But Lucy’s column was the biggest success, and it had been from the first. She was, as Cindi Coeur, a Latter-Day Miss Lonelyhearts, and the picture that accompanied her column showed her with hair romantically disheveled, eyes wide (presumably with wisdom), and a smile that, coupled with hair and eyes, might have suggested après l’amour, tristesse. The beatific smile was actually après $125 a gram.
These days, Lucy did the column straight — if you could call making up the questions and writing the answers on pieces of pink stationery she had her mother send her from John Wanamaker in Philadelphia and using a fountain pen with lavender ink doing it straight. Lately, Lucy had been thinking that maybe it was time to stop. Just because Jagger was still popping up like a jack-in-the-box, did she really want to be Cindi Coeur at forty? Still, Lucy herself admitted to a morbid fascination with being facile.
Dear Cindi Coeur,
When my husband makes love to me he always has a lot of money under the pillow. I mean, before we get into bed he empties out his wallet, and in the middle of lovemaking, he plunges his hands into the money. His money is always all wrinkled. I think that clerks in stores will see the money and maybe know what is going on. What can I say to my husband to make him stop? Do you think that he likes money more than he likes me?
Sad in the Sack
Dear Sad,
Your husband is sexually excited by money. This is called a “fetish.” You have not given me enough information. First, I need to know the ages and educational backgrounds of some of the clerks in order to tell you whether they will know what your husband is up to. You do suggest that your husband has quite a bit of money if there is so much that he can plunge his hands into it. What denomination is this currency? If your husband has as much money as it seems, I want to suggest two things: (1) that you put up with whatever he does and (2) that you not consult your clergyman, as he will expect increased donations.
The phone rang in the kitchen and Lucy got up to answer it. It was her sister, Jane, calling from California. Jane’s calls were always a sidestep from whatever she was doing. She would call someone, clamp the phone between shoulder and ear, then become so involved in painting her nails or doing leg stretches that when the phone was answered, it caught her off-guard.
“Oh. Hello,” Jane said.
“Hi,” Lucy said.
“I set my alarm,” Jane said. “I wanted to be sure to catch you. It’s seven o’clock here.” She sounded offended, as if Lucy had arranged for it to be early morning on the West Coast.
“What’s up?” Lucy said.
What was usually up was something involving Jane’s daughter, Nicole.
“Nicole’s blue,” Jane said. “Piggy was trying to set up a spot for her on Saturday Night Live, and it fell through. Then you know that gorilla that she liked so much — the one they put in a sailor suit, that she stood next to on the deck of the QE2 for Vogue? He just died of pneumonia. I sent a contribution to the San Diego Zoo.”
For the last two years, Nicole Nelson had appeared on Passionate Intensity as Stephanie Sykes, an abused child from a broken family, a teenage alcoholic who was being rehabilitated by a woman internist and her husband, Gerald, a wimpy would-be novelist who felt misunderstood not only by his wife but by the world. The woman internist, who secretly subjected herself to experimental surgery to correct sterility, then found out that she could conceive. She faced the dilemma of whether to divorce her husband, who was at last working on his novel, to have a child with her true love, another doctor at the hospital, thereby disrupting the family routine she had established that had put young Stephanie on the road to recovery, or to settle for what she now realized was probably the correct thing: a childless marriage. This was also complicated by the fact that her husband’s sister, a volunteer worker at the hospital who had always envied her sister-in-law and who had had a brief affair with the same doctor, was now considering blackmail, wanting to force her sister-in-law into the dull routine of motherhood with the wrong man, so that she could make the handsome doctor who would be left behind fall in love with her again. The further complication was that when his wife’s wealthy benefactor died, the wimpy husband had buckled down long enough to put his wife through the last two years of medical school. The day of her graduation, he had had a mental breakdown and, when he was recovering, a brief affair with a woman who worked in the lab. Then he had at last gotten an advance for his book, Barren, a fictionalized account of his and his wife’s failure to have children. What no one but the doctor/lover knew was that Stephanie Sykes was pregnant and begging the doctor to abort her. What even the doctor did not realize was that his lover’s husband’s ex-lover, the woman who worked in the lab, had found out that Stephanie was pregnant. She was anti-abortion, and if the doctor performed the surgery, she was going to go to the wimpy novelist and let him know what a farce his happy family life was, in hopes of getting him herself.
“Nicole needs a vacation. I want to send her to you,” Jane said.
“She’d be bored to death,” Lucy said. “You know what happens here? In the late afternoon the cows walk into the field.”
“Boredom might be good for her,” Jane said. “Don’t people develop their imaginations if they’re bored?”
Why argue? Lucy thought. If Jane had made up her mind, the visit from Nicole was a fait accompli. Only seconds elapsed before Jane’s ideas materialized. Their mother likened Jane’s mind to a dollop of pancake batter dropped on a hot griddle.
“Both of you come, and we’ll go to Philadelphia and visit Mother,” Lucy said.
“I’m going to tell you something that you can never tell another soul,” Jane said. “I’ve gained eight pounds since you last saw me. I’m on a macrobiotic regime. I have to stay close to the seaweed store. I’ll come visit when I’ve finished ingesting half of the ocean.”
“Does Nicole want to come?” Lucy said.
“She loves you,” Jane said. “She had such a good time the last time she visited. She still talks about Heath Bar Crunch ice cream and Hildon’s motorcycle.”
“He sold it,” Lucy said.
He had sold his motorcycle because he wanted a pickup instead, but so far he hadn’t found one with the right ambience.
“Come on,” Jane said. “Martyr yourself.”
Lucy laughed. She spent no more time than other people thinking about being a do-gooder. Like the rest of the world, she was preoccupied and imperfect: she had had an abortion, crushed a few rabbits under tires as she rolled down country roads, turned the page of the magazine when her eye met the eyes of the orphan she could save if she made out a check and sent it before the winds of fate blew the urchin’s last grain of rice away.
Take Nicole for the summer? To Lucy, she was still a baby — the poor baby whose father had died before he ever saw her, two months after he and Jane married, off the southernmost point of the United States, in Key West, after drinking ten piña coladas with friends. After Nicole had been born, Jane had gotten engaged again, to an actor. They broke it off when Jane had a miscarriage, but before they did, he arranged for Nicole to meet his agent. Just after her first birthday, Nicole had done a toy ad, hugging a Baby Do-Right doll against her cheek, and the rest was history. From the first, she had not just been personable in front of the camera. Other children had rashes and insect bites, but Nicole’s skin was unblemished; she always looked windswept rather than rumpled. She was the perfect California girl long before her mother took her there. Her bedtime lullaby, suitably enough, was harmonized by the Beach Boys, who also played at her kindergarten graduation. She tap danced on the Tonight show, sharing the limelight with Charles Bronson and a macaw. The first time Nicole visited her grandmother in Philadelphia, Grammy could not believe that the child had never learned a prayer. Instead of rattling off “Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep” when she was put to bed, Nicole waited patiently to be questioned. At night her mother always asked, “How do you feel about everything?” When Grammy took Nicole to see a Shirley Temple movie, Nicole’s whispered comment was, “What’s wrong with that girl?”