Double Happiness (2 page)

Even facing straight ahead she could still issue the look not to say anything. You want to wait until we're at the Hilton? I said. She laughed. We weren't going to the Hilton, it turned out. We were staying with a friend, Faye, who had lent my mother, for the purpose of this holiday visit, the guest cottage on her waterfront property. You'll love this, she said, you've always loved the water. I couldn't remember loving the water, but was sure my mother was right.

Faye had problems of her own. Her thieving ex-husband had run off with the golf club locker-room attendant she'd over-tipped for years. It was disgusting! Even so, Faye had taken time to fill the larder and the bar at the guest cottage, and she let it be known, before going off to the lawyer to skewer her lousy ex, that if my mother's husband put one foot on her property he'd regret it. My mother sighed, and smiled her gratitude. But when the sound of Faye's MG died out, my mother explained that Faye was consumed by rage. It was a terrible, wasteful shame.

Faye's cottage had twin chaises that looked out from the veranda to the bay. In the early evening light, sailboats bumped
and tilted around delicate crescent waves. The sun went down, turning everything pink for a while, and my mother's face behind her sunglasses looked a little less distorted. She told me there'd been a particularly harsh rejection letter that week, and now the novel was dead. Which novel? I asked. I knew there had been several. My mother was quiet. A small boat tacked back straight into the last sliver of sun. Mom?

Maybe all of them. It's possible.

I was quiet, out of respect, but then said, Sometimes people just feel that way. I told her the story of despair and renewal at the movie theater. An actor-usher who'd met Francis Ford Coppola at the McDonald's on Sixth Avenue was now a night intern at his literary magazine. Who knows what will happen next? And he'd just about given up! And what about my own friend whose oppressive home environment and fevers cut his art down to bare scratches for a while? Second runner-up in the Cooper Union Gesture Drawing Competition last Monday! And what about me?

Sweetheart, you're a dreamer. She gave me a one-cornered close-mouthed smile that was a dead ringer for her husband's. I'd seen this smile before, trotted out for this very subject. Her husband was a professional. It was different. They weren't children.

Well, I'm not exactly a child, either, I said. But I was, her nonreply said. And this came down to the checks she sent me, and the cash gifts, and the winter coats and boots I got for nearly
every birthday, and the microwave and the matched living-room set. And the arrangement she'd made years ago with my co-op board and with Con Ed. I paid for my own transportation and food out of the paycheck from the art-movie theater, but the rest, as everyone who came to my mother's house knew, and about which old Sven had been particularly vocal, basically came from my allowance. Meanwhile, my mother's smug friends' children were busy working out plans for third babies and second homes. Even Faye had a daughter with a time-share in Aspen.

The financial side of pursuing our art wasn't subject to the deep truth-telling we otherwise advocated at the movie theater. I liked to quote Virginia Woolf to myself, now that I was leaning toward fiction, about the five-hundred pounds and the lonely room. Was there some caveat about not getting that from your mother?

My mother gently pressed her vodka collins up against her face and squinted at the dark water. The reflection of the tiki torches looked like jellyfish wriggling on the black surface.

Maybe you'd like to hear my new story?

Darling, you'll wreck your eyes reading in the dark.

It's short, I'll recite it!

Oh, bunny. Well.

But then the gunshot revs of Faye's MG sounded in the gravel beside the guest cottage. Did I imagine my mother's relief? There, suddenly, was Faye, hopping mad, sucker punching the hydrangea. The scum had married the locker-room floozy.
Could we believe it? My mother was lovely and magnanimous. Something like this, she knew, could never happen to her. She said sweet, smart things that made Faye laugh.

I was still thinking about my story, maybe Faye would like to hear it? My mother offered to mix some healing martinis. But Faye said she'd do it herself. With that hand—she tipped her perky head at my mother's sling—they'd be slugging down pure vermouth. At this, Faye and my mother made little mews with their mouths at the same time, and I was startled that my mother could be so friendly, so intimate, with a female who wasn't me. This seemed new.

But the biggest news, along with the disastrous rejection letter, was that old Sven had done something naughty with his will. Faye and my mother hunkered down, stem glasses balanced in the air, to talk it over. It turned out he'd left an enormous chunk to the Author's Guild! And on a cruel Post-it, in a scrawly hand, he'd written to my mother's husband: For your colleagues, thought you'd be pleased.

He wasn't, my mother said, and Faye slid her an appreciative glance. Both drained their glasses, and I offered again to recite my story. Sweetness, they drawled out in tandem, then collapsed into giggles. Unstoppable giggles, they bent their sculptural coifs over slim, extended legs and roared. Oh god. Darling, my mother tried, and then waved her swollen hand quickly as if shooing a mosquito, and Faye laughed harder still. Finally, Faye stood and coughed to say she'd handle this. Though her eyes were still
weeping with laughter, her mouth looked somber. My angel, she addressed me, and my mother kept her face tilted down. Don't you think your mother has had just about enough literature for today? I'd say, really, enough for a lifetime? Yes?

Oh, Faye, stop, my mother said. Sweetie, I'll hear your story in the car tomorrow, um? Faye, stop it. Then I can really concentrate. Okay?

That's okay.

Good girl, said Faye.

Sweetheart, my mother sighed.

Don't worry about it.

Well, maybe when it's a little longer than a paragraph you'll send it to me and I can take a good hard look.

It's supposed to be a paragraph.

Faye smirked, and now that it was really dark outside, my mother took off her sunglasses and gave her a serious look. But that communication was lost because my mother's eyes were so swollen, so deeply purpled and bruised even in the dim light of the tiki torches, that Faye stopped laughing and put down her stem glass.

I'm calling Lou, said Faye. Lou was her scum of an ex-husband. But he was also an orthopedic surgeon. My mother said, Absolutely not. But Faye plugged her ears with soft-looking fingers and marched straight into the guesthouse. Lou arrived within fifteen minutes. He and Faye were surprisingly cordial for two people who hated each other's guts. Lou remembered
me fondly from golf-club brunches when I was a child and then forgot me completely while he dressed my mother's wounds in the surgical light of Faye's guest dressing room. He gave my mother a sedative. In the morning she was very tired, so Faye drove me to the bus.

I had to work that afternoon at the movie theater and my mother had urged me to go. Don't worry, my mother said. She was incredibly sleepy. Don't worry, Faye said. Don't worry, said the painter when I told him on the phone.

Soon after that, my legs began to give out spontaneously; I didn't even have to think about my mother. My legs would wobble out of the blue and then hip, knee, ankle would collapse in a ripple. It made it tricky to walk. The steps down to the subway, which I was obliged to take from Gramercy Park to the movie theater, became a challenge. This wouldn't have been that big a deal, since I was already making the transition from modern dance to fiction writing, but I did have one last performance scheduled at the famous White Columns. My “Pelican Song,” old Sven had called it over the speakerphone at Christmas. His last pronouncement, as it turned out. My mother and her husband had always planned to attend. They'd sent a giant check to the choreographer during his holiday fund-raiser. And he'd tacked on a three-minute solo at the end of the piece, “Wings of Love,” for me. Now the performance was minutes away. And my sudden leg-melts were trying the patience of even this well-funded choreographer.

I decided to address my condition by writing about it. Master the problem by making it conscious. So I began work on a full-scale paragraph to describe what I understood about my mother and her husband. This was more difficult than I'd guessed. In my mother's husband's novels, the women, I knew from several brief glances over the years, had fabulous, surprisingly active nipples, and insatiable appetites for very straight-ahead penis-worshipping sex acts. In my paragraph, there was sex, certainly, but of a different order.

The two weeks between my Mother's Day visit and the performance were terrible. The worry, the rehearsals, the distress of composition (I began, oddly, to sympathize about this with my mother's husband). And the rain. Every single day. I was forced to work double shifts pouring bagged popcorn into the pretend popper unit. Everyone in the West Village was coming to the movies, it seemed. By the time I got home each night, it was late, and the phone at Faye's guest cottage rang and rang.

My painter finally recovered enough to spend a night of love on my air mattress. We jiggled and drooled and painted our chests with Nutella. When the phone blared after midnight we assumed it was his mother, who'd insisted on taking my number. But the answering machine speaker played out an echoing voice in the little room that, even without words, only crying, I knew was my own mother instead. I scrambled to pluck up the receiver. Wait, wait, I said. Hello?

She was still there, breathing hard, whimpering, Darling? And now I felt my sternum shudder and give. Where are you? I asked.

At home. She was locked in her bathroom, the one with the pinwheel wallpaper, the Jacuzzi tub, and the pocket door she had long debated: solid core or green glass? I could hear, even behind her harsh breathing, the bang of a fist against the swirly maple she'd finally picked and a muffled growl just like old Sven warming up for his holiday message. It's locked, she said. I listened. The window, she said. And I thought hard. The window opened onto a trellis that reached down to a patio which bounded the putting green. If she pushed her pelvis— she didn't like that word; hips then, I said, keep your hips close to the wall of the house. She could probably shimmy down.

That's crazy, said the painter, and laughed. (That laugh ended our relationship.) Flush the toilet, I said in a whisper, as if her husband could hear me, flush before you open the latch. I would get the next bus to Freehold. Just walk into town, can you do that?

Of course, she said, putting me in my place. If she could get out the window, she'd see me there. He called me a sick, rotting cunt? she said, as a question, as if reviewing whether she was making the right move.

Well, you're not, I said. Be careful of your feet. There might be broken glass.

Sweetheart, she whispered, for goodness sake.

My mother was a woman who dressed for bed. When the bus pulled in at the all-night diner in Freehold I scanned beyond the parking lot for where her cream satin peignoir might be flitting through the holly bushes. The exhaust-smelling heat of the bus had made the Nutella gluey. My sleep T-shirt stuck to my chest. I backed down the exit steps, uncertain. The bus driver stared at me. Eyes on the road, you pervert, I barked, then felt ashamed. My mother would be ashamed, too, if she'd heard me.

I had a coat for her and some shoes. Sneakers are for athletes, she always maintained. So I carried my only pair of black sling-backs and a lovely silk overcoat she'd given me, but no money. I'd borrowed the fare from the painter. Now, I realized, as the bus chugged away and the quiet settled in, that my mother probably didn't have much cash on her, either. Didn't matter. First I'd find her, and then, once she was appropriately dressed, we'd hitchhike our way to Faye's guest cottage.

Was it an hour? It's hard to know in the dark. But eventually, when she didn't show up, I began the long walk past the cornfields to her house. I was shivering though the weather was balmy, and I was hungry. Each lumpy-looking shadow made me afraid I might find her lying by the side of the road like some fallen animal. But I didn't find her. When I came to the end of her drive the house was lit as if for a holiday party. The button lights glowed to trace the curve of the the drive through the fragrant peach trees. The deep porch, its long planters thick
with ivy and juniper, was aglow. It seemed every room was lit: the writer's den, the guest suite, all the reception rooms, the master bedroom. Around back the garage doors were flung open as if the party might flood into its bays. The blue Caddy my mother liked to drive was parked close to the mudroom door, but the Mercedes, her husband's staid sedan, was missing. I didn't need to go inside the house to know she wasn't there.

My dearest heart
, my mother wrote to me.
You'll find it strange, I know, but we've flown away to try again. It's difficult for a writer, maybe for any true artist, to make a good life here. Old Sven was kinder to you than to his own son, as you will see from the enclosed. I love you more than anything, always have, always will
.

My birth date was penciled on the envelope. A bonded courier slid it beneath my door. The letter was typed and unsigned. The bank check was for a hundred-thousand dollars.

The house in the orchard was sold by old Sven's personal lawyer in a private auction. He phoned me about furniture and, of course, the manger, but I didn't want anything. This lawyer tells me from time to time, when I press, that they are both fine, they are in a quiet place now, they just need a little peace. He tells me that my mother sends her best love, as though she's right there waiting on another extension. Sometimes I think my mother is still looking for me. She just doesn't recognize me in my suit and leather shoes. Sometimes I scan the back pages of books. I pay close attention to long murder mysteries with
women as dispensable, secondary characters. I read the acknowledgments, especially of the authors with phony-sounding names, hoping he will have the courage someday to say how amazing she was, how beautiful, and how she made everything, absolutely everything, possible.