After I'm Gone (20 page)
W
hile the rest of her family had been seated at table number 2, Michelle was at number 12, with all the strays. She was outraged on principle, although she planned to sneak away after the entrée was served, table-hop her way right out of the ballroom and upstairs, where she had taken a room in order to meet the man she was seeing for a Valentine’s Day tryst. Still, that didn’t excuse Lorraine Gelman for sticking her at such a lousy table.
Her lover had been nervous about the meeting, said it was a risky thing to do with so many people around. But it was important to Michelle to see him on Valentine’s Day because that would prove his loyalty to her. She had insisted, and she usually got her way with him. Usually. She glanced at her watch—Cartier, a gift from him. As was the BMW she had driven here tonight, the diamond earrings, and the fur coat she had refused to check because she wanted to be wearing it, and nothing else, when he knocked on the door of the room.
She pulled her phone out of her bag and typed: “1212/2030.” Room and time. It wasn’t the first time they had met in a hotel.
“What are you doing?” asked the man seated next to her. Barry something. Friend of Adam’s from Northwestern or maybe law school.
“Texting.”
“That’s a rip-off on most plans.”
“I’m not worried about it,” she said loftily. She wasn’t. The phone was another gift. She didn’t even see the bills. She wasn’t sure exactly how things worked, but it was her understanding that the phone, along with the credit card he had given her—they were all assigned to some fictitious employee. It was a little worrisome that there was a practiced slickness to the setup. How long had he been catting around? Yet he swore he had never done anything like this before, that she had pursued him. She remembered a chance encounter, a stolen kiss outside the Red Maple, wasabi and sake on his breath. Had she really initiated it? Probably.
“And it’s generally not deductible, a mobile phone plan. People assume it’s a deductible business expense, but that’s not always true.”
“Are you an accountant?”
“Of sorts. I work for the government.”
He grinned as if he had made a joke, but Michelle didn’t get it.
“You knew Adam at school, right?” She gave him her attention, if not the full wattage of her charm. Back at Park, when they had read the Greek myth about the birth of Dionysus, how his mortal mother had demanded to see Zeus in godlike splendor and he had chosen his smallest lightning bolts hoping in vain not to kill her, Michelle had felt a rare moment of connection with the bookish world in which her sisters excelled. This guy required only her smallest lightning bolts and he, too, was still at risk.
He nodded. “Alec, too, of course. You can’t really know one without the other. I’m surprised Adam isn’t taking Alec on the honeymoon. They are thick as thieves.”
“Those of us who have known them all their lives are surprised that they didn’t turn out to be thieves. Or, you know, serial killers.”
He laughed, taking it for a joke, or at least hyperbole.
“No, seriously, they should have been voted most likely to be hit men. They were awful when they were young.”
“Maybe,” said Barry something. “But they’re nice guys now, and isn’t that what matters? Not who we were, but who we become?”
“Adam had a crush on me for years.”
She hadn’t planned on saying that. Why had she said it?
“Oh, I know. He told me he was doing me the enormous favor of making sure I got to sit next to you tonight.”
So it wasn’t Lorraine’s fault that she was at this awful table. Michelle was mollified, although now skeptical of Adam’s intentions. Was he punishing her? Or playing a joke on both of them? He couldn’t possibly think she would be interested in this Barry guy.
Besides, these days she just wasn’t in the market at all. There was no one else for her. But her lover wouldn’t leave his wife, and even if he did, there would be such a shit storm. No, they could never be together. This would be the romance that kept her alive, inside, like—oh, Lord, was she really comparing her life to
The Bridges of Madison County
? Or some Nicholas Sparks book?
She picked at her steak, unimpressed. There had been too many filet mignons wrapped in bacon, too many blinis, too many cheese puffs over the last few years as all her friends got married. Food was becoming excitingly expensive, another luxury to pursue, although one had to range beyond Baltimore to get the really good stuff. Just this month, a new restaurant had opened in New York, Per Se, and it was said to be impossible to get a table. She had told her lover that she wanted to go there for her birthday. It was a test—not of his ability to snag a reservation, but of his commitment to her. If he didn’t find a way to be with her on her birthday, she would—what? Her only power over him was her ability to wreck his marriage, and he had to know she would never do that.
“What do you do?” Barry asked, her least favorite question.
“I work for a tech company,” she said. “Marketing. I hate it.”
“Stock options?”
“Some.” Worthless, or soon to be.
“Still, you’re doing well.” His eyes rested on the watch, the earrings, the fur on the chair, and—oh so inevitably, and oh so boring —the neckline of her dress, which a man would never recognize as expensive, much less Prada. Her mother had, though, reaching out to touch the fabric, torn between approval and suspicion. She knew Michelle couldn’t afford a Prada dress, and she sure as hell hadn’t procured it through Bambi’s discount.
She opened her purse wide, letting him see the tampons inside, then took out a small bottle of ibuprofen, a time-tested conversation ender. “I hope the ladies’ room has a place where I can lie down.”
“Oh,” he stammered. “Well—feel better.”
She went up to the room, 1212, and ordered champagne, the best available. It was already 8:30—2030; he insisted on military time for some reason, one of his quirks, he said it was common in the United Kingdom, where he traveled on business—but she understood that he might be in a situation where he couldn’t call her. He often was. She treated herself to some TV. He hated her taste in television, said it was base, but so what if she liked
Extreme Makeover: Home Edition
? If she kept the remote close at hand, she could click it off as soon as she heard his knock at the door. She had left it imperceptibly ajar so she could remain on the bed, the beautiful coat pooled around her, its platinum silk lining so close to her skin tone that she all but melted into it. God, she couldn’t believe she had ever worn that made-over mink passed down by Bambi—
She awoke to the show where the girl spy always seemed to be wearing wigs and boots and kicking someone in the face. When she got downstairs, the DJ was exhorting people to do the electric slide, but the party was clearly winding down.
He’s going to break up with me,
she thought. No one had ever broken up with Michelle before. She could beat him to the punch, have her pride, but she didn’t want to stop seeing him.
Adam’s friend—what was his name?—pulled out her chair and didn’t comment on the fact that she had been gone for more than an hour. He continued to chatter to her, and she tried to make appropriate responses, but it was like speaking to someone on a very bad cell connection. His voice seemed to come from so far away that she had to keep asking him to repeat himself. She looked around the room, desperate to find someone better with whom to flirt. Adam? Inappropriate, even for her. Alec? Funny, but he really disliked her to this day. Everyone else, except her mother, was part of a set—including her two sisters, who were keeping tabs on her, as always.
Get a life,
she wanted to say to them. What will you do when you don’t have me to gossip about, disapprove of? Linda looked angry, while Rachel just had her usual sympathetic simper on, which was far worse.
“Is the bar still open?” she asked—Barry. That was his name. “Would you get me a vodka martini?”
“She’s almost thirty-one,”
Linda fumed to Rachel. “When is she going to get her act together?”
“She’s nervous about her job,” Rachel said. “The rumors are they won’t make it through the year.”
As a website designer, Rachel was plugged into Baltimore’s tiny tech community. Everyone knew that Michelle’s company, Sinergie, was going to go down; the only question was when and how. Michelle said she was sticking it out to the end in hopes of a severance package, but how could a company pay severance when it was already stiffing vendors and landlords? Linda thought Michelle was lazy, but Rachel knew their baby sister was scared. It wasn’t lost on her that Michelle had wandered into a job that combined her sisters’ two fields—communications for Linda, tech for Rachel. And neither one suited her. Michelle needed to find her own thing.
“A therapist I know”—Rachel was careful not to say
my
therapist; only Joshua knew she was seeing someone—“says there’s a theory that traumas leave us arrested at the age of the trauma.”
“Michelle doesn’t even remember Daddy. And that would make you forever fourteen, me sixteen. With all due respect, your therapist friend is kind of a quack.”
Twenty-four for me,
Rachel thought.
That was my traumatic year, although I didn’t realize it until recently.
And, no, Linda wasn’t frozen at sixteen, that was true. Linda had been earnest and idealistic as a teenager, qualities she had carried into adulthood. But a professional lifetime of choosing her words with care had left her blunt and hard in her most intimate relationships. Henry handled it well, but it grated a little on Rachel, even though she almost never came in for Linda’s criticism.
Then again, Rachel was expert at keeping things from Linda. From everyone, when need be. An open, sunny nature is a great cover for secrets, as Rachel discovered long ago. Even now, with the therapist, she couldn’t open up completely. She had gone, at Joshua’s pleading, to discuss her depression over not being able to conceive, but she wouldn’t give the therapist all the pieces needed to understand the bigger picture. She also refused any medication. So what was the point? Rachel knew why she was sad, and she also knew she wasn’t going to do anything about it. Maybe her therapist was an idiot not to see through her.
Joshua came up and put his hand at the small of her back. Together nine years now. Eight years ago, even three years ago, he would have pointed to one of the children present and said: “Ours will be cuter.” He knew better than to do that now. She was almost forty-two. No one got everything in this life. Her mother had children, but no husband. Linda had a family, but supporting them meant spending much less time with them than she wanted. Michelle didn’t have a family or a real career, although she clearly had a boyfriend who was buying her very nice things. Rachel had Joshua—lovely, marvelous, really—and her business, small but successful. Rachel had always thought small. Why was she like that?
These would probably be very good questions to explore with her therapist. If she were inclined to tell her therapist such things.
Bambi was exhausted,
but Lorraine and Bert expected her to stay until the end. Well, Lorraine did. That was the price of having friends like family. They treated you like family. Worse, there was the fact of all the money “lent” over the years, although that was more of a Bert thing and he never guilted her. Bambi had a hunch that Lorraine really didn’t know the extent, the various subterfuges Bert had used to prop her up. She always insisted she would pay him back one day and he was always gallant enough to pretend he believed her.
She calculated the cost of the event, a habit she would never quite break. Bambi knew the price of everything. But also its worth, she was no fool. Adam’s fiancée came from a family of modest means, working-class types from Southwest Chicago, so Bert had insisted on paying for the wedding. “It’s not like we’re going to have to pay for Sydney’s,” Lorraine had said, happy to have the control that came with signing the checks. Such a joke showed real progress for Lorraine, who had gone from being Very Brave about Sydney’s lifestyle—“As close as Lorraine will ever come to saying ‘lesbian,’ ” Linda had observed—to being almost capable of accepting Sydney’s girlfriend as a de facto spouse. And although Lorraine had always favored her boys, she was, with Adam’s marriage, coming up against the hard truth that daughters are forever, whereas sons are absorbed into their wives’ families more often than not. Adam was staying in Chicago and wherever Adam was, Alec would probably end up.
Plus, it was Sydney who had delivered the first Gelman grandchild, an adoptee from Guatemala. The little boy was gorgeous, although Bambi had to wonder how that worked, a Latino boy named Reuben being raised by two women in Brooklyn. Could that end well?
Probably about as well as a married-in-name-only woman raising three girls in the Baltimore suburbs without any real income.
She pulled a wrap around her shoulders. The ballroom had felt overheated when it was full, but as the last guests lingered, it took on a sad chill. Fifty, sixty thousand she guessed. Maybe as much as a hundred thousand, but Bert was good at negotiating. And for what? A meal, wine, music, flowers. Within forty-eight hours, the only physical remnants of this night would be the boxes of cake slices that no one ever remembered to put in the freezer. The bride’s dress would go into a sealed dry cleaner’s bag, and the bridesmaids’ dresses would go into closets, never to be worn again. At least they were black. The bride, Alina, had been gently dissuaded from her original color scheme, a red-and-white Valentine’s Day tribute. She was a sweet girl, though. Lorraine would take her in hand, best she could over a distance of seven hundred miles, and train her, much as Bambi had trained Lorraine back in the day. Who, for all her money and social status, had been very unsure of herself when they first met, in need of a mentor when it came to clothes and style. The student had surpassed the teacher long ago, but Lorraine was gracious enough to still seek Bambi’s advice on most matters.