In her absence, New York had been invaded by cupcakes. Joggers ran barefoot now. Hipsters wore nerd glasses and beards. And walking had become an obstacle course, pedestrians inebriated on handheld devices, jostling one another as they passed, glancing up dimly at the shared world, then back into the bottomless depths projected from shining glass.
When she lived here, people were always lamenting how New York had changed, how Mayor Giuliani had cleansed Times Square of its gritty charm, turned it into a bland Disneyland. But the city had gentrified further since. Maybe it was just the experience of knowing New York over time, that it kept tidying up. Or perhaps it was the experience of living generally, that you hitched yourself to a particular period but places refused to remain anchored, jarring you at each re-acquaintance.
She arrived at Grand Central for her 4 P.M. train, people fast-walking in all directions, an explosion of humanity with rolling bags. In Caergenog, the church parking lot would be full right now, Saturday-night drinkers at the Hook, ponies wandering the windy ridge. It would be dark up there, lights dotting the valley.
Upon her arrival in Stamford, she hesitated before the station exit, surprised at her nerves on seeing Duncan again. A silver BMW pulled up; the passenger door clicked open. He nodded at her. “Welcome to sunny Connecticut.”
He’d become rather middle-aged: a hunch and a paunch, skin dull, eyes fatigued. She saw already the elderly man he would become, while the youth she’d known grew faint. “Jet-lagged?” he asked, glancing from Tooly to his lap, where he balanced an iPhone on one thigh, a blinking BlackBerry on the other. A notepad lay on the dashboard. She hadn’t seen his handwriting in years. Architectural block letters on graph paper evoked him so powerfully — even more than the man himself, somehow.
Driving toward his home in Darien, he pointed out the sights: a pond where he’d ice-skated as a boy, plus the old Post Road, a stagecoach-mail route in the early years of the republic that now offered SmartLipo, laser hair removal, and Bob’s Unpainted Furniture Gun Exchange.
Duncan was a partner at a Manhattan law firm now, head of a household, and self-possessed as he’d endearingly not been when younger. She perceived irony in the way he spoke to her, as if he’d discussed her earlier, perhaps with his wife — had said that Tooly was just so, and now before him she was proving exactly that. What had Duncan said she was? A little false? A little untrustworthy?
He turned sharply into a driveway. “Home.”
Before exiting, she said, “About tomorrow?”
“There’ll be time to discuss that later,” he said, getting out. “Meet my family now.”
“Sure. Of course.” She took out four cellophane bags of wrapped Swiss chocolates. “I brought presents for the youngsters. They each get a bag, I thought, to avoid civil war.”
“They’ll explode if we let them eat all that,” he said, struggling to unlock the house door with a mobile phone in each hand. “May have to take control myself.”
“Will not, you thief. I’m handing them out now, and you’re not interfering.”
“Three of them over there,” he said, back-kicking the door shut and nodding toward his seven-year-old identical triplets, who lay on an Oriental rug in the living room, one bopping to huge white headphones, her genetic double playing a game on a smartphone, the third goggling at an iPad. All three were dressed as fairies, in leotards with gossamer wings.
“Abigail?” Tooly said. “Which is Abigail? Stand and identify yourself — this is for you. Actually, doesn’t matter who gets which. Are you Chloë? And you’re Madlen? Eat them fast, before your father confiscates.”
Each girl snatched a package and ran to the couch.
“Four candies each and save the rest for later,” he said. “All right, girls?”
The triplets settled cross-legged, picking through their respective hauls, wings quivering as they dug forearm-deep into crinkly cellophane.
“And your boy?” Tooly asked, raising the final gift bag.
But Duncan was shouting upstairs for his wife. “Hail to the chief! Bridget!” No response. “Girls,” he asked, “where’s Mommy?”
They ignored him, gorging themselves.
“Bridget!” he shrieked, calling down to the basement now. “Bridge!”
“Mommy!” one of the triplets cried.
Another added, “Mom-my! You got uh vis-i-tuhhhh!”
Soon all were yelling. Houses with children — Tooly had forgotten about the shouting.
Chloë started dialing her phone.
“Honey,” Duncan told her, “don’t call Mommy. She’s probably just studying upstairs.”
That’s where they found her, earbuds in, which explained her fright when Duncan tapped her shoulder. “Oh jeez, hi,” she said, clasping her necklace. “Why didn’t you tell me your guest got here?” She clipped back her dirty-blond hair, nudged up black-rimmed glasses, and offered a handshake. Tooly would never have put her with Duncan. She was considerably taller, for a start. Not that this precluded a match, but it wasn’t what you expected.
They found the eldest child, Keith (known as Mac), playing Kinectimals on his Xbox 360 in the den. Whenever he moved, it controlled a cutesy puppy onscreen. Though, when you saw the eight-year-old falling on his back, then on his hind legs, it looked rather like the machine was doing the controlling.
“Seriously, Mac, isn’t that kind of a baby game?” Duncan asked.
Chastened, the boy turned it off. Whereas the triplets had traces of Asia in their slender features, with long black hair swishing like prideful little ponies, Mac was a plump boy who shared his mother’s pale Irish-German coloring.
“You didn’t hear us calling?” Duncan said. “We were all calling.”
Mac accepted his bag of chocolates and thanked Tooly, standing barefoot before her, his big toes crossed over each other.
“We’re about to eat dinner,” Duncan said. “You can try them after. Just be patient.”
“Oh, let him have some,” Bridget said.
Duncan counted out just two, then placed them on the table.
Dinner proved raucous, not just owing to the cross-purpose conversations but because of the laptops. Checking email was discouraged at mealtimes but — fortunately for Abigail, Chloë, and Madlen — there was no rule against playing Justin Bieber videos on YouTube. The triplets kept jumping from their seats and setting off new clips.
“Aren’t there nine planets?” Duncan said. “Can someone Google that? Not with your knife and fork, Mac. You’re getting sauce in the frickin’ keyboard, man!”
“I’m not Googling. It’s Wikipedia.”
“How on earth,” Bridget said, “did people find out stuff before Google?”
“The library?” her husband suggested.
“Like on iTunes,” one of the triplets said.
“Not an iTunes library, Maddy,” Duncan told her. “Like an actual library.”
“Whatever, dork ass,” she responded.
The family exploded into laughter, Duncan above all, and Madlen beamed, staring in red-faced delight at each adult in turn.
“Keyboard’s filthy, you guys,” Duncan said. “Let’s try and not total that computer in, like, its first six months of life.”
“How do you spell ‘planets’?” Mac asked.
Bridget answered, “Like it sounds, honey: plan-ets.”
Mac whispered those sounds to himself, typing each letter as if depressing a key might explode something. He read it back, looking to his mother: “P-L-A-N-I-T-S?”
“With an e,” Duncan said. “She told you: plan-ets.”