The Widow Waltz (8 page)

“He insisted she lose the vampire nail varnish.”

“She’s not acting loopy?”

“Actually, ‘smart’ and ‘efficient’ were in his lexicon. She convinced a nervous bridegroom to go with the square instead of the cushion cut. Said it was her favorite.”

Who knew?
“This is a relief.” My brother isn’t ready to terminate Nicola’s employment with some withering remark that will cost me thousands in therapy I can’t afford. “I’ve been worried and she’s telling me nothing. Acting almost like Luey.”

Naturally, then, Daniel asks, “How is my favorite malcontent?”

I let it sail. “Pregnant.”

He gulps and coughs up soup. “Little Luey? Mother of God!”

“No, just pregnant.”

“Is she going to . . . you know . . . do something about it?”

My face twitches into the kind of half-smile you see on a stroke victim.

“I don’t know.”

M
y heart is calling me back to the bat cave. After lunch I tried to persuade Daniel to take me to a supermarket and then return me to the house.

“George,” he said, “I know you’re climbing the worry wall, but how much can you accomplish alone, without a car? Wait a week—I’ll come out here and we’ll do it together, with cocktail breaks. The girls should—”

I growled, “I shouldn’t be inflicting myself on anyone just now,”
now
having commenced two hours ago.

“I don’t want you to throw out your back excavating closets. If I have to endure one more friend’s play-by-play about physical therapy . . .”

I lean forward to stroke Daniel’s cleanly shaven chin. “Daniel obviously needs younger friends. I give you my word—I’ll behave like a matron properly respectful of her joints and tendons.”

I have. Getting out of bed today, my third morning here, I quickly assessed the damage from the previous evening’s banshee storm—branches littered the yard. I stood straight and made the bed, folding the mohair throw a la Georgia, with thorough disgust and lapidary precision, brushed my teeth, ran a brush through my unwashed hair, and got down to business.

I had already tackled each bedroom. The evidence stands by the front door, as piles of clothing await their next stop down the food chain: the chichi village consignment store, an Internet auction, or the local dump. Thus far, I have found nothing more incriminating than a Costco-sized condom assortment in Luey’s room. Where was this stash when she got pregnant? There has been a sensation close to satisfaction in my mindless sorting and deciding, as if by putting my house in order I am doing the same for my head. This illusion winks at me while I stay the course.

Today I will attack the kitchen, which I intend to clean as thoroughly as did my mother’s rabbinic grandfather who before every Passover rooted out offending crumbs with the help of a feather and a candle. It is astonishing and disgraceful how much food a family of four can stockpile. Friday and Saturday I boiled up half-filled boxes of spinach lasagna and a member of the penne family the color of a bruise, creating sauces from sardines, anchovies, fennel seeds, tomato paste, and smoked oysters that would have made my great-grandfather curse and gag. Tonight I will move on to quinoa, and for tomorrow I have my eye on some kernels that resemble shriveled caviar, a delicacy that thanks to my reduced circumstances, I no longer need to pretend to like. When I return to the city, I plan to find my mother-of-pearl caviar spoons and learn how to sell them on eBay. Will this switch from buyer to seller feel oddly unnatural, like trying to write with my left hand instead of the right?

I begin to evaluate the cereal, stopping to consider whether Ben’s devotion to steel-cut oatmeal puts his death in the same subset of irony as a vegetarian being gobbled by a wolf, when I hear someone pull into the driveway. I carefully straighten my knees, walk to the back door, and peer through the window. A dark green, mud-spattered van is discharging what appears to be a tall, thin teenager wearing work boots and, on this overcast Monday, sunglasses, with a hank of blondish hair peeking out from a cap that says, A
DAM AND
E
VE
.

The very expensive gardening service—I’ve seen those triple-digit bills—has arrived, although not in the form of the squat Ecuadorians with which I am familiar. This must be the out-of-season brigade. Adam, I suppose, deposits a cache of tools on the edge of the driveway and walks toward the outdoor shower, then the shed, bending to gather branches blown down in the storm.

What would it be like to have a brisk job in fresh air? To dress every day in gently worn overalls and wear nothing more on my face than sunscreen and Chapstick, my shorn hair squashed under a hat, to become a twenty-first-century Emily Dickinson, raising flowers instead of children, allowing weather to dictate my life.

I surrender to the romance of the notion until I remind myself that I loathe Emily Dickinson; I am more of an Edna St. Vincent Millay “My candle burns at both ends” sort of gal. My Emily Dickinson animus is not simply because I cannot weed unless under expert supervision. I’m strictly an indoor gardener, a fact confirmed when I ordered two hundred bulbs from a mail-order catalog and planted every last one upside down, providing fast food for rodents. The following spring a grand total of seventeen tulips rose from the earth to give me the finger. Everything Emily represents—her
meshugas
with the white dresses, her fanatical virginity, and yes, her deranged midnight gardening—appeals to me only slightly more than, say, pro-wrestling. If Emily had been my freshman roommate, I would have demanded a single. Becoming even an elegant landscape architect would be, for me, too earthy and exhausting. I sigh and am ready to return to my cupboards when the visiting gardener stops before he enters the sheds, turns toward the house, squints, and waves.

I wave back but he is no longer in sight and I return to toss opened packages of flaccid potato chips into an industrial-sized black plastic bag. On the radio, an announcer is giving top-of-the-hour news, delivered with the calm, peculiar cadence exclusive to NPR, as if there is a subtext about a bombing in Syria that I should get.

I progress to canned goods, looking for dents and leaks that, given my recent track record, I am positive will breed botulism—baked beans; pineapple, sliced and crushed; garbanzos; beets; yams in sweet, heavy syrup; and enough pumpkin to bake a pie for every Pilgrim. When I’m back here with a car, I’ll make a hefty donation to a food pantry, I am thinking, as I hear a soft knock. I get up from my crouch, go to the back door.

The gardener is here but he is not Adam. She is Eve, aggressively wholesome and most definitely cold, with a small, pointy nose that is slightly runny, and rough lips. She’s also no teenager, but not much older—Nicola’s age, at the most.

“Mrs. Silver?” she asks.

It never was, officially. I have been steadfast to Waltz.

“Yes?” I’ve spoken to both daughters and Daniel every day and to Wally Nothing-to-report-I’m-so-sorry-Georgia Fleigelman on Friday. Nevertheless, my voice sounds as if it’s been greased with an unguent, and before I continue I clear my throat. In those seconds the face comes into focus. This Eve looks familiar. I might know her from valet parking at a party or standing behind a cash register ringing up insect repellant at the drugstore. She belongs to the tribe that makes the Hamptons hum and who I assume, if I think about it—which I haven’t, until now—must despise my kind, the second-home crowd. Now that I’m staring at her, I realized I have misjudged this girl, who is actually far more attractive than most of the summer people with their three-thousand-dollar watches and spray tans. Despite her lanky frame and slender limbs our gardener is blessed with what Ben referred to as a rack. Unlike most of the women at the beach similarly endowed, I am going to guess her set is God given.

“Excuse me,” she says. I realize that I must be gawking. Expecting condolences, I prepare my stock response, gratitude encased in stoicism.
Yes, a heart attack. You’re right, way too young. Hanging on, thanks for asking. The girls? It’s tough.
But what the gardener says is, “Pardon my asking, but could I please use your phone? My battery is dead.”

“Certainly,” I say. “The phone’s over on the counter.” I return to my task at hand while I eavesdrop.

“I’m finished here. . . . Okay, I’ll wait til he wakes up then. . . . See ya in a bit.”
She replaces the phone in its cradle, thanks me, and heads toward the back door, pulling a tissue from her pocket to blow into it with a thoroughly unladylike blast.

“Can I offer you some tea?” I find myself asking. If my life was measured by tea bags, I have discovered that I would still be wealthy. Organic cranberry green, lemon chamomile, Earl Grey, et cetera.

“Thanks. I have to wait awhile for my mom to pick me up. This is nice of you, Mrs. Silver.”

“It’s Waltz, Georgia Waltz,” I offer.

“I’m Clem,” she says. “Clementine DeAngelo.” She surveys the scrambled objects around the room. “Doing some cleaning?”

“Major purge. I’m putting the house on the market.”

“Really?” I think I catch chagrin. “Why? It’s such a beautiful property, and the perennials are going to be great this year. We just put in those rhododendrons and forsythia a few springs ago. This year they’ll come into their own.”

I never cease to be amazed at how every human being views the world through her personal lens, and how even the shy among us are prepared to chat up their angle. The historian observes a moment in time—how New York at the dawn of the twenty-first century is not so unlike Vienna in 1890, let’s say. The writer keeps an eye out for material, the psychiatrist, problems. Daniel looks at life as if it were a painting he might buy—is the composition balanced and original? Stephan evaluates in carats and profits. This Clementine looks at my life and apparently sees beyond scrawny privets, stunted shrubs, and a broken trellis to picture ruby red phlox, blue clematis climbing the wall, and herbs that I, proud hausfrau
,
will hang to dry.

Or maybe she just doesn’t want to lose a customer. “The house is too big for me,” I half lie as I sit opposite her at the table. “And, well, you probably heard about my husband.”

“Ben?”

I’m “Mrs. Silver.” He’s “Ben”?
Clementine DeAngelo hooks me with a steady look as I hear a loud, angry noise. To my ears it’s like a gunshot, and I startle like Sadie roused from a dream.

“I think your water is boiling,” she says evenly.

“Right!” I get up awkwardly and have to grab the counter not to trip.

“Are you okay?”

In the lingua franca of Luey, I am so not okay.
“Don’t mind me,” I answer as I pour water into mugs. I have already placed an assortment of tea on the table next to the sugar. “I don’t have fresh lemon, but there’s lemon juice in the fridge. And milk.”

Why did I invite this Ben-knowing stranger into my home? I want her gone. I want her to never have been born.

“Just sugar is fine.”

I rip open a Splenda and swirl it into my tea, happy to not have to look at her.

“You were saying?” she asks.

I have not forgotten. “Yes, my husband.”

“I know him. From the pro shop.”

“You knew him?”

A pause hangs in the air like a grenade. I believe she may have caught the tense I used. I search her tone and come up blank while a second Georgia realizes that she will have to phone the private golf course ten miles from here and cancel Ben’s membership. This Georgia has forgotten he belonged there and she hadn’t seen a notice for yearly dues.

“I see,” I say wearily. “Then I guess you haven’t heard.” I feel hollow and shivery. “My husband has passed away.”

Clementine DeAngelo takes in a breath as sharp as a scythe. Freckles stand out on her ashen face. I’m almost ready to reach forward and comfort her when she turns back toward me and says, with complete composure, “Excuse me. That’s horrible. I’m so sorry, Mrs. Silver. What—when did this happen?”

“Beginning of last month.”

She shakes her head. The cheeks that looked chapped when she entered my kitchen are drained of color. “I had no idea.”

“It was sudden.” And none of your business.

“I wonder if my mom knows, and if she did, why she never mentioned it,” she says in barely a whisper. I can hear the wall clock ticking and outside, the wind continuing to blow, as if the weather is angry. Clementine DeAngelo stands, her mug in hand, and glides toward the sink, where she pours the tea down the drain. “I think I better go. Thank you.”

“But your mother isn’t here yet. And it’s started to drizzle.”

“Thanks again.” She slips her jacket. There is grace in her simple movement. “I’ll be back to finish.”

To finish what, I am unsure, but I tell Clementine DeAngelo that tomorrow is fine. I return to the table to drink my tea. That damn ticking is louder than I have ever noticed.

It is fifteen minutes later when I hear a vehicle come up our driveway. I watch as the girl standing in the hard rain bolts to the car. I crane to see the driver, but all I can make out is a baby in the back, strapped into a car seat, a child who Clementine DeAngelo reaches to hug.

B
uffalo Bob r u out there?
@feralkitty pressed Tweet. The last time Luey had been at this bar, she’d downed four dirty martinis and was wearing her shirt unbuttoned to flash a lacy black pushup bra. Today she was in the same jeans she’d had on every day for the last week and the only thing good she could say about her underwear was that it was clean.

She had never sat alone at a bar in the afternoon, an act of slutty defiance that Luey could have gotten off on if demons hadn’t been line dancing in her belly, announcing either morning sickness or garden-variety panic. As she sipped a second ginger ale, she wished she could puke. Or at least make up her mind.

Luey would have liked to dissect her quandary with a female that she felt bonded to beyond all others—her mother, a best friend, her sister—and arrive at a reasonable resolution. But this wasn’t, unfortunately, a YA novel, so instead she had called several crisis hotlines, and hung up each time she heard the overly solicitous purr on the other end. Luey decided it would be better to simply walk into Planned Parenthood, which was nearby, and try to trick herself into believing that if she was facing a live body, she wouldn’t have the nerve to bolt. From going through this drill with her college roommate, Luey knew it was early enough for her to swallow a pill. In a few days she, too, could be sitting on the toilet, doubled over with cramps, wailing for her mother or God, while trying to pretend she was enduring a natural miscarriage of a pregnancy that wasn’t meant to be. And this was considered the easy solution.

The soft ding of her phone broke her thought. A text:
Hey Miz Kitty when can I see u again?
Luey could understand why second-rate writers talked about leaping hearts. She could text back, maybe even call, and tell him everything.
Or not. If she laid this on him, she’d probably never hear from the guy, and the problem was that Luey liked this one. No thank you, she decided. At least no thank you for now. She allowed herself the privilege to change her mind. Wasn’t that part of a woman’s right to choose? If it wasn’t, it should be.

“Is this seat free?”

Luey hadn’t noticed the curly-haired type who was parking his beer next to her glass. Of course it was free, she thought, as was every other seat at the bar.

“I don’t feel like being alone today,” Curly said.

I do,
Luey thought, and fixed her face in outta-my-space
mode.

“Don’t judge a man by his come-on.”

How could you not? she wondered, as he extended his hand for an actual shake. “I’m Marc.”

Mark’s trying to make his mark. Mark drinks Brooklyn Lager, not Maker’s Mark. Mark starts with the same letter as
mnemonic.
That’s how I’d remember his name if I wanted to, which I don’t,
Luey thought, because karma had failed to take into account that this was a highly inauspicious moment to meet a guy with broad shoulders, which topped her list of nonnegotiable requirements. “Mark with a K?” she asked. She wasn’t ready to write him off just yet.

“M.A.R.C. You?”

“Caroline.”

“With a K?”

“How did you know? Call me Karo. Like the syrup.”

“Because you’re sweet?”

“Not at all.”

“Whew.”

“Why the suit?” He looked like he’d come from court. Lawyer or plaintiff, she couldn’t say.

“Job interview.” Marc pulled a tie out of his pocket.

“How’d it go?” Luey approved of the tie, Rat Pack skinny.

“I got an offer, but it would mean I have to move.”

“From where?”

“Bay Area.”

The door of the bar opened, blowing in a gust of cold. “Why would anyone move to New York who could be living there?” Luey asked. What, for example, was she doing here in New York when she should be in Palo Alto this minute, improvising a scene in her sketch comedy class? “Whereabouts?”

“You know San Francisco?”

“A little.” Enough to love it. She thought of learning to drive a stick shift and chugging up and down the hills, her heart in her throat; biking the Marin Headlands; bowling at Lucky Strike; and Japantown’s cherry blossoms in the spring.

“I’ve got my own place in the Mission between a Burmese restaurant and a used-book store,” he said.

Maybe he wasn’t as old as she’d thought.

“How about you?” Marc asked.

“Paris.” She went on to describe the apartment where she’d visited Cola, on the sixth floor of a Belle Epoque walk-up with a rooftop view straight from
Gigi
, Nana’s favorite movie.

“I was hoping you’d say ‘here.’” He smiled—his teeth were endearingly crooked—and took a business card from his pocket.

Luey was touched by his complete lack of cool and, hormones be damned, felt dangerously close to tears. “Maybe you’ll hear from me, @notanarcmarc.”

She scribbled
@feralkitty
on a napkin. “I’m leaving tonight, but here.”

“So, bye,” he said, helping Luey into her jacket.

She left the bartender a five-dollar tip, and thought about giving Marc a kiss on the cheek
.
“Bye,” she said, and walked out the door toward the clinic.