Ladies and Gentlemen (16 page)

“But none of them made the cut. I don’t think she even slept with anybody. One guy, Thomas, was part of the Heinz or Hellmann’s family—directly related to some condiment. Anyway, he took her out regularly and spent many late nights at the apartment, but always left scratching his head. I mean literally. He looked so puzzled that Maria and I started calling him Doubting Thomas during those last few weeks he held on. And suddenly we stopped seeing him altogether.

“By then we were graduating. Maria and I both got into schools in Oregon and Lisa took a job with a think tank in Washington, DC.”

“No husband?” Carla asked.

“Not even a boyfriend,” Nicholas said.

“Can I see the card?” Carla whispered to Maria, even though I was holding it. Her indirectness made me mildly furious, but I passed it to Maria, who handed it to her, both of us keen to see her reaction to the image—which was one of total indifference.

“Over the next few years,” Nicholas said, “we began to drift apart. We were busy. She and Maria didn’t speak often. She’d gotten into medical school but dropped out after a year and a half. She took a high-paying job in pharmaceutical sales, then quit. She moved to San Francisco and worked for a dot-com startup and was traveling coast to coast all the time. When she and Maria did manage to talk, Lisa mostly discussed the men in her life. If she was still on her quest, she’d made a real mess of it. She’d had an affair with the married CEO of her company, who was going to leave his wife, then he wasn’t, at which point Lisa fell into the arms of some journalist she was involved with back in New York. And I thought she’d arrived at the perfect solution to her own character, because I couldn’t imagine her tolerating anyone long enough to get to the point of marriage.

“But maybe a year later she calls to tell us that she’s in love. His name’s Uzi Levi, an Israeli investment banker. They’d been together for two months, and she goes on and on about how successful and handsome he is, that he’s everything she could ever hope for, et cetera. She described this whirlwind romance, how on their first date they flew down to Los Angeles for the evening, had dinner in Santa Monica, then drove to a house he’d rented in Malibu. How when she woke up the next morning the view from the bedroom was of nothing but the Pacific, the dolphins swimming, the whales breaching, all typical Lisa-extravagance. And when we asked her what he was
like
she said, ‘All questions will be answered at our wedding.’ Again just like Lisa to make such an announcement.

“Have you ever been to a wedding that feels like a horrible mistake? Where every accident seems like an omen? The reception’s
held outside, and it pours. The bride’s father’s toast is uncomfortably short. A child wails during the vows. We meet this Uzi Levi and he’s thin, balding, charmless—as blunt as a lot of Israelis can be. He had these three girlfriends he’d known since childhood, and they hovered around him the whole time like a bizarre chorus. During the rehearsal dinner, they gave a weird, inappropriate toast, this poem they’d written in couplets full of innuendo about his sexual past with them and his decision to marry outside the fold. And of course it was wrong of us to hold anything against him, because he was the victim of our
own
expectations for Lisa. Everybody’s a social Darwinist at a wedding: you want the perfect pairing for a friend. But we just didn’t get it. And to see them under the
chuppah
and watch their two families circle up for the
hora
—Lisa’s WASP contingent and Levi’s clan—it was like some bad comedy of intermarriage, the most insane mismatch. I know it sounds like I’m some closet anti-Semite, but that’s not it. They were just so completely different it was hard not to think about them in almost animal terms. Meanwhile, the spectacle of it all was off the charts, and god knows how much it cost. When Lisa and I danced she kept me stiffly at arm’s length, and when I asked what her plans were she said, ‘Go on my wonderful honeymoon, take care of my wonderful husband.’ Everything was so wonderful it was depressing. She smiled, thanked me after the song ended, and then she made her way around the room. Maria and I watched her talk with the other women, putting her hand to their pregnant stomachs and oohing and aahing and showing off her enormous ring—and if this all seems clichéd, it was, and
that’s
what stunned us, that she’d transformed herself so utterly. And when she wrote
us a thank-you note for our wedding present, she described the private island where they’d honeymooned in excruciating detail: how every couple had an open-air hut and put up a flag when they wanted a meal, how the owner of the resort bred yellow Labs that swam in the surf and ran free in honey-colored packs. I guessed she’d finally gotten what she wanted.

“After that, we heard from her only when we got the birth announcements. And holiday greetings like that card there—pictures of Lisa and her husband and their kids. Until, a few years later, we get another unexpected phone call.

“She’d latched onto the idea of buying a dog for her children, a German shepherd, and as soon as she said this I could envision her mind working through a series of associations back to us. We had two Shepherds and would be the ideal resource to consult about this important decision. She made a little small talk but then went right into it: ‘How are your dogs with kids they meet? Are they too protective with you? Did you cage train?’ It was painful talking with her. She’d done some Internet research and was full of the concerns that come with superficial knowledge. What about Schutzhund shepherds? Should she buy from a German breeder? It wasn’t surprising that she needed a best-in-show dog with impeccable bloodlines. We got a slew of calls from her over the next few weeks—questions about what to look for in terms of temperament, personality, conformity standards, training techniques—but never any sense that she realized we hadn’t spoken in years. Did we use treats or vocal praise? Would a male dog recognize a woman as alpha? Did we let our dogs on the furniture? Were they afraid of blacks? Until finally, after this endless
back-and-forth, she called to say she’d bought a puppy, as if we were dying to hear what she’d decided. Naturally, it was a bitch Shepherd she’d had shipped from Germany and paid an arm and a leg for, maybe four thousand dollars, and she was going to train it herself. The children
loved
the dog, and she was
so
enjoying their bonding with it and would send us a picture—and that was it. We didn’t hear from her again, though a few weeks later we did get the photo, and of course the puppy was gorgeous, and on the back Lisa had written her name: Eva.

“So a few months later, Maria and I had a wedding to go to in San Francisco. We hadn’t seen Lisa since she got married, so we called the week before our trip and made arrangements to stay an extra day afterward to visit with her and meet her kids. We were very curious. I remember how giddy we were as we drove up to Pacific Heights. You always have this preconceived idea of luxury that’s rarely fulfilled in reality, but not in this case. It was a white house perched on the highest point in the neighborhood, with incredible views of the Golden Gate and the bay. It was surrounded by a huge brick wall and had a roof deck like a crow’s nest—a widow’s walk—with a wrought-iron fence around it. Inside, everything was immaculate and the furniture ultramodern: Viking range, Sub-Zero fridge, shower with jets from five angles, the whole works. After the tour we met the children, who were with the nanny in the third-floor playroom. You could tell the daughter had all of Lisa’s intelligence, and the boy was unusually self-possessed, but they were both so
odd
-looking. I don’t want this to sound mean but Lisa’s perfect features had combined with her husband’s in such a twisted way that it made you realize how close beauty can be to its opposite.

“So finally the three of us sit down for coffee. Uzi, Lisa informs us, had been called away on business at the last minute and couldn’t join us, which was all we heard about him that afternoon. After we’d been talking for a while, Maria goes, ‘Wait, where’s the
dog
?’ And Lisa says, ‘Oh, we don’t let her play in the house.’ And Maria asks, ‘Well, is she out back? I didn’t see her.’ And Lisa says, ‘No. She’s downstairs.’ And Maria’s like, ‘What do you mean?’ And Lisa says, ‘During the day we keep her in the basement.’ So Maria looks at me, then at Lisa, and finally says, ‘Well, c’mon, let’s go see the girl.’

“I’ll never forget this until the day I die. Lisa crossed her arms and led us down a narrow wooden staircase to the basement. It was dry and very cool, perfectly clean and bare, as if the house had been vacated or nothing in their lives ever made it to storage. A dim light was shining through the dirty transom windows looking out into the front yard and the flower garden. And in the middle of the room, in the near dark, I could see the kennel—probably the same crate they’d flown her over in.

“A single exposed bulb hung from the ceiling above it, and the moment Lisa flipped the switch I could see the light reflected in the dog’s eyes through the bars. It was so small there was barely enough room for her to move. Utterly rigid, she looked at us with her ears pricked up, waiting for Lisa to come to the gate. There was so much love in her eyes, so much patience, as Lisa drew closer, her arms still crossed, and bent down to peer inside. We all stood quietly, and the dog, completely alert, frozen, just waiting, didn’t make a sound.

“But
we
waited too. Maria and I were speechless, horrified, waiting like the dog for Lisa to do something, until finally she
said, ‘There she is.’ She gestured toward the animal with her head. ‘That’s Eva.’ She waved at her halfheartedly, her other arm still pressed across her chest. ‘Hello, Eva,’ she said. This sent a pulse of movement through the cage, which scratched against the floor, jumped slightly. Then Maria looked at Lisa and said, ‘Let her out.
Now.
’

“The moment Lisa opened the gate you’d have thought the dog was shot from a gun. She ran out and past us up those creaky stairs. Her back legs were asleep, so she lost her footing and tripped as she dragged herself up, her hindquarters splayed out behind her. And then, at the top of the landing, she
waited
for us in the kitchen.

“The dog was completely out of control. She was so submissive that as soon as I got upstairs and made eye contact with her she pissed all over the floor. She was so desperate for company that she mouthed like a pup, jumping and pawing at us all, barking and running wild in tight circles as if she were chasing her tail, and then she squatted to shit. Meanwhile Lisa was leaning against the door, calmly watching the whole scene as Maria and I tried to settle Eva down. Lisa just stood there, slowly shaking her head. ‘You see? This is why we can’t let her in the house. She
pees
everywhere. She jumps. She knocks things over. She S-H-I-Ts on the floor. It’s just terrible.’ And I said to her, ‘My God, Lisa, how can you treat an animal like this?’ The dog had her mouth on my wrist, pulling at me. And Lisa told me, ‘Honestly, Nicholas, I was very patient with her, but it didn’t help a bit.’

“Maria and I couldn’t stay after that. We looked at each other, and without saying a word we had this silent exchange: Do we take the dog with us? No, we can’t. But we will
never
speak with this person again.

“So we left. We made these embarrassed, hurried good-byes, then drove down toward the bay. We didn’t say anything for several minutes. I think we were both in shock. And then Maria broke down, sobbing her heart out. You remember how you cried?” Nicholas said.

But she wasn’t looking at him, just sitting there, looking at the image on the television screen, swirling her wine.

“Anyway,” Nicholas said, “we haven’t spoken to Lisa since. She still sends us Christmas cards, though I don’t think she gives us a thought. I mean, I’m sure it never occurs to her that we’re people she no longer knows. We’re just another thing on her list of a million things to do.”

It was snowing harder now than before. I could feel the heat escaping through the front door, could see the accumulation rising on the sill and honeycombing the panes, streaming down through the streetlight like so much dust.

“So that’s the story,” Nicholas said.

Carla and I cleared the rest of the dishes. We told Maria to stay in her chair and rest, and asked Nicholas not to move, though from the living room he said we should just leave the whole mess by the sink; he’d take care of it in the morning. Maria had leaned her head back against her chair, and within minutes she was asleep. We didn’t even consider waking her up to say good-bye.

Carla and I walked home. It was beautiful outside, with no cars on the road and no traffic noise at all, and for a long time we just absorbed this quiet world falling around us. The tension I’d felt between us had dissipated in the cold, which forced us to lock arms
as we slipped and slid together. Our laughter at each surprising misstep sounded like the only laughter on earth, and we spoke only of the night and the snow until we got close to home. We stopped to look at our house blanketed in powder, as if to make sure we’d taken its true measure. And then Carla said she loved me, that she wanted me to finish my book, that she knew I could. She wanted us to have a child soon. She hated Nicholas, I
had
to know she did, and she didn’t want her life to be like Maria’s. I assured her that would never happen. I gave her my word, and to make sure she believed me I enumerated all of Nicholas’s failures. I rehashed all the unpleasant things he didn’t know we knew about him, like I was going down a checklist of faults I didn’t have. I talked for a long time, longer than I should have. I kept talking even after my eyes no longer held hers, Carla staring instead at her feet. And in that moment of weakness, I hoped that she might look on me afterward and feel lucky.

Regarding my brother, Kevin, my father would always say, “You have to try to be available to him.” I thought he meant that there would inevitably come a time—a very bad time—when Kevin would need my help. Then, my father hoped, I’d have a chance to finally reach him, that he’d take my good advice, whatever it might be, and begin to turn his life around.