Lucky in the Corner (22 page)

“You must think I’m such a loser,” Tracy says.

“I think everything is hard. I think what you’re doing is especially hard. I don’t know that I’d be doing much better.”

“But you would. Of course you would.”

“Maybe,” Fern says, but they both know she probably
would
be doing better. They are both capable of fucking up, but Tracy’s potential along these lines has so much more range.

“Let me show you what he can do,” she says to Fern as she hands Vaughn over. He is making funny faces; he thinks he’s the pinnacle of wit. Tracy goes to the living room and fetches a bolster pillow from the sofa, sets it down on the floor, and then takes Vaughn and props his stomach on the pillow.

“We play wheelbarrow.” She picks up his feet and starts rolling him gently back and forth. He starts laughing.

“You try it,” she says to Fern. “He loves this game. I take him for rides in the car, too. We drive around. Lots of walks. He’s a guy who likes to be on the move. Mr. Mobile.”

Mercifully, the phone rings, saving her from any more of this pitch. Fern doesn’t want to watch Tracy selling herself as a good mother, a flawed but improvable human. She shouldn’t have to do this.

Fern takes over the wheelbarrow operation while Tracy gets the phone. She holds Vaughn by his fat ankles and tries to imagine the weight of the responsibility Tracy bears, as well as the huge connection that must come with shepherding someone through the beginning of his life. Then she imagines being Vaughn, pinning all his hope on Tracy, on her coming through for him.

It’s a guy on the phone. Fern can tell. Tracy has a whole other voice she uses for guys. There is suddenly a little challenging element in her tone. And then she has hung up. She’ll save this call for later. She doesn’t want to have this conversation with Fern around.

“How was Florida?” she says instead.

“I feel like I was only there for a minute. I hardly knew my grandfather. I mean once he read to me from a picture book. I was like four or something. The main point was trying to be there for my grandmother. My Fern was there, too. The two of them—she and my grandmother—are total characters together. They’ve been friends since they were our age. Inside, I think, they’re still the chorus girls they were all that time ago. They have tons of stories.” She pauses, then asks Tracy, “What do you think our stories will be?”

Tracy hardly has to think at all. It’s as though she had stories at the ready, as if there were going to be a quiz. “The time we were in Michigan with your dad and Louise and we were skinny-dipping at night and that boat of fishermen puttered by and we had to swim like crazy to get to our clothes.” She pauses to think some more. “When you had appendicitis that summer in high school and I drove you to the hospital and you were in agony and the thing was about to burst and then they gave you that huge pain shot in the emergency room, and then you wanted me to get you out of there and take you to the beach. Don’t worry. We’ll have plenty of memories for our golden years.”

Fern pauses, then says, “So. Okay. You’ll let me start picking up some of the slack? When you can’t do it, you’ll know I’m there, ready to step in.” She doesn’t want this conversation to turn bad. She just wants it to be over with, behind them. And so she doesn’t say anything else, only waits until Tracy shrugs and picks Vaughn up off his bolster and holds him and says, “Sounds like a plan.”

NORA IS
PUTTING TOGETHER
a “Crying Jag” party for Jeanne. Two pricey bottles of Bordeaux and a video are riding on the passenger seat next to her. She has just been to Facets, where she tried to get
Imitation of Life,
but it was out. (How could it be out?) So she settled for a second-best weeper—
Madame X.
Lana Turner is a little older in this one, a little more doughy in the face, thicker in the waist. Her age works against her in the setup scenes, where she’s supposed to be a blushing bride, but
for
her in later scenes, where she’s down in Mexico in the Cucaracha Hotel, on the long lam from her past—the suspicious-looking death of her playboy boyfriend, the child and husband she was forced to leave in order to spare them scandal. Now reduced to drinking absinthe with a blackmailing Burgess Meredith. Destroying her mind, marbles all but lost.

From memory, as vibrant as though it happened only the night before, Nora can see herself and Harold and their mother in front of the television, sharing the box of Kleenex on the big round coffee table in the den of the house in White Plains. The three of them watching one of these movies, all favorites of Lynette’s. The tragic figures in these films are always women—mothers cast off because of their class or color or indiscretions, forced to hide themselves away, watching their children from afar. Barbara Stanwyck as Stella Dallas. Joan Crawford as Mildred Pierce. Lana Turner as Madame X.

In Harold’s case, these stories seem to be another element in his peculiar imprinting. (He is not invited tonight. If he came, he would give everyone the benefit of his expertise. On the movie; on Lana Turner’s entire filmography; on her life, which was as lurid as her movies—the multiple marriages, the teenage daughter killing the gangster boyfriend, the late-life devotion to the nightclub hypnotist. No, Harold will not be coming tonight. He’s probably already watching
Imitation of Life
anyway. Who else could have rented it?)

Nora’s next stop is Pete’s up on Western. At Pete’s, they put pizza on an industrial scale with long rows of stainless-steel ovens manned by sweating guys with huge biceps, their torsos bound in white aprons smeared with tomato sauce. These guys shuffle pizzas in and out of the ovens with spatulas of the gods. In front of them, closer to the counter, is a shorter line of order-taking women of similar heft. They sit facing a bank of wall phones, a notepad and a small raffia basket in front of each of them. A sign on the wall reads:

ALL GIRLS ON
7–11
SHIFT
MUST
PEEL GARLIC

From Pete’s, Nora heads home in a vapor lock of greasy cheese and cardboard. The pizza, the movie, the Bordeaux, this whole evening is a satin pillow plumped up under Jeanne, everything arranged as a small pageant in her honor, showing off Nora’s encyclopedic knowledge of her lover, combining elements guaranteed to please. Nora can already see Jeanne weeping at the end of
Madame X.
Of course, she understands that she is proving something.

Arriving at their house in a half-hour will be Nora’s friend Stevie and Stevie’s girlfriend, Lauren. Although Lauren is twenty years younger than Stevie, they seem to be a perfect match. They don’t even joke about the May-December thing, and when you’re with them, it does seem about as insignificant as Lauren being a couple of inches taller.

Since Nora has told Stevie a little about the thing with Pam, and since she always assumes any secret you tell anyone is tacitly telling her partner too, she supposes everyone tonight but Jeanne will be holding the same soiled scrap of information. Jeanne will be the only one in the room whose enjoyment of the pizza and the good Bordeaux and
Madame X
will be wholehearted and unburdened. Nora joins the chorus of everyone who would hate her in this moment.

“Oh, lovely,” Jeanne says when the pizza box has been opened, the wine uncorked and poured.

Fern slides in with Lucky at her heels, both of them scouting for pizza. Fern takes a slice, tears off a strip of crust for the dog, nods hi to everyone. Then stands looking at the scene in the living room as though the sofa and the TV are props on a stage, as though she and Jeanne and their friends are actors in a small, domestic drama staged by Nora.

Nora has been getting a lot of these penetrating, ironic looks from Fern. At first Nora was sure she was being judged harshly, but now she suspects that what Fern is actually doing is pitying her. She can’t decide if pity is better than disapproval, or worse.

“Why don’t you stay and watch with us?” Nora says, trying to get in the way of Fern’s look, also to get her to join the group. Lauren is also in her twenties; Fern would fit right in. Even as she offers it, though, Nora is confident her invitation will be rejected. Fern is already backing out the doorway.

“Yeah, well, I’ve got a little sleepover buddy tonight. I think I’m just going to hang out with Vaughn and work on my presentation for my seminar.” She gives Lucky a nudge forward and slips with him back out of the room before anyone can delay her with polite conversation. Tonight is the third or fourth time in the past couple of weeks that she has kept Vaughn here. She’s trying to give Tracy a break. She’s a good friend, Nora thinks. And although she and Jeanne have been woken a few times by Vaughn’s middle-of-the-night longings for contact or food or changing, it is also nice to have a baby in the house again.

“A toast,” Jeanne says, lifting her glass, and Nora thinks how beautiful and lovely she is, small and still, even after all this time a little mysterious for being from another place. Then she thinks how the wine looks like liquid garnet in their glasses and how full her home is tonight and how this is her real life, the life she is meant to be living.

Jeanne’s toast is to Stevie and Lauren, who have bought a house. It’s an awful house—too far west and in a gang-riddled neighborhood. The owner lives in Saudi Arabia and has rented the place out for years and was only selling to avoid the long-distance legal hassles that would have come up if the property were condemned. But now—as opposed to the years ago when Nora and Jeanne bought their house, which was merely dowdy and paneled everywhere—the only houses any of their friends can afford are in distant neighborhoods, requiring a map to find them, or terrible houses, which will be years in the reclaiming.

“There was shit in the corners of one of the bedrooms,” Stevie says. Something like pride reverberates under the statement, a Swiss Family Robinson dauntlessness.

“Human shit?” Nora asks.

“We didn’t get a lab analysis.”

Madame X
is fabulously terrible. Stevie and Lauren find it hilarious. Lana and John Forsythe, old as Methuselahs but gamely impersonating young newlyweds, new parents. Ricardo Montalban, heavy accent notwithstanding, wedged into the role of Connecticut hunt club playboy. The special credit for “Gowns by Jean-Louis.” The gowns themselves. The Technicolor dialogue.

Best of all, the tearjerker ending. After years spent in boozy reclusion, Lana has returned to New York, shot the blackmailing Burgess Meredith, and is about to be tried for his murder. To protect her identity, she burns her passport and signs her confession with a spidery X. In the years she has spent going downhill, her husband has become governor of New York. He comes to her trial to see the young public attorney assigned to her case—the music crescendoes—their son!

Stevie and Lauren are in a state of high hilarity, tossing wadded-up paper napkins at the TV screen while Jeanne remains impervious to these peripheral hijinks; she stays firmly enmeshed in the movie’s trumped-up tragedy. She yanks Kleenexes furiously from the box on the coffee table, snorts, and wipes her eyes.

Nora is neither laughing nor crying; rather, she has slipped into a niche between the two. The movie has given her an opportunity to crawl into this place, where she currently spends quite a bit of time. What she does inside is listen to Pam. Replay is all she has available at the moment. They have agreed to a hiatus, to cool things down, like the shower with a chain pull they used to have in the chemistry classroom in high school. If anything blew up, they were supposed to rush over, stand under, and pull the chain.

Of course, nothing at the moment is going to cool down anything. Surprisingly, Pam is new to passion. Up until now, romance has been more cut and dried for her. And so she tells Nora she is floored and baffled by the intensity of what has happened between them. Whereas Nora, from benefit of slightly more experience, recognizes this strain of fever, malarial in nature. Once you’ve been struck, you may recover, but always carry a susceptibility. In a weak moment you can be felled again, a quick swoon to the ground, then the lovely, terrifying incandescence that is the hallmark of the condition. And as you lie there, you have to wonder, is it the other you want, or the other as agent of the incandescence?

This afternoon Nora found a message waiting on her cell phone voicemail. Now she neither makes nor receives calls on this phone. It is now purely a vessel for messages. In not talking with Pam, only replaying the messages in her car, in the basement while she is doing laundry, Nora feels she is at least technically adhering to the hiatus. Pam is having less success. According to her latest message, she’s going crazy, has to talk with Nora, has to see her. She wants to talk about a future for the two of them, a life beyond Melanie. “She’s not going to be easy to get away from, but I’m prepared to run through the wall of fire.”

Hearing this declaration is terrifying. Nora has said nothing to Pam about a life beyond Jeanne. She doesn’t want a life without Jeanne. Still she replays Pam’s message a few times, listens as though something more must be done with these words of desire, as though they must be eaten, swallowed, inhaled. What, she has begun to wonder, is this—obsession or actual love, and what is the difference between the two? Does one merely disguise itself as the other? Here is the very scary part, the idea that you might think this huge, invasive force is love and too late see it’s only obsession in a cheesy costume, with a zipper up its back.

FERN AWOKE
on the outskirts of a nightmare. At eleven, she was still dogged by the same bad dreams that went back to the earliest parts of her childhood, populated with the same creeps and boogeymen. Dark, never quite revealed figures, lurking around corners, behind doorways, or as in this one, waiting behind the trees of a dense forest.

She dragged herself awake. If she fell back to sleep, it could well be back into the same dream, which would only pick up where it left off. This apartment, still unfamiliar, especially in its night shadows and shapes, was only a little less scary than the dream.