I changed into running tights and a sweatshirt and went out. Being still full of tofu, and not wanting to puke all over my shoes, I set an easy pace-nine-minute miles-and wound my way through Washington Square, the Village, and SoHo for forty minutes. Afterward, I showered and changed and opened a can of tuna. Then I put on WFUV and read from a book of Carver stories until I fell asleep.
Chapter Twelve
The taxi dropped me in front of Ned’s building at three in the afternoon on Thanksgiving-only an hour late, despite my best dilatory efforts. A guy I didn’t know held the big bronze door for me. I crossed the vast lobby to the concierge’s marble bunker, and another guy I didn’t know. He rang upstairs to announce me. The elevator guy I knew. He nodded at me.
“Long time,” he said. Not long enough.
The elevator door slid open, and I stepped into a foyer about a hundred feet square. The walls were cream colored, and the floor was black and white stone, set in a diamond pattern. A small, bronze chandelier hung from the high ceiling. There was an ebony table to my left, with some flowers on it, in a tall, glass vase. Straight ahead was a pair of glossy, black doors. I pressed the bell and heard a deep chime inside.
Meg answered. She’s a jumpy girl from County Mayo, with lots of freckles and skittish blue eyes. I’d be jumpy too, I guess, if I were Ned and Janine’s maid, and had to wear that silly getup. I heard music, something baroque, and voices and glassware.
“Hi, Meg,” I said.
“ ’Lo, Mr. March. Nice to see you,” she answered in a soft brogue. I stepped inside, and she took my coat. I was in a much larger foyer, with pale gray walls and white molding. Some Dutch landscape sketches that I’d always liked were hung on the walls, and a big Oriental carpet covered the floor.
My sister-in-law Janine inspected me from the opposite doorway. Dressed appropriately? Unexpected guests? Visible contusions? Weapons? I was wearing olive corduroys and a black sweater over a blue shirt, so the clothes passed muster. I was alone, wound-free, and if I was carrying it wasn’t obvious. She smiled and crossed the foyer to greet me.
“Hello, stranger. It’s been a while,” she said. She patted my arms and made a kissing noise near my ear. Janine is forty-two, a year younger than Ned, but like Ned she looks and acts more like fifty. She’s five and a half feet tall, with a long, fragile-looking neck, reedy arms and legs, and a body like a plank. Her hair is an expensive blond, worn in a rigid page-boy. Her nose is straight and narrow, and her mouth is small, with thin lips that are prone to pursing. Her eyes are a bright, cornflower blue, with aperture settings that range from large as saucers, as when Ned presents her with some expensive bauble, to narrow as knives, as when she flays an impertinent junior member of one of her charity boards. With me they were dialed to wary.
Janine wore tailored camel pants, a chocolate-colored cashmere twinset, and pearls. Her eyes flicked to my packages and grew quizzical.
“For the boys,” I said.
“Oh, John, you didn’t have to. They have too much as it is, really. What is it?”
“Puzzles for Alec and Legos for Derek.” I gave her the packages, and she put them down in a corner.
“They’ll love them, I’m sure. They’ve been asking every five minutes when Uncle Johnny will be here.” She guided me across the foyer, to the left down a wide hallway, and finally to the living room. The music and the voices and the glassware sounds grew louder as we approached.
The living room, like the whole apartment, was large and formal. We stood at one end of the broad, high-ceilinged space. The walls were a green just darker than money, and the pilasters and molding and beamed ceiling were a crisp white. A white marble mantelpiece dominated one wall. The wall opposite us was mostly windows and French doors, framed in green and gold drapery. The doors opened onto a terrace that wrapped around much of the apartment. The waning sun filled the room with amber light.
The furniture was old and French, and though there was a lot of it, the room did not seem crowded. The ten or so people in it didn’t come close to its capacity. Most of them turned to look as we entered. Some of them smiled. Ned was there, and so was Lauren, with her husband, Keith. Liz was there, talking to an older, dark-haired man I didn’t know. My brother David was on the terrace, talking to someone I couldn’t see. His wife, Stephanie, was sitting with some more people I didn’t know. Ned crossed the room to greet me.
“We thought we’d have to start without you,” he said, and clasped my shoulder. “Good to see you, Johnny. Let me get you something to drink.” He led me to a large chrome drinks trolley. “Cranberry and soda still your choice?” I nodded, and he took a tumbler off the cart and started fishing for ice in a silver bucket.
Ned is a couple of inches shorter than I am, and broader. His gingery hair is short and wavy, and it was thinner and grayer than the last time I’d seen him. He has a ruddy complexion and a square face with blunt features. His gray eyes looked tired and distracted, and there were more lines than I remembered around his small mouth-the burdens of being the number two guy at Klein amp; Sons. He was wearing dark gray trousers and a navy blazer over a white shirt. Turkeys strutted over his red tie. He handed me my drink and looked like he was about to speak, but before he could, I felt a dig at my ribs and a kiss on my cheek. Liz.
“What happened, you forget how to tell time, or has it been so long you forgot the address?”
“Hey, yourself,” I said, and kissed her cheek. She was wearing a black cashmere turtleneck over a short, plaid skirt. A matching plaid ribbon was tied in her thick, blond hair. Liz is rangy and tall, just my height in flat shoes. She’s thirty-six and looks it. She has shrewd, green eyes, a strong nose, and a wide mouth, all set in a lean face. The effect is more handsome and smart than conventionally pretty.
The traders who work on the hugely profitable desk that Liz runs at Klein would probably use different words to describe her. “Scary bitch” would be the kindest of them, and they might have a point. Liz is handsome and smart, but she’s also brutally impatient, utterly intolerant of mistakes, and merciless in her sarcasm.
Her companion was cut from the same cloth as all her men friends: older, European, attractive, and affluent looking. She introduced him as Marco. He smiled with a bemused detachment that I envied.
“Back in the bosom of your family. I knew you couldn’t stay away,” she said, looking me up and down. “You’re too skinny, eat something.” Meg was walking around the room with a silver tray heaped with smoked salmon, pate, shrimp, and a few things I didn’t recognize. Liz hauled her over. I took some salmon and felt a hand on my shoulder.
“Lauren said she’d ground you down. It’s nice when it happens to someone else. How you doing, John?” A wry smile lit Keith’s narrow face. Lauren’s husband is tall, around six foot four, and thin, with a thatch of unruly brown hair, piercing blue eyes, and a long, bumpy nose. He wore khakis, a tweed jacket, and a rumpled denim shirt, open at the collar. Keith has a Ph. D. in molecular biology, and he does things with DNA at Rockefeller University. I smiled and shook his hand. Lauren was behind him.
“See, it’s not so bad,” she said. “You’re having a great time already, I can tell.”
“Whee,” I said.
“Come meet our strays.” She and Keith led me to one of the large sofas and introduced me to a German couple and a young Italian man. They worked in Keith’s lab, and they were all new arrivals to the city. Their English wasn’t great, but they seemed pleasant enough, if a little nervous. Sitting next to Stephanie for too long can have that effect.
“You made it. David and I were betting that you wouldn’t.” Stephanie smiled thinly at me. She’s thirty-four, the same age as David, and the two of them have been inseparable since b-school. It’s no wonder. I can’t imagine that either of them had ever encountered anyone as driven or abrasive as themselves before. It was either marry or kill each other. I guess they made the right choice.