“So I’ve heard.”
“Julie disappearing-I never caught a break after that. That restaurant was my big shot. I left Maryland, came back. Tried a superlocal thing on the Eastern Shore, but that was ahead of its time and too far from the Washington money. Now I’m trying to make traditional work. Want my advice? Look at what I’m doing now and do it in five years, and you’ll be a rich man.”
“What’s the old saying? How do you make a million dollars in the restaurant business?”
Bayard smiled, finished his Ricard, then finished the joke. “Start with two million.”
April 12, 1986
Rachel washed her hands, taking far more time than necessary, but she was enjoying listening to Michelle’s young friends as they ran in and out of the bathroom, puffed up with their intrigues. Joey says he likes you more than a friend, but not quite as a girlfriend. Michael kissed Sarah even though he’s going with Jessica. Baz-Baz?-says you’ll be cute after your nose job. Rachel loved kids, of every age, but you couldn’t pay her to be thirteen again, not even a thirteen-year-old beauty such as her sister, who had been pulling a pout all evening over this party, for which their mother had spent thousands, maybe tens of thousands.
“When did bat mitzvahs start having themes?” Linda had asked Rachel rather crankily when they entered the Peabody Hotel’s party room, transformed into the Rue Brewer in the Thirteenth Arrondissement. The thirteen was for Michelle’s age, of course. The Brewers had no intimate knowledge of Paris.
“They all do now,” said Rachel, who had been her mother’s confidante throughout the planning, in part because the mere mention of the party triggered Linda’s temper. “One boy in her class did baseball-the family created an entire deck of baseball cards, with all the kids and their ‘stats’-and another girl did Madonna, if you can believe it. I don’t know what her parents were thinking, and I can’t imagine what she wore. Then that one girl, Chelsea, whom Michelle dislikes, also decided to do a Paris theme and hers was first, in March. When Michelle got the invitation, she tried to wheedle Mom into changing the whole thing-I think she wanted to do some variation on Hollywood-but Mother was firm with her.”
“For once,” Linda had said, apparently determined to be in a bad mood all evening. She was seven months pregnant, and the hormones were taking their toll.
Ah, but Michelle deserved her party, Rachel thought, drying her hands and continuing to eavesdrop. (The girl who liked Joey had sent her emissaries back into the party to further parse his feelings. She remained behind with two others. She was pretty and appeared confident, but Rachel, as the older sister to a truly confident girl, recognized fake bravado when she saw it.) And the ballroom was really very charming, with the catering stations set up as pushcarts and sidewalk cafés. Artists sat at easels, drawing caricatures of the guests, and a strolling band of musicians played the kind of music heard on the sound track for Charade. Excessive, yes, but the crepes and pommes frites and madeleines were outstanding, not always a given at such a large-scale party. Lorraine Gelman had been right to crow about her caterer.
But-ninety-five dollars a head, and that didn’t include the open bar-Rachel didn’t want to do the math. The per-plate fee also didn’t include the cake in the shape of the Eiffel Tower. Figure another five hundred dollars or so. It would probably be tasteless, too; in Rachel’s experience, the more elaborate the cake, the less enjoyable it was. She had requested German chocolate cake for her bat mitzvah, which gave her grandmother Ida palpitations. Nana Ida could not stand anything German, although she made an exception for the Singers, the German Jewish family into which Rachel had married two years ago. And an exception for the BMW that Marc’s parents had given them as a wedding gift, in which Ida loved to ride. “It’s the least we could do,” Marc’s father said, “given that you kids took us off the hook for a wedding.”
Yes, Rachel had wanted to say. It really is the least you could do. You’re very good at figuring out the least expected of you and doing just that, nothing more. Besides, my mother would have paid for the wedding, insisted on it, which is why we had to elope. But for all your alleged class, you have no antennae for the feelings of others.
While Rachel had eloped, terrified by the unmatchable elegance of the engagement party thrown by Marc’s family, Linda had the smallest wedding possible, only family and the Gelmans. A brunch at the Gelmans’ house, coconut cake with whipped icing. Now that had been a good cake. My life in cakes, Rachel thought wryly. An interesting structure for a book of poetry. Except she wasn’t a poet. She had tried to be, but it just wasn’t in her. Instead, she had settled on a degree in semiotics, a very fashionable thing to study at Brown and an excuse to lose herself in the words that she could not corral on the page, no matter how she tried. There had been two Baltimore boys in the program, one named Ira, whom she never got to know, and Marc, whom she spent three years avoiding because they had been at Park together and she was all too familiar with his rep as a snob and a player.
Then she fell in love with him. Crazy-insane-head-over-heels in love with him. Marc was the best thing that had ever happened to her. And now the worst.
Respect your first instincts about people, her father had told her the day of her bat mitzvah. People make fun of love at first sight, but it’s just good instincts.
You fell in love with Mama at first sight.
I did. And she with me, although she always pretends she didn’t.
Had Rachel fallen in love at first or second sight? Had she loved Marc back in high school, but pretended indifference because he was out of her reach? She could no longer sort it out. She loved him, he loved her-and he had hurt her more than anyone she had ever known.
Sometimes, Rachel wondered if her parents’ big romantic story would be less of a burden if Felix had actually stayed. Certainly, that charade of perfect love at first sight couldn’t have been sustained as his daughters had grown, become more adept at picking up subtle signs that things were far from perfect. And yet-the myth survived, even after the terrible confidences that Bambi had shared with the two older girls not long after their father left. It was Michelle who was growing up with the full fairy tale, with no knowledge of the other woman. Women, although Bambi seemed to be bothered only by the last one, Julie Saxony, whom she described in strangely poetic terms. Flaxen hair. Cornflower-blue eyes. Those pretty words were worse, somehow, than the gag-worthy information that their father’s girlfriend was a stripper.
The girl who pined for Joey suddenly squealed and ran out of the ladies’ room, her handmaidens in tow, and Rachel was left alone. She sighed and tried to do something with her hair, finally admitting to herself that her dawdling had as much to do with avoiding Marc as it did with playing Margaret Mead in the ladies’ room. She poked at her usually limp brown locks, which had been amplified by Bambi’s hairdresser into seriously big hair, with bangs and tendrils that looked sexily spontaneous until one tried to touch a strand. It all but repelled her comb. She then stuck an experimental finger into her outsize skirt, but the dent repaired itself immediately. Bambi had insisted that all three daughters buy their dresses at Barneys New York, and the result was that the Brewer women were so fashion-forward that they looked hilariously out of place at a Baltimore bat mitzvah. Rachel wished she could have had the cash her mother spent on the dress, but then-she would never take money from her mother. Like Linda, she was terribly worried about the cost of this event. She just wasn’t in a dull fury about it. Besides, Bambi swore that it was okay, that she had found a way to get the money without putting too much of a strain on the household. Which probably meant she had gone to Bert.