The Unfortunates (3 page)

“My heroes,” she says, watching George circle the crowd, “what wonderful work you’ve done this quarter!” For the forty years she’s had her foundation, she’s visited each organization they fund, but this last year, after her diagnosis, they’ve plotted, quietly, what she will only refer to as her transition; now her transition is more or less complete. “Annie,” CeCe says, “I want you to go talk to the Turners about that museum in the Bronx. Two thousand eight, remember? I think they might be of use.” They leave her to find the Turners. She watches one of George’s guests, Robert Barrow-Wood—or is it Woods?—follow Iris through the crowd, calling, “Iris, come look at this!” Pathetic. She watches Iris’s vivid face as she turns and strides across the deck—a longer step, more graceful, than her son’s, the red dog trailing behind. The guests watch Iris pass, a point of which Iris seems unaware. That she brought the dog with her today—beyond belief.

A foursome of local widows descend upon CeCe, invite her to join them on a January trip to Nice. “Old broads abroad, we’re calling it,” they say, slapping their white shorts. CeCe hears Iris laugh and the man Barrow-Woods shouting, “I love you, you liar!” The devil mutt comes over and jaws a shrimp off CeCe’s plate and trots away. Ambassador Thompson, retired, interrupts the widows to ask if the boat is set up for skeet shooting. One of the Turners’ children, Dill, not yet back to college, says, “Does that mean this boat has guns? Did that dog take your lunch?”

“I love to spoil him,” she says. To change the subject she asks, “And who are we?” as she reaches out to muss the head of a passing child, who swivels in alarm. She looks into the faces of the child’s parents, and into an adjacent group of guests. In this way, with her eyes and her hand, she dismisses the widows and the ambassador and brings this new group to her, mostly Bakers. Mrs. Baker leans down to kiss her, saying, “CeCe, don’t you look beautiful today!”

She does
not
look beautiful. No, what she looks like now is a squirrel monkey. Her head, one day, tiny under the elegant fringe of silver and honey-colored hair. Her green eyes, muddier, shrunk into the sockets. Unchanged are her high but flattened cheekbones that, while not in fashion in her youth, were geometrical under her eyes, the eyes close together but bright and captivating. Along with her fair hair and her stark, Cleopatra eyebrows, she turned heads, the black and the blond of her, her face an assemblage of unlikely contrasts that she embellished with large, precious stones. She’d never been beautiful. But she was remarkable, and glad to not be counted in the limp category of pretty. The elegant force of her had once made her appear taller than her five feet five inches. Now she seems shorter, short. Gone is the glow of the skin but unchanged is her long, precise nose and tight nostril, as if drawn in perpetual inhalation. Her hair is blown out straight, cut expensively below the chin with a demure flip, pushed impatiently and tidily behind her ears, gold at the temples, not the high-voltage blond of some of her contemporaries—but that toy-monkey face beneath! Can it belong to her?

To mask her irritation at Mrs. Baker’s flattery, she musters some of her own. “Talk about beautiful. This year I can see your honeysuckle from a mile away!” There’s no denying the Baker garden is a mess. She turns to Mr. Lewis, and they laugh about the disparity in age and attractiveness between himself and his wife, whom they wave to while they speak. CeCe kisses Nan Porter, whom she’s known since their sophomore year at Vassar, from the days when every afternoon they were required to attend tea wearing white gloves and pearls. She says, “Give it a rest, today, Nan,” and Nan says, “Give what a rest?” and they too have a laugh.

Forty-five years before, CeCe was thirty, sitting up on the rail of a smaller boat, her silk collar fluttering in the breeze. Walter Minch—a stranger twenty years her senior—grabbed her shoulders and leaned her backward over the sea. Stranger, curio, husband, enemy, stranger once again, father to Patricia, father to George. Walter, the third and last man she ever had relations with on a beach, but who was the first? That pocket-eyed manufacturer of Italian cars, always mentioning the time after the war he drank absinthe with Picasso in Vallauris. Halfway up the cliff of a chalky Dover beach, she’d put her hand on his spine and they looked at the long shadows and no one was in sight, no one at all. How boring this party would have been to her younger self. How the line where the ocean meets the sky—now or then, how it remains the same. The face of the man who met Picasso slips back into the black chamber of forgetting. The voice of Wickie Randall eddies in. Wickie, who always wants to know what things are made of, is asking what the boat is made of. Someone says it’s teak. Yes, CeCe enjoyed getting ready for the party more than she’s enjoying the party. This, the part of sliding again and again into the right tone of voice, she does as a starling reiterates a snatch of music. She could do it in her sleep.

“Well, hi, look at you,” says a woman CeCe doesn’t recognize, all in black, hanging over the rail in front of her. “I don’t feel great either. So hot. Worst idea, martinis.”

CeCe looks deeply at the side of George’s head. Her guests are, as Walter would have said, getting hot under the beak—sauced, washed, squiffed. George turns and backs politely out of a conversation to join them. If nothing else, she’s raised her son to weave in and out of chatter as well as she.

“Julia, hello! You know my mother? Hey, did I tell you Iris and I had this boat for our honeymoon? You won’t believe its history. Oil guy used it as a floating brothel in the eighties. Port of Los Angeles. Mirror and shag, stem to stern. All restored, obviously. I’ll show you the stateroom. It has the most amazing bathroom, marble and nautical gargoyles jutting out of the walls. You’ll hate it, come on.”

“Yuck,” the woman says. “Gargoyle.”

To CeCe he mouths,
You’re welcome
, and hurries the woman away.

“You can’t run far on a boat!” CeCe calls, but they do not hear. It
is
hot. The sun’s directly overhead. The boat rocks beneath her. The guests are no longer eating, but lolling on deck chairs, drinking in a torpor. The servers work the perimeter, sweating. CeCe moves to a new seat with cautious success. She hears Mrs. Baker murmur to Mr. Turner, “I don’t care about gardening,” as a white, folded napkin slides from her knee. Someone asks loudly, “Is anyone getting a signal?” CeCe smiles at a man in a tight straw hat wiping his forehead, saying, “—well, clay’s better for your knees and the bounce of the ball.” What is his name? Iris’s cool face is above her. Iris, nodding, listening to Mrs. Warren tell of her journey through Nepal, as together they pet the dog. Iris, beautiful like an actress in front of a camera, but also beautiful as the camera—blank, lodestar, animal.

“Nepal,” CeCe says. “What fun.”

Iris sits down beside her. “Everyone’s having a great time. Nobody would’ve made a party like this, except you. Are you feeling okay? I get nervous at these things. I try to seventy percent listen, that’s my trick. Do you want me to run around and wake everybody up? Breeze is back, feel it? That’ll help.”

Here is the good-hearted and clever child she never had. Here is the child she hates.

“Do what you like,” she says. “Take the dog with you.”

There is an unexpected grinding noise below. She turns to Iris, but Iris is gone.

“Hallo, anyone home?”

CeCe rises—it’s fine, she’s strong enough for now, a good time for her to stand. She takes hold of the rail and looks down. Four teenage girls in swimsuits sit in a speedboat, its motor fracturing the green mirror of the water. The radio is on, broadcasting a summer song, a man’s voice calling, “All, all, all the million girls go,” followed by a thumping and a scratching and a moaning sound.

“No,” she says. “Nobody’s home.”

“Hey, hi! I’m Clover, the Rhavs’ daughter? Is my mom on board?”

A few of the guests rustle themselves out of their chairs.

“Hi, Mom! Mom, can we come up? We packed this huge picnic basket and we left it on the counter. We haven’t eaten for like a hundred hours.”

“Girls!” Mrs. Rhav hisses, looking at CeCe. “This is an event! You can’t come up in your Skivvies.”

“Can you throw us down a burger or something?”

“We’re starving, Mrs. Rhav!”

“There sure are a lot of you for nobody being home,” the girl in a black bikini mutters. She slides from the front to the backseat, bone-bent as a snake.

“We don’t have hamburgers,” CeCe says.

The Becks’ son joins the crowd. He sticks his arms out over the water, claps the backs of his hands together, and barks like a seal.

“Jeremy, you’re retarded,” Clover shouts up, on beat with the music. “Come down and swim.”

“There’s an idea,” the ambassador says.

The guests disappear belowdecks and return in their swimsuits. One by one they teeter down the metal steps. George is by CeCe’s side. An appropriately pleading chorus rises from the mouths held above water: “CeCe, it’s warm!”; “Change into your suit!”

She was glad they hadn’t noticed she spent the morning seated. She
is
glad. And yet how is it they had not seen? Do any of them know her? How can friends so easily fooled be called friends? Either too lively to notice or too unkind to care. And which would she prefer?

“Somners don’t like water!” she calls with firm gaiety. She turns and whispers to George and, with hidden determination, cautiously sits back down.

“But you told me not to change into my suit! Fine, yes, I’ll hurry back.” He hurries back in swim trunks. She watches him descend the steps. He looks up at her, red-faced, and disappears under the water.

*   *   *

George bobs away from the boat, rejuvenated. He finds he’s in the general vicinity of the girls from the speedboat, an agreeable place to drift.

“Great fucking party,” one says, treading. And another: “That lady’s giving us the stink eye, the one pushed up against the rail.” And then Clover, explaining who CeCe is. Her parents say she’s sick. Really sick, like—she grabs her nose and gurgles and sinks beneath the water, breaking back through smiling and spitting.

How do they know? No one is to know. He considers saying something. He swims away.

The girls are loud and the news skips across the water.

“She isn’t well?” one of the widows asks.

“Swim’s over,” the ambassador says.

*   *   *

The guests file up the stairs, all at once. George is last to drip his way up. She asks if everyone is socializing well.

“What? I don’t know. I have water in my ears. I hate swimming. I’m going to change.”

There is a tapping and tugging at her calf.

“Do you know how these eggs got here?” It’s the Foxes’ grandniece, a plastic snorkel and goggles plastered to her wet head, water dripping from the rainbow belly of her swimsuit onto CeCe’s shoes, which, now that they are wet, might as well have gone in the shoe pile. The child is pointing to the refuse of the buffet.

“How, Maggie dear?”

“First the farmer buys a lot of birds. He puts them in rows like bunk beds. He feeds them way too much so they are stuffed and he gives them medicine with a needle like our neighbor Mrs. Rose. Mrs. Rose is always allowed to come over. Then the farmer turns on a light that scares the chickens to lay more eggs—”

“No, dear, these eggs are from wild quail. That means they are quail, not chickens, and they are wild.”

“My dad says they just put wild on the package because people like it.”

Parties are so seldom what one wants them to be. She wishes everyone would go home. She wishes she were home. She feels betrayed by each person she’d watched wetly ascend the stair. She scoots her chair closer to the buffet and plucks two eggs from the bed of chopped ice.

“Have you ever wondered, little fox, how many eggs you could fit in your mouth at once?”

“No, but at recess when there are grapes—”

She shoves the eggs neatly into the mouth of the child. “Impressive! Two, perhaps try for three! This boat was once a whorehouse. Do you have an opinion on that? I do. Tell that to your daddy, dear!” The girl’s hands fly to her mouth. Something pulls CeCe’s attention—Iris, on the other side of the buffet. Iris looks away. If CeCe had known the wife and the dog were so nearby, well! She hears the child’s feet slapping across the deck. She slices off the top of a fresh egg’s head using a little spoon and her thumb, scoops caviar into the recesses. She watches Iris join George, now under a heap of towels, watches him reach out to Iris from inside the mound of terry cloth. CeCe calls merrily to the fleeing child, “More eggs, dear, a different kind of egg!”

Dana Barnes is looking at her oddly. CeCe smiles. “I hope it hasn’t been too difficult for you, not smoking this afternoon? Was that a secret?”

“Oh, CeCe.” Quite unexpectedly, CeCe finds herself crushed to the woman’s swimsuit, enveloped in a wet hug. “We’re so close by, you call us anytime you need. Day or night. I hope—a lovely time.”

Later, CeCe stands in her wet dress and her wet shoes, locked between George’s arm and the rail at the top of the metal stairs Javier has for a third time lowered into the sea. As the guests descend and board the launch, she says, “Goodbye! Goodbye, dears, goodbye!”

3

Two weeks later George and Iris are in bed, staring at the ceiling, not wanting the day to begin. George is to help his mother move to Oak Park. They’ve been preparing for this morning for almost a year.

“I miss you already,” George says. “I don’t want to be a grown-up.”

“I know,” Iris answers.

“Here we go.” He rubs his eyes, pads to the closet. “You want this one?” He holds up a ragged sweatshirt, her favorite on cool mornings. He tosses it to her, opens his top dresser drawer, and tosses her a pair of balled socks. He takes some out for himself, for they share, have worn the same socks, his socks, since the day she moved in with him, at his old apartment in Washington Square. A mystery she hadn’t arrived with socks of her own. She is beautiful by the window, the trees dense below. A surprise to them both, that their new home was in the woods and had no ocean view.