Soothe yourself, she thought with pride. You and I, we don’t need them. We can comfort ourselves with our strength.
PETER STUDIED his mother’s thin, elegant body. Gail was dressed in a tight black turtleneck; her breasts made small, almost circular lumps against the material, whitish lumps, the hue presumably caused by a bra.
“Did you breast-feed me?” he asked.
“Nobody did in those days. Are you hurt?” Gail teased Peter with the question, her thin, bloodless lips (pale even with red lipstick) pressed together, holding back a smile.
“Diane says, or, rather, the books say, that some chemical is transferred which helps brain development—”
Gail caught up to him quickly, as always. “So I’m at fault for your bad LSAT’s.”
“I guess you were breast-fed,” Peter parried. “You’re too clever.”
“I gave you good genes, Peter. It’s up to you to make something of them. And you have. I’m proud of you.” Gail turned her head, apparently to search for a waiter (she raised her unadorned hand in the air to attract attention), but Peter felt she meant to avoid intensifying her words by meeting his eyes. A waiter appeared. “I’d like some ice water please.” Gail loved cold water, was the first in the Hamptons to brave the spring ocean, kept a pitcher of fresh water, loaded with ice, to drink as a cocktail years before people gave up hard liquor, and liked, when sailing with her second husband, to stand with her face vulnerable to the spray, not wincing at its cool spit. The hand with which she had gotten the waiter’s attention went to her undyed hair, gray (although not stiff or yellowed) and brought back in a simple bun. Her hand smoothed hairs that were not out of place, arranging the arranged. “How’s Diane?”
“Fine. She’s bounced back from the C section.”
“Strong girl,” Gail said, with a nod to herself, confirming previous knowledge. “I admire her for planning to go back to work so soon. I should have.”
Peter closed his eyes and sighed. Since women’s liberation had made such talk fashionable, Gail spoke this way, in little phrases of sacrifice, about her now-defunct ambition to be a painter. Even the recent trend toward praising women for staying home, for the benefits of a nonworking mother, hadn’t discouraged the subtle complaints. Peter’s irritation made him provocative: “You’re chief fund raiser for the most important museum in New York. If you’d gone back to work earlier, you couldn’t have accomplished anything more. You merely would have done it sooner.”
Gail smiled to herself. “I meant my painting. You can’t not garden for ten years and expect to have fertile soil when you return.”
“What about Grandma Moses?”
“What are you saying, Peter?” Gail picked up her ice water and took a healthy gulp. There was nothing dainty about her physically; she might push her emotional food about with a reluctant appetite, but she swallowed the real meal with gusto.
“Since Diane fired Mrs. Murphy, I haven’t gotten a solid eight hours. I must be cranky.”
“You’re saying I’m a dilettante,” Gail commented.
“If you’re a dilettante, what does that make me? No, I’m saying, if you had wanted to paint, you would have. You didn’t sacrifice it for your children.”
“Well, thank you. I’m glad to find that out. Why did Diane fire Mrs. Murphy?” Gail moved on, but without rush, her tone not making a point of changing the subject — simply altering it.
Peter laughed. “I’m sorry if I hurt your feelings.”
“That’s nice of you. Did they have a fight? Was she a nuisance?”
“Diane likes things done her way.”
“Good for her. But she’s going to get some help?”
“She has to. To go back to work.”
“Trying to make partner means late hours,” Gail said. She squinted at the bright light coming from the restaurant’s windows. “I remember that much from being married to your father. Are you going to take the load?”
“No. Now that I’ve convinced the foundation to commit more money to theater, I’II have to go more often. We’re funding six theaters in the city and maybe one particular production. That means a lot of cocktail parties and openings.”
“When is my grandson going to see his parents then?” Gail asked without emotion, despite the accusation of neglect.
“On the weekends. You’re not making sense, Mother. You regret giving up your career, but attack—”
“There’s a difference between going to work from nine to five and never being there.”
“I’ve never done anything right in my whole life. You know that. Why should this be any different?” Peter smiled pleasantly, held his head still, his eyes returning her irritated glance evenly. The bluff seemed to work. She opened her mouth to speak, but then shut it, looked off, and frowned. Peter’s heart beat loudly while waiting to see if she would fold, but taking in the chips seemed a lonely victory after all.
“When you screw up with children,” Gail said, her head still turned away, the small diamond in her earlobe washed out by the strong light, “you mess up a person, not a project.” She looked at him. “And you’re faced with your failure for the rest of your life.”
“Are you—”
“No, I’m not,” again faster than he could be. “But I came close. I think it’s my duty to warn you. I’ve told you many times, there are no hidden meanings in what I say. If there’s something I don’t want to admit to, I say nothing. I don’t believe in lying. People always know, or can guess, or, worse, find out.”
She doesn’t have to lie, he thought. She can contradict herself with absolute conviction, sometimes within a sentence. “How old was I when you and Dad split up?”
“You don’t remember?”
“I don’t know how old I was.”
“You were five. Your fifth birthday was the last party we hosted together.”
“I presume that was when you came close.”
Gail blinked her eyes. “Came close to what? Are you done? Do you want more coffee?”
“Yes. I mean, no, I’m finished.”
She signaled to the waiter, again the hand up, assertive, but casual, and made a writing motion. She looked back at him, with cocktail cheerfulness. “Going back to the office?”
“Yes. Was it the divorce?” Peter asked.
“What are you talking about?”
“Was it the divorce that came close to screwing me up forever, is that what you meant?”
“What gave you that idea?” The waiter handed her a leather case with the check inside. She opened it and frowned. “Outrageous.”
“Let me put it on the foundation,” he offered.
She laid a platinum American Express card down. “Let your stepfather pay.”
“He has a platinum card!” Peter couldn’t suppress his horror at this foolish ostentation.
“He likes to remind himself he’s rich. I think he worries it’s all a dream and needs to pinch himself.”
“Never thought discounting electronics would bring Gimbel’s and Macy’s to their knees?”
“Exactly. He chuckles every time he sees one of their sales in the Times.”
“He does?” Peter was again unable to keep disdain out of his tone.
“Kyle had to struggle for everything he has — you wouldn’t understand.”
“I know, I know. I’m spoiled, privileged.”
“Well, you are privileged, Peter. You can’t deny it.”
“I was admitting it.” He felt the exhaustion of being with Gail; he had spent the lunch shoring himself up against the surf of her critical and whimsical tide, but erosion was inevitable. Time to move away from her ocean.