Lily was in Amsterdam with Matt when Elena was shot by bandits in Malaysia, where she’d gone to work with Catholic Charities. “They had all that trouble with her,” Lily’s father said, “finally she gets her act together, and now this. Don’t you go doing good in the world.”
“Yeah,” Lily said, “what are the odds.”
—
The next morning she goes into the video store on the chance they might have Gold Diggers of 1933, which she was stupid not to have brought.
“I knew it,” the man at the counter says. “No. I’m sorry, we should.” His short blond hair’s just starting to go gray, and he’s got lines at the corners of his eyes and the beginnings of man breasts under the knit shirt.
“Oh, it was just a whim,” she says. “I’m afraid if I start browsing, I’ll never get out of here.” Already she’s spotted Carnival of Souls.
“That wouldn’t break my heart,” he says. Straight for sure, just unappealing. “If you find yourself jonesing for something, here’s the number.” He hands her a card. “Ask for Evan.”
Well, it’s a day for whims, isn’t it? Walking past the hair salon, she sees that both chairs are empty—and there’s your gay boy. Maybe. He’s got a shaved head, and he’s wearing a Hawaiian shirt. “Don’t be bashful,” he says when she sticks her head in. “Come. Sit.” A boom box on the glass shelf is playing the Robert Plant–Alison Krauss CD that everybody’s sick of back in the city. “First let me get a look at the lay of the land, and then we’ll shampoo you.”
He’s got strong fingers—she can feel her scalp move on her skull—and he’s rough with the towel. She’s still not sure about him. “So,” he says, walking her back to the chair, “what are we doing today?”
“Something we may end up regretting,” she says.
—
On the drive home—why not call it that?—she keeps pulling down the visor to check herself in the makeup mirror. The sky’s getting dark to the west; when she gets out of the car she hears faraway thunder. Excuse enough to bag the swim. She allows herself a few minutes in the bathroom to turn her head from side to side in front of the mirror; she hadn’t realized her ears were so big. She takes a shower, puts on her father’s big white shirt, then goes out to the porch, lies in the hammock and tries to stop touching her hair and get serious about Mansfield Park. Maria has fled with Henry Crawford—and Mary Crawford has proved so deficient in moral sense that she merely calls it “folly”! When the storm hits, she closes the book to watch: hailstones bouncing off the lawn, big trees waving like feather dusters—isn’t that good? Better write that one down.
After eating dinner she turns her cellphone on and finds a new message, from Garrett. You’re not answering your email. Call me. Contact me. What time is it, eight o’clock? A couple of hits now and it’ll wear off by movie time. She goes to the freezer and pinches just that much off a bud. It’s cool in the living room, where the original wood paneling has been cured in a couple of centuries of smoke from the original walk-in fireplace. She presses her nose into the wall, wishing to exchange molecules with that aroma, then lies back on the long leather sofa with her head propped up and starts her iPod—a mix Renaldo made for her, which sounds cold and clattery. The second song takes a much longer time to go by than the first, and when she’s somewhere in the middle of the next one she can’t remember back to the first song—oh, good, this is good. If you could be like this all the time, you’d never worry about the years flying by, because even an hour is just so full. Too full, actually.
She wakes up on the sofa in full morning light. She’d considered going up to the bedroom, but it would’ve been hot and she would’ve had to deal with the fan and, let’s admit it, she’d been afraid Elena might be up there. One of the big buds is gone, and half the bottle of sherry. She starts coffee; that should take care of the headache, though Satan’s whispering, How’s about a little drinkie? She eats a handful of raisins and—though it’s way off schedule—goes upstairs to get into her bikini.
The lake water feels so cold she just stands there up to her knees, hugging herself. She looks around: at this time of morning there’s nobody here to see her punk out. Just a thin little girl whose fat mommy is yelling, “That doesn’t work for me!” What has the little girl done?
Back at the house, she finds rackets and some cans of balls in the mudroom and goes out to the tennis court. She hits a half-dozen balls over the net, then walks over, barefoot on the hot clay, and hits them back. Okay, clearly, she can’t put this off any longer. She goes back inside and turns on her cell.
“Hey, I was about to give up on you,” Garrett says. “Listen, some friends of mine invited me up to Kent this weekend. That’s not too far from you, right?”
“Don’t you get enough action with my sister?” she says. “And your wife?”
“Correct me if I’m wrong, but somehow I got the idea that you and I both sort of take things on a case-by-case basis.”
“You’re making me wet,” she says.
“Okay, you’re pissed at me. I’ll give you a call when I get up there tomorrow night.”
“You really like yourself, don’t you?”
“I’ll pass on that one,” he says. “How about you?”
—
Lily and Matt had broken up a year before Portia’s marriage ended—which was counterintuitive, because shouldn’t the less traditional couple be revealed to have the stronger foundation, or was this counter-counterintuitive? She’d moved into Matt’s low-tide-smelling factory loft in Greenpoint, where he used to live with Melanie, his previous girlfriend. One night the bass player in his band said, “Thanks, Mel,” as Lily passed him a platter of couscous and lamb; when she brought it up later, Matt said it wasn’t his fault. That was when she got the idea to fuck the bass player.
He was a tall, lanky specimen, like all bass players, named Rob. Called Rob, strictly speaking. This would be a one-shot deal, off in its own space: wear a halter top to a gig, brush the girls against his arm, email him to consult about a gift for Matt’s birthday, meet him at Sam Ash, go for a drink afterward. Portia herself couldn’t have done it more efficiently.
When Lily refused to go to his place a second time, Rob quit the band and moved back to Chapel Hill, which wasn’t at all the spirit of the thing. And then she began to email him—not only men were allowed to send mixed signals!—and of course Matt got into her email, and so on.
By the time Portia found out about her husband’s girlfriend in Bilbao, Lily was able to give her refuge in Brooklyn Heights, on the foldout she’d been so prescient to buy. Every night they drank a bottle of Sancerre apiece and watched one of the old movies their father had loved; Portia always sobbed at the happy endings, then kept sobbing, even after Lily had clicked over to CNN.
“I felt like Daddy was watching with us,” she said one night, when Swing Time was over and Larry King had Ed Asner on, talking about his autistic son.
“I’m curious,” Lily said. “What kind of stuff does he say? You know, when he’s speaking to you?”
“He just says—I don’t want to say.” She began to cry again. “He says, ‘I’m taking care of you now.’ ”
“I wish he’d spread it around a little,” Lily said.