“I’m just worried about you,” I said.
“Why?”
“That’s a silly thing to say, Mom. You’re my mom. I love you.”
“If you love me, you’d leave me be. I was born ten miles from here, I lived in Amber near all my life, I’m not moving nowhere else now. So just quit that idea, got it?”
“I got it. I’m just saying I’m doing well. I can afford to help you. Maybe move you to a posh retirement community where there are people around, and you can make friends.”
She snorted and her voice dripped with contempt.
“What you have yet to learn, Jackie-O, is that all that money you got, it’s an optical illusion. It ain’t nothing.”
For some reason, this was the thing that finally got to me. I could let so much go with her. Water off a duck’s back and all that. My therapist had given me this technique once: When a person you love hurts or angers you, think of a thing they’ve done that made you love them. With my mom, I would remember her “lice checks.” One time I’d come home from school quite excited because they’d checked our scalps for lice, and I thought it felt wonderful. Thereafter, my mom performed lice checks on my small head whenever I requested, and the feel of her careful fingers moving through my hair, nails gently scratching at the skin of my scalp always sent shivers of pleasure through me. She’d do this while the whole family sat around the TV, her fingernails performing with love.
“Mom, do you have any clue how much I made last year?”
“Think I heard your father say the same thing. Couple years before he had to sell the whole dang farm.”
I set my fork down, pulled my hair back, and arranged it into a quick, angry bun so I’d have something for my hands to work.
“In a few years, our fund is going to be one of the most important on Wall Street. We’re working with proprietary computer models and AI that will make other investors look like Stone Age bean counters.”
“Oh, how impressive. I take it all back.”
“And I worked for that!” I jammed myself in the breastbone with two fingers. “I didn’t get knocked up by a doctor twenty years older than me like Allie, I didn’t run away like Erik, I went out and worked my ass off and made myself invaluable. I’ve turned down more job offers from— I’ve done more than you or Dad ever could’ve dreamed for me. And as a woman! As a woman wading through sexist bullshit in every job my whole life. Because I had to watch you and Dad get your hearts broken by this goddamn place, and I wanted to be able to help you and take care of you guys. And are you grateful or even remotely happy for me? No. You resent me for it. And what have you done with your life, Mom? You go to the same church as Dad’s fucking mistress.”
I picked my fork back up and jammed a big piece of noodle into my mouth. My mother never looked away from the TV. She was quiet for a moment while the anchors squawked.
“You work for your boyfriend,” she said.
“I left a six-figure salary to help him do something special. And we’re doing it.”
“And he won’t marry you.”
I shook my head. Though I should’ve known this was what she was driving at, it amazed me how deft she was at the sneak attack. “Fred and I live together. We’re in love. It’s by far the best relationship of my life.”
“He’s still married.”
“He has a complicated situation, Mom.”
She nodded. “You know the old phrase about the milk and the cow.”
“Jesus Christ. Mom, they’re separated. She lives in San Francisco. Fred and I live together. Just because that doesn’t conform to your antiquated, white-wedding-dress idea of love…”
“You won’t bring him here, you won’t introduce him—”
“Is it any goddamn wonder?! I walk into this place and it looks like you haven’t cleaned it—or yourself—in months.”
“I read about his son.”
Just the fact that she cared enough to use the internet. To find out about Fred Jr.
“What about his son.”
“He killed a boy.”
“No, he didn’t.”
“He might as well have.” She sucked on her teeth to remove a piece of food, a disgusting sound she would have scolded me for thirty years ago. Staring down at my crossed arms, I thought about my skin: how the flesh would turn old and liver-spotted and psoriasized like hers.
Finally, I asked, “Are you trying to get me to leave?”
“Honey, I long ago stopped trying to get you to do anything.”
The TV blared, on and on, a babbling brook of voices and light streaming quietly over our dark faces.
Two weeks later, Fred and I arrived in Venice for our working vacation. We stayed in the Aman Venice on the Grand Canal amid its gorgeous period furniture, frescoes, and gilded walls, waking to the crisp, cool morning air flowing through open patio doors. The saltwater and waste scent aside, I’m not sure I’d ever seen such a beautiful place in my life. Fred arranged for private tours of Saint Mark’s Basilica and the Doge’s Palace. Over the course of a day, our tour guide, a retired professor from the University of Padua, spun a fabulous portrait of fourteenth-century Venice, a mercantile superpower that drew together some of the most brilliant minds of the age, only to destroy itself when the city’s oligarchy initiated La Serrata, or the Closure.
Later, Fred and I sipped champagne on a private water taxi up and down the Grand Canal and strolled hand in hand across the Piazza San Marco, nibbling at stracciatella. In the Murano Glass Museum, we watched one of the craftsmen fashion a vase and then had it shipped back to New York. That night at dinner, we drank a $1,000 bottle of champagne from the Trentino region in the Dolomites. According to our Bengali waiter, “the high peaks and the steep valleys make for the best champagne in the world.”
During that week in Venice, work, my mother, my difficult, fractured family—it all melted away. And Fred, he did his typical Fred thing: So at ease, he put me at ease. When we’d first begun seeing each other I’d just assumed he’d come from money, and he laughed at this. He was born in Humboldt County, his mother had died young, and his father had gone through long stretches of unemployment, depression, and alcoholism after the timber companies were forced out following the battle over old-growth redwoods. “My dad and I were moving towns every year,” he said. “We could never make rent, even when I started working. He became a really angry guy.”
Hearing the echoes of my own father’s life, it was the first time I felt something more than just attraction to him. It ran deeper than similar biographies. I recognized that specific pain of watching someone you love have their pride taken from them and the sad carapace it leaves behind. Fred escaped these bitter circumstances when he got into Stanford. From there, it was on to his first position at Leo Burnett, and then Galvani, the major D.C. PR firm. Finally, at thirty-three he cofounded Palacio-Wimpel and made a raucous name for himself in the industry. By the time I met him, he was plotting his move to become head of investor relations for a new hedge fund. Wall Street had chuckled at the cute little PR boy suddenly diving into the hedge fund game, and Fred had welcomed their scorn. It took him time to convince me to join him—not only because we were sleeping together but because I didn’t see how my background as a creative could translate at all to the world of high finance. But he was persuasive. “I saw you in that room with those big-leaguers of the SFC, just this rough, pissy, old-boy network of backslappers, and you were fearless. Your creativity is what’s going to make you so good at selling investors on us.”
The night of the $1,000 champagne we made love and then wrapped ourselves in terry-cloth bathrobes and sat on the patio looking out over the lights of this priceless city.