The View From Penthouse B (28 page)

“Go out,” said Anthony. “Isn’t that the deal? One out of two nights at a decent restaurant?”

Margot said, in an uncharacteristically few words, “I don’t mind staying in.”

I welcomed these distractions, grateful to be off the topic of my upcoming evening. One had to manage expectations. I knew from my premarital social life that a girl could romanticize the silences between the meetings after developing an unwarranted crush on the stranger across the table.

He was dressed more casually than he had been on the previous Saturday. No tie, but a white shirt, starched and impeccably pressed. It was another beautiful evening, warm and still light. He asked how I felt about a walk to the East Village . . . we could cab it if I minded. I said, “I think a walk would be wonderful.”

He tucked my hand inside his elbow, and I let it sit there. We were a throwback, I realized, arms entwined. After only a block or two of our promenade, I noticed the occasional fellow pedestrian smiling in a rather un-Village-like manner as we passed.

I volunteered that it was especially nice to be out this night because my sister-roommate was entertaining her ex-husband.

“It must have been an amicable divorce,” he noted.

“No! An atrocious divorce. But it’s creeping toward . . . friendly.”

“Do you know what made it atrocious?”

I liked his “Do you know?” as if marital troubles were subtle and hard to discern in what must be an exceedingly discreet family. I told him that the
official
grounds had been adultery . . .

“But?”

“I guess I didn’t tell you before—that Charles was a doctor who’d acted inappropriately with his patients.”

Eli didn’t answer. I could tell that behind his silence was delicacy, as if any follow-up question would suggest prurient interest.

“It gets worse,” I said. “His specialty was infertility. He did use a sperm bank, with contributions from the educated and the handsome. But guess what?”

After a long pause, Eli said, “I’ll let you tell me.”

I stopped. I probably wet my lips and cleared my throat. “With some of the patients . . . it was direct deposit. Insemination without the syringe.”

Finally, he asked, “Are you saying he had sex with his patients?”

“Exactly.”

“Good God . . . Wait! Did I read about this? Was there a trial?”

I said yes, two years ago. A very splashy one. Then prison.

“And this is the couple who’s having dinner together tonight?”

I said, “He claims to be very sorry, and she seems to have forgiven him.”

“What about you? Have you forgiven him?”

“Working on it.”

We passed a café on the corner of Greenwich Avenue. It had a few tables outside and a big wood-burning oven inside. He stopped to read the posted menu, then asked if I’d tried it. I said, “We mostly cook at home because we’re sort of a boarding house. Dinner is part of the package.” Then bravely, “You’ll join us some night.”

“I’d love to,” he said. “And will I get to meet the famous Anthony and the notorious ex-husband?”

“There could even be another interesting guest: his son.”

“
Their
son? Your nephew?”

“No, just Charles’s. As in when you inseminate your patients yourself, you sometimes get a baby.”

He stopped midstride. “How old and how many?”

“Eighteen going on nineteen and so far just the one who went public . . . Lucky for Charles, not all the treatments took.”

“Treatments,” he repeated. And with the first smile the topic had evoked, “Is that what they’re called?”

Who can say when formality tilts slightly in the opposite direction? We were adults talking about very personal things. I do know this: By the time we got to Broadway, we were holding hands.

I was surprised that an engineer in a white button-down shirt would know hipster musicians at any club, let alone one in the East Village. It was a neighborhood I rarely visited since I didn’t engage in what Anthony called “clubbing.” Eli knew two couples at one table and a threesome across the room. The pianist was a fellow engineer, he explained.

The early set lasted less than an hour. One of the women said they were going out for dinner, probably just pizza, and would we like to join them. Without consulting me and without a glance at his watch, Eli said, “Thanks, but I have a table waiting back in the West Village. We’d better get going.”

“You can call the restaurant and cancel,” said another woman with huge gold hoop earrings that looked to be a strain on her lobes.

Eli smiled. “Well, I
would
if I wanted a quorum instead of having Gwen all to myself.”

Was he flirting with me? Was I supposed to hear that? I’d ask my team when I got home.

It had to have been a townhouse once, or a speakeasy. We walked down a few steps to the restaurant’s entrance, up a half landing to a bar, then up another flight to a dining room with bookshelves and draperies and antique maps on the walls. There were leather banquettes and white tablecloths. It was beautiful. It was where you’d bring someone for an anniversary or on a second date if the first had had romantic potential.

Even though I’d already had two mojitos at the club, I agreed to a glass of something bubbly. Clinking his glass, I said, “I’m having a really good time.”

“Go on,” he said. “I’m listening.”

I meant to come up with something charming, but instead I heard myself asking what Betsy had worried about aloud. “Have you dated a lot of women since your wife died?”

Eli said, eyes now on the menu, “A lot? Enough.”

I said, “I’m not even sure why I asked.”

He said, “Might it have been because my mother took matters into her own hands, hinting that I needed her matchmaking services . . . ironically.”

“Ironically?”

“Because if I
had
told her about my social life, she wouldn’t have made it her business to find her poor widowed son a date.” He looked up finally, and said most solemnly, “Then one night she sent me an e-mail about you. And your photo. I was surprised she even knew how to forward something.”

I waited. Such solemnity could easily take a disappointing turn. “Yes?” I prompted.

He raised his glass. A toast? It did look a little meaningful.

The room was low-lit. Our table felt private enough, and I wasn’t my usual sober self. Right then, I decided to kiss Eli Offenberg. I leaned forward, raising myself an inch or two off the bench. He grasped what was about to happen and met me halfway.

37

For Love and Country

D
ESPITE ALL OUR
efforts to forgive and forget, Betsy and I remained wary of Charles’s character and intentions. An intelligent man, in therapy, occasionally self-aware and benefiting from pillow talk with our eldest sister, he knew exactly where Margot’s sisters stood. Could that have contributed to the very un-Charles-like, altruistic thing he did upon the restoration of his medical license? With hair cut short, and letters of reference in hand, he went to the army recruitment office in Times Square and took the first steps toward signing up.

Weeks passed between his first visit and the army’s decision, during which he jogged daily along the Hudson and rewrote his will. Often he raised the topic of how relatively safe an army doctor would be, in case we’d stopped thinking about inherent dangers. You modern ladies, he reminded us, know that there are thousands of female troops, maybe hundreds of thousands, so his specialty was essential in a way it hadn’t previously been. Not that his duties would be mere pelvic exams, Pap smears, and birth-control prescriptions! Hadn’t we all read about pregnant women in backward nations, with careless husbands and brutal neighbors, who’d had no prenatal care and less-than-sanitary midwives, who needed to be airlifted to clean American hospitals for emergency C-sections? Dr. Charles Pierrepont would once again be saving lives and serving his country, albeit in gynecological and obstetrical fashion.

Schooled on TV coverage of soldiers’ sad departures and ecstatic homecomings, I asked Margot if she’d be one of those women waiting back home, who e-mails and Skypes and bakes, along the lines of every straight soldier’s fondest wish. His personal goal, she confided, was this simple, this pragmatic: Should the unthinkable happen, he wanted Margot to be his lawfully wedded beneficiary.

She resisted at first. Many mornings at breakfast Anthony and I heard about Charles’s latest effort to stage a romantic proposal—each setting and prop a little showier than the last. When a bouquet of long-stemmed yellow roses didn’t do the trick, his next inducement was a path of rose petals leading up to the terrace where he was waiting, flanked by votive candles, a little velvet box in hand. Margot finally said, somewhat off the emotional mark, “Okay. I’ll wear it.”

The wedding would have to be soon, before the alleged deployment. There was a brief discussion about holding a ceremony in penthouse B, on the terrace, weather permitting. Strenuously objecting, Anthony cried, “Christ almighty! You never leave this place! Could we please have a wedding off-site? I’ll find it. I’ll plan it. There are event venues. There are churches. You’re what? Protestants, Catholics, Jews? Just tell me how many guests. And where was your first one? Would you go back there?”

No, she would
not.
Margot said she had enough ambivalence about their doing this a second time and didn’t want any déjà vu to spook her. Or, just as bad, the inevitable pangs caused by the missing faces of her parents and grandparents, and the memory of the unfortunate dresses we bridesmaids had been cajoled into wearing twenty-six years before. As for her own dress, she threatened to wear black or red or deepest purple, signaling nonconformity or simply because a Fashion Institute undergrad was acting as her personal shopper.

However, as soon as the unflawed, emerald-cut diamond, a bigger version of the original one, was on her finger, Margot decided to go all the way. And Betsy, who’d once said she could not attend or stand up for such nuptials, nor bring her children, insisted that a new wedding dress, a symbol of a fresh start, would be her contribution and gift. I knew it was something close to patriotism that had won her over, and a grudging respect for Charles’s unexpected, upcoming bravery. She and I, along with Chaz, spent three consecutive Saturdays watching Margot try on wedding dresses, which all evoked unanimous thumbs-down. At every store the salespeople asked what was so unflattering and what was it that her bridal party found so funny.

Margot said, “They can’t believe I’m getting married.”

“To her ex,” I added.

“Don’t get me started,” said Betsy.

“He’s joining the army,” I inevitably told every consultant.

“A military wedding!” the women always repeated, revived, as if this new intelligence called for a reimagining of the day, the setting, the groom, the dress.

“This one is awful,” said Betsy, now on her feet, poking her finger into the too-ample cleavage produced by the current mummy- inspired gown.

“Can you honestly say you like this one?” Margot asked the saleswoman. “You think this is
me?
”

At the last shop, the woman hurried to an adjoining room and came back with a long curtainlike veil, edged in lace, which caused Chaz to leap to his feet.

“Uh-uh. No. Sorry, that’s my territory. No thanks.”

“His major,” said Margot. “He’s won awards.”

“Not quite,” said Chaz.

“Commendations? Something like that?”

Chaz said, “Just A’s.”

“We think he’ll be famous some day,” said Margot.

I had noticed a thawing in Betsy, and not just in the direction of Charles. These outings were her first meetings with Chaz. She was, after all, the mother of two sons, and here was something close to their cousin and a very appealing something at that. “What if she wore a suit for the ceremony?” she asked him. “Something classic, maybe in ivory or an ice blue. Not so bridey.”

“A suit can be very MOB,” said the saleswoman.

“MOB?” we repeated.

“Mother of the bride,” said Chaz.

“A whole other department,” said the woman, “literally and figuratively.”

Margot asked, “How about a plain old gorgeous dress that I’d wear to a black-tie event—”

The woman said, “In that case, I’d try Bergdorf’s or Saks.”

She fished a business card from the pocket of her black smock, wrote something on it, and handed the card to Margot. “This is a friend who is a personal shopper at Saks. You’ll make an appointment first. I don’t usually do this, but when one of my brides is marrying a soldier . . . did you tell me what branch of the service?”

Slinging the long train over her arm for an easier walk back to the dressing room, Margot called back to us, “Someone else explain.”

Chaz said, “He’s a doctor. So he’ll be . . . like, a medic? I’m not sure.”

Betsy said, “He’s a board-certified physician, who will undoubtedly be assigned to that big hospital complex in Germany where the incoming seriously wounded are medivacked to.”

Later, when I told Margot about Betsy’s aggrandizement, her proud use of “medivac” and “board-certified,” we both agreed it was progress.

Now we know: Not every doctor with an MD from Yale can be accepted into the armed forces. Charles had worried that his age would disqualify him (it didn’t) and that his specialty would not be useful enough (it was). He had also feared that his medical records would reveal a recent fainting spell or elevated blood pressure or a slightly enlarged prostate. But what killed it, said the recruiter who swore that his application had gone all the way up to the Secretary of the Army, was Dr. Pierrepont’s status as a felon. Outstanding traffic tickets or math errors on income tax returns might be overlooked. But when the crime was committed in his professional capacity? No, thank you, Doc. Good luck in the private sector.

Had he known all along that they wouldn’t take him? Perhaps. He kept up the jogging and talked of an appeal. His next utterly uncharacteristic job outreach, or at least one that went as far as his placing a phone call, was to serve as a contract doctor with the Department of Defense. This was the juncture at which Margot said, “Enough already. Don’t they send you to war zones? Aren’t those the people who are mercenaries and killers?”