The living room of Francesca's apartment had pale yellow walls, peach moldings, and an exquisite Heriz rug accented in navy. With its English country garden touches of cotton chintz and silk damask, the room was exactly the kind of tastefully elegant and outrageously expensive showplace House and Garden loved to feature on its glossy pages, except that Francesca refused to raise a child in a showcase and had, quite casually, sabotaged some of her decorator's best work. The Hubert Robert landscape over the Italian marble fireplace had given way to an elaborately framed crayon rendering of a bright red dinosaur (Theodore Day, circa 1981). A seventeenth-century Italian chest had been moved several feet off center to make room for Teddy's favorite orange vinyl beanbag chair, while the chest itself bore the Mickey Mouse telephone Teddy and Holly Grace had bought as a present for Francesca on her thirty-first birthday.
Holly Grace stepped inside, dropped her purse on a copy of The New York Times, and waved to Consuelo, the Spanish woman who took wonderful care of Teddy but left all the dishes for Francesca to wash up when she came home. As she turned away from Consuelo, Holly Grace noticed a girl curled up on the sofa engrossed in a magazine. The girl was sixteen or seventeen with badly bleached hair and a faded bruise on her cheek. Holly Grace stopped in her tracks and then rounded on Teddy with a vehement whisper, "Your mother did it again, didn't she?"
"Mom said to tell you not to scare her."
"This is what I get for going to California for three weeks." Holly Grace grabbed Teddy by the arm and pulled him back to his bedroom out of earshot. As soon as she had shut the door, she exclaimed in frustration, "Dammit, I thought you were going to talk to her? I can't believe she did this again."
Teddy walked over to the shoe box that held his stamp collection and fiddled with the lid. "Her name's Debbie, and she's pretty nice. But the welfare department finally found a foster home for her, so she's leaving in a few days."
"Teddy, that girl's a hooker. She probably has needle tracks in her arm." He began puffing his cheeks in and out, a habit he had when he didn't want to talk about something. Holly Grace groaned in frustration. "Look, honey, why didn't you call me in L.A. right away? I know you're only nine years old, but that genius I.Q. of yours has some responsibilities attached to it, and one of them is to try to keep your mother at least partially in touch with the world of reality. You know she doesn't have an ounce of common sense where this sort of thing is concerned-bedding down runaways, tangling with pimps. She leads with her heart instead of her head."
"I like Debbie," Teddy said stubbornly.
"You liked that Jennifer character, too, and she stole fifty bucks from your Pinocchio bank before she split."
"She left me a note telling me she'd pay it back, and she was the only one who ever took anything."
Holly Grace saw that she was fighting a losing battle. "You should at least have called me."
Teddy picked up the lid of his stamp collection box and put it over his head, decisively ending the conversation. Holly Grace sighed. Sometimes Teddy was sensible, and sometimes he acted just like Francesca.
Half an hour later, she and Teddy were inching their way through the traffic-snarled streets toward Greenwich Village. As Holly Grace stopped for a light, she thought about the beefy forward on the New York Rangers she was meeting for dinner that night. She was certain he would be terrific in bed, but the fact that she couldn't take advantage of it depressed her. AIDS really pissed her off. Just when women had finally gotten themselves as sexually liberated as men, this awful disease had to come along and stop all the fun. She used to enjoy her one-night stands. She would put her lover through all his best tricks and then kick him out before he had a chance to expect her to make breakfast for him. Whoever said sex with a stranger was demeaning had to be somebody who liked to cook breakfast. Resolutely, she pushed aside the stubborn image of a dark-haired man whose breakfast she had very much liked cooking. That affair had been temporary insanity on her part-a disastrous case of rampaging hormones blinding her judgment.
Holly Grace leaned on the horn as the light changed and a moron in a Dodge Daytona cut in front of her, barely missing the fender of her newest Mercedes. It seemed to her that AIDS had affected everybody with any sense. Even her ex-husband had been sexually monogamous for the past year. She frowned, still upset with him. She certainly didn't have anything against monogamy these days, but unfortunately Dallie was practicing it with someone named Bambi.
"Holly Grace?" Teddy said, looking over at her from the soft depths of the passenger seat. "Do you think it's right for a teacher to flunk a kid just because maybe that kid doesn't do a dumb science project for his gifted class like he's supposed to?"
"This doesn't exactly sound like a theoretical question," Holly Grace replied dryly.
"What's that mean?"
"It means you should have done your science project."
"This one was dumb." Teddy scowled. "Why would anybody want to go around killing a bunch of bugs and sticking them to a board with pins? Don't you think that's dumb?"
Holly Grace was beginning to get the drift. Despite Teddy's penchant for war games and filling every sheet of drawing paper he put his hands on with pictures of guns and knives, most of them dripping blood, the child was a pacifist at heart. She had once seen him carry a spider down seventeen floors in
the elevator so he could release it on the street. "Did you talk to your mother about this?"
"Yeah. She called my gifted teacher to ask if I could draw the bugs instead of killing them, but when
Miss Pearson said no, they ended up getting in an argument and Miss Pearson hung up. Mom doesn't
like Miss Pearson. She thinks she puts too much pressure on us kids. Finally Mom said she'd kill the
bugs for me."
Holly Grace rolled her eyes at the idea of Francesca killing anything. If any bugs had to be killed, she
had a pretty strong notion who would end up doing the job. "That seems to solve your problem, then, doesn't it?"
Teddy looked over at her, a picture of offended dignity. "What kind of jerk do you think I am? What difference would it make to the bugs whether I killed them or she did? They'd still be dead because of me."
Holly Grace looked over at him and smiled. She loved this kid-she really did.
Naomi Jaffe Tanaka Perlman's quaint little mews house was set on a small cobbled Greenwich Village street that held one of New York's few surviving bishop's-crook lampposts. A tangle of winter-bare wisteria vines clung to the green shutters and white-painted brick of the house, which Naomi had purchased with some of the profits from the ad agency she'd started four years ago. She lived there with her second husband, Benjamin R. Perlman, a professor of political science at Columbia. As far as Holly Grace could see, the two of them had a marital match made in left-wing heaven. They gave money to every goosey cause that came their way, held cocktail parties for people who wanted to bust up the CIA, and worked in a soup kitchen once a week for relaxation. Still, Holly Grace had to admit that Naomi had never seemed more content. Naomi had told her that, for the first time in her life, she felt as if all the parts of herself had come together.
Naomi led them into her cozy living room, waddling more than Holly Grace thought necessary, since she was only five months pregnant. Holly Grace hated the gnawing envy that ate away at her every time she looked at Naomi's waddle, but she couldn't seem to help it, even though Naomi had been her good friend ever since their Sassy days. But every time she looked at Naomi, she couldn't help thinking that if she didn't have a baby soon, she would lose her chance forever.