The Widow Waltz (18 page)

“D
o you ever think Daddy might not have been so perfect?” Nicola had asked Luey last night.

As she pulled away from Central Park South, Luey said good-bye to him, once again. Over the last few weeks she’d been so thoroughly busy—not only with the panoramic, all-encompassing mind-fuck of baby making but with dog walking, packing, and eBay selling—that she’d barely had time to think about the aftershocks of her father’s death. But when her mind tuned to the Daddy channel, she’d begun to hope—to convince herself—that flaky investment schemes explained the riddle in which her family found itself entwined. Luey would consider no other explanation for why their coffers were as empty as the apartment they were leaving behind. In one of their new heart-to-hearts, Nicola suggested that their father is—
was—
a philanderer; that they’re hard up now because he tossed heaps of money at women.

“You mean a lot of women?” Luey had asked. “An assortment?”

“He had a thing for the ladies,” Cola said. “You had to notice that. Some fathers make birdhouses. He made—”

“Shut up, Cola,” Luey said, which is what she wanted to do when her mother raised the topic as they drove to Long Island. She preferred to stick to the idea that bad luck, or at least schlocky judgment, was her father’s dark side of the moon—that, in the words of her Stanford roommate, Mittens Montgomery, a Houston deb, her father was all hat and no cattle. This was far superior to believing he collected girlfriends; it was hard enough for Luey to share him with her mother and Nicola. And so Luey deftly wallowed in denial, thought as little as possible about her father, and allowed herself complete preoccupation with the child growing in her womb.

If I can do it,
anyone
can,
Georgia had said of motherhood. Luey realized this disclosure was meant to reassure, but its effect had been the opposite. Luey knew better. If the little cherub inside proved to be anything like her, each day would be a like the raid on Entebbe.

Logic might suggest that having a father who was a flake would make Luey believe a man was unnecessary in helping her raise a child. But since when did logic have anything to do with the heart? Every day she hoped to hear from Buffalo Bob. She’d like to have a partner for at least some of this enormous project she was taking on.

Last night she felt a pull as strong as an alcoholic must feel for a drink. She called.

He didn’t answer. Later, however, her phone rang. By the time she found it under a stack of boxes in the hallway, the caller—
the
one—had hung up. She returned the call with a carefully calm statement that went to voice mail. By midnight, Luey was solidly into an REM sleep, dreaming that her baby was a daughter who came out talking in complex critiques of Henry James. That’s when her marimba ring tone went off.

“Hey, Stanford girl,” the voice said.

In her near narcolepsy it took Luey a moment to realize she was hearing from the person she’d been hoping would call since their high-in-the-clouds night overlooking San Francisco. “Hey, Buffalo Bob,” she said, too dopey to remember that he’d asked her to call him Peter.

“Hope it’s not too late,” he said.

Luey looked at the clock. What woman her age was asleep before midnight? “Of course not!” she said, too heartily. She may as well have been shouting across a gym.

“What’s doing?” he asked, his slap happiness hyped by inebriation.

“Not much,” Luey responded. Just another down-on-her-luck, pregnant college dropout selling claptrap on eBay, bummed because her dog-walking business came and went in weeks. “You? How’s the tour?”

“Sweet. We’re in Boston tonight, heading to New York in two days. I’ll be back on the West Coast in a few weeks”—and here he downshifted to sultry—“If you’re around, I’d like to see you.”

Luey’s heart began to
thump
.

“A shame you’re on the wrong coast,” he continued. “I’ve been thinking about you. But it’s been, you know, busy.”

“You’re heading to New York?”

“Like I said.”

“Let’s dial back. It’s where I live.”

“Right. Little private school girl. I’m seeing a kilt, red panties to match.”

“
Now
, Peter—that’s where I live now.”

“Like today?”

“Like yesterday. I’m moving to East Hampton . . . you know, out on the Island.”

“What happened to the Harvard of Palo Alto?”

May the God of humility forgive me.
“I’m taking a gap year. It’s a long story.” Short, really.

“Hey! Great. If I left you VIP tickets, could you get to Madison Square Garden on Thursday night? I’d see you backstage afterwards.”

“Love to.”

“Ask for Gus,” he said, and spelled out specifics.

Before he changed his mind, she said, “I’ll be the girl with the red panties.” No way was she fitting into a kilt.

“D
inner, family!” I shout. If I had a gong, I’d ring it.

I’m thinking of this meal as a feast of the epiphany, honoring the revelation that anything good that will happen in my life is most likely up to me. If I decide to subsist on a diet of bitter herbs and twigs, I’ll have no one to blame but myself. Nicola splurged on supermarket tulips, which she arranged with branches gathered from the frozen yard, setting the table as if tonight were a celebration—which I’d like to think it is. Nicola and Daniel grilled steaks UPS’d by Wally, which we—minus an abstaining Luey—consumed with numerous bottles of Pinot Noir brought by Chip Sharkey, he of the unlikely kindness, who joined us for dinner. Chip assured me that the grapes were sustainably grown in a nearby vineyard. I thanked him, and wished that worrying about the origin of red wine could be higher on my list than
money
followed by
job.

“If you want to know what God thinks of money, look who he gives it to!” Daniel toasted. I clicked my glass with his and the others’, but given such philosophy, I wonder, am I obligated to offer up round-the-clock mea culpas for once having had a surplus of income? This is just one topic careening through my brain now as sleep eludes me. My lids stretch tightly over my eyes, which feel like ping-pong balls bulging from my head. I have tossed and turned, failing to find comfort in the raft that is my bed. I cannot bring myself to cross over to Ben’s shore.

My conversation with Luey in the car echoes like an annoying jingle. “That woman the other night?” she asked, as I’d been waiting for her to do. “Clem’s mom? What did she want?”

“Nothing.” I hope my answer was correct.

“I’m not a fool,” she said.

We drove another mile until I trusted myself to continue. “I think Clementine might have been involved with your father.”

Luey craned her neck in my direction and said, “That’s crazy.” This translated to:
You’re crazy.

“Sweetheart, your dad wouldn’t be the first guy to fall for a woman as young as his daughter. Don’t deify him, please.”

We rode past two more exits before Luey said, “I don’t see it. Clem is, like, twenty-one going on sixteen.” When Luey is upset, she sounds sixteen herself.

I thought of the obligatory premarital counseling session Ben and I suffered through before the rabbi would marry us. “It’s sex or money that take down most marriages,” he’d lectured. “Sex or money,” he repeated for an extra shot of pomposity and fright.

My mother had confided that the man’s wife had recently left him for a college sweetheart who owned a chain of A&W drive-ins near Pittsburgh. “Such a
shanda
”—a scandal, she translated for me. When our counseling session ended, I said to Ben, giggling, this rabbi may, with the power vested in him by the State of Pennsylvania, be allowed to unite a couple as husband and wife, but given his track record, what gave this guy the chutzpah to advise us on marital longevity? Lately I’ve wondered if his pronouncement wasn’t a curse.

“I don’t buy any kind of Dad and Clementine hookup,” Luey said. “You’re going off the deep end here.”

I didn’t try to defend myself and hoped Luey was right. She futzed until she found NPR and for the following twenty minutes, we played along with “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me,” egregiously bombing. We’ve each become so suffocated by the minutia of our insular world, neither of us remembered the name of California’s governor.

I turn on my light now and try to read. Nicola has passed along a novella. The author is English. Give me mackintoshes, drinks parties, fine fillies, jumpers, fortnights, and people shouting “Bollocks!” and I’m generally good to go. But in the first chapter, a government wonk agrees to an assignation in the car park with a man she’s met on the job one hour earlier. After he rips off her knickers, they do it standing up against a fender. Following this indignity he helps her find a lorry, and semen leaks on her skirt. That’s when I pitch the book against the wall. What did the author live through to write it? I’d prefer not to know, and, more to the point, what made Nicola like and recommend this book? I prefer not to know that either.

The wind pounds the window like a bear that wants to get in. I am thoroughly and miserably awake. I get out of bed, tighten a worn robe around my flannel nightgown, slip into my ancient moccasins, and start to roam.

There had been few lookers at this house—as Chip predicted for the winter. I find myself sizing up my property as a prospective buyer might. The coat of Linen White that he insisted on for every wall makes the place feel not only as buffed and fresh as promised but sterile. I could be shambling down the hall of a mental institution. Our family pictures have been replaced by chilly black-and-white photographs of the sea from a collection that Chip rotates for staging. “You want another person to be able to imagine living in the house,” he’d advised. What I hadn’t realized was that this would mean that I would no longer be able to see myself here.

I don’t plan to tell Chip that with Luey’s new business visiting dogs will have their run of the place. He’d need a defibrillator if he knew.

Nicola’s room is closed but Luey has left her door ajar. I peek inside and listen to the inhalations of her breath and think about how her body is manufacturing my grandchild, cells multiply by the minute. It’s a miracle I find impossible to grasp, no different than when I could no longer see my toes beneath my own pregnant belly, needed to wear support hose, and had to pee every twenty minutes. Thanks to an app from
What to Expect When You’re Expecting
, at one point Luey informed me that the embryo was the size of a blueberry. I try not to imagine this child too vividly; it’s been hard to shake the image of the father’s bison head.

From downstairs, I hear a slight rustling. Please, not mice. But bravery in all matters is required, I tell myself. I tiptoe to the kitchen.

The mouse is Nicola, sitting at the wooden farm table, abraded by scratches long before we owned it, a package of graham crackers and a mug of steaming tea in front of her as she reads what looks like a letter
.
The room is tidy. Only a salad bowl drying next to the sink and the evening’s candles, burnt to stubs, reveal that five people ate a meal here hours ago.

“Too much on your mind?” she whispers.

“I could ask you the same.” I feel a rush of guilt. I should be charged with motherly infidelity, because since Nicola moved in with Stephan and Daniel, we’ve hardly seen or spoken to each other.

Like all sisters, when my girls were young, there were taunts of “Mom loves me best.” As they got older, the gibes stopped. But along with the devotion that I’d like to believe is a subterranean bond cementing my daughters, I suspect each has moments when she feels the baiting is true.

In my own childhood, it was Waltz boilerplate that my mother preferred my brother. Precisely because of this, I wanted no gaming in my own family. I’ve tried to mete out love not only lavishly but equally, and hoped that sibling rivalry wouldn’t become a blood sport. Yet here I am, feeling I have failed the daughter who was first in my heart.

“How’s the job?” I ask, stroking her hand.

“Wonderful,” Nicola says, and smiles shyly. “Uncle Stephan thinks I’ve got panache.”

Only Stephan would use that adjective; it must be true. “I completely agree,” I say, although I surely haven’t mentioned it often enough, and Nicola’s never until now been able to express it in a professional setting.

“He thinks I’m a born saleswoman—he wants me to commit full time. And we’re talking about having me design jewelry, maybe going to England to take a course.”

Amazing, if Stephan is footing the bill. “Congratulations.”

“Want to see what got it started?” Nicola lifts a necklace, dreamy and delicate, that she’s wearing under her white T-shirt, and points to one of several nearly transparent oval discs surrounded by small, sparkling stones. “These big ones are rock crystals,” she says.

Nicola must be gifted indeed to get my Brahman brother to want to make jewelry out of what I suspect is everyday quartz, but all I say is, “Spectacular.”

“It was my idea to sell what people my age may be able to buy.”

“Smart. Are those little ones diamonds?”

“They are, and the setting is rose gold.”

“I’m proud of you,” I say.

“But there’s more.” She sips her tea. “Hey, want a cup? I’ll make it. The water in the kettle’s still hot.”

“You sit, honey.” I get up to rummage in the cupboard. “Let me find a tea bag.”

“I brought loose tea—it’s in a canister over there.” No Lipton for my Cola. She points to a small tin. “It’s white snowflake tea, hardly any caffeine.”

Yet here she is, up at three.

“Supposed to refresh your mind,” she says. “Smell it? Chestnuts, right?”

I sniff. Smells like tea. I empty and refill the tea ball in the sink and let it steep in a mug while I rejoin Nicola at the table.

“I also came up with the idea of champagne Saturdays,” she says, eager and proud. “I’ve convinced Uncle Stephan to open the showroom to couples shopping for engagement rings and wedding bands and give them the red carpet treatment.”

If Luey ever gets married, she’ll probably elope, but Nicola has been planning her wedding since she was in third grade, and has documented it in a scrapbook. Five bridesmaids, because more would be tacky, she declared at eight years old. Sumptuous train, though she wants a ceremony at the beach. Leaving the reception in Stephan’s Jag. Guests throwing dollar bills, I suppose, instead of confetti. Decadence I’ll never be able to provide even if I haven’t always thought that splashy weddings—as I myself had—are corrupt.

As Nicola continues with conversation about bead settings, diamond shanks, and Asscher cuts, I could be sitting at the dinner table with my father. At risk of sounding like a commencement speech, after a few minutes I say, “It sounds as if you’ve found your passion.”

“Maybe,” she whispers and sighs.

Here it comes, the disclaimer. Nicola doesn’t look me in the eye. No matter how enthusiastic she appears to be about a school, a guy, an apartment, a job, or a continent, there is inevitably a snag. She is in perpetual drift.

“What’s it like at home with your uncle and Daniel?” When I’ve asked how her living arrangement has worked out, Stephan has grunted, “Couldn’t be better,” not inviting comment. Daniel has amplified the picture by saying only that on most nights Nicola goes out, though once a week she cooks something heavenly from culinary school—to make me feel that that particular two-year investment wasn’t a complete wash, I’m guessing. “Are you lonesome?”

“They go their way, I go mine,” she says. “It’s easy.”

I’m not ready to be relieved. “Who are you with when you’re out after work?” Once a mother gets to her third question she is officially meddling, but I don’t care; I have no idea how Nicola spends her off-hours. She mentions names of girls I remember from high school. “Anyone special in your life?” Why not really push?

To my surprise she says, “Maybe,” again.

“That high school friend up in Boston?”

“No, I haven’t heard much from him. It’s a man from Paris.” She glances at the letter on the table.

A man. “Does this person have a name?”

“Emile,” she says, drawing out the second syllable. “A chef.”

“Sounds romantic.” Also geographically undesirable.

“Sometimes.”

Once, both daughters turned to me to share what mattered most in their lives—teachers straight from Stephen King novels, four-foot-ten harpies who snubbed them at lunch, and eventually boys who held their happiness in their small, sweaty palms. After one of these young males would get upgraded to boyfriend, I’d know every detail about his braces-flashing smile, his invitations, and his IM’ing. But when the girls left home, the curtain came down. I never got to hear much about men, if that’s how they’d characterize their suitors. For that I am sad—and now deeply curious.

“Why only ‘sometimes’ romantic?” I ask. “Because he’s there and you’re here?” This must be my twentieth question.

Nicola finishes her tea before she answers. “I thought I’d never hear from him yet now that I have, I feel as if I’m being courted.”

She shows me the letter. It’s on ivory parchment with flowing cursive in black ink. My French is from junior high school but I’m pretty sure that
“Tu me manques”
means, “I miss you.”

“Right, and I miss him. More than I realized.”

“What’s the problem?”

“I feel pressured.”

I don’t want to imagine what sexual favor could be left in the twenty-first-century repertoire that would pressure a woman.

“He wants me to move back to Paris.”

“But you have a job here, maybe a future.”
Possibly a boyfriend, if you give the guy any encouragement,
but even I knew better than to mention Michael T.
And also, I’ll miss you if you leave,
another unspoken subject.

“Emile doesn’t care about any of that. He wants me to move.”

“Isn’t that premature?”

“Not after being together for almost a year.”

I don’t care if the hurt shows in my voice. “That’s a long time for you to be together without mentioning it.”

“It was off and on,” she says, as if that makes a difference. “Plus, Daddy met him when he visited me.”

That Ben never mentioned he’d met Nicola’s boyfriend would feel like one more treachery were it not consistent with his failing to remember the names and details of either daughter’s boyfriends, ever. He always considered these young men to fall far, far short of the mark, the mark being him.

“What did Dad say to you?”

Nicola mimics him as she says, “‘He’s way too old.’” She sees my face. “Emile is turning forty.”

Forty is the age some women my age date. Nat is forty-eight. “That is a substantial difference, Cola.”

She literally pulls back by inches. “One of the things I like best about him is that he’s the first guy I’ve been with who’s a man and not a boy.”

“Boys grow up, Cola.” I married a boy, though maybe he never grew up.

“Emile has plenty of good points.” Her defensiveness is so thick she can barely speak. She ticks off an inventory as if she’s been keeping a list, which I suspect she has. “He’s warm and kind. He has gorgeous green eyes. He’s been promoted at the restaurant. He has a wonderful house in Provence with a view of the water—well, it belongs to his mother but he goes there whenever he wants. I love his accent. He thinks I’m beautiful.”