Alternate Side Page 14

  An exhibit on the silverwork of the Navajos might impress, or at least mollify, the curators at the more established museums. It was actually a beautiful exhibit—the Museum of the American Indian had loaned them some clay pottery and a few ceremonial robes and headdresses, and the turquoise and silver glowed against a black fabric with a thick nap. But when Nora had gotten up there that afternoon it was empty except for an old woman with a walker, her long black coat almost dragging on the floor because her curved back and forward lurch had made her inches shorter than she once was. A younger woman in stretch pants holding a down jacket was pressed up against an exhibit case across the room. Old woman and paid minder: like twins, they, too, were everywhere in New York City. Every time Nora saw a pair together, indivisible, like skis and poles or salt and pepper shakers, a small voice in her head said, Not me. Behind that was another voice that said, I bet that’s what they once thought, too.

  Bang! Bang! Bang! The old woman was hitting the base of the display case with the walker with a strength belied by her stringy, spotted hands. Each time she did, the guard yelled, “Ma’am!” and the aide’s shoulders jumped. Nora could imagine the aide going home every night, slipping her black lace-up shoes past her bunions, sighing, and saying to her husband, or her sister, or her kids, “That lady is a handful and a half.” Nora wondered if even Ricky’s wife, Nita, could have kept her under control. She couldn’t blame the guard for doing nothing.

  When Nora moved to the older woman’s side, she swiveled with the walker in her hand and Nora stepped back a bit. “Can I help you?” Nora said quietly.

  “That’s mine!” the woman shouted, pointing to the large squash-blossom necklace that was the centerpiece of the exhibit. It was not particularly valuable, especially compared to most of what they had, but the center turquoise was very fine and the etchings intricate.

  “And that,” said the woman, gesturing with the walker as the guard moved forward behind her. “That, too.” A bracelet. Another bracelet. Another necklace. They were all from Bebe’s personal collection, although Nora had never been able to imagine her wearing them. “I can’t abide silver,” Bebe had told her once. “It’s so ordinary. Forks and spoons, okay. Jewelry? Forget it.”

  “They’re beautiful pieces,” Nora said.

  “Oh, good Lord above,” said the aide behind her.

  “They were purchased in Santa Fe,” the woman said. “There’s a lot of cheap copies for sale out there. These are the real thing.” Her voice sounded like a door that needed its hinges oiled.

  “Why don’t we go to my office? You can tell me more.”

  For the first time the woman looked up at Nora. The whites of her eyes were a faded yellow, the irises a milky brown, as though if she lived long enough, the colors would meet in the middle. The look in her eyes was knowing, almost predatory, and her first thought, that the woman was senile and confusing jewelry she’d once owned with what they had on exhibit, evaporated.

  “You run this place?” the woman said.

  “Yes,” said Nora, smiling.

  “Shame on you,” the woman said, and she tightened her hands on the bar of the walker, like the little claws of a parakeet on a perch, and clumped out of the exhibition hall, her coat sweeping the floor. “Thank the Lord,” the aide said as they left.

  Later, as Nora went over their coming events—a class on gem assessment for men buying an engagement ring, a lecture by a historian on Marie Antoinette’s jewels—Richard buzzed her. “There’s a woman here who is asking for a minute or two of your time,” he said. “Her name is Deborah Messer. She says her mother was here earlier.” Nora looked down at her computer screen. Richard had texted: Mother disruptive in southwest exhibit.

  Deborah Messer turned out to be a handsome woman perhaps ten years older than Nora. Like her mother, she was a type, albeit a different type, well dressed, in beautifully tailored clothes that might have been in her closet for decades or be brand new, so classic as to be completely unmemorable and acceptable.

  “My mother was here today,” she said. “I understand she caused quite a kerfuffle.”

  “There’s a word you don’t hear very often,” Nora said, but the woman didn’t smile.

  “I also understand she may have caused some damage, and I wanted to take care of that.”

  “There was no damage,” Nora said. “She was just confused. She seemed to think that some of the pieces in an exhibit of Navajo silver jewelry were hers.”

  “They are.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I suppose it’s more accurate to say that they were. My mother was Norman Pearl’s first wife. I’m his daughter.”

  If Nora had not spent so many years being politic with older donors and museum trustees, she would have said what she was thinking: Holy shit. Bebe had once told her that most men truly wanted to have three different kinds of wives during their lifetimes: the first one, who was to make a home and a family; the dishy trophy wife, who could be enjoyed and then dispensed with when lust paled and died; and the third wife, who would be devoted but still interesting, admiring but not slavish. The point was that Bebe was that third wife. Nora didn’t know if there had been a second, but it had certainly not occurred to her that Norman Pearl’s first wife was even still living.

  “I toured the museum soon after it opened,” the woman added. “As far as I could tell, none of the things on display belonged to anyone but my father’s last wife.” Nora could tell by the way she said this that that was what she always called Bebe: my father’s last wife. No “Bebe dear” from this woman, for sure and certain. “My father didn’t acquire a taste for buying jewelry until after he and my mother divorced. She kept her engagement ring, of course, and a few other things, but there were some items at the weekend house that she’d either forgotten or was forbidden to fetch, depending on whom you believe.” Deborah Messer sighed heavily, as though she was exhaling the poison of years and years.

  “I don’t know what to say,” Nora said. She was painfully aware of the Andy Warhol four-panel portrait above the office sofa, the portrait that Bebe had had hung recently to, in her words, “dress up the place.” The father’s last wife, times four, in neon colors.

  “There’s no need to say anything,” Deborah Messer said, standing with her camel-hair coat over one arm. “I didn’t intend to make you feel bad. I was just concerned about damages. I’m relieved to know that there weren’t any.”

  “Please tell your mother that I’m sorry.”

  “For what? She was the first wife of a rich man who got much richer after the divorce. It’s not an unusual story. She has everything she needs. I don’t know how she found out about these things, but I imagine they were just symbolic.” She chuckled mirthlessly. “This whole place is symbolic, isn’t it?” she said, and for a moment the mask fell. It happened so seldom in Nora’s world that it was even more shocking than what had gone before. In an instant the placid water of good manners closed over the fury and erased it as though it had never been, but the mother’s words had seemed reflected in the daughter’s face: Shame on you.

  A real museum, Charlie said to her that night. There couldn’t have been a worse night for him to say that. There hadn’t been a time when Nora had felt so uncertain of what she was doing. Shame on you, she heard over and over again, shame on you. And she knew if she told Bebe, the big boss, what had happened, she would say contemptuously, Oh, them. Those two. The detritus of the past, with their silver jewelry and wool coats.

  “All those emeralds getting you down?” Phil had said when she passed him at the end of the day, and when she went on without a look or greeting, she heard him say quietly to himself, “One of those days.”

  But she shared none of that with her husband. There had been times when she and Charlie had aired their uncertainties with each other, but not this time. Instead she narrowed her eyes and said, “Let me give
you the bottom line, Charlie: I am staying in my little job in my little museum living in my little house. I am not selling it. And since my name is on the deed, you can’t sell, either. It’s as simple as that. End of discussion.”

  “Bun,” Charlie began, but Nora interrupted.

  “I’ve had a really long day. I’m going to bed.”

  The lot is closed to all parking until further notice. Fees will be reimbursed at the end of the month on a pro rata basis. Any car found in the lot will be towed.

  Sidney Stoller

  New York hospitals were like telephone companies: they had started out smallish and local, and then merged and merged and merged so that they became behemoths. The greatest behemoth of all was the hospital in which Nora had given birth to the twins. From the bridge it looked like a small city, and inside it felt like one. Charlie had gotten lost in its hallways when Nora was recovering from her C-section and had somehow found himself entering neuro-oncology, which he’d only realized after he passed two rooms in which the occupants had shaved heads with railroad tracks of staples across them. It had taken directions from two nurses and an orderly to get him back to maternity.

  It also turned out to be the hospital where Ricky was recovering from yet another surgery, which Nora had learned through various disapproving miming gestures from Charity. Nora was ashamed that she hadn’t visited sooner. She stood paralyzed in the gift shop: Flowers? Balloons? A teddy bear whose shirt said HOPE YOU’RE BEAR-ING UP? She settled on a large box of chocolates. She figured that even if Ricky didn’t have a sweet tooth, his children must.

  “Eight-oh-two-B?” she said in one of the endless hallways, and someone hurrying in the other direction pointed.

  It was a double room, but one bed was obviously unoccupied. Ricky was in the other, his leg encased in a cast to the hip, immobilized by equipment that looked not unlike one of the trusses on the bridge seen from the window of the hospital room. In the buzzing fluorescence of the terrible overhead lighting he looked waxy and slightly gray. She remembered that the doctors had wanted to keep Rachel for a few additional days after Nora had given birth because they said the baby had jaundice. “In this light, how can you tell?” Nora said to the doctors. “Everybody looks jaundiced. You look jaundiced.” They said it was clear in the blood tests, but she’d taken Rachel home anyhow, even though she had looked a little yellower than Oliver.

  Ricky’s breathing was shallow, but he seemed to be sleeping soundly. A breakfast tray still held a plastic cup of that kind of orange juice that separated into watery top and bright, unappetizing bottom. “Like sunset in a toxic nuclear sky,” Ollie had said once when he was holding a glass of the stuff in a dining hall during a college visit. “That’s a little dramatic,” Nora had said, but she’d never forgotten the turn of phrase.

  Nora remembered that when Charlie had gotten lost in the hospital she was furious because she was so hungry and he had promised her a pastrami sandwich and chocolate pudding. When he finally arrived at her room, where a lactation consultant had just tried to explain how to breastfeed twins—in succession, which had almost killed her over the months that she’d done it—Nora was in a fine postpartum rage state until Charlie opened a greasy white paper bag and took out a glazed doughnut. It was one of those just-made doughnuts that tasted like a cloud composed of sugar and fat. Nora had bitten into it and started to cry. “I can’t believe you brought me this,” she said around an enormous mouthful.

  “I got the sandwich and the pudding, too,” Charlie said.

  “No, no, this is perfect. It’s so good. It might be the single best thing I’ve ever eaten in my entire life.”

  “Your hormones are out of control,” Charlie said, unwrapping the sandwich on her tray table.

  “I love you,” Nora mumbled, stuffing the rest of the doughnut in her mouth.

  “I love you, too.”

  Looking at Ricky’s breakfast tray, she could almost taste that doughnut. Someone had told her that elsewhere in the hospital there were rooms with toile drapes, nice art, a menu from which you could choose your dinner. But she was quite sure Ricky’s insurance wouldn’t cover that. She had once thought hospitals were the great equalizers, but in New York even they could be stratified so that people with money seemed to be in a completely different place from people with none, or even people with less. She had once complained about how long it had taken in the ER when Ollie had cut the underside of his chin open on the edge of the tub. Another mother at school had said, “You took him to the ER? My pediatrician says to dose them with codeine and wait until morning to take them to a good plastic surgeon.” Now that Oliver was a head taller than she was, Nora sometimes saw the small pink line where he’d gotten five stitches and wondered if she should have waited until morning and taken him to a good plastic surgeon. In Manhattan, finding one must be like finding a good latte. Just walk down the street with your wallet out.

  She put the box of chocolates next to the breakfast tray and stood silently, looking at Ricky’s face. He had a couple days’ growth of beard, the way male models and movie actors did nowadays. She supposed shaving was beside the point. On one arm he had an IV line attached to one of those little boxes that she knew, from visiting Jean-Ann after she had had her mastectomy, allowed you to dose yourself with morphine. She was just starting to wonder whether she should leave, when Ricky opened his eyes. It seemed to take him a minute to focus them.

  “I didn’t mean to wake you,” Nora whispered.

  “No, no, that’s okay. Sit down. It’s nice that you came. Charity said you might come by.”

  Nora pulled up a chair. “Are you in a lot of pain?” she said.

  “It’s not so bad now. In the beginning—” Ricky grimaced.

  “I’m so sorry, Enrique.”

  “Nothing to do with you, Mrs. Nolan,” he said. “How’s Mr. Nolan?” Nora wondered if Ricky knew that Charlie was parroting the Jack line to the authorities. Nora had shifted to saying, “Talk to your father,” when the twins asked about it.

  “Good. He was asking about you. He wanted you to know he’s sorry, too.” Not true, but suitable. “Everyone on the block really misses you.” Absolutely true. The forecast was for a freak ice storm later in the week, and Nora knew that everyone was wondering who would salt the sidewalks, as though salting the sidewalks were a complex ritual that none of them could manage themselves since it involved a bag of salt and the ability to drop it in handfuls.

  “How’s the dryer vent?”

  “The dryer vent?”

  “Charity, she’s not getting the clothes dry the way she’s used to. The last time that happened, I cleaned out the vent with a Shop-Vac. Lotta people think, you take care of the lint filter, you got it covered, but a lot of lint winds up in that dryer vent, and then it doesn’t dry so well.” Ricky smiled, his eyelids at half-mast. Nora wondered whether he was high from the medication, and also whether when they’d lived in the apartment they’d gotten rid of a perfectly fine dryer that seemed as though it didn’t work anymore purely because they hadn’t used a Shop-Vac on the vent.

  “She hasn’t said anything to me. Maybe it’s better. Or maybe she’s just waiting for you to come back and fix it for her. You know the way Charity is. She doesn’t like change much.”

  “Maybe I can get one of the other guys to go down. I gotta see how they feel about that, you know. Plus how they could get down there. You know, there are a lot of issues.” Ricky looked away, grimaced again.

  “Oh, I almost forgot,” Nora said, reaching into her purse and pulling out an envelope. “Your Christmas bonus. I never got to give it to you.” She laid the envelope on the tray table next to the chocolates. “I didn’t want to wait until you were back to work.”

  “Ah, you didn’t have to do that. But I appreciate it. It’s tough, you know. I miss the job. Charity comes by, she tells me about something like the dryer vent, I feel b
ad. She’s got to have a dryer that works, Charity. You don’t want her to have problems with that machine.”

  “What the hell?” said a loud voice from the doorway. A small, round woman in acid-washed jeans and a T-shirt stood there, and Nora realized that until now she’d seen Ricky’s wife only from the chest up and at a distance.

  “Hi, Nita,” Nora said. “I just wanted to see how your husband was doing. I brought some chocolates.”

  “What the hell—you’re talking to him about fixing your damn dryer, the shape he’s in? Look at him. The man might never walk again, and all you care about is your damn dryer?”

  “Babe, it’s Mrs. Nolan. She’s the one who brought the humidifier up that time. She sent the boys all that stuff, the soccer goal, the checker game. She’s got Charity works for her, they got a problem—”

  “They got zero problems, Rico. You’re the one with the problems, your leg all busted up like that. You brought chocolates? You bring his van back fixed up? You bring the money he’d be making if he wasn’t lying here in a hospital bed? You bring my rent money?”

  A nurse stuck her head in. “You’re disturbing the other patients again, Mrs. Ramos,” she said.

  “I should leave,” Nora said. “I should let you rest, Enrique.” Nita stood in her way, with her arms across her chest. Her cleavage was still gargantuan. Nora noticed that she had a deep, ropy scar along one cheek, as though someone who hadn’t really learned how to suture skin had practiced on her a long time ago. She was wearing a gold cross, a Saint Christopher medal, and a nameplate necklace that said JUANITA. She followed Nora out into the hallway, which was bright, with even less flattering fluorescent lights and pale-green paint. All hospital corridors could double as operating theaters in a pinch.