Carolina schedules regular lessons for the rest of your time in New York. You don’t even have an appointment calendar; she tells you to go get one. Sometimes they give them out at the bank for free. Carry it always. You will have many appointments. You race back to the Barbizon, scuffing your best flats without a care (you can touch that up later); you’re dying to make a long-distance call to Fred to tell him the news, to outline a detailed plan for your entire future, but you’ve agreed not to call unless there’s an emergency, long-distance is simply too expensive. So you sit down to write him a letter on the hotel stationery; three drafts later, you’ve got a version that seems reasonable, though when it reaches Dad, it’s still shocking. Fortunately, by the time you return home, he’s had some time to sit with it, and you reach a compromise: you will rebudget, you will go back and forth from New York every other month and see how that goes, and you will do this for a year.
But before you leave New York, something else unexpected comes up. Carolina, seeing your rapid improvement under her tutelage — you do everything she tells you to, practice as much as she dictates but no more (she knows you would be inclined to) — invites another student of hers, a tenor, to sing a duet with you. This goes as marvelously as she expected, though what she hadn’t realized (or perhaps she had), was that there would be sparks between you and this handsome, also-married tenor. Carolina, married, divorced, married again, divorced again, married again, and now widowed at sixty with an amante, knows a thing or two about sparks, and she keeps you behind after the married tenor leaves and pats the sofa next to her, again. I do not tell you to do this, my love. I do not tell you to do this, but I do not tell you not to do this. We cannot — must not — contain our passion. Our passion and our art are one thing, do you see? Discretion is everything, yes? You try to interrupt Carolina several times during this; Oh, I would never! you insist (though you have imagined moments like this a time or two, harmless fantasies, weren’t they?), but she shushes you, says I don’t say what will happen. I just say I know of this. Our hearts and bodies go where they will.
Just a Letter
On a trip back east for a visit, you read me a letter to the editor you wrote that got printed in the New York Times. You are as elated as if you’d been proclaimed the next Virginia Woolf. Someone published what I wrote, you say. I’m a published writer! I nod; it was just a letter to the editor, though, granted, a funny one. Something about bagels. Don’t people publish letters to the editor all the time? I ask. How do you not get it? you answer. Someone read what I wrote and they saw something in it. Did you become a singer overnight? Hardly, Betsy. I busted my ass for years. For a brief second you think I might key into your point, when Victor asks how much you got paid for it. They don’t pay for letters to the editor, Victor. You’re pretty sure he knew this before he asked. If they don’t pay then you’re not really a writer. Everything isn’t about money. Don’t kid yourself. Well, it isn’t for me. Yeah, I’m aware, he says. You have health insurance yet? You know I don’t. Get back to me when your letters to the editor start offering major medical. At this point, you look like you could haul off and punch him in the face, and if it had been my battle, I very well might have. Instead you tell him to fuck off.
— You know I never would have told you or Victor to fuck off.
— Well, there’s your problem.
— You might be right about that.
— Anyway, you said you only wanted things that didn’t happen.
— But this is not unlike something that did happen.
— So it could have happened, but didn’t.
— Sure.
— Like all the other scenes so far.
— I guess what I’m saying is that the point of view gets blurry in these scenes. Because here, in this one, it’s you, talking about me, sort of from my POV, even though you were actually there, as opposed to let’s say a scene that we know didn’t happen in any form.
— Now you’re confusing me.
— It is confusing.
— How are you and I supposed to have any conflict if we’re not in the same scene together? Someone has to write it. How do you have a mother-daughter story where the mother and the daughter are never together?
—. .
Holiday Letter
Your father, on the other hand, is positively proud about your letter to the editor. You’re on your way! he says. He buys you your first laptop computer to replace that clunky old desktop from the eighties. You’re going to need the best moving forward. You’ll be on a book tour in no time! I have to actually finish writing a book first, Dad. Well that’s why you need the laptop. Do you know that soon everything will be done on the computer? People are going to write letters onscreen, and send them instantly through their phones. It will be fantastic! Your father has never had piles of money sitting around, and he and Jeannie do have other kids too, but they’re always happy to help out when they can, and he could not be more excited to see your name in the paper. This is one of the top stories in his holiday letter this year, in the same paragraph as your sister’s college graduation and your youngest brother’s first son.
What didn’t make the holiday letter at alclass="underline" your father’s heart attack.
— Interesting.
— Really? I guessed right?
— No, but he was in the hospital. A heart attack — that’ll work. That sounds weird.
You drive out to Iowa City from Chicago several times a year now — it’s just four hours door to door — so when Jeannie calls from the hospital with the news about Fred, you’re able to get there later that same day without taking on any more credit card debt. The prognosis is good, assuming he changes his entire diet and currently non-existent exercise routine, but he’ll stay in the hospital for a week for observation. Your father is a different kind of patient from me, he’s a patient patient, he’s a patient who doesn’t hate the lukewarm beef broth or the pudding cups on his hospital tray (Oh, these are delicious! Jeannie, can we get these at home?), who’s content to catch reruns of old Westerns on network TV and read the back copies of Ramparts magazine that have been piling up at home.
—Ramparts hasn’t existed since the seventies, Mom, but whatever, I guess.
— But is it believable that he still has piles of them that he bookmarked in 1968 to read later?
— Yep. It sure is. Continue.
He would have never thought a thing of it if you hadn’t made it there, but the fact that you did, and that you stayed the whole week, spent every day next to his bed watching those Westerns that actually put you both to sleep at times, sharing the extra pudding he got the nice nurse to bring, meant more to him than he could ever tell you. You really didn’t have to come, Betsy. Dad, I would never not come. Well, it was extra-special nice of you. You’re a good daughter. I could improve. I don’t think a poll of my parents would indicate that to be fact. You’re a wonderful daughter, Betsy! Jeannie says. I fought with Mom when she was in the hospital. What? Oh, you’re exaggerating. Not really.