“All the queen’s roses were in bloom,” Leigh read. “And the kingdom rejoiced, for the spell of the evil wizard had at last been broken.”
Now the child was watching her closely. He had the look of a solemn deer.
He was six years old. Nothing but life had been given to him: he had had to struggle for every ounce he possessed of humanness. His name was Happy, and Leigh was as proud of her association with this child as she had been of any friendship in her life.
“The king said to the prince, ‘You have vanquished the wizard, and you shall have your reward. Whatever you wish I shall grant you.’ The prince said, ‘I wish the hand of your daughter the princess in marriage.’”
Leigh felt morally inferior to Happy. He existed like a tree or a rock or a flower, without troubling the universe. She felt he had a great deal to teach her.
“The king blessed the royal pair, and decreed seven days of celebration. At the end of seven days the prince married the princess. And …” Leigh closed the picture book. “And can you guess what happened after that?”
Happy shook his head.
“Oh, yes, you can. The prince and the princess lived …”
“Happily ever after!”
“You’re right!”
Happy giggled and began slapping his fists on the xylophone.
The front door slammed. A moment later Happy’s father strode into the living room.
“Happy and I just finished a story,” Leigh said.
“Good.” Ruddy-faced and military with his bristling crew cut, Luddie bent down and hugged the boy.
Happy stopped moving. Stopped laughing. Completely stopped.
Why is he always so quiet around his father? Leigh wondered. Why does he just click off when Luddie comes into the room?
“Coffee?” Luddie offered.
She looked at her watch. “Sure. I have a little time.”
She went into the kitchen and helped Luddie load up the coffee maker.
“How’s Waldo?” Luddie said.
Leigh shrugged. Waldo Carnegie was the man she’d been living with since her detox, and Luddie had an annoying habit of saying she’d exchanged one dependency for another. “Waldo’s okay.”
“You should leave him,” Luddie said. “Really. What do you get from him?”
Leigh sighed. Every now and then Luddie got on this refrain, and she hated it.
“Money?” he said. “You’re working again. You don’t need money. Companionship? The only time you two even have dinner together is when he’s giving himself a birthday party and inviting half the planetary media. Do you two even sleep together?”
“Come on, Waldo is a hardworking, decent human being.”
“Okay, in minuscule ways, he’s a mensch.”
She followed Luddie back into the living room. They dropped onto the canvas-covered sofa.
“Why don’t you just admit you don’t like my friends?” Leigh said finally.
Luddie shrugged. “It’s not that I dislike them. I’m only asking why you have to have these particular friends? For instance, why these two gals you’re having lunch with tomorrow? Why if you can’t stand them do you agree to meet them?”
“Because I grew up with them. They’re part of me.”
Happy tapped out three notes on his xylophone. The sounds hovered in the air like dust motes.
“They aren’t necessary to you,” Luddie said. “You’ve always got the option of detaching. If they live in burning houses, it doesn’t mean you have to go up in flames with them.”
“Why are you always tearing my world down, Luddie?”
“What do you want me to do—ask for your autograph? Get it through your head that no one’s going to love you till you learn to give yourself a little unconditional love.”
“What the hell is unconditional love?” she said.
“What do you think I give you?”
“Luddie, I’m not you. I haven’t got it to give.”
“Bullshit. What did you just give my son? What do you give him two times a week?”
“I play with him.”
Luddie fixed her with the manic, electrifying blue of his eyes, “That is as hands-on and unconditional as love can get. You’re here for him when he needs you.”
“So are a lot of other people. I’m just a couple of hours a week, Tuesdays and Fridays.”
Luddie shook his head and sat there for a long, silent moment appraising her. “Not only would I not lift a finger to help you when you sell yourself short like that but I wouldn’t lift a leg to piss on you.”
“You put it so agreeably, Luddie.”
“You make choices in life every goddamned minute you breathe. Not making a choice is still choosing. It’s a loser’s choice, but it’s a choice. Recognize it. You chose to be a drunk, and you chose to stop being a drunk. You chose to enter AA, and the latest I heard, you choose to stay in AA. You chose me to be your AA sponsor, and you can tell me to go to hell anytime you want. You chose to live with a self-important billionaire eunuch, and God knows why, you choose to keep doing it. You chose to have lunch tomorrow with a political fanatic and a drunk, and you can still pick up the phone and cancel.”
“It’s only twice a year—and we’re friends.”
“And you have a choice, so don’t come whining to me that you’re trapped. You don’t have to sit there for two hours. You can take those bitches shopping.”
She drew in a deep breath and pulled her voice way, way down. “There’s a new boutique at Marsh and Bonner’s, and I hear the designer’s great. I had them pencil us in for a private showing at two-thirty. And please don’t call my friends bitches.”
“Cut lunch short.” Luddie tossed her a lopsided, cynical grin. “Get to Marsh and Bonner’s at one-thirty. Say you made a mistake.”
“I thought you wanted me to be honest.”
“Then get to Marsh and Bonner’s at one-thirty and don’t say you made a mistake. Just get your ass out of that restaurant before your two pals have you drinking again.”
THREE
Wednesday, May 8
“HI, KIDS,” LEIGH SAID with her best reunion smile.
“Hi, toots,” Oona said. “What’s the magic word?”
Leigh bent down and exchanged the ritual lunchtime kiss with each of her schoolchums, lips barely brushing makeup. A waiter pulled out a chair for her and she sat. “Have you two said anything interesting yet?”
“Waiting for you before we bother.” Tori, with her small freckle-splashed nose and dimpled cheeks, had a face that would have seemed impishly pretty if she hadn’t countered the effect with enormous, rimless aviator glasses. The glasses made her look intelligent.
Leigh had never understood why Tori needed to look intelligent. Tori had been Phi Beta Kappa at Smith, and surely being intelligent was enough.
“Would you care for something to drink?” the waiter asked.
Leigh took the linen napkin from the wineglass and spread it on her lap. She saw that Oona was working on a split of Piper and then she saw a split already up-ended in the wine bucket and she realized this was not Oona’s first.
Tori was drinking a Kir.
“Just some diet Pepsi for me.” Leigh’s hand went to the tiny platinum hummingbird that she had pinned to the lapel of her ecru silk jacket. She drew an instant’s security from its touch. Encrusted with emerald and ruby chips no larger than grains of demerara sugar, it exactly matched the brooches that Oona and Tori were wearing.
They had made presents to one another of the three hummingbirds when they were students at Smith. They wore the brooches only when they were alone together—which had come to mean at these twice-yearly lunches, when they did their best to pretend the last fifteen years hadn’t changed a thing and they loved one another just as much now as they had then.
“Ugh,” Oona said. “How can you drink diet anything?”
Oona had been a beautiful young woman in college, in the blond way of the time, and usually Leigh saw her with the eye of memory. But today, in the noon light pouring in through the window onto the best table in Archibald’s, memory didn’t have a chance. Oona looked like an artifact—her face powdered white as rice paper, the makeup heavy as ink on a Chinese scroll. She was like a clumsy tracing of a beautiful picture.