As Husbands Go (18 page)

“You can’t see from here,” Theo said. “But I bet you anything her Gigi de Lavallade waterproof mascara is still working.”

I stopped the smile before it got to my face and said, “Theo, stop!” My brother-in-law had the bad-boy appeal of a precocious kid. People were forever shaking their heads at his scandalous remarks while being charmed at his wicked assessments. With him around, I was the nice one, but we’d always enjoyed verbal tennis, volleying remarks back and forth. So in this brief, bright time-out from the darkness of Jonah’s murder, I was on the verge of responding that Babs could use the mascara’s reliability for a first-person “My Tragedy, My Mascara” ad campaign. Theo would like that one, but I couldn’t take the risk. He could easily become a loose cannon, and my remark was great ammunition the next time he
decided to zing Babs: “I know your mother is in terrible pain.”

Theo leaned back, tilting one of the antique prints of ferns hanging in the hallway. Though he obviously heard the scrape of frame against wall, he didn’t say anything like “Oh, sorry,” the way most people would have. He just shifted and spoke, his voice relaxed yet somehow flat, as if he were chatting about an actress not quite talented enough to play the mother in a movie he was casting. “She’s probably in pain because my father wants to go straight back to work and not take a post-shiva week in Saint Barth to console her, which means she’s feeling pressure to go back to work before she’s ready.”

“So you’re telling me not to go gently with her?” I asked. “I mean, if she’s feeling pressured.”

“No. Be however you want to be. Say whatever needs saying. Well, easy for me to say. I am her son, which I guess entitles me to special treatment from her. The Best of Babs: Good, Bad, Ugly. You know, I had an internship at a rep company out in L.A. the summer between my junior and senior years at Wesleyan. Okay, I’d been to camp and on teen tours, but that was the first time I was really away from my parents’ world. Not that summer theater is the place to go if you’re big on genuineness, but I felt so
right
there. What’s really strange, though, is even driving out there, I went through Terre Haute, Indiana, and I thought how much easier my life would have been if I’d grown up there. I’d never realized before how—I don’t know—complex, difficult, it had been living in my parents’ world.”

I could almost feel Jonah beside me, whispering in my ear, “See? You asked a question about you, and what did it become? All about Theo.” He’d be smiling, less with pleasure than with satisfaction that he had his brother’s MO down pat.

I had to get back into the living room. Heads were starting to swivel. Visitors were searching for me so they could say, “This must be such a nightmare for you!” and still have enough time to get home for
American Idol
. But my bro-in-law didn’t want to let me go.

“I call it my parents’ world,” Theo continued, “but my mother
rules.”

I’d told Jonah once that Theo reminded me of those sprites or whatever in a Shakespearean comedy. Not gay, I’d added. He was definitely a hetero sprite, but he was unusually graceful and was always making delightfully wicked comments. Jonah replied that the problem was his brother often didn’t see the difference between being wickedly witty and being a mean little shit.

I waved to Andrea at the far end of the living room, but she missed the urgency of my
Come get me!
signal and just waved back. I hoped a few seconds of silence would discourage him, but Theo wasn’t going anywhere. I finally said, “You’d think with your father being an oncologist, he’d be more . . . not aggressive. Assertive. He’d know what’s important in life.”

Theo took over. “He knows cancer is important. But cancer isn’t all there is in the world. The only other thing he ever knew was that being the son of a podiatrist with a plantar’s-wart specialty wasn’t a ticket to the A-list. More than anything, my father wanted to be a someone. He was like the Little Match Boy, staring in on people living—whatever—elegantly. He so wanted in, but he didn’t have a key to the door. That’s where my mother came in. ‘This is the biography to read, the film to see, the primary candidate we should support. Wear a white dinner jacket for formal occasions between Memorial Day and Labor Day. Stop ordering risotto because risotto is so 2001.’ It’s all about surfaces with her. Look what she does for a living: marketing director for a cosmetics company. Can you get more superficial than that?”

Naturally, I didn’t say “How about the last movie you cast?”
Call 666-SATAN
was not only superficial but supremely lousy. Also, as Jonah pointed out, totally miscast. Then again, Theo wasn’t exactly coming home to voice mail from Martin Scorsese. He worked for deeply minor theater companies and film directors whose common goal seemed to be making bad imitations of successful horror, soft-core porn, and hacked-up teenager movies. So I said, “I don’t know about superficial, but your mother is capable of love. You—” Theo shook his head:
No. She doesn’t love me.
Arguing with him would
have taken too much time, so I kept going. “She loved Jonah.”

“Absolutely.”

“She loves the boys. I know she sees them as individuals, not just the triplets.”

“That’s true. She—the two of them—are the quintessential doting grandparents. Granted, it’s baby-boomer chic, being crazy about your grandchildren. But they are completely besotted. Well, she told my father he was completely besotted, so that’s what he is. And that will be great for you.”

I didn’t get what he meant. Normally, to avoid the Gersten I-Must-Be-Patient-with-Your-Stupidity deep breath, I would have said sure, but I’d waited too long. As Theo inhaled, I was forced to ask, “What do you mean, great for me?”

“I mean she’s not going to do anything to alienate you. Don’t you see why? She’s smart enough to know that, ultimately, alienating you would also mean alienating the grandchildren. You are the doorkeeper.”

“What?”

“You control access to the boys. Also, if my parents didn’t do right by you and word got out, they’d look bad. It’s not comme il faut to fuck over your late son’s widow.”

Just as I was wondering if he meant his parents could deal with their son’s murder but not with looking bad, Fat Boy came into the hall, double-timing it from the living room on his way to the bathroom. I noticed a macadamia nut drop from the huge fistful he was trying to hide by stuffing his hand into a too-tight side pocket. Since I didn’t want to make him uncomfortable about having to squeeze by the two of us, I parted from Theo with “Later.”

“Later” took quite a while, because I made the mistake of saying “Why don’t we sit down?” to Gilbert John Noakes and his wife, Coral. She was a long-limbed Englishwoman. Though her looks made you think,
Oh, more graceful than a gazelle,
Coral lurched through life like a bad actor imitating a drunk, which I guessed she was. It was hard to tell, because all she ever drank in public was sparkling water, yet she showed the signs: Most of her sentences
made you wonder whether you’d misheard—they were Britishly enunciated and probably grammatical, but they didn’t make sense. Also, she was dangerous in any space containing antique vases and other people’s feet—such as my living room.

Once we were seated, though, I was hardly able to speak to the Noakeses. People kept crowding around me like I was a Nancy Gonzalez sale table at Bergdorf’s. I got that phobic feeling of
Oh my God, not enough air,
so I stood. That left the two of them gazing up at me, but at least I didn’t feel like the oxygen was being sucked out of my lungs.

I sensed Coral and Gilbert John would understand my getting up, or pretend to, or not notice, and they wouldn’t disappear from my life. I could look forward, unfortunately, to still being asked to their dinner parties. Gilbert John would invite a mix of doctors, potential patients, and what he called “interesting young people,” which meant anyone under thirty who wore retro eyeglasses. Coral used a caterer who always served what Jonah had called “elderly chicken” with halves of grapes and a curdled white sauce. But maybe I’d be too tainted by the scandal of Jonah’s murder to be asked to dine chez Noakes. They might take me to a restaurant every six months. Without the comfort of knowing I could at least laugh about them on the ride home, how could I bear it? Gilbert John would rake a fork tine on a tablecloth to show me the pattern of his newest mosaic, thereby competing with Coral’s convoluted conversation about English gardens of her youth, though she could never remember the names of flowers: “The purplish ones with . . .” She’d fluff a couple of fingers outward, waiting expectantly, so I’d wind up guessing iris, anemone, cosmos. No to each. “Passionflower, echinacea?” Again a no.

At very long last, they stood to say goodbye. Gilbert John’s chapped lips felt like an emery board against my cheek. “We’ll speak soon,” he said. Coral put her cheek to mine. As I kissed the air, she said, “If there’s anything . . .” She must have thought she’d completed a sentence, because she turned and walked away. Gilbert John hurried to catch up and grab her elbow. He steered her across the rest of the living room so if she did trip over any feet, they would
be her own.

I realized that by standing up, I’d become a one-woman receiving line for friends, relatives, and everyone else, from the long-retired coach of Jonah’s high school tennis team to a Baptist minister who’d sat with me on the board of the Nassau County Coalition Against Domestic Violence. All the heartfelt words that came my way—“So very, very sorry” and “I know nothing I say can ease your pain, but . . .”—were offset by Buddy Gratz, a local pharmacist who elbowed his way into a knot of neighbors and in history’s loudest recorded whisper confided to them, “Hey, can you
believe
the cops haven’t found that hooker yet?”

Shudders passed through the room. But before the whispered “Oh my God’s” that would mortify me even more got started, there was a Distraction with a capital D—as well as Drama. As “that hooker” still echoed, every head turned to a spot ten feet behind me. Right on the borderline between the entry hall and living room stood a tall, slim exclamation mark of a woman. Something about her drew attention, like the giant horseshoe magnets in science class that pulled in all those iron filings.

And there she was, Ethel O’Shea, my mother’s mother, a woman I’d seen only twice in my life. Grandly, she swooped into the living room on the arm of her lover, Felicia Burns, whom everyone called Sparky. Halfway over to me, Ethel came to a halt. As we all waited for her to speak, she lifted her liposuctioned chin. In a voice that made Buddy Gratz’s remark sound like silence, she declared, “Susie, dear girl! Grandma is here!”

Chapter Fourteen

For Babs, the blue-eyed rabbi became history. Like everyone else’s in the living room, her gaze kept racing from Grandma Ethel to me and back again. For those who knew my family history, here, in pants and a black Malo turtleneck, was the anti-mom, the dreadful woman who’d walked out on her eight-year-old child. Heartless. But hey, did she look fabulous.

For the rest—showtime! There was the new widow greeting a woman who was practically her clone. Except the clone had called herself Grandma, so she must be, what? In her late seventies? Amazing, because the clone was simply not an old lady. She had fabulous hair, astoundingly lush for someone her age, deep gold and platinum—colors from a treasure chest. She wore it twisted into a soft knot pinned with careful casualness on top of her head.

Their thoughts were so loud I could hear them.
Look at her and Susie!
The same long arms and legs. Necks that came close to qualifying for swan status. Straight noses that Jonah once swore no plastic surgeon could replicate. Cheekbones like that of Mrs. Genghis Khan. And those mesmerizing eyes, so pale they were barely on the green side of white.

Seeing Ethel O’Shea was seeing the future me. Thankfully, since I was a superficial person, it was not a nightmare vision, though it didn’t make me think,
Hey, I can’t wait till I’m seventy-eight!

I kissed my grandmother on the cheek, inhaling the Gardenia Passion I’d smelled the other two times we’d been together. I kissed Sparky, who was scentless. I’d met her about five years earlier, when she and Ethel had come to New York and Jonah and I had
taken them out for dinner. My grandmother had introduced us by putting her arm around Sparky’s shoulders and saying, “This is the love of my life.” Sparky had grinned and said, “Ethel’s got that line down pat.”

“Susie, I am so, so sorry,” Sparky began. She was a civil liberties lawyer. Every word she spoke, probably even “with milk and Splenda,” came out loaded with passion and conviction. “Jonah was a wonderful guy. I only wish we’d had the chance to spend more time with him.”

“He was beyond wonderful,” Grandma Ethel corrected. “A total doll.” Those in the audience close enough to hear her lines nodded in agreement. “You couldn’t help loving him. He didn’t hold back, you know what I mean?” Sparky nodded. Since she was the expert on how to handle my grandmother, I decided nodding was the way to go. “You know what was remarkable about Jonah? None of that ‘Let me see if you’re worth my while before I’m nice to you’ crap. He was so decent. To everyone, even the waiter. Remember? Also, there wasn’t an ounce of that bullshit gemütlichkeit successful men use to show they’re not the arrogant putzes they actually are.”