“Patron saint of hopeless causes?”
“Exactly. What’s a church for if not lost causes?”
“I feel this way about sports teams,” Denise said. “That the winners don’t need your help.”
Robin nodded. “You know what I mean. But if you live with Brian you start feeling like there’s something wrong with losers. Not that he’ll actually criticize you. He’ll always be very understanding and patient and loving. Brian’s great! Nothing wrong with Brian! It’s just that he’d rather root for a winner. And I’m not really a winner like that. And I don’t really want to be.”
Denise would never have talked about Emile like this. She wouldn’t do it even now.
“See, but you are that kind of winner,” Robin said. “That’s why I frankly sort of saw you as my potential replacement. I saw you as next in line.”
“Nope.”
Robin made her self-consciously delighted sounds. She said, “Hee hee hee!”
“In Brian’s defense,” Denise said, “I don’t think he needs you to be Brooke Astor. I think he’d settle for bourgeois.”
“I can live with being bourgeois,” Robin said. “A house like this is what I want. I love that your kitchen table is half a Ping-Pong table.”
“It’s yours for twenty bucks.”
“Brian’s wonderful. He’s the person I wanted to spend my life with, he’s the father of my kids. I’m the problem. I’m the one who’s not getting with the program. I’m the one who’s going to confirmation class. Listen, do you have a jacket? I’m freezing.”
The low candles were spilling wax in the October draft. Denise fetched her favorite jean jacket, a discontinued Levi’s product with a woolen lining, and noticed how large it looked on Robin’s smaller arms, how it engulfed her thinner shoulders, like a letter jacket on a ball-player’s girlfriend.
The next day, wearing the jacket herself, she found it softer and lighter than she remembered. She pulled on the collar and hugged herself with it.
No matter how hard she worked that fall, she had more free time and a more flexible schedule than she’d had in many years. She began to drop by the Project with food from her kitchen. She went over to Brian and Robin’s house on Panama Street, found Brian away, and stayed for an evening. A few nights later, when Brian came home and found her baking madeleines with the girls, he acted as if he’d seen her in his kitchen a hundred times.
She had a lifetime of practice at arriving late in a family of four and being loved by all. Her next conquest on Panama Street was Sinéad, the serious reader, the little fashion plate. Denise took her shopping on Saturdays. She bought her costume jewelry, an antique Tuscan jewelry case, mid-seventies disco and proto-disco albums, old illustrated books about costumes, Antarctica, Jackie Kennedy, and shipbuilding. She helped Sinéad select larger, brighter, lesser gifts for Erin. Sinéad, like her father, had impeccable taste. She wore black jeans and corduroy miniskirts and jumpers, silver bangles, and strings of plastic beads even longer than her very long hair. In Denise’s kitchen, after shopping, she peeled potatoes immaculately or rolled out simple doughs while the cook contrived lagniappes for a child’s palate: wedges of pear, strips of homemade mortadella, elderberry sorbet in a doll-size bowl of elderberry soup, lambsmeat ravioli Xed with mint-charged olive oil, cubes of fried polenta.
On the rare occasions, like weddings, when Robin and Brian still went out together, Denise baby-sat the girls at Panama Street. She taught them how to make spinach pasta and how to tango. She listened to Erin recite the U.S. presidents in order. She joined Sinéad in raiding drawers for costumes.
“Denise and I will be ethnologists,” Sinéad said, “and, Erin, you can be a Hmong person.”
As she watched Sinéad work out with Erin how a Hmong woman might comport herself, as she watched her dance to Donna Summer with her lazy half-bored minimalism, barely lifting her heels from the floor, faintly rolling her shoulders and letting her hair slide and sift across her back (Erin all the while throwing epileptic fits), Denise loved not only the girl but the girl’s parents for whatever childrearing magic they’d brought to bear on her.
Robin was less impressed. “Of course they love you,” she said. “You’re not trying to comb the tangles out of Sinéad’s hair. You’re not arguing for twenty minutes about what constitutes ‘making the bed.’ You never see Sinéad’s math scores.”
“They’re not good?” the smitten baby-sitter said.
“They’re appalling. We may threaten not to let her see you if they don’t improve.”
“Oh, don’t do that.”
“Maybe you’d like to do some long division with her.”
“I’ll do anything.”
One Sunday in November, while the family of five was walking in Fairmount Park, Brian remarked to Denise, “Robin’s really warmed to you. I wasn’t sure she would.”
“I like Robin a lot,” Denise said.
“I think at first she felt a little intimidated by you.”
“She had good reason to. Didn’t she.”
“I never told her anything.”
“Well, thank you for that.”
It didn’t escape Denise that the qualities that would have enabled Brian to cheat on Robin—his sense of entitlement, his retrieverish conviction that whatever he was doing was the Good Thing We All Want—would also make it easy to cheat on him. Denise could feel herself becoming an extension of “Robin” in Brian’s mind, and since “Robin” had permanent status as “great” in Brian’s estimation, neither she nor “Denise” required further thought or worry on his part.
Brian seemed to put similarly absolute faith in Denise’s friend Rob Zito to oversee the Generator. Brian kept himself reasonably well informed, but mainly, as the weather got colder, he was absent. Denise briefly wondered if he’d fallen for another female, but the new darling turned out to be an independent filmmaker, Jerry Schwartz, who was noted for his exquisite taste in sound-track music and his skill at repeatedly finding funding for red-ink art-house projects. (“A film best enjoyed,” Entertainment Weekly said of Schwartz’s mopey slasher flick Moody Fruit, “with both eyes closed.”) A fervent admirer of Schwartz’s sound tracks, Brian had swooped down like an angel with a crucial fifty thou just as Schwartz began principal photography on a modern-dress Crime and Punishment in which Raskolnikov, played by Giovanni Ribisi, was a young anarchist and rabid audiophile living underground in North Philadelphia. While Denise and Rob Zito were making hardware and lighting decisions at the Generator, Brian joined Schwartz and Ribisi et al. on location at soulful ruins in Nicetown, and swapped CDs with Schwartz from identical zippered CD carrying cases, and ate dinner at Pastis in New York with Schwartz and Greil Marcus or Stephen Malkmus.
Without realizing it, Denise had let herself imagine that Brian and Robin had no sex life anymore. So on New Year’s Eve, when she and four couples and a mob of children gathered at the house on Panama Street and she saw Brian and Robin necking in the kitchen after midnight, she pulled her coat from the bottom of the coat pile and ran from the house. For more than a week she was too ripped up to call Robin or see the girls. She had a thing for a straight woman who was married to a man whom she herself might have liked to marry. It was a reasonably hopeless case. And St. Jude gave and St. Jude took away.
Robin ended Denise’s moratorium with a phone call. She was screeching mad. “Do you know what Jerry Schwartz’s movie is about?”
“Uh, Dostoevsky in Germantown?”
“You know it. How come I didn’t know it? Because he kept it from me, because he knew what I would think!”
“We’re talking about a Giovanni-Ribisi-as-wispily-bearded-Raskolnikov type of thing,” Denise said.
“My husband,” Robin said, “has put fifty thousand dollars, which he got from the W——Corporation, into a movie about a North Philly anarchist who splits two women’s skulls and goes to jail for it! He’s getting off on how cool it is to hang out with Giovanni Ribisi, and Jerry Schwartz, and Ian What’s H
is Face, and Stephen Whoever, while my North Philly anarchist brother, who really did split somebody’s skull—”
“No, I get it,” Denise said. “There’s a definite want of sensitivity there.”
“I don’t even think so,” Robin said. “I think he’s deeply pissed off with me and he doesn’t even know it.”
From that day forward, Denise became a stealthy advocate of infidelity. She learned that by defending Brian’s minor insensitivities she could spur Robin to more serious accusations with which she then reluctantly concurred. She listened and she listened. She took care to understand Robin better than anyone else ever had. She plied Robin with the questions Brian wasn’t asking: about Billy, about her dad, about church, about her Garden Project plans, about the half-dozen teenagers who’d caught the gardening bug and were coming back next summer, about the romantic and academic travails of her young assistants. She attended Seed Catalogue Night at the Project and put faces to the names of Robin’s favorite kids. She did long division with Sinéad. She nudged conversations in the direction of movie stars or popular music or high fashion, the sorest topics in Robin’s marriage. To the untrained ear, she sounded as if she were merely advocating closer friendship; but she had seen Robin eat, she knew this woman’s hunger.
When a sewer-line problem delayed the opening of the Generator, Brian took the opportunity to attend the Kalama-zoo Film Festival with Jerry Schwartz, and Denise took the opportunity to hang out with Robin and the girls for five nights running. The last of these nights found her agonizing in the video store. She finally settled on Wait Until Dark (disgusting male menaces resourceful Audrey Hepburn, whose coloration happens to resemble Denise Lambert’s) and Something Wild (kinky, gorgeous Melanie Griffith liberates Jeff Daniels from a dead marriage). The very titles, when she arrived at Panama Street, made Robin blush.
Between movies, after midnight, they drank whiskey on the living-room sofa, and in a voice that even for her was unusually squeaky Robin asked permission to ask Denise a personal question. “How often, in, like, a week,” she said, “did you and Emile fool around?”
“I’m not the person to ask about what’s normal,” Denise answered. “I’ve mainly seen normal in the rearview mirror.”
“I know. I know.” Robin stared intensely at the blue TV screen. “But, what did you think was normal?”
“I guess, at the time, I had the sense,” Denise said, telling herself large number, say a large number, “that maybe three times a week might be normal.”
Robin sighed loudly. A square inch or two of her left knee rested against Denise’s right knee. “Just tell me what you think is normal,” she said.
“I think for some people, once a day feels right.”
Robin spoke in a voice like an ice cube compressed between molars. “I might like that. That doesn’t sound bad to me.”
A numbing and prickling and burning broke out on the engaged portion of Denise’s knee.
“I take it that’s not how things are.”
“Like twice a MONTH,” Robin said through her teeth. “Twice a MONTH.”
“Do you think Brian’s seeing somebody?”
“I don’t know what he does. But it doesn’t involve me. And I just feel like such a freak.”
“You’re not a freak. You’re the opposite.”
“So what’s the other movie?”
“Something Wild.”
“OK, whatever. Let’s watch it.”
For the next two hours Denise mainly paid attention to her hand, which she’d laid on the sofa cushion within easy reach of Robin’s. The hand wasn’t comfortable there, it wanted to be retracted, but she didn’t want to give up hard-won territory.
When the movie ended they watched TV, and then they were silent for an impossibly long time, five minutes or a year, and still Robin didn’t take the warm, five-fingered bait. Denise would have welcomed some pushy male sexuality right around now. In hindsight, the week and a half she’d waited before Brian grabbed her had passed like a heartbeat.
At 4 a.m., sick with tiredness and impatience, she stood up to leave. Robin put on her shoes and her purple nylon parka and walked her to her car. Here, at last, she seized Denise’s hand in both of hers. She rubbed Denise’s palm with her dry, grown-woman thumbs. She said she was glad that Denise was her friend.
Stay the course, Denise enjoined herself. Be sisterly.
“I’m glad, too,” she said.
Robin produced the spoken cackle that Denise had come to recognize as pure distilled self-consciousness. She said, “Hee hee hee!” She looked at Denise’s hand, which she was kneading nervously in hers now. “Wouldn’t it be ironic if I was the one who cheated on Brian?”
“Oh God,” Denise said involuntarily.
“Don’t worry.” Robin made a fist around Denise’s index finger and squeezed it hard, in spasms. “I’m totally joking.”
Denise stared at her. Are you even listening to what you’re saying? Are you aware of what you’re doing to my finger?
Robin pressed the hand to her mouth now and bit down on it with lip-cushioned teeth, sort of softly gnawed on it, and then dropped it and skittered away. She bounced from one foot to the other. “So I’ll see you.”
The next day, Brian came back from Michigan and put an end to the house party.
Denise flew to St. Jude for a long Easter weekend, and Enid, like a toy piano with one working note, spoke every day of her old friend Norma Greene and Norma Greene’s tragic involvement with a married man. Denise, to change the subject, observed that Alfred was livelier and sharper than Enid portrayed him in her letters and Sunday calls.
“He pulls himself together when you’re in town,” Enid countered. “When we’re alone, he’s impossible.”
“When you’re alone, maybe you’re too focused on him.”
“Denise, if you lived with a man who slept in his chair all day—”
“Mother, the more you nag, the more he resists.”
“You don’t see it, because you’re only here for a few days. But I know what I’m talking about. And I don’t know what I’m going to do.”
If I lived with a person who was hysterically critical of me, Denise thought, I would sleep in a chair.
Back in Philly, the kitchen at the Generator was finally available. Denise’s life returned to near-normal levels of madness as she assembled and trained her crew, invited her pastry-chef finalists to compete head to head, and solved a thousand problems of delivery, scheduling, production, and pricing. As a piece of architecture, the restaurant was every bit as stunning as she’d feared, but for once in her career she’d prepared a menu properly and had twenty winners on it. The food was a three-way conversation between Paris and Bologna and Vienna, a Continental conference call with her own trademark emphasis on flavor over flash. Seeing Brian again in person, rather than imagining him through Robin’s eyes, she remembered how much she liked him. She awoke, to an extent, from her dreams of conquest. As she fired up the Garland and drilled her line and sharpened her knives, she thought: An idle brain is the Devil’s workshop. If she had been working as hard as God intended her to work, she would never have had time to chase someone’s wife.
She went into full avoidance mode, working 6 a.m. to midnight. The more days she spent free of the spell that Robin’s body and body heat and hunger cast on her, the more willing she was to admit how little she liked Robin’s nervousness, and Robin’s bad haircut and worse clothes, and Robin’s rusty-hinge voice, and Robin’s forced laughter, her whole profound uncoolness. Brian’s benign neglect of his wife, his hands-off attitude of “Yeah, Robin’s great,” made more sense now to Denise. Robin was great; and yet, if you were married to her, you might need some time away from her incandescent energy, you might enjoy a few days by yourself in New York, and Paris, and Sundance …
But the damage had been done. Denise’s case for infidelity had apparently been compelling. With a persistence the more irritating for the shyness and apologies that accompanied it, R
obin began to seek her out. She came to the Generator. She took Denise to lunch. She called Denise at midnight and chattered about the mildly interesting things that Denise had long pretended to be extremely interested in. She caught Denise at home on a Sunday afternoon and drank tea at the half Ping-Pong table, blushing and hee-heeing.
And part of Denise was thinking, as the tea went cold: Shit, she’s really into me now. This part of her considered, as if it were an actual threat of harm, the exhausting circumstance: She wants sex every day. This same part of her was thinking also: My God, the way she eats. And: I am not a “lesbian.”
At the same time, another part of her was literally awash in desire. She’d never seen so objectively what an illness sex was, what a collection of bodily symptoms, because she’d never been remotely as sick as Robin made her.
During a lull in the chatter, beneath a corner of the Ping-Pong table, Robin gripped Denise’s tastefully shod foot between her own knobby, white, purple-and-orange-accented sneakers. A moment later she leaned forward and seized Denise’s hand. Her blush looked life-threatening.
“So,” she said. “I’ve been thinking.”
The Generator opened on May 23, exactly a year after Brian began paying Denise her inflated salary. The opening was delayed a final week so that Brian and Jerry Schwartz could attend the festival at Cannes. Every night, while he was away, Denise repaid his generosity and his faith in her by going to Panama Street and sleeping with his wife. Her brain might feel like the brain of a questionable calf’s head at a Ninth Street “discount” butcher, but she was never as tired as she initially believed. One kiss, one hand on the knee, awakened her body to itself. She felt haunted, animated, revved, by the ghost of every coital encounter she’d ever nixed in her marriage. She shut her eyes against Robin’s back and pillowed her cheek between her shoulder blades, her hands supporting Robin’s breasts, which were round and flat and strangely light; she felt like a kitten with two powder puffs. She dozed for a couple of hours and then scraped herself out of the sheets, opened the door that Robin had locked against surprise visits from Erin or Sinéad, and crept down and out into the damp Philly dawn and shivered violently.