Emily and Nina sat in the kitchen, quietly talking so as not to disturb Anna, who, Nina said, can hear everything if she wants to. Anna’s presence was overwhelming. Especially when she was absent, that small body loomed over them, vigilant, watching. But what, Emily wondered, was she waiting to see or discover. By comparison she thought her own relationship with her mother was not so bad, but she couldn’t imagine living with her forever. That struck Emily as European. The old world that could be visited without being absorbed. Not a model. She watched Nina roll shag into a skinny cigarette that needed to be lit again and again, and fat already-rolled American cigarettes seemed to her representative of things that she as an American took for granted. And as one of the representatives of a powerful and dangerous nation, Emily was hard pressed to explain that she and it were not the same. Although as she sat at the table with Nina and watched her roll shag and listened to her stories about her mother, she found herself wanting to say, Find a place of your own. You can do it, it would be good for you. She recognized her Americanness in ideas like: things can change. Everything is possible. Just leave him. Her. You’ll get the money somehow. Ideas about the frontier and a young country are unavoidable. Emily concentrated again on Nina’s mouth, with the rolled cigarette stuck to her lipsticked lips. Her lipstick was smeared, and when Emily was sixteen she’d written a poem about smeared lipstick and her mother no longer wearing lipstick. She pictured her own mother, who rarely wore lipstick, sitting at the table with them, holding herself upright while Nina slouched. Wanton. Emily regretted the image and replaced it with Madame Bovary dropping her clothes at the sight of her lover. Aren’t we all wanton, witches because of it. Nina threw one leg over the chair. She said very young men were frightened of her and all the other men she knew were married, only available for affairs, if that. As she drank, the skin on her face relaxed, her mouth loosened. Nina repeated that her husband had been a very, very good man but added this time that his being so much older had been a problem. Even so, she said they had a good marriage and never fought, or rarely. She said he sometimes disappeared into his room for a day. Then she stopped and clasped one hand in the other and seemed to be deliberating within herself and miles away. When she came back she said she hated him, despised him, and that he had hated her as well. She called him a bastard and said that on his deathbed he told her that he wanted her to be unhappy after he died and for all her life. He said he had never trusted her and that she was no better than a tramp. The awful thing was that she’d been faithful to him she said. Nina laughed, then cried, and suddenly was vomiting on the kitchen floor. Emily held her head the way her mother had held hers. Nina said he’d gotten his wish and Emily half-carried her upstairs to her bedroom and undressed her. The next day Nina apologized for her drunkenness and none of this was ever spoken of again.
In fact, Nina seemed to avoid Emily. And Emily felt more alien. She tried to think noble thoughts or to think about noble people, like Margaret Fuller, who died so dramatically, her boat sinking off the coast of Fire Island, drowning with her new husband, the Count Ossoli, and their baby. After two years in Italy, she was coming home from her self-imposed exile fighting for the revolution, at Garibaldi’s side, metaphorically, no doubt. And now she was returning home to face everyone who had laughed at her, and she never got there. Never got home. There was something sad, even tragic, Emily thought, about how Margaret Fuller’s happiness was not allowed into her mother country.
Chapter 15
Grace was listening to Lou Reed sing “I can’t stand it anymore, more” when Mark phoned from New York. When he’d left Providence, Grace had taken him and his boyfriend to the train and waved goodbye as it pulled out of the station, Mark yelling, How often have you gotten to do this scene? And he grew smaller and smaller the further away he got. When he was no more than a blotch, Grace went to her waitressing job, cursing him for leaving until she got to the restaurant, where she stopped talking to herself because people think you’re crazy if you do. Mark wanted her to join him and this call described the bounty she’d find were she to arrive. The pissoirs were more dangerous. One club made Oscar’s look like kindergarten or maybe Lamston’s. Every drag queen in the universe plus all the pop stars and fifteen-year-old hustlers who’d go home with you for a cup of coffee and a danish. Bliss, it was twisted bliss. He said his color slides were better than ever and he realized yet again what a terrible photographer he’d been, and he wanted to write a new play, something about Marilyn Monroe, and there’d be a role for her if she’d just get her act together.
Grace was thinking about studying acting, because even if she wasn’t sure that she liked it, it was better than being a waitress. But maybe she’d change her mind about that too. Mark told her to read any biography she could find about Marilyn, just in case.
Show business was kind of appealing. Maggie said Grace might be an exhibitionist. Grace denied it. Maggie had moved into the room beneath her. She’d earned money doing almost everything, from being a short-order cook to being a call girl, the way she was now, once a week, which made it seem more like dating, the way she talked about it. She also did art, as she put it, and magic, concocting potions and drawing magic circles on the floor of her room, which Grace had to be careful not to step into or on. Maggie had one expensive dress for her dates, and that dress was good enough to go anywhere. The way she talked it sounded like the dress could go there without her, Grace told Mark. It had passed inspection by the madam, a woman Grace never saw but heard about. The dress was big enough to be worn no matter what size Maggie was. She could swell as much as twenty pound in two weeks, she swore, because of the moon and gravity and how she held on to liquid.
Black plastic bags of garbage lay strewn all over lower Manhattan and to Mark they looked like parts of a huge body that some maniac had cut up and scattered. People sometimes found babies in the garbage. He couldn’t go for a walk without thoughts like that, even in a bucolic setting he’d wonder about what was really going on in the woods and behind the placid facade of a saltbox house. Mark was debating with himself whether sexual fidelity had any value at all, apart from staying out of VD clinics. Like anyone else his understanding of the present was tainted by some previous view. A moon landing looked fake or merely a reproduction of a fake. An original fake. Like me, he thought. The fact that moon landings happened even depressed him slightly, as if too organized or efficient, they left nothing to the imagination. But he doubted its existence as well, and finally decided it was part of that long list of déjà vus he’d stopped keeping. To think that when Oscar Wilde contemplated life after Reading Gaol, he expected there would be loveliness to look at. Mark jumped on an uptown train, to the Met, to look at paintings of the Madonna and Child because they made him feel peaceful.
Maggie’s room was a mess but not as bad as Grace’s, in which she could never find anything. Grace was looking for something she’d lost when her father called to say that her mother had had a heart attack. It didn’t look good. Grace borrowed money from Maggie to return to New York, Maggie sympathetic even when Grace walked right in the middle of a magic circle, but Grace said she felt nothing. Maggie said it was shock.