The Queen Gene (8 page)

“I said it was at the reception!” Anjoli defended. “Anyway, she promised she would call me, and the next thing I know, I hear that Mrs. MacIntosh bequeathed the damned place to NYU.”

“Wow, what inspired that?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” Anjoli sighed. “Apparently Mrs. MacIntosh is an alum there and wanted to ‘give something back’ to the university.”

“That’s incredible,” I said, astounded. “That place has four apartments. It’s worth a fortune.”

“You’re telling
me
!” Anjoli said. “Are you ready for the worst?”

“I always am, Mother.”

“Sit down for this one, darling,” she said.

“I’m sitting,” I lied, as I browsed the selection of sheets and duvets, wondering if an artist would find floral prints appealing or pedestrian.

“The leases run out this summer, and they’re turning the place into student housing — for
girls!
It’s going to be a goddamned sorority!”

Even I felt for Anjoli this time. Here was a woman who made unthinkable sacrifices to maintain her youthful appearance. She drank 10 glasses of purified water and four ounces of wheat grass juice every day. Anjoli ate organic vegetables and legumes, avoided all meat, wheat, sugar, honey, gluten, and dairy. She did yoga, tai chi, and spinning class religiously. Vampires had more contact with the sun than Anjoli. She had hats with brims that could double as umbrellas. The idea of her opening her window every morning and seeing bouncy co-eds bopping down the stairs of the old MacIntosh house was Anjoli’s version of Dante’s Hell.

“Oh, Mother, that is hard,” I said, careful not to address the real issue. “I know how noisy students can be. What will you do?”

“What will I do? I’ll do as I have always done, darling. I will go on. I will survive. I shall overcome.” It’s tough to manage sounding like Scarlett O’Hara, Gloria Gaynor, and a one-woman civil rights movement all at the same time, but Anjoli pulled it off with aplomb.

“You’re a true inspiration, Mother,” I said.

“You think
I’m
something? You should see your cousin Kimmy. She got herself all dolled up and took the train up to New Haven this afternoon. She could pass for a 25-year-old,” Anjoli said with admiration. “She obviously paid attention to all of those makeup artists from her modeling days because she looked smashing. Anyway, she packed a small purse with nothing but lipstick and a change of panties. She said she wasn’t returning to the city without an Ivy League zygote. How’s
that
for determination?”

“Wow, she’s really going through with this whole baby thing?” I asked.

“Uh huh,” Anjoli replied. “She said we’ve inspired her, darling. Isn’t that touching?”

“How did we inspire her?” I asked.

“You with little Adam, and me with Paz, I mean, Spot,” Anjoli said. “Between us, Lucy, I detest this new name. Who would name their dog Spot?”

“Dick and Jane?” I suggested.

“Precisely,” she said. “Do I strike you as a Jane? Do I even know a Dick?”

“So change it back to Paz,” I suggested. “How is he anyway? Has he stopped chewing his fur?”

“No, his front legs look like raw chicken,” she said. “It kills me to see him chewing, chewing, chewing the way he does. Kiki thinks I should give him a colonic.”

“Mother, do not give that dog an enema!” I shouted, noticing shoppers staring at me. I suppose this is not the sort of thing they’re used to hearing while selecting pillowcases and towels. I lowered my voice. “If you do that, I’m going to report you to animal cruelty. Seriously, Mother, no dog should have to live this way.”

“What way? Spot is spoiled rotten. Do you know what he had for supper last night, darling? I fed him steak tartar!”

“Then let the dog enjoy his steak tartar without fear of it being sucked out of his ass the next day,” I said.

“It was just a thought,” she said sheepishly. “What do you think I should do? You know I can’t stand to witness suffering.”

“Well, Mother, you might try taking him out of your purse every now and then and letting him burn some of his energy doing normal dog things.”

“Such as?” she inquired.

“I don’t know, chasing sticks, burying things. Maybe you could take him to Washington Square Park and toss around a Frisbee.”

“He couldn’t get his mouth around a Frisbee, darling!”

“Then one of your old diaphragms, Mother. The point is that he needs to burn some energy.”

She sighed. “I don’t know. Let me give it some thought.”

“Our guests are coming in four days,” I told Anjoli.

“Guests?”

“The artist and his wife, remember? I’m buying sheets for the guest house. It feels so real all of a sudden,” I said.

“It must,” she returned. “I spoke with your aunt Bernice yesterday.”

“Oh?” I said, wondering how much she revealed.

“I think the woman’s losing her mind,” Anjoli said. “She was carrying on, telling me I had to shave off my pubic hair. Can you imagine? She says you told her it would keep her vagina cooler. Anyway, she’s convinced all of the women in her condo to try it, and apparently it’s the rage among seniors in south Florida right now. I’m very concerned about her stability, darling.”

“Well, it seems harmless enough and —”

“Hang on a sec, would you, darling? I’ve got a call waiting.” After two full minutes, she returned. “I’ll call you back, Lucy. It’s Kimmy. She’s lost in New Haven.”

Chapter Nine

I had just put Adam to bed for the night when Jack’s car pulled in to the driveway with Maxime and Jacquie. It was a snowy Valentine’s Day, which I thought was an appropriate, however coincidental, time to bring French artists into our lives to fulfill a dream concocted on Jack’s and my first date. My heart raced with anticipation.

When a cold rush of air burst in the front door and I saw their faces, I knew everything would be fine. Maxime had a wide, weather-beaten face with black razor stubble that matched his shoulder-length wavy hair. He had high cheek bones, icy blue eyes, and a dimple in his chin. When he smiled, one side of his mouth opened a bit wider than the other. Jacquie’s eggplant-color leather coat was the first thing I noticed about her. That and her brightly colored Kandinsky-patterned silk scarf. Her hair was long and wavy, mostly pepper, but some salt too. It was twisted and pinned up in the back. The couple seemed utterly unafraid of appearing their age, which I knew from their application to be early forties. They placed their one suitcase in the foyer and immediately made their way over to me for kisses and hugs. I was unprepared for such warmth from strangers.

After both cheeks were double stamped by each of our new guests, Jacquie informed me that she and Maxime brought a bottle of wine from near the town where they live. Or used to live. They gave up their apartment in Lyon and planned to travel through the United States after they left our place after Labor Day.

“Your accent,” I said without thinking. “You sound American, Jacquie.”

“This is what I tell her,” Maxime said, laughing. “Which is perfect when she speaks English, but not so good when she speaks French,” he said with the
zeeses
and
zats
of a man whose native tongue is French.

“I was raised in the United States until I was twelve,” said Jacquie, seemingly not offended by Maxime’s comment. She then turned to him and snapped something in French. I hoped the two wouldn’t have their private asides in French. I hated when people did that.

Before I could fret about our relationship dynamic, Jack offered to show our guests to their house. “You have a beautiful home,” Jacquie said. “Rustic and yet modern.” I knew I liked her. Those were the exact words I told the decorator when he asked about the look we wanted for our home.

Fifteen minutes later, I had poured four glasses of wine and started a fire. Funny how Jacquie saying that we’d achieved a modern rustic ambiance made me want to create more of it. Suddenly I was setting logs in the fireplace and breaking out the Frank Lloyd Wright coasters.

Jacquie settled into Maxime’s arms as they sat on the couch. “We made it,
cheri
,” he said, brushing his wife’s long hair with his fingers. She had let it down while the two got settled in the guest house.

“Rough trip?” Jack asked.

“You can say that again,” affirmed Jacquie.

“The past five years has been a rough trip,” Maxime said. No one followed up, lest Jack and I seem like nosy Americans. By midnight they filled us in on how they met seven years ago when Jacquie went to see her then-boyfriend playing soccer one weekend. “I saw her standing on the sidelines and I thought to myself, ‘Who is this beautiful girl cheering for the wrong team?’” Jacquie giggled.

“Maxime was amazing,” she recalled. “You couldn’t help notice him on the field. I was stunned when he came over at the end of the game and asked me if I understood how it pained him to see his future wife rooting against him,” she said. “I thought he was just being, well, French. He told me that all his life he had a vision of the woman he would marry and I was her. I laughed, but he said that I should at least give him a chance, and insisted that I come to watch his match the next week. He said, ‘You weel zee, cheri, next week, you weel come and watch for me and I weel score zees time. You weel zee.’ I thought the man was crazy, but charming.”

“Correct and correct,” Maxime said. “Tell them what happened the next week.”

Jacquie smiled. “I came to the match.”

“And?” Maxime became animated.

“And he was brilliant.”

“Three goals,” he said. “I have never played so hard in my life. She was my good luck charm.”

Somehow, I expected them to have met in front of the Mona Lisa or at Monet’s gardens. I suppose it was a cliché fantasy, but I liked it.

Maxime continued. “Then the next week, I went to her apartment to pick her up for dinner, but I was early so I stopped into an art shop, and I see this man putting tiny pin pricks of ink onto paper. I had been painting all my life, but never even considered ink drawings before — and never with the pin pricks. I brought her back to the shop with me, and she told me to give it a try. I said no, but the next week after we went to see a film, she gave me a bottle of black ink and a needle pen. I figured, what have I got to lose? I can invite this beautiful girl to my studio and convince her to take off her clothes perhaps?”

Jacquie burst into laughter and swatted him with our couch pillow. “You were trying to seduce me?! You are such a rat!”

“Trying, nothing. I think if you will recall —” he started.

“Maxime!” she scolded.

He bowed his head in playful deference to his wife. “So you see my wife has brought me nothing but good luck since the day I met her.”

“It’s been a hard few years, though,” Jacquie told us with a serious tone.

“It has, but it was Jacquie who found this beautiful guest house for us to live,” Maxime said buoyantly. “Life will give us troubles, but as long as I have you, I know it will turn out for the better.”

I glanced at Jack, whose eyes had beaten me to the gaze. We contained our smiles. It was always comforting to be with other couples who’ve been through hard times, but were still optimistic about their future together.

In bed that night I told him I thought we made the right choice with them. He agreed. “Are you that in love with me, Jack?”

“Mais oui, cheri,” Jack said, rolling closer to me. “Life, eet will hand me zee troubles, but wis you by my sides, eet weel all be for zee better.” With that, he nuzzled his face into my breasts and muttered something in bastardized French. I knew he was speaking French gibberish, but it sounded pretty authentic as his lips moved down my stomach. Either his “bleus” and “rues” were convincing, or my ability to discern had gone completely out the window.

* * *

During Maxime and Jacquie’s first few days with us, they spent most of their time getting settled. They made a short list of repairs that needed to be done — things that no one would notice until trying to live in the guest house. Tom and Robin were eager to meet our guests, so we arranged a lunch on one of the days that Tom was sealing their windows.

“Do you have anything special you’re planning on working on here?” Robin asked solicitously as she sipped her wine.

“No,” Maxime said charmingly. “We will see.”

How a French accent could make anything sound sexy was beyond comprehension. I’ll be honest. If Jack said, “No, we will see,” I would tell him to get his lazy ass into gear and make a plan. Yet we excused the Frenchman as spontaneous and artistic.

“Both your and Robin’s ankles are broken?” Maxime asked.

Robin jumped in too quickly. “Mine is broken. Lucy’s is just a sprain.”

Oh yeah, well I once had a ruptured disc,
I refrained from saying.

Jacquie smiled, utterly unperturbed by the fact that Robin was obviously smitten with her husband. “Would you like Maxime to draw a picture on your cast?”

“Would I ever?” Robin jumped.

“He does hilarious caricatures,” Jacquie said. “Maybe he could do one of you and put it on your foot so you can always be reminded of the funny way he sees you.”

Meow!
Tom pronounced the artist’s name
Maxim,
like the men’s magazine, not as a dig but as an honest mistake. “You say on your list there’s a crack in the bathroom mirror, but I was in there this morning, and no crack, Maxim.”

“I know, it is crazy!” Maxime said with his usual flamboyance. “I apologize for my mistake. It looked cracked to me, but it is fine.”

“Don’t sweat it, bro,” Tom said. “You just saved these guys a couple bucks. Probably just a hair or something made it look like a crack at the time.”

“No, it was a crack,” Jacquie said. “I saw it.” She paused awkwardly. “I mean, who cares about these little cosmetic things? We are so grateful to be living on this beautiful property with you generous patrons.” She lifted her glass to toast us.

* * *

As I drove Adam to preschool the next morning, my cell phone rang. Anjoli charged forward without introduction. “We’re waiting for Kimmy’s pregnancy test results,” my mother announced. “It takes a few minutes, so we’re doing a little chanting while we wait. I need you to join in. What is that noise in the background?”