Alternate Side Page 16

  “You need to work on your husband’s knife skills,” Jim said, pointing his fork at her. Knife skills: this was a new badge of honor, a status symbol for guys who had finally—finally!—become tired of talking about wine. The slightly aberrational spouse was a status symbol, too. The husband who cooked. The wife who played golf. The husband who took his children to school. The wife who ran her own business. Of course, it was chancier with the women than with the men. You couldn’t push it too far. The marathoner wife who made partner—perhaps. The wife who could bench-press her own weight and made the cover of Fortune—too emasculating. The men, on the other hand, got unlimited mileage out of performing so-called women’s tasks as long as they also had substantial disposable income and significant business cards. Occasionally a woman would say of her husband, “He’s a stay-at-home dad,” and everyone would smile and think, He doesn’t have a job.

  Jim’s wife had been a significant woman, a doctor who treated people with addiction issues, which probably explained why he was a wine aficionado. Nora could hear Polly now, saying to her husband, “Nora might have better things to do than work on her husband’s knife skills.” Charlie and Nora had been close friends with Jim and Polly, once upon a time. They had lived in similar three-bedroom apartments, not far from each other, and had children around the same age. There had been a couple of years there, when, one Sunday a month, they had had takeout dinners in each other’s places, the children throwing Lego blocks around in the next room while the grown-ups ate Peking duck or sashimi. Jim and Polly had nothing that Charlie and Nora wanted except for a wood-burning fireplace, which Polly said was more trouble than it was worth. “We have to start a fire hours before anyone arrives because the room fills with smoke,” she said. “Can’t you smell it?”

  By the look on Jim’s face when she said this Nora could tell it was one of those low-level arguments that married couples had frequently. “What good is a wood-burning fireplace if you don’t have a fire?” Jim said.

  Nora had enjoyed those evenings. The men would talk across the table to each other about work, and the women about their children. Then someone had canceled, and someone else had canceled, and Jim had become a bigger deal than Charlie, which Nora only figured out at the cocktail party Jim and Polly had had as a housewarming for their new place, which no amount of partying could warm, with its marble entrance foyer and elaborate window treatments. She and Polly agreed, when the Nolans were leaving the party, Charlie impatiently holding the elevator, that they would schedule lunch, they would, and then they never did. And now Nora never could. Having lunch with the estranged wife of a man your husband wanted to think well of him was a no-go.

  Charlie had never liked Polly. He had always said he thought she was difficult. Also not sexy. He was seated now with the thin blonde on one side. Alison? Alyssa? The conversation was a hubbub, like modern music, discordant, with odd bleats and no melody. People in New York never really listened to anyone else; they just waited for a break in the action so they could start to speak, push off with their own boat into the slipstream of talk.

  “Your wife is in the jewelry business?” Nora heard the blonde ask Charlie.

  “How large is your endowment?” said young Jason, who obviously knew precisely what Nora did, the kind of man who researched his fellow guests before a dinner party.

  “Substantial for the size of the museum,” she said. “Plus we own the building free and clear, which is certainly an advantage.”

  “And your annual budget?”

  Nora tapped the table with her dessert fork and laughed. “Are you really interested?”

  “I’m interested in board service. I’m trying to decide where.”

  “That’s interesting. People are usually much cagier about that than you are.”

  “Should I be cagier?”

  She laughed again and saw Charlie narrow his eyes across the table. She realized she had to hit some sweet spot between being nice to Jason and appearing to be too cozy with him.

  “I’ll be candid with you,” she said. “Our board is largely decorative. The founder of the museum picks its members for optimal society traction. She makes all the decisions herself.”

  “I’ll be candid right back,” Jason said. “I’d be interested in being involved with Bob Harris’s foundation.”

  “I don’t know anything about that,” Nora said.

  “Really? Because he talks as though he’s certain you’ll be running it.”

  “Running what?” Charlie said from across the table. Luckily dessert was served, lemon tart and raspberries, and Jim tapped her arm, so she turned from Jason. “I want to hear all about this crazy thing on your block,” he said. “I don’t know Jack Fisk, but I know lots of people who do, and they say he must have lost his mind. I told them, Well, I know someone who will be able to give me all the details.”

  Later, as she pulled her nightgown over her head, Nora said to Charlie, “Did Jim ask you about Jack Fisk?”

  “It’s all he wanted to talk about,” Charlie said sourly. “It’s the same deal in the office. Someone comes in and I think they want me for a meeting or on a call, and instead it’s all, What the hell happened there? Plus they all think it was a tire iron. Why the hell would Jack swing a tire iron?”

  “A golf club makes more sense?”

  “And what about you and Jason?” her husband said as though she hadn’t spoken. “There’s a guy who’s an operator. His middle initial is H. I think it stands for Howard, but we all say it really stands for Hungry. He’s one of those guys you’re afraid to turn your back on. He’s sort of Jim’s boy, which is why he was there. I guess he knows something I don’t about you and Harris.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake, Charlie, he’s just ambitious, like everyone else in town. He doesn’t know anything. And Jim needs to learn how to make risotto. It was like chewing gravel. And how he could trade Polly in for whoever she was…”

  “He didn’t,” Charlie said in the darkness as she got under the covers. “One of the other guys in the office told me this morning. Polly left him. She was apparently having an affair with some other doctor for years, and once their youngest kid was out of the house she figured, What’s the point. I hear he’s really a mess.”

  “He didn’t act like he was a mess.”

  “Yeah, like he’s going to fall apart with the people at that table? He got wasted at some cigar bar last week and told one of the guys that he has sex with that girl all the time because when they’re not having sex she talks to him, and he can’t stand to listen to her.”

  “He’ll find somebody,” Nora said. “He’s rich, he’s nice-looking. Maybe he’ll even learn to cook.”

  “What do you want to bet Jason knows how to cook,” said Charlie. “He probably studied at the Cordon Bleu after his Rhodes scholarship.”

  A petition is being prepared to request that the lot be reopened at the same rate as previously. Please let George know if you are willing to sign.

  The lot is closed to all activity until further notice. Any cars in the lot will be towed at owner’s expense.

  Sidney Stoller

  The empty lot was a constant reminder. That, and the fact that nothing worked in any of their houses. A dripping tap in the Nolan kitchen kept on dripping. Harold Lessman tripped over a flagstone in the patio that had heaved up during the winter freezes and spring thaws and sprained his ankle. The Fisks were mainly at their house in the country, but their housekeeper, Grace, told Charity that there was a leak in the skylight and she had to put a bucket in the hall. Ricky had made himself essential. They had all made themselves helpless.

  “I hear you know the golf club guy,” Phil said, sitting outside the museum with a new sign that said STILL CRAZY AFTER ALL THESE YEARS.

  “Don’t you think that one will put people off?” Nora said, pointing at the cardboard placard.

  “You
know, people our age love this one. I’m thinking of using nothing but song titles from now on. Maybe ‘Born in the U.S.A.’ When does the big boss come back from Florida?”

  “You really keep up on things,” Nora said.

  “I’m a student of my surroundings,” he said. “Who’s your new guy? The skinny one?”

  “He’s a temp,” Nora said. “My assistant quit.”

  “The snooty tall one? I can’t believe you put up with her for a minute. She never said hello to me, not once. This new guy is a good guy. Smart, too. You think you’ll keep him?”

  “I’m thinking about it,” Nora said. Richard was still technically working for the temp agency, but Nora had made it a point to sit down and talk to him after he had rearranged her computer files so that finding anything made infinitely more sense.

  “My parents came here from the Philippines,” he had said. “Seven kids, and here’s all they want: a college degree, and then a job where you don’t get your hands dirty. All they know is that right now I work in a museum. No dirt, right?”

  “A museum, but not jewelry?” Nora asked.

  “I’m not sure they’d get it,” Richard said. “I’m not sure I get it, to be honest. But I like working for you. Where did your last assistant go, if you don’t mind my asking?”

  The Met, of course. The pinnacle of New York museums. Madison had sent Nora a note on stationery engraved with her initials. “I learned so much from you,” she wrote, a student of the no-bridges-burned playbook. Apparently she had told Bebe’s assistant that she didn’t think there was sufficient room for growth for her, that the museum was a one-woman show. The woman she meant was not Nora.

  “There’s a man on the phone for you,” Richard said as Nora took off her coat. “He won’t give his name, but he said to tell you”—he looked down at his notepad—“fasten your seatbelts, it’s going to be a bumpy ride.”

  “A bumpy night,” Nora said. “It’s going to be a bumpy night. It’s a line from a movie. All About Eve. Everyone gets it wrong.”

  “I thought he said ‘ride.’ ”

  No, he didn’t.

  “James?” she said into the phone in her office.

  “Moneypenny,” he replied.

  That’s what he’d always called her, James Mortimer, ever since they’d ripped through three James Bond movies the month they first met. She was Moneypenny and he was James. Never Jimmy or Jim or, God forbid, as he had once said early on, at a crowded party full of lacrosse players, Jimbo. “You’re blessed,” he said then. “No one can turn Nora into anything else.”

  “My sister calls me Nonnie,” she said.

  “That’s different,” he said. “My sister calls me Manchild. Mannie for short.”

  His sister lived in London, his parents in the suburbs of Philadelphia, or that’s what he called them, which sounded fine until he and Nora had started up the long driveway on a snaky street where none of the houses were visible from the sidewalk. Nora was too young to know then what she knew now, that on the outskirts of every American city there were areas in which the houses were invisible from the road, and that that was where the richest people lived. Grosse Pointe, Bel Air, Buckhead: during her years raising money for museums and schools she’d been to almost all of them. The Mortimers lived in Gladwyne. They were stereotypical bad parents, almost stock characters from a film, which might have been one reason their only son so loved old movies. She drank, he screwed around. She shopped, he managed their investments. At dinner in the morning room, which had wallpaper that looked like a trellis and a table that sat only six, as opposed to the dining room, which could hold twenty in a pinch, they had both been pleasant enough, although when Nora had mentioned that she and James had met in an art history class Mr. Mortimer rolled his eyes. He said that the town where Nora had grown up had a decent golf course, and Nora agreed that it did, and Mrs. Mortimer asked if her parents lived on the water, and she said unfortunately not. The food all tasted somehow like canned vegetable soup, even the salad. It was awful, and there wasn’t enough of it.

  Nora had been given a guest room with yellow walls and white furniture, but it was right next to James’s room, which still had a pennant from his boys’ school above the twin bed, and she’d barely gotten under the covers before he slipped in next to her. The guest room had twin beds, too, but they were used to it from the dorms. Nora could remember it all so well, better than she remembered what she’d done yesterday, how smooth and warm his skin had felt against hers. She’d realized that that was how life was, that certain small moments were like billboards forever alongside the highway of your memory. There was a strip of moonlight through the curtains that moved across James’s back—waist, shoulder blades, waist, shoulder blades—as he moved. And then suddenly she heard a thud, thought for a moment that they’d knocked the bed frame loose, and he stopped, and she heard shouts and doors and other sounds that couldn’t be identified but that sounded like pitched battles from one of those old movies he had taught her to like, My Man Godfrey or The Philadelphia Story, which James said was about a family who had lived not far away from his parents’ house. It went on for a long time, and after that James didn’t finish, went back to his own room.

  “Now you know why I’ll never get married,” he’d said after an hour-long silence in the car. Nora stared out the passenger side window and let the tears fall onto her barn jacket, but deep inside she was thinking, I’ll change his mind.

  Almost two years together, three more disastrous visits to his parents, one visit at school with his sister, who had said, “You took her to the house?” as though her brother had exposed Nora to a communicable disease. Dinners with Nora’s father and Carol and Christine, who all loved him. “No wonder you are the way you are,” James said after the first such dinner. “Which is what?” Nora said, hoping for “wonderful” or “irresistible.” “Uncomplicated,” James said, and somehow it seemed like an insult. It still felt that way, the few times Nora remembered it. No one in New York ever said about anyone interesting, Oh, yes, that So-and-so, she’s uncomplicated.

  “What a dick thing to say,” Jenny had said one night when Nora had gotten drunk and told her about it, and about James, and everything that followed, while Jenny held the tissue box.

  The truth was, she had been uncomplicated, and naïve. Would she know even today, nearly thirty years out, that a good-looking young man who at twenty swore by French cuffs, who spoke much of the time in the language of old movies, and could sing all the lyrics to “I’ll Be Seeing You” might not be suited to be her boyfriend, or that of any woman? She imagined Rachel describing him, bringing him home, and alarms ringing between her ears as though the house were on fire. But perhaps that was just retrospective. Or stereotypical.

  He had already graduated, moved to New York, put off her two scheduled visits to him there over the summer. She remembered the day in early August when he drove up in his VW convertible and took her to a nondescript local place for lunch, not the inn where they’d had dinner on Valentine’s Day, and she wanted to say, No, no, the choice of restaurant a door slamming in her face. James was incandescent. When he finally spoke, it was not only as though he’d rehearsed his words, but as though he was jubilant at being able to deliver them.

  “I love you, Moneypenny,” he said. “I’ll always love you.” Even in everyday life James had a tendency to talk like a movie, perhaps one with Ray Milland or Dana Andrews. They’d watched Laura at least half a dozen times.

  Then he added, “And I like sleeping with you. But I really want to sleep with men.”

  “How do you know if you’ve never done it?” she sobbed.

  There was a long silence, and it contained so many things that she didn’t want to know that it took years for her to color in all those lines, one terrible realization at a time, one suspicion, one acquaintance, one prep-school friend, one swim-team member. Finally James
said, “I just know.”

  Of course she had moved to New York, too, and from time to time she would see him, or hear of him. What were the chances that she would be at a party with a friend of a friend at an artist’s loft three years after graduation and see his black-and-white photograph on the bedroom wall, shirtless, laughing, beautiful? It turned out things like that happened in New York all the time. Things like what happened to the artist happened all the time when they were young, a big success, then no new paintings, then the obituary, age forty-one, dead of AIDS. Nora couldn’t help it; when she had seen it in the Times, part of her had been oddly, shamefully glad: her replacement was gone. Then she’d gotten tested, been negative, which managed to convince her that James had not been sleeping with the artist and her at the same time. She and Jenny had the kind of friendship in which they told each other everything, and yet it had taken her nearly two bottles of Chardonnay atop two margaritas to tell Jenny that. “Oh, honey,” Jenny had said, stroking Nora’s forearm. “Here’s the thing: he didn’t really break up with you. He broke up with the lie that was his life.”

  “I had no idea. What sort of woman am I, that I had no idea?”

  “Lots of the women I know slept with gay men in college, before they knew they were gay. Or before they admitted they were gay. One of my colleagues said it was the best sex she ever had.”

  “Oh, thanks a lot, Jen. That bodes well for the future,” said Nora, who was already with Charlie by then.

  In retrospect it seemed that American colleges were the opposite of English boarding schools, where boys who would wind up married to women and surrounded by children were said to try it on for a time with other boys. All of her female friends now talked about the men they knew at Williams or Columbia or Oberlin who had had college girlfriends before they realized, or acknowledged, that they were not really interested in women in that way at all. Nora sometimes thought that if only she and James had been young fifty years earlier, they would have married and had children and been as happy as most people and she would only wonder sometimes why he had run out of steam in the sex department and took so many business trips (which was no different from being married to a straight man, if it came to that). Instead they had had the good fortune—or the bad, from her perspective—of meeting at the dawning of the age of enlightenment. But when she’d said that to Jenny that drunken night, her friend had looked at her sternly and said, “You need to check yourself, Nor. That’s just crazy. There’s a reason those kinds of arrangements went out of style.”