Claudia Silver to the Rescue (9780547985602) (19 page)

“Is it Bronwyn?”

“Bronwyn?”
Claudia repeated. What, at this point, would Bronwyn have to do with
anything?
It pained Claudia to picture her, so she refused the image. “No,” she answered emphatically. “Bronwyn's fine.”

A brief rush of relief carried Annie to the galley kitchen as Claudia remained rooted to her spot. “She told you about this place?” Annie asked lightly, rustling in the cabinets among the many teas. How many, many,
many
tea trays she'd made in her life. Far more trays than paintings. She switched on the electric kettle, then turned, uncrossing her arms, not wanting to appear defensive. “How do you know about this place, Claudia?”

“I've been here before.”

“With Bronwyn?”

Now Claudia hesitated. She had no idea what anybody in her position would be expected to say at a time like this. Briefly, she wondered if she was the only person who had ever been in this position. If this was a funeral or an inauguration. An emergency or a strangely lucky break. If there was a hidden camera. She wished Paul were here. She thanked God he wasn't. She didn't want to get Bronwyn in trouble. She realized that worrying about getting in trouble was for babies. She knew she should dissemble, make something up, quickly, about how Bronwyn had asked her to come here in order to
who the fuck knows
. “No,” she said, “not with Bronwyn.”

Annie cocked her head, baffled. Bronwyn had simply
told
Claudia about this place? Given her the
address?
To come here in the middle of the night? To . . . to
what?
“I'm afraid I don't understand,” Annie confessed.

“With Paul.”

With Paul.
Slowly, Annie considered both these words, so strange, and the girl, just standing there, bristling in her getup like she owned the place. Or was about to bolt. She should paint her soon, Annie thought, before Claudia hardened. She could call it
Stunned Jewish Girl in Mannish Coat
. Painting Claudia would be a lively departure. It would be pure ease, compared to what had just been said. Why on earth would Claudia Silver have been here with her
husband?
Unless Paul was thinking of subletting the place out from under her. He'd never liked her subject matter. Paul had wanted her to paint flowers. Or seascapes. Every painting in his mother's goddamned apartment had been glorified hotel art, come to think of it.

“With Paul?” Annie asked Claudia, steadily. “Whatever for?”

Claudia drew in a breath. She felt a vague urge to simply let go, to drop the unwieldy burden of her lie, to spew, then beg Annie to help clean her up. She pressed forward, blindly. “Look, Annie,” she began, somewhat sternly. She halted. There was another sharp intake of breath. “We—”

The “we,” of course, was the tell. Annie was already free-falling as the rest of Claudia's announcement unfurled.

“We didn't mean for this to happen. But it's—” Here, Claudia paused, surprised to have run out of breath again so quickly. The words had taken over, a marauding band of invaders. “It's gotten serious.”

Annie shook her head. “Serious? What are you talking about?” she somehow asked.

“We're in love, Annie,” Claudia blurted. So this was where she had arrived. Seized territory. Somehow there was nothing else to do but plant her flag. She told herself it was the simple truth.

“In love,” Annie repeated.

Claudia tried to make direct eye contact, as Edith had always instructed her to do when speaking to an adult. “Yes.”

“He brought you
here?
”

“To show me his art.”

“My God.” Annie rolled her eyes in pity and in mirth, having been rendered instantly grotesque and agonized, ungainly, a
Guernica
horse. Her hand managed to cover whatever was happening with her mouth—Annie couldn't tell what. A strange sound crawled up, and was blessedly muffled by the electric kettle as it burst forth with a plume of steam and clicked off. Her face contorted. She knew she looked hideous when she cried, which is why she never did, but now she had no choice. “This is my studio, Claudia,” she was somehow able to say through her twisted mouth. Her voice belonged to the person she used to be. “This . . . work,” she said, immediately ashamed to call it
work
. Work was something you did that was
useful,
that other people
saw,
and that they
paid for.
“It's mine.” Annie's legs were wilted stems beneath her. Wobbling forward as best as she could, she reached into a cabinet for a box of cookies and set about the familiar ritual of assembling a tea tray.

Claudia glanced around the room, doubtful and unmoored, scanning for evidence. She never considered that Annie had talent beyond graciousness, menus, and the exact placement of a brooch on a lapel, nor intelligence beyond guiding her daughters to make the most of their own. But alarming details quickly stacked up in Annie's favor. The mini Mason Pearson hairbrush in the medicine cabinet, the British
Vogue
that Paul convincingly explained when it had appeared on the doormat, the chocolate kefir yogurt drink in the little fridge, the fat Korean-market peonies in a cut-glass pitcher that Claudia, charmed, had pictured Paul selecting—

And now, Annie tore the box top clean off, unceremoniously dumping its contents directly onto a tray. Afrika cookies, in fact.

The very chocolate cookies Claudia had chosen for Annie with such care, a lifetime ago, on Christmas Eve. That she had broken her second-to-last twenty to purchase.

“I was at the Rhode Island School of Design for two semesters,” Annie announced, reminding herself once again. “Before I got pregnant with Martha.” She had gotten halfway across the room with the tray before realizing there was no place to set it down.

“
RISD?
I thought you went to Radcliffe.”

“I started over.” Annie considered dropping the tray. She could hurl it, spoiling her wool Berber. Claudia, meanwhile, was aware she could help her hostess by clearing some space, but that would mean moving, and as long as she held still, nothing else would change.

“Paul is a liar, isn't he,” Annie remarked after a moment, breaking the spell. “A spectacular one.” She wondered briefly what she would do with all these paintings. “Make some room, won't you?”

Claudia removed the Thai food cluttering the table to a counter. Annie wasn't bothering with the wetness flooding her face. “I should go,” Claudia said.

“Go where, exactly?” Annie asked.

Annie had a point. From this heightened vantage point, Claudia could survey that every home she had ever known was now rubble, while the solid ground on which she and Paul would establish their homestead had not yet been broken. If she looked down, she might find herself standing in a pool of her own shame. So she didn't look down.

“You can't go anywhere at this hour,” Annie declared. “This is when most of the crime happens in this city.” She dunked an Afrika into her tea and, uncharacteristically, popped the whole, melting wafer into her mouth. “Are you ever going to sit
down?
”

Moving slowly, Claudia approached the sofa and lowered herself onto an armrest. She removed her fur hat and messenger bag, placing them on the sofa, and eyed the telltale cookies.

“I'm curious,” Annie said. “What did he say about my art?”

“That it was his.” The passing off of Annie's art as Paul's own
was
a curious choice, Claudia had to admit to herself. But maybe Paul felt that he'd
had
to lie, for some reason. Or didn't realize that he
was
lying. Maybe he considered himself the owner of the things he paid for. That made some sense. “I . . . I should probably go,” Claudia eventually said.

“Surely you're collecting belt notches,” Annie explained to herself out loud. “Or one of you is, at least. That's obviously what this is all about.” The sky seemed to be growing lighter, differentiating itself from the dark movement of the river. Over the years Annie had found tacky hairpins in Paul's coat pockets, decorated with chipped enamel flowers. She'd scooped several unfamiliar lip glosses from the bottom of the dryer. And once, the law firm had hosted a weekend retreat at a hotel with a nonworking phone number. Paul had blamed an unexpected rash of summer thunderstorms, but his running shoes and jeans cuffs had returned home entirely devoid of mud. “How long has this been going on?” she asked.

Claudia wondered if there was any way to respond to Annie. As Paul's beloved, she felt a responsibility to protect the details. “Awhile,” she replied, with some pride.

“Awhile,” Annie repeated, considering the sturdy, glossy-haired, pink-cheeked girl. Size ten, size twelve maybe. What could a few weeks matter to a couple of rotting decades, with fine lines around the eyes? “It's hard to imagine that you would do such a thing to us,” Annie said. “But there you have it.” Claudia shifted uncomfortably on the sofa.

“Does Bronwyn know?”

“Of course not,” Claudia replied.

“So here's what we'll do,” said Annie.

There is no “we,”
Claudia thought, standing up.

“I will make up the sofa and you will sleep on it,” Annie continued. “And tomorrow, you will tell Bronwyn.”

“You're fully tripping,” Claudia found herself saying out loud as she pointed herself toward the door.

“Fully tripping,”
Annie mused. “I may well be. But either you tell her yourself, tomorrow, or I will.”

Yes,
Claudia acknowledged to herself, Bronwyn would have to be informed, but surely not by Claudia
telling
her. By some other means. Osmosis. The wedding pages in the Sunday
Times,
which she and Bronwyn used to jokingly call the business section. The sight of Annie Tate pulling neatly folded pillowcases from a wardrobe in which Claudia hadn't bothered snooping when she'd had the chance was mind-boggling.
That's the real headline,
Claudia told herself.
How batshit crazy Annie is.
Claudia would wander. She would ride the F train all the way to Coney. She would no more stay here on Annie Tate's dowry linens than fly to the moon. It was obvious she'd made some kind of mess of things, but Claudia couldn't tell where tonight's disaster began and all the other ones ended.

What if Paul was angry?

She could not tell Bronwyn.

“I'm not staying here,” Claudia announced. Was Annie her boyfriend's daughter's mother? Or her best friend's father's wife? Swaying with sudden nausea, Claudia sank back on the armrest. “But I'm just going to sit here for a second, if that's okay with you.”

“By all means,” Annie said. “Make yourself at home.”

 

When Claudia awoke some time later, toppled over on the sofa, her head leaning against the armrest, the apartment was filled with dove-gray morning light. Annie Tate stood outside on the frigid balcony, wrapped in a duvet and staring out at the river as the sun rose on Friday morning. Claudia sat up, plucking her fur hat from the carpet and setting it firmly on her head. Taking care, she crept to the bathroom, silently closed the door, peed, and looked at herself. Her cheeks were creased from sleep, her mouth stale, her dark brows in need of the little brush she kept in her makeup bag. Her reflection split as she opened the medicine cabinet. Only recently she'd seen this charming assortment—the Mason Pearson, the tooth twine, the
vih
-tah-min tablets, the mysterious unguent, the Kneipp pine bath—and understood them as Paul Tate's refined toilette. But it was Annie Tate's dental floss she'd been borrowing. Plus her
husband.
Claudia squeezed a plug of anise toothpaste onto her index finger and scrubbed it across her gums, then slipped from the bathroom, grateful that Annie was doing her best pillar of salt on the balcony. Last night's scattered cookies called to her: Claudia grabbed a handful on tiptoe, refusing the notion that Annie could turn at any moment, then backed her way out of the apartment.

Last night this passageway had been breathing, warmly beckoning to her. This morning it was just another airless New York corridor, smelling, as Paul had once apologized, like rent control. She piled the cookies into a solid block and stuffed them into her mouth, where they molded to her palate.

The elevator was a tomb.

She needed to get Paul on the phone so they could go somewhere. A shingled refuge strung with glass buoys at the far end of Montauk, with no phone and a roaring fire. If Claudia could just catch Paul at work before he returned to Jane Street to freshen up after his closing, only to find his wife on the balcony, all cried out—

Outside, the West Village on an early Friday morning hummed with promise. Claudia let the prosperous flock of commuters carry her along to the familiar corner of Sixth Avenue and Eighth Street.

Work and money.

Somehow Claudia was made of them, but had neither.

 

Bedford High School was big, old, brick, and pulsing. It sat across the street from Brooklyn College, capped with a cheery white cupola. It had tall sash windows and a wholesome history of Jews and Italians in bobby socks, but that was then. Thanks to various global diasporas, Bedford's classrooms and hallways had become hectic with the competing college ambitions of sixteen hundred rainbow-hued, motor-mouthed, science-fair attending, viola-schlepping, gum-snapping, grandmother-fearing overachievers. Their maniacal focus on fully funded Ivy League admission did away with any potential ethnic combat, and their currency was grades. Tribes at Bedford included State School Future MDs, Zeitgeisty Literary Magazine Snobs, and Elite Armed Forces Pragmatists.

Phoebe Goldberg belonged to none of these.

Her nature, fluid and chill, had led her to smoke blunts with Cambodian physics prodigies under the bleachers, paint a few backdrops for the eunuchs of musical theater, toss a Frisbee on the Brooklyn College quad with fellow City University faculty-and-admin brats, split a Blimpie with the co-captain of the Math Team, and drop some choice words with the menacing riffraff in the back row of homeroom. She
was
the riffraff, was how she saw it. Phoebe knew she was supposed to be grateful for Bedford High School, grateful to Edith for pulling strings to get her in. For
having
strings.