We Could Be Beautiful (33 page)

“Okay.” I readjusted the rock between my palms like it was a thing that mattered and waited for her to begin.

After another deep inhale, she did.

“This is what happened. It happened the night this photo was taken. Your mom was throwing a party for an artist. It was a big one—there were a hundred people, at least. She was raising money—you know, she was always raising money. This picture of us was taken at the very beginning of the night, after I put that dress on you. Your dad wanted a picture of you. I was going to get up, but your dad wanted me in it. Your dad was a really wonderful man. I’m so sorry he died, baby.” She stopped, swallowed. “Sorry if it’s weird I’m calling you baby. When I look at you, it’s hard not to see this little girl.”

I half smiled. I tried not to judge her. I tried to ignore her greasy couch. It was hard. I was so uncomfortable.

“Okay. Later that night your mom was understaffed, and she asked me to help. She wanted me to bus tables, basically. I said it was almost your bedtime—your bedtime was eight o’clock—and she said that was fine, she would take care of you. So I rushed around busing everybody’s glasses and plates and taking them to the kitchen. I did a few laps of that and then I went to find you guys, but I couldn’t find you anywhere. I thought maybe she’d taken you to bed a little early and you must be in your bedroom. So I went to your bedroom. You weren’t in there. And then I heard this noise from the hall, like a shrieking sound, and I was pretty sure it was your mom shrieking. I freaked out. I thought maybe she’d fallen or something. I rushed to the guest room and opened the door and…your mom was in bed with a guy. And you were in the bathroom. The door was wide open.

“Your mom said, ‘Get out.’ She didn’t yell—her voice was chilling. I didn’t move. I couldn’t just leave you there. I ran to you and grabbed you off the floor. You were crying. I remember looking at your mom before we left the room because I still thought maybe this was a mistake. Maybe she didn’t know you were in there. But how could she not have known? You were crying, and the door was wide open, and the light in the bathroom was on. But I thought maybe she was just too drunk to notice, so when I looked at her, I thought she might be horrified that I’d found you and apologize. But she didn’t look surprised at all. She just said, ‘Close the door, Mae.’ And the guy—he was just staring at me, kind of smiling. He was creepy.

“I took you to your bedroom and asked you what had happened. You said, ‘Mom told me to wait in the bathroom while she played a game with her friend.’ I remember thinking, When Mrs. West isn’t drinking, she’ll see how wrong this was and she’ll apologize.

“I put you to bed. Your mom was waiting for me outside your door. She’d reapplied her makeup—I could tell. She handed me a check. It was for $5,000. I said I wouldn’t take it. I said I loved you so much and I really wanted to stay in this job and I couldn’t bear to think of leaving you. I begged her to wait until the next day to talk about this again. She kept saying, ‘Take it take it take it, Mae,’ and so I finally just took it out of her hands. I planned to rip it up when I left. I planned to tell your father. Once I had taken it, she said, ‘Give me your key.’ I pleaded again. It got nowhere. She had made up her mind. I had no choice. I gave her my key. She said, ‘Don’t ever come back to this house. I’ll have you arrested, I swear my life on it.’ I knew she meant it. Your mom—she was incredibly intimidating to work for. And I was only twenty at the time. I don’t mean to be negative about her—she was definitely charming, too. But she scared the shit out of me. On my way out, I saw this Polaroid of us on the counter, so I took it.

“Downstairs I said bye to the doorman like I always did, and when I got outside, there was the guy, smoking a cigarette. I didn’t realize how tall he was until I saw him standing up. Tall and blond, with crazy blue eyes. He was a really good-looking guy, but I could tell there was something wrong with him. He was missing a chip. I don’t know. I’ll never forget what he said to me. ‘Eventful night, isn’t it?’ I didn’t say anything. I left. And that was the last time I saw you. That night was the last time we saw each other.”

Mae looked up. Her eyes were glassy. She said, “I was so sad to leave you, Kitty.”

I was like ice. I was paralyzed. Maybe I was a rock, like my mother. “Did you cash the check or did you tell my father?”

Mae winced. “Please forgive me,” she said. “I was going to rip it up, I was going to rip it up—that was my plan. I swear to God, Kitty, I swear.”

“But.”

“But I kept it for some reason. I kept it. I did call your father’s office the next day, but he’d gone out of town. And later in the week I found out I was pregnant, and I used some of the money for an abortion. I was too young to have a kid.”

“So you never told my father.”

“No. It was the wrong thing to do. So that’s why I wrote the letter. To do the right thing. So that one day I could tell you.”

“Well, I hope you feel better.” I set her rock crystal on the coffee table.

Mae looked confused. “Do you not believe me?”

There was the memory of myself, age four, cheek against the smoky marble tiles of the bathroom, and yes, it had been the guest bathroom Mae was talking about. But I didn’t remember anything traumatic about that moment. I just remembered feeling sad. If what Mae had recounted was true, how could I possibly have forgotten it? I couldn’t have.

And then I looked at the cats on the wall. Mae Simon liked to save things. Mae Simon was excited about saving things that did not belong to her. Maybe Mae Simon should have been focusing on her own life instead of nominating herself to be the Cat Savior of Bushwick. Mae Simon was addicted to other people’s problems. I thought of the sign in the kitchen.
Free Education for Everyone!
Mae Simon probably called 1-800 numbers all day, hoping her complaints would get her something for free. She probably wrote notes to her neighbors about their cars being parked incorrectly. Mae Simon had an opinion about everything. And in the meantime she couldn’t figure out how to put on a pair of pants.

If I saw a glint of good in Mae Simon’s fogged-over eyes in that moment, I dismissed it as a play of light.

“Do you believe me, Kitty?” she asked again. “Please answer.” She reached for my hands and I moved them away. The curry air began to feel even heavier. It had seeped into everything I was wearing. It had seeped into my hair and my skin and it was all over my bag.

“I don’t know,” I said.

The look on her face: you would have thought a volcano was erupting. You would have thought she was seeing the ocean for the first time in her life.

“Do you remember that night?”

“I don’t remember anything like what you’re describing.”

We looked at the picture of us. She took it off the table. “The real reason I took this picture? Is because this is the guy.”

She pointed to one of the figures in the background. There was the guy—most of him anyway. The top of his head was out of the frame. His face wasn’t visible. He was turned away from the camera. There was only a thick head of blond hair; it looked like sheep’s wool. And it looked like youthful hair. Was he young? How young? He wore a blue blazer, dark khaki pants, brown dress shoes: typical Upper East Side. It could have been anyone.

It wasn’t that I thought Mae Simon was lying. I thought some version of her story must be true. It pained me to think how much, and in that moment I wouldn’t let myself go there. I told myself she was exaggerating. Because my mother didn’t have affairs; she was very opposed to them. She would have done anything to stay in her marriage. And even if I was wrong about that, there was one thing I knew for sure: my mother never would have left me in the bathroom like that. She never would have done that to me. That I knew. Without question. Without a doubt. I was 100 percent sure about that.

Why didn’t I ask Mae who he was? This was the only question a person in my position could have possibly asked. In my recollection of this moment now, the peanut butter bunny rose up through me with a violent acid burn before, and not after, she answered the question I had not asked.

“His name was William Stockton.”

32

D
enial, I have learned, is not the act of lying to yourself. Denial is not an act, it’s a state. It’s the state of not knowing you are a liar.

I was fixated on a certain picture of my life, and that picture was reflected on the surface of everything I saw.

We do not choose to be blind, and when we are blind, we don’t know that. We see as much as we can bear to see, and we assume that’s all there is.

•

What I saw was that my parents had been happy. If my mother had had a drunk kiss with some guy at a party one night, that was a forgivable mistake. I knew the guy wasn’t William. It couldn’t be. William was too moral, too Catholic. He was too kind. He was too polite. Also, smaller, he’d never smoked a cigarette in his life; you could tell that was true just by looking at the perfectly smooth skin on his face.

What I saw was that I loved William.

What I saw was that I needed him.

I needed his sturdy presence, I needed the way he adored me. A small, loathsome voice inside my head also knew there were logistics involved. When I had the baby, I would have what I always wanted. I would also have $10 million. There was nothing to do but wait.

•

I called Dan. We met at the park in Fort Greene and sat on a bench and he held me as I cried and cried, but I couldn’t bring myself to tell him. The great thing about Dan, and the reason I had called him, was that I knew he wouldn’t ask.

I told him as much as I could bear to give away at the time. An old nanny. With information that was fucking insane and very upsetting, and she might be insane, too—she saved cats and lived in a hippie commune that was maybe a cult, led by a man named Philip. And why did I come here, why did I come here, Brooklyn was horrible, I was never leaving Manhattan again. And my shop was gone and I hated church, and my mother, my fucking mother, had ruined everything.

“Also,” I said, snotty and bleary-eyed, “I’m pregnant.”

“You are? That’s great.”

“I knooooow,” I cried.

We talked for a long time about my mother. This was a convenient place to put everything. I was angry, scared, hurt. I felt abandoned, alone. And I felt betrayed. I felt really fucking betrayed.

Dan listened. When I think back to this day now, I can’t remember much of what he said, and I think that’s because he barely said anything. He just let me talk.

I do remember that at some point, when I was all cried out, he said, “Why don’t we take a walk?”

We walked to the center of the park, which was on a hill, and sat at the top of a big staircase overlooking Manhattan. We were quiet for a while. Of course I was thinking about what Mae Simon had told me and what I would do, but I thought about that less than I imagined someone in my situation would. Because I already knew what I was going to do. I wasn’t going to do anything, not yet. There was not enough information. Mae Simon was not a reliable source. A misunderstanding—this had to be a series of misunderstandings.

I remember thinking, as I sat there with Dan in Brooklyn and looked at my city, that there were so many ways to live a life. I could be a masseuse, for example, or live in a commune, or buy property somewhere around this park. The life I lived seemed small, one-tracked. But when I thought about what I would change, there was nothing. I had the life that everyone wanted. My life was good. I didn’t need to change my life because my life was really, really good.

I remember the orange sun on Dan’s face when he said, “Dusk is my favorite time of day.”

This seemed so simple. It seemed too simple. I remember how quickly my next thought flashed and burned: I was missing something. There was something I was missing. And that’s when I said, “I should get back.”

“Okay,” Dan said. “Can I walk you to the train?”

“How about a cab.”

“Sure,” he said.

We walked down the stairs. He would take me to Atlantic Terminal, where there would be cabs. But then a cab drove by. Dan said, “Wow, this never happens here,” and flagged it down. He opened the door. “I’ll see you on Sunday.” He hugged me. Meaningfully, tenderly. My response was to stand there like I was dead. I didn’t hug him back. I didn’t say thank you. In the cold voice my mother reserved for her assistants, I heard myself say, “See you on Sunday.”

33

I
moved around like I was caught in a thick and viscous gel. I was tired all the time. I wasn’t sleeping. I was overwhelmed by the thought of sleep and by the thought of being awake. I hated it when William came home. I hated it when he left in the morning and I was alone with my thoughts again. I was so tired that I became a little delusional. I thought my phone was ringing when it wasn’t. I thought I’d put toast in the toaster. I would run to the kitchen, expecting to find it burning, but there was nothing there. Just sparkling clean countertops and bright pink roses, huddled together in the vase, and me, alone, falling apart.