Love and Other Impossible Pursuits (24 page)

Carolyn has not, I notice, mentioned ice cream. Clearly there are some secrets William is still happy to keep.

Carolyn leans her face so close to mine that one of her long, fine, brown hairs, lifted by the static electricity of the forced heat of the room and her rage, hovers between us and attaches itself lightly to my lip. “Stay away from my son,” she says, a mist of saliva spraying my face with every sibilant
S
.

“Carolyn,” Sonia says, very softly. “Dr. Soule. Carolyn.” She tugs gently on Carolyn's arm, pulling her away from me. “Not in front of the boy.” She points to William who is standing, his hand still clasped by his mother's, but his whole body leaning away, like a water-skier pulling back on the bar. His face is turned to the floor, almost parallel to it, and as we stare at him a tear splashes down, then another. He is crying silently, motionlessly, his body not wracked by sobs, not trembling with weeping, just taut like wire strung against the restraining hand of his mother, tears dripping onto the dirty stone slabs of the lobby floor.

Sonia slips an arm around her employer, easing her away from me. Then she loosens Carolyn's grip on William's hand and substitutes her own. Strangely, Carolyn allows herself to be led, succumbing to the temperate authority of this young woman. She backs off and then whirls away, storming across the lobby and out the front door, leaving Sonia, William, and me standing in a stunned little clot in the middle of the room.

“Thank you,” I say.

Sonia nods, picks up the booster seat that Carolyn has left lying on the floor, and leads William out the door. I follow them, and watch as they dodge around the cement planters to where Carolyn is waiting impatiently, one hand on her hip. I stay near the exit, as far from them as I can be, as Carolyn waves down a cab with a snap of her fingers. She has more luck than I do, even with the dreaded booster seat. She opens the door and holds it for Sonia, who gets in and installs the seat. William climbs in and Sonia buckles him, testing the straps to make sure they are tight. Carolyn leans inside and says something to the driver. Then she slams the door and lifts her arm to hail a second cab.

Chapter 24
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         

W
hen
the driver of my taxi asks me where I am going, I hesitate, unable to bear the idea of going back to our apartment where I will have nothing to do but wait for Jack to come home so I can confess what has happened. Instead I say, “Le Pain Quotidien, on Madison and Eighty-fifth.”

I sit once again at the community table, and while there are no babies, there is a little boy, a few years younger than William. He is eating a chocolate cupcake and I wonder if it is dairy free. I order my latte, and am about to order a strawberry cupcake with which to soothe the ache knotting my stomach from my horrible encounter with William's mother, when instead I ask for a vanilla cupcake with chocolate frosting, dairy free like the one William gets.

“Did you want soy milk in that latte?” the waitress asks.

“No,” I say.

She looks confused for a moment and then shrugs, as if she has already spent too much time puzzling the intricate eating disorders of neurotic East Side matrons and has vowed not to squander any more.

When the cupcake comes I lick the frosting and then take a bite of the cake. It's surprisingly tasty, light and fluffy, with little of the oily texture I would have expected from butter-free pastry. Still, William is right, it isn't as good as the strawberry cupcake. I lick the frosting thoughtfully, swirling my tongue through the chocolate.

I would not have expected William to cry like that. He is too young to be embarrassed by a scene, and it must have been, after all, what he wanted. He had all but insisted that Carolyn come and rescue him from me. And yet, when she bore down with her righteous and bilious indignation, he had cried.

I wave to the waitress.

“Is the pastry chef here?” I ask.

“There is no pastry chef,” she says. “We have everything made at a production facility in Long Island City.”

“What about the owner?”

“It's a chain. Why, is there something wrong?”

“No, no. Nothing. Everything's great. It's just . . . I sort of have a suggestion.”

She sighs. “I'll get the manager,” she says.

When he comes the manager is extraordinarily polite, but firm, as if he has become accustomed, by virtue of the restaurant's address, to dealing with a certain kind of patron, one who views complaint as not merely a right but an obligation, one who does not hesitate to write scathing letters to corporate directors and throw shrill and costly tantrums in crowded restaurants.

“What can I do for you, madam? Is there some problem I can help you with?” he says in an accent of undefined European origin.

“No, not at all. There's no problem at all. It's just. My stepson is allergic to dairy. Sort of. Anyway, he thinks he is, and his mother never lets him eat dairy. He loves the dairy-free cupcakes here. But you only make them with chocolate and vanilla frosting. I was wondering if you might consider adding pink frosting to the menu.”

“Ah,” he says.

“Because he had some of my pink cupcake, and he loved it.”

“He is allergic to dairy but he ate the regular cupcake?” The manager is perturbed, as if he can already imagine the cupcake litigation; he can see in his mind's eye the depositions, the discovery requests demanding release of secret recipes, the expert witnesses—scientists with multiple degrees in lactose intolerance and the digestion of dairy enzymes.

“He's not really allergic. He just thinks he is.”

“But you want him to have dairy-free cupcakes nonetheless?”

Well, no, I don't want to indulge this insanity, but his mother insists on it. “Yes.”

“Ah.”

“So I just thought you might consider making dairy-free strawberry cupcakes.”

“I will present your suggestion to Claudio, the head of our production facility.”

“Thank you. Thank you so much.”

“Not at all, madam. Please, enjoy your cupcake. You are eating now the dairy free, I see.”

“Yes. Just to try it.”

“Ah.”

“To see if it's as good. As the regular cupcake.”

“And is it?”

“No.”

“Ah.”

“It's very good. Really. Delicious. It's just, you know. Not
as
good.”

The manager leaves me to finish my cupcake and think how happy William will be if Claudio takes my suggestion seriously and adds pink to his dairy-free repertoire. Perhaps William will be so pleased that he will forget what happened in the lobby of his school. He will forget how his mother and I made him feel. He will be overcome by the bliss of a strawberry cupcake and he will forget the rage in his mother's face when she looked at me. I wish there was a cupcake that delicious.

What will it take for me to forget, I wonder?

         

W
here's William?”

These are the first words out of Jack's mouth, before he even hangs his coat up in the hall closet, while his umbrella is still dripping water down the sides of the tall, galvanized bucket in the hallway outside our front door.

“At his mother's.”

Standing in the front hall, I explain what happened, and I can see Jack begin to shrink. His long black raincoat loosens, hangs lower toward the floor, the shoulders droop, the cuffs hide his hand. He is contracting and shriveling before my eyes. Telescoping into his despair. He shucks his coat and it puddles onto the floor. He drops his briefcase on top of it. He walks by me, trailing raindrops from the wet cuffs of his pants. I follow him down the long hall into our bedroom.

“It will be all right,” I say hopefully. I am hovering close to him, but not touching. I am afraid to touch him. It is as if we are poles of like magnets and between us is a palpable field of energy, pushing us apart. Or, rather, pushing me away from him. I sit down on the bed. My feet are flat on the floor, my back is straight, my knees are pressed primly together. I look like a schoolgirl awaiting a scolding.

Jack says, “Oh
shit
.” He looks at his watch, and then at the clock on the nightstand as if verifying that it really is 6:17. “Shit.”

I say, “Do you think we should go get him? I mean, you. You should go get him. Should you go get him?”

“I don't know.”

I must figure out a way to change the ringer on our telephone. Something less malevolent. Something that doesn't scream “Carolyn” quite so loudly.

“Shit,” Jack says. His “hello” is so wary it is nearly comical. So is his relief. “It's your mom,” he says, passing me the phone after an obligatory moment of stilted conversation.

“Hi,” I say. I have not spoken to my mother since I abandoned her on that suburban main street, and I gear myself up to apologize.

“What's wrong?” she says.

“Nothing. Nothing's wrong. Wait, do you mean now? Or like, because of the other night?”

She clucks her tongue. “Forget about the other night. The other night doesn't matter. I just wanted to make sure we're still on for that memorial walk.”

“Yes. I mean, I think so.” I cover the mouthpiece with my hand. “She wants to make sure we're still going to the Walk to Remember.”

Jack is standing in the middle of the bedroom, holding the lapels of his suit jacket as if trying to decide whether to take it off. “Why?”

“She wants to come.”

“Oh. I guess so. I mean, sure.”

“Mom?” I say. “Meet us at four at Strawberry Fields.”

“Let me write that down,” she says, and just then the call waiting beeps.

“Hold on a second,” I say and press the flash button. Now it is, of course, Carolyn.

“I'd like to speak to Jack, please.”

“Hello, Carolyn.” I am impressed with how cool my voice is, given the knot in my stomach. It must be the lawyer in me. I am not my father's daughter for nothing. “One moment,” I say. I click back over to my mother. “It's Carolyn.”

“Do you have to go?” my mother says.

“Yup. I'll see you at the thing, okay?”

“Yes. Um, honey?”

“I really have to go.”

“Okay. I love you, sweetheart.”

“I love you, too, Mom.”

I hand over the phone. Poor Jack. I toss his son into the Harlem Meer and get into a fight with his ex-wife, but it is he who must stand in his stocking feet with her voice boring a hole in his eardrum. I am impressed with the job he does defending me, although it is true that I've given him all the ammunition; he simply uses the phrases I coined when defending myself against
his
opprobrium.

“It was an accident.”

“They tripped and fell.”

“It's only a little water and mud.”

I feel especially gratified when he tells her that she is overreacting. Jack improves on me significantly by telling Carolyn that he fears she has become hydrophobic. That's a very good word. I wait for him to suggest aversion therapy or flooding—I'm ready to volunteer to dump the woman into the Meer myself—but he is not so sarcastic as that. Alas, by the end of the conversation, he is apologizing. And then he says, “Well, thank you. Thank you for that. I do appreciate it.”

“Thank you?” I say, horrified. “For what? Thank you for what?”

He waves his hand, silencing me. A moment later he hangs up the phone.

“What the hell were you
thanking
her for?”

“She said she hadn't intended to say anything about the incident. She was apparently just going to let it go, but when William got so upset, she didn't feel like she had a choice.”

“The
incident
.” I laugh bitterly. “You thanked her for changing her mind and yelling at you after all?”

“I thanked her for being willing to let it go. I'm just
managing
her, Emilia. Don't you see that? Don't you understand that that's what I have to do? I have to
manage
her. Jesus, you'd think you of all people would understand that.”

“Why? Because you have to manage me, too?”

“I didn't say that.”

“But that's what you meant.”

“Can we just stop this, Emilia?” He yanks off his jacket and throws it on the little armchair. His tie quickly follows. He unbuttons the top button of his shirt and sits down heavily on the bed next to me. He rubs his hands roughly across his face. “I'm just so tired of all this.”

I grab his hand and hold it in both of mine. “I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I can't believe I even said that. This whole thing is totally my fault.” I kiss his palm. “I'm sorry Jack.”

“I know.”

I pull his palm to my cheek and rest my face on it. It's smooth against my skin. “Do you think William can still come with us to the walk?” I say.

“What?”

“You know, the Walk to Remember. What my mom was just calling about. It's next Sunday afternoon. The 29th. Leap day. Or whatever you call it. The last day of February.”

Jack lets his hand stay against my face but he does not cup my cheek like I want him to. “Do you still
want
him to come?” he says.

“I
need
him to come.” And I do. I need all of us to be there together, even William,
especially
William, so that I can show him that I am trying to put things back together, to become the kind of stepmother who doesn't drop you into icy water. The kind whom you can trust to change your soiled pants. If William joins us on the walk through the park, I can begin the reconstruction of my life and our family.

I tell this to Jack and though he seems unconvinced, he says, “He'll be there.”

“But Carolyn said I couldn't take him to the park anymore.”

“It's not Carolyn's decision.”