The Red Book (34 page)

“Clearly she’s doing an excellent job on brand recognition,” says Jonathan.

“You mean these?” says Jane, pulling out, from under a well-hidden shelf, an unused package of Depends her mother was forced to wear in her final weeks. Of all the indignities she had to endure, Claire maintained that that one was the worst. Jane feels a fresh stab of sadness, the pain radiating outward. How could her mother—her beautiful mother!—be gone while these cartoon diapers remain?

“Yes, that’s them,” says Addison, grabbing the Depends and tossing them, without fanfare, into a bag. “There, one object down, seven thousand more to go. What about these tennis shoes, keep or chuck?”

“I don’t want to keep anything,” says Jane. Each object is a land mine. She looks at her friends and imagines them each in the protective, mine-sweeping gear from that movie about Iraq she finally just forced herself to see when it played at the UGC Odéon. Bruno had wanted to go with her—“It will bring up stuff,” he’d said, in his typical compassionate if oblique way—but she’d said no, she wanted to go by herself, which was stupid (there’s that word again) in retrospect. Half the things we do, she thinks, even those of us who consider ourselves pretty darned smart, are stupid in retrospect. In fact, some of the smartest people she knows have made the dumbest errors, granting more weight to intellectualized reasoning than to their (oft contradictory) baser impulses. Look at Addison, she thinks. She’s gay! Married to a man!

“Nothing?” says Addison. She’s been secretly eyeing a pair of white vintage Courrèges go-go boots she would kill to guard/keep/whatever verb you want to call taking them into her home and pairing them with the three vintage Pucci dresses also in her direct line of vision.

Clover spots the dresses, too, perfectly maintained, along with what looks like an original Mary Quant miniskirt. They’d be too big on Jane’s size-two frame and probably too small to fit over Mia’s ample hips, but on Addison and her, man-oh-man. The thought of giving such treasures away is too much for Clover to bear. “Jane, be smart about this. I know it’s hard, and this would all be easier if you could just shove everything into bags and be done with it, but your mother had amazing taste. I mean, look at this skirt!” She pulls out the brown leather treasure, in mint condition, and checks the label. “Yup, just what I thought. Mary Quant. Do you know how much you could get for this on eBay?”

Jane remembers her mother wearing that skirt to a party at, wait, of course, the Waldmans’. Her first winter in the United States. She’d never heard of Hannukah before and was therefore surprised when everyone started dancing the hora around the dining room table, holding hands and singing in yet another language she didn’t understand. Did her mother hold Lodge’s hand that night? Yes, she did. Definitely. Or, wait, maybe no. Jane can’t remember. It’s all so fuzzy now. Only individual frames remain of the film of her life: the skirt swaying, a feeling of closeness, the flickering flames of the menorah. “I have no idea how much I could get for it on eBay,” she says. “I can’t even bear the thought of dealing with it.”

When Hervé died, it was her mother who flew over and dealt with the removal of his clothes so quickly and with such magical efficiency, to this day Jane couldn’t tell you how the bags made it out of the apartment.

“I’ll sell it for you,” says Clover. “Well, maybe not this one. I’d like to keep this one, but believe me, we can set up a college fund for Sophie with the proceeds from this closet. I mean, shit, if I can bundle a bunch of bad mortgages and sell them to people who should have known better, I can definitely sell valuable vintage to people who know a pair of awesome boots when they see them. Just look at this stuff !” She picks up a black suede boot and checks the label. “Biba. Amazing.”

“I’ll help you,” says Addison. “But if it’s okay with Jane, I’d like to claim a few pieces, too, since these are all my size, and apparently I’m now too poor to buy new clothes forever.”

“Take anything you’d like,” says Jane. “Seriously. You know my mom. Knew, I mean. Past tense, shit. I’m not used to that yet. Whatever. You
knew
her. She would have been thrilled to know the clothes, at least, would have had a second life.”

Jane remembers the day—Sophie must have been no more than four—when her daughter understood not only that she but that
everyone she knew and loved
would one day die. Jane feared it was because of Hervé’s untimely demise, but a child shrink she consulted about it said no, most children figure out mortality sometime in their early-to-mid childhood, whether or not a person close to them dies.

“But I get a second life, right?” Sophie had asked.

“No, sweetie, you only get one,” Jane told her.

“Just one?” Sophie’s mouth dropped open.

Jane had felt a small lump in her throat, despite herself, as if she, too, were learning the one great truth about life for the first time again: that it ends. “Yes, sweetheart, just one.”

“But what about heaven?”

Jane considered dissuading her daughter of the whole heaven juggernaut, but children, she knew, need the comfort of the fantasy. So she did what any good parent who doesn’t want to lie outright does: She stalled. “If anyone is special enough for heaven,” she said, “it’s you.”

“Okay,” says Clover, taking charge. “Here’s what we’re going to do . . .” On Claire’s bed, she creates four piles: one for the Salvation Army, another for her, a third for Addison, and a fourth for clothes to be sold on eBay, which she organizes meticulously and with drill sergeant efficiency. Jane is put to work stuffing the finished piles into bags and labeling them with a Sharpie. Mia and Bruno stand in the closet itself, stripping dresses of their hangers, shelves of their sweaters, drawers of their contents. Addison is put on aesthetic duty, separating the wheat from the chaff; this results in periodic squeals of delight, such as, “Holy shit, look at
these
!” and “They just don’t
make
them like this anymore.” Meanwhile, Jonathan plugs in his portable iPod speaker dock and sets Pandora to Radio Jonathan, a carefully honed blend of minor-chord-driven bands like R.E.M., Aimee Mann, Nirvana, and Radiohead he’s been nurturing on its path to perfection by pressing thumbs-down whenever something too hard-core, soft-core, or major-chord pops up, or thumbs-up when the algorithm treats him to “Man on the Moon” or “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” or something equally as stirring; no matter whether he’s heard it before or not, it just has to hit him in the gut within the first twenty notes.

He’s been hoping to find the perfect sound track for
Remembering Richard
, a soulful mix of songs about settling for imperfection, in time for a meeting with his agent Wes and an indy financier who’s shown passing interest in the script if they can “
Garden State
it up,” in the financier’s words, with a killer iTunes list. “This is it. Our last-ditch effort,” Wes had said, when he called Jonathan last week to tell him about the meeting. “No one’s funding independent films right now. The wells are all dry. If he doesn’t bite, I’m saying yes to that Cameron Diaz thing.”

“No, please, anything but
Unwedded Bliss
,” Jonathan had said. The script, by some hot twenty-three-year-old, concerns a wedding dress designer who falls for the bride whose dress he’s designing. “It’s totally inane.”

“It’s Paramount,” Wes said. “It’ll get you out of that sinkhole you’ve been complaining about.”

“I’d rather be homeless than direct that piece of shit. I mean, come on, who ever heard of a straight wedding dress designer anyway? The whole premise is bogus.”

“Beggars can’t be choosers,” said Wes.

Jonathan feels his chest tightening at the memory of that conversation. “Beggars?” he’d said. “Since when have I become a beggar?” In retrospect, he wishes he’d said, “Fuck you, Wes. Find another client to insult.” But he was too worried that at his age, it might be hard to find a new agent.

Addison tosses a blur of fabric to Clover. “If you want the wrap dress, take it,” she says. “It’ll look better on you anyway.”

“Everything looks better on her,” says Mia with a mock sigh. “Bitch.”

“Sweetheart, you look beautiful in everything,” says Jonathan, his sincerity heartbreaking as he comes up behind Mia and kisses her on the neck. This elicits, from the others, a howl of groans and a throaty “Get a fucking room!” as Jonathan wonders, once again, when and how to tell his wife they’ll have to sell the house in Antibes.

“What does this mean, ‘Get a fucking room’?” says Bruno.

Clover feels an embarrassing rush of pleasure, as fresh memories of her recent interactions in the Charles Hotel surge up from the depths. She’ll have to figure out a way to keep these images of Bucky moving inside her from bubbling up and sullying her conscious thought. “It means get a hotel room,” she says.

“Excuse me?” says Bruno, still confused. “But why to get this hotel room?”

Whenever he’s with Bruno, Jonathan can’t help picturing Peter Sellers as Inspector Clouseau. He literally has to suppress his desire to say
minkey
. “It’s just a rallying cry against public displays of affection,” he says. “In case you haven’t noticed, we are a nation of Puritans and prudes.”

“Yes, I have noticed this,” says Bruno, shaking his head and smiling.

Clover wraps the wrap dress over her other dress. The sleeves are an inch short, but no matter. It will be useful if her belly expands. Thank God maternity clothes have become better-looking since the demure tents and clown overalls Addison and Mia had to endure. Incredible that her child, should she be carrying one, will be nearly a whole generation younger than her roommates’. Max leaves for college in a year, when Mia’s forty-one. Clover’s child, God willing (she does the math in her head), will leave for college when she is sixty-one. Sixty-one! Had she known that, in the end result, she wouldn’t even use her husband’s sperm, she might have taken the procreative plunge years earlier. She wishes she could tell her younger self this. She takes off the dress, folds it as neatly as possible, and sticks it on top of her pile of stuff to keep.

“What about these?” Mia says, holding up a pair of rainbow suspenders. “Ebay or donate?”

“Oh my God,” says Jane, standing up from her bag-labeling position on the floor and walking over to Mia to grab the suspenders. “The
Mork & Mindy
suspenders. I can’t believe she kept them. I remember buying these for her for Christmas.” Mork was the first American TV character who made sense to Jane: an alien, trying to figure out the rules of his new environment. In general her mother was against TV consumption, but for
Mork & Mindy
Claire made an exception, sitting on the couch once a week with her daughter and laughing together at the absurdities. “Nanoo, nanoo,” she took to saying when she’d wake Jane up for school, which she never failed to follow up with a “Rise and shine, Sunshine! It’s another glorious day of life,” as she thrust open the curtains.

“These I’ll keep,” says Jane. She clips them to her pajama bottoms without fanfare and gets to work stuffing another bag.

By 4
A.M.
, Mia, Addison, Clover, and Jonathan have collapsed together on the king-size bed, forty-three bags of clothes have been lined up against the wall, two vacuum cleaner liners have been stuffed and tossed, and Claire’s closet is now completely empty aside from a few lone hangers and Jane and Bruno, who stand, cross-armed, in its center. “So that’s it,” says Jane.
“Fini.”

“
Oui
,” says Bruno.
“Fini.”

“
Incroyable
,” says Jane. “It feels so . . . empty.” In the end, though Jane won’t know this until later, it was Addison who dealt with her mother’s underwear, tossing them into a green trash bag, which she immediately took out to the curb.

“You already know this, but I will to say it anyway, because it would be useful, this repeating,” says Bruno, who’d already lost both of his parents to cancer and Alzheimer’s several years earlier. He takes Jane’s hand in his. “It will ameliorate, your sadness. Two years from now, three years from now, you will be doing something that will remind you of your mother, or you will hear a song she loved, or you will see something you desire to show her, and instead of feeling despondent that she’s not here, you will catch yourself smiling. Really. Happens to me all the time.”

“I know.” Jane has only vague memories of her birth family, but certain odors—the Vietnamese restaurant on the rue Bastille in the fourth, the smell of rhododendrons—are capable of exhuming intense feelings not of loss but of grace, comfort, well-being. As for Hervé, she sees him every day in the planes of her daughter’s face, which doesn’t provoke sadness anymore so much as a deep-seated if melancholic joy. “But right now I’m just not there yet.”

“Of course you are not.” He turns to face her, now holding both of her hands in his. “The grief is too new. And she was your
mother
. The mothers are the hardest. There’s that great letter by Proust to his friend whose mother had just died. Do you know it?”

Jane shakes her head no.

“Wait, I will to find it.” He removes the phone from his pocket and Googles, in French, the words
Proust inert henceforth
and
broken
, without quotes, hoping these four little words will lead him to the half-remembered phrase within a letter, hazily recalled, whose recipient’s name escapes him. “
Et le voilà!
” he says, still amazed by the ease and instantaneity of information, the minimal effort now required to disinter it. One need not remember anything anymore. The entire human population of Earth can fall victim to Alzheimer’s, and one would still be able to locate the full lyrics to “Tangled Up in Blue” or to Lady Macbeth’s cri du coeur with only the vaguest recalled fragments: “rain falling on my shoes”; “unsex me now.” He takes curious comfort in this.

He reads off the tiny screen:

Now there is one thing I can tell you: You will enjoy certain pleasures you would not fathom now. When you still had your mother you often thought of the days when you would have her no longer. Now you will often think of days past when you had her. When you are used to this horrible thing that will forever be cast into the past, then you will gently feel her revive, returning to take her place, her entire place, beside you. At the present time, this is not yet possible. Let yourself be inert, wait till the incomprehensible power . . . that has broken you restores you a little, I say a little, for henceforth you will always keep something broken about you. Tell yourself this, too, for it is a kind of pleasure to know that you will never love less, that you will never be consoled, that you will constantly remember more and more.