This Beautiful Life (4 page)

“He loves us,” Casey whispered loudly. “We had two tins of caviar before you got here.” And then, “Do you like caviar? I can order another.”

“I could eat ten more of these scones,” said Marsha. “But I shouldn't.”

“No, no, but thank you,” said Liz. “I just need alcohol, preferably intravenously.”

“We can always have more sent up to the room,” said Casey. “Caviar. Champagne. My husband called from Dubai this morning and told me to go crazy. He said, ‘What the hell, enjoy yourselves; we're not throwing a bat mitzvah.' ” She laughed.

“Oh my God,” said Sydney. “I have four kids in Hebrew school. I'm planning on robbing a bank. I've even joined the celebrations committee… so we all don't book conflicting dates. With my oldest daughter, we had to register her party in the fourth grade; that's three years in advance.” She drained her glass. She lifted it and said, “Champagne me,” and Casey, laughing, emptied the last inch or two from both bottles into Sydney's flute.

Liz reclined on the pink Louis XIV chair across from the harpist in her flowing gown, next to a gilt-edged marble column beneath the tall palm trees and potted pink azaleas, and began to feel like a human being. Here in the pretty hotel lobby, her daughter pleasantly occupied, her husband and son out of sight and out of mind, it was almost as if she were on vacation—away, away, in a resort somewhere. Where, who knew? Palm Beach? There was something old-ladyish about this place, in an appealing way. It was the job-well-done, now-you-can-relax-in-a-hammock-of-sea-breezes-and-social-graces ambience. The idyllic pink flamingo'd Florida of her soul.

Enrique returned with the fixings for Liz's drink on a tray and it looked so good—little pearls of condensation dripping down the sides of the elegant silver shaker, proof positive of the icy cold elixir inside—that she almost wept. The martini was expertly shaken and poured, and it perfectly met the edge of the glass. Liz had to hover like a hummingbird over it to take that first welcome sip. From that angle she noticed that the carpet was fraying. As she raised her eyes to sea level she saw that Enrique's uniform was faded. Even the harpist's skin looked worn under her pancake makeup. Sydney's pink satin seat cushion sported a few shiny stains. Looking up, she saw that the leaves of the sun-deprived palm trees were dotted with urban blight.

They were shutting down the hotel. It had been neglected and had gone to seed. The pleasures it had once provided were being chipped away by the ticking clock. For a few giddy moments, she had forgotten why they were there. Something was ending.

“This is delicious, Enrique, thank you,” she said. “How much longer will the hotel be open?

“We close soon,” he said. “Nobody knows for sure.”

“That's so sad,” said Marsha.

“I've worked here thirty-five years,” said Enrique, his dark eyes liquid and wide. “They say they will bring the Palm Court back, but once it is gone…”

The ladies looked at him. No one knew exactly what to say.

“Oh, sure they can!” said nice Marsha. “Perhaps it'll be even better. New and improved, you know?”

“Two years is a long time to wait for work,” said Enrique. “They want me to take early retirement. But I'm not sure…” With the look of a man who had violated his own sense of dignity, he shrugged. “What can you do?”

Another beat of silence.

“Drink,” said Casey, in nervous hostess mode, clearly anxious to dispel the gloom. “Enrique, please bring us another bottle.” Then, with a flirty smile: “This time with an extra glass for you.”

“In that case, I bring two,” said Enrique.

And the ladies laughed.

I
t was five a.m. and Liz couldn't sleep. She couldn't sleep because Coco couldn't sleep. She was too wired from all the room service—chicken tenders and brownie sundaes, all that fat and sugar and artificial everything making her tawny skin glow orange and her diminutive aura buzz—and Liz, poisoned as well, grown-up poisoned, was hungover and crashing, so dehydrated her tongue felt like parchment paper she had to peel off the roof of her mouth. She hadn't drunk this much, she thought, since high school.

Mother and daughter had been sprawled out side by side on the king-size bed watching videos for hours. This newest period of respite came after an initial phase of screen time, from eleven p.m. to three a.m., when Coco was mostly jumping on the bed and Liz was curled up in a fetal position on the carpet. Progress has been made, Liz thought. It was a thought that comforted her. She had now crawled her way up off the floor and onto the bed; she was presently sitting up, sort of, her head and neck leaning against the headboard at a bizarre, but not nauseating, angle. It was five o'clock in the morning. It said so on the digital clock's glowing green dial, and the numbers echoed with a sick-making pulse on her inner lids when she shut her eyes, so she knew that this was true.

Luckily, each mother-daughter team had been assigned its own bedroom in the “Tony Soprano Suite,” which Casey had rented, she'd said, for a song. It wasn't actually called the Tony Soprano Suite, of course, but that is how Sydney referred to it when they first swung open the doors, and since then, that's how Liz thought of it. Because they each had their own rooms, Liz was able to keep the door shut and the volume down at the Bergamot end of the hall, enough to allow the other ladies and their daughters a little shut-eye. Marsha and Kathy were one door down; Clementine and Sydney, the next bedroom over. All three rooms overlooked Fifth Avenue and the little plaza with the fountain in it at the entrance to the hotel—the Plaza's plaza. Then, at the corner of Fifty-ninth Street, the suite and the hotel both hung a left and the hall opened up into a massive L-shaped living room, half of which overlooked Central Park. A long, ornate dining room glided along Fifty-ninth Street heading toward Sixth Avenue, followed by the master bedroom and bath, all with large windows with picture-perfect park views, like grand landscapes hanging in a gallery. This central part of the suite looked exactly like the one Tony Soprano had once rented in a dream sequence, Sydney swore to it (Liz had never seen the show; motherhood had robbed her of her taste for violence), and Liz believed her. It was thickly overdone. All gilt and gold, the chandeliers simply ridiculous, and the furniture overstuffed. The bathroom in the main bedroom—Juliana and Casey's—was a two-unit affair: double sink, toilet, shower, and bidet in a room the size of a studio apartment; and in the other, an enormous tub was raised up on a marble stage like a giant cake stand. It faced a floor-to-ceiling glass window that, of course, overlooked the park. The ceiling of this bathtub room was domed and adorned by a rococo extravaganza of fat little painted cherubim. At one point in the evening, all the real little cherubim had ended up in this Jacuzzi together, first with their clothes on and then naked, dressed only in soap bubbles—all at Coco's behest.

But first came the pedicures.

“We don't pay those Korean women enough,” Sydney had said with a little wink at Liz, rising to her feet and passing the petal pink polish to Marsha. It had been a rollicking evening. The mothers swapped sex stories while the little girls gave each other makeovers, heavy on the eye makeup, until they looked like miniature Russian whores. It was at some point after that that Coco had managed to get them all, even the reticent Clementine, into the giant tub, into which she had poured all the in-house bubble bath. All this decadent beauty reminded Liz of the sprites at the Allée d'Eau, at Versailles, the wet, shiny, prepubescent girls flipping and flopping among the bubbles like baby seals, their mothers ringed around the bathroom sipping their champagne and wondering when exactly their own youth had abandoned them.

Then there'd been the pay-per-view movies—kid stuff for the kids—and more mommy talk. It turned out that Sydney had been a campaign consultant in her former incarnation. “Nobody who ever won,” she said, dryly. “Gary Hart, talk about the winner's touch.” But still, thought Liz, that must have been exciting. “That must have been exciting,” she said, and Sydney's eyes misted for a moment. “It
was
really fun,” she said, “the camaraderie, the sense of purpose. It was sort of great to have a mission… but I got married, I had kids,” and here she leaned over—her shy little girl was sitting on the floor with the rest of the kids watching
Herbie Fully Loaded
—and lovingly gathered Clementine's hair into a shiny ponytail, wrapping it around and around her fist. “Now the four of them are my mission,” Sydney said, giving Clementine's head a little kiss before releasing the long silky locks in an uncoiling twist, and Liz noted, not for the first time, that someday little Clementine would be a great beauty.

The women talked and talked. They talked about the schools, the camps, the real estate, until Liz thought her head would shoot off her neck, and then, one by one, the girls faded. Like tulips on fragile stalks, they began to bend and nod on the couches in the living area until their grateful mothers carried them off to bed. It was so hard to be with other people, it was hard on everyone, be they social creatures or not; it was such a relief to retire into seclusion, the bacchanal officially over. That is, all except for Coco, who seemed to grow more wound up and animated the more exhausted she became.

Now it was five o'clock in the morning, and Coco still did not sleep.

“When I was a child, there was no twenty-four-hour Cartoon Network,” said Liz, but Coco couldn't have cared less. There was one now.

“Let's turn it off for a while,” Liz said, with a little moan. She flipped over too fast and her brain sloshed from side to side within her skull, like water in a sinking rowboat in the middle of a rough, turbulent sea.

“What will we do now, Momma?” asked Coco.

Sleep, thought Liz. We could sleep. “Coco, we could sleep, baby,” she said.

“I'm not tired,” said Coco. She didn't look like she was. Her black eyes were shining. Her skin was the delicious caramelized brown of a butterscotch cookie. She was a great-looking kid. Her birth mother must have been gorgeous. Liz wished she could send her a postcard, right here, right now, with Coco's picture on it. Liz hoped it would give her comfort. The desperate woman, who had left newborn Coco in the orphanage doorway in a threadbare nightie, umbilicus still attached, wrapped in newspapers to keep her warm.

“What time is it?” asked Liz rhetorically, for she was peering at her wristwatch. “Maybe it's sunrise time. Coco Louise Mei Ping Bergamot, have you ever seen the sun rise?”

Coco shook her head no, she never had.

“Come, we have to tiptoe,
shh, shh
, quietly,” said Liz and she hoisted herself up on one elbow and then swung her legs over the side of the bed. When she stood, the floor made a rocking motion, in accompaniment to her head, a little like a bongo board before it steadied.

“
Shh
, Coco, come,” said Liz.

“I didn't say anything,” said Coco, running to her mother and taking her hand.

“Don't breathe, baby,” Liz said.

They tiptoed down the carpeted, dark hall. They made their way into the living room. Streetlights lit up the park below. Liz sat herself in the window seat, and Coco climbed up into her lap.

Below, the park was dark green velvet with jeweled stitching, streetlights strung along the roads. As they watched, a wave of gray light—dawn, it must be
the
gray light of dawn, Liz thought—passed over Fifth Avenue and began to spread across the park. Soon half the park was lit, the smoky dark luminescence of morning, and the other half was still inversely radiant with the green-black nothingness of night. Liz had never seen anything like it.

“It's half morning,” said Coco.

“Yes, sweetie pie,” said Liz.

The light made its steady progression from east to west, and soon the whole park was illuminated by the ashy-dusky light, and then the sky turned pink; it turned pink in increments, a great pink wave rolling across the park, and on its back rode a large white hawk.

“It's a hawk,” said Liz excitedly. “Coco, look! Maybe it's Pale Male.”

Perhaps it was. Perhaps it was the famous red-tailed hawk who had made his nest on the outside of a fancy building on Fifth Avenue. Liz loved that hawk. He defied the urban forest of buildings and the cement skin that choked and encased the earth, building his little family a home where he damn well pleased. He'd even defied the wealthy, powerful residents of the building—Manhattanites!—with their co-op board battles and their warring lawyers and their positive and negative media exposure, and their spin; all those big guns called to arms over one lone hawk and his mate, some demanding he be turned out, then ripping down his nest, then delighting those who'd championed him by rebuilding it after all that bad press.

The brave, defiant hawk flew in great swoops over the park.

“Or maybe it's a pigeon, Momma,” said Coco. “It's awfully small.”

Yes, maybe it was. Liz kissed Coco on the back of her neck, directly on top of the tiny cigarette burn inscribed in her creamy skin like a little signature of ownership. Not every Chinese infant in their group of adoptive American parents was thusly scarred. The interpreter who had accompanied them to the orphanage had said at the time that scars like Coco's were there to be read like personalized tattoos, not designed to help the Chinese birth mothers identify their offspring in the future, as Liz and the other adoptive parents had first worriedly surmised, but rather as missives to whoever might find the little ones, that no matter what terrible set of circumstances had forced
this
woman to relinquish
this
baby, she still claimed her, marking her forever as her child.

B
y the time Liz got Coco home that morning—screw Saturday ballet and West African dance class; they were a schlep-and-a-half every weekend anyway—the kid was practically in a coma. She fell asleep during the cab ride home and Liz had to hold her under her arms with one hand, while jostling their overnight bags with the other, and walk her like Frankenstein's monster into their building. Coco never fully woke up. “
Now
you're asleep,” Liz muttered under her breath. When they got into the apartment, Liz dragged Coco into her room and slung her across the bed. Her own mouth felt raw, as if she'd smoked a thousand cigarettes. Her body stank; alcohol was leaking out of her pores, although she'd bathed in that beautiful marble hotel shower ninety minutes before. The water had been so hot, and the soap had smelled so expensive and so good. She'd felt so clean!