Outside, on the terrace, where he chilled the white wines, he’d asked me to help before uncorking the bottles. We stood still in the cold weather with just our shirts on, staring at this black-and-white Manhattan night, making out echoes of the merrymaking from the neighbors’ crowded rooms across the tower, two years ago today, Theirs is the real party, ours is make-believe. He’d taken me aside and said, with veiled distemper in his voice, Why don’t you just marry her, which meant, Why don’t you just marry anyone and bring us children before we’re gone — twins for the price of one, so it’ll be faster. Then, changing the subject, he’d stare through the glass door into our crowded living room: “Just look at your mother, catering to everyone but me, Xanthippe the shrew, if ever there was one.”
I was wrapping numbered red paper napkins around each bottle of wine to hide the label, applying Scotch tape tightly around the napkin while he held a finger to it to hold it in place, as he automatically did when helping me tie a difficult package, his way of apologizing for the improvised homily about children and twins and the chronic distemper in his voice.
I remember how Livia had come out onto the terrace to smoke just as he was finishing his little talk. She too would help me wrap the starched napkins around each set of silverware while our Brazilian cook was putting the finishing touches to her yearly bombino, the music filtering in through the glass window. I placed both hands on Livia’s hips, spun her gently around, and proceeded to dance a few steps with her on the freezing terrace, then back into the living room, my rakish whim passing for tacit reassurance intended for my father, meaning, See, Dad, I’m working on it, knowing the whole thing was a fib, because I knew he knew she knew we wouldn’t last a month, a season, ten days. “What were you two speaking about?” she’d asked.
“Nothing,” absentmindedly.
“About me, wasn’t it?” She knew he was growing to like her. It was just like her to put two and two together, minus my dissembled nothing, and come out with Dad’s pep talk about kids.
Not even ten days, I kept thinking. My father must have caught that look on my face as I watched her go back inside and turn to the other guests in the room. “Funny how they cater to everyone but us — as if they’ve always known we’d never love them a single bit.”
•
“So where to tonight?” my mother asks.
“Party.”
“Just one?”
“Just one.” Obviously I’d abandoned the idea of going to Rachel’s tonight.
“Going with someone?”
“With, without. Unclear.”
“Unclear to you or unclear to her?”
“That too is unclear.”
Mother snickers. Some things never change. Did I need anything? No. Had just come to wish her a Happy New Year. Well, if I had nothing better to do later tonight, maybe I could drop by again — always a sap when it comes to Champagne on New Year’s. There’s a cold bottle in the fridge, one never knows. Maybe, I say, meaning, Yes, but don’t bother waiting up for me. “At least try,” she throws in, a last appeal. I say nothing.
“Just be an angel, could you replace one of these bulbs for me?”
No wonder it feels like a mausoleum in her house. I dig out a spare bulb in the pantry, stand on a chair, remove the dead one, and twist in a new bulb. “Finally,” she exclaims; now she can see me, she adds. I am about to put on my coat.
One more thing, she almost apologizes. That coffeemaker I’d bought her for Christmas, would I mind terribly going over how it works?
I know what she wants. She doesn’t want me to leave, at least not just yet. Oh, stay another minute, will you! So I take out two capsules of espresso, fill the water tank, plug in the machine, push the red button, and wait until the green light stops blinking. She wants to try it herself this time. We go through the motions once again.
Two minutes later we are sitting at the breakfast table, drinking two foaming cups of decaf cappuccino.
He would have loved this, she adds, stirring listlessly.
I hate it when she starts in about him—“I know, I know,” she apologizes, and right away lights a cigarette. But then she remembers and makes a silent motion to put it out. No, don’t stop, I say, it doesn’t bother me. Just because I’m trying to quit smoking doesn’t mean I’m obliged to hate cigarettes. The same, I suddenly realize, might be said of people, of so many things. Just because you can’t have them doesn’t mean. .
My mother must have read my mind or been on the same wavelength herself. “Ever hear from that Livia woman?” We’ve made the same connection, yet neither wishes to disclose the train of thought that led from cigarettes to Livia. “She used to smoke a lot,” she adds, as though to cover up her tracks, “didn’t she?” All the time, but no, I hadn’t heard from her at all. Just like you to blow up bridges behind you. Sometimes, she says, we never want to see people again for fear we still care. Or that they still do. Sometimes we turn from our past and look away in shame. But few of us let go. We find others. What’s hard is having to start all over again with the little that’s left each time.
She catches her breath, puffs, then looks away. She’s trying to ask me something.
“Is this new person better than Livia?”
“Better, worse, too soon — or too late to tell. Who knows.”
“You’re a funny one.”
She stubs out her cigarette halfway. She looks at me and then past me.
“I met someone.”
She met someone.
“You met someone?”
“Well, that’s not quite accurate. He’d heard about Dad and decided to call one day.”
“And?”
“He’d lost his wife a few years back.”
I must look either dumbstruck or totally vacant.
“So?”
“We were together once.”
“You were together once.”
I find it hard to think of her with anyone but the man I’d seen her with all my life.
“I don’t understand.”
“There’s nothing to understand. I used to know him long before your father. He went away West for a year, maybe more, he said. Then I met your father.”
She makes it sound so heartless, so savage almost.
“How did he take it?”
“Not well. He found someone out West and got married even before I did. Of course, I never forgave him. Never forgave him each time your father and I bickered, and we bickered all the time at first. Never forgave him when the ice I walked on cracked under me to remind me that Dad was just a man who’d been put there to tide me over.”
“And?”
“And nothing. We had a few dinners. He’s with his daughters tonight. But he said he might show up. Though with him, you never know.”
Now I understood the bottle of Champagne.
What did he want from her?
“Who is he?” I finally asked her.
“Listen to you. Who is he?” She smiles expansively, mimicking my tone. “Soon you’ll be asking what he earns or how he plans to support me.”
“I’m sorry. It’s just that I worry.”
“For me? Are you sure it’s worry you feel?”
I shrug my shoulders.
“If it’s any consolation, your father knew. He knew from the very start. Now, thirty years later, this man calls. We’re widowers, he says. That we certainly are, I say. It took a lot of courage.”
“What are you telling me?”