What Nora Knew (23 page)

My brain detweeted. “An uncomfortable obligation?”

“Yes.”

“Oh. I hate those, too.” He hadn’t meant me; he’d meant
him
. Only later would I think,
Jesus, Cameron, then why didn’t you sign the books in your friend the manager’s office?

Cameron finished his obligation and suggested we go for a walk. “Unless you’re hungry?” he said.

“I’m good.” My stomach wasn’t looking forward to hearing feedback.

So we walked. If we were in a movie, we’d have been in the middle of the montage, those quick scenes directors use to let you know a couple’s hitting it off, without dragging out the movie an extra twenty minutes. There’s rarely any drama in the scenes, no big mystery over whether the happy couple will giggle when they splash each other in the swimming pool; will they collapse into laughter when they pretend-wrestle on the picnic blanket? I suppose somebody could drown in a swimming pool; that would be dramatic, but I’ve never seen it happen. Not even in foreign films.

Cameron and I wandered past the Starbucks on Eighty-First, down Broadway and through a farmers’ market. Picture corn, tomatoes, zucchini, homemade breads, and goat’s-milk soaps. We strolled over to Riverside Park along the Hudson River. Envision
dogs, grass, water, boats, and dog shit. We looped our way up to the flower gardens at Ninety-First. Sometimes a montage has conversation snippets, hints of how the relationship is developing.

In front of Starbucks:

CAMERON
: Why do I threaten you?

ME
: Don’t flatter yourself.

CAMERON
: What if you believed I’m sincere?

ME
: I pride myself on not believing you. Or any lothario.

CAMERON
: Nobody’s been a lothario since the eighteenth century.

ME
: You look good for your age.

On Broadway at Seventy-Sixth:

CAMERON
: You’re a romantic, Molly. You just won’t admit it.

ME
: Me?

CAMERON
: Anyone who reads Thomas Hardy for fun is a romantic.

ME
: Is it time to discuss my essays? I’m afraid to ask.

CAMERON
: Were you scared to jump out of a plane?

ME
: No. I just closed my eyes and jumped.

CAMERON
: You should try that more often.

Farmer’s Market:

ME
: Tell me about a woman who broke your heart.

CAMERON
: Easy. Amanda Carson.

ME
: Easy Amanda Carson?

CAMERON
: We were sitting at an outdoor café. She sees a guy at another table, by himself, with a fuzzy little dog.

ME
: Doesn’t sound like a guy kind of dog.

CAMERON
: She goes over to pet the dog, starts talking with the guy. I’m still at our table. I see them laughing; the guy hands her a business card. She later married him.

ME
: Too many dogs in this town. How long had Amanda and you gone out?

CAMERON
: Only once.

ME
: Heartbreaking.

Along the Hudson:

CAMERON
: You’re the Nora to my Nick.

ME
: Nora Ephron?

CAMERON
: Nick and Nora.
The Thin Man?
You and me, Molly. I’m using Nick and Nora’s banter as a prototype for Mike Bing and his new girlfriend.

ME
: You’re stealing it?

CAMERON
: An homage.

Riverside Park flower gardens:

ME
: Do Emily Lawler and you really have secrets?

CAMERON
: That’s a secret.

*  *  *

He pointed at one of the overhead banners hanging on the lampposts. The banners promote park events: free kayaking; yoga classes; free movies shown on the Seventieth Street pier. “Spontaneous movie date?” he asked.

I looked up and read that night’s selection:
Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call—New Orleans.

“Nicolas Cage,” he said.

“I’ve got plans,” I said.

We walked up and out of the park without speaking. We didn’t even exchange snippets. At West End Avenue, I waved for a taxi. I needed to leave. I wasn’t sure why; I just knew I needed to.

“Next time?” he said.

“Are you sure we’ll have a next time?”

He pulled off his baseball cap and with two hands gently placed it on my head, giving the brim an extra little tug. “Absolutely,” he said. “You have to return my hat.”

He never mentioned my essays. Few montages include essays.

I wasn’t lying when I said I had plans that night. I could have broken the plans. My mother would have been thrilled if I’d broken the plans. It depressed her when her thirty-nine-year-old daughter asked to come home for a Saturday-night sleepover. But I’d ruled out staying home with my television cranked up to drown out Kevin and Lacey’s sex moans. I’d ruled out the Hamptons and the thought of Pammie’s introducing me to her other guests as “This is Molly. She’s between boyfriends.
Again.
” And I’d ruled out an evening with Cameron Duncan when my insides began to panic. I was clicking with a man I knew for a fact was on automatic click-pilot with every woman he met. As soon as my taxi drove off, he probably whipped out his cell phone and called the next number in his date-o-dex. Maybe even
Emily.
They might be sharing popcorn and secrets right now. But why didn’t he
already have a Saturday-night date? Why was he even in town for the weekend? And why was I sitting on the LIRR heading to Roslyn wearing his baseball cap? How many other women were riding around town in his baseball caps?

I wanted him to be sincere yet I didn’t believe he was sincere yet I wanted him to be sincere. Why couldn’t I trust a man who’d never married, ran around with a hundred different girlfriends, and had perfected the art of always saying exactly the right thing in exactly the right way, making even the most levelheaded, intelligent women require smelling salts? Gee, you’d think I’d be fine with that.

I changed trains at Jamaica, sat across from a woman sucking on one of those fake, I’m-trying-to-quit cigarettes. She tapped her foot, drummed her fingers on the armrest, chewed on her plastic cigarette, and chewed on her lip. She was skittish the entire ride. By the time we got to my station, she had me biting my nails and craving a cigarette.

My father grilled corn and salmon for dinner. My mother made a salad out of something called Grand Parisian Mix from Costco, although nothing about it seemed particularly French. Or grand. I set out three plates, three glasses filled with ice, the silverware, a bottle of Pepsi and a bottle of Coke. My mother insists Coke tastes too syrupy, and my father insists Pepsi tastes too bubbly, and everyone else in the family insists you can’t tell any damn difference, but to end the debate and keep peace in the household, my mother’s been buying both brands for years. I was drinking vodka. I sat in my Molly seat. Even though my sisters and I were grown and out
of the house for years, when we returned home, we still sat in our assigned seats. Mine was across from my mother and next to Lisa’s empty chair. My mom sat next to my dad, who sat next to Jocelyn’s empty chair.

“So, seeing anyone new?” my mother asked when we were settled in our places.

“If she was, would she be here?” my father said, peppering his fish. The salmon was blackened. It wasn’t supposed to be blackened, but that’s what we called my father’s overcooked salmon.

My mother had conflicted emotions about my liking Russell, and now she had conflicted emotions about my breaking up with Russell. On the other hand, she’d found him dull. On the other, at least I had a boyfriend. “I might know someone for you,” she said.

“Really? Who?”

“I don’t know. But I might.”

One time only in my life, my mother had procured a potential boyfriend for me. Elliot somebody or other. I was home on Easter break my sophomore year at SUNY Albany. Elliot was home on Easter break from his junior year at Cornell. In the hierarchy of schooldom, for people who keep track of that sort of thing, Cornell ranks about ten trillion universities higher than SUNY Albany; so for me, dating a Cornell student would be considered an upgrade. Two months earlier my mother had met Elliot’s mother, Frances, in a steps aerobics class, the one step class my mother ever attended before deciding it was all a bunch of crap; but she was there long
enough to buddy up with Frances, become girlfriends, and have the two of them decide they’d be excellent mother-in-laws together. (They no longer speak. Something to do with a dispute in 1998 involving matinee tickets for
Ragtime
.) Over break, my mother invited me to lunch with her new friend—tossed out a carrot by saying we’d go to Trattoria Diane, with their to-die-for arancini rice balls. Diane’s is also famous for its Sunday prix fixe, not that that matters if you’re there on a Tuesday. My mother didn’t mention her friend was bringing a son, and I’m sure Frances sprung me on an unsuspecting Elliot. My mother had never set eyes on this young man other than a wallet photo Frances showed her in the locker room. I should also point out that my mother hasn’t replaced her wallet photos since I was in fifth grade, so I don’t know what Frances was agreeing to unless she was impressed with my Girl Scout uniform. But the two plotting mothers, the Ivy League son, and state-university Molly met for lunch.

I’m pretty certain I was the only one at that lunch who knew Elliot was stoned out of his mind. Even Elliot was too stoned to know he was stoned out of his mind. “How do you like Cornell?” I asked. That was the extent of our conversation. He sat there staring at the saltshaker and finishing his ravioli, knocking off the remainder of his mother’s linguine and whatever was left in the bread basket. At the end of the meal the mothers suggested, “You two kids should get together again!” I later suggested to my mother that she resign from the matchmaking business, that I’d manage on my own, thank you very much. Ever since my divorce I’ve lived
in fear that she’d try again; that she’d bring home nephews of women she met in grocery stores.

Sitting at my parents’ kitchen table, I decided it would be far better for my mother to think I was involved than for her to get involved. I told her that, yes, I was drawn to a particular man.

“Drawn to?” she said.

I picked at my salmon. “I can’t tell if he likes me, or if he hates when a woman doesn’t like him, making me some sort of challenge. He’s what your generation would call a ladies’ man.”

“What would your generation call him?” my father asked.

“A man-whore.”

“Do you like him?” my mother asked, spearing her Parisian Mix.

“I don’t want to like him.”

“Do you like him?” my father asked.

“I suppose.”

“If you already like him, then you’re no longer a challenge,” he said. “He’d have moved on. Your man-whore’s sincere.” My father the problem-solver.

I said, “He’s forty-two years old and never married.”

“Good,” my mother said. “The last thing you need is a married man.”

“I believe we can all agree on that, but I’d feel better if he were divorced.”

“Why? What’s the difference between someone who’s never married and someone who married someone they shouldn’t have married?”

“One of us is capable of commitment.”

“Yes,” my mother said. “And one of you is capable of bad judgment.”

She was defending Cameron without even knowing it. That’s the kind of power he had on women.

“I was quite a ladies’ man myself,” my father said.

“Oh, Dad, you were twenty-two years old when you met mom. How much of a ladies’ man could you be?”

“I had quite a lot of girlfriends in college.”

“And I had a lot of boyfriends!” my mother said.

“So how’d you two players know you were ready to commit?”

“Look at your mother!” my father said, waving at her with an ear of corn. “She’s a beauty!”

My mother giggled. “It’s impossible to resist a man who always says the right thing.”

*  *  *

Sunday afternoon my sister Jocelyn showed up with her new boyfriend. Sunday afternoon my grandmother showed up with her new boyfriend.

“Dave Rooney, Molly Hallberg,” my sister said, making her introductions. “Molly, Dave Rooney.” She seemed to be confusing a business meeting with a family brunch.

“Arnold,” my grandmother announced, indicating her gentleman friend with her thumb, hitchhiker-style. “Introduce yourself, Molly.”

Everyone else had already met. Long Island bonding and all that.

While I was busy reassessing my relationship with Russell, my sister had gone out and found herself a fella. And more shocking, so had my grandmother.

Jocelyn was scoring higher on the shock-o-meter. She was wearing capris, a lacy pullover, and flip-flops; her toes were polished a frosty peach. Somewhere from the soul of a Wharton grad, a new sister had emerged. I was happy for her. Dave Rooney was clean-cut and ruddy cheeked with short-cropped hair that gave him the look of a handsome choir leader. Dave’s family was also in the upholstery business, except Dave was only second generation, not fourth like Jocelyn, and Dave’s family sold supplies. Twines, foam, muslin, Dacron wraps. I knew all this from my mother, who’d been reporting on what was now called Jocelyn’s Romance with Dave the Supply Guy.

Happy couples create romantic narratives; they tell meet-cute stories worthy of a romantic comedy. Dave and Jocelyn’s was
Isn’t it amazing? We were negotiating over shirring tape and fell in love!
I imagined their conversations in bed: “Darling, the earth moved.” “I noticed that, too, sweetheart. Do you think this is memory foam or down feathers?”

My grandmother met Arnold while waiting for a free blood-pressure reading at her independent-living residence. He tried to cut in line and she gave him hell. One thing led to another, and now they were inseparable. Arnold spoke in idioms. “Shirley and I are two peas in a pod!” “Since meeting Shirley, life is just a bowl of cherries!” “She’s a horse of a different color.” According to my mother’s reports from her girl-to-girl conversations with my grandmother, Arnold was a hot
commodity at the residence, other women making goddamn fools over themselves trying to snag him. He was two years older than my grandmother. Slim. Courtly. With a vein protruding in his forehead that looked ready to pop any second. I just hoped he wasn’t here today and gone tomorrow.