“Is he gay?” India asked. This couldn’t be true-not Grant!-but she lived in the art world, where she had seen the most unlikely people come out of the closet.
“God, no,” Birdie said. “But he has his golf, the Yankees, the stock market, work, his car, his scotch. I’m sick of it.”
“I don’t blame you,” India said. “You have my full support.”
“Oh, I know I do,” Birdie said. “I just wanted to tell you first. You’re the first person to know other than the kids.”
“Oh,” India had said. “Well… thanks.”
That had been the extent of their conversation on the topic, though now India wished she had asked more questions. What had the deciding factor been? Had something happened, had they fought, did Grant check his Blackberry one too many times, did he fail to look up from the Wall Street Journal when she called his name, had he not thanked her for his eggs (over easy, perfectly salted and peppered)? Or had something shifted in Birdie’s own mind? Had she read a book, seen a movie? Had one of her New Canaan friends asked for a divorce? Had Birdie fallen in love?
India hadn’t asked then, but she could ask now. Now they were alone, face-to-face, with a string of empty hours ahead of them. They were smoking together.
“What was it?” India said. “That made you leave Grant?”
“Oh, God…,” Birdie said.
“No, I mean the one thing. The moment.”
“The moment?”
“The moment when you knew. When you were spurred to action.” India was high from the nicotine and from this unusual closeness with her sister. “Because you know Bill and I had our problems, big problems, huge fucking problems. How many times did I contemplate throwing him out? Leaving him on the subway in Stockholm? Serving him with papers on the squash court? And yet, I couldn’t. I never had the guts. I didn’t want to turn our world upside down. I didn’t want to disrupt the status quo.” India exhaled. “And then, of course, he did it for me.”
Birdie nodded thoughtfully, and India felt ashamed. Here, she’d asked Birdie a question and then she’d talked about herself. She was a selfish bitch and always had been, and that, ultimately, was why Bill had shot himself.
Birdie said, “Well…”
India leaned forward. She wanted to know.
“It was a couple of things in succession. First, there was the trip we took to Charlotte to visit Tate. She had just moved to the city on her own, and I wanted to see how she was faring. We arrived on Friday night and left on Sunday, but it killed Grant, you know, because it was what he liked to call ‘forced family fun.’ He had to interact with us; he had to be present. So Friday night was fine-Tate drove us around the city a little, we saw the stadium lit up at night, that kind of thing. Saturday we met Tate at the park where she liked to run, and then we went to lunch and did a little shopping. I wanted to buy Tate some new clothes, pretty clothes… get her out of her jeans. The whole afternoon, Grant was like a huge, reluctant Saint Bernard that I was yanking on a leash. Then, that night at dinner-we were at a steak house-Grant got up from the table and I thought he’d gone to the men’s room, but he never returned. So Tate and I finished up, I paid the bill, and we went to find him. He was in the bar, of course, where there was a television. He was talking to a complete stranger about the Giants’ chance the next day against the Panthers.”
“That sounds like Grant,” India said.
“It was Grant, is Grant. But it hurt. He loved us, but he didn’t like us.”
“You know that’s not true…”
“He liked us but he didn’t want to be with us,” Birdie said. “So that was the precursor to ‘the moment.’ ‘The moment’ came a few weeks later.”
“What happened?” India asked.
“It was a beautiful autumn Sunday. Grant had golfed all day Saturday, and our agreement was, only one day of the weekend could be devoted to golf. So on Sunday, he was mine, right?”
“Right,” India said.
“So we woke up and we… made love.”
“How was that?” India asked.
“Oh, it was fine,” Birdie said. Here, Birdie blew a stream of smoke out the window. It was weird watching her smoke. It was like watching President Obama smoke. Or the pope smoke. “But it wasn’t like I was hearing ‘Unchained Melody’ play in my head. I’d been married to the man thirty years. I was hoping for some other kind of connection, something deeper. I wanted to do things with Grant. I wanted to be his friend.”
“Gotcha,” India said.
“He wouldn’t go to church with me because he said he didn’t feel like it… the only thing he worships, as you and I know, is money. Okay, fine, to each his own, but then I asked if he would go to brunch with me after church. I was talking about a nice brunch at the Silvermine Tavern, with mimosas and Bloody Marys. Since when has Grant ever turned down alcohol? But he said no, he didn’t want to eat a big brunch and he didn’t want to drink because he had plans to go jogging with Joe Price at two o’clock. And that was it. The moment.”
“It was?” India said.
“Grant had never jogged in his life. But on that Sunday, he was going jogging with Joe Price. Because he would accept any offer to avoid spending time with me.”
India exhaled and picked a fleck of tobacco from her tongue. What could she say? Birdie was probably right. Grant was a guy’s guy. He excelled at the manly. He wrote the handbook.
“I didn’t want to do it. I spent a lot of time thinking about the Campbells and the Olivers and the Martinellis and the Alquins and all our other friends who had weathered the first storm of divorce that came through when we were all in our late thirties. We were the survivors, we thought. We had skirted stepchildren and alimony payments. We were proud of that; I was proud of that. I was proud to still be married. But the only thing I was holding on to, I realized, was my own misery. So before he could even tie up his running shoes, I asked Grant to move out. And he said, ‘Are you sure, Bird?’ As nice as can be, but in a way that let me know the marriage wasn’t something he valued enough to fight for. And I said, ‘I’m sure.’ And he was gone-not that night, but a couple of nights later.”
“Did it feel weird?” India asked. “Watching him move his stuff out?”
Birdie tapped ash into the clam shell that India was using as an ashtray. “What was weird was that he had so little to take. What was there? His suits, his toothbrush, his bathrobe and slippers. His humidor. His tennis racquets and his two sets of golf clubs. A few pictures of the kids, but these I suggested. He took the flat-screen TV and his really good scotch from the liquor cabinet. He made only one trip and all of it fit into the Jaguar. And that was it.”
“That was it,” India said. God, Bill had had so much stuff. His studio was filled with sketchbooks, clay, rolls of copper wire, copper sheeting, canvases, paints, color palettes stolen from the hardware store, and half-finished studies for sculptures. He had hundreds of CDs-from Mozart to the Beatles to the Cure. He loved music; he always wanted to know what the boys were listening to. He had the things he bought in other countries-a Tibetan prayer shawl, a flute from India, masks and blowguns and kris knives, a tea set from China. He had other artists’ sculptures and other artists’ paintings. He had his own set of chef’s knives and his special Indian spices ordered from Harrod’s. He had a library filled with books. Thousands and thousands of books. If India had asked Bill to leave, it would have taken him months to gather his shit. As it was, after he died, India kept it all. This was her attorney’s suggestion. Do not throw away anything that personally belonged to Bill Bishop. Someday, down the road, they could talk about donations. Or about a foundation. Or about turning the house into a museum.