On the rare occasions, like weddings, when Robin and Brian still went out together, Denise baby-sat the girls at Panama Street. She taught them how to make spinach pasta and how to tango. She listened to Erin recite the U.S. presidents in order. She joined Sinéad in raiding drawers for costumes.
“Denise and I will be ethnologists,” Sinéad said, “and, Erin, you can be a Hmong person.”
As she watched Sinéad work out with Erin how a Hmong woman might comport herself, as she watched her dance to Donna Summer with her lazy half-bored minimalism, barely lifting her heels from the floor, faintly rolling her shoulders and letting her hair slide and sift across her back (Erin all the while throwing epileptic fits), Denise loved not only the girl but the girl’s parents for whatever childrearing magic they’d brought to bear on her.
Robin was less impressed. “Of course they love you,” she said. “You’re not trying to comb the tangles out of Sinéad’s hair. You’re not arguing for twenty minutes about what constitutes ‘making the bed.’ You never see Sinéad’s math scores.”
“They’re not good?” the smitten baby-sitter said.
“They’re appalling. We may threaten not to let her see you if they don’t improve.”
“Oh, don’t do that.”
“Maybe you’d like to do some long division with her.”
“I’ll do anything.”
One Sunday in November, while the family of five was walking in Fairmount Park, Brian remarked to Denise, “Robin’s really warmed to you. I wasn’t sure she would.”
“I like Robin a lot,” Denise said.
“I think at first she felt a little intimidated by you.”
“She had good reason to. Didn’t she.”
“I never told her anything.”
“Well, thank you for that.”
It didn’t escape Denise that the qualities that would have enabled Brian to cheat on Robin — his sense of entitlement, his retrieverish conviction that whatever he was doing was the Good Thing We All Want — would also make it easy to cheat on him. Denise could feel herself becoming an extension of “Robin” in Brian’s mind, and since “Robin” had permanent status as “great” in Brian’s estimation, neither she nor “Denise” required further thought or worry on his part.
Brian seemed to put similarly absolute faith in Denise’s friend Rob Zito to oversee the Generator. Brian kept himself reasonably well informed, but mainly, as the weather got colder, he was absent. Denise briefly wondered if he’d fallen for another female, but the new darling turned out to be an independent filmmaker, Jerry Schwartz, who was noted for his exquisite taste in sound-track music and his skill at repeatedly finding funding for red-ink art-house projects. (“A film best enjoyed,” Entertainment Weekly said of Schwartz’s mopey slasher flick Moody Fruit, “with both eyes closed.”) A fervent admirer of Schwartz’s sound tracks, Brian had swooped down like an angel with a crucial fifty thou just as Schwartz began principal photography on a modern-dress Crime and Punishment in which Raskolnikov, played by Giovanni Ribisi, was a young anarchist and rabid audiophile living underground in North Philadelphia. While Denise and Rob Zito were making hardware and lighting decisions at the Generator, Brian joined Schwartz and Ribisi et al. on location at soulful ruins in Nicetown, and swapped CDs with Schwartz from identical zippered CD carrying cases, and ate dinner at Pastis in New York with Schwartz and Greil Marcus or Stephen Malkmus.
Without realizing it, Denise had let herself imagine that Brian and Robin had no sex life anymore. So on New Year’s Eve, when she and four couples and a mob of children gathered at the house on Panama Street and she saw Brian and Robin necking in the kitchen after midnight, she pulled her coat from the bottom of the coat pile and ran from the house. For more than a week she was too ripped up to call Robin or see the girls. She had a thing for a straight woman who was married to a man whom she herself might have liked to marry. It was a reasonably hopeless case. And St. Jude gave and St. Jude took away.
Robin ended Denise’s moratorium with a phone call. She was screeching mad. “Do you know what Jerry Schwartz’s movie is about?”
“Uh, Dostoevsky in Germantown?”
“You know it. How come I didn’t know it? Because he kept it from me, because he knew what I would think!”
“We’re talking about a Giovanni-Ribisi-as-wispily-bearded-Raskolnikov type of thing,” Denise said.
“My husband,” Robin said, “has put fifty thousand dollars, which he got from the W — Corporation, into a movie about a North Philly anarchist who splits two women’s skulls and goes to jail for it! He’s getting off on how cool it is to hang out with Giovanni Ribisi, and Jerry Schwartz, and Ian What’s His Face, and Stephen Whoever, while my North Philly anarchist brother, who really did split somebody’s skull—”
“No, I get it,” Denise said. “There’s a definite want of sensitivity there.”
“I don’t even think so,” Robin said. “I think he’s deeply pissed off with me and he doesn’t even know it.”
From that day forward, Denise became a stealthy advocate of infidelity. She learned that by defending Brian’s minor insensitivities she could spur Robin to more serious accusations with which she then reluctantly concurred. She listened and she listened. She took care to understand Robin better than anyone else ever had. She plied Robin with the questions Brian wasn’t asking: about Billy, about her dad, about church, about her Garden Project plans, about the half-dozen teenagers who’d caught the gardening bug and were coming back next summer, about the romantic and academic travails of her young assistants. She attended Seed Catalogue Night at the Project and put faces to the names of Robin’s favorite kids. She did long division with Sinéad. She nudged conversations in the direction of movie stars or popular music or high fashion, the sorest topics in Robin’s marriage. To the untrained ear, she sounded as if she were merely advocating closer friendship; but she had seen Robin eat, she knew this woman’s hunger.
When a sewer-line problem delayed the opening of the Generator, Brian took the opportunity to attend the Kalama-zoo Film Festival with Jerry Schwartz, and Denise took the opportunity to hang out with Robin and the girls for five nights running. The last of these nights found her agonizing in the video store. She finally settled on Wait Until Dark (disgusting male menaces resourceful Audrey Hepburn, whose coloration happens to resemble Denise Lambert’s) and Something Wild (kinky, gorgeous Melanie Griffith liberates Jeff Daniels from a dead marriage). The very titles, when she arrived at Panama Street, made Robin blush.
Between movies, after midnight, they drank whiskey on the living-room sofa, and in a voice that even for her was unusually squeaky Robin asked permission to ask Denise a personal question. “How often, in, like, a week,” she said, “did you and Emile fool around?”
“I’m not the person to ask about what’s normal,” Denise answered. “I’ve mainly seen normal in the rearview mirror.”
“I know. I know.” Robin stared intensely at the blue TV screen. “But, what did you think was normal?”
“I guess, at the time, I had the sense,” Denise said, telling herself large number, say a large number, “that maybe three times a week might be normal.”