Keep Your Mouth Shut and Wear Beige (14 page)

I hadn’t taken a real vacation since Mike had left. That was something I needed to figure out how to do.

Leading out of Rose and Guy’s massive kitchen was a hallway that led to the garage and the door I had noticed earlier. As I went down it, I snooped. To my immediate left was a big pantry with a second refrigerator. Across from that was a built-in desk with a computer monitor and assorted devices that provided music, security, and internal communications. Recessed storage cupboards lined the desk side of the hall, while beyond the pantry was a back staircase, followed by another half bath, less elegant than its front-hall sister but possessing a full roll of toilet paper. The hall ended with a door to the garage. At right angles to that was the door to the parking court. Just inside that door were perhaps ten plastic pots of gold-and rust-colored mums. I moved them a bit and then unloaded my car, putting the contents of my cooler in the pantry refrigerator.

I was just finishing when I heard the little door open. I went down the hall to meet Rose. She apologized for not having gotten here before me. “I hope that Jill Allyn was at least mildly welcoming.” She sounded as if she thought that there had been no chance of that.

“She thought I was the cleaning lady.”

“Jill Allyn thinks everyone is her clean— Wait a minute. Why did she think you were the cleaning lady? Mariposa and her sister come on Mondays. We told Jill Allyn that when she said she wanted to come out early.”

I explained about Jill Allyn’s sending Mariposa away.

“You aren’t serious, are you? The house didn’t get cleaned?”

“It looks fine,” I tried to say, but Rose wasn’t listening. She was angry, and I didn’t blame her. She jerked out the keyboard on the house computer, keyed in a code, and spoke into the intercom. “Jill Allyn, I’m here.” She was forcing her voice to be pleasant. “Could you come down and move your car so I can unload?”

We both looked at the intercom speaker. There was no answer, not even the bewildered clicks I had heard at the front door.

“I’m not sure she knows how to work the intercom,” I volunteered.

“It may be more than that,” Rose said darkly. “I’ll bet she isn’t where she’s supposed to be.” She tried a different code and spoke the same message. “Do you have friends who are this annoying?” she asked me while we were waiting to see what would happen. A moment later came the futile clicking as Jill Allyn tried to respond.

“No wonder those mums are sitting in the hall,” Rose said. “Mariposa was bringing her son, who was going to plant them.”

“Rose . . . Rose . . .” Jill Allyn called from the front of the house.

I followed Rose through the kitchen and out to the front hall. Jill Allyn was bending over from the railing. “I’m in the middle of a paragraph. I’ll drop my keys down and you can get someone else to move the car.”

Her aim was so bad that if I hadn’t spent years and years playing catch with my boys, the keys would have ricocheted off the wall, chipping the paint.

“Sorry,” she apologized for her bad throw. “Just bring them back up when you’re done, okay?”

No, that wasn’t okay. “I’ll leave them right here.” I pointed to one of the empty sculpture niches.

She looked blank for a moment, as if she had never heard of a
parking attendant—which apparently I now was—being so uncooperative. “All right,” she said and started to move away.

“Wait a minute,” Rose called up to her. “Don’t go. You need to change rooms. I know that both Guy and Mary Beth told you when you wanted to come out early, that you needed to stay in the room over the garage.”

“They said that, but it made no sense.” Jill Allyn leaned back over the railing, her hair falling forward. “No one else was here, and I work so well in the front room.”

“I understand,” Rose acknowledged. She was having to speak with her head tilted back. “But now everyone is coming, so you need to move.”

“I know that, and I will. I definitely will.” Jill Allyn sounded a bit like Zack when he talked about his college applications.
Oh, don’t worry. I’ll get to them . . . just maybe not today.

Rose picked up on that. “I would appreciate it if you could do it now.”

“It doesn’t have to be this minute, does it? I’m in the middle of a scene . . . and my stuff’s all spread out. So if you need a room this instant, it’d probably be easier for you to reassign things a bit. I’m just suggesting that because it would be easier for you if you did it that way.”

“That’s not the issue,” Rose said. “We have people coming who have never been here before, and Guy and I would like them to have rooms with views.”

“If you’re going to bring Guy into it, what do you think he cares about—me finishing this manuscript or who sleeps where? What’s gotten into you?” Jill Allyn’s voice was edged with contempt. “You never used to care about things like this.”

“Maybe, maybe not. But I would like you to move.”

“And I am going to . . . just not this very second.
I
still have work to do.” She emphasized the
I
as if to say that Rose no longer
had work to do. She flicked her hand, dismissing the issue, and then disappeared from the railing. Rose said nothing.

I was astonished, not just at Jill Allyn’s phenomenonally bad manners but at the fact that Rose had caved. She had given up, let Jill Allyn have her way.

If Jill Allyn had been a superimportant “offend at your own peril” client, then Rose wouldn’t have raised a fuss in the first place. But to take a stand, then back down . . . that didn’t fit with the impression that I had of Rose. She’d seemed confident and poised. She’d struck me as reliable and straightforward, qualities that mattered a lot to me. So why had she let herself get into an “I’m more important than you” spitting match, and why had she let Jill Allyn win?

I followed her back into the kitchen. “If this is about me or my dad having that room, we don’t care. We really don’t.”

“I know that,” she said with a sigh. “I’m sorry you had to witness that scene, but when it comes to Jill Allyn, I must have some sick inner need to punish myself. I can’t think of any other reason why I put up with her. She and I have a long history—we were moms on the playground together—and sometimes it gets ugly like that.”

“The way she was talking . . . that sounded like working-mom versus nonworking-mom crap. You work at the agency, don’t you?”

“No.” Her voice was tight. “I haven’t really worked since Finney was born.”

“Oh.”

She turned her back to me and started fiddling with the toaster cord, tucking it behind the appliance. “You have to understand . . . he changed everything for us. He had his first surgery when he was a week old, and then he had a total of four. After he was finally able to start on solid foods, he was a mess until we figured out the corn
allergy. Then we had to come out of denial about the fact that his issues weren’t only physical. So, no, I haven’t been working.”

“I wasn’t judging you,” I said instantly.

“Other people have.”

My guys had been healthy—thank God for that—but I’d seen the toll that a chronically ill child takes on a woman: the nights in the hospitals; the frustrating days of waiting for doctors to return phone calls; the research that never agreed with other research; the anxiety, the depression. It was hard to reconcile what I knew about such women with the glossy magazine article about Rose Zander-Brown who discovered new literary talent at her kitchen table.

Rose probably couldn’t reconcile them either. She must have felt like a different person.

“Do you miss working?”

“Not at first. I was too busy and under too much stress. Everything was so complex—there were so many different issues—it all took over my brain. I don’t regret the choices I made, not at all. Finney’s doing so much better than anyone ever thought he would.”

“And you have to give yourself a lot of credit for that.”

She nodded. “I know that. But that orientation to the world, that practical, problem-solving, list-making, completely left-brain stuff, has spread. Like with this house, I didn’t want to come out here and have to do more housework than I do in Brooklyn. We were supposed to have someone living here all the time and so on weekends we would just walk in with however many guests, and dinner would be ready. But Guy also thought that it would be a great way to support new writers. They could live here rent-free with a small stipend as long as they kept the lightbulbs changed and went to the grocery store before we came.”

“That didn’t work?”

“Hardly. We bought the place in May, and we’ve already been
through two different caretakers. The first woman was fine when we came out here with a bunch of Annie’s friends. But then over the Fourth of July, we had a big party with people we knew professionally—editors and such—and she finally told me that talking to them was more important to her career than helping me in the kitchen. She thought that they wouldn’t take her seriously if they saw her as kitchen help. Of course, I wanted to ask her if that meant that no one was taking me seriously, but I didn’t want to know the answer to that one. So then we had two young guys—they were a couple—and they were pretty good, but we showed up Labor Day with two other families, and they had done nothing because they were both on deadlines, and couldn’t imagine that anyone would think that going to the grocery store for
me
was more important than their work. And to top it all off, these people go back to the city and tell everyone that I’m a complete bitch. Just exactly what I set out to be in life—the boss’s bitchy wife.”

The nurses on the OB floor complain about the doctors’ bitchy wives, coming in demanding the best rooms because their husbands are on staff. I wouldn’t want anyone talking about me that way.

“How does Jill Allyn fit into this?” I asked. “She’s the important, moneymaking client and you’re the freeloading wife?” Some nurses pay way too much attention to what cars the doctors’ wives drive and what jewelry they wear.

“That’s what Jill Allyn would say,” Rose agreed, “except when she needs to be my dearest friend. In the old days, she was our most important client. When we started the agency, we used to pride ourselves on taking manuscripts that no one else knew what to do with and making them work. Money was only one of the ways of gauging how you were doing, and we usually pretended that it was the least important. Then Finney came, and Guy felt
powerless. The one thing Guy could do was make sure we provided for Finney. Making money started to count a lot. We—he— took on a different kind of a client. I’d been the one with the eye for the quirky, literary project that would get great reviews; he could spot the one that would get a movie deal. He turned out to thrive in a higher-stakes world, not just in the publishing deals but also in our own investments, so even after Finney’s trust was set up, he kept going, and now we have this.” She waved her hand around the marble foyer.

“So Jill Allyn’s not as important as she used to be?”

Rose gave her head a slight shake. Her auburn hair swung around her neck. Her earrings were gold, but nothing fancy. “We’ve got some authors with seven-figure deals, and she’s not one of them. In her heart, she knows that, so she uses the friendship to make herself seem important. She works it from both ends. She invites herself out here because she’s our dear friend, our neighbor back in Park Slope, and then she won’t change rooms out here because she’s a client facing a deadline.”

“Let’s forget about her and get to work.”

Rose had been leaning against the counter. She straightened, ready to get on with things. “But how,” she asked lightly, “am I to forget about the fact that we wouldn’t be working at all if Jill Allyn hadn’t dismissed the cleaning lady?”

The house was, in fact, quite clean. Apparently Mariposa and her sister came out for a full day every Monday whether or not the Zander-Browns had come the preceding weekend.

I moved Jill Allyn’s car. Rose pulled hers into the garage and we unloaded quickly. Then Rose took me up the back stairs to the room over the garage where I would be staying, now that Jill Allyn was squatting in the room originally intended for me.

It was a big, bright space, but the view to the front was of the road. The windows on one side looked down on the parking
court. The other side faced the construction project next door. Furthermore, the dormers, necessary to the house’s external grandeur, left the room cut up and difficult to furnish. There was no unbroken wall for the bed, so it was angled into a corner, protruding awkwardly.

“The people who built this house fired their architect and their first builder,” Rose explained. “The second builder tinkered with the plans, and this is one of the results.”

“Other people lived here? It seems so new.”

“They never moved in. They split up two weeks before they were supposed to. We saved a ton of money, and they had already chosen all the furniture, so we could move right in.”

“So you didn’t choose any of the furniture downstairs?”

“God, no. I can’t stand all those noncolors. I keep meaning to do something with the place, but once I get out here, I never seem to have the time.”

Rose turned back the coverlet on the bed. Seeing that there were no sheets on it, she crossed the room to get a set from the closet. “I should make Jill Allyn do this.”

“It’s just making beds,” I said. I had already stripped off the coverlet. “It’s no big deal.”