The Third Child (15 page)

“I’d still like to see the reports on the accident,” Blake said.

“I know. You want to see if the family is capable of putting out a contract, when they learn about the two of you.” Karen grinned. “They’re nasty, but they don’t kill people.”

“I’m not so sure of that,” Blake said very quietly. “Do you suppose supper is warm? I’m ravenous.”

MELISSA COULD TELL
they liked each other. “He is absolutely gorgeous,” Karen said to her as they went riding the next morning.

Blake declined to get on a horse. “Two feet good. Four feet bad.”

Karen continued, as they took their horses slowly up the trail, “He seems bright and well-spoken. No matter what blather Dick and Rosemary spout when they finally meet him, you could do one hell of a lot worse. He’s a keeper.”

Melissa felt blessed. As they took their short ride, turning around when the snow became too deep and the going treacherous, she remembered many summer rides with Karen when she had been eight, ten, twelve. Riding had been an escape for both of them from Grandpa’s rigid expectations and the cold unpleasant regimen of the farmhouse. Being in Vermont had been a mixed experience. She felt disregarded by Grandpa, parked here by her parents for convenience. Yet she loved the farm animals, she loved when Karen was around. She adored running up the mountain to sit on a rock and feel herself completely, beatifically alone.
To be alone was a rare pleasure. There were always her siblings. If not always her parents, there were the people who worked for them, did for them, wrote Dick’s speeches and press releases, planned his campaigns, raised money and spent it, nannies, tutors, cleaning women, cooks, caterers, secretaries of various sorts, interns, assistants, aides. Eyes were always on her.

To be alone was to stare at everything, feeling herself the only, the private consumer of these mountains, these ledges and firs and brambles, the birds that crossed her path, the animals rustling the underbrush. All for her and her alone, the squirrels, the weasels, rabbits. She loved them with her eyes and ears, she gobbled them, she relished them. Then she would sink into one or another fantasy without danger of being caught daydreaming, a capital offense in Rosemary’s eyes. She would spin out elaborate movie plots starring herself, with no one to interrupt, no one to make her lie about what she was thinking. She felt then as if she had really escaped her life, her self, her circumscribed destiny.

She had not been supposed to read comic books: Rosemary was passionately opposed to them. But Billy and she had managed to buy them in secret, for they both liked the adventures of superheroes, sharing them the way they shared an occasional toke nowadays. She had not imagined herself to be a mutant with powers like the X-Men because she liked better to imagine hidden powers that no one would guess until she revealed them. Suddenly she would emerge from her quiet ordinary shell and save everybody. Then they would admire her. Then they would see the powerful and wonderful being she hid inside.

Now she rarely fantasized that way. She had not realized the change until this moment bobbing on the roan mare Guinevere behind Karen, who was riding Legerdemain, the horse that Grandpa had left to her father. She enjoyed on a normal day short piercing fantasies about Blake taking her here or there, sharing something that she had enjoyed, making love in different places, getting married. Having children. She imagined his family embracing her. They would protect her from the scorn of her own.

But these daydreams were fleeting. All those years, as long as she could remember from first grade on, she had carried her stories with her
as some girls carried knitting. They were ready to open for her in dull classes, during lectures, during boring concerts and bad movies, when she was supposed to be studying in her room, when she was sitting at agonizingly stiff family dinners that seemed to last a week. What had happened to those fantasies? Blake. Blake had happened in all his real body and strong will and sweet succulent smile. Blake had touched her, and all those heroes of a decade of imagining had turned to powder and blown away. Suddenly the path seemed too long and she wanted to be back in the farmhouse with him.

Karen was talking about Eve. “She was always up for everything, but mostly she led the way. I’d never gone white-water rafting before Eve, and I’m sure I never will again.”

“You didn’t like it?”

“Only with her. She loved adventure. She loved testing herself. Together we had this illusion we were invincible…. Blake said you were researching something about Dick?”

“I want to be a reporter, you know? Like an investigative reporter? So Blake put me in touch with a guy whose father does that, and he’s learning to do the same thing. I’m getting the how-tos from him. Daddy is just the obvious subject, that’s all.”

“You don’t have to be defensive with me. Eve and I were pushing on him about his role in the Susquehanna River debacle…. You know, we had a lot of material. I wonder what happened to it? Eve probably still had it when she died, but I think when they put me away, she lost heart.”

“The Susquehanna River project? I vaguely remember that.” She had loved the melody of the name. Dick had a plaque on his office wall honoring his role in the project.

“The Susquehanna River Basin Commission is a tristate effort to clean up the Susquehanna and its tributaries, to control flooding, to develop green tourism and manage water use,” Karen rattled off. Obviously at one time she had talked about it a lot. “It was supported by environmental groups—including the one Eve was on the board of—along with fishing and recreational interests and local residents not too fond of cancer and floods.”

“I remember Father giving speeches for it. So why do you call it a debacle?”

“Baby niece, he may have given speeches blessing it, but he screwed us. He took the protocols we had worked out and watered them down to suit the big polluters, so that they might have sounded great in a sound bite on the evening news, but little real got done, and that little the people of the state paid for, not the polluters. He had a big contributor who developed golf courses. Now golf courses used to water only tees and greens, but in recent years, they’ve been watering fairways as well—and thus using one hell of a lot of water.”

“I always thought of golf courses as being boring but benign. Just a bunch of middle-aged people walking around banging on balls and then ending up in the clubhouse drinking themselves sodden.”

“Not only do they use way too much water, they frequently dump herbicides and pesticides into the drinking water. The Commission had been trying to get golf courses to sign on to the protocols about water use, but your father unilaterally excluded them.”

“A golf course, could it really matter that much? That’s a big long river.”

“It doesn’t take a lot in the water to cause cancer. It was during his reelection campaign for governor that Dick got Father to stash me away. I don’t imagine Dick had trouble talking the old man into it.”

“So why did he leave you the farm, then?”

Karen looked back over her shoulder at her, shaking her head. “Because I’m good with animals. So he left his cows and horses to the one person who would take their well-being seriously. It wasn’t to take care of me, Melissa. It was to take care of his beloved cows.”

“By the way, my roommate at college is a lesbian,” Melissa said. She was feeling proud of herself about how cool she had been when Fern told her, and she figured that might be worth a few points with her aunt.

“Yeah? I hope her family takes it better than ours did.” Karen looked back over her shoulder, giving the reins a little shake to move Legerdemain along faster. “Good luck to her. She may need it.”

M
elissa and Blake went up a second time to Vermont, to visit Karen. The snow was gone, the cows, out to pasture cropping grass. Liz had talked Karen into a goat named Thelma, and the chickens were laying madly. Karen said she was settling in. “After Mountain View, this place is buzzing with excitement. It’s about all I’m capable of handling. We’re putting in a kitchen garden. Even I can pick lettuce and boil beans.”

FERN AND MELISSA
were watching Emily getting dressed, changing her clothes, tossing them around the room. Whitney had gone to a frat party. Melissa rescued a red silk top from the floor. “I always liked this color on you.”

“It emphasizes the sad fact that I have no tits.” Em threw it back.

“How about the blue stripe?”

“Makes me look fat.”

“You aren’t fat,” Melissa said plaintively. “You’re absolutely skinny!”

When Emily had left and Fern and Melissa returned to their own room, Fern said, “Emily doesn’t like her body much, does she?”

“I used to hate mine too.”

“It seems too weird. To hate yourself. I mean, she isn’t ugly or deformed.”

“Do you like your body?”

Fern thought for a moment. “I guess I do. I mean, it works just fine. I like to push myself hard, in practice, doing laps, but that makes me feel good. If I didn’t like my body, I’d work out more, that’s all.”

“It isn’t that simple!” Melissa shook her hair back. She was growing it out the way Blake had asked her to. “None of us are really beautiful.”

Fern looked at her blankly. “Yeah, but since none of us are, why does it matter? It’s like saying none of us are six feet six or double-jointed.”

“You are.”

“I’m just flexible.” Fern could do backflips and not only touch her toes but lay her palms on the ground by her feet.

“I hated my body until Blake liked it,” Melissa said.

Fern looked at her with visible pity.

THE NEXT TIME
Blake went to New York, he let her come along. They stayed with Slam, a friend of his from high school who was going to NYU and lived off Avenue C in a small dirty apartment whose floors creaked and seemed to sway when she walked across them. Downstairs was a falafel place. The apartment smelled of cooking oil and insecticide. They slept on a mattress on the floor. She had never done that, and it was kind of romantic in a way, like that musical the gay guy on Blake’s hall kept playing,
Rent.
But everything was dirty and she hated using the bathroom. She was sorry she had nagged Blake to come.

Slam smoked incessantly. His body was like a half-melted icicle, thin but shapeless. She thought he was as dirty as his quarters. He wore the backwards baseball cap and baggy pants of the rapper wanna-be. Fortunately he was hardly ever there except to sleep and recharge his cell phone.

Saturday afternoon, Blake told her to go shopping or to a museum. “Got to see my hacker friends. I bring anybody along, they’ll go bullshit. I need them a lot more than they need my couple of bucks.”

“What is it you need?”

“Just some programs. I’ll meet you back here at six and we’ll have supper in the Village. Then take a long walk all over and have a drink at an outdoor café. Maybe catch some jazz. I promise a great evening. But I have to see them now.” He swept from the apartment and she heard him forcing his bike through the hall and out. She knew he was bound for Williamsburg. She left immediately afterward, freaked by the cock-
roaches that ran all over the kitchen and the bathroom. This was sordid. No wonder he hadn’t wanted to bring her before, while she had accused him mentally of infidelity or being ashamed of her. She ought to trust him more. No one thought more about her true well-being. She went to the Guggenheim, soothed by its ambience of clean lines and money. The last time she had been here had been with her aunt.

Blake had an amazing number of acquaintances. She knew no one to stay with in New York—so maybe they could have been in a nice clean hotel—but Blake seemed to know people wherever he might be dropped. He got on with a wide assortment of types. He had a gift for sounding formal with the formal, casual with the casual, and streetwise with the streetwise. The very cadences of his voice would change when he spoke to Slam or to her. It was a chameleon gift he used without being conscious of it. When she called him on his changes, he looked at her blankly. It was just what he did, instinctively, unconsciously, but very well.

She bought a sandwich and ate a late lunch on the concrete rim of the plaza of an office building, watching people go by and studying what the women were wearing. A dude tried to pick her up, but she got rid of him without having to move. She window-shopped, bought herself some nice underwear at Saks—Blake might enjoy the change from her utilitarian kit—then slowly made her way to Washington Square Park, where she sat for an hour near guys playing chess. Finally the shadows grew long and it was time to meet him. She took a cab. The subway was beyond her, puzzling and a little frightening. When she got to the apartment, Blake was there and so was Slam, arguing about whether raves were truly liberating. Blake disliked the chaos, she knew that. She always felt buffeted, invisible except when some creep glommed on. And if you didn’t do drugs, it felt pointless.

THE END OF
the semester was nearing, making her anxious. Her parents were not going to spend the summer in Philadelphia, although they would surely visit often enough for Dick to fuss over his constituency, pat their
heads and tummies, stroke his supporters, milk them if he could. The rest of the summer except for two weeks in August, when they would visit a backer who had a summer house on an island in Maine, they were staying put in Washington. Rosemary had not worked all those years to get there in order to leave it so quickly. Next year, Melissa thought, she and Blake should enroll in some summer program rather than go home. Too bad Wesleyan had no summer semester.

One morning, Blake e-mailed her. “I got it! It came through. I’ll be studying intensive Russian in Washington from June 15 to August 15—so we’ll be together. My father arranged for me to stay in the house of a lawyer colleague of his in Bethesda, so we won’t be that far apart.”

“Bethesda? Isn’t that in Maryland?”

“I keep forgetting you don’t know Washington that well. Look, you just go out Wisconsin, one block from your house, right? And keep going. Let’s celebrate! A guy on my floor is going to buy a bottle of champagne for us. Tomorrow night I’ll get takeout and we’ll hang one on. Now will you be happy? You should have faith I’ll manage for us.”

Now the crisis with her family would loom. Still, she needed Blake, she needed to be with him. Rosemary would just have to eat it. After all, it wasn’t the same as when Merilee brought home some guy Rosemary deemed unsuitable; surely Rosemary didn’t expect Melissa to fetch a prize. She couldn’t keep them in the dark forever.

Congress was still in session when she got home, well before Blake was to arrive. Alison had a summer job lined up for her as a glorified gofer at one of those organizations that shunted money to her father, Citizens for the Right Way. The Right Way was just an office on K, a reception area with a long counter, leather chairs and potted tropical plants, four executive offices, the harried secretaries of the pool, the mail room and her. Her desk was in a corner of the mail room. She was sent out for coffee, takeout, particular requests from the newsstand two blocks away, sent to deliver papers across town. She spent much time tracking FedEx and UPS packages and missives and taking deposits to the bank. She helped send out fund-raising mailings. Often she sat in the mail room
reading. She tried to practice her scanty Spanish on the two guys who worked there, but that was pretty much a lost cause. She would spend five minutes piecing together a sentence. Then either they would look at her as if she were crazy or one would answer and she wouldn’t understand. It was irritating for them and boring for her. After the first week, they ignored one another.

As she e-mailed Emily, she was marking time until Blake got there, hanging around the house so that her parents would grow bored with her and be glad when Blake arrived and she would be out more. In the last days of Congress, her father was pushing hard to get his maiden bill voted on, but the chances, she understood, were lessening every day. Rosemary was in high gear. She was mounting a campaign to woo the chairman of the committee that would vote the bill out to the full Senate or decide to let it die ignominiously. It was for Mr. Potts mostly, as far as Melissa could tell, and other backers in the trucking business. It had to do with tonnage. The bill itself was never discussed, only how to get it through. Apparently Rosemary had run into the chairman’s wife at some boutique and they’d lunched together. Rosemary was now her bosom pal. They had coffee, they had lunch, they shopped together regularly. Rosemary was working all the angles. Billy was at hockey camp. Merilee was interning for the summer in a law firm in New York. Rosemary was not pleased that her favorite daughter was away. Blake was still forwarding the family e-mail to Melissa. She had gotten accustomed to learning about all of them from Rosemary’s notes.

Merilee wrote:

What Rosemary could not object to was the caliber of the law firm. But Melissa knew that her mother did not like Merilee too far away. She worried about the unsuitable. She was afraid that Merilee would slip from her achieved perch on the glass mountain of unutterable perfection. Melissa knew that Rosemary would love to run up to New York and check out Merilee’s scene, interview her roommates and associates—but her duty to the Senator and his maiden bill prevented her from getting away even for a day. So she fretted via e-mail.

Occasionally Rosemary’s eye-beam fixed on Melissa. “Have you made any friends at work?”

“Don’t be absurd, Mother. The two guys in the mail room are Puerto Rican and they talk to each other in fast Spanish. The secretaries are years older than me. Nobody’s my age. The comptroller and the vice president are not about to hang out with me.”

“How about other offices in the same building? I’m sure there are young women in the same situation as yourself working there during the summer.”

“They keep me busy. I don’t have time to scope out the other offices.”

“There’s always time to make connections if they’re desirable. Use your lunch hours. I suppose you miss Emily, but you can’t rely on old contacts forever.”

It occurred to her if she invented friends at work, she would have a cover for seeing Blake when he arrived. “I’ll try, Mother. I promise I’ll make an effort,” she said fervently. “I’ll use my lunch hours as you suggest. That’s a great idea.”

Every day she communicated with Emily as well as Blake. Em had gone to New York with friends for a weekend, picked up a musician, and now she had body lice. She had to keep her parents from finding out, so she hid the medicine and tried hard not to scratch in front of them.

How totally gross,

Melissa typed.

Are they big as cockroaches?

Emily wrote back:

No, they’re little, but they itch like elephants!

That Thursday, Rosemary made her call in sick to work—as if they would miss her—to drag her off to a committee hearing. This was not a glamorous bill, so only minimal press was present, two photographers—one from some trade journal—and three reporters, sitting in a row on the floor against one wall of the paneled room. Dick was up there behind the long table with his aides hovering. He was questioning some old guy very gently about the needs of interstate trucking. Melissa thought she had seen him once with Joe, Dick’s chief of staff, who was present, perched in the audience but in and out of the room. Melissa must have dozed off, because Rosemary poked her sharply. “Sit up!”

She had no idea why Rosemary had insisted on bringing her, but perhaps her mother considered this part of her education. Rosemary had dragged her to the Senate gallery twice before she left for college. The surprise was how few senators were on the floor at any given time. Those who were often were chatting or wandering around. Nobody seemed to be listening to the speeches. Most senators were holed up in their Cloak-room—which had nothing to do with cloaks or even coats but was a working hangout, Rosemary told her—in their offices or roaming the corridors looking for other senators to buttonhole on their pet projects. Today all the committee members apparently were present, but the hearings droned on and on until they broke for lunch.

Dick came over. “No reason to hang around. They’re not taking a vote today and this afternoon will be abysmally technical.”

“Do you have everything you need?” Rosemary asked nervously.

He looked to Joe, who nodded, a sheaf of papers under his arm as usual. Then Joe took Dick by the arm and steered him off to a group waiting to speak with him. Rosemary and she left. What a wasted morning.

Still, she was determined to prove to her father her new political interest and maturity, so the next time she could catch his attention, Saturday noon as they were picking at leftovers in the kitchen, she began, “I’ve been trying to understand globalization, Daddy—”

“It’s just free markets, sweetheart. Bringing people closer together—”

“But I’ve been reading about what it does to the poor people in those—”

“If that’s what they teach you at Wesleyan, I want my money back.” He patted her shoulder. “Leave it to the economists. It’s complex, my girl.”

The following Tuesday, Dick’s bill was voted out of committee, a first step and a victory for Rosemary’s diplomacy as well as his own. Now the game was to get the Senate to act on it before they recessed. Melissa was paying more attention to her parents’ political maneuvering since she had decided on investigative journalism and since Blake always asked so many questions. She found herself restive, itchy. Finally she realized with a shock that not only did she miss Blake but she missed sex. She masturbated—something she hadn’t done since arriving at Wesleyan—but it was not satisfying. She wanted his touch and the feel of his long supple body against her own. She wanted him inside her, not her finger. Sometimes, in spite of her restlessness, she simply quit out of boredom before she could reach orgasm.