Lucky in the Corner (25 page)

“She was back in town last week,” Fern says. “For a little visit, I guess. But not to us, not to Vaughn.”

“You didn’t tell me,” James says.

“I just found out. I ran into Deena, and she told me she’d talked with Tracy and Dale at the Radiohead concert. Tracy told her they’d come down to pick up supplies. Which I guess translates as scoring recreational drugs.” Fern thinks for a minute. “This is one of the worst things she’s ever done to me. I can sort of see the twisted path of emotional logic she’s gone down. She couldn’t handle Vaughn, and James and I picked up the slack, and we’re managing to do what she couldn’t. So, instead of being grateful, she’s pissed off at me and alienated from Vaughn. Which explains why she’s behaving badly, but it doesn’t make me happy with her. I mean, she can’t even stop by for a guest appearance in her kid’s life?”

“On the other hand,” Harold says, always ready to smudge any black-and-white situation into a gray area, “there’s this new guy in the picture. Worse than Tracy disappearing would be Tracy showing up with him and taking Vaughn into those deep Wisconsin woods and raising him to be a drunken fisherman. You know, it’s probably time to stop thinking of your situation with Vaughn as a holding pattern, and start considering whether you’re up to a permanent commitment.”

Vaughn, who doesn’t know temporary from permanent, stays pretty squarely in the moment. In this one, he sucks on a plastic teething ring that Fern has pulled from Harold’s freezer (wall-to-wall, Fern noticed, with packages of lima beans).

“I’m not saying you have to take Vaughn on,” Harold says. “I’m not even sure you should. Just that if you’re not, maybe we’d better think about finding someplace he can settle into for his upcoming childhood.”

Fern takes a little while with this thought. The truth is, she hasn’t made any long-range plan around Vaughn. A plan hasn’t seemed called for. She has taken this sequence of days each as it has come. And so James takes her a little by surprise.

“I think Fern and I
are
the plan,” he says. “We’ve made a groove in our lives that fits around him. He’s happy. We love him. We’ll work the rest out as we go along.”

Fern looks around for a few words but can’t find them.

For the ride home, she has Vaughn bundled up inside two jackets. James’s car is freezing on account of a busted heater, but much easier to ride around in since he cut a piece of plywood to make a floor on the passenger side. Fern took the floor as a gesture of love.

“When you and Tracy were ... you know ... together...” Fern says.

“That would have been for a short part of one night.”

“But still. It could have ... you could be...”

“Well, yes. I could be Vaughn’s father. I suspect a few other guys could say the same. But, really, what does it matter? Those guys aren’t here. I am. I mean, clearly it’s not mattering much who his mother is, so it doesn’t matter if I’m his ‘real’ father or not. What’s ‘real’ anyway?”

“This?”

“Yes,” he says. “I think it is.”

A little further along, he says, “I like your uncle.”

“It would have been okay if you didn’t, but, well, I love him so much...”

“Does he have a girlfriend?”

“I don’t think so. I think he has a crush on Gretel, his boss at the restaurant, but I don’t think that’s really going anywhere.” Fern finally met Gretel backstage, the first time she went to see Harold’s play. She had been expecting flaxen locks and an operatic build, tall with a huge bosom. Instead, she was beyond hip with Cleopatra hair and red leather jeans, glasses with turquoise frames. She was scary in a way Fern hadn’t anticipated, witheringly serious. She wanted to discuss the play in terms of its semiotics. Meeting her, Fern thought she was going to have to go home and reconsider Harold’s romantic inclinations.

“It’s just that when I was using the john I noticed ... I mean I couldn’t help notice that there was a lot of Victorias Secret sort of stuff hanging from the shower pole.”

If James were a snoop like Fern (or her mother, or Harold himself), he would have found a lot more.

“Oh, that. That’s a little complicated. I guess you could say, in that way, Harold is sort of his own girlfriend.”

James takes this in without pressing for more. One of the most excellent things about him is that he is able to let conversations roll to a comfortable stop on the side of the road. He gets the general idea.

When they are almost to her mother’s house, where Vaughn is scheduled to sleep over tonight, Fern notices Nora’s car parked at the end of the block. The engine is running, the window open with a light veil of smoke drifting out. James is driving slow enough that Fern catches more than a glimpse. She can see that her mother is deep into a call on a cell phone. A cell phone that Fern wasn’t aware Nora had. A cigarette, which she thought Nora didn’t smoke anymore.

NORA,
in a moment emblematic of where she had arrived at twenty-one, stood waiting for an elevator, holding a paper sack from the bottom, her hand warming a little from the grilled cheese inside. She had a large vanilla shake in the other hand. So far, bringing the exact same lunch every day to her boss appeared to be the most important duty of this job, a job to nowhere. She had hoped by now to be a little further along toward somewhere.

The school part was a breeze. Taking a degree in literature was, for Nora, like a pie-eating contest at an old state fair—being rewarded for doing something purely fun anyway. For years, reading had been her refuge from the limelight in her parents’ house, from their disappointment at her refusal to join the fun. Then the books provided her with a graceful way out, a fond farewell for all of them. Nora slipping off to college, Lynette and Art and Harold making up for their lack of understanding with abundant goodwill, as though they were flicking straw boaters over their heads, canes tucked beneath their elbows as they bid her goodbye.

Not that she had gone all that far away. She had great grades coming out of high school; she could have gone to college anywhere. Yet she had traveled only as far as Manhattan. Forty minutes by train from the house in White Plains. A short cab ride from her father’s office on Forty-seventh Street. It was as though she didn’t want to look back but wanted to be able to reach around and still feel them there. After a childhood spent setting herself apart from her family, she seemed to be entering adulthood already nostalgic for them.

At the same time, they appeared to be moving away from her faster than she was able to leave them. Lynette, now in her late forties, past her dancing days, had snagged a small but steady role in a TV series,
Glenda’s Girls.
She was Glenda, the head of an all-female detective agency. She had about five minutes in every episode—at the opening, when she gave the girls their assignment, and at the end, when she affectionately scolded them for risking their lives to get the job done. For this work, Lynette lived in L.A. for thirteen-week stretches, staying with Fern Lawler, who was now an abstract painter living on the wealth of past marriages (four), while Lynette was bringing home the largest paychecks of her long career. The two of them were accomplices in recapturing their youth and glamour. Lynette even had a fan club. There was a board game for the show with tiny dolls to represent the characters. Lynette had given Nora a Glenda doll.

Nora’s father still managed Vicki Ashford, who had a long-running gig in the lounge at the Tiara on Miami Beach. He also had a new discovery, a folk-rock duo called Hammer & Nails, and spent time on the road with them. He was going to bring Harold along with him next summer, teach him the business. Harold wasn’t really interested in the biz aspect of show biz. Nor did he care much for the road, or for rock. But he adored Miami and seemed to enjoy being around stages in general, and so was going along with the plan.

He had pretty much given up on high school. He didn’t like that they chose what he had to study. He found it oppressive. There had been meetings—Art and Lynette and the school psychologist. When Nora’s parents were out of town and she called Harold at the house, there was no answer. Then, on some impulse Nora couldn’t figure out, he would come to the city to stay the night with her, and seemed happy for her company, but he revealed little about what was really going on with him. If she asked direct questions, he would dodge and weave. He was “thinking about things,” or was certain that “everything was going to work out.” He was beautiful and confused and totally unable to talk about whatever it was he was sorting through.

Neither of them mentioned it when he used her make-up. Once, Nora got up before him and, coming through the living room on the way to meet Mr. Coffee, looked over at him lying tangled in a sheet on the sofa, and saw that his bony ass was snug inside a pair of flowered cotton Carter’s Spanky Pants.

She loved Harold ferociously but wasn’t up to dealing with everything there was to deal with about him. It was enough just trying to find her way into her own future, which in her more optimistic moments she envisioned rolling out like a rug before her—college, then graduate school, a thesis on the evolution of the novel of manners, an assistant professorship at a small college. In reality, though, she seemed to have already veered a bit
off
the carpet, or rather it kept getting tugged out from under her. This nowhere job, for instance, was the result of just such a tug.

Technically, it was not even a job; it was an internship for the spring semester of her junior year. She had been hoping for a spot at an old and famous literary journal, something that would have typed out as a nice, chunky line on her CV when she applied to grad school. Instead, she was only able to get something at a fashion magazine, which seemed enough of a comedown, but was actually a little worse in that
Elan
was not even a very good fashion magazine. Nora was assistant to the beauty and make-up editor, a thrillingly severe woman named Celeste, soon to be the recipient of the grilled cheese and shake.

Celeste was extremely thin; the rumor around the office was that she was addicted to laxatives. She consulted a tarot reader every month and ran her life by these readings. She seldom wore an outfit that wasn’t all black; in rare cases, for contrast, she added an earth tone. She had distinctive hair—long and coarse, wavy, and made up of several shades of brown and blond. Kind of Joan Baez with highlights. It was hair that had its good points and its bad days, as did her eyes, which were sometimes recessed in dark hollows. But even on the worst days Celeste was extremely attractive in a way Nora hadn’t encountered before. That is, she suspected the attraction existed in the space between them, that it ran both ways. She wasn’t sure what to do with this magnetic field, which didn’t seem to give her any particular power over Celeste, who mostly manifested her side of the attraction by averting her gaze from Nora whenever the job called for them to interact.

Today, when Nora brought her lunch in, Celeste looked out the window of the office and Nora followed her gaze. The window faced a warehouse that now held artists’ lofts. The loft directly across from Celeste’s office was usually brightly lit and sometimes occupied by a portly man who wore bright (yellow, Day-Glo orange) bikini shorts. It was always worth a look to see if he was there; at the moment, he wasn’t. Whenever they did see him, each of them claimed dibs on him. This was pretty much their only joke.

“I’m going to give you a chance to prove yourself,” Celeste said (to the window). As though they were in the brain surgery department of a teaching hospital. As though anything Nora could do here would prove anything. “I want you to do the fall lipstick roundup.” She said this with a totally straight face. Everything was straight-faced and dead earnest around the offices of
Elan.
They couldn’t afford to laugh at the ultimate purpose of all their enterprise and long days and pressing deadlines. If someone started laughing, it was all over.

“Roundup,” Nora said, nodding, trying to look as though she was accepting a challenge, had precisely the article in mind, understood the concept and was ready to run with it. Celeste wasn’t fooled.

“You have to find a new angle, some way our readers can think about lipstick and how it can work for them, and how it has to be particular to them. Specific.”

“Like choosing shades based on your blood type?”

“We could all position ourselves ironically here,” Celeste said, and took her gaze and tucked it down amid the proof sheets scattered across her desk. “But ironic detachment doesn’t really work. It starts seeping into the pages of the magazine. Our readers are not ironic. They are young and desperate to be stylish and attractive. Because of this, they need to know what’s happening with lipstick, and how it directly relates to them. They await our guidance.”

Nora didn’t know how to respond and so wound up standing silent across Celeste’s desk from her until Celeste said, “You’ll see. You step into this version of reality, and everything starts to fall into place.”

Throughout that same spring, Nora had also been dating Russell Koenig, from her poetry workshop at school. Her poems, she was pretty sure, were third-rate Sylvia Plath. Maybe fourth-rate. His were a combination of corny and sentimental and rugged. She attributed these qualities to his being from the Midwest, which she imagined as a place of good intentions and plainer emotions. Russell was also an English major, but with a commercial bent. He had been working part-time for the past couple of years at an ad agency. He hoped they would keep him on after graduation. Nora liked him. Also, she liked that he didn’t like her too much, that whatever he felt about her fell short of passion. There were training wheels on their romance. No one was going to fall off and get hurt.

On their dates, they went mostly to films at revival houses, and to author readings. So far they had been to hear Grace Paley and Joseph Heller, had seen
Notorious
and
Double Indemnity.
They had had dinner once at an Indian restaurant in a basement on Sixth Street, and twice at an Italian place in the Village. It was as though they were following some plan, ticking off events and accomplishments, acquiring merit badges.