“O.K.,” Louise says. She is holding a pale-pink, bubbly drink. She sips it like a cocktail.
Bradley looks very bad. He has circles under his eyes, and he is ill at ease. A red light begins to blink on the phone-answering device next to where Bradley sits on the sofa, and Milo gets out of his chair to pick up the phone.
“Do you really want to talk on the phone right now?” Bradley asks Milo quietly.
Milo looks at him. “No, not particularly,” he says, sitting down again. After a moment, the red light goes out.
“I’m going to mist your bowl garden,” Louise says to Bradley, and slides off the sofa and goes to the bedroom. “Hey, a little toadstool is growing in here!” she calls back. “Did you put it there, Bradley?”
“It grew from the soil mixture, I guess,” Bradley calls back. “I don’t know how it got there.”
“Have you heard anything about a job?” I ask Bradley.
“I haven’t been looking, really,” he says. “You know.”
Milo frowns at him. “Your choice, Bradley,” he says. “I didn’t ask you to follow me to California. You can stay here.”
“No,” Bradley says. “You’ve hardly made me feel welcome.”
“Should we have some champagne — all four of us — and you can get back to your bourbons later?” Milo says cheerfully.
We don’t answer him, but he gets up anyway and goes to the kitchen. “Where have you hidden the tulip-shaped glasses, Bradley?” he calls out after a while.
“They should be in the cabinet on the far left,” Bradley says.
“You’re going with him?” I say to Bradley. “To San Francisco?”
He shrugs, and won’t look at me. “I’m not quite sure I’m wanted,” he says quietly.
The cork pops in the kitchen. I look at Bradley, but he won’t look up. His new hairdo makes him look older. I remember that when Milo left me I went to the hairdresser the same week and had bangs cut. The next week, I went to a therapist who told me it was no good trying to hide from myself. The week after that, I did dance exercises with Martine Cooper, and the week after that the therapist told me not to dance if I wasn’t interested in dancing.
“I’m not going to act like this is a funeral,” Milo says, coming in with the glasses. “Louise, come in here and have champagne! We have something to have a toast about.”
Louise comes into the living room suspiciously. She is so used to being refused even a sip of wine from my glass or her father’s that she no longer even asks. “How come I’m in on this?” she asks.
“We’re going to drink a toast to me,” Milo says.
Three of the four glasses are clustered on the table in front of the sofa. Milo’s glass is raised. Louise looks at me, to see what I’m going to say. Milo raises his glass even higher, Bradley reaches for a glass. Louise picks up a glass. I lean forward and take the last one.
“This is a toast to me,” Milo says, “because I am going to be going to San Francisco.”
It was not a very good or informative toast. Bradley and I sip from our glasses. Louise puts her glass down hard and bursts into tears, knocking the glass over. The champagne spills onto the cover of a big art book about the Unicorn Tapestries. She runs into the bedroom and slams the door.
Milo looks furious. “Everybody lets me know just what my insufficiencies are, don’t they?” he says. “Nobody minds expressing himself. We have it all right out in the open.”
“He’s criticizing me,” Bradley murmurs, his head still bowed. “It’s because I was offered a job here in the city and I didn’t automatically refuse it.”
I turn to Milo. “Go say something to Louise, Milo,” I say. “Do you think that’s what somebody who isn’t brokenhearted sounds like?”
He glares at me and stomps into the bedroom, and I can hear him talking to Louise reassuringly. “It doesn’t mean you’ll never see me,” he says. “You can fly there, I’ll come here. It’s not going to be that different.”
“You lied!” Louise screams. “You said we were going to brunch.”
“We are. We are. I can’t very well take us to brunch before Sunday, can I?”
“You didn’t say you were going to San Francisco. What is San Francisco, anyway?”
“I just said so. I bought us a bottle of champagne. You can come out as soon as I get settled. You’re going to like it there.”
Louise is sobbing. She has told him the truth and she knows it’s futile to go on.
By the next morning, Louise acts the way I acted — as if everything were just the same. She looks calm, but her face is small and pale. She looks very young. We walk into the restaurant and sit at the table Milo has reserved. Bradley pulls out a chair for me, and Milo pulls out a chair for Louise, locking his finger with hers for a second, raising her arm above her head, as if she were about to take a twirl.
She looks very nice, really. She has a ribbon in her hair. It is cold, and she should have worn a hat, but she wanted to wear the ribbon. Milo has good taste: the dress she is wearing, which he bought for her, is a hazy purple plaid, and it sets off her hair.
“Come with me. Don’t be sad,” Milo suddenly says to Louise, pulling her by the hand. “Come with me for a minute. Come across the street to the park for just a second, and we’ll have some space to dance, and your mother and Bradley can have a nice quiet drink.”
She gets up from the table and, looking long-suffering, backs into her coat, which he is holding for her, and the two of them go out. The waitress comes to the table, and Bradley orders three Bloody Marys and a Coke, and eggs Benedict for everyone. He asks the waitress to wait awhile before she brings the food. I have hardly slept at all, and having a drink is not going to clear my head. I have to think of things to say to Louise later, on the ride home.
“He takes so many chances,” I say. “He pushes things so far with people. I don’t want her to turn against him.”
“No,” he says.
“Why are you going, Bradley? You’ve seen the way he acts. You know that when you get out there he’ll pull something on you. Take the job and stay here.”
Bradley is fiddling with the edge of his napkin. I study him. I don’t know who his friends are, how old he is, where he grew up, whether he believes in God, or what he usually drinks. I’m shocked that I know so little, and I reach out and touch him. He looks up.
“Don’t go,” I say quietly.
The waitress puts the glasses down quickly and leaves, embarrassed because she thinks she’s interrupted a tender moment. Bradley pats my hand on his arm. Then he says the thing that has always been between us, the thing too painful for me to envision or think about.
“I love him,” Bradley whispers.
We sit quietly until Milo and Louise come into the restaurant, swinging hands. She is pretending to be a young child, almost a baby, and I wonder for an instant if Milo and Bradley and I haven’t been playing house, too — pretending to be adults.
“Daddy’s going to give me a first-class ticket,” Louise says. “When I go to California we’re going to ride in a glass elevator to the top of the Fairman Hotel.”
“The Fairmont,” Milo says, smiling at her.
Before Louise was born, Milo used to put his ear to my stomach and say that if the baby turned out to be a girl he would put her into glass slippers instead of bootees. Now he is the prince once again. I see them in a glass elevator, not long from now, going up and up, with the people below getting smaller and smaller, until they disappear.
PLAYBACK
One of the most romantic evenings I ever spent was last week, with Holly curled in my lap, her knees to the side, resting against the sloping arm of the wicker rocking chair. It would have cut into her skin if I hadn’t tucked my hand under her bony knees. Her satin nightgown came to mid-calf when she stood, but didn’t cover her knees when she curled into my lap. In the breeze, tiny curls blew against my cheek, where it rested on top of her head. Ash used to say that her fine, long hair reminded him of the way ribbon curled when you held it stretched lightly across your thumb and ran a pair of scissors along the top. The nightgown had been a present from Ash: tiny pink flowers scattered here and there among the narrow pleats, a nightgown from the 1930s. He had bought it at her favorite store, Red Dog, where he had bought her the mysterious homemade rug with a chorus line of squirrels, eating what looked like shrimp. He had also gotten her a satin jacket with “Angelo” written across the back. He cut off the “o” and had a friend add embroidered wings. On cool nights, she’d wear it over the old-fashioned nightgown.