telling her own small stories.

Annie listened to her sister talking about their childhood. Now and then she would add something, or Betty would jump in with a clearer memory. Annie had to admit she liked having Kit and Henry around. On the floor, Henry muttered seriously to his toys and allowed her to stroke his silky hair. Kit had dropped his jacket on a chair and kicked off his shoes and, though just barely suggesting the sweeping piles of shoes and socks and sweaters and electronic gadgets that her own boys would strew around her apartment when they were home, these small gestures afforded her a momentary tender motherly exasperation.

She heard a phone ring from deep inside her reverie and thought for an instant that it was her phone, her call, her sons. But of course it was not even her ring, it was Miranda's.

"Yes," Miranda was saying in her patient Awful Author voice, at the same time grimacing to the others in the room. "Oh, that's outrageous! You poor, poor thing. However, that's why you have me. That's exactly what I'm here for."

"Christ," Annie said when Miranda hung up. "Those people. What's he doing, writing a memoir about writing a false memoir?"

Miranda shrugged. "One of the few clients I have left. You guys have children, I have has-beens. We all do our bit."

"But look how great you are with Henry," Kit said. "The Awful Authors must have trained you well."

Miranda beamed.

She's beaming, Annie thought, surprised. She was also surprised that Kit knew the family name for Miranda's clients. It seemed so intimate, somehow. And Kit and Miranda had known each other such a short time--a month? Although they had been together almost constantly during that time. She watched Miranda turn her smile to Kit, not her seductive manipulative smile, but this open, unstudied, happy, beaming smile. Kit, clearly dazzled, blinked at Miranda as if she were a bright light and he a stunned bunny.

This can only end in tears, Annie thought.

This can only end in tears
: the words parents used when their children became too exuberant. She reminded herself that Kit and Miranda were not her children. Even her children were no longer her children. They were all grown up. Soon enough they would have their own children. This small boy on the floor who had brought back so many memories was closer to a grandson than a son. She felt suddenly very old and curled up next to her mother on the couch, murmuring, "Mommy," as she laid her head on Betty's shoulder.

We are old, she thought. Miranda is old. Miranda must not become a desperate old cougar.

Then again, who was she to say what Miranda should be? Who was she to say what was desperate? That way lies tears, but who was she to say that tears were wrong? You couldn't protect anyone, not even Miranda. Particularly if they did not want to be protected. Particularly from a handsome, attentive young lover. If lover is what he was. A handsome, attentive young lover might, at any rate, take Miranda's mind off the Awful Authors. The Awful Authors were not the victims they had been cracked up to be. They were charlatan victims. It must be galling to a connoisseur of imperfection like Miranda. They were fakes, reproductions, costume, paste. If she could not have authentic victims, then at least she deserved an authentically ordinary, healthy person like Kit Maybank, a man with a real life--if you could call auditioning a real life--to take her mind off all those counterfeit people chronicling their counterfeit lives.

Nevertheless, this could only end in tears.

Frederick was a real man with a real life, she supposed. He worked, and he doted on his children and grandchildren. He woke up in the morning and breathed air blown in from the sea. That was really all she knew of him. Except that he had come up to her apartment one night. He had followed her into the narrow hallway. He had pushed her roughly against the wall, a hand on each of her arms. He had kissed her and pressed against her and surprised her with his urgency, to which her response had at first been the unworthy thought that he had perhaps taken Viagra. Was it just kicking in or about to wear off? Was that what this was all about? "Erections lasting more than four hours . . ." The TV commercial flashed through her mind--then her thoughts got gorgeously foggy and she pulled him even closer and they staggered like teenagers to the bedroom.

Annie smiled at the memory. Frederick had spent the night, his clothes scattered across the floor. He had carefully turned off his cell phone, though, probably hiding from those children of his.

Betty marveled at the new houses that seemed to lurch out of the ground at ever-decreasing intervals, each one bigger and in a more complicated interpretation of a greater mixture of historical styles than the last. Each new house had a garage with three doors, behind which were three cars, which explained, she supposed, the constant traffic in the town. She drove her own car slowly and disapprovingly to the supermarket and wandered stupefied through the wide aisles. When she marveled at the size of the supermarket, at the abundance of produce and the gigantic cereal boxes of every brand imaginable, Annie told her she was like a Russian refugee in 1983, and she might just as well have been a refugee, that was how foreign she felt. In New York, she had fought her way through the cramped aisles of Zabar's and Fairway or stopped on the corner at the little produce market to pick up some flowers. The bags were delivered, and the doorman kept them for her if she was not home, bringing them upstairs when she arrived, carrying them into the kitchen. Here, she pushed an oversized shopping cart to her car, struggled to get the bags into the trunk, struggled at home to get them out of the trunk and into the house. She enjoyed her shopping trips when she set out. The supermarket spread before her as a place of boundless opportunity, something new and vast and exciting, the way the prairie must have looked to the first settlers of the West. But by the time she got home, Betty was tired and defeated and longed for her old life.

My old life, she would think. And then she would muse on the irony of the phrase. She was young in her old life. She was old in her new life. It didn't add up. She wished she had a doorman.

She never let her daughters know how she felt. What would be the point? Annie went off swimming at the beach in the early morning. Miranda took walks in thunderstorms. They seemed to have adjusted to this country life very well. She would stay in Westport for the time being, for their sakes.

It was not easy. She was not a youngster just starting out. It had not been easy for her in Westport when she was a youngster just starting out, so how had anyone imagined it would work this time? Lou had meant no harm, of course. But Joseph, Joseph of all people, should have known better than to consign her to a cottage in a town with traffic but no place to go.

In New York, Betty and Josie had often entertained when they were younger, and even in the last few years they would invite old friends to dinner. More often than not, though, they would meet their friends at restaurants. There were always new restaurants in New York about which to read, at which to make reservations a month in advance, in which eventually to overeat and overspend. Restaurants had taken the place of movies, which had all become so violent and crude, and children, who had all grown up, in the social lives of the Weissmanns and their circle. Betty wondered where that circle was now. They had perhaps circled around Joseph, for they had certainly not drawn their wagons around her. There were a few close friends--the Harveys and the Littmans--who called regularly and tried to make dates with Betty. And there were her friends from college, Judith and Florence. Nothing changed those friendships, which were intimate and deep and existed still, as they had for decades, almost exclusively on the phone. But Social Life, as Betty once knew it, was gone. The restaurants in Westport were dull and overpriced. There was no movie theater, even if she had wanted to see a film and could have found a friend to accompany her. There was nothing to do, no one to do it with, and she wouldn't drive at night, so on top of everything else there was no way to get there. She daydreamed about the buses in New York with their interesting bits of poetry or quotes from George Eliot, their ads for Con Ed or the Bronx Zoo. How civilized and communal New York seemed from the vantage point of this lonely land of cars and crows and Lanes and Drives and Crescents.

"Oh, it's so peaceful here," her friend Judith said when she came to have lunch and go to the Westport Playhouse with Betty one day. They walked along Main Street, peering into shop windows. "You can see the sky! All the stores we have on Madison Avenue, but on this quaint little street. A theater, too! It's got everything New York has, really."

In some perverse way this was true--the play turned out to be just as dreadful as most of the theater in New York, the shops were frequented by the same loud, slender mothers as the ones who shopped in the city, the styles were too young for Betty, just as they were on Madison, the sky was the same gray swathe high above.

"Very cosmopolitan little town," Betty had answered her friend in her most chipper voice. But Westport struck her as neither cosmopolitan nor little. In fact, it did not even strike her as a town. It was large and spread out and bustling and provincial.

"If you have to be in exile, Betty, you could do worse," said Judith, who was no fool and had known Betty such a long time.

Betty smiled at her. How lucky she was to have friends who understood what she meant rather than what she said. "You're absolutely right," she said. But as they drove out of the parking lot onto the Post Road, she could not help adding, "Look at this traffic!"

Cousin Lou's latest event was a particularly large dinner party in honor of Rosalyn's father, Mr. Shpuntov. Mr. Shpuntov had changed his name to Sherwood many years ago, on October 24, 1929, to be exact, Black Thursday. He was eighteen years old on that day, and fearing the Jews would be blamed for a stock-market crash as they were blamed for every other disaster, Shpuntov looked into the future and saw himself as Sherwood.

But as Sherwood ne Shpuntov got older and began to forget more and more, one of the things he remembered perfectly was his old name. He had stopped responding to Sherwood about a year before. He disliked younger people calling him Izzy, thinking it impertinent, and as there was never anyone present who wasn't younger than his ninety-eight years, he prevailed. Shpuntov he had been, and Shpuntov he became.

Mr. Shpuntov was seated between Betty and his son-in-law, Lou. His daughter, her hair coaxed into its stiff, elaborate swoops and valleys, sat across from him.

"My father and I were just marveling at the farmers' market phenomenon here in Westport," Rosalyn was saying to a woman sitting beside her.

"That man has a terrible comb-over," Mr. Shpuntov said loudly to Cousin Lou, pointing his chin at his daughter. "Comb-overs . . . never liked 'em myself."

"That's
Rosalyn
, Mr. Shpuntov," Cousin Lou whispered nervously.

"Dad has a theory about farmers' markets," Rosalyn continued, in a louder, determined voice. "Don't you, Dad?"

"He looks ridiculous," Mr. Shpuntov said, glaring at his daughter.

Rosalyn glared back.

"I would like to make a toast," she said suddenly. She stood up. "To my father, who has come to live in our house. We hope to make his waning years happy and comfortable." She bowed to Mr. Shpuntov. "To your waning years!"

"What's he say?" Mr. Shpuntov asked.

"Hear, hear," said Cousin Lou quickly, at top volume. "Hear, hear!"

Hear hear's echoed down the table, drowning out Mr. Shpuntov.

Waning years, thought Betty. Oh dear. I don't like the sound of that. Poor fellow. "Never mind," she said to the old man. "You're as old as you feel."

"Why is that old woman talking to me?" Mr. Shpuntov said to Cousin Lou. "I'm as deaf as a post."

It was Lou who had insisted on taking his father-in-law into the house. The old man had been living with his girlfriend, a younger woman of eighty-two. But she had died suddenly of an aneurism, leaving Mr. Shpuntov and three unruly dogs in an apartment in Queens. Rosalyn suggested a home, and Lou assumed she meant their own. When she realized his mistake, it was already too late: the arrangements were much too far along and, more important, much too public to countermand. Mr. Shpuntov moved into the big house in Westport and was assigned a bedroom and an attendant. (The dogs, thank God, had been taken in by the deceased girlfriend's son--there had to be some limits, after all. Though, with regard to Lou and his hospitality, Rosalyn had yet to discover what they were.) And so a permanent place was set for the old man at Lou's long table. Rosalyn attributed opinions and bons mots to him, and he, increasingly petulant, wondered aloud why the skinny old man with the comb-over kept badgering him.

"Beautiful baby,"
Lou had begun singing, winking at Miranda.

Miranda was sitting next to Kit, the beautiful baby in question. At the other end of the table was the pensive Roberts in a sprightly yellow bow tie. Lou now made some comment about September and May and romances in those lovely but different months. He seemed to amuse himself by casting Kit and Roberts against each other as rivals for Miranda's affection. Annie thought her cousin was remarkably indelicate on this matter. Still, she could understand where he got the idea--her sister was so beautiful, so lively these days. Annie's heart went out to Roberts. He caught her glance, and his mouth twitched into a slight, tentative smile.

More and more, she'd found herself engaging Roberts in conversation, as if it were her duty to compensate somehow, to provide some small diversion for the spurned lover by offering him her less glamorous attention. He was, indeed, difficult to talk to at first, shyly answering questions with monosyllables that made any continuation of conversation on that topic almost impossible. But as she spent more time with him, Annie observed that he grew more comfortable, and as he grew more comfortable, Roberts grew interesting and surprisingly amusing.

"How come people call you by your last name?" Annie asked him. "Why does everyone just call you Roberts?"

He smiled modestly. "It's kind of a rock-star thing."

The weeks passed and the days began receding, becoming shorter and darker, drawing themselves in, curling in on themselves like sleeping animals. Crows dozed among the turning leaves. Fatter and fatter credit card bills arrived in the Wisemen mailbox, but still Betty and Josie had not ironed out the wrinkles in their separation, still Annie heard nothing from Frederick Barrow, and still Kit spent almost every day, and evening, with Miranda.

Kit joined Miranda on her morning walks, with Henry, sleeping or singing or whining from an olive-green backpack, coming along for the ride. They walked slowly and watched the sky expand into the silver light, and they talked.

After the initial days of questioning Miranda, Kit had begun at last, as expected, to talk about himself. Miranda dutifully prepared herself to listen, as she always listened to everyone, waiting for the confidences she knew would come.

But instead of describing sexual abuse at boarding school or stepfathers who beat him or a sordid struggle with crack cocaine, Kit talked about his happy boyhood in Maine, the walks through the woods digging up rare wildflowers with his parents and brothers and sisters; the evenings on the rocky beach splashing and digging for clams in the frigid water. The picture of this group of beautiful human beings--for surely they all looked like Kit--plunging headlong through the verdant Maine woods beneath the cheerful songs of warblers or standing windblown knee-deep in the surf made Miranda long to be in Maine herself. The smell of the pines. The breeze hurrying the bright white clouds through the infinite blue of the sky. It was true that Miranda could smell pines perfectly well right where she was, and that the breeze was hurrying just the kind of bright clouds through exactly the infinite blue sky she imagined right there on Compo Beach, which was probably what made her think of pines and clouds and infinity in the first place, but still she longed for Maine, the land of Alex Katz and E. B. White.

"I thought lobster at a bar mitzvah was totally normal . . ." Kit was saying.

Miranda smiled at him. She looked at Henry, asleep at the moment, his pink mouth pressed into his father's shoulder. She listened intently to Kit, not hearing him. What a luxury his stories were, like a vacation. No tortured memoir here, no Lite Victory. Just tender reminiscence. She had never seen eyes like Kit's, she thought. His best friend, Seth, he was saying. His words passed over her like a silky breeze. Bright, pale gray eyes as deep and translucent as air--look at them--the lashes thick and dark, above and below, like a horse's lashes. His eyes were as dramatic as the eyes of a silent-film star. Oh, she could go on and on about Kit's eyes.
At Seth's bar mitzvah
, Kit said. Bar mitzvah, Miranda thought, trying to pay attention. Seth's bar mitzvah. She was probably the same age as Seth's parents. But surely she was better preserved than Seth's parents, whom she envisioned as a weathered couple in matching track shoes and kelly green fleece jackets.
Appetizers of oysters and chopped liver
, said Kit.