Alternate Side Read online

  “I just wanted to see how he was doing,” Nora said.

  “Maybe take it back into the room?” the nurse at the nurse’s station said.

  Nita ignored the nurse, who looked nervous. “You people,” Nita said. “You make me laugh. How’s he doing? His leg bone is broken in two places. He’s got pins in it. Twenty stitches in his leg, and that’s before they cut him open for the pins. A couple of torn ligaments that the doctors say might really be a problem in the future. In the future, they say, he could have some problems bending the knee. It’s gonna be hard for him to fix your dryer then, huh?” She’d started out in almost a normal tone of voice, but now she was yelling. The nurse stood up. Obviously the staff was familiar with Nita.

  “I’m so sorry about what happened.”

  “Yeah, you’re all so sorry. What about that son of a bitch who did this? He sorry? He gonna pay? Rehab, lost wages, pain and suffering? Compensation?” She sounded like the personal-injury lawyers who advertised on TV. Nora wondered if she’d already hired one.

  “I hope your boys are okay,” she said.

  “How you think they are? You want to explain to them why some crazy person beat their father up so bad he put him in the hospital?”

  Put that way, it sounded as though Nora had wound up on the wrong side of some battle line. She said, “All of us on the block like Enrique and miss him.”

  Nita pushed past her, and though the hallway was wide, she came much too close, elbowing Nora aside. Nora felt stupid for coming in the first place. “How many more worthless assholes from where you live coming here to pretend they care whether he lives or dies?” Nita said over her shoulder.

  “He seems like a nice man,” said the nurse behind Nora at the nurse’s station in a low voice. “She’s a piece of work, though.”

  Nora took the subway back downtown afterward. She remembered taking it up there when she was pregnant, to visit her doctor, to tour the hospital. It had been terrifying. It wasn’t just that she was so big that she felt she might pitch forward off of the platform, onto the tracks. The subway was scarier then. The twins and their friends rode it now at all hours. “Every once in a while you get a weenie wagger, but if you pull out your phone to take a picture, they usually stop,” one of Rachel’s friends had said.

  The train was the great equalizer now, not the hospitals, not the neighborhoods, the way they’d been when she first came to the city. The Upper West Side had had students and old people, Puerto Ricans and Orthodox Jews, strollers and shopping carts filled with the ersatz acquisitions of people who lived on the streets. Now it had black cars waiting for corporate pickups at the curbs, and expensive mountain bikes in the park. No one tried to steal car radios nowadays, and no one feared having the bikes stolen. Nora supposed this was an improvement. She was packed tightly into a subway car with medical students still wearing their scrubs, hipsters in short, tight pants, a few of what looked like Columbia professors carrying leather book bags, brown girls, black guys, a man who said he was collecting for the homeless and looked homeless himself and played a harmonica. It was like a casting director had said to herself, Something for everyone. Like a diorama of New York City life. A teenage girl with cornrows and a City College sweatshirt offered Nora a seat, and she shook her head, and felt old because of the gesture, and stupid for going to the hospital in the first place.

  As she came down her block, she saw a young man pick up a black trash bag from in front of the Fisks’ house and hoist it over his shoulder. “Reporters go through people’s trash now?” she said, enraged, while the man blinked behind his glasses. “Is that what journalism has come to? Do you people have no shame?”

  “This is my laundry,” he said quietly.

  “What?”

  “My laundry. I’m taking my clothes to the Laundromat.” That’s what the renters did. Laundry in trash bags, boxes of empties after parties.

  “Whatever,” Nora said as he looked at her quizzically. It was the rudest she could remember being in years. Nita had undone her. How pleased she would be to know that.

  “Are you nuts?” said Charlie that night when she told him about the hospital visit. “Those people are going to sue the Fisks, and you went up there to see how they’re doing?” While Charlie’s face was normally ruddy, it had turned practically purple.

  “He’s a person who worked in our home,” Nora said. “He’s a good person and I like him. Jack is a bad person and I don’t like him. So, yes, I went up there to see how he’s doing. And, by the way, he’s not doing very well. That leg is a mess, which is what I suppose happens to your leg when someone keeps hitting it with a golf club.”

  “Nora, Ricky is a person who did odd jobs for us. He’s not our friend, he’s the neighborhood handyman. Jack is our friend.”

  “Jack’s not my friend. I think he’s a terrible person and he deserves whatever he gets.”

  “What are you thinking? Are you trying to take sides against our neighbors?”

  “Aren’t you interested in doing the right thing, Charlie? You talk all the time about Jack’s version of events. Aren’t you interested in the truth? What about the truth?”

  “Oh, Jesus, Nora, you’re on such a high horse with this I don’t know how you’ll ever get off. Just don’t drag me into whatever crazy liberal guilt thing you’ve got going on.”

  “I don’t have a crazy liberal guilt thing going on,” Nora said. “I have a human thing going on.”

  Sherry Fisk was annoyed, too. Nora felt sorrier about Sherry’s reaction than Charlie’s, but not sorry enough to regret what she’d done. “I just wish you’d mentioned it to us, Nora,” Sherry said when she ran into her on the block. “Apparently Ricky’s wife told their attorney that you said Jack was to blame for what happened.”

  “I absolutely did not say that, or anything like that.”

  “She says you told her you were sorry for what Jack did.”

  “I said I was sorry. I never mentioned Jack’s name or the particulars of what happened.”

  “She also said you gave them money.”

  “I gave him a Christmas card with his Christmas bonus in it, Sherry. That’s all. He shouldn’t have to lose his Christmas bonus.”

  “Well,” Sherry said, sighing, “it’s just unfortunate. We’re in the middle of trying to work something out with them so that this whole thing can be nipped in the bud. The timing of your visit wasn’t great in terms of those negotiations.”

  “I’m sorry if I upset you,” Nora said. “His wife talked as though I wasn’t the only one who had visited.”

  “Yes,” Sherry Fisk said. “George went up there and apparently told Ricky that if he didn’t say the whole thing was an accident he would never work on the block again. That wasn’t helpful, either.”

  Nora felt her face grow hot. Being lumped in with George was a terrible feeling. “Apparently Ricky’s wife came in and hit George with a crutch. It’s the only good thing to come out of this whole sorry situation.” Sherry started to laugh a little tentatively, as though she hadn’t laughed in a while and was trying to get the laugh motor running again. “I have to admit, the idea of someone hitting George with a crutch made my day. She didn’t hit you, did she?”

  Nora shook her head, although she suspected Nita had wanted to. As Nora was going toward the double doors that led to the elevators, walking fast, although what she really wanted to do was sprint, she had heard footfalls behind her.

  “Hey!” Nita called, and Nora turned to see her with the candy box in her hand. “You leave these?”

  “The food is pretty terrible here, right?”

  “Not bad enough to eat these,” she said, shoving the box hard into Nora’s chest. “And all that stuff you give Rico for the kids? He sells it all on eBay. Ice skates? Who you kidding, lady? Ice skates?”

  Nora and Charlie were a little surprised to find themse
lves going to a dinner party, but it saved them eating alone together, which had become difficult since they were barely speaking, and it was an invitation that could not be denied. Charlie still had hopes of another rung on the ladder at Parsons Ridge, and the dinner was being given by one of the so-called rainmakers, Jim DeGeneris. There had almost been a snafu; Charlie had looked at the date and time, but not the address, and until the afternoon of the dinner had planned to meet Nora at the DeGeneris apartment, a rather bare but enormous place with elaborate moldings and fireplaces off Fifth. But his assistant had reminded him that Jim and his wife were now separated and that Jim had moved to a loft in Tribeca, neither of which Charlie had known, making it even more important that they attend the dinner party. “A Tribeca loft,” said Nora. “Where rich guys go when they ditch the first wife. When he remarries someone younger he’ll move to Madison Park.”

  “Maybe table the cynicism for tonight,” Charlie said on the phone. “This could be important for me.” Nora had lost count of how many times her husband had said this. They each found the other’s work inconsequential, for very different reasons. But hers was shinier in public. Charlie was interested in what she did when he could proffer it for possible professional gain, or at least reflected stature. He needed the card to play. He was afraid that he was never going to be one of the big men, the ones whose names popped up in Forbes or the Journal. He was usually the third guy to be introduced to the major client in the conference room.

  “Is Jim cooking?” Nora asked.

  “I have no idea,” Charlie said. Charlie had never cooked a thing in his life. When she left him something to reheat, on those evenings she was out with a prospect or a friend, he would always text: What temp how long? Several years before, she had written on the chalkboard in the kitchen 350/30 minutes. It was still there. She’d once seen a quote on someone’s inspiration board—“Kill me if I ever have an inspiration board,” she’d said to her sister, who’d responded with a silence so weighty that Nora instantly concluded that Christine had one—that said “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.” She actually sometimes thought that was the definition of marriage.

  “Everyone attibutes that quote to Einstein,” said Jenny, standing in the wreckage of what had been her old kitchen and would become her new one. “It’s not Einstein. Maybe it was Einstein’s wife.”

  “Was Einstein married?”

  Jenny had nodded. “Can you imagine? You’re not married to a man who thinks he’s Einstein, you’re married to a man who is Einstein.”

  “God, this looks great,” Nora said when Jenny showed her the cabinet door samples. “This finish is beautiful. Jasper really knows what he’s doing, although I assume you get special treatment.”

  “That’s what happens when you’re fellating the craftsman,” Jenny said.

  “Oh, my God, Jen,” Nora said.

  “I love that you’re still shockable. Seriously, he’s really talented. And I don’t just mean in the obvious way. He reads all the time. He cooks, too.”

  “Oh, please, save me from the man who allegedly cooks.”

  “This is completely different, Nor. He’s not a guy who talks about cooking, or buys a ten-thousand-dollar stove and then tells you you can’t make osso bucco properly on anything else. He’s a guy who goes through the cupboards, stops at the butcher, and makes real food that tastes good without making a big deal about it or expecting you to act like he cured cancer.”

  Jim DeGeneres was the other guy, the guy who acted as though making a meal were akin to nuclear fission, who produced food that tasted of nothing, or too much of something you couldn’t identify and didn’t particularly like. Nora knew this new place would have a monumental kitchen, and it did. The Tribeca loft was cavernous and modern but, oddly, done in Swedish antiques, all white and blue. It was the kind of downtown place that, for a few years after September 11, would have gone begging. Everyone who lived below Canal Street had been traumatized; everyone who had considered buying or renting there had gone elsewhere. But though everyone was fond of saying that New York, and New Yorkers, had been changed forever by the terrorist attacks, forever in terms of real estate lasted about thirty months. A shiny new tower stood where the Twin Towers had crumpled to the earth, and the downtown real estate market had bounced back. At some point Nora expected Jim to say, “I don’t want to tell you what I paid for this place,” and then proceed to do just that.

  “Nora!” Jim said. “You cut your hair!” Not a good beginning; over the years Nora had learned that when a man said you’d cut your hair, it was less an observation than an indictment. She decided to parry with a generalization, since she had in fact been wearing her hair the same way for a decade: “It’s been too long, Jim. I hope you’re cooking.”

  “Of course,” he said. (Thank God for big lunches.) “You haven’t changed a bit.”

  Why did they all say that to each other? There was the fact that it was so patently untrue; Nora had looked at herself in the bathroom mirror as she was applying mascara and realized that her skin had begun to look like silk after you washed it, still serviceable but without its sheen. She had never been vain and had never felt she had reason to be: strangers were always asking her whether they knew her from high school or the ad agency or this or that suburb because she looked like a generic woman of a certain age. Even the people she knew who had taken preemptive action to maintain their looks had changed more than a bit. And that was only the exterior. “I used to really like him, but Jim’s a different guy now,” Charlie had said on their way downtown. As was Charlie, of course. And Nora as well.

  “How’s the jewelry business?” Jim said.

  “You’re in the jewelry business?” said a thin blonde behind him.

  “Not really,” said Nora.

  “I want to hear all about what happened on that block of yours,” Jim said. “What a story! Everyone’s been talking about it.” And Nora suddenly realized exactly why they had been invited. Luckily Charlie was placing a drink order with the cater waiter and hadn’t heard.

  “Charlie, come sous-chef,” Jim cried. Charlie shucked his jacket, took off his tie, and rolled up his sleeves so that he was dressed like Jim. Nora was dressed in her dinner party uniform: black dress, statement necklace. “Are those real?” said the blonde, peering at the stones.

  “If they were I’d need an armed guard,” Nora said, but the blonde continued to peer and didn’t crack a smile.

  There were two other men there, one above Charlie in the pecking order, another young but, from the sound of him, promising, with the kind of party patter that was smooth and memorable, a few witticisms, a recommendation for a New Yorker article, the kind of bright young man her husband would have once befriended and now hated and feared. His wife was a lawyer—“semiretired”—who had just had her second child and wanted to talk only about private-school admissions. Nora was tolerant. She had passed through a phase in which she did the same, until the twins had been accepted to a school that had been founded just after the American Revolution and that, most important, ran from kindergarten to the end of high school. The semiretired lawyer’s eyes lit up when Nora mentioned it. Jennifer? Jessica? The husband’s name was Jason, she was certain of that. It was so hard to remember. Nora’s assistants had always been told to give her flash cards to tuck beneath the napkin in her lap when she was hosting a donor lunch so that she could keep the names straight.

  “Charlie, when’s the last time you diced an onion?” she heard Jim say in that kidding way that had an edge of exasperation. Mumble, mumble: Charlie was probably saying he didn’t cook as much as he used to. Nora glided away from the kitchen, an open-plan stainless-steel number that looked as though it had been lifted right from one of those restaurants whose layout demanded you admire the chef’s technique.

  Since Nora had first moved to New York, dinner parties ha
d mainly evaporated. In the beginning there had been one a week, exercises in competitive cooking. “Whose is this?” they would ask one another, the way they now asked it about a particularly sharp coat or pair of boots. Marcella. Julia. Cookbook intimacy that passed for friendship. At the end of every evening they were wrecked by the need for perfection and the assumption of judgment.

  Then they’d made some money and graduated to virtual cooking. Nora discovered that, like manicures and pedicures, cooking was something she could do herself but preferred to have someone else do for her. She was one of the first to discover HomeMade, a company that delivered meals with little cards that described how to prepare them. Like dress designers supplying gowns for a big gala, the women who ran the company kept a computerized accounting of who’d ordered what to avoid unfortunate duplications. When Nora sent along a list of guests, one of them might say, If you’re having the Roysters don’t get the Chicken Marengo; they served it themselves last week. It all seemed like cheating, but Nora prided herself on the fact that at least she didn’t lie and pretend the HomeMade dinners were homemade. In the beginning, lots of other women did, but after a while it became impossible, the roster was so well known, although Sherry Fisk’s sister-in-law swore her Apple Brown Betty was her grandmother’s recipe when it was exactly the same dessert, in the same ramekins, that they’d all had elsewhere.

  “She claims her nose is original, too,” Sherry had once said.

  Eventually they had all started meeting at restaurants, so that no one had to hide the pill vials in the medicine cabinets from nosy guests. It seemed the only time they went to dinner parties now was when the men had taken up cooking. Everyone acted as though that were akin to Christ turning water into wine at Cana.

  “Risotto!” the women exclaimed joyfully when Jim brought it to the table in an enormous shallow serving bowl, which Nora knew meant by the time it got to her it would be lukewarm. Which was fine. It was crunchy, too, which meant she wouldn’t eat much.