Love Saves the Day (25 page)

Laura had tried to quell the beginnings of panic as she listened to him talk. “It’s a terrible thing,” she’d said. “But this is just what
happens
in this city, Josh. There’s not even any point in fighting it. One way or another, the developers always win.”

“And the music studio!” Josh exclaimed, as if she hadn’t spoken. “Do you know how many great artists rehearsed and recorded there? Evil Sugar, Dizzy Gillespie, Tom Waits, the Ramones, Richard Hell. And the space is still in use! This isn’t just gentrification, this is decapitalization of the arts in New York.” He was pacing the room in his excitement. “Clarence Clemons, Nile Rodgers, Dylan,
all
the sessions guys who backed up the big-name performers on their albums and played in clubs all over town. The list is endless!”

It was an uncanny thing, Laura thought, to hear the exact same words her dead mother might have used coming from her husband’s mouth.

“But, Josh,” she’d tried again. “This is a lost cause. Surely, you can see that. You and I,
we
are
not
a lost cause.
We
need someplace to live, too, and we can’t live here forever on my salary alone. The last of your severance is coming up in two months.”

“Laura,” Josh had replied, and his frustration was evident in the way he said her name. “I’ve worn my fingers down to nubs
making phone calls and sending out résumés. And at this point, nobody’s making any major hiring decisions until after Labor Day, anyway. At least this way I could possibly make some new contacts, or maybe it’ll lead to something else.” Josh had paused to give Prudence, who’d taken up diligent residence in front of the couch, a dollop of tuna salad from his half-eaten sandwich. “It beats the hell out of sitting around here doing nothing.”

“Maybe you could try writing again,” Laura had suggested. “Isn’t that what you did when you first moved to New York? You know people at so many different magazines …”

“Oh please, Laura. I couldn’t make it as a writer back when people were actually hiring writers. It won’t happen for me now when everybody’s scaling back.” He’d taken her hand and said, “Look, I don’t want you to think I’m trying to put the whole burden on you. I
swear
I’m going to find something else. And I know it’ll be tight, but we can manage on your salary and what’s left of our savings until then. What’s that expression?
Safe as houses
? Isn’t your job at the firm safe as houses?”

“Yeah,” Laura said. “Safe as houses.”

White-shoe firms like Laura’s had traditionally never engaged in major layoffs the way other companies did. In part this was a point of pride—of maintaining public confidence and public appearances—and in part it was a practical matter. Large cases were apt to spring up on short notice, and then you’d want partners and associates whose skills you knew you could rely on. Sometimes a firm would grow so large and unwieldy that it would collapse under its own weight, sucking everyone into its vortex like a black hole. Typically, though, jobs like Laura’s—even during recessions and downturns—had been safe.

But now uneasy whispers and rumors were afloat, tales of large corporate firms like Laura’s that were actually laying associates off. Laura wasn’t sure precisely when the early-morning phone calls from recruiters had stopped coming in; she only knew that one morning, when the phones were unusually quiet, she’d realized
with a start that it had been some time since anybody had called to “feel her out” about her willingness to move elsewhere. At Neuman Daines, the new class of first-year associates, who in the past had always started their employment the September following their law school graduations, had seen their start dates deferred until the following spring. A handful of associates who fell onto the lower end of the billable-hours-per-month scale had been told, in the most civilized way possible, that it would be best for all concerned if they were employed elsewhere within, say, the next two months. Perry had never exactly been a jovial person, but Laura had detected an undercurrent of strain lately in their interactions. She didn’t know whether it had to with her personally, or with the firm’s larger financial outlook, but whatever its source, it was disturbing.

Nothing had been the same since Josh’s company had gone through its own round of layoffs. As soon as Laura had seen the severance agreement in Josh’s hand, she’d known what had happened. A “Chinese wall” had been erected around her at the firm. She had been deliberately excluded from anything related to Josh’s company, the paperwork the firm was preparing for it, and everything else associated with it. It was foolish, Laura knew, to take such a thing personally. Had she gone to Perry and confronted him with it, if she’d said something like,
How could you not tell me?
she knew exactly what Perry’s response would be.
You knew what you were getting into when you started dating a client
, he would say.
You knew there might be complications
. Probably he would have thrown in some pithy quote from the Talmud about choices and consequences for good measure. And of course he would be right. The only thing to be gained by bringing it up would be to appear naïve and overly emotional. Just another woman in business who couldn’t separate the personal from the professional.

Still, the thing hurt. Laura would look at her co-workers, particularly the other fifth-years, and wonder who had known what and when. How long before Laura had they known that her home life was about to turn upside down? What had they said about her when her name was mentioned? Growing up, Laura had always
had a keen sense of being different—tall and white in an elementary school where few children were either. She had spent most of her adult life trying to fit in, and since marrying Josh she’d nearly convinced herself that this was something she no longer gave much thought to. Yet, as it turned out, it had taken very little for that feeling to come rushing back, to make her wonder if every hushed conversation that ended abruptly when she entered a room had been about her, the oddity, the one who wasn’t quite the same as the others, the associate foolish enough to marry a client—something no other Neuman Daines associate had done in the entire hundred-year history of the firm.

Laura remembered a little joke of her mother’s, something like,
You’re not paranoid if they really are all against you
. Laura didn’t want to be paranoid, but she couldn’t help noticing that where she’d typically racked up anywhere from 200 to 240 billable hours a month, in the past two months she’d barely broken 160. While technically this wouldn’t affect her salary, her bonuses this year would undoubtedly be smaller than in previous years—and bonuses accounted for nearly half of what she earned.

It wasn’t that Laura had slacked off or was unwilling to take on the work. Work wasn’t being sent her way. It could be that there wasn’t as much work to go around as there had been in flusher times. She suspected that some of the other associates might be “hoarding” work, although it was nothing she could set out to discover and prove without making herself appear even more paranoid than she already felt. Maybe Perry wasn’t looking out for her the way he used to. Maybe Perry was somebody else’s rabbi these days, although she couldn’t be
so
far out of the loop as to be unaware of something like that, if it had truly occurred.

Unless, she would think grimly, she was.

Laura had fallen into the habit of staying up late thinking about these things, telling Josh she was staying up to go over work papers the way she always had, but actually turning everything over in her
mind. Frequently she found herself encouraging Prudence to join her for company, placing a morsel of tuna or cheese, or some other much-loved treat, on the couch until Prudence was lured into settling down next to her. Once the cat had fallen asleep, Laura would gently comb the tips of her fingernails through the fur of Prudence’s back, which was what had first suggested the cat brush she’d spontaneously stopped for on the way home from work today. Only a few months ago (had it really only been a few months?), Sarah must have stroked Prudence in much the same way Laura did now. Laura would look at her long fingers—fingers that, under different circumstances, might have moved with ease across a turntable or a musical instrument or a typewriter—and think,
I have my mother’s hands
.

As a child, on hot July days like this one, with school out and her mother busy at the store, Laura had spent a great deal of time in one of the ladder-backed chairs in the Mandelbaums’ kitchen with Honey in her lap. Mrs. Mandelbaum would chop a frozen banana into a bowl, sprinkle a teaspoon of sugar over it, then mix it with sour cream taken from what she insisted on calling, to Laura’s amusement, “the icebox.” Honey would lick the sugared cream from Laura’s fingers with her raspy tongue while Mrs. Mandelbaum prepared dinner and Mr. Mandelbaum rested in his overstuffed living room chair only a few feet away, listening to the big-band albums that Sarah scavenged from her store to bring back for him.

Once, listening to an album by the Count Basie Orchestra, Mr. Mandelbaum had closed his eyes and said, “Ah, this takes me back.” Calling into the kitchen, “Ida, do you remember this one?”

“Of course I do,” Mrs. Mandelbaum had answered. She thwacked a chicken breast cleanly in half with a cleaver. “Norm Zuckerman and I danced to this at the Roseland Ballroom in 1937.”

Mr. Mandelbaum grumbled something under his breath that sounded like
Norm Zuckerman
followed by a bad word in Yiddish. But Mrs. Mandelbaum had been unperturbed, her deft hands massaging
spices into the chicken as she smiled and told Laura, “Mister Bigshot in there might not have thought much of me at first, but plenty of boys had eyes for me in those days. Believe you me.”

“No wonder,” Mr. Mandelbaum snorted. “You had the shortest skirts and longest legs on the whole Lower East Side.”

“Stop it, Max! You’re filling her head with nonsense.” Mrs. Mandelbaum slid the chicken into the oven and ran her hands under the faucet. “I’ll put the leftovers in the icebox and bring them up later when your mother comes home,” she told Laura. “Nothing beats cold chicken at the end of a hot day.” She wiped her hands on her apron. “Don’t listen to what he says. My mother used to measure my skirts with a ruler before I went out. If they were shorter than two inches below my knee, I had to go back upstairs and change.”

“Ah, but those were some knees.” Mr. Mandelbaum smiled from his chair. “They still are, you know. Nobody has knees like my wife’s.” Mrs. Mandelbaum had pretended not to hear him, but a pleasant blush spread across her wrinkled cheeks.

Laura, rubbing her knuckles gently behind Honey’s ear, had considered this, unable to imagine what it would be like to have such a strict mother. Sarah had never been especially prone to discipline, had never once raised her hand to Laura or enforced punishments of any kind. “Do you have any pictures of what your dresses looked like back then?”

“Do we have any
pictures
?” Mr. Mandelbaum’s voice was always powerful. Sometimes Laura could hear him from the hallway in front of her own apartment, all the way downstairs. But even Honey opened her eyes wider at how loud his voice sounded now. “Ida, bring out the photo albums.”

Mrs. Mandelbaum had gone to the linen closet in the front hall, pulling out several thick albums. She’d spread them out on the linoleum kitchen table, and Mr. Mandelbaum came in to join them. Laura marveled at the tiny hats and long beads women had worn back then as Mr. and Mrs. Mandelbaum told stories about this relative and that friend. Finally, Honey had crept from Laura’s lap onto the table and sat smack in the middle of an open photo
album, rubbing her head against Mr. Mandelbaum’s cheek and swishing her tail across Laura’s hand. “Honey, in her infinite wisdom, is here to remind us that all good things must come to an end,” Mr. Mandelbaum declared. Then Mrs. Mandelbaum had put the albums back in the linen closet and begun preparations for a strudel with Laura’s help (“A girl is never too young to learn how to cook,” she always said), and Mr. Mandelbaum returned to the living room where he continued to listen to Count Basie until dinner was ready.

Later, after they’d eaten, Laura would fall asleep in the bed that had once belonged to their son, Honey clasped in her arms and purring contentedly. It was from Honey that Laura had learned the trick of sleepily half closing her eyes in a series of slow blinks in order to make a cat fall asleep. At some point Sarah would close the record store and come to carry her downstairs to her own bed, although Laura would be too deeply asleep to remember this part. She’d always slept well with Honey snoring softly beside her.

If she squinted now, sitting on the couch with Prudence, she could almost imagine that it was Honey sleeping next to her once again. The two of them looked somewhat alike, both slim brown tabbies (although Prudence seemed to be getting plumper lately—or was Laura imagining things?) with black tiger stripes. Prudence even had a hint of the same tiny black patch on the white fur of her lower jaw that Mrs. Mandelbaum had referred to as “Honey’s beauty mark.”

Of course, Prudence and Honey were very different creatures. Honey hadn’t been nearly as comical as Prudence, with her funny little airs of self-importance and the peremptory way she was apt to demand food (a thing Honey had never done). And Prudence was far more aloof than Honey had ever been, Honey who was so gentle and who had turned huge, green, adoring eyes upon you the second you reached down to stroke her head.
Sweet as a piece of honey cake
, Mr. Mandelbaum had always said. Laura remembered now, with a sudden shock at having ever forgotten, that Mr. Mandelbaum had also sung the “Daisy Bell” song to Honey—except, of course, he’d sung,
Ho-ney, Ho-ney, give me your answer do …

Honey and Mr. Mandelbaum and everything else she’d loved had been lost to exactly the same inexorable forces Josh was now trying to combat. Mr. Mandelbaum himself had talked about friends forced from their tenements in the West Sixties back in 1959, when the buildings were leveled to clear space for Lincoln Center. It was the inevitable life cycle of a large city. A few tenderhearted people would wring their hands and write piteous op-ed pieces for the local newspapers, and some poor sap would be trotted out before the cameras to share his tale of woe for the evening news. But in the end, the buildings came down, the rents went up, and sooner or later everybody forgot. Cities had no memories. Only people did, and even people would forget eventually.