“Oh my,” Madeleine said. “Did we overdo?”
“Did we? No, we are blameless. As always.” She kicked the door shut with the sole of her boot, put down a bag and saw me. “You got here,” she said. “Big change of plans—I’m going to make Flemish soup with winter vegetables. I read about it in the store. I think I wrote it down.” She unwrapped her scarf and I could see her cheeks were red.
“You must be freezing,” Madeleine said. “I just made some tea.”
“Yeah, I don’t drink that shit.”
“Since when?”
Her father had appeared in the archway. “Hey,” she said. She reached into one of the bags and held up a bottle of Rémy by the neck. “See? I made a stop just for you guys.”
“Well,” he said. “Since you went to the trouble.”
“And?” she said to me. “Do you care about my trouble?”
“You didn’t make a stop in addition to your stop, did you?” Madeleine said.
“Why?” she said. “Do I seem cerebral? No, what am I trying to say? Cel-e-bra-tory. That’s a hard word.”
“Oh, honey,” Madeleine said. “Why don’t you let me put stuff away and you can go sit with your father.”
“I think I need to get to the bathroom.” She headed down the hall, meandering rubber-legged to one side, her shoulder displacing a poster of Patti Smith.
“What’s all this?” her father said.
“I’m not sure,” Madeleine said. “This isn’t her usual.”
“Is she just drunk?” I said.
“Well,” Madeleine said. “This is Portland. I better go in and see about her.”
The house was small enough so we could hear vomiting. My husband got up and went to the kitchen; he came out with a glass of Rémy for each of us. “Cheers,” he said. “She does have a flair for the dramatic. Poor Madeleine.”
“What about her?”
“I imagine she’ll pay for it tomorrow.”
I heard more vomiting, then water running. “Should I go in?” I said.
“They’d probably rather you didn’t. This isn’t quite the jolly visit you had in mind.”
“Probably not what she had in mind, either.”
“That would be the charitable view,” he said.
I heard the bathroom door open, then the two of them moving toward their bedroom. We finished our glasses, and he got up and poured us more. “May we always have the wind at our back,” he said. “To get us the hell out of here.”
Madeleine came in and sat on the sofa. “God, I am so sorry about this. I don’t even know what to say to you. She has some friends I wish she didn’t see.”
“So is this a regular occurrence?” he said.
“No. That’s the thing. I don’t know, maybe it was you coming here—I mean, please don’t think I’m blaming you. You know she loves you. It’s just so out of character.”
“How is she?” I said.
“I think she might sleep. She feels terrible about this. As far as I can tell. When do you have to leave?”
“Early,” he said. “Unfortunately.” Our plane didn’t leave till two.
“Crap,” she said. “Well, whatever.”
“I’m just sorry you have to deal with this,” he said.
“Should we go in and say goodbye?” I said.
“I think maybe not?” she said. “We’ll all be in touch.”
—
When we got home and I went through the mail, I found a birth announcement from my brother and his wife—what was this, number three?—and an invitation to Andrea’s wedding, forwarded from the old address in Rhinebeck. To a Thomas Somebody, at St. Somebody’s Church in Belmont, Massachusetts, June something. Below the engraving, in her handwriting: Please please please come. Miss you. Much loves, Andy. P.S. bring the huz!
Of course I’d neglected her, along with my other friends—that’s what the “Miss you” was about. She’d stopped offering me pieces when Mirabella went under and she’d gone on to Marie Claire, and then I think to Vogue, and now she was someplace else. She’d come up to Rhinebeck for a weekend, back during the living-in-sin era; then the three of us had dinner in the city, and after that I’d taken the train down to meet her for lunch a couple of times. The huz had said she depressed him.
“Why, because she’s not pretty?” I’d said.
“I wouldn’t mind that so much. You bring enough pretty for two. It’s more, what would you call it, the non-pretty syndrome.”
“You mean she tries too hard.”
“Ah,” he said, and kissed his fingertips at me. Back then it still made me wonder—these little things that seemed faggy. I imagine you’ve wondered too, but it was just him.
True, when Andrea was around men the voice went up, the hands were always going, fluttering, playing with her hair or—the worst—tugging her blouse down, since she was a little overweight, and she would make her eyes go wide and ask them questions and then say “Really?” But when you were one-on-one, she sat still and you could talk. Okay, I can’t defend “Much loves,” and certainly not from a grown woman, I don’t care how long she’d been working at those magazines. At Yale she’d done a paper taking down Lionel Trilling’s takedown of Ethan Frome, on which her professor—not Harold Bloom, but not nobody—had written: Against my better judgment, you have persuaded me about this lady. So what sort of creature must Thomas be? Either he was someone who had come to see her—knowing men, I wasn’t hopeful—or he was as graceless and overweight and desperate as she was, which you’d suspect from a back-to-the-hometown church wedding in June.
—
This was the spring when I gave up and went back to work. Ever since Portland—I want to forget Cleveland, where my husband drank too much again and slept on the floor beside the bed as a precaution—I’d been writing a paragraph and deleting it, then a sentence, then a phrase, and getting out my one-hitter by ten in the morning, which made it a long day until the late-afternoon drink. I was too ashamed to call Andrea, or the Newsweek editor—at that point, though I didn’t know it, he must have been burning through his long-term disability—and I couldn’t think of anyone else. Good job of keeping up your connections. The only thing I could find anywhere nearby was a job as the so-called managing editor of a free want-ad paper in Kingston, organizing the stuff that came in—cars, sporting equipment and musical instruments with photos; sad personals without—and coming up with filler: quotes, maxims, fun facts, quizzes with the answers upside down, a joke column called “Strictly for Laffs,” with a line drawing of a toothy goon laffing. I knew not to tell the so-called publisher—a printer who also did flyers for local supermarkets—that I’d worked at Newsweek, and Yale became UConn. I accounted for the years since I’d written my column by killing off my brother and sister-in-law (yes, in a car crash) and having to take care of their children. I suppose he gave me the job because no one else with any qualifications could afford to work for so little. It was an hour each way, but at least I no longer had to trust the Tercel; my husband had bought me a red Subaru, girly but with all-wheel drive. The radio was all about Iraq—this was 2003—but I’d usually catch A Word in Edgewise around the time I was driving over the Kingston-Rhinecliff Bridge, and I would read malign significance into the expressions whose always-surprising origins she’d chosen to explain: letting the cat out of the bag, going haywire, a pretty kettle offish, taken down a peg. On the weekends I smoked when I dared, but my husband took time from his painting so we could be together. He brought me on expeditions that had a volkish vibe right out of Lolita: to Lago di Giorgio, where we ordered prime rib at log restaurants—he did; I had the salad bar—and wandered through the outlet stores, which had nothing either of us wanted; to musty-smelling country motels, which he chose for the campiness of their neon signs, where we played miniature golf among fat tourists and their fat children; to state parks where we picnicked at picnic tables, saw lakes and trees. I thought his sense of irony had gone critical; I should have realized he was running out of money.