The Widow Waltz (16 page)

“
N
icola!” You have to see something.” Her uncle motioned her to enter his inner sanctum, its tall windows overlooking Fifth Avenue from the ninth floor. “Sit,” he commanded. Nicola settled herself in one of the delicate armchairs and admired its watered gray silk upholstery. “I want your opinion.”

Instead of going to the safe, Uncle Stephan unlocked a drawer with a key he kept along with a loupe on an old-fashioned gold watch chain, pulled out a blue satin box, and removed a ring he placed on a black velvet tray. “What do you think?” he asked.

Nicola forced herself not to fidget by crossing her ankles tightly together. She’d learned that emeralds come in many shades, from newly mown grass to the color of string beans that were nearly past their prime. This stone was different. The emerald surrounded by two diamonds looked otherworldly, like the absinthe she’d drunk in Paris.

“I don’t know what to say,” she admitted, as she smoothed the creases on her high-necked brown jersey sheath. “I’m not sure what period this is from.”

“This isn’t a test, Nicola,” Stephan said, although undeniably, it was. “Tell me whether you like it or not.”

She felt cornered. “I don’t know the ring’s provenance.”

“Do you like it or not?” Uncle Stephan sighed.

She didn’t like it. The green of the emerald was like nothing she’d ever seen. She thought it might be fake, and that this exercise was a trick. “I could never imagine owning something like this, but a woman who wanted her jewelry to shout would.”

“You’re equivocating. What else?”

“May I look with your loupe?” Even if a piece was substantial, it needed a gossamer quality, Uncle Stephan had taught her. “This ring has a certain delicacy,” she admitted, as she studied the diamonds and emerald. “The stones are big, but,”—she looked closely and decided to wing it—“they seem almost to be floating in the setting.”

Nicola had seen Stephan smile at Daniel, over excellent cigars and five-fold Italian silk ties—he once said the choice of a necktie set the tone for the day—but this was the first time, in this office, that he’d shined that beam on her. His teeth were perfect, exactly like her mother’s and Nana’s.

“A-plus,” he said. “This ring, you should know, is extraordinary. One of a kind, from nearly a hundred years ago, when workmanship was done entirely by hand, and standards were higher.”

Her job had its moments of pleasure. This was one, though most days were built of drudgery, her uncle endlessly repeating directions in his own homegrown version of ADHD. Most of the tasks, however, if dull, were not hard. Every morning, with appropriate reverence, Nicola was expected to remove items from the vault, review the inventory list, and make certain all was copacetic. Next, she polished the jewels Stephan selected for display, rubbing each treasure with chamois and special potions until it looked airbrushed. Invariably, this lulled her into a trance, remembering how her Grandpa Martin used to simonize his Mustang.

As a child, Nicola was too shy to ask who Simon was, but now, in an effort to be excruciatingly competent, she had been asking plenty of questions, touching Uncle Stephan’s hem in the process.
How do you tell a citrine from a topaz?

A garnet from a ruby? A fake from a real something? Is a sapphire from Ceylon superior to a stone from Madagascar? Who in this century would purchase a ruby, sapphire, and diamond walrus lapel pin? What makes it “witty”?
Most important,
How do you decide what to buy from an estate?

At first Nicola invented questions to feign interest, but gradually her curiosity became genuine. She listened to every answer, and couldn’t imagine that she would ever not want to play with jewels, lustfully imagining she owned this or that.

Yesterday she shyly asked Stephan—it had been difficult to get used to dropping
Uncle
if anyone else was in earshot—if a stylist friend could have an appointment in order to scout jewelry that a mysterious client wanted to borrow for the Golden Globes.

“I sell,” Uncle Stephan scoffed dryly. “I don’t lend.” But if Nicola ran the zoo, that’s what she’d do. Nicola planned to bide her time and ask again.

It was basic arithmetic that was doing her in, reminding her that the temporary employment could terminate sooner than she’d like. The only numbers she could remember were prices and carats. Every time Uncle Stephan asked Nicola to tally a sum, she made a mistake, even with a calculator. Last night she dreamt that Uncle Stephan left her a phone message. The number included pi, and she woke up gasping, unable to decipher it. On the SATs, her math score of 519 was more than two hundred points below Luey’s the following year, making Nicola a shoo-in for the University of South Florida, but, unfortunately, not for any of the schools on her list. It was Luey who suggested her essay be about math anxiety and it was Luey who wrote it.
“Since I was in fourth grade, I’ve had a lifelong fear of two trains approaching each other at speeds of 60 and 80 mph
,
”
the essay began . . . and Nicola got into college.

Nicola thought of the ring her uncle had shown her. Two months ago she wouldn’t have known how to answer his questions. Today she did. Maybe she’d found her place, even if her answer was utter bullshit.

“N
urse, you’re killing that plant,” my mother snaps from her armchair. She may no longer recognize a radish or be able to tell a bird from a butterfly, but Camille Waltz hasn’t forgotten how to criticize.

At home I have almost two dozen hale and hearty plants ready to relocate. If there’s one thing I know how to do, it’s keep houseplants alive. Husbands, not so much. “Don’t worry, Mother,” I say as I water. “This aloe’s going to live another day.”

“I’m not your”—she air quotes, still remembering how to do that—“mother!”

“Camille.” Daniel’s voice is a purr. “You’re speaking to your daughter, to Georgia.” My mother eyes him with the suspicion of a child encouraged to sample liver. “Though she does look like your nurse,” he concedes in a flagrant fib. The attendant on duty is taller, ten pounds lighter, and wears cornrows, although yes, we are both middle-aged females.

I am grateful to Daniel for getting me through this overdue visit, just as last week he waited seven hours in the country for the ace installers from my Internet provider, and the day after tomorrow he will help with the move. If I had any money, I’d buy every self-portrait from the beak-nosed, vainglorious painter whose work he hung two weeks ago at his gallery. I know this isn’t an advantageous moment for Daniel to also produce the Georgia show, but Nicola can no longer get away during the week, Luey’s canine customers await their walks, and I’d rather eat mothballs than visit my mother with Stephan, whom she remembers far more often and clearly than me. Yet here Daniel is, asking, “What do you say we all go out for lunch?”

The local diner is a five-minute drive. Daniel and I split a spinach omelet. Camille polishes off the Bananas Foster French toast as I blurt out, “I wanted you to know I sold the apartment.”

She points to a picture of apple pie on the laminated menu and says, “Yum. Whattya think?”

“Mother, did you hear me?”

“What do you think?” She enunciates each word as if I didn’t understand the first time. “A la mode? Why not? You only live once.”

“I’m moving in two days. To the house in the country. I—we—sold our apartment. It’s a big change in my life.”

“That’s nice, dear.”

Now her fingers wander to the photograph of a cheesecake, rain-slicker yellow. My mother still wears her gold band, marking forty-four years of marriage, and has remarkably youthful hands. Looking at them, I swear I can smell the cherry-scented hand cream she always kept by the sink. I reach out to hold one of her hands. Her skin is as soft and warm as flannel.

“Is Ben retired?” she asks, mild, curious.

Yes, epically. I feel Daniel’s eyes on me and choose to believe he is offering approval when I breathe deeply and say, “Ben’s decided to practice out on the island instead of the city.” I grant myself this pass/fail lie.

My mother looks up and says in her take-no-prisoners tone, “How can that be lucrative, Georgia?” I recognize a flicker of cognition and connection. The jolt makes me sit as straight as if I’ve been taken to task by the school principal.

“Not necessarily lucrative,” I say.

“Honestly, you’ve made some boners in your day but this is a beaut.” She furrows her still-smooth brow. “It’s insane to move. Once a person abandons the city he can never afford to buy back in or start a practice here again and”—here she takes a breath—“you of all people were never meant for country life. Sitting at the beach will make you wrinkle and you’re a rotten driver.”

I am
that
driver, who still struggles to parallel park and is invariably followed by honking cars because she lags below the speed limit.

“Don’t come whining to me when you regret this move,” she sniffs.

“Camille, Georgia knows what she’s doing,” Daniel offers in his unofficial capacity as minister of civility and common sense.

“About what?” she says, looking at him as if they’ve never met, and I am grateful for the reprieve dementia delivers. My mother can throw a punch, but she can’t get to the end of round one. I slump in the booth. After she settles on her pie and gobbles it down, Daniel pays the bill. At Camille’s pace we walk back to the car and drive to The Oaks in silence. I escort my mother to her room, and hang her coat. Today I decide not to loop through the pictures on her dresser, filling her in on Nicola and Luey.

“I may not be back for a few weeks,” I say. Soon the trip here will take twice as long. I expect to visit less and suffer accordingly, since guilt remains my lymph system.

“Fair enough,” she says. At lunch I was shocked when my change of address made an impression on her softening mind, yet not as blown out of the water as when she says, “Ben visited this morning and showed me a ring he plans to give you. Now that is a ring. And that is a son-in-law, a good provider. When you married him, I had my doubts . . . .”

“A ring, Mother? Tell me more about that ring.”

But the next words I hear are, “Camille, time for your medicine,” as an attendant pushes a cart into the room.

My mother accepts a paper cup containing one red pill and another cup filled with water. “As you wish,” she says, and puts the pill behind her tongue. As soon as the attendant leaves, she spits it into the trash. “She was delivering poison to erase my memory,” she explains, sotto voce.

“We were talking about a ring.”

“What ring?” She yawns and motions for me to come near. When I do, she encloses me in her arms. “Take it from your old mother,” she whispers. “Don’t do everything your husband says and be sure you keep your own checking account.”

I thank her for the excellent advice, only a few decades too late. Her eyes close.

“Let’s stay a few more minutes,” I say to Daniel. “Maybe she’ll remember.”

We sit in silence, interrupted by the squeak of sneakers in the oppressively clean hall, the cracking voices of old people, and the sound of a mop sloshing on the linoleum floor until we hear “My
cherie
?”

Morris Blumstein shakes my mother gently. “
Le temps pour le dîner?”
The voice is low and kind. She opens her eyes as he takes a crisp linen handkerchief from his breast pocket to blot the corner of her mouth.

“Papa? V
ous êtes venu pour me sauver?”
she says.

“No, no.
Reveille-toi, ma douce.
”

“Maurice?” she says. “Maurice!”

“
Oui,
Jacqueline.” He kisses her on each cheek, extends his arm, and helps Camille rise from the chair.
“Au revoir,”
he says to Daniel and me, as they stroll out of the room, down a corridor hung with poorly executed drawings of sunsets, and head to the dining room. When Camille passes her old friend Vera, she salutes her with a sniff and lifts her chin. Once again, she is the envy of all.

For the return drive, Daniel keeps the conversation painless—the trip that he and Stephan will take to Bhutan, a country that, he informs me, calibrates success by gross national happiness; a cat they plan to buy of a breed—Tonkinese—known to be chatty, which sounds bloody annoying; and the Austrian Gewürztraminer so fruity, cheap, and great with Chinese food that he stocked a case. I find my eyes closing and when they open, we are pulling up to the address I may continue to call my own—well, my own and the banks’ that hold two mortgages—for the next forty-eight hours.

“Want me to come up?” Daniel asks.

“I wouldn’t think of it—you’ve already gone far beyond the call of duty.” I mean it. After another set of good-byes, I make my way upstairs.

As I open the door, I am struck by how sad the apartment feels. Dust covers every surface, stirred by the poltergeists of unearthed possessions. The walls, denuded of picture frames, look like maps of a life that is fading more from my memory as each minute passes. Boxes stacked higher than my head crowd every space, clustered by genus and species and, thanks to Luey, identified by colored duct tape—green for the country, red for thrift shop donations, blue for the auction house.

I wend my way through a narrow canyon to my bedroom, the last room I will clear out, stopping first in Luey’s room. She is cross-legged on her bed, at her laptop, Sadie wagging at her side.

“How’s Nana?” Luey asks, rising to greet me. Pregnancy is sweetening her, I swear. “Mean as ever?”

“She sends her love,” I say, wishing it were true, as I bend to kiss my daughter. “What’s new with the Barking Lot?”

Luey, wearing one of Ben’s old T-shirts and looking only the tiniest bit fuller, has proved herself to be a multitasking virtuoso. One of her customers has convinced her to board dogs in the country and she’s been spreading the word, now that her abridged but surprisingly lucrative dog-walking business is ending. A YouTube for her venture, starring Sadie, has gone viral. Louisa Silver-Waltz is her father’s daughter. The more she has to do, the more she accomplishes. I could swear she is happy.

After she fills me in on today’s eBay haul—my mother’s Swarovski owl collection has flown the coop—I escape behind my closed door. The closets and drawers are already empty, and once I’ve showered off the emotional residue of my maternal torture, I intend to sort what’s left in plain sight, a term I use generously, since every surface is swimming with pitifully overdue library books, expired Groupons, pages torn from magazines (including my favorite: “154 Ways to Live on Nothing”), and bits of paper I am tempted to toss without identifying. That’s the top layer. Valentines, cards, and love letters, photo albums and my most treasured books, none of which I can bring myself to dump, are already boxed, ready for the country move, as are the Christmas ornaments, including the angel who always topped our tree, which I discovered only two days ago and try to see as an omen. My moonstruck shadow operating under a disclaimer of denial wants these testimonials intact on the remote chance that Wally will call and say,
I just found a Swiss bank account and you, my dear, are an heiress. Your Platinum card will arrive via your new top-of-the-line Mercedes, driven by Fred.

On top of one of my shorter piles is a message taken today by Luey to call Nat. I dial his number and when he doesn’t answer, I feel relief. I don’t know what to say to a man so willing to exist in a zone between friendship and romance. The other night, he fed me a forkful of cheesecake, and for a moment we were as intimate as if we were in bed. I pulled away. I’m not ready. Every time we’re together—once or twice a week for movies, followed by casual dinners or drinks—I am struck by how Nat is able to wait for me to notice that he has everything a woman should want in a man—decency, humor, a good pair of shoulders, and not just to cry on. He’s even two years younger than I am.

I sort the other messages, abusing the bedrock commandment of time management to never touch a piece of paper more than once without filing, recycling, tossing, or fobbing it off on someone else. A few, however, remain mysteries. Who, for example, are Audrey and Renee and Naomi? Are these women I should recognize, or did they leave last names and details that Luey was too rushed to write down? Most likely all three were offering condolences, and my mother would be appalled if she knew I wasn’t gracious. Remorse begins to crawl on my skin.

I call Audrey first and reach her voice mail. It’s Audrey Pomerantz, moved to Sarasota, who served with me on a Central Park Conservancy benefit committee four years ago and has made a generous contribution in Ben’s name, which I should have acknowledged weeks ago in a note. I leave what I hope sounds like a sincere apology and a thanks. Audrey, check.

Renee turns out to be Rene Riviera, Ben’s goat of a masseuse. I always told Ben he gave me lascivious looks when his back was turned. We speak, and the lech offers me a free massage. I ask for a rain check, which I will redeem never.

I dial the third number. “Is Naomi there, please?”

“My mother’s out,” a youngish voice, vaguely familiar, says, and adds, outted by caller ID, “Shall I tell her you called, Mrs. Silver?”

“Certainly, and that I returned her call.”

There is a significant pause. “She called you? Really?”

“She did. Please tell her I’m sorry it took me so long to call her back.”

“That’s weird,” she says, which is how I find the reaction of this churlish teenager. “Do you want her to call you back?”

“That won’t be necessary,” I say, scratching off the last call.

I move on to three soul-satisfying hours of cleaning and packing, working without stopping to order in dinner, since the kitchen is empty and broom-clean for the next owners. It’s only a few minutes past nine when I crawl beneath my duvet, weary but rewarded by a sense of accomplishment that only sweaty physical work can bring. I allow myself a nap—I still need to shower—but soon enough my sleep produces a dream in which Ben and I keep getting lost in the canals of Venice. We are no more than thirty and are kissing—long, deep kisses—in what must be a gondola. I savor his tongue in my mouth, as his hands climb toward my breasts and I forage below his belt. In the dream, a phone rings and rings, but I do not want to answer it. I do not want to end the kiss.

I am startled by a loud hammering and I realize the noise is at my door. “Mom, someone keeps calling on your line—if you don’t pick up I will,” Luey threatens. I force myself awake to answer the phone.