“She shouldn’t care,” Linda said. “Nobody knows better than her what he’s like. Did you ever hear the story of when they first got Brutus? Jack didn’t want to neuter him. That says it all. One day Sherry looked up and Brutus had his leg lifted and was marking all down the hallway on this wallpaper that it had taken her months to find. She took the dog to the vet that afternoon, and Jack went crazy. I think that was one of the times she left him. The mystery is why she came back. Although I suppose it’s not really a mystery. Two children and all that.”
The Lessmans had no children. “It’s a big house for just two people,” someone had said years ago at the Christmas party, the constant refrain of those whose children were grown and gone, and Linda looked at Harold and he looked back at her and they both smiled and said, “It certainly is.” Charlie liked to posit that the Lessmans were one of those couples of restrained dress and manner who had a dungeon in their basement. Maybe he was right. Or maybe they were just what they seemed to be.
“You don’t think he hit her?” Nora asked Linda.
“Amazingly, no. His abuse was always verbal until the encounter with Ricky. He’s the kind who abuses down the social ladder. Cabdrivers, waiters. He’s relatively civil to surgeons, senior partners, and CEOs. Have you ever gone to dinner with them? It’s a nightmare. One substandard piece of fish and it’s World War Three. I’ve put up with it for years, but not anymore. This was it for me. I told Harold, I’m done. Sherry, yes. Jack, never again.”
“You are tough,” Nora said.
“What? Oh, it’s mainly professional posturing. Not for this, though. I mean it. Really, it’s unforgivable, what he did.”
Nora had to agree. So did all the people who worked on the block. Grace, the Fisks’ housekeeper, had quit. She had told Sherry that it was because she was used to being able to work alone in the house, both Sherry and Jack at work, and that having Mr. Fisk around all day when he wasn’t at the country house, criticizing the way she cleaned the steam shower and telling her Mop & Glo was dulling the floors, was making her crazy. And Brutus had growled at her twice. George had told Charlie that Brutus had been placed on medication to combat his anxiety about the atmosphere at home.
“You think they’ll be able to find another housekeeper?” Nora had asked Charity.
“For sure and certain,” Charity said. “People always needing jobs.”
Grace had begun to get angry months ago, when Sherry asked her not to take a get-well card from house to house for the other housekeepers to sign for Ricky. “We got free speech like everybody,” Grace told Charity.
“Please don’t talk to reporters,” Nora had said at the time, and Charity made her explosive dismissive sound, although Nora was not sure whether it was aimed at reporters or her request. They had had a terrible time when the Rizzoli grandchildren had been interviewed on their way down the block from the school bus. Their sitter had stopped to talk to Grace, and so the magazine writer James had mentioned to Nora had had a few minutes to pretend to be merely a friendly passerby with a cellphone set to record in his hand.
“When I had strep throat, Ricky gave me honey candies and they made my throat feel better,” the little girl apparently said.
“My mom says Mr. Fisk needs to learn to get his temper under control,” said the boy. “She says let this be a lesson to me to use my words and not my hands.”
So Sherry had also stopped speaking to the Rizzolis. She had suggested to the wife that her children were inadequately supervised, and the Rizzoli wife had said that it was clear the person in need of supervision was Jack Fisk. And so on and so forth. It was the first time anyone could remember the block erupting in this kind of discord. It had always protected its own, the facing houses seeming to agree, cornice to cornice, window to window, that intimacy and privacy could exist together. For years, the elder Mrs. Rizzoli had attended both the Fenstermacher holiday party and the barbecue as drunk as a woman could be and still remain upright, and no one had said a word. Nor had they taken notice, except covertly, when she disappeared for several months and came back for a year of sparkling water with lime, followed by the addition of the occasional glass of wine, followed by the holiday party, at which she’d fallen into the tree, and then another stint away. Because of her senior status on the bench, Linda was able to take off the entire month of August and move to their beach house, Harold driving out late on Thursdays, and no one mentioned that Harold spent many weekday nights away from their house on the block, which could be because he had a sofa bed in his office (unlikely) or stayed with his sister at her townhouse in the Village (perhaps). Or it could be that while August was a time for Linda to play tennis with her friends and have her nieces come and stay, it was a time for Harold to spend the night with his girlfriend, who, in the way of girlfriends everywhere, would hope that August would turn into December, girlfriend into second wife.
Or maybe it wasn’t girlfriends at all. Maybe it was boyfriends. All of it was none of their business. Nora thought that her friends who lived elsewhere felt free to gossip about their neighbors because they didn’t know them, and about their friends because they knew them too well. But the people who lived on the block existed in some weird nether region between the two, and that made all of them protective of one another. They had been able to turn aside from one another’s secrets and setbacks until Jack Fisk had taken that three iron from his car trunk.
“I hate to say this,” Linda Lessman had told her, “but I think we need to hire somebody else to do things around the house.”
James’s friend the magazine writer had written a loathsome piece about the block, suggesting that it was a bastion of white privilege served by people who were frequently mistreated by those for whom they worked. He had asked Charity if the Nolans paid her on the books. “Go away, fool,” Charity said, snapping a finger in his face, “or I’m gonna hit you.” He had seemed to take special pleasure in comparing the holdings of the Museum of Jewelry with Charity’s public-television tote bag and imitation leather jacket. Nora took pleasure in the way Charity had schooled him, and in the fact that what was supposed to be a cover story had merely been two pages near the back of the issue.
“Boy, this guy was really out to get you,” Charlie said, looking up from the magazine.
“I’m sorry, Moneypenny,” James said when the story appeared. “I should have known he was a class-A little pissant.”
“He’s turned into a little pissant already? What was it, a couple of months? Am I the longest romantic relationship you’ve ever had?”
There was silence, and then James said sadly, “I suppose that’s true, but it’s not a fair point. In the beginning they all died.”
“And now?”
“They’re all so young,” he said.
“You could fix that.”
“I suppose that’s true, too.”
When she first woke Nora had one of those moments in which she wasn’t sure where she was. A sharp sliver of silver daylight had broken through closed drapes and maneuvered itself across her face, or maybe she’d maneuvered her face out of the shadows and into the glare as she slept. She rolled over and heard Charlie singing in the bathroom. He was giving it his all. Then she realized she was in a hotel room, and hoped that the walls were solidly built, not just because Charlie was singing so loudly but because they’d had sex the night before, and her headache and the soreness in her thighs made her suspect that both of them had been loud then, too.
Charlie had always had a thing about hotels, maybe because he’d lost his virginity in a Holiday Inn on prom night his junior year. Nora remembered taking the twins to college that first time and a hotel room in Boston, where she and Charlie had had frantic sex while both of them wept drunkenly. They’d even broken a lamp. She looked at the bedside tables. Both lamps were intact. That she would have remembered, although she was powerfully hungover. Nora had a thing about hotels,
too, but it was entirely different from her husband’s. Sometimes she had a momentary fantasy of never checking out, of living forever in a state of constant impermanence, no address, no lightbulbs or shampoo to buy, no shopping, chopping, or cooking for breakfast. French-press coffee and a vegetable omelet on a tray with butter in little curls. Then she packed up and went home.
Asheville, North Carolina, was famous for a large resort built around what had at one time been the largest private house in America, before everybody and his brother was trying to build the largest private house in America. When they first arrived, Charlie went out onto the terrace and spread his arms wide. “God’s. Own. Country,” he said, inhaling audibly. “For what it is, it’s nice,” Bebe had said dismissively when Nora said she was spending a weekend there. It was nice, with a view of the mountains and an enormous bed with high-thread-count linens. The fact that she could tell this about the sheets made Nora feel ridiculous.
“Good last night, right?” said Charlie, coming out of the bathroom in a towel, and Nora was not sure if he meant the food, the wine, or the sex. Probably all three. The minibar had Advil, thank God.
The day before, after Charlie had left to play golf with the president of a local bank who had been a fraternity brother, she did a long trail run, had a massage and a facial, and sat out on that terrace, drinking an eleven-dollar smoothie and reading a fashion magazine full of clothes no one she knew would ever wear. She called Jenny to tell her that her newest book, Witches and Wise Women, was mentioned in one of the fashion magazines.
“Why are you reading that?” Jenny said, and Nora explained where they were.
“I’m exhausted by Charlie’s midlife crisis,” she said, sipping her smoothie, but Jenny was oddly unsympathetic.
“I’d like to see the midlife crisis get more respect,” she said. “Everyone talks reverentially about terminal illness or bipolar syndrome. Why do we all blow off the midlife crisis as nothing but red convertibles and hair plugs? It’s a perfectly reasonable response to increased life expectancy and the demands of modern life.”
“Is this your next book?” Nora said. “Because you sound like it’s your next book. It would just work better for me if it wasn’t a bad mood twenty-four/seven and the determination that I should trade New York for a picture window on a golf course.”
“Well, that’s not going to happen,” Jenny said. The two of them had decided years ago that even a move to Brooklyn on one of their parts would be a geographic betrayal. At one point Emory University had tried to lure Jenny to Atlanta with more money and a teaching schedule that basically consisted of not teaching at all. The provost had taken Jenny to what she said was a wonderful restaurant, but when she was invited back for a tour of the campus and another dinner, this time with the president, Jenny decided it would be dishonest to go any further.
“You’re not even considering it?” Nora had said.
“You’re stuck with me, babe,” Jenny replied.
After Nora hung up the phone, a woman in a white uniform came to the door of the hotel room with a wheeled cart of supplies and gave Nora a pedicure on the terrace while she started in on a mystery novel. She felt totally content, although she would not tell Charlie that, since he would think it was yet another sign that they should move here, or someplace like it. After her pedicure she sat there alone. When she had first met Charlie, part of the appeal had been that she found New York such a hard place to be by herself. In the ensuing years Nora had discovered that by herself was a condition she really liked.
In the afternoon they went out to lunch at the kind of first-rate pretentious little bistro that garnished the food with flowers. “What are these again?” Charlie asked.
“Nasturtiums,” Nora said. “I’m so glad they stopped doing this in New York.”
“You’re from New York?” the massage therapist at the spa had asked. “I love New York.”
“Are you from Asheville originally?” Nora asked.
“Buffalo,” the woman said, shivering slightly. “I don’t miss the snow.”
“But now you get it here, too, don’t you?”
“It’s true. This winter we had two inches one day, and they had no clue how to handle it. But the same day my mother said they had a foot in Buffalo. So, no contest, right?”
They had dinner in the main dining room, and Charlie ordered a bottle of wine so good that Nora knew the dinner bill would be larger than the bill for the room. They chatted determinedly, but they avoided the obvious oil slicks: Bob Harris, Jack Fisk, the estimated value of their house, the lack of parking on the block, the persistent drip of their kitchen sink. Nora knew that they were there that weekend to convince her that a life elsewhere would be wonderful, but Charlie didn’t even mention how pleasant the weather had been that day. She told him about Oliver and Lizzie. He told her about the fraternity brother and his wife. When they were first married they had vowed they would never be one of those married couples who sat silently at dinner because they’d run out of things to say. They were determined that they would never run out of things to say. So they repeated themselves a lot.
A hotel car drove them a half hour outside town for a house tour. Several of the houses on the tour appeared to have been designed to give the resort a run for its money in the square-footage sweepstakes. One kitchen had three sinks, two refrigerators, a cooktop in the center island, an eight-burner stove, a wall oven, and two microwaves. “The caterers must love this place,” Nora said.
“Don’t be cynical,” Charlie said.
“I’m a New Yorker,” said Nora. “Cynicism is my religion.”
“I just love New York,” said the tour guide, who had an accent so thick the consonants appeared to be chewy nuggets in the butterscotch pudding of her voice. “Is that where you all are from?”
“Nobody’s really from there…Carolyn,” Charlie said. Charlie always tried to personalize things, with the rental-car clerk, the bagger at the grocery story. If a person wore a name tag, Charlie would use the first name, although it had become less offhanded and neighborly now that his vision was shot and he had to take that telltale minute to narrow his eyes and parse the letters. “Everybody in New York is really from somewhere else.” And there was the problem in a nutshell. Nora had been a New Yorker from the very first usurious security/first-month/last-month check on that ratty apartment. When she thought of the gifts she had given her children, one of them was that for the rest of their lives, when a form said “Place of birth,” they could write “New York City.”
There were three types of people in New York: people like Nora, who had found their home there; people who talked about how much they hated it and would always live and eventually die there; and people who always had one foot over the border, to Scarsdale or Roslyn or Boca Raton. Once upon a time those last had been driven out by muggings and cockroaches. Now they left because of five-figure monthly rents, three-figure restaurant lunches, and the covert realization that if you weren’t a big winner, you were a loser. Nora suspected her husband had unconsciously consigned himself to the last camp.
All the qualities that made people love Charlie—“Charlie Nolan, the best,” so many of them said—were the same ones that would ensure that he was never a major player. So he blamed the block, the firm, the city. If only they were somewhere else, he would be someone else.
And he was right. It was hard to be important in New York. Sometimes Nora felt guilty because she knew he would have been aces elsewhere, the president of a small bank in a city in North Carolina chairing the United Way campaign, the mayor of a town of fifty thousand people who would always respond to citizen calls. Once she’d suggested that he might want to try something else, perhaps become a teacher or a coach. “Yeah, that’ll pay the maintenance on this place,” he said, but Nora had been able to tell that he was insulted. You could argue they’d lost their way, in their choices, their work, their m
arriage. But the truth was, there wasn’t any way. There was just day after day, small stuff, idle conversation, scheduling. And then after a couple of decades it somehow added up to something, for good or for ill or for both.
On the plane Charlie put his hand over Nora’s and said, “Come on, Bun. They have art galleries and chamber music and a marathon you could run. I could golf year-round. Aren’t you tired of all the craziness?”
“All what craziness?” Nora said. “The only craziness is restaurant reservations.”
“Things on the block are crazy. You can cut the atmosphere with a knife some mornings.” Nora had to admit that this was true. People who had once easily met and chatted on the street now passed with stiff, perfunctory greetings, or even crossed to the other side.
“There’s a financial outfit in Charlotte that has an office there,” Charlie added. “They’d hire me in a minute.”
Nora settled back in her seat and closed her eyes.
“Just think about it,” Charlie said as the plane lifted off, and then again as they came down the escalator to where the scrum of limo drivers gathered, like undertakers in their black suits. NOLLAND, said one sign in capital letters.
“They can’t even spell, these people,” Charlie muttered.
“No whining on the yacht.” That’s what Christine always said when Nora complained about lousy food in first class, or a manicurist who had nicked her cuticle, or a luxury hotel. “Spotty wireless and a wait for room service? Poor baby,” Christine would say. Success had not spoiled her.
Both of them leaned back against the headrests in the SUV. “Do you have a preferred route, sir?” said the driver.
“Take the tunnel,” Charlie said, as Nora said, “Take the bridge.”
Nora laughed. Charlie didn’t. “It’ll be a nightmare either way,” he said.