We Could Be Beautiful (17 page)

I sighed as loudly as possible.

“Do you want some water?”

“Yes. No. I—yes. Ted, I am distressed.”

“I can see that.”

He filled a glass of water at his tacky personal sink, touched my back in a fatherly way when he gave it to me. I recoiled. I was not a child anymore. I was a small-business owner with a serious problem.

“How much money is left, Ted?”

“It’s gone,” he said, taking his seat across from me.

“It’s gone? Gone?” This wasn’t registering. “Gone? What does that mean?”

“It means you will no longer receive monthly payments, Catherine.”

“No,” I said. “No no no no no.” I was going to tear my hair out. I was going to die. “There must be some way around this. Tell me there is. Please. Tell me there’s a loophole.”

“There is something additional you should know. In your father’s trust, it was stipulated that you and Caroline would receive additional funds if you had children. And you must be married to receive those funds. I believe he added that later. Your father rewrote his will more often than anyone I’ve ever known—it was hard to keep track. He loved the idea of a large family. Well, you know that. He thought this would give you and Caroline an incentive to have kids. Ten million dollars per child is the number he chose. A separate account holds that money. I believe it accommodates up to eight children. If that number isn’t reached, the remainder will be given to the Met.”

“What? I’ve never heard that.” As the words came out of my mouth, I realized I was wrong. I had heard this before. Ten years before, when Dad had died, Caroline, Mom, Ted, and I had sat at the dining table (I remember the roses had been red that day) going over these logistics. I had barely paid attention. Of course, I’d been distraught. My father had been everything to me, and he had died so suddenly.

“But how can it be gone? My mother said the trust contained $500 million!” I was repeating myself. This still wasn’t registering. I was going to pass out. I was going to die. “I’m positive about that.”

“And you never asked your mother to see any printed record of this? The statements I sent you would have negated that figure.”

“No, Ted.” I said his name like it was something ugly. “Why would I? Why would I check? I believed my own mother. Wouldn’t you?”

Ted pressed his lips together. His wispy white hair looked like sprinkler mist above his head.

“Does Caroline know about this?”

“Yes,” he said.

“Yes?”

“Correct me if I’m wrong, but Caroline has three children?”

“And?”

“Right.”

I managed to set my jittering glass of water on Ted’s idiotic desk without spilling it everywhere. “This is not real. This can’t be real.”

“I’m sorry. I thought you were aware.”

“How could you not inform me that my monthly payments wouldn’t be coming?”

“I did inform you,” he said certainly. “I have sent you a letter every month for the past year.”

“I didn’t get any fucking letters, Ted.” I saw myself in the kitchen all those mornings, throwing the letters away.

“Catherine, please.”

“Please? How could you not have called me? Don’t you think this warranted a phone call? Or an e-mail? No one reads their fucking mail anymore, Ted. It’s a waste of paper!”

Ted waited. He seemed unfazed. He had probably been in this situation more than once.

“How much money does Mom have now?”

“I am not at liberty to say.”

“But it’s enough to pay for her to live in that home?”

“Your mother’s facility is paid for by the money she has saved in her account, yes. She has enough saved to cover her living expenses until the age of one hundred and ten.”

“What?”

“She wanted to be safe.”

“A hundred and ten?”

“It’s a creative number. It should not be taken literally. That number just means she has padding, so to speak.”

I covered my face with my hands. “I’m going to pass out.”

“After your father died, your mother wrote a living will. In this will she stipulated that in the case of dementia or any other degenerative condition that left her unable to think coherently, the art collection—everything you and Caroline did not want—should be donated to museums and charities, along with most of the proceeds from the sale of the apartment on Eighty-Fourth Street. She wrote an extensive list of charitable organizations, in fact. I can pull it up now if you’d like.”

“So she gave all that money away, knowing we would run out?”

“I can show you the will. And the list of charitable donations. It will just take a second.” He turned the computer on. The computer hadn’t even been on.

“I think you need to get off the golf course and be better at your job, Ted. And turn your fucking computer on!” I stood up. I may have made wild gestures with my hands.

The door opened. A suit stood there, his eyes wide, like sunny-side-up eggs. “Everything okay in here?”

“Fine, Bernie, thanks.”

“See how Bernie is dressed? This is how you should be dressed for work, Ted.”

Bernie gave Ted a look: She’s crazy.

“E-mail me the documents. You’ll hear from my lawyer.”

It was like a bad movie. I tore through the cubicles. I jammed my finger into the elevator button too many times, as if that would make it come faster. And I was so skinny then—the gaunt-actress version of myself. I had gotten a blowout that morning by a stylist whose vision of “feathery, feathery!” had left me looking like a Farrah Fawcett drag queen. I was a woman playing the role of a small-business owner on a tirade, and I was playing it badly. I’d even worn a pantsuit. With pinstripes. Who was I trying to be that day? I think I was trying to be myself, but in all the trying, I had missed her completely.

15

I
invited Caroline out for dinner that night without telling her why. Of course she came. “The nannies are here tonight,” she said, as if they weren’t there every other night. We went to a French bistro we used to like as children, which had since become a hokey chain that gratinéed everything in oozy, oily cheese. The smell was killing me. Even the cone-shaped sconces on the walls appeared to be made of cheese. People crammed in, filled the booths, made too much noise. Of couse Edith Piaf was playing. How cheesy.

We ordered food to appear civilized. We chose the macaroni because that’s what we had chosen as children. We didn’t eat it because we were wasteful, and we drank instead because we were in pain. Yes, I was feeling dramatic. My life as I knew it was ending.

I was still in the pantsuit. I had walked to the restaurant from Fifty-Fourth Street, earbuds in, head down. I listened to Metallica the whole way. I stopped only once, to buy a water bottle at a bodega. I drank the whole thing on a busy corner and threw the bottle into a trash can with force.

Caroline was her chirpy birdy self, quacking away about how it was so wonderful that she could practice Spanish with the cleaning lady. I thought, When I’m poor, I won’t have a cleaning lady.

Caroline always gave me compliments. I waited for her to comment on my blowout. Instead, when she finally shut up about the romantic cadence of the Spanish language (what movie was that from?), she said, “You look like hell.”

“
You
look like hell.”

“What? I meant it like how are you feeling?” She gulped her red wine. Her knobby elbows on the table looked like gnarls on a twig. “Don’t be mean to me.”

“Oh, God.” This had been one of Caroline’s favorite refrains since childhood: Don’t be mean to me, Catherine, be nice to me, Catherine, love me, Catherine, be my best friend, Catherine, I’ll do anything. “Let me tell you why I’m being mean to you. I just found out—” and I told her the whole story, including the part about Ted’s funky tan. “And who knows, maybe Ted stole the money from us.”

“Ted did not steal the money from us.”

“Oh my God,” I said, “what if that’s what happened? That kind of thing happens all the time.”

“No, that didn’t happen.” She traced an eyebrow—her good eyebrow, not the fucked-up tadpole. “How could you not have known about this?”

“How could I not have known? How could you not have told me?”

“I didn’t tell you because I thought you knew.”

“And you’re not freaked out that we’re out of money?”

“Catherine,” she said, “we planned for this. I thought we were all planning for this. Why do you think Bob and I went to Playa del Carmen instead of Cabo?”

“I didn’t even think about that, Caroline. Why would I stop and think, Oh, Caroline and Bob are going to Playa del Carmen because we are about to lose our monthly deposits and Mom gave everything to charity? Why would I
ever
think that?”

Caroline’s mouth looked dry, wrinkled. It looked like an asshole. Maybe she was smoking again. “Catherine, we never talk about money. That’s how we were raised. I don’t talk about money with anyone except for Bob.”

“That’s so codependent.”

“Please be nice to me.”

“Oh my God, you’re like a three-year-old.” Caroline made the face of the girl in the movie who’s about to cry, so I said, “Sorry, but it’s true.”

“It seems like William has money, doesn’t he? I kind of thought that was one of the reasons you picked him.”

“That is disgusting, Caroline.”

“Sorry, I just— I didn’t mean—”

“Is this why you’ve been popping out babies? To get more money than me?”

She actually looked pissed off in a real way then, not in a movie way, which rarely happened with her. “I love my children, Catherine.”

“Fine, sorry.”

“I love them,” she said again.

“But it’s $10 million per child. And if you knew that, you had to be thinking about that. I mean really, come on.”

“Well…” Caroline readjusted herself in the booth. “Yeah, I guess I was thinking about it, to be honest. It’s a lot of money. Why would I
not
be thinking about it?”

“So you had more kids to get more money.”

Caroline looked at me, looked at the table, looked at her split ends. She twirled them around her fingers. “It’s not that simple,” she said.

“Isn’t it?”

“No.”

“And why didn’t you tell me to have Fernando’s baby? That was only last year! I wouldn’t be broke now if you had told me to have it!”

“You’re not broke. Stop.”

“But I’m going to be.”

“Would you really have had that baby?”

“Fuck! Probably.”

“And you’re accusing
me
of having babies for money?”

“Yes, because you actually had them. I didn’t.”

“Well, it wouldn’t have mattered anyway, because you wouldn’t have been married! And Catherine, this is not why we had kids! Have you met my husband? He’s obsessed with kids. He’s a pediatrician! Jesus!”

“Yeah, with a pediatrician’s salary. Did he know about this special trust when you guys decided to get pregnant?”

“Of course he knew.”

“Well how convenient for Bob. Now he can retire early.”

“That’s a mean thing to say.”

“Maybe it hurts because it’s true.”

Caroline twirled her split ends but didn’t look at them. She was looking at me. “I feel like you’re blaming me because you don’t…”

“What?”

“Never mind.”

“Tell me. Don’t do that. Tell me.”

“Because you don’t want to blame yourself.”

“I’m blaming you because I don’t want to blame myself?” This struck me as being more insightful than I thought Caroline had the capacity to be. And it bothered me because it was probably true. But then she ruined her moment of wisdom by saying, “I am your blame receptacle.”

“My what?”

“Blame receptacle.”

“Is that a real term or did you just make it up?”

“I heard it on TV.”

“Of course you did.”

Caroline rubbed her temples with her knuckles. “Catherine,” she said, “you are stressing me out.”

“I’m stressing you out? I’m—what if I have to sell the shop?”

“No, you won’t. You’ll be fine.”

“No, Caroline, I won’t be fine. Things are not fine!”

An old man in a light blue beanie looked over. I wanted to flick him off. If I were young and rich and flicked off an old man, I’d be a brat. If I were old and poor and flicked off an old man, there was no excuse.

“Why did Mom donate the money from the house to charity? Why everything?”

“I have no idea. Bob and I were very surprised. But the money’s rightfully hers. The house was left to her. We got our own houses. We hoped we would get some of that money, too, obviously, but we haven’t been counting on it. We actually didn’t find out about the living will until the house had sold. And by then she was already so out of it. I thought about talking to her, but there would be no point.”

“Have you asked her why?”

“No.”

“Really?”

“I don’t want to upset her. You know how she is.”

“Oh my God.”

“You ask her if you want. She’s more likely to tell you anyway.”

“Why did she lie and say we had more money in the trust than we did?”

Her look said, Are you serious? “You know how Mom is always throwing numbers around. I never believed it was as much as she said.”

“You didn’t?”

“Catherine, remember when Mom told us our horseback riding lessons cost $1,000 an hour?”

I somehow still thought this was true.

“And didn’t she tell you Sarah Lawrence cost something like three hundred grand a year?”

“Yes.”

“Well. And also, that was always money that was
coming
. From stocks. If you look at the statements, the balance is right there.”

“Oh my God. What the hell am I going to do?”

“If we can help you, we will, okay?”

If you were rich and your sister annoyed you, you could avoid her. If you were poor and your sister annoyed you, you might have to sleep on her couch anyway.

“I know. Thanks. I’m—yeah, thanks, really.”

“I mean this in the nicest way, but maybe you should eat something. I’ll eat something, too. Not this macaroni though.” She piled her uneaten plate on top of mine. It looked like yellow maggots. “How about a salad?”

“Fine.”

She flagged down the waiter. “Hi. Can we have two green salads?” She looked at her empty glass. “And some more wine.”