“This is very admirable,” Denise said.
Robin, mistaking her tone, said, “Whatever.”
Denise sat on the plastic skin of a bale of peat moss while Robin washed up and changed her clothes. Maybe it was because she could count on one hand the autumn Saturday evenings that she’d spent outside a kitchen since she was twenty, or maybe because some sentimental part of her was taken in by the egalitarian ideal that Klaus Müller-Karltreu found so phony in St. Jude, but the word she wanted to apply to Robin Passafaro, who had lived in urban Philly all her life, was “midwestern.” By which she meant hopeful or enthusiastic or community-spirited.
She didn’t care so much, after all, about being liked. She found herself liking. When Robin came out and locked the house, Denise asked if she had time for dinner.
“Brian and his dad took the girls to see the Phillies,” Robin said. “They’ll come home full of stadium food. So, sure. We can have dinner.”
“I have stuff in my kitchen,” Denise said. “Do you mind?”
“Anything. Whatever.”
Typically, if a chef invited you to dinner, you considered yourself lucky and you hastened to show it. But Robin seemed determined not to be impressed.
Night had fallen. The air on Catharine Street smelled like the last weekend of baseball. Walking east, Robin told Denise the story of her brother, Billy. Denise had already heard the story from Brian, but parts of Robin’s version were new to her.
“So wait,” she said. “Brian sold his company to W—, and then Billy attacked one of W—’s vice presidents, and you think there’s a connection?”
“God, yes,” Robin said. “That’s what’s so horrible.”
“Brian didn’t mention that part.”
Shrillness came pouring out of Robin. “I can’t believe it! That’s the whole point. God! It is so, so, so like him not to mention that part. Because that part might actually make things hard for him, you know, the way things are hard for me. It might get in the way of his fun time in Paris, or his lunch date with Harvey Keitel, or whatever. I can’t believe he didn’t mention it.”
“Explain to me what the problem is?”
“Rick Flamburg’s disabled for life,” Robin said. “My brother is in jail for the next ten or fifteen years, this horrible company is corrupting the city schools, my father is on anti-psychotics, and Brian is like, hey, look what W — just did for us, let’s move to Mendocino!”
“But you didn’t do anything wrong,” Denise said. “You’re not responsible for any of those other things.”
Robin turned and looked straight into her. “What’s life for?”
“I don’t know.”
“I don’t either. But I don’t think it’s about winning.”
They marched along in silence. Denise, to whom winning did matter, grimly noted that, on top of all his other luck, Brian had married a woman of principle and spirit.
She further noted, however, that Robin didn’t seem particularly loyal.
Denise’s living room contained little more than it had after Emile had emptied it three years earlier. In their contest of self-denials, on the Weekend of Tears, Denise had had the double advantage of feeling guiltier than Emile and of having already agreed to take the house. In the end she’d succeeded in making Emile take practically every joint possession that she liked or valued and many others that she didn’t like but could have used.
The emptiness of the house had disgusted Becky Hemerling. It was cold, it was self-hating, it was a monastery.
“Nice and spare,” Robin commented.
Denise sat her down at the half Ping-Pong table that served as her kitchen table, opened a fifty-dollar wine, and proceeded to feed her. Denise had seldom had to struggle with her weight, but she would have blimped out in a month if she’d eaten like Robin. She watched in awe as her guest, elbows flying, devoured two kidneys and a homemade sausage, tried each of the kraut salads, and spread butter on her third healthy wedge of artisanal rye bread.
She herself had the butterflies and ate hardly anything.
“St. Jude is one of my favorite saints,” Robin said. “Did Brian tell you I’ve been going to church?”
“He mentioned it, yes.”
“I’m sure he did. I’m sure he was very understanding and patient!” Robin’s voice was loud and her face red with wine. Denise felt a constriction in her chest. “Anyway, one of the great things about being Catholic is you get to have saints, like St. Jude.”
“Patron saint of hopeless causes?”
“Exactly. What’s a church for if not lost causes?”
“I feel this way about sports teams,” Denise said. “That the winners don’t need your help.”
Robin nodded. “You know what I mean. But if you live with Brian you start feeling like there’s something wrong with losers. Not that he’ll actually criticize you. He’ll always be very understanding and patient and loving. Brian’s great! Nothing wrong with Brian! It’s just that he’d rather root for a winner. And I’m not really a winner like that. And I don’t really want to be.”
Denise would never have talked about Emile like this. She wouldn’t do it even now.
“See, but you are that kind of winner,” Robin said. “That’s why I frankly sort of saw you as my potential replacement. I saw you as next in line.”
“Nope.”
Robin made her self-consciously delighted sounds. She said, “Hee hee hee!”
“In Brian’s defense,” Denise said, “I don’t think he needs you to be Brooke Astor. I think he’d settle for bourgeois.”
“I can live with being bourgeois,” Robin said. “A house like this is what I want. I love that your kitchen table is half a Ping-Pong table.”
“It’s yours for twenty bucks.”
“Brian’s wonderful. He’s the person I wanted to spend my life with, he’s the father of my kids. I’m the problem. I’m the one who’s not getting with the program. I’m the one who’s going to confirmation class. Listen, do you have a jacket? I’m freezing.”
The low candles were spilling wax in the October draft. Denise fetched her favorite jean jacket, a discontinued Levi’s product with a woolen lining, and noticed how large it looked on Robin’s smaller arms, how it engulfed her thinner shoulders, like a letter jacket on a ball-player’s girlfriend.
The next day, wearing the jacket herself, she found it softer and lighter than she remembered. She pulled on the collar and hugged herself with it.
No matter how hard she worked that fall, she had more free time and a more flexible schedule than she’d had in many years. She began to drop by the Project with food from her kitchen. She went over to Brian and Robin’s house on Panama Street, found Brian away, and stayed for an evening. A few nights later, when Brian came home and found her baking madeleines with the girls, he acted as if he’d seen her in his kitchen a hundred times.
She had a lifetime of practice at arriving late in a family of four and being loved by all. Her next conquest on Panama Street was Sinéad, the serious reader, the little fashion plate. Denise took her shopping on Saturdays. She bought her costume jewelry, an antique Tuscan jewelry case, mid-seventies disco and proto-disco albums, old illustrated books about costumes, Antarctica, Jackie Kennedy, and shipbuilding. She helped Sinéad select larger, brighter, lesser gifts for Erin. Sinéad, like her father, had impeccable taste. She wore black jeans and corduroy miniskirts and jumpers, silver bangles, and strings of plastic beads even longer than her very long hair. In Denise’s kitchen, after shopping, she peeled potatoes immaculately or rolled out simple doughs while the cook contrived lagniappes for a child’s palate: wedges of pear, strips of homemade mortadella, elderberry sorbet in a doll-size bowl of elderberry soup, lambsmeat ravioli Xed with mint-charged olive oil, cubes of fried polenta.