The groom’s brother pulled up in a Lexus with a ski rack—he hoped he wasn’t late; the traffic was a motherfucker—and left his cashmere overcoat on the bench in the hall; he’d told us he had to get up to Bromley that evening. When the U.U. minister came in right behind him, my brother’s wife looked at her as if she’d never seen a butch lesbian before, clutched her one-year-old tighter, and the kid started to squall. Finally she had to take him upstairs, reluctant as she was to go where our bedroom might be, so we could get on with the show. Afterward, my new brother-in-law kissed me from inside his walrus mustache, clapped my husband on the shoulder and said, “You dog. Listen, gotta jet.” We took the rest of them to lunch, and after we’d gotten the baby into a booster seat and ordered drinks—Diet Cokes for the Christians—my brother said, “Would you mind?” He reached for my hand and my mother’s, his wife took my husband’s and the baby’s, my husband gave me a quick look and reached for my mother’s hand, leaving me to take the baby’s other hand, which felt soft and moist, between my thumb and forefinger. He pulled it away and began to wail as my brother said, “God our Father bless the bounty that we are about to receive in the name of Jesus Christ Our Lord amen. There, that wasn’t so tough, right? Hon, maybe you should take him and see if…” The bounty—white wine for my mother, scotch for me and the bridegroom—arrived none too soon.
When we opened the gifts, theirs turned out to be a leather-bound Bible, the New King James Version, with a page in front they’d had calligraphized with our names; lines had been ruled below for the names of offspring.
And before we leave the wedding day behind, just one final word about my little moment that morning; I don’t want to keep coming back to this as if it were some big motif, though I might be tempted to hit it one more time near the end, for the sake of symmetry. So probably every film critic in the world has already figured this out—originality has never been my strong suit, as I think we’ve seen—but in Psycho, in the shower scene, I think we’re supposed to think that Janet Leigh is making atonement for stealing that money, as well as for being a slut in a slip, which for a woman-hater like Hitchcock is really the sin, and simply washing herself clean isn’t sufficient. Only when the chocolate syrup goes swirling down the drain, and her open eye sees everything at last and yields up a tear—of contrition!—only then…et cetera et cetera. My point is, where was Mother when I needed her? To part the curtain, raise the knife and freeze me in a state of grace. Now there’s a cadence, or am I flattering myself?
—
I’d been to Rio, Amsterdam, St. Kitts and wherever else a snotty Yale girl goes, as well as France and Peru with my first husband, but I’d never seen what you might call America: just New York, L.A., San Francisco, Washington, D.C., and Colonial Williamsburg. So for our honeymoon, which he called a wedding trip, we’d driven in his truck (and thank God for four-wheel drive) across days of increasingly desolate late-winter landscape, staying in grimmer and grimmer motels, until the Rocky Mountains appeared and we were in Montana, at a turn-of-the-century hot spring resort where I suspect he’d gone with his first wife. By day we skied trails in Yellowstone, just over the state line into Wyoming, and saw as many elk as a pair of newlyweds could wish for; by night we drank whiskey out of plastic cups while floating in water the temperature of our bodies, with snow falling on us. On the way back, we took a detour from Rapid City down to Mount Rushmore—“Would you mind indulging me?”—and he pointed above and beyond the presidents’ heads, which were smaller than I’d expected, to where James Mason’s North by Northwest house would have stood. “As you can see,” he said, “it couldn’t possibly have been there.”
“Whoever thought it could?” I said.
“Nobody,” he said. “I’ve probably seen too many movies.”
Mud season had set in by the time we got back, but he couldn’t wait to bring me up to his hilltop. He put the truck in four-wheel low, and we fishtailed up a dirt track, mud and snow and pebbles rattling under the floorboards. At the top, he got out, came around and helped me down, and we looked across the river at a rugged gray mountain on the other side. “What do you think?” he said.
I pulled the hood of my parka over my head against the cold wind and put my hands in my pockets. “It’s impressive that you own all this,” I said.
“Do you think you could live here?”
“It’s a little short on amenities,” I said.
“Amenities we can do,” he said. “Just draw up the plans and add money. You don’t want to live in a Charles Addams house the rest of your life. Hell, even the rest of my life.”
“I like your house.”
“You’ll like this better, trust me. I’ll show you what I’ve got, and we can fine-tune it together.”
“Can we get back in the truck?” I said.
He put an arm around my shoulders. “Come on.”
As we inched down the hill, heater blasting, I said, “You’ve wanted this a long time.”
“All my life.” He put on his old-timer voice. “Not yet.”
—
They began excavating on the hilltop as soon as they could get their machines up the track, and by late April they’d poured the foundation, dug for the septic and the drainage field and started drilling the well. Next year at this time, he said, we’d be in there. He’d sat me down in his workroom to go over the plans with me, and what he’d designed turned out to be more or less the James Mason house, right down to the triangular braces under what I would have called the deck.
“Of course Wright would never have used those,” he said. “You’ve seen Fallingwater.”
“You don’t mean Niagara?” I said. “That’s not Hitchcock.”
“Dear God,” he said. He jumped up and went to the bookshelf.
His plan seemed fine, what did I know. Flat roof, two stories and a basement, balcony all around the inside, looking down into the living room, with rooms off it, something like the high-end motel where we’d stayed outside Chicago—a Radisson or something, with a pool down in the atrium—which of course I didn’t say. Workroom for him, workroom for me, wall of windows facing west.
“For me to die in and you to inherit,” he said. “We’ll call it Viduity Manor.”
“I’m getting sick of this motif,” I said. “Maybe you should give it a rest?”
“Eventually, of course. Why do you think I’m running it into the ground?” He shook his head. “Maybe that’s not the happiest metaphor.”
—
I met my new husband’s old wife at an opening—mobiles by a woman who’d been a friend of theirs—somewhere in the borderland of Chelsea and Hell’s Kitchen. He was in what you might call rare form, if it had been rare, most of the way down the Taconic—“Hellsea! Do I have a genius for marketing?”—but on the West Side Highway he gave the finger to a driver who cut us off, which I’d never seen him do; now I realize that he knew she’d be there. He asked me what I’d like from the bar, then started pushing through the crowd. A wiry middle-aged woman in black jeans and a black silk top, her short black hair moussed up into flames, came over to me. “Quite the wingding,” she said. “I know who you are.”
“I’m afraid you’ve got the advantage.” But of course I knew.
“I used to,” she said. “You’re lovely. You should last him the rest of the way. I see he’s in no hurry to get over here.” I looked toward the bar in time to catch him turning away. “One can hardly blame him. How’s life in Lord Weary’s Castle?”