She went out to the garage, got into the car, remembered her cell phone, clattered back into the house, returned to the car, remembered her umbrella, made it back to the house in time to answer the ringing phone in the kitchen. It was her mother in North Carolina.
“Hi, Mom, look, I’ll have to call you later. I’m running out the door.”
“You sound tense,” her mother said. “Where are you going?”
“To a party for Claire’s book.”
“In the city?”
“Yes. And I’m late.”
“I read her book,” her mother said. “Have you?”
“Not yet.”
“Well. You might want to.”
“I will, one of these days,” Alison said, consciously ignoring her mother’s insinuating tone. Then the children were on her. Six-year-old Annie dissolved in tears, and Dolores had to peel Noah off Alison’s legs like starfish from a rock. Alison made it out to the car again, calling, “I’ll be home soon!” and madly blowing kisses, and realized when she turned on the engine that she didn’t have a bottle of water, which was annoying, because you never knew how long it would take to get into the city, but fuck it. There was no way she could go inside again. Halfway down the driveway she saw Annie and Noah in the front window, frantically waving at her and jumping up and down. Alison pressed the button to roll down her window and waved back. As she pulled the car into the street she could see Noah’s cheek mashed up against the glass, his hand outstretched, his small form resigned and motionless as he watched her drive away.
EAST END AVENUE was quiet and damp in the shadows of early evening. Several blocks over, traffic swished and rumbled, but here Alison was the only one on the street. After easily finding a parking spot—just in time for the changing of the guard from metered to free, a rare lucky break—she locked the car doors and pulled her coat tightly around her. It wasn’t raining now, but the air was chilly; bare trees creaked in the sharp wind like old bedsprings. The avenue, the buildings, even the cars parked along the street, were washed in dull tones. Early March—not yet spring, though not still winter. A purgatorial season, Alison thought, when the manufactured cheer of the holidays has worn off, and desolation feels palpable. Or maybe just to her. She wasn’t sure, and had so little confidence anymore, in ascribing opinions to other adults. She seemed to have lost the ability to gauge what they might be feeling and thinking. (Children were a different story; she had developed an uncanny ability to decipher their moods—even those of the ones that weren’t hers.) She wondered if such an ability, which she used to pride herself on, was a social skill you could lose without practice.
The doorman, dressed in a navy blue uniform and standing just inside the small vestibule leading to the lobby, inclined his head and said, “Good evening, miss,” as Alison approached. “Miss”—she liked that.
“Apartment five-twelve?” she asked, waving the invitation.
Holding the door open, he ushered her in. “Elevator straight ahead.”
“Thank you.” She nodded, thinking, Oh yes, it’s like this; it’s this easy, and walked through the gleaming, harlequin-tiled lobby, past marble columns and inset mirrors, glancing at her reflection as she passed. Her hair was windblown; she was wearing last year’s coat—or did she buy it two years ago? It hardly mattered—the cut was conservative, tasteful, unexceptional, made to last for years without drawing undue attention. Under the coat she wore the loose black pants and a heather gray ribbed turtleneck she’d bought at the Bendel’s end-of-season sale on a rare foray into the city a few weeks earlier. At home, in front of the mirror in the bedroom, she had toyed with a scarf, a Christmas gift from her mother in the luminous shades of a medieval stained-glass window, but ultimately decided against it: too … suburban. She’d tucked it back in the drawer.
When Alison had lived in the city and worked as a magazine editor, she’d observed the fashion editors for ideas about what to wear. She’d never been particularly creative herself, but their example wasn’t hard to emulate: a wardrobe of black basics, with several fresh pieces mixed in each season to keep it current. A short pleated plaid skirt, a plum-colored poncho, round-toed satin shoes. But now that she no longer knew which trends to follow, even these small flourishes were risky. And besides, the person she’d become had little use for them. When was the last time she’d worn a short pleated skirt or satin shoes? Now she dressed in clothes that didn’t gap or expose too much, that absorbed mess and fuss and a child’s handprints, that could as easily be worn at a playdate as at a meeting of the planning committee of the preschool fund-raiser. After they’d moved to the suburbs she’d added a little color to her wardrobe so she wouldn’t come off as too “New York”—unfriendly, severe—but she balked at the bright costumes some women wore, holiday-themed sweaters and socks, matching headbands. These women scared her as much as the trendiest New Yorkers did, at the opposite end of the spectrum—possibly more. She was less afraid of being judged by them than she was of becoming them. She didn’t know how that might happen, but she feared it could be as simple as prolonged exposure, a wearing down of discernment and a fun house– mirror questioning of her own judgment. It was happening already, in so many ways. Here she was, at the threshold of this party, doubting the drab cut of her coat, her risk-averse turtleneck, whether she had a right to be there at all.
As the button flashed and the elevator doors finally opened—it had taken forever; she might as well have walked up the stairs—Alison heard the clickclickclick of high heels on the tile floor of the lobby. She turned to see a woman striding toward her, her flapping coat exposing a lime green lining. “Hold it!” the woman commanded.
Alison stepped into the elevator and pushed the door open button. The clicking sped up, and then, in a staccato clatter, the woman was inside the elevator, too. “Thank you,” she said without looking at Alison, one polished fingernail poised over the panel of small circles designating the floors. She paused over 5, and then, seeing that it was lighted, dropped her hand. Out of the corner of her eye, Alison watched the woman compose herself. Like a preening bird, she made fine adjustments: she touched the back of her head, unfastened the buttons of her quilted silk jacket. She slipped a finger into the waistband of her skirt and smoothed it. Alison observed all of this with a benign curiosity. So this is how a woman prepares for a party, she thought; these are the small modulations that give her shape and identity.
Since she was a child, Alison had made these kinds of minute assessments of other females, searching for clues that would show her how to act, how to carry herself, how to pull off being a woman. Her own mother was uninterested in social niceties; when Alison was growing up her mother wore paint-spattered T-shirts for days in a row and tied her hair back with rubber bands. She went barefoot all summer and wore sneakers when it got cool. It was almost worse that she was effortlessly beautiful; she had no tricks or techniques to pass along to a shy and insecure daughter. In fact, it puzzled her that Alison was interested in learning those things she so assiduously avoided. “Why do you buy these trashy rags?” she’d ask, pausing over a stack of Seventeens and Glamours on the floor of Alison’s bedroom. “They perpetuate such absurd stereotypes.”
“I like them,” Alison would say, snatching the magazines from under her mother’s inquisitive gaze. “There’s a lot of information—”
“About the crap they want you to buy.”
“Not only that,” Alison would say, without the tools or the fortitude to make a reasoned defense. Her mother was right, but it wasn’t the point. However unrealistic or unattainable, the paint-by-numbers makeup guides and ugly-duckling before-and-afters gave Alison a sense of possibility. They made her feel that she might one day transform herself into the kind of woman she dreamed of being—confident, savvy, sure.
How ironic, she thought now, fleetingly, as the elevator ground to a hesitant stop at the fifth floor before it settled into the right notch and its doors lurched open, that for a while, when she lived in New York,
she actually was that woman—or a reasonable imitation—and now she was feeling as vulnerable and insecure as she had back in high school. It takes so little to strip the gears, she thought, to find yourself pedaling in place when you thought you were moving forward.
“Are you a friend of Colm’s?” the peacock said suddenly, turning around as they stepped out into the hall.
Colms. Colm. Alison panicked for a moment; the word sounded made up, like the name of a Star Trek alien. Oh, yes, Colm—the name on the invitation, Colm Maynard; it was his apartment. “No,” she said. “I’m an old friend of Claire’s.”
“From Bluestone?”
Alison nodded.
The peacock narrowed her eyes and gave Alison a once-over. “Fascinating.”
Even from halfway down the hall, the buzz of the party was audible, with an occasional shriek of laughter rising above the din. Pushing open the door to 512, the peacock exclaimed, “Darling!” in the general vicinity of a cluster of twentysomething publishing types, throwing up her hands and disappearing into the crowd.
In the long entry corridor, people were juggling drinks and business cards. They barely acknowledged Alison muttering “Excuse me—pardon—excuse me” as she nudged past, inching her way into a large, dimly lit room. Stepping back against the beige linen-covered wall, she looked around. The apartment was enormous, rooms leading into other rooms, all of which seemed to be filled with people. She could see a bar at the far end of the living room, set against the panoramic backdrop of the East River, with a young man in a starched white shirt with rolled-up sleeves mixing drinks. Several fresh-faced women—moonlighting college students, Alison suspected—were circulating trays of teeny-tiny brightly colored hors d’oeuvres. The crowd was dense and animated, densely animated; for a moment Alison saw it as one breathing organism. She shook her head, dispelling the illusion. That was an old trick from childhood, a way to transform an intimidating situation into something remote and featureless that she could observe from a distance.
Claire’s hardcovers were piled in stacks on tables around the room. The cover, hot pink with white letters, featured a slightly blurry photo of a martini glass, tipping sideways, splashing droplets of blue liquid around the spine and on the back. This wraparound style was, Alison knew, the signature of Rick Mann, a graphic designer whose book jackets were everywhere this season. Sidling over to a table, she flipped the book open to see the author photo. Claire was half in shadow, her molten hair as timelessly sculpted as an Irving Penn landscape, her expression a pensive gaze into the middle distance. The photographer, Astrid Encarte, was another trendy name. Evidently the publisher had spared no expense.
Turning the book over, Alison skimmed the names on the back cover—a roster of young, self-consciously renegade authors delivering a predictable staccato of lush adjectives and arcane phrasings— “Nebulously brilliant wanderings of an incandescent mind over the pitted minefield of an American childhood,” one said. Another exclaimed simply, “Wow. Yes. Hello!”
Across the room, Claire was holding court. Wearing a sheer lace dress over a spaghetti-strapped black sheath that accentuated her toned biceps, the toes of her pointy green heels poking out from under the hem like the snouts of baby crocodiles, she bent forward with the flat of her hand across her stomach, her other hand flapping theatrically in the air. “Oh, behave!” she exclaimed. The man who’d provoked this admonishment whispered in her ear, and she looked up at him flirtatiously, in that flagrant way that is only possible with a gay man, and said, “Trevor, you are terrible.”
Despite their long history, Alison was hesitant about approaching her. Several months ago she had extended an olive branch by inviting Claire and Ben to dinner in Rockwell, but Claire remained as distant as ever. It occurred to Alison that their falling-out was somehow bigger than she’d realized; it seemed unlikely that a trivial magazine assignment alone could have ruptured a lifelong friendship. But Alison was afraid to ask.
For years, growing up, the two of them had spent much of their time together exploring provocative questions and ambivalent answers—about the world, about other people, about themselves. But the better you get to know another person, the more you risk with each revelation. More than once, as teenagers, when Claire was passing along gossip about somebody else, Alison wondered if all this time spent together might be insurance against Claire’s hating her someday. At the time, Alison didn’t know why she even imagined it—she just had the feeling, deep down in some barely acknowledged place, that Claire’s friendship might be provisional.
Why are you so distant? Sometimes, Alison thought, you don’t ask the obvious question because you don’t want to know the answer. And it’s not only that she might not tell you—it’s that the truth is layered and complex; it is no single thing. Perhaps she does believe, as Claire had said, that you don’t have much in common anymore; she doesn’t want to intrude in your busy life; your children are so present and take up so much of your energy. But what she means by saying that you don’t have much in common is that you are inconvenient to get to and clueless about the latest movies, and you hold your child over your head to sniff his diaper. She means that she is ambivalent about having children, and the simultaneous mundanity and chaos of your life repels her. She finds your daughter’s constant questions tiresome; she is sick of those dinners in the city when you become skittish and distracted around ten-thirty and start looking at your watch because you have to get home for the babysitter’s midnight curfew. The truth is, she can sense your impatience with the details of her life, too—her quest to find the best dim sum in Chinatown, her exhaustion from jetting off to Amsterdam for the weekend, her analysis of the latest off-Broadway play. What good did it do to articulate the ambivalence? In therapy, maybe a lot. In real life Alison wasn’t sure.
Claire had a glamorous future to look forward to, at least for the next few months, and she also had an intriguing, and now very public, past. Alison was just an anonymous suburban housewife who’d grown up in a small southern town—nothing special about that.
It wasn’t that Alison wanted to be Claire—she didn’t. But she admired her tenacity and clarity and single-mindedness, particularly compared with her own indecisiveness. Alison had been living for other people for so long that she could barely identify what she wanted for herself anymore. She’d find herself paralyzed with indecision in the strangest places—the grocery store, for instance, where she roamed the aisles with a rising panic, even as she clutched a list in her hand: What would her kids eat? What would her husband want? She rarely asked herself what she wanted. It seemed irrelevant.
In front of Alison, now, was the drinks table. Martini glasses stood in rows like cartoon soldiers; on the other side of the table stood the second unit, ordinary wineglasses for the spoilers who weren’t in the spirit. Alison wasn’t at all sure that she was in the spirit, and she’d never really liked martinis; but to ask for a chardonnay or, worse, a club soda, seemed cowardly. She watched as the bartender poured a midrange Swedish vodka, in its distinctive ink blue bottle, into a large shaker of ice. He added Curaçao and shook it, then strained the liquid into a martini glass and added a twist of lemon peel.
“One of those, please,” she said, and the student-bartender, more charming than experienced, flashed her a grin and sloshed blue-tinted alcohol all over the tablecloth before handing her the sticky glass. She took a sip. The martini tasted lemony, with a medicinal aftertaste, mouthwash fresh. The next sip was sweet; the taste of the Curaçao melted away, overwhelmed by the alcohol. She was beginning to like it.
Emboldened now, holding her glass out like a calling card, Alison made her way over to a group of strangers and introduced herself.
Chapter Two
Where is Charlie? Claire scanned the room for a glimpse of his sandy hair and broad shoulders, but no one remotely resembled him, not even from the back. Out of the corner of her eye she’d seen Alison wandering alone through the crowd a few minutes earlier, but that didn’t necessa
rily mean Charlie wasn’t there. Maybe he’d been waylaid in the foyer.
That morning he had called Claire from work. “It’s your big night,” he said. “Excited?”
“A little nervous. I’m glad you’re coming.”
“I want to. I’m going to do everything I can.”
“What do you mean?” she said, struggling to keep the irritation out of her voice. “This is important to me. Why can’t you just say you’ll come?”
He sighed. “It’s complicated. The kids, Alison … I’ll try. I’m just not a hundred percent sure.”
“But I’ll be really disappointed.” She knew she sounded petulant, but she didn’t care.
“Me, too.”
“It won’t be any fun without you.”
“Oh, come on, Claire—you’re going to have a great time, whether I’m there or not.”
“No, I won’t,” she said stubbornly.
“Claire,” he said. “I do want to come. I want to be there for you. But I’m no good at hiding my feelings; you know that better than anyone. With Alison there, and Ben … Frankly, it seems dangerous.”
“Don’t be so dramatic, Charlie. It’s a big party, with lots of people.”
“But I won’t be able to keep my eyes off you.”
“That’s okay; I’m supposed to be the center of attention.”
“Not to mention my hands.”
She laughed. “Stop. Promise you’ll come.”
He had promised, but she wasn’t sure she believed him. This would be the first time the four of them would be in a room together since that night out in Rockwell, three months ago. Once or twice in the past few months Ben had remarked that they hadn’t seen much of Alison and Charlie; but everyone was busy, and it didn’t seem particularly strange. The falling-out with Alison, Claire had to admit, made it easier to do what they were doing.
“Claire, this guy’s important,” her publicist, Jami with an i, said sotto voce, startling Claire out of her musings. Jami motioned toward a man with wolfman sideburns who was bearing down on them, snagging a martini from a waiter without breaking his stride. “Jim Oliver. He’s a reviewer for People.”