You Lost Me There (17 page)

The nose ring was gone. “Uncle Victor, you have to help me.” She took one of my hands and started massaging my fingers. Cornelia’s fingers were long and spindly, dry and cracked around the knuckles, covered in rings. She almost never dropped eye contact.

“Of course I will.”

“What did my father tell you?”

“That you want to go to cooking school. That he wants you to work in a restaurant first.”

“What an asshole,” she said, then she laughed, kicked off her sandals, and slung her legs over my knees. “But please, I know, it’s so sad, he’s still paying for college, so who is Connie to ask for more. But I am so serious about this, Victor. Someone should make me an apprentice. I want to have a craft and pay rent and have a career, you know? This is my calling. If I felt called to be a monk, I’d ask for a ticket to Tibet, but I’m not a monk, I’m a cook. Russell got into business because he wanted to make money, but I don’t care about money.”

I said, “Maybe because it’s his money we’re talking about.”

Cornelia yanked her feet down to punish me, and we watched a young man walk by wearing a tuxedo, pushing a big instrument case on wheels. What was he singing? Glancing away, I noticed Cornelia still didn’t shave her legs, one of those things I’d always found admirable about her, if not pretty.

I’m never upset around her, I thought.

“Well, if you’re so serious,” I said, “then why not take him up on his offer?”

“What offer?”

“Setting you up in a kitchen in New York.”

Cornelia snorted. “Please, excuse me, then he’s the power broker and I’m indebted. I’ll be the third-world country that can’t export corn. Can you see me in his friend’s restaurant, under, like, surveillance? Plus, how would I know if I was there on my own merits, or because someone owed him a favor?”

“That’s just networking.”

“I hate networking.”

“Young people always hate networking. What if I had a friend who owned a restaurant?”

“What?”

Now or never, I thought.

“Why don’t you come live up in Maine for the summer?”

She deliberately blinked twice in a row. “You are joking.”

“You’ll have your own room, your own bathroom. That house is too big for one person anyway.”

“But why?”

“Because I’m your godfather, I’m supposed to do these things,” I said gruffly. “People my age like feeling useful. Plus, I actually do know a guy, he owns a terrific restaurant. There’s no guarantees, but I should at least be able to get you an interview.”

“But, like, Uncle Victor,” she said, “you’re joking.”

“But, like, I’m not.”

And I wasn’t. What I was was exhausted. I missed my routines. Somehow, I sensed, by bringing Cornelia up to Maine, I’d get them back.

Cornelia shrieked and nearly burned me with her cigarette. She kissed me several times on the cheeks. I told her we needed to make sure her parents approved, but that turned out to be a piece of cake: Russell phoned that evening to say he was surprised, but also supportive and grateful, and Cornelia’s mother called the next morning to say how much she appreciated my cordoning off Cornelia from her ex-husband.

By Cornelia’s age, I’d written encyclopedias inside myself on the ways of the universe and the gears of man. Now I contained about a pamphlet, mostly relating to rodent brains. I flew to Logan, bought a coffee, and waited for my connection to Bar Harbor. I knew I’d never swim a mile faster than thirty minutes. That I wasn’t one for political buttons, country clubs, merchandise with logos, one cuisine over another, the latest trends.

That I wasn’t any good as anyone’s boyfriend, at least not yet.

I sat with my coffee in a rocking chair, feeling tired in every muscle group, staring at Boston across the water. Time to face facts: I wasn’t ready. Between work and looking after Betsy and now Cornelia, I had more than enough to sustain me through the summer, at least another year.

I knew I should have replied to Regina and congratulated her about her poetry book, for courtesy’s sake, but that otherwise we were through.

I boarded my connection.

The man next to me on the plane was a Texan businessman, employed by IBM, I gathered, based on the logo on his polo and his matching laptop bag. He brought up e-procurement channels. Sensing he wouldn’t shut up, I asked him about his family, and he talked for an hour about his dog. He said when we landed, “You just don’t meet people like you where I’m from anymore, people who will talk to a fellow passenger rather than pretend to be asleep.

“Must be Maine,” he said.

A good modest Mainer, I didn’t commit to more than “Perhaps.”

After
Woman Hits Forty,
I wrote four scripts in two years; none went anywhere and each was tougher than the last to finish. Victor came around. He saw room to maneuver. Since I was back to scratch, he was ready to coach: looming, notating, leaving Post-its on the fridge. We’d spend evenings together in our separate chairs studying movies and rehearsing dialogue and discussing character motivations (which cracks me up now, Victor The Unaware under the reading lamp twirling a pencil, wondering why people do what they do, but of course he was very good at it, better than me with people on paper: nailing cause and effect with no sympathy for mystery if it wasn’t reasoned and strategic). And again, it was helpful, I knew as much, but I was also quite aware of what he was doing and what I wasn’t, and I remembered the joy of writing
Woman
on my own.

When Victor bought books on how to write screenplays, he always bought two copies, keeping one for himself to read on the subway. He over-participated right when I wanted back my sense of soloing. Was that so egotistic? Supposedly I was the artist in the house, he the scientist. What if I’d stayed up late reading
Nature,
giving him tips?

When people asked me where I drew inspiration, I always wanted to say my Aunt Betsy. Her determination, her carnal will was so affecting, not only to get my own ass up and out of bed, but also for the character. Doctor, if you haven’t seen
The Hook-Up
(I realize how awful that sounds, but it seems as if everyone has seen it by now, if only on a plane, and after it came out I gave up on false modesty anyway. It’s my baby and I’ll be proud of it as long as there are DVDs on this planet), it’s about redemption and revenge and a rather extreme May-December romance: the story of a washed-up movie star who makes a come-back at seventy-two, post-cancer, with the help of a young film director. Who knows why, America loved it. When Sony tested the movie, the most common comments were “sweet” and “light,” and if that led certain critics to call it sappy, it still nearly paid in cash for the house in Somesville. Two months after the release, Mark set up an auction, and in a weekend he’d sold my four other screenplays. Didn’t matter that they were crap. One alone bought me and Victor new cars.

But aside from cars, houses, investment accounts? Frankly,
The Hook-Up
did nothing good for our marriage. Talk about a change of direction unforeseen. The more successful I became, the less Victor liked it. The less he respected me, was how it felt. And I’m sure he felt less loved. It really was something, that year, where here I was the toast of some midnight dinner in Tribeca, and Victor was home with the television. Some producer would pull me aside at a festival and tell me that this happened only once in a lifetime, that I should enjoy myself, and so I did: me with a suite for a week at the Chateau Marmont, being recognized at the gate, being driven here for a photo shoot, there for a panel discussion, and where was Victor? In the lab with his specimens. As though for a year I was constantly abandoning him for further trappings of (accidental? undeserved?) success, was how he saw it, and yet he never said a word, just went back to the microscope, and meanwhile I was flying to Vancouver, to a festival in Toulouse, lonely and sick with a cold and tired of traveling solo and imploring him to join me.

When
The Hook-Up
hit it big, the tables flipped. Victor wore all sorts of smiling faces, but obviously he was wounded. He was lost. Me? I was too happy to observe much, much less act on what he wouldn’t confide. When I say the movie did nothing good for our marriage, do I mean I did nothing good by creating it? Or was it how Victor responded, how he continues to respond? I loved the limelight. It was one long, fizzy dream. If Victor had a memory—false, in any case—of what we once were like and he wanted to preserve it, fine, was my thinking at the time. Let him stand in place. Me, I was on a flight somewhere, probably to California, business class
.

Two weeks after the conference
in New York, my physician’s office called, an automated voice recording saying I was due for a checkup. The night before my appointment, a storm brought down power lines, and I took it as a sign of doom. In the locker room at the pool, I eyed the other men closely, senior faculty in their sixties and early seventies with fluffy eyebrows and white spotted potbellies and fallen arches, losing balance, lacking motor skills, shuffling to avoid a fall. In the waiting room at the doctor’s, one specimen gave me the fish-eye. He was probably eighty, gray-skinned with long brown fingernails, hooked up to an oxygen tank and a walker for ballast. Incontinent, I guessed, and probably vexed about that. During my appointment, I inquired how old he was. “Sixty-one,” said my doctor. “Three years on you, but that’s cancer for you. You don’t smoke, correct?”