“Why?”
“To illustrate what I’m not getting from Rhoda.” He paused self-consciously. “It may’ve been an unkind thing to do. I mean, I don’t want that from Rhoda, but I want her to understand that need in me because it’s part of who I am. And she just can’t. I mean, her card was generic flowers and a love message.” He sighed. “Underneath all the New Age goofiness, she’s just totally suburban, you know?”
“So are we, remember?”
Patrick was silent for a moment. Margot salted her oily tomato salad.
“You’re right,” he said. “That sounded ridiculous. What I meant to say is, she’s really conventional.”
“Patrick,” she said, “how’s Dolores?”
“Oh.” She almost heard him wince. “I don’t know. Isn’t that awful? We haven’t had much contact over the last five years. I know she’s living in some slum in Miami, probably working as a waitress. She’s a total alcoholic. Last time I talked to her she was having an affair, if you could call it that, with this fourteen-year-old Latin kid who couldn’t speak English. She rear-ended somebody because she was driving around drunk with her pants down and the kid’s face between her legs, and I mean so drunk that when she got out of the car, she forgot to pull her pants up and she fell and broke a tooth. That was the last time I talked to her. Since she stopped speaking to my dad, I’m not even sure where she lives. It was just too much, you know? It was painful.”
Margot remembered Dolores sitting at the table, affixing her false fingernails, holding her hand at a distance and appraising it with an arched, theatrical brow. She remembered Patrick’s attention on her, a drop of traveling light. “Could you get her number for me?” she asked. “Could you try? I don’t know what I’d say to her at this point, but. . .”
“Of course.” The loyalty in Patrick’s voice was like a muscle that’s gone flabby but is still strong; it was loyalty for her, not Dolores, and it both flattered and troubled her. “It’s probably time for me to check in anyway. Who knows where she is now. Spiritually and emotionally, I mean.”
Margot thought of something Dolores had once told her. They had been sitting at the kitchen table, drinking sweet coffee and smoking. “When Patrick was a baby, I used to do this really mean thing to him,” said Dolores. “He was just learning how to walk. All by himself, he’d struggle to his feet with this earnest frown and start slowly fighting his way forward with his little hands balled. He’d be in this nightgown our mom used to put him in, and it would trail out behind him. I’d follow along and I’d let him get so far and then I’d step on his gown and he’d fall over with this cute little ‘oof.’” Dolores drew on her cigarette and left a wet red lipstick mark on it. “The funny thing is, he never cried. He’d just set his little face and slowly get up and toddle on. Sometimes I did it just ‘cause it was so cool to see him get up again.”
Patrick was saying that while he had enjoyed being a psychopharm, he was tired of it now and was looking for a way out. With this end in mind, he was working on a CD-ROM about depression, in which psychiatrists would appear on a tiny screen to explain to viewers what depression is and how to get treatment. “It’s going to be complex and layered,” he said. “Like performance art.”
Margot agreed to meet him for dinner that weekend, even though she wasn’t sure she wanted to. Their conversation had made her feel passive and nonplussed. When they hung up, she sat for a while and stared at the spray of greasy salt scattered across her plate, at the tidy little snarl of chicken bones and the minute pistil of broccoli. Her tabletop was red Formica. On the table she had a salt shaker in the shape of a mournful sheep and Magic Markers in a row and a dish of colored rocks mixed with cheap jewelry she’d worn when she was a kid. She liked her things, but now the sight of them made her sad. She always had arrangements of bright little things on her walls and furniture. Roberta had made fun of them, mildly at first.
Late one night, a woman Patrick didn’t know had called him and asked if she could come over. He told her that she could, but when she got there he didn’t like the way she looked, so he made her tea, conversed for as long as he felt etiquette required, and then asked her to leave. Margot had been asleep and, to her regret, had not seen the girl. She was fascinated by this story and by the casual way Patrick told it at breakfast; without knowing why, she found herself imagining, repeatedly and in varying ways, the girl’s face when Patrick told her to leave. She could not imagine calling anyone and asking if she could come over late at night, no matter how much she wanted them, nor could she imagine letting a person who made such a call come to her home.
She and Dolores had analyzed the incident at length, sitting on Dolores’s big bed in a flood of sunlight, eating from a box of dime-store chocolates. “Patrick has always had these things with women,” said Dolores moodily. “And being a guy, he can’t help but take advantage of them. Like, that girl put herself in a situation where he might tell her to go home, you know? What do you expect if you call up strangers in the middle of the night?”
Margot supposed it was true. “But still, something seems gross about it. Like, maybe he could’ve told her that he might ask her to leave.”
“Oh, come on, how could he have done that? That would really have been gross.” Dolores took an open package of cigarettes and a silver lighter from her bedside table; she manipulated the small objects with the grand, suppressed languor of a person moving underwater. “In his own way, Patrick is an old-fashioned gentleman,” she said. “He likes things to have a certain decorum, a certain . . . gracious style. He’s a romantic.”
Dolores’s hands were crossed at the wrist, a fresh cigarette inserted between two slightly puffy fingers. Margot wondered if the medication she took made her hands puffy. “But it doesn’t seem gentlemanly to let a stranger come over,” Margot persisted. “I mean, he was allowing a situation that would probably not be very gracious, whether she stayed or left. Don’t you think?”
“But the thing is, she probably really wanted to come over. She probably had extremity in her voice, and any extremity is potentially very romantic.” She brought the cigarette to her lips and Margot noticed that her hand trembled. “People often want something from Patrick, and he has a hard time saying no. It’s our family and this awful boundary crap. Our mom was all over Patrick, physically and every other way. She let him get away with anything because he was beautiful, but then there were all these other ways she had him by the balls. She was obsessed with him. The sick old bitch. She called him ‘my orchid.’” Dolores imitated her mother with fine, slippery malice. “My orchid.”
They sat in silence for a moment. Dolores’s bed was covered with an old quilt made of meticulously color-coordinated shapes sewn together with the pretty humor of a child. A strip of pink cloth decorated with abstract roses was sewn next to a triangle of blue and white stripes next to a lavender oblong with green and yellow polka dots on it. At the head of the bed were Dolores’s pillows, in faded yellow slipcovers. She had lace curtains on her windows. Her room did not look like the room of someone who had recently torn the hair from her head.