The Widow Waltz (10 page)

“What’s not it?” Luey asks. She and Nicola have appeared at my side.

“Ah,” I say, “these are my daughters, Louisa and Nicola. And this is Chip Sharkey and . . . I am so sorry, I’m an idiot with names.”

“Nathan Ross,” he offers. “Nat.”

“Nat Ross,” I echo. “Chip is trying to sell the house in the country.”

“Ouch,” Luey says, although this is not news to her. “Please don’t.”

Luey loves Fortress Hampton as Ben did, playing tennis, flambéing herself on the beach, and once she could drive, scaring the bejesus out of us as she navigated the winding, wooded streets late at night.

“Would you be the daughter with the pink bedroom?” Chip asks.

“Would you be the guy who insisted it be painted white?”

“Both of you are invited, too,” he says to my daughters, and reels off details.

I make a show of checking my watch. “My dog,” I say, invoking Sadie, the all-purpose excuse. “She’s waiting for a walk.” We offer polite good-byes and Nicola, Luey, and I weave our way through the crowd, which has doubled, out through the wide front doors. Since we entered St. Patrick’s the city has been set to mute. Flakes have begun to stick, frosting Fifth Avenue, slowing traffic. I feel as if I have stepped inside a snow globe.

“Do we really have to head home?” Nicola asks, linking her arm in mine as if we were promenading on a Warsaw boulevard, circa 1932.

“Honestly? I’m exhausted.” What has worn me out most is faking a normal, five-minute conversation with strangers. “But you two have fun without me.”

Luey and Nicola exchange the look that tells me I have been Topic A. “No, let’s get home,” Luey says. “Cola can make us hot chocolate.”

“You should go to that party, Ma,” Luey says, when we are almost there.

“Don’t be nuts. Anyway, I think I’ll drive out to the country. Seeing that broker reminds me of all the work I have to do”—and the young woman and baby, I’m
sure
there was a baby, I’d like to forget. My mind has run an endless race, imagining the baby’s face as Luey’s. Or Ben’s.

“I like him,” Cola says.

“Chip? You don’t think he comes on a little strong?”

“The other guy. His smile reminds me of Dad.”

“Your father was a God next to that guy,” I say, surprised by my stern defense.

“Maybe I just liked him because he liked you.”

“He didn’t ‘like’ me. He simply has good manners, which you see too seldom to recognize.” He’s probably gay, and if not, too young, early forties.

“We should all go to the party,” Luey says.

“Can’t—I have plans,” Nicola says. “In Boston.”

“So you’re leaving me all alone in the city?” Luey asks me. “Imagine the damage I’ll do. I might trash the place. And in my delicate condition—”

“What delicate condition?” Nicola swoops in to ask.

“I am always in a delicate condition,” her sister snaps.

“Isn’t that the truth,” Nicola says.

“Silence, please,” I say.

There are times when I wonder what it would be like to have had sons. Surely they would have simply adored me, and been less demanding and intrusive than daughters, for whom I feel destined to never measure up as we tramp through life side by side, each girl always making me feel as if I’ve done her wrong or favored the other. Ben had it easy. All his daughters required was love and approval, which they reciprocated without question.

Back home, I escape to my bedroom, Sadie at my side. In the morning, I get up early and drive our one remaining car to the beach. For two days straight I sort, box, donate, or ditch whatever is left from my earlier assault on the house, scrubbing it clean of family history. But this is not all. In the phonebook, I search unsuccessfully for Clementine DeAngelo’s phone number and address.

What would I do if I’d found it? Call and hang up? Stalk the girl? I tell myself I’ve gone mad to think what I think, but in every parking lot and on every trip to the dump, the thrift shop, or the grocery store I search for her mother’s van and a baby tucked into a car seat with arms outstretched, twenty pounds of swaddled evidence. I look up the address for Adam and Eve and drive by, seeing only an austere metal building surrounded by cold, lonely shrubs.

A
t first Nicola didn’t recognize him. He’d grown taller and filled out since high school. “Michael T. Kim ?” she said, dropping the black turtleneck for which they’d both reached at Uniqlo.

“Nicola Silver-Waltz?” His smile told her he wasn’t going to hold their last conversation against her. “What the fuck? I thought you were living in Europe.”

How did he know that? “I came back. My father died.”
Why are you shopping? in that case,
is what he’s probably saying to himself, she thought.

But he responded with, “My God. That’s horrible. I’m so sorry.”

Nicola had dated men who were Indian, African American, Chinese, Japanese, a guy who claimed to belong to the Cherokee nation, and dozens of Caucasians. But Michael T. Kim was the only Korean. That was her senior year at Stuyvesant, the city’s most selective public high school, overrun by arrogant geeks consumed with grade-point averages, others’ as much as their own. Most of the students took themselves far more seriously than Nicola did, leading them to the glory of colleges better than SUNY New Paltz, the only college where Nicola was accepted.

At Stuy, it was hard not to wind up with a Korean boyfriend. Sixty percent of the population was male and almost that big a wedge was not merely Asian but Korean, though not Nicola’s kind. These were children of immigrants—doctors, midwives, and pharmacists now slaving as dry cleaners, manicurists, and owners of twenty-four-hour delis—hard-driving parents who treated their kids like lumps of Play-Doh to be molded into scholarship winners who’d restore the family honor as surgeons, investment bankers, and hedge fund managers. On the evenings of teacher conferences, many classmates accompanied their parents to translate. The Korean students had strict curfews, unrelenting pressure, and dire consequences if they earned less than an A or talked smack to their mother and father.

Nicola had met no other Korean girl adopted by Caucasians who considered their daughter a perfect Asian rose. The Korean girls got up at five in the morning to practice their figure skating or violin and commuted by subway from solidly middle-class Queens, not an apartment with a Central Park view. Those girls stuck together, often jabbering in a language as foreign to her as Flemish. When she’d started high school, a few of them made chummy overtures. Nicola could never relax around these supremely self-confident creatures, however. They had little in common beyond the products they preferred for their silky black hair. The Korean crowd hadn’t spent the previous summers at camps in Maine, didn’t commute to school by taxi, and they certainly hadn’t had a Bat Mitzvah, after which they celebrated at a disco with a hundred classmates.

None of the friendships stuck. Which was why Nicola was surprised when the boy who sat behind her in AP French asked her to go to the prom. She didn’t immediately accept Michael T., the initial to distinguish him from the four other Michael Kims in their grade. She said she’d think about it—she might have even thanked him—and then told her best friend, Ashley, that she’d go to the prom with Michael T. Kim when pigs fly. To start, she hardly knew the guy. He’d tried on two unsuccessful occasions to explain the subjunctive tense to her, but in the cafeteria he sat with the Koreans. She sat with the hot girls who were anything but Korean. Furthermore, Nicola expected to go to the prom with Ari Klein, captain of the tennis team.

Ari wound up asking that twat Ashley, to whom she never spoke again. The next day, Michael T. unleashed fifty pig-shaped balloons at the end of French class—Ashley had obviously repeated Nicola’s remark—then kneeled at Nicola’s feet and asked her to prom in front of the whole class, all thirty-two students chanting
“Oui, oui, allez avec lui!”
in unison.

Nicola did.

On prom night, Michael T. swung by the apartment, decked out in a tuxedo with a black silk shirt, looking surprisingly handsome and impressing her parents with his politeness. Downstairs a party bus was packed with his friends and dates, all Korean, and not of Nicola’s ersatz variety. The booze was flowing, the laughter loud.

Before that evening, all Nicola had thought about was her dress. No knockoff gown from a prom magazine for Nicola Silver-Waltz. Mother had let her splurge on a Narciso Rodriguez, and shoes that cost almost as much. So when Michael T. had moves on the Waldorf dance floor and even better ones at the after-party at a suite in a W hotel, Nicola was surprised. She didn’t have sex with him, not even a blow job, because she wasn’t sure if a legit Korean girl would on a first date, but they made out on the bus, and wound up wrapped around each other all night long in one of the suite’s many beds. He slept. She didn’t.

The next weekend, they went to see “The Hangover,” and later to a karaoke bar in Koreatown, a few dingy streets of restaurants and stores selling tchotchkes and flimsy handbags in the shadow of the Empire State Building. Over Stella Artoises, they quoted lines from the movie and were working up the nerve to sing. Nicola was thinking how she might be able to take a relationship with Michael T. Kim to the next level—she’d started seeing him as a guy, not a Korean—when at the third beer he said, “Why do you behave like a white girl?”

“Excuse me?”

“Like you’re not proud of your heritage?”

What heritage would that be, Nicola wondered. She’d spent two weeks of her life in Korea, not nearly as long as, say, Israel, where she visited for an entire summer on a Hadassah tour with a gang of hormonal American teenagers, exactly as her mother had some thirty-five years earlier. Luey would go the following summer. That was her family’s tradition.

“My background isn’t like yours,” she offered.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Michael T. asked. “Because my family lives in Flushing we’re a subspecies?”

“Don’t be so defensive,” she said, though while she’d never been to Flushing, she was grateful that she didn’t live in a neighborhood that doubled as a punch line to a scatological joke.

“I find it pathetic that a smart, full-blooded Korean girl could be utterly clueless about her DNA,” he chided.

Nicola liked the “smart” part. Next to Luey she generally felt like a dolt. When Nicola had scored high enough to get into Stuyvesant, she and her parents could barely conceal their shock, though Nicola had lived up to expectations by being in the bottom third of the class all four years.

“I am what I am, not some guy’s rehab project,” she snapped.

“I never implied that,” Michael T. said. “But I thought you might evince some curiosity.”

“
Evince?
Learn that at a SAT prep course? How about evincing some curiosity about my life?” Her voice was shrill. “Where’s it written that the way your family does things is the gold standard?”

Nicola didn’t wait for an answer. Bristling with resentment, she found her way home, and never spoke to Michael T. Kim again until she ran into him today. When he asked her what she’d been doing since college, she kept turning the conversation back to him. Michael T. had graduated from Yale. Now he was at Harvard med school, sharing an apartment with guys—she could tell from their names that they were all Korean—who’d also gone to Stuyvesant. She pretended to remember them.

“We’re having a New Year’s Eve party,” he said. “Why don’t you come up? I could give you a ride.”

A
t noon on December thirty-first, driving back to the city, traffic is sluggish. By the time I arrive, Nicola has already left.

Late in the afternoon, Daniel and Stephan swing by with fine cheese, Greek olives, and two bottles of champagne, which Luey doesn’t touch, along with the soft cheeses. I, however, drink two glasses. Stephan, at his most priestly, offers a cool kiss on both of my cheeks. We call our mother, who thinks Stephan is our father and I am Mildred, her dead sister. When Luey excuses herself to prepare for a night out with high school friends, I ask Stephan, “Any sign of the mystery ring?”

“Not as yet,” he says. “None of the jewelers who handle this quality of stone have seen or heard about it. Keep in mind that Ben may have palmed off the ring to another jeweler in October, after he brought it to me for appraisal. Or parked it in a safe deposit box, as your forensic wizard will discover.”

Or Ben may have given away the ring or sold it in a private transaction. I’m sure the same thought has crossed my brother’s mind.

“Try not to be downcast, little sister,” Stephan says in what for him is a landslide of affection. “Despondency does nothing for a woman’s face. And don’t forget—this is the fabled holiday season. Perhaps the gentlemen I’ve been pestering have given my request short shrift because they’re too busy selling the crown jewels.”

After an hour, Daniel and Stephan leave for dinner at home, where I imagine my brother dandied in velvet smoking slippers, holding two snifters of brandy, while Daniel lights Cuban cigars. They are in matching leather wing chairs in a secret eating club fit for Hogwarts. While I clear and wash the dishes, Luey emerges from her bedroom wearing black leggings, a long, tulle ballerina skirt, and a tight silver sweater which shows off her newly voluptuous breasts. Looking as if she has stepped out of
The Rocky Horror Picture Show, s
he grabs her coat and leaves.

Sadie and I trot up and down Central Park South. At the Ritz Carlton, couples in evening dress are coming and going, wishing the world a happy new year. I return home and crack open a P. D. James, but I am restless and switch to channel surfing. Every movie is maudlin or vacuous. I miss Ben, who was supposed to be my permanent New Year’s date, and without a daughter or two, the fragrance of a scented candle, or a sumptuous spread, the apartment is too big and too empty.

I will not cry. I will not cry. Crying is for cowards and I am trying to hardwire myself for moxie.

I put the second bottle of champagne in a black velvet pouch I unearth from a drawer and I head out to Chip and Nat’s party.

It’s going to be a new year. What the hell.