Stay With Me (10 page)

"We could take the other halves home," the other woman says. "Maybe Mama would like them."

"She does love them," the first woman says.

Sisters! Who call their mother Mama, just like Clare and Rebecca. I want to ask them a thousand things and warn them to stay alive, but there are some things even I know cannot be said. To anyone.

"Can we do that?" they ask together and then start laughing.

"I'm sure you can," I say. "I'll bring it right out."

I pause at table nine and ask Eamon if he needs anything.

"I'm in the wrong section, aren't I, bunny?"

He calls me that sometimes, and when I asked him if he thought I looked like a rabbit, he said,
No, you look young and worth protecting.

"You're in Drew's section," I answer. "He's great with cake and coffee."

"How much commotion if I move?" Eamon asks.

Hal's looking right at me, and no wonder. I'm not doing my job.

"The customer is king," I say. "But maybe order something else so there's a reason I'm standing here."

Eamon asks for a glass of wine and off I go, passing Drew arriving with the chocolate raspberry cake. I check with Hal that it's okay to tell the kitchen to cut pastries in half and then ask him to bring a Merlot over to the man at table nine.

"The one who's moving?" Hal asks.

"That's right," I say, without turning around.

"Is he bothering you?" Hal asks me.

"No," I say. "No. He's really nice."

"Just remember that some people think waitresses are available," Hal says. "Like what's on the menu."

"Yuck," I tell him and get back to work.

The sisters act like seven-year-olds over their dessert. They're so happy to be eating it. When I give them the boxed-up remains I tell them both that I hope their mother likes it.

"Just my mother," says the woman taking the box. "We're not sisters."

So you never know. Raphael is right. A lot of the things we see are what we wish.

"I've read your book," Eamon says when I come to clear his table. "It took longer than I thought."

"You did?" I ask, almost dropping my little tray of dishes. "A week's not long."

"Well, I was sorry not to see you Monday," he says. "But I thought I should finish."

I put his bill down and say I'll be right back. I clear the rest of my tables so I can focus on what he has to say about
Tender Is the Night.
I can't believe he read it. Even Raphael hasn't done that. He just keeps saying he has every faith in my abilities. That's a mistake.

"So, what's it about?" I ask, hoping this isn't cheating.

I'm still going to keep on reading it twice, but it'd be nice to know.

"I think it's about disappointment," Eamon says. "Life has failed everyone in this book. Everything they touch leads them to ruin."

"Ruin," I say, thinking, of course, about Janie and Julian, but also about Rebecca.

She wasn't part of a ruined great love, but ... she was obviously disappointed. Even before she killed herself, I knew as much as that.

"I make and sell cake," she used to say whenever you asked about her work. "It is what it is."

When she was a hospice nurse, she said, "I watch people die."

Rebecca said
It is what it is
more than Clare says
Oh, joy.
Did life fail my sister? Did she think that?

And then a thousand things about
Tender Is the Night
snap into place. Failure and disappointment. That makes sense. Maybe Rebecca, like the people in the book, felt them too much.

No one ever believed you were a failure.
But, of course, it's too late to tell her. And it's not what I would have told her if I'd known her plan. I try not to get lost in Rebecca World and bring my mind back to the living.

"You must think I'm so dumb," I say to Eamon. "That only took you a week."

"I think you're what, twenty-two? Twenty-four?" Eamon asks. "A book about life's disappointments is a bad fit for you. That's all."

I wonder how come I'm the only one in my class who can't understand it. It would be nice to think I'm too young instead of too dyslexic. And then: he thinks I'm over twenty? For a while now, people have assumed I'm older. I think it's the height and the whole needing an underwire bra. But Rebecca says it's because Da's never stopped expecting me to be older.

"It's as if you seem older because of how he treats you," she says. "And the height helps."

She said. Remember, Leila, Rebecca is dead.

Twenty-two?
Well, that makes up for being too dumb to know what I'm reading. Or does that make me more dumb?

"I'll be twenty soon," I say.

Twenty actually feels as far away as Poland, but my parents are always talking about how time flies and maybe it does for Eamon as well, whose age remains a mystery.

"You're not twenty yet?" he asks. "Oh, shoot me. When's your birthday?"

"June," I say. "Why?"

"We can talk about that in June," he says.

"June's ages away," I say, thinking,
Talk about what?

"It'll keep," he says. "I hope I didn't sound too ridiculous just now, talking about the book."

"No, no. It was really nice of you," I say. "To take the time and all. It was nice."

I have the worst vocabulary. You're so
nice.

"Well, thanks. It's that, you know, my father can really get long-winded," Eamon says. "I'm terrified of turning into him."

"Mine's like that," I say. "But you were helpful. I mean, I'd missed the whole failure thing."

The whole failure thing?
Have I lost my mind? I remember how in ninth grade Da charged me twenty dollars every time he heard me use the word
like
as if it were the verb "to say." I owed him a hundred and eighty dollars by the end of three days, but I stopped saying it so much and Da stopped complaining that it pained him to hear me speak.

I was totally relieved when I gave him some babysitting money and he said I could consider my debt canceled. But right this second I wish he'd thought to charge me for sounding as if I were a moron. Why couldn't I have said,
You were of great assistance. I hadn't grasped the novel's many nuances.

Of course, now I think of it. But Eamon doesn't look as if I sounded especially moronic.

"I don't think you missed it so much as it didn't jump out," he says. "And maybe I've missed what it's really about."

"Oh, no," I say, thinking carefully. "Failure does resonate throughout the book."

He smiles, saying, "I'll see you next week, Leila."

"Bye, Eamon."

And while saying his name feels like a prized and rare occurrence, for many months what I remember about that day—what I write down—is that Rebecca's reason might be related to some kind of big disappointment that we haven't uncovered. Am I looking for one big disappointment? Or were there a lot of little ones that became, all at once, too big? Or will the secret I find be a failure? In the end, what will it matter, as neither of those things can have killed her.

After all, I always thought that Janie and Julian's great love was ruined because it ended. I never thought there was a secret failure to it. The story I tell myself is of a big, consuming love which produced my sisters, but could not continue. A great love ending was failure and disappointment enough.

But as Da and Janie proved, it was nothing to die over. Instead, it made Janie work more than usual and Da listen to sad music. So what happened to my sister? In my notebook, I write down the date and what Eamon told me. I underline the word
ruin
and put a question mark after Rebecca's name.

And another one after the word
June.

F
OR
C
LARE'S BIRTHDAY,
which is the last Friday in April, Raphael has helped me to make a cabinet. I didn't need the help as much as he thought, but I was glad to have it while drilling mortises. My mother had shown me how, but a good three years ago. In this way, I didn't mess up and Raphael got to feel useful, which is pretty much what he lives for.

We designed the cabinet to fit between the living room windows and to hold pillows and blankets. A kind of portable linen closet.

"It's beautiful," Clare says. "Oh, and we can put these on the top."

Raphael has given her white lilies in a vase made of heavy blue glass. It's from the same German glassware company that Clare negotiated with when she started working for Edward Schweitzer. He's her boss who owns all the hotels.

"That was ages ago," Clare says. "How on earth did you remember?"

"You had quite a lot to say," Raphael tells her. "About the glasses used in hotel bars."

I wish I had been there to hear my sister holding forth on which glasses hotels have and why. Last month, I went to dinner with Clare and Gyula at the hotel where he stays. When I said I didn't want to order eight-dollar orange juice, they both made a list of all the nice details in the hotel's restaurant. The waiters' jackets, the red wallpaper, the dark tables, and how my water glass sat on a ribbed coaster.

"All of it is the result of contracts," Clare told me.

"Contracts designed to create a refuge for people," Gyula added. "Charge anything less for juice and nothing gets reupholstered, the jackets lose their shape, and—"

"Slowly but surely everything falls apart," Clare finished for him.

It was definitely one of the best nights of my life. I knew I'd never go into a restaurant or a hotel or a bar without thinking of Clare and Gyula's lesson on contracts and prices.

"I was so happy when that deal came through," she says now, holding the vase up for inspection. "Edward was very impressed. He thought I'd never get the price down, but I'd researched it to death."

It's becoming possible to imagine Clare happy. You can see it in bits. Like when she's with Gyula or had a good day at work or spent time with Raphael. I wouldn't say she's totally happy now, but for the past couple of weeks she hasn't been crying in the bathroom. She told me that on her last business trip, something had shifted. Or cracked.

"I've started noticing things again," she said. "The way certain kinds of soap come wrapped in tissue paper. The shape of espresso cups. Dried flowers in bowls. You know, stupid little things that shouldn't matter, but that I like."

I thought that maybe her brain had been foggy too (not in the same way as mine, but in a Clare-ish way) and that because she's smarter than I am, she'd been able to shake it off. I loved her for finding her way back to soap and cups.

She puts the vase on the shelves and steps back a little.

"It's all so perfect," she says, putting her hand on my shoulder and looking at Raphael. "So we're still on for tomorrow?"

"Yes," he says. "Of course."

We're going ice-skating. There's an indoor place called Sky Rink down at the Chelsea Piers. When Clare and Rebecca had figure-skating lessons, Sky Rink was still in midtown.
Decades ago,
as Clare said.
I was little then.
She's going out with Gyula tonight. He was in Toronto this week and found a way to get here for the day, but he has to go back to Canada first thing in the morning.

I hand Clare the earrings Gyula sent when he still thought he was going to miss her birthday. They're little pearls arranged around a diamond in a gold mesh setting. When Clare opened the box, she simply stared at them before finally saying,

"How odd."

"They're beautiful," I said. "God, they're like ... beautiful."

At least I know I'm not articulate.
Beautiful
is as bad as
nice.
I've got to learn not to sound so ... limited.

"They're exquisite," Clare said, picking one up. "It's just Mama always told us you never accept jewelry from a man you've no plans to marry."

This is exactly the kind of information my mother would never give me. There's a rule about men and marriage and jewelry other than the engagement ring? Well, now I know. And it sounds more important than Janie's what-to-order-on-a-date rule.

"I've told Gyula that," Clare said. "He wanted to give me a necklace a year after we met."

"What did he say?" I asked her, guessing that Gyula isn't that much fun when he doesn't get his way.

"He said he wasn't giving it to my mother, and then he was truly offended when I wouldn't take it," Clare said, with a buried laugh. "Not one of my more shining moments."

"Do you think the earrings mean he wants to marry you?"

I sort of hoped they did, which was disloyal to Raphael, but I thought there was something in Gyula—something hard and glittery and far away—that suited Clare. You could tell that Gyula, unlike Raphael, didn't long to protect her; he assumed he already did. And I thought she was sparkly around him. When together, they didn't just remind me of how a chandelier was arranged, but of how it gleamed.

"No, the earrings do not mean that," Clare said. "Believe me."

She opened the card and translated from the German, which is what she and Gyula speak when he doesn't trust his English.
So glad you were born. Please allow them. Yours, etc., G.

I said that I thought this was the best love note I'd ever heard, and she smiled, saying, "Yes, he does these very well."

At the time, this did not sound like a ringing endorsement, but tonight, wearing them, she looks like sparkly, happy Clare in the earrings. And a dress she's pulled from the back of her closet. It's light green, zips up the side, has a square neckline and no sleeves.

"You're going to freeze," Raphael says. "Take a sweater or something."

"It used to have a matching jacket," Clare says. "But I lost it. Mama was furious."

So this is one of the Janie dresses. According to Rebecca, Janie had given them both
insanely beautiful clothes
to wear to opening nights of shows she had worked on. They were clothes to admire, Rebecca told me. Not to wear. And yet, here is Clare all decked out in one for her thirty-seventh birthday.

"You look beyond lovely," Raphael says, handing her a black raincoat from the closet.

"Not too old?" Clare asks.