Tales of Accidental Genius (5 page)

One day Michael had the idea to write a screenplay about the Old Testament story of Abraham and his son Isaac—a movie set in the present day, about parents willing to sacrifice the life of a child for their belief in some greater good. Larry helped Michael draw in the scenes, trim the dialogue, use silence effectively. . . .

Six months later, a big studio bought the script and began casting.

A
LEXANDRA SAID THAT
Larry sounded a little like her own father, with whom she would go walking or fishing. She described the place where she grew up in Ukraine, the snowfall,
and the narrow lanes along the border with Belarus, the cool shade of trees in summer, and the dry, incessant wind.

When she told him the name of her fashion house, Michael admitted that he'd heard of it—had read about her in newspapers, even passed one of her boutiques on Melrose Avenue—but to him she was just a woman who had kindly sewn on his button the night before.

She confessed how it felt to see people wearing the dresses she designed: how it made her shy, how she hoped each piece enabled some secret part of the self to be shared with the world. And designing for runway was exhausting, she said, the traveling endless.

When she was a girl her family had taken their meals at a large table—though not always at the same time. Sometimes she sat watching her mother boil pans of water for vegetables and large cuts of meat. Sometimes she wrote her name in steam on the window, then peered through each letter into winter's heart. On cold Sunday afternoons, she went with her father to the shed for logs. They were stacked under a blue tarp. He wrapped the pieces she was to carry in an old blanket to prevent splinters. Once a month her mother spread a towel on her shoulders, then the tug of wet hair and the small, ensuing snips of her hairdresser's scissors; her mother shaking the towel over the sink, then the knock of a broom under the seat.

Her grandmother watched from the kitchen table.

“
She
was religious,” Alexandra said. “But not like you—more like Larry. They would have had things in common, I'm sure, like special words and customs, how things are supposed to be done. That's all lost to me, I'm afraid, I don't even celebrate the holidays. . . .”

Michael listened as other moments of childhood rose to the surface of her eyes.

When he asked what inspired her to become a designer, she told him how, one night when she was little, she'd woken up and wandered into the kitchen because her throat was dry.

Sitting in the half-dark was her grandmother. She was repairing some garment with a needle and thread, and had not heard the figure of a child approach from behind. Alexandra remembers her sitting there, very still, in a deep chair beside a table of family photographs.

Some of the pictures showed her late husband, and the many ages they had lived through. On her grandmother's lap was the wool jacket he wore when they were young and took weekend trips in a silver car to Kiev. She was mending a tear in the lining, and with each loop, fused the separated pieces of fabric into one piece.

In a wicker basket by her foot were other items that belonged to the family, including one of Alexandra's bears, which was missing an eye.

It was the first of many nights when she would creep out of bed and listen to her grandmother's quiet hands working. Sometimes she would mutter something, or cease her sewing as winter flakes brushed the window.

Not long after, she died in her favorite chair, which Alexandra's father used to carry outside when she wanted the sun on her cheeks. They all thought she was sleeping.

Going through her things after the funeral, Alexandra's mother discovered a small box under the old woman's bed. It contained silver needles, thimbles, old spools, scissors, and a note addressed to her granddaughter.

Олександра,

Спасибі за мені компанію на тих довгих ночей.

Я хочу, щоб ви це швейний набір.

Тепер ви будете знати, свою владу.

бабуся
^*

A
LEXANDRA DINED LATE
in her suite listening to the faint applause of rain upon the window. It was Sunday night in a foreign city.

She cut wide patterns of fabric from the rolls of cloth and pinned them to her mannequins, folding and layering each piece instinctively.

About midnight she put away the fabric and went downstairs with her sketchbook.

As expected, Michael was writing quietly in the lobby. He was surprised to see her, and thanked her again for making notes on his script and for their talk at the pool.

She sat directly across from him, and for hours they worked together in silence, her hand moving of its own accord, making one sketch after another.

When she began to feel tired, her strokes grew slower and more deliberate.

Then, when her eyes closed, her head fell slightly to one side, as though tipping the last of her thoughts onto the page.

Michael stopped what he was doing and looked at her hands, remembering how they had sewn on his button the night before.
Then he moved carefully toward her, the way he imagined she had moved so as not to disrupt the rhythm of her grandmother's sewing. In her face, Michael saw the expression of the child who had stood there in the darkness, and the heavy, rolling flakes of snow that behind the veil of her sleep were still falling.

Before she could wake up, he took from his pocket the tiny Star of David necklace left behind by his friend, which he knew had traveled vast distances and borne witness to many things. Alexandra's pocketbook was open on the floor and he dropped it in without any sound.

On the flight home to Los Angeles, he wondered if one day she would find it—turn it over in her fingers, as if trying to connect the chain and silver points to a memory. But if such a thing didn't happen it wouldn't matter, for he would never again have to worry that what had been given up, was also lost.

M
ICHAEL AND
J
UDY
had sushi that night because their mother and father were leaving for Los Angeles. The restaurant was near their apartment in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. Michael wanted noodle soup with a fried egg on top. Judy had a California roll. The waiter brought tea and small cups without handles. Judy kept looking at her phone until her mother said something.

After the meal, they got up and put their coats on to leave. Michael took the striped candy that came with the check and unwrapped one for his older sister.

The sidewalk was busy with people coming from the subway on North Seventh Street. Michael raised the hood of his jacket against the wind. It was spring, but the weather was yet to turn. The headlights of cars on the cold street made him reach for his mother's hand. They would soon be home, and he could go into his bedroom and lie on the floor, or play video games, or look at his fish and tap the glass. Then his mother stopped walking because Judy was lagging behind.

“C'mon, Judy,” Rebecca called. “Please stop texting and do up your coat.”

The weekend before, Rebecca had taken her to Bergdorf Goodman to pick out a new coat for spring. They selected a few possibilities, then lunched on the eighth floor, where the waiters wear green knit ties. Outside the restaurant, currents of people drifted along Central Park South, past the Plaza and the horsemen in top hats offering rides to young families and couples. They had once taken a loop around the park in a carriage, but Judy could hardly remember it now.

Over lunch, Rebecca noticed Judy watching a table of girls just a few years older than she. The girls had expensive pocketbooks and kept covering their mouths to laugh. When dessert came, Judy asked loudly for a macchiato, and Rebecca remembered enough about being young to say nothing.

After lunch, they went downstairs to make a final decision on the coat, then to the lower level to try different shades of lipstick.

When they got home, Judy stretched out on her bed and stared at the American Girl dolls lined up on the dresser. She knew their names and remembered how each one had felt different to play with. The lipstick was still on her mouth and the taste of it made her wish the dolls would disappear.

That same day, her brother, Michael, went out to Long Island with their father to get basketball shoes at the mall. They were the newest ones from LeBron James and everybody at school was getting them. While his father was paying, Michael made a point of checking that he had the right box, with pictures of LeBron James in action printed on the cardboard. He wanted to study them, figure out the links between the photos: were they all from games where LeBron James scored more than a certain number of points? Were they all photos taken at away games? Shots from rookie season? Assists?

Michael explained all this on the drive back to Brooklyn, his father listening with admiration and fear.

Transitions had always been difficult for Rebecca, and any impending separation from her children usually inspired a rush of closeness. Her parents were Broadway entertainers who for decades had worked six nights and two afternoons a week. Now they were retired and lived in the Hamptons, joyfully hosting their grandchildren when she and David had to travel.

It was Rebecca and David's fifteenth wedding anniversary, and they were going to Los Angeles for three days to celebrate. Their son and teenage daughter had never been to Los Angeles but had seen pictures of the hotel where their father proposed. Michael wasn't interested; said it looked too girly, with all the palm trees and pink everything.

Rebecca's parents had talked about going to Hollywood when she was a girl, but never left the West Village, even for a summer. Now they were in Southampton, near the movie theater, with its frame of blinking lightbulbs and old-fashioned black letters. When they got
very
old, their plan was to buy into an assisted-living home for retired actors in New Jersey and live out their last days around the piano, with people who knew the same songs they did.

“You have to understand,” they once told Rebecca. “There'll be a time when we can't even take showers, let alone cook or make the bed.”

When Rebecca and David traveled, their children had to share a room at their grandparents' house. That was the part Judy used to hate, but now she didn't mind. Her mother said it was because she was growing up. But the truth was she could sleep with her phone on the pillow.

O
N THEIR WAY
home from the sushi restaurant, Judy almost got hit by a car. Traffic was coming fast along Driggs Avenue heading for the Williamsburg Bridge, and Judy was watching a picture of herself upload with excruciating slowness. Michael felt the pull as Rebecca lunged for her daughter's arm, but the car missed by several yards.

“Jesus!” her mother said. “What are you doing?”

When it was finally clear to cross and they were safely on the other side of the road, Rebecca turned to her daughter. “How can I trust you to be out by yourself in Southampton if you don't watch where you're going?”

“I'm sorry, Mom,” Judy said, feeling for the shape of her phone in a pocket. It was still warm and she imagined all the data scrolling through it, the people looking at her photo on Twitter—
re-Tweeting
it,
faving
it—what boys might see it and want to
follow
her.

“How can I go away with your father if I can't trust you to cross the street?”

“I always look when I'm alone or with Michael, but when I'm with you or Dad I forget.”

“That's true, Mom,” Michael said. “When she takes me to Vinnie's Pizza, she always looks. Well . . . she's looked five times out of the six we've been allowed to go there this year, but the fourth trip—which is the time she didn't look on the northeastern corner of Bedford Avenue—was when Dad met us halfway because we didn't have any money, which means we weren't out by ourselves technically, because we returned home with Dad
who was carrying the pizza—though she didn't look
before
Dad met us, so does that count?”

“It's okay, Michael,” his mother said, squeezing her son's hand. “I understand. I get what you're saying.”

As they neared the apartment, Rebecca felt a stab of rage. Imagined her daughter's body in the street, limp and bleeding. Wanted to grab the lapels of Judy's new coat and drive home the point. But her daughter was at an age where even the smallest humiliation could shred her confidence, and so Rebecca kept quiet.

J
UDY WAS FIVE
and Michael only a year old when they moved across the East River to Brooklyn. The city had already changed so much. You could live almost anywhere. They had never thought to search outside Manhattan, but then someone told them about Williamsburg: old factories rezoned into new residences with doormen, gyms, and unlimited parking. Now their bedroom looked out on the city where Rebecca had grown up, a place she and David had once agreed
never, ever
to leave.

In the wake of their move, Rebecca had taken four months off work, and David took two. There were no sushi places then, no endless stream of yellow cabs, no high-fashion hair salons or French pastry shops with back gardens—just an expanse of concrete with weeds rising up through jagged lines, and clouds of dust from thumping demolition sites on every block. She remembers the grit-sound of the baby stroller's wheels on broken sidewalks; her children's fingers clasped over a doll or colored block of wood; the shapes of their bodies and how they moved
in her arms when trying to flee. They took baths together then, splashing around with the same toys in the shallow water. The ladybug scissors were still under the sink in a cup, and the thought of them resurrected the smell of clean hair and the softness of nails.

They're still young
, she thought, waving to the doorman who buzzed them in—
but not in the way they used to be.

Rebecca's parents were coming in from Southampton to pick up the kids. They would sleep at the apartment, then drive out fresh in the morning with their grandchildren in the backseat. Rebecca and David were booked on an early evening flight to Los Angeles out of Kennedy.

David worked in publishing. He had a row of cacti on his window that the cleaners would carefully dust. The view from his office was of gray stone, lit windows, and smudges of yellow on the street below as taxis queued at red lights. He had been with the same company for two decades. He was known in the book world, and had even worked with a few famous authors. Sometimes writers came in with their literary agents or a private assistant. David preferred his newer discoveries and liked it when they sat in his office in the wake of that first book deal, poring over the contents of his bookshelves.

“These are just a few of the books I've worked on,” he would say casually.

In David's mind they were
his
books, but he knew enough about authors not to say it.

Rebecca designed bedding sets for a company based in South Korea and had to take courses at an arts school to keep up with the software. After she decided the pattern and the colors, someone else would prepare the file by filling in codes for the
fabric and then making sure the machines did their job. A year later, the sets would be released in home sections of American department stores. Rebecca would take her family to see them, rubbing the fabric and commenting on whether the color was lighter or darker than she had imagined.

O
N THE FLIGHT
to Los Angeles that night, Rebecca and David caught up on emails, then ordered sandwiches on a touch screen. It had been almost a year since their last trip. A textile conference in Milwaukee where Rebecca gave a speech. David tagged along to see one of his authors read at the Boswell Book Company. They stayed downtown at the Pfister and worked out in the gym together. At night they ordered room service, then made love as the food cooled under silver domes. Cling wrap had been stretched across the tops of the drinks.

When they landed at LAX, a uniformed driver from the hotel was holding a sign. “We should have told him our last name was Godot,” David said. “Just for fun.”

The driver tried to take their suitcases, but David insisted on wheeling them himself. "The kids will be asleep by now," Rebecca said.

On the 405, David asked if she would ever live a year or two in California. “We could have a pool and a driveway—imagine that.”

“You can be the one to tell my parents.”

Rebecca imagined herself on the porch at their house in Southampton. “You missed
me
growing up,” she would say, “and now you're going to miss your grandchildren growing up as well.”

The power of her fantasy surprised and saddened her.

On their last visit to Los Angeles, Rebecca and David stayed at one of the hotel's famous bungalows. Rebecca wondered what it would be like after so long, but David said fifteen years is nothing.

“But for a hotel?” Rebecca said. “Think about it—two people staying for an average of two nights, and one person staying for one night, with, what? Four hundred rooms? The number of guests each week would be, give or take, around—”

“You sound like Michael.”

“Well, I am his mother. And I think fifteen years
is
a long time. That's two years longer than Judy's whole life. Think about it, David—more than the whole of our daughter's life since we've been here, yet to us it feels like no time at all.”

“That's one way of looking at it,” David said. “One of my writers said that life is slow to live, but quick to remember—that's why it feels short, because of the speed of memory. Imagine if it took weeks of thinking to remember a single detail?”

“Weird,” Rebecca said.

“Or it just means we're getting old; that's probably what it means.”

“We're not
that
old, David. Forty-six is not old, not these days.”

David wanted to say more, but knew he would be arguing only for the sake of it. His wife did the same when she was hungry or tired.

After they arrived and were waiting for the porter to bring their luggage, Rebecca and David walked around the bungalow—but couldn't tell if it was exactly the same.

“The bathroom is different,” David said. “That's for sure.”

Rebecca said the bathtub was new, because the faucets were on the side.

“We can take a bath later, if you're not too tired,” he said.

“Funny to think there was someone here last night,” said his wife. “Someone in the bed, their clothes on the chair, their things out on the table.” David looked at the toilet and imagined an old man with pleats of white skin.

They had ordered a sports car to drive around. It was something they could do only when the kids weren't there. The car had to be delivered to the hotel because the engine was in the back and there was no room under the hood for their luggage.

When they met years ago, David had a green Porsche that belonged to his late father.

A
FTER
R
EBECCA PUT
her clothes away, she called the restaurant to check they were still serving. “You can have a really good glass of wine,” she said, “then after we can stroll back along the brick path.” She said she loved California at night. The air was warm, and there was bougainvillea and the aroma of jasmine just pulled you along.

Before dinner, they had a drink. The bartender was in his fifties and had a tight, red face. He shook Rebecca's Shirley Temple as if it were something exotic, then asked where they were in from.

When their table was ready, the bartender put their drinks on a tray. David took a card from his wallet.

“I bet you have a million stories,” he said.

The bartender nodded. “You bet.”

“Well, if you ever think about doing a book . . .”

The bartender smiled and took David's card. “Oh, sure,” he said.