“Anna was trying to talk me into a green thing,” Magda said. “Chiffon, with sequins. Hideous. There's nothing here, tomorrow I will have to go to New York.”
“Yes, New York is full of dresses,” Ben's mother said. “Oh, look, here he comes.”
Ben's father's car was gliding up the driveway. Leaf shadows fell over its sleek maroon flanks, and Ben felt the tick in his belly. Soon he'd be alone again with his parents.
“Take the tomatoes,” Grandpa said. He picked up a brown paper bag, shook it open with a quick competent snap of his wrist. Grandpa always knew what he was doing. He was kinder than Magda but, like Magda, he could give himself whatever he needed. He loved his tomatoes, his house. He put the tomatoes into the bag, another and another and another. There was his strong brown hand, there was the fat fullness of the tomato he loved. Ben felt the rising sensation again, the shifting at his crotch, and knew he could slip over into the wrong condition, the lost place. He rescued himself by running out to meet his father's car.
Ben's father had parked and was getting out. He brought his stern self-sacrifice with him, his endless virtue. Ben ran to him and entered his father's goodness, the rigor and the daily work of him. For a moment Ben and his father were the same person. Then his father said, “Hi, pal, how goes it?” and the sound of his voice was enough to separate them. Ben's father lived a life of expectation. Ben was what he waited for.
“Okay,” Ben said. He paused between the two conditions, the lost and the visible. With a surge of panicky love, he forced himself.
“I practiced my free shots,” he said. “I sank seven out of ten.”
“Good. That's very good.”
His father was smooth-skinned and broad and anxious for happiness. Ben gave whatever he could find.
“I want Grandpa to raise the hoop,” he said. “I want him to raise it all the way.”
“Do you think you're ready?”
“Uh-huh.”
Ben peppered the air around himself with punches. He danced for his mother; for his father he struck the air with his fists. His father had a handsome face, a body nervous and graceful as a boat. His father's eyes measured what they saw, made quick decisions.
“Simmer down, buddy,” his father said, and his voice was so full of delight that Ben punched the air with a new determination, a fiercer mock fury. His father smiled, shed a thin beam of love for the future. He would run for senator. He would drive with a steady hand, be satisfied by food, find mercy in his work.
“Is your mother inside?” he said.
“Uh-huh.”
“Are you both ready to go?”
“Yeah.”
Ben's father touched his shoulder. His hand said that it was time to be calm, to move with precision and modesty. Ben imagined him that way at work, touching the people and the computers and the telephones, bidding them all to help him go forward, to make a sterner world that rewarded the good and annihilated the bad. Ben stopped hitting the air. He walked with his father into the house, where his mother was waiting.
She told his father she was happy to see him. She kissed his mouth, quickly, to be finished with kissing, and took her sunglasses out of her bag.
“Hey there, Todd,” Grandpa said, and he and Ben's father shook hands in the way of men, advertising to one another their harmless intentions and their potency. Magda shook his hand also—she didn't kiss men or women—and Ben could see that she was thinking of jewelry stores and the inside of her purse, that perfection of quiet gold and black. She was lost in the placid contemplation of order. Tomorrow she would go to New York, which was full of dresses.
“We've got to run, honey,” Ben's mother said to his father. “You're late.”
Ben's father shrugged, elaborately, for Grandpa. They were both innocent workers trying to survive in a world of women. But Grandpa refused. He made the noise again, hwrack hwrack hwrack, and kissed Ben's mother, loudly, on the cheek.
“You got your tomatoes?” he asked her.
“Yes,” she told him, and her voice crackled. Magda was the tomatoes' fault; cancer got Mrs. Marshall next door.
“Gimme a squeeze,” Grandpa said to Ben, and Ben gave himself up to Grandpa's big bristling arms. There was his grandfather's perfume, the sweet sharp musk of his breath. Ben was unmade in his grandfather's embrace. He was free to be no one.
Then he was released again, back into the demands of the ordinary day. Magda gave him her dry kiss as she thought about dresses and cancer, the lost safety of other countries. He went with his parents to the car, got into the back seat and watched as his grandfather's house disappeared in the flat, watery shimmer of other houses and potato fields.
“How was it?” Ben's father asked his mother.
“Okay,” she said. “The usual. I wish you wouldn't be late.”
“I do my best.”
“Magda's put on even more weight. She's big as a house.”
“I guess your dad likes a little heft,” Ben's father said.
“Please don't joke about it. Joke about anything else.” Ben's mother took off her sunglasses, wiped them on her skirt, put them on again. She turned to Ben.
“Well, honey,” she said. “We made it. What if we went to P.J.'s for dinner?”
“Sure,” Ben said, and he could tell she was pleased with his own pleasure. The car moved forward through the leaf shade and the patches of sun. His mother was happy again, safe. She hummed something under her breath, a tune that was her gladness set to music.
“I am so relieved,” she told Ben's father, “to be away from that place.”
“You did your duty,” Ben's father said.
“Do you know what they're adding now? A fountain. When you walk in the front door the first thing you're going to see is a plaster dolphin spitting water into a clamshell.”
“Whatever turns you on.”
“It's embarrassing. Who do they think they are, the king and queen of Sheba?”
Ben sat in the back seat with the bag of his grandfather's tomatoes on his lap. He slipped his hand inside the bag. He held a tomato, still warm from the sun, and permitted himself a brief lapse into the other way, the weak silent self who wanted only to be alone, and to sleep.
1987/ The ladies' lunches had been Cassandra's idea. Mary put him off at first, saying always that she had another engagement or a sinus headache or just too much to do around the house. But Cassandra kept calling, with a grand and strangely innocent patience (couldn't he tell he was being put off?), and finally Mary gave in. Yes, fine, she'd drive up to the city and meet Cassandra for lunch. All right, a week from Monday at one-thirty, at an address somewhere in Greenwich Village. No, she felt sure she'd have no trouble finding it.
What else could she do? Cassandra was, really, Mary's best single point of access to Zoe. For some reason, Zoe seemed to trust this person. Zoe had made this person the godmother (her term) of her baby, though of course it hadn't been a real baptism and, of course, Zoe couldn't be persuaded to give the child a real baptism, in church. Mary had complicated feelings about that. On one hand, there was the question of the child's soul. On the other, there was, undeniably, a certain sense of relief at not having to go to Father McCauley at St. Paul's and discuss the particulars of baptizing an illegitimate half-black baby whose father was god knows where and whose mother wanted as godmother a man who might very well have shown up at the christening in a wig and a dress.
On Monday at eleven in the morning Mary stood in her bedroom trying to decide what to wear, and she thought, This is what's happening to me. The thought, in all its clenched simplicity, made her sit down, harder than she'd meant to, on the green silk bench of her dressing table. This is what's happening. Up until then her recent circumstances had existed in her mind as a shifting mass of no discernible shape or dimension, bright and silvery in some places, dark in others, made up of more or less random events: the minute slippage of the copper-colored toupee her lawyer wore when he drew up the divorce papers; a string of amber beads sh
e'd bought for Susan but decided, suddenly, to keep for herself; a cloudy Wednesday morning sky full of promise and warning, as if the two states were intimately related. There had been only small incidents like those, sharp but hardly illuminating, moored to the particulars of cleaning and shopping and her new job, and to the surprisingly intense nightly pleasure she found in going to bed alone. Now, as she tried to dress herself for lunch, she thought with an almost scientific detachment, This is what's happening. I live by myself in a five-bedroom house. My oldest daughter hardly speaks to me. My son loves other men. I'm trying to decide what to wear to lunch with the “godmother” of my younger grandson and I have no idea what to wear because I don't know what kind of place I'm going to and I've never had lunch with a man who wears dresses. She picked up a bottle of nail polish, set it down again, and it occurred to her that Cassandra might, at that moment, be sitting in an apartment somewhere wondering what to wear to lunch with a woman like herself, wealthy and respectable, well-groomed. “I'm not,” Mary said out loud, and was surprised by the sound of her own voice in the empty room. What had she meant by that? She was wealthy and respectable; she was undeniably well-groomed. What, exactly, was she not? She picked up the botde of nail polish again, looked at it as if some kind of clue might be hidden in the pale, glossy beige liquid. I'm not sure, she said to herself.
The navy St. John suit, she decided. And then, abruptly, she started to laugh. This is what's happening, she said to herself, and she decided to think of it as funny. She decided to think of it as funny, and just that suddenly, it was. Lunch with a man who might outdress her. All right, then. The navy St. John suit. The Ferragamo pumps. A simple strand of pearls.
Cassandra had chosen a restaurant on a street called Charles Street, in a part of the city where Mary had never been. As a younger woman Mary had known—had insisted on knowing—only the New York of theaters and hotels, of turreted limestone rising above the calm green dangers of Central Park. Now, in later life, thanks to her children, she'd been to unspeakable sections. She'd passed among beggars and lunatics, ruined a Charles Jourdan flat on a broken beer bottle, walked up flights of dingy, reeking stairs. Once, on her way to visit Zoe, she'd had to step around a turd, human, that lay like stupidity and degradation itself in the exact center of an azure-tiled vestibule. If she'd survived all that, she could survive lunch in yet another unfamiliar part of town, in the sort of restaurant someone like Cassandra would choose. This was happening. It could be funny, if you let it be. If you didn't look at it too hard, or think too far ahead.
Neither Charles Street nor the restaurant, however, proved half as trying as Mary had expected them to be. Charles Street was actually very pretty, shaded by trees, lined with town houses Mary herself could imagine living in, substantial old buildings whose generous windows revealed bits of elaborate moldings, of fluted ceiling medallions and chandeliers. One of the houses was covered in wisteria vines, through which Mary could make out a stone panel engraved with leaves, arabesques, and a weathered face that seemed to advertise one of the harsher virtues, forbearance or strength or adamant virginity. She stood before the face, which was netted in its tangle of coarse brown vines, and felt an odd but not disagreeable sense of familiarity, as if she might have visited this street as a child. The face appeared to be female, though it was hard to tell absolutely, what with the vines and that old-fashioned style of carving in which everyone, men and women alike, looked somehow like self-possessed, slightly overweight young girls.
The restaurant, which stood at the corner and bore its name in discreet gold letters on its window, was the sort of little cafe Mary imagined in Paris: dusky but clean, dark-paneled, with snowy tablecloths that put out more light than did the amber wall sconces. As she paused at the door she knew an unexpected pang of regret: Now this lovely, mysterious street and this charming restaurant would remember her as someone who had business with someone like Cassandra. Someone whose life had gone this far. She told herself she'd fly to Paris; she'd put aside a little money every week.
Cassandra waved to her from a table near the window. Mary was relieved to see he'd chosen men's clothes, just a black turde-neck sweater and jeans. As Cassandra rose and extended his hand Mary was taken all over again by how undistinguished he looked, this thin, jug-eared specimen with patchy reddish hair and small, watery eyes. He might have been an aging salesclerk or waiter, one of the people you hardly noticed because they were neither succeeding nor spectacularly failing. They were just living lives of quiet service.
“Lovely to see you, Mary,” Cassandra said.
“I'm happy to be here,” she answered. She gave him her hand and he squeezed it with more power than she'd expected.
“Please. Sit down.”
“Thank you.”
She sat, and immediately took her napkin from the table and spread it on her lap.
“This is an adorable place,” she added. It was easiest to be gracious. It was easiest to treat this as lunch, just lunch with a friend. If she abandoned courtesy she had no idea what she would say or do.
“It is, isn't it?” Cassandra said. “Very soothing. I come over here sometimes when my nerves can't take another moment of joie de vivre. You can sit by the window with a cup of tea for an hour if you want to.”
“It makes me think of Paris, a little bit,” Mary said.
“Oui. Ca pourrait être un bistro en plein Marais.”
“You speak French?”
“God, that was unspeakably pretentious, wasn't it? Sorry, hon, it's just nerves. I'm not ordinarily a lady who lunches.”
“Do you really speak French?” Mary asked.
“Oh, sure, I don't spend all my time trying out eye shadow. I've picked up French and Spanish and I can get by in German, but then all you can do with that is talk to Germans.”
“Where did you learn your French?”
“In Paris, about a hundred and fifty years ago. I lived there for a while, this old scow has been to any number of ports. Cheesy little studio down by the Beaubourg, believe me, America is not the sole repository of the tacky or the vulgar.”
“My husband and I were always meaning to go to Paris,” Mary said.
“Oh, well, it's beautiful in spots, just like they say, but I don't know. Lately I've let my passport lapse. Travel started to seem . . . slightly pathetic, or something. You went someplace and then you went someplace else and then you went someplace else, and I know it was supposed to be marvelous, but frankly it was starting to make my teeth ache a little. I kept seeing people buying souvenirs and I kept thinking about how they'd turn up at rummage sales in the year 2000, how those Hermes scarves would outlast the people who bought them, and, well, never mind. Suffice to say that these days my idea of travel is going up to Central Park.”
Briefly, Mary lost track of herself. She smoothed the napkin in her lap. Just say what you'd say to anyone, she thought.
“We always meant to travel,” she offered. “But what with the kids and the business and everything—”
“So do it now,” Cassandra said. “Believe me, if I was a stunning divorcee like you, I'd be on the next boat. Though frankly, honey, the men in France are pigs.”
“I'm not thinking much about men these days.”
“Well, whenever you're ready to start thinking about them, skip the French. Trust me.”
“And I'm hardly a stunning divorcee,” Mary said. “I'm a fifty-five-year-old woman and, honestly, I'm a little tired these days. I'm just, well, a little tired.”
“Ridiculous,” Cassandra said. “You're a great beauty, you know you are. You're only now coming into your mystery.”
“That's sweet. But really.”
“Don't but really me. How long's it been since you dumped that bastard? Five years? Honey, it's time for the Widow Stassos to cut loose a little.”
Mary picked up her menu. “Shall we order?” she said. “I'm starving.”
“What you heed,” Cassandra told her, “is a haircut. You need a change. What do
you suppose would happen if you cut it right under your earlobes, just a simple blunt cut, and let it hang loose? No curls, no spray.”
“It's fine like this, really,” Mary answered. “I wouldn't know what to do with it any other way. Mm, chicken salad with papaya. That sounds good.”
“Maybe you should stop coloring it, too. Let it go gray, I'll bet it's a beautiful silver gray.”
“It's fine. Really. Thank you for your interest. Have you talked to Zoe lately?”
“This morning.”
“How is she?”
“She's all right,” Cassandra said. “Today is the day she works until seven, I'm picking Jamal up at kindergarten.”
“Do you . . . Do you spend a lot of time with him?”
“Zoe needs help, it's too much raising a child all alone.”
Mary sipped at her water. She believed she could survive this lunch just as she'd survived a wedding night and three births and a hard marriage and all the inexplicable little hatreds of her children. She could know someone like Cassandra. The peculiarity of all this could not harm her because she had lost her old hopes and she wasn't afraid anymore, not like she used to be. What else could happen? What more could be lost?
“I felt like I was alone when I raised my kids,” Mary said. “My husband was hardly ever there.”
“Well, then, you know.”
“Yes. I know.”
“Jamal is going through a gun thing right now,” Cassandra said. “Suddenly the world is made up of two things, guns and useless objects.”
“I guess that's normal.”
“Oh, sure it is. Aggression, what could be more normal? Zoe doesn't like it, she keeps imagining herself being interviewed after he sprays a shopping mall with bullets, but I tell her it'll pass. A little boy is not Winnie the Pooh, however much you might want him to be.”
“You sound like you've had experience,” Mary said.
“I raised two brothers and a sister. Our mother forgot to come home sometimes, and frankly, I don't blame her. If I was a woman named Erna Butz trying to raise four children alone on no money in Table Grove, Illinois, I'd