The Widow Waltz (23 page)

DM @mizkitty:
Diehard NYer now w/car & license. C U soon?

DM @marcnotanarc:
Luv 2 but leaving 4 Thailand. Later!

W
hat’s a fib between a pregnant lady with a secret and a guy she wants to keep on the back burner? Who tweets the truth anyway? Especially when her baby-daddy would be arriving in a half hour.

Luey tried on all the sweaters and tunics in her mother’s closet. Yet despite how voluptuous her boobs had grown, her tummy would now cross the finish line first. Overnight, it seemed to have gone from mango to honeydew melon. Luey saw herself as a very maternal animal in a fat suit but, to her own surprise, not a sexual cipher, which she couldn’t have imagined five and a half months ago. Lately, every dream had a porno plot in which she starred. As she painstakingly massaged cocoa butter into her skin, she wished that when Peter showed up, they could go to bed first and talk later.

Luey highjacked an angelic white shirt from Nicola’s sparsely populated closet, paired it with maternity leggings from Wal-Mart, and wrapped herself in her mother’s most voluminous pashmina. She considered variations on speeches, each with the same punch line:
It’s yours.
What would follow, she hadn’t worked out. All she knew was that she wasn’t fishing for a marriage proposal; Cola was the sister who bought
The Knot
on the sly.

She propped herself up on the window seat by the front door and opened
Olive Kittredge,
which she’d half finished. Olive turned out to be Luey’s kind of heroine, a flinty, misunderstood, sharp-tongued shrew with a warm, squishy center. Olive yo-yoed from guile to kindness, and Luey guessed that the author’s point was to show how little we know of one another—even ourselves. The woman embodied hope minus sappiness and when Olive caught a break, Luey cried.

“People are never as helpless as they think they are.” Luey had underlined that sentence. She’d like to think
she had some Olive in her, that even if Peter would sling some choice words her way when she told him about the pregnancy, she’d carry on, even if that meant accepting interviews with prospective couples who wanted to adopt her child. Luey had been in touch with several agencies and as soon as she mentioned Stanford, their solicitor made her feel like the prize sow at the fair.

Luey didn’t expect Peter for at least fifteen minutes. She leaned back and closed her eyes, reliving their one and only tryst, with that bathtub as big as the bed where they played all night. It wasn’t the worst scenario, she decided, in which to usher in a new life.

Luey was woken by a pounding, and her mother rushing to the front door. “I’m Peter Eisenberg,” a voice said. “Luey’s friend. Is she here?”

Even though she’d been playing his music, Luey had forgotten the deep timbre of Peter’s spoken voice. His legs looked spindly even in baggy 501 Levi’s sitting low on his narrow hips. He’d grown a goatee. Perhaps now he could pass for twenty-six, not twenty-five.

“Peter,” Luey said, hopping up, her apricot shawl strategically wrapped and trailing, as if she were an Elizabethan heroine. “How was the drive? Did it take forever?”

“Hey,” he said, as he gave her a kiss on the cheek and handed her a wrapped bottle. “If I’d listened to the GPS, I’d be in the ocean now.”

“Welcome to our nunnery. This is my mom, Georgia Silver-Waltz. Mother, Peter Eisenberg.”

“Your mother?” he said.

Luey hadn’t mentioned that she‘d returned home, and hoped her mother would take the question as a compliment about her youthful appearance. Regardless, Georgia’s curiosity was barely restrained.

So you, Mr. DNA, are Buffalo Bob. Who are you, really? What’s your family’s health history—maternal and paternal sides both, please? Mental and physical? Your IQ? Did you go to college? Where? Did you graduate? The Buffalo Bob bit? Let’s not go there. This is going to take a while, though, so it would be easier if you’d complete this eight-page form. Please don’t overlook the essay question: Do you actually recall impregnating my daughter?

Yet Georgia managed the formalities. “We’re so happy you could make the trip. Let me take your jacket.” He handed over a black peacoat and pale blue scarf. “Now you’ll have to excuse me,” she had the grace to say. “I have some cooking to finish. You’ll be staying for dinner, of course?”

Not just for dinner, Luey hoped.

“I’d love to, thanks,” Peter said.

“Sorry I got snowed out of the concert,” Luey said, as they walked to the living room, where a fire blazed. She’d been generous with logs. “You have no idea.”

“It was a sell-out,” Peter said. “I was shocked, if you really want to know. It was nuts.”

Luey sat down on the couch and patted the seat next to her. Peter went on about the concert. She tried to nod at regular intervals. Finally, he stopped talking, most likely waiting for her response to a question.

“If you’re wondering why I’m out here with my Mom, well . . .” she said.

“Yeah,” he said. “What happened to San Francisco?”

“I took a leave of absence from school.”

Peter shrugged. “Hey. It happens. Stanford’s fucking hard. I dropped out of Yale for a year.”

Did he take her for a moron? “I didn’t flunk out. My leave is entirely kosher.”

His face turned grave. “Please don’t tell me you’re sick. That would be terrible.”

“Oh no, not that,” she said. “I’m very well, actually.” Blooming. Her planned oratory vanished and she stood, opened the shawl, and pointed to her belly. “Six months.”

Peter’s face pop-eyed with astonishment. He stared at her bump, back at her face, at her belly again, and then encircled her in a distinctly asexual hug. “Wow. Congratulations! We should toast,” he said. “Let’s open the bubbly. Right. No, not champagne.” He shuffled from one leg to the other, thumbs in his belt loops. “I should have brought a teddy bear! Who’s the lucky schmuck?”

She’d have to work up to eye contact. Luey looked at her shoes.

“Hey, that was a rude question,” Peter said. “Sorry.”

“It’s not rude. It’s fair.” A chill climbed down Luey’s spine. She flashed back to the evening they were introduced and felt that fabled click of deep, libidinous attraction, as if arranged by some heavenly Match.com. Luey had never experienced it before. “Here’s the thing. That night we spent together?”
We had laughs and sex and we never thought beyond the moment. I left the hotel without expecting to see you again, and if I’d considered it, I’d have imagined you felt the same way.
“Well . . .”

Peter cocked his head like a dog waiting for a command. As he scratched his beard, his voice broke like a Bar Mitzvah boy’s. “What are you saying?”

“What you think I’m saying.”

She heard the fire cracking, a creak in the house, the distant, tranquilizing burble of
All Things Considered
, wind whistling and shaking the trees, her own breath,.

“What the fuck?” he said.

“It’s true.” Luey hoped she wasn’t slack-jawed, smiling stupidly.

“Shit.” Peter sighed.

Fair enough. “My first response exactly.”

“But didn’t you use something?”

Luey felt herself going bag-lady loony, every emotion set to vibrate. “What’s this
‘you’
?
We
did, supposedly. I brought a condom. You wore it.”
Dickhead.
“These things happen.”

“Christ.” Peter stood by the window and stared outside, as if he might find an answer waiting for him behind a shrub. “Jesus H. Christ.”

“I wish I believed in him. I really, really do. It would help.”

Peter squinched his face as he asked, “Why didn’t you get in touch with me sooner?”

“I tried, often,” Luey said, though that wasn’t true during the stage when she may have ended it all. She waited for him to challenge her as a lawyer for the prosecution.

Peter turned his attention to the flames in the fireplace. “What do you want me to do?” He stabbed the logs with the brass poker.

“Excuse me?”

“Are you looking for money?”

Was he going to have his people call her people and ask where to send a kiss-off check contingent on signing a confidentiality agreement? Did he think she was going to sell her story to
The Star
? “I didn’t invite you here to see if you’d pony up. I’m not out to gouge you, if that’s what you’re worrying about. But I was hoping for some moral support.” Luey realized this only when she said it.

“I like you,” Peter said after a moment. “We had a pretty great time that night—I haven’t forgotten or I wouldn’t be here. And you seem like a smart girl. A smart girl who’s going to turn into someone even more amazing. But we were together for one night. We don’t even know one another. And you’re, what, twenty?”

“Twenty-one.” She joined him by the fireplace, putting her hand on his arm. She felt as if her father was leading her way. “And yet, you, Peter Eisenberg, a guy who dances around stages with a buffalo headdress while he makes music that sounds like whales talking,”
that I’m not sure I even like
, “are the father of my child. Our baby, who according to the Web site I read every day, can already hear, so you better be careful about what you say.” Eye contact ceased to be a problem. “I thought you deserved to know, would want to know. I thought telling you was the right thing.”
That’s my Luey,
she could hear her father say.

Peter went wan, completely stonewashed. “When are you due?”

“Fourth of July.” Independence Day? Not for her.

B
efore I send off my fiscal effluvia to Wally’s accountant for tax prep, I spent all morning attempting to penetrate their hostile world. I scrutinized 1099 forms and shuffled through records of interest and dividends in wee-small type along with a thicket of year-end brokerage statements, surely designed to be cryptic. If I’d been in a plane crash, I could search for a black box that would reveal the naked truth, but trying to marshal evidence leads me only to greater confusion. As an unabridged word girl, it hurts my brain to look at numbers. Digits marched in front of me like artillery, ready to shoot between the eyes.

This much I now know: Ben’s earned income has turned out to be fairly high, yet not so flush that he didn’t dip into savings. He wrote large checks made out to “cash” from a money market account. There my trail ends. The money’s hit the road.

Investigation makes this Nancy Drew ravenous. Fortunately, Daniel has arrived bearing olive oil and pottery handmade by nuns, and is giving me the bona fides of painters he signed on in Italy. There is an eighty-three-year-old, one-eyed woman whose landscapes are entirely in lashings of green and navy; a six-foot, three-hundred-pound miniaturist who paints heartbreakingly delicate metallic religious scenes; and a gondolier-turned-watercolorist whose cloudy shapes mirror a Tequila Sunrise. “But this one, Paulo, is my favorite,” he says, showing image after image on his iPad. The artist’s work recalls Renoir, if the old master had painted during fever dreams and favored eerie four-legged creatures with human torsos and faces. It’s clear that the Picasso in the crowd is Daniel’s animal portraitist, whose persona—“a man born knowing how to tango”—he seems to admire as much as his talent.

As Daniel gives the lowdown of why he is magnetized by this work, I find myself wondering if he has a crush and I become happily distracted, able to shake off the morning’s cursed numbers as if they were crumbs. “Are you bringing over these painters for shows?” I ask.

“Paulo, I hope, in June.”

“Show me,” Luey says as she walks in with this weekend’s posse of dogs. They heel as she commands and line up like preschoolers waiting for Goldfish crackers. I hope she’ll have the same knack with a child.

Daniel moves through his images until he arrives at a leopard with John Lennon’s face. “Here’s Paulo’s work. Tell me what you think.” He offers Luey his seat. At the kitchen counter, he helps himself to a panini while she gushes over the art.

“You’re looking well,” he says to her.

Except for her puffy eyes. Peter left before dawn, and afterward I heard crying behind her closed door. When our trajectories crossed two hours later, Luey’s face wore a No Trespassing sign. Yesterday her hair, which hasn’t been cut for months, billowed around her shoulders. Today it is pulled into a hurried topknot and she is wearing a pair of Ben’s oldest, most cottony pajamas. Luey and I are due for a big talk, and I am counting on a few hours with Daniel to give me the wallop of radiant energy I need to initiate it.

My daughter pats her bump. “I hope I’ll be the kind of woman who gives birth in the middle of a field,” she says.

Fat chance. She hasn’t been in a field since she played soccer. I make a mental note to ask when her next appointment will be with the midwife, and if drugs—many drugs, very strong ones—are an option. This is a girl who fainted before her wisdom teeth were extracted. As did I.

“I see the dog business is thriving,” Daniel says.

“I’m turning the hounds away,” Luey reports, as she continues to scrutinize Daniel’s artists’ work. “I can manage four plus Sadie, but I tried a fifth one week and now I totally get ‘barking mad.’”

“Has Nicola found that necklace?” Daniel asks. I hear him trying to be casual, but this had to be the subject of Stephan’s keynote address as soon as Daniel stepped off the plane from Italy.

Luey looks up from the laptop. “Necklace,” she says. “What necklace?”

I was hoping I wouldn’t need to tell the tale, but now that I do, I’m careful to salt my account with
maybe
and
misplaced
. Yet there is nothing like a giant scoop of schadenfreude to lift a younger sister’s morning.

“Nicola
lost a diamond necklace?” Luey asks, incredulous.

“Looks that way,” I say.

“Poor Cola,” she says, which is not what I expected. She unwinds and twists her hair into an even messier bun than its earlier version.

I am relieved when Daniel begins to report on and debate the merits of gelato with candied orange peel or the sort infused with hot pepper and cinnamon. Will I ever get another stamp on my passport? So caught am I in this spurt of self-pity that I don’t notice the rumble of a car in my driveway. “You have a gentleman caller,” Daniel says, peering through the slats of the window blinds, “driving a BMW.”

Nat? He said he couldn’t visit this weekend, yet here he is, I hope, to surprise me. All week, as I’ve performed workaday tasks, I have been taking our embrace to its logical conclusion. With each round of fantasy we come more clearly into focus. I am writing my own story, sentence by sentence. Ben and I may be yoked by history, but our bond has suffered a mortal rupture, and in that crevasse I have started to recognize a place for Nat, a man who I believe may become precious to me, a flawed, fully-formed adult, not a girl stretching to be a woman.

When I think of Nat, I like where my mind is leading me—away from Ben. I feel certain he would be a lover built from kindness, strength, and everything good. If I get to know him better, will I learn that he, too, has mysteries? Will there be obfuscation and semitruths? These are risks I am willing to take. I have widow-waited long enough.

But the man locking his car, looking purposeful, isn’t Nat.

“Decided to revisit the scene of the crime?” I say as I welcome Wally Fleigelman. He is a creature from the black lagoon wearing head-to-toe Prada, the rich man’s Gap.

“Love the gallows humor.” He thrums with unexpected merriment as he kisses me on the cheek. “I took a chance you’d be home.”

“This is a social visit?”

“The price of that answer is a cup of coffee.” He removes his cashmere overcoat, which I hang in the front closet. “Two sugars.”

This time better not get charged to my ledger. A cuppa is all I am paying for, I think, and lead him toward the kitchen.

“Nice place,” Wally says as he eyes an antique church pew lining the wall.

“If you want to bid up the house,” I say, “stand in line.”

“Got a buyer?”

“So it seems,” I answer. The offer still waves in the air like a sock on a line.

“Oh, forgive me,” Wally says as we reach the kitchen and Daniel gets up to greet him. “I’m interrupting.”

“Not at all,” Daniel says, extending his hand for a manly shake. “Daniel Russianoff.” I like that he chooses not to add
Georgia’s brother’s partner
and enjoy watching Wally glance from Daniel to me and do the three’s-a-crowd math.

“I’ll just stay a few minutes,” Wally adds.

I eye his briefcase as I use up the last of the fine coffee Nat brought last week. Tomorrow, Chock Full o’ Nuts. After Wally asks about the best route to the ocean—“As long as I’m out here I have to see it”—he quizzes Daniel on his line of work, so he can see if my possible suitor deserves a place on the Fleigelman map of all-that-matters. Wally opens his briefcase.

“For you.” He removes an envelope and pushes it toward me on the table. “Perhaps you’ll want to open it later,” he adds.
In private
, is the message I receive,
when you’re not entertaining a one-night stand.

“Daniel and I have no secrets,” I say, and steel myself. I think of how I had to deliver skinny envelope after skinny envelope to Nicola after she’d applied to colleges. In my experience, a thin envelope does not bring good news.

I carefully open the envelope and find a check from Fleigelman, Kelly, Rodriguez and Roth made out to me. The sum is for $100,000, each zero staring at me in bug-eyed shock, which I return.

“So, you’ve starting to find our money?”

“Not exactly. It appears you have a secret admirer,” Wally says, grinning.

“I don’t understand.”

I expect a story with embellishment, but all Wally says is, “A money order arrived in the office yesterday.”

“From where?”

“There was no return address.”

My eyes dart to Daniel. If this is his—or Stephan’s—way of bailing me out, I am overwhelmed and immensely moved, yet I cannot keep their money. This much I have learned during the past few months: I will earn my own respect only by taking care of myself—self-sufficiency has become my all and everything. But I believe I know Daniel fairly well, and he looks as startled by this check as I must.

“You don’t know who sent it?” I ask Wally.

“I couldn’t say.”

“‘Couldn’t say’ or won’t say?” I ask. Perhaps Wally wrote it himself, overcome by guilt bred from faulty advice. This check might be his prickly ethical payback.

“The money was sent to the estate of Benjamin T. Silver,” he informs me. “Your benefactor has gone to a fair amount of trouble to protect his identity, so while I’d like to trace it, there’s no way. This donor obviously wants to stay anonymous.”

“What the hell?” I didn’t intend to say that aloud.

“The philosopher Maimonides is famous for saying anonymity is the highest level of charity,” Wally adds.

“
Charity?
I am not a charity case.” I drop the check as if it’s dusted with Agent Orange. It must be from Stephan, and if he wants to give me money, I’d prefer that he hand it over directly. “What do you suggest that I do with this check?”

“I suggest, Georgia Waltz, that you deposit it. I’m guessing it’s from one of Ben’s deadbeat clients. Maybe someone grew a conscience.”

I sit dumbly for a moment, then stagger along with Wally to the front hall and collect his coat. He kisses me lightly on the cheek. “You have no idea how good it feels to a lawyer who gets to deliver good news,” he says, and leaves in a cloud of smugness.

“You’ve been staring at that check like it’s a land mine,” Daniel says.

He throws his arm around my shoulder and hugs, tight. “Why don’t you accept that you’ve gotten lucky?”

I’ve always believed the essence of luck is to recognize her when she camps out on your front lawn. Should your streak run sour, if you see that interloper at all, you expect her no to turn around and tell you that she owns the property—and that you owe back rent. Which is why the only luck I wholly trust now is the sort I make myself.

“What do you say we deposit the sucker, like your lawyer suggested?” Daniel adds. “Later on if you find out who your benefactor is and are revolted, you’ll give back the money.”

I nod in numb agreement, my hands shaking, and Daniel understands that I am in no condition to be behind a wheel, so Sadie and I tumble into Stephan’s car. At the ATM I can barely complete the deposit slip, though when I feed the check to the jaws of the bank, I feel a jolt of relief.

From there Daniel and I hit the beach, where Sadie is as oblivious to her improved circumstances as I am mystified and mistrustful of mine. It’s chilly, but brisk air is the tonic I need. “It’s not enough for me to live on until I’m one hundred, you realize,” I say as I toss a stick for Sadie. “I still need to sell the house and find a way to finish paying for Luey’s education and support myself”—possibly for more than forty years.

“Think of it as a down payment on your happiness,” Daniel says, Hallmark card-ish, “not some bunker of gloom.”

“Where did that check come from?” I ask at least four times, as if I am Camille wondering when lunch will be served. I also make a mental note:
Georgia, visit your mother
.

“Like Wally said, maybe it’s from one of Ben’s clients who got religion and paid a debt.” If the money came from Stephan, Daniel is not going to out him.

Daniel and I scuffle along under a shale gray sky until the cold, hunger, and impending nightfall defeat us. On the way home, we buy the makings of a celebratory dinner—steak, the first spring asparagus, and a chocolate cake iced in mocha decadence.

When we get back to the house, Luey and the car are nowhere to be seen. “I won’t be home late, don’t worry,” a note says. She knows I will.

While the steaks marinate, Daniel and I settle down for Scrabble. He is an ace, given to kicking off games by using all seven letters and scoring fifty extra points. He also has an uncanny ability to draw the Z, X, and J, which he plays on premium squares. I begin with
cark
. Given the muzziness of my mind, I’m not half-bad today.

“You made that up,” he says. “What’s a ‘cark?’”

“It means worry,” I say. “Trust me, that’s a subject on which I am an expert. Want to challenge?”

Daniel backs down, knowing if he loses the challenge, he’ll forfeit his turn.

He plays
rowan.

“That’s a name,” I say. “No proper nouns.”

“Also a tree,” he informs me.

Gloating, a few plays later I put down
oryx
on a double-word score.

“Well done,” he says. He plays
yahoo
.

I snap back with
dilly
.