After the Reunion (36 page)

The week went by so fast Annabel couldn’t bear it. She called Emily just to say hello, and to explain that she was passing through town very quickly. And then she had one more weekend alone with Zack, until she had to go to New York Sunday night on the Red Eye. On the plane she almost cried.

When she was back in New York Zack called her every night, and when she went to Milan and Paris and London he called her there. In April Annabel went back to California to see him again, for another week.

“When I finish shooting and start editing,” he said, “you’re really going to see a devoted lunatic.”

“Devoted to me?” she said.

“No, devoted to my little machine.”

“Can I watch?”

“Sure.”

“Emma will be so jealous,” Annabel said. “She’d give her eye teeth to be hovering over your shoulder in the cutting room.”

“She’d probably enjoy it more than you will too.”

“We shall see,” Annabel said.

“In our own funny way, though,” Zack said, “it’s still working out for us, isn’t it?”

“It is.”

“Are you beginning to understand what I meant when I said that loving each other was only the easy part?”

“Yes.”

“But you’re still willing to give it time to see if it’s going to work?”

“Of course I am,” Annabel said.

“I’m glad.” They looked at each other. “And then,” he said, “we’ll have to figure out how.”

Chapter Thirty-one

By the end of March Daphne and Michael knew they wanted to marry each other. For both of them it was very simple: they were in love, they made each other’s lives complete, they were happy now when before they had been simply marking time. Even though he knew all her flaws and scars he still thought she was perfect, his princess. Not in the way Richard had, denying that she had a right to be like other people, but in his own way because she was
his
princess. Perhaps Daphne was one of those women who was always destined to be someone’s Golden Girl. She preferred to think of herself as someone who had come through trouble and had survived. Michael thought of her as that too, and admired her and wanted to take care of her.

And she wanted to take care of him. She wanted to meet his children, to win them over, to make them happy. She wanted her sons to like him and his children, to become a family again, or even the family they had never really been. She looked around her house and grounds, the places she had once loved before all the things had happened to ruin them for her, and now all she thought was that they were an obstacle that kept her away from Michael, and that she wished she lived in New York. She began to hate commuting, and the too-brief dinners with Michael that had to end with each of them going home separately, and Sunday nights after their weekends together, when he had to leave. She knew he hated it too.

“This is silly,” he said one night. “Spending all our time in cars and trains when we could be together.”

“I know,” she said.

“We ought to get married.”

“I thought you’d never ask,” Daphne said.

They decided that he would take her out to dinner with his children, and later, when her boys came home for their Easter holiday, they would all go out together. Daphne knew her sons would not be a problem. Whatever they thought (and how could they not like this kind, charming, sweet man?) they would behave properly. And they still had their time with Richard. She wondered, however, how Michael’s children would feel about her being brought into their lives as some kind of replacement.

She met him at his apartment for a drink. It was the first time she had been there, and as soon as she walked in Daphne felt the emptiness. It was like her house; the heart was gone, and everything was too still. The furniture was modern, quite different from hers, but it set off his collection of paintings very well. She liked them all. He had put out some little Japanese crackers in a crystal bowl on the coffee table, and gave her a glass of wine. Then his children came in, all dressed up. Cathy, fourteen, very pretty but very overweight, too fat really to look right in anything stylish, wearing a kind of smock thing. She had Michael’s blue eyes and aristocratic features hiding under the pudginess of her face. And Jeremy, twelve, a skinny, active-looking little kid with big dark eyes. He hadn’t started his real growth spurt yet, and when he did he would probably be even thinner, which would be worse for his sister.

Michael introduced them to Daphne, they helped themselves to diet sodas—of course—and sat there looking at her. They knew she was important, Michael had told them, and they knew why she was there. She smiled. They smiled; Jeremy warily, Cathy merely politely and barely even that. Cathy looked longingly at the crackers, and then looked away. Daphne wished she had a cigarette. The children remained silent and she wished they were just shy. There was nothing to do but talk around them, so she and Michael did. He told her about his day, and she told him about hers. Then, because he’d just come home from his office, he asked the children about school. Then they went out to dinner.

They went back to Woods, which was one of Michael’s favorite places because it was possible to get plain food, attractively presented. Cathy ordered the most fattening thing on the menu. Michael raised his eyebrows at her.

“If you didn’t do that,” she said to him quietly, with hurt and anger in her voice, “then
I
wouldn’t do it.”

“Yes you would,” he said lightly.

“Cathy’s Dad’s only unsuccessful patient,” Jeremy said.

“I’m not his patient,” Cathy said.

“Bigfoot,” Jeremy said. “Ouch!” He rubbed his arm where his sister had pinched him and glared at her.

“Daphne’s going to think you’re savages,” Michael said.

“
I’m
not,” Cathy said. “
He
is.”

“The kids at school call her Bigfoot,” Jeremy said to Daphne, by way of explanation.

“I think that’s cruel,” Daphne said.

“
Children
love to be cruel,” Cathy said. “They think it’s funny.”

Daphne smiled. “Then I guess nothing has changed since I was a kid.”

“
You
were never fat,” Cathy said. It wasn’t a question, it was a statement.

“No,” Daphne said.

“Then you didn’t have my problem.”

“No. I had others, though.”

“Really?” Cathy said. She looked rather pleased and interested. “Like what?”

Daphne glanced at Michael. She could read his mind: he was saying go ahead, tell them, who cares? “Epilepsy,” Daphne said.

The two kids were staring at her. Here was an adult they had just met, a woman who was here to make a good impression on them, and she was telling them outright, in the calmest way imaginable, that she’d had a rotten childhood too, that she had no secrets, that she could understand.

“Were the kids mean to you?” Cathy asked.

“I wouldn’t let them be,” Daphne said. “If they were, I ignored it.”

“Did they make you feel terrible?”

“Very.”

“When you’re a fat person,” Cathy said, “everybody acts like that’s the most important thing about you. They don’t even bother to see what you’re really like.”

“I know,” Daphne said.

“No you don’t,” Cathy said suddenly. “How could you know?” She looked away, dismissing this intruder, and devoted herself to the food on her plate. For dessert she ordered strawberries, and then she loaded them with whipped cream and sugar and gobbled them up almost vindictively. The rest of them pretended not to notice. Daphne asked Jeremy which movies he had seen lately that he liked, and which ones he wanted to see. She felt like a good dinner guest, giving equal time to the person on her left and then the one on her right, but she felt as if she were at the wrong dinner.

At the end of the evening they all walked Daphne to the garage where she had left her car. Even though she knew it wouldn’t be for much longer, she felt like the outsider, going home by herself, and Cathy didn’t even like her. She leaned down and kissed Jeremy on the cheek. His skin was still soft and childlike. Then she tried to kiss Cathy, but the girl stiffened, and very subtly but firmly pulled away. When, finally, she kissed Michael goodnight, Daphne could almost feel his daughter’s eyes boring into her back.

The next day Michael reported to Daphne that his children had loved her, that they thought she was beautiful and nice.

“You
wish,
” she said lightly. “Only Jeremy does.”

“No …”

“Bring them to the country for the weekend,” she said. “I’ll try harder.”

“Just be yourself,” he said.

She prepared her house for their visit. Michael would stay in Matthew’s room again, for appearance’s sake; he could sneak across the hall to hers when everyone was asleep, not that it would fool anybody. Jeremy would like Teddy’s room, she thought, so she would put him there. And Cathy … There was a feminine, pretty, girl’s room waiting empty. It seemed natural to give it to Cathy, so she did, and tried to ignore the brief stab of pain for the child who would never live there anymore and what could never be …

“Whose room is this?” Cathy asked.

“My daughter Elizabeth’s.”

“Where is she?”

“She lives in a special home. She’s retarded. I visit her.”

There was a long pause. “My mother would never have given her daughter away,” Cathy said.

Only a child, but what power they had to hurt you when they wanted to! “I know,” Daphne said calmly. “I didn’t know your mother, but I’m sure she wouldn’t have.”

“My shrink says that I’m angry at my mother for dying, but that’s ridiculous of course because I know she couldn’t help it. Nobody wants to die.”

Daphne thought of Jonathan and her eyes filled with tears. She turned her head away, but not before Cathy saw, and knew she’d drawn blood, more than she’d meant to, and didn’t know why. Daphne didn’t say anything.

“I guess I’ll unpack,” Cathy said.

Michael’s children did not come every weekend, because sometimes they had things to do in the city with their friends, but now it was April, and her boys were back for their Easter vacation from prep school, and the plan was for all of them to be in the house together. Matthew would need his room again. Jeremy could double up with Teddy, as there were two beds. But Michael? The last door had to be opened, both literally and figuratively. She could not keep Jonathan’s bedroom a shrine forever. Ina cleaned and aired it. Daphne helped her move the furniture around to make it look a little different, and bought a new bedspread. But Daphne knew nothing would really change that room, even the presence of Michael who was so alive and filled her life, and besides, no one was actually going to sleep there.

“Who used to live
here
?” Cathy asked. It still didn’t look like a guest room, it looked like the room of someone who had grown up and moved away.

Daphne took a deep breath. “I had a son who died. He … killed himself.” There was a pause while they looked at each other. “I guess there are some people who
do
want to die,” Daphne said.

Cathy was at a loss for words. For the first time, at last, she looked at Daphne with some human sympathy, even concern, as if she were more than the interloper who was trying to take her mother’s place. “A lot of terrible things happened to you too, didn’t they,” she said finally.

Daphne nodded. “Maybe now only good things will,” she said.

The children got along. It occurred to Daphne that hers weren’t all children anymore: Matthew had been accepted at Harvard and would be going there in the fall. He was graduating from St. Martin’s at the end of May. She and Michael were planning a June wedding. They had started looking for a large apartment in New York with space for all of them, and she had put her house up for sale. Michael was going to sell his co-op, and he had suggested they also buy a house at the beach for summer weekends. He worried a little that a Manhattan co-op board would not let them in with so many children and two big dogs, but Daphne wasn’t worried. She had never been rejected by any place in her life.

During the school holiday she took Cathy shopping for clothes. Cathy hated everything. “I look disgusting,” she said. “I wish I was thin like you.”

“As a matter of fact,” Daphne lied, “I was going to try to lose a few pounds for the wedding. Why don’t you and I go on a diet together?”

“You mean for moral support?”

“Why not?”

“But I have to lose at least
twenty!
”

“You have two months, and at your age it’s easier than it is for me. You’re still growing, and your metabolism’s faster. What do you say, want to try it together? You could call me up every night and report how it’s going, and tell me what you ate, and how you overcame temptation …?”

“I don’t overcome temptation very often,” Cathy said.

“I’m going to wear a sort of pale pinkish dress to the wedding,” Daphne said. “I see you in apricot. What do you think?” Cathy shrugged. “You’re going to be in the wedding pictures …”

“I’ll hide behind three people.”

“No you won’t. Come on. It’ll be summer. You’ll be thin by then. We’ll get you a bikini too, for East Hampton. And designer jeans, from wherever you want.”

“You sure you won’t mind if I call you up every night?”

“I’d be flattered,” Daphne said.

“I guess I could try,” Cathy said. She looked down at her hands. “I just want to tell you,” she said shyly, “that I think you’re a wonderful person, and that I think of you as a friend, and I’m glad I’m in your life, and … I really like you.”

“I love you too,” Daphne said.

So the weeks went by quickly. Daphne found an enormous apartment on Park Avenue, and the board accepted them, children, dogs, and all. Between them she and Michael had plenty of furniture, and the painters promised to be finished in time for them to move in before the wedding. They planned to be married in their new apartment by a judge, in the living room; one of the few rooms in this monolith they had purchased that faced the wide and sunny street. There would be flowers everywhere, a wedding cake, and just the family. And then she and Michael would go to Venice, Rome, and Florence, for two weeks.