Happy Any Day Now (17 page)

I called the Berenson at five to tell them to have Joan Farley, our assistant principal cello, sub for me that night, then dozed fitfully until intermission, when Geoff phoned.

“What’s going on? You looked fine this morning. Pissed off, but healthy.”

“I think it’s some kind of flu,” I said. I took a deep breath and made my chest ache trying to be nice. I told myself that in spite of my snitty performance in the lobby, he’d called to check up on me, so he deserved a little nice. “How did your excursion go? Catch anything?”

“We did. Irwin caught a mess of croakers. He seems to be a natural on the water. Then he ate the first steamed crabs of his life and drank two beers. He was quite the mellow fellow when I delivered him back to Grace. Actually, we had a fine time. He’s not bad company, the old bloke. Has a sense of humor. A bit Henny Youngman, but funny.”

“Funny.”

“After the first beer. After the second he got serious and told me how he’d been a bastard to you and your mother and how much he regretted it. His eyes filled.”

“Yeah, cheap beer, cheap talk.” Oh, please. I really didn’t want to hear any more about how funny and sensitive Irwin Raphael was. I delivered my punch line: “I’m going to say good-bye now, Geoff. I’m feeling really lousy. Maybe this is that forty-eight-hour bug that’s going around. If so, I’m not sure I’ll be up for our session Monday.”

“Understood. Well, if you wake all bright and sunshiny, I can do last minute. Otherwise, if you like, I can pick up some Attman’s chicken soup and drop it off.”

“Thanks. I have some of my mom’s in the freezer.” A white lie.

“Ah. See you at rehearsal on Tuesday, then.”

Well, no. Since I was taking the following weekend off for my trip to Maine, I wasn’t going to be rehearsing at all that week.

“Maine,” Geoff said, after I’d explained. “What’s in Maine?”

Had I ever told him about Charlie’s place up there? I couldn’t remember.

“Beautiful scenery and not my father,” I answered, the second half-truth tripping off my coated tongue.

“Sounds like just what the doctor ordered,” Geoff said, signing off.

After hanging up, he phoned Marti to have her check in on me. Within ten minutes, she was sitting at the edge of my bed spoon-feeding me ice chips. My headache had dulled down, but I was still fighting nausea.

“He wanted to drop off chicken soup for you. Well, isn’t
he
gooder than grits,” she said.

“Oh, right, all the men in my life are just paragons of virtue.”

“What you told me about your dad before—” Marti held up a hand. “And honestly, babygirl, I’m about fed up to my gullet with the erstwhile, so-called, purported, alleged father bit. The man sired you. You are genetically linked to him, like it or not. And now with Gracie’s herring confession, you have to deal with the possibility that Irwin wasn’t the monster you spent your life believing. Okay, he abandoned you and your mom and took off for warmer, richer climes. Pretty shitty. But . . . he made payments, he sent presents, he tried to contact you.”

I was seized by a furious spasm of chills.

“That really throws you, doesn’t it? Of course it does.”

I glared at her as she tucked the quilt under my chin.

“It shakes your entire belief system down to its roots. Maybe that’s why you’re shivering. An old dead tree is about to fall. About time, too. All I can say is
tim-berrrrr!!!
”

I
began to have second thoughts about the Maine trip about twenty minutes into the flight. The idea had been to escape from the gaggle of demons chasing me. Hanging out with Charlie was supposed to be a bonus, but when I was almost there, the thought of spending three days on an island with a man I hardly knew anymore . . . Well, the plane hit a rough patch over Philadelphia, but that wasn’t what made my stomach lurch.

It didn’t help that, succumbing to curiosity, I’d picked up Eloise Flint’s memoir at the airport bookstore and was thumbing through it. What a crock! The fake had shifted her rough Brooklyn childhood to tonier Manhattan. Her father had been upgraded from a guy in the subway token booth to a railroad executive. No mention of the Charlie interlude, of course, and her years at the conservatory read like a novel, the blossoming of a musical genius.

I flipped to her account of the Balakirev competition, when we’d met up again after a five-year hiatus. I was twenty-seven years old, in top form, and itching for retribution. Eloise was already considered the up-and-coming successor to Jacqueline du Pré, but my sense was I could beat her, that whatever I lacked in talent I’d more than compensate for with a burning desire to even the score.

We both got through the first two rounds. I was psyched to take the last one, really show her up and also show Charlie, whom I fantasized would read the details of my triumph in the
New York Times
. I was cruising along until ten minutes before my slot onstage, when I turned into one of the Moscow Conservatory’s labyrinthine corridors and nearly crashed into Eloise. All I wanted to do was free myself from her tentacles, but as I pulled away she tightened her grip on my arm and said in the accent that was no longer British but some cloudy international concoction, “I just want to wish you good luck, Judith.” We both knew that wishing someone good luck in our profession meant bad luck. I shook her off, but I couldn’t shake off the curse.

I blew the final round. Little glitches in the Hindemith Sonata
and a loss of control in Lutoslawski’s Sacher Variations added up. Eloise took the grand prix and went on to a blazingly successful solo career while I decided, after some thought, that my calling was playing tutti cello in a world-class orchestra.

Don’t get me wrong: I loved my work, loved the embracing Philharmonic family and the anchor of a regular paycheck. But the idea that the bitch had
twice
bested me big-time—that rankled.

In her book, she awarded the Balakirev competition a single self-serving paragraph. In retrospect, it had been no big deal to her. To me, the event had been life-shifting, the first time my nerves had derailed my ambition.

When the flight attendant came around collecting trash, I tossed the book in with my empty Coke can and half-eaten cheese crackers.

At the airport, Charlie hardly seemed in the mood for any kind of face-to-face conversation. He gave me a peck on the cheek as he mumbled into his Bluetooth headset. On the drive to Rockland, he took two or three more calls.

And then a magical transformation—he set foot on the deck of the ferry taking us across Penobscot Bay and his spirits lifted. He clicked off the BlackBerry, pocketed the headset, and turned garrulous. “Ahh—” He inhaled deeply. “Freedom.” He wound an arm around my shoulder. “When I was a boy, this trip was like falling down the rabbit hole. You left the mainland, the real world, and twenty minutes later you were on Cove Haven, wonderland. No set bedtime. On or in the water all day.” A gust of spray spewed up from the bay to whack us hard. Charlie laughed and tightened his grip. “It’s hard to explain, but you know what I mean.”

“In theory,” I said. We didn’t have air-conditioning in any of the Brooklyn apartments until I was maybe twelve and Uncle Arnold installed a window unit in the flat on Moore Street. Summer was always a killer.

“Here we are. The Landing,” announced the lord of the manor ten minutes later. His eyes sparkled taking in the view under a cloudless sky.

The Pruitts’ Maine estate sprawled on the longest point of Cove Haven. The Landing, as Charlie’s great-great-grandmother Eliza Pruitt had named the expansive New England fieldstone and shingle house on the property’s rugged rim, had been built by her husband, Harrison, to afford his young family escape from a predicted epidemic of typhoid fever in the fetid New York summer of 1904. With bacterial fevers roaming the cities, an island off the coast of Maine seemed like the end of the world to Eliza, and that’s exactly where she wanted her brood to be.

“She was a pip, Eliza was,” Charlie declared. “Strong woman. My mother claimed to have met up with her ghost in the attic. Maybe she hung around to haunt us, because Kiki dumped the original furniture in 1958. Come on.” He took my hand as we rounded the boathouse to the Landing’s front entrance bracketed by pine trees. “I’ll show you around inside.”

I’d been in larger homes because I’d been hired to play in them. And God knows I’d wandered through better-appointed ones. The living room was furnished in scratched-up whitewashed oak and peeling rattan. Two sofas and a brace of chairs were draped in slipcovers of gray ticking that was also a little ratty, and the few upholstered pieces had deteriorated way beyond shabby chic and into threadbare. Aunt Phyllis would have taken one look and called in her decorator to do a complete makeover, in seven shades of blue no doubt, the desert tribe’s favorite color. On the other hand, the Landing’s atmosphere was pure summer house, with slatted louvers and ceiling fans, and I felt its pull. Charlie had called in one of the year-round people to come by that morning, clean the place, and open all the windows. The breeze that blew in from the bay was tangy sweet and wistful. Or maybe the wistful part was me.

“Aside from the overhaul of the kitchen, which we did a few years ago, the house is pretty much Kiki,” Charlie told me. Upstairs, she’d gone wild with chintz. Only the master bedroom had been spared the flower explosion. That room was a gorgeous, spacious retreat in lavender and purple against white.

“Betsy finally prevailed upon me to let her do her thing in here.”

The ex-wife. “She had lovely taste.” I fingered a cloudy Lalique sculpture.

“Expensive taste. We spent a fortune on this room.”

“But you and Betsy ended not because she had expensive taste . . .” I paused so he could fill in the blank. Sure, I applied a bit of chutzpah here, but I felt I had a right. He’d been mine before he’d been hers. And I was going after some insight that might be useful later.

He sighed. “We grew in different directions. That was the party line anyway, and she was the shrink, the PhD. That she also stepped out on me with a thirty-five-year-old ski instructor in Aspen she claimed was irrelevant because the root causes lay with me, apparently.” He sounded bitter. I left well enough alone. We had an entire weekend ahead.

The remainder of the afternoon was spent on the balcony off the bedroom—I engrossed in a musty Perry Mason I’d dug out of the bookshelf in the guest room, Charlie doing legal work on his laptop. He was taking calls again. Occasionally, he reached over to squeeze my hand.

“Time for a drink,” he announced, around four.

“Just water for me,” I said.

When he came back with a glass of water for me and a tumbler of Glenfiddich for himself, I put down my mystery. It seemed an appropriate moment to solve another, more private one. I gave him a few minutes to stare at the sea and make a dent in his scotch. Then I said, “After we split back in Cambridge, you started dating Eloise Flint.”

He twirled a finger lazily in the liquid, apparently unalarmed. “Eloise Flint. So long ago.”

“I was even longer ago. So you and I had just broken up and suddenly you were a hot item with Eloise. She and I were friends. But you knew that.”

“You were dormmates, not friends. Acquaintances. That’s what she told me.” He put down his scotch and removed his sunglasses to squint at me. “I don’t ever remember your mentioning Eloise when you and I were together.”

Probably true. Certainly true after I’d moved out of the dorm and into his place on Wendell Street.

“So tacky,” I said. “Sleeping with someone who lived across the hall from the woman you’d just ditched.”

“Come on, Ju-ju. I was a jerk, but not so much that I would have dated your close friend. But you’re right in a way. I did see a connection between you two. She was also brainy and good looking, except for the legs. A New Yorker. A cellist. At first I thought, Okay, a reasonable facsimile of Judith.”

I snorted.

“No, really. When you and I split, I went into a deep funk, angry with myself for buckling to my family, and still in love with you. And then Eloise came on to me, all engines firing. She said just the right flattering things at a time when I was really vulnerable. Don’t get me wrong. I didn’t push her away. I figured, Well, I’ve got the Protestant version of you, only this time with the required papers. Her father was a railroad executive—did you know that? And her mother was descended from some obscure Irish baronet.” More Eloise bullshit. “Though Kiki couldn’t find him in
Burke’s Peerage
.”

“You took Eloise Flint home to Mommy?”

“Never. But I mentioned the noble lineage in passing. So she got the Kiki Pruitt seal of approval.” He slugged the last half inch of scotch, eyes on me. “Of course, it didn’t work. Couldn’t have. It was all built on an impossible fantasy. On wanting the woman I couldn’t have.”

“Wouldn’t,” I corrected. “So who ended it?” Somehow that still seemed important.

“I did. And she was very ticked off indeed. I received a venomous letter. Quite a long letter for such a short affair. Also I got a rash of hang-up calls. Not a pleasant ending.”

“Most aren’t.”

“Right.” He inspected me first for damage and, not finding any obvious signs of it, checked his watch. “Well . . .” I could almost hear the relief in the released breath. “We have a little time yet before we have to dress for the club. I think I’ll refresh my drink. You sure I can’t interest you in a very fine cabernet?”

No, I wanted to assess his tale of Eloise with a clear head. Also—here I took up my glass of ice water—it might be prudent to keep my wits about me since I’d be facing a jury definitely not of my peers at the club later.

Smart decision all around.

• • •

As the sun began to fade, I came down with a nasty case of the jitters and there wasn’t a cello in sight. Six of Charlie’s friends had flown in from Boston on a private plane piloted by one of their own just to meet me. Talk about pressure.

I’d known about the Cove Haven crowd as far back as Cambridge. They’d romped together through golden childhood summers on the island and as adults returned every season to the family compounds. They were a loyal, protective, insular band, and I was, as I’d always been, the quintessential outsider. So of course I dreaded this dinner.

However, there was one member of the crowd I was dying to meet. Ginny Forbes Carlin was Charlie’s first girlfriend. At seventeen she’d enthusiastically awarded him her virginity behind the boathouse at Maweshenook Harbor. She’d been a beauty back then, patrician, a direct descendant of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and she had a talent for giving incredible head, a combo that seemed to me, when I first heard about it back in Cambridge, the most blatantly unfair distribution of DNA since God gifted Michelangelo. She was a drunk now, Charlie told me, which sounded like the universe was just trying to balance out the goodies.

Ginny with a snootful I figured I could take. The rest of them? Well, I knew I was facing one tough audience and that I had a couple of big-time acts to follow: Betsy the gorgeous PhD wife, Carolyn the TV reporter girlfriend. Oy,
aigoo
, I’d never pass muster.

“You’re kidding, Ju-ju,” he reassured me after he’d spotted my left eyelid twitching as we mounted the steps to the Cove Haven Yacht Club and I confessed how intimidated I was. “You’re an accomplished, charming woman. You’re going to knock their socks off.”

Possibly, had there been any socks to knock off. It was mid-May and the men were all in loafers or docksiders sans socks, the finishing touch to the uniform of khakis and blazers. The women looked like a stable of long-necked, long-maned, long-legged racehorses. They wore slacks with twee patterns like anchors and cherries, topped with blouses and cardigans to hide the kidnapping of their waists around menopause. I wished I had the headband concession.

I elicited a few
Isn’t she the exotic flower?
looks. But after the first few minutes, I faded into the wood paneling, sipped my gin and tonic—no chocotinis or mojitos here; time stopped at the bar around 1937—and listened, smiling blandly, while they caught up.

Twenty minutes and two rounds in, we drifted out to the deck and sorted ourselves by gender. Well oiled with yet another round of drinks—thanks but no, I demurred—the talk at the women’s table turned to what interested the wives almost as much as creeping socialism: their kids and grandkids.

This effectively shut me out for a while, the way the subject of labor and childbirth had exiled me from female conversations in my twenties and thirties.