Claudia Silver to the Rescue (9780547985602) (24 page)

“I'm Annie Tate,” she announced into the shadows. She paused, unsure how to describe herself under the circumstances.
Your daughter is my future ex-husband's girlfriend
was just ridiculous. She opted for “My daughter Bronwyn is Claudia's roommate,” instead.

Edith opened the door another inch, allowing Annie a view of the woman's large brown eyes and the pale, slender finger, unencumbered by a wedding ring. “Yes?” Edith queried, tensely.

“Do you think I could come in for a moment, Ms. Mendelssohn? There's a, um . . . situation I'm hoping we can discuss.”
In which my husband's penis seems to have fallen into your daughter's vagina,
she realized with some amusement she could say if she cared to, ripped from the pages of
The
Little Slut's Phrase Book
.

Edith disappeared for a moment, and as the door opened wider, it was clear she was willing. Annie stepped into the chilly foyer. Its tile had long ago lost its gleam, the light fixture was penitential.
So this,
Annie thought,
is where Claudia is from.
The girl suddenly became worthy of admiration, while at the same time her utter unsuitability was now officially cemented. Annie's disoriented spirit, right down to her sullied feet, formed a rough-hewn footbridge across which the two women carefully approached each other.

“Is there some sort of emergency?” Edith asked. Her tone was intriguing, simultaneously gamine and authoritarian.   

“It depends who you ask,” Annie replied. Then: “But no bloodshed.”

“Do come in,” Edith said stiffly. She stepped aside to open the door wider. “Tea and sympathy?” she asked.

“First one,” said Annie, stepping into Edith's parlor, “and then maybe the other.”

 

“Yup, just like that,” the photographer was saying. He was a flushed, burly fellow of Nordic extraction with a halo of pale curls, a rumpled custom dress shirt, a giant camera and army pants, and Phoebe Goldberg and Ramona Parker had already forgotten his name. But they'd been tapped, snapped, and arranged by him on a white riser in front of a white backdrop, and were currently standing side by side, in a version of the pose that hadn't felt like a pose when they'd been holding hands outside.

Discovered on a SoHo sidewalk by editor Holly Platt
is how the story would go, with the pesky detail of the open casting call excised for the sake of a good story.

Could you guys maybe just stand the way you were on the sidewalk? You know, holding hands. Wow, yeah, cool, thanks!

The white girl and the black girl holding hands, both of them odd looking, the white girl stunningly so and the black girl more real, bookish, and thusly exciting—it said something powerful and tender about
this exact moment
. This Exact Moment being the moving target that
Moxy
was in the business of pinning down.

Phoebe had realized quickly, and with some relief, that there wasn't much to actually
do.
Deciding to show up was the main thing, and now she was pretty much just standing there being herself. Since things seemed to be going pretty well—Phoebe could tell this was so by the rapt attention that Holly Platt and her nodding handmaidens were paying her—maybe Claudia's fucked-up-ness would prove, in time, to have been a good thing. The photographer had been at it for a while, pacing like a potbellied panther, crouching down, standing splayed. Phoebe did something with her feet, and the
Moxy
ladies vibrated. She did something else with her hip, and they froze and grabbed one another. She popped the collar of her peacoat and they cocked their collective head; she put the collar back down and they sighed, all together now, with relief. She grinned, and they gasped. At one point, the photographer had Phoebe and Ramona lie on their backs as he climbed a ladder above them. Phoebe looked up his loose shirt, like a gym teacher, and saw his round, pink belly bouncing over his belt. Snap, snap, snap. All the while, the photographer asked Phoebe and Ramona random, borderline loserish questions: “So . . . d'you guys like hip-hop?”

Still lying on her back at the foot of the ladder, Ramona turned her head to address Phoebe. The photographer snapped wildly, but it wasn't the shot they'd land on. The black girl talking to the white girl while the white girl stared straight ahead looked too worshipful, and this would be a story about how teen girls are
equals.
“I really need to go,” Ramona said. “My supervisor is going to kill me, that is, if I still even have an internship.”

“I can go with you and explain,” Phoebe offered.

Snap snappity
snap.
This was better. The black girl and the white girl in deep
conversation.

The photographer exclaimed, “All right, fuck. That's it. I'm done!” He threw his meaty arms in the air—“
Take
this,
Jay
-sus”—and two assistants, one lanky, the other squat, appeared at his side to remove the camera and proffer an espresso as he clattered heavily down the ladder and pushed his curls off his damp forehead. Passionate applause exploded. Phoebe got nimbly to her feet and offered Ramona her hand.

“Well,
that
was just slightly more than I had in mind,” Ramona said as they stepped down from the risers. Bronwyn, beaming, hurried toward them. “Gotsta go, for reals for
reals.
”

“I'll walk you to work, okay?” offered Phoebe.

“I'm
running.
”

“Then I'll run with you.”

Bronwyn pulled Phoebe into a tight hug as Ramona slipped her backpack over her shoulders. “My parents are taking me out tonight to Café des Artistes to celebrate my new job,” Bronwyn said, “but seeing as we both have one, you've
got
to come. Meet us there at eight?”

Ramona, pulling on her fingerless gloves, seemed to be ignoring the fact that Bronwyn was clearly excluding her from the invitation. “Okay,” Phoebe said, clocking Bronwyn's easy rudeness. “Where is it?”

Bronwyn held Phoebe at arm's length. “Sixty-Seventh between the Park and Columbus,” she replied. “How
fantastic
that you've never been there before! And Holly's totally going to help you find an agent.”

“I think I may already have one,” Phoebe admitted, modestly. “Paolo Crespi?”

“Paolo?” Bronwyn gasped. “Oh my God, he's
huge.
”

“Right on,” Phoebe said. Ramona was already threading her way through the milling crowd. Phoebe was determined to stay by Ramona's side, but the Moxies were heading her way, parting the milling crowd like a pyramid of water-skiers, with Holly Platt at the tippy-top in a flowered two-piece. “Ramona!” Phoebe cried as Ramona disappeared behind the formation, her skinny braids bouncing.

“Oh, you can't go anywhere,” Bronwyn admonished, grabbing Phoebe's wrist, as ten blocks north, the exact F train bearing Claudia was hurtling into the Broadway-Lafayette station. “This is just the beginning.”

 

Annie Tate stood in the mouth of Edith Mendelssohn's parlor.

The dim room, with its torn upholstery and its rock-and-roll poster, smelled of cigarettes and incense. It was the home of a woman who cared little for housework, a helpless woman, by which Annie meant a woman who clearly did not have
help.
A woman of books, not book parties, without proper window treatments, and yet there was a peculiar style to the place—more substance than style, really. This was how a private woman lived when left to her own devices. When not trapped, and consumed, by trying to please, soothe, or entertain. This was the home of the mother of the girl for whom Paul Tate had thrown their whole life away. How many other mothers of how many other girls were peppered along the mid-Atlantic Annie could scarcely calculate, which only heightened the threadbare poignancy of this particular parlor, lacking as it did both coasters and a coffee table to put them on.

Annie was far out in a strangely peaceful sea of tiredness, past the breakers of the facts—her philandering husband, her dirty feet. She had the vague faith that she'd eventually be spit back onto shore, and that it would hurt.

“English or Chinese?” Edith asked. The question was among her favorite gauntlets.

“English, wonderful,” Annie replied. She was well aware that her host was referring to the tea, and accordingly, earned a notch of Edith's estimation.

Edith nodded to the dining room table. “Please, sit.” She did not offer to take Annie's duffle coat, which was fine, as the room was cold.

Annie sat and unfastened a few toggles. “You have a wonderful place,” she said, as Edith set a tin of rough, seeded cookies and a chipped ceramic bowl of clementines on the table, then returned with a tea tray. While the individual elements were coarser than any Annie would have chosen, the civilized ritual gave her hope in Edith's basic womanhood. “Do you remember that old commercial?” Annie began as Edith poured.
“It's ten o'clock. Do you know where your children are?”

Edith settled in her Victorian throne and adjusted a hairpin. “I'm afraid not,” she replied. “I don't have television.”

From her spot at the table, Annie could see clear to the front room, where a small TV, its antennae wrapped thickly in aluminum foil, had been pushed into the corner on a green plastic milk crate. “Well,” Annie observed boldly, imagining that this was where the live-in boyfriend from whom the daughters had fled must watch his baseball games, “
somebody
does.”

It was then that Annie's calculations faltered.

She had decided on her announcement (
Your daughter is fucking my husband
), but how would it land? Edith was a woman with two children from two different, disappeared men. She had red lightbulbs in her ceiling fixture, for heaven's sake, and no coasters. What on earth would a woman like this care about adultery?

For all Annie knew, the news flash that Claudia and Paul were an ungodly item might earn Edith's grim
respect.

“No television must be why Claudia's so bright,” Annie praised, selecting a clementine that felt loose in its skin.

“I assure you Claudia always loved TV,” Edith replied. “She made me get her that little set for her bedroom when she was a girl, to watch a program called
The Electric Company,
that, as I recall, wound her up terribly. I don't think I've seen a minute of television since she went off to school.”

“Well,” said Annie, “that commercial shocked me when my girls were small. To imagine a time when I wouldn't know their exact whereabouts.” Annie set down her clementine and advanced along a new tack. “Edith,” she began again. “Mother to mother—”

“Mrs. Tate,” Edith interrupted, sounding a bit stern. Annie braced, a bird dog with a raised paw, anticipating vitriol. Then: “Can I offer you something stronger?”

Annie had been trying for some time now not to drink during the day, except that this day did not exactly count, did it, as it was the end of days. “Well, yes,” she found herself saying. “I suppose that would be just fine.”

From a bookshelf hollow behind three volumes of bound Judaica, Edith extracted a pint of Chivas. At the dish drainer, she removed two small glasses, and from her refrigerator's little freezer shelf, overgrown with thick frost, a blue plastic ice-cube tray. As the whiskey slid down Annie's throat, it warmed her chest and strengthened her mind. Shaming Edith with Claudia's behavior may have been an exercise in futility, but that didn't mean Annie couldn't be an emissary for good. “I want to talk to you about Phoebe,” Annie declared.

“Phoebe?”
Edith frowned. “You know her?”

“Well, yes, of course,” Annie replied, despite the fact that her source of information was her future ex-husband and that she had only a vague memory of the girl from their one meeting, a month ago, on Christmas Eve. “Did you know she's been living with Claudia and Bronwyn since November?”

Edith took an efficient pull on her drink. “I've had my suspicions.”

“But do you know
why?
”

Edith shrugged. “I left home at sixteen,” she said, “to enroll at university. I had a borrowed suitcase, one sweater, one pair of lace-up shoes, and my collection of poetry in a brown paper bag. My mother's parting gift was a marble cake from Wertheimer's on 181st Street and a sack of Winesap apples. If I remember correctly.” She took another sip and shook the ice cubes in her glass. “I'm not sure there is a particular
why
to the process of differentiation, other than a Darwinian imperative. It's much worse, I'd say, when it doesn't happen at all.”

Annie set down her sweating glass on a cloth napkin, so as not to add another ring to the table, and leaned forward. “Were you running for your
life
when you left home?” she volleyed with purpose.

“Running for my life,” Edith repeated, savoring the phrase. “No, Mrs. Tate. By the time I left home, we had already done that. I will say, however, that once one has escaped a burning continent, the niceties do take on a certain abstraction. I suppose one either clings to them, taking exaggerated comfort in jam pots and that sort of thing, or comes to recognize how they defile the memory of the dead.” Annie stared. “Are you familiar with the Shoah, Mrs. Tate?”

“The . . . the movie?” Annie faltered.

“No,” Edith countered with a withering patience, “the
actual genocide
on which it is based.” The conversation was halted, and Edith sat back in the horrified silence.

Annie took a deep gulp of her drink, then broke it. “Your
boyfriend,
” she pressed on, determined. She would not be shooed away by the Holocaust. “Is his name Robbie?”

“Boyfriend?”
Edith mused bitterly. “I've always loathed that word.”