Antennae, yeah, that’s it.
Okay, maybe it’s an “abstraction,” but that’s how it always looked to me. And I figure Laurie meant it that way too. Who Is Coming? Well, it wasn’t Laurie, because her hair was long and dark, nearly black, and it sure as hell wasn’t me. So who was it that was coming?
I’ll tell you who: it was Laurie’s mother, Celia. And that’s why she gave it to us, because she wanted Dan to be reminded all the time of his dead wife, and she wanted me to be reminded, too. Haunted, you could say. She wanted me to have to look at Celia every damn time I walked into this room.
Nuh-uh, I certainly didn’t say anything to Dan. If he didn’t get the idea himself, I wasn’t going to put it into his head. What I did was, I suggested we should move the painting into the study. I told Dan I thought it was lovely, but it didn’t match my color scheme: the gold carpet and upholstery and these red and blue accents that I chose to harmonize with my Matisse prints, they wiped Laurie’s picture right out, I said.
Nah, I didn’t get anywhere. Dan thought it’d hurt Laurie’s feelings if we even just moved her painting from over the fireplace, where she’d hung it, into the corner there. But he loved me, he wanted me to be happy, so he offered to have the whole room redecorated to harmonize with Laurie’s picture.
God, no. That was all I needed, to have my beautiful apartment done over in Celia Zimmern’s favorite sad wishy-washy colors.
There was nothing I could do about it. I just made up my mind not to see the picture. I trained myself not to look in that direction, and most of the time I didn’t, for sixteen years.
Yeah, that’s why I got rid of it, soon as I decently could after Dan was gone. Rod, that’s my son, he said to me the other day, “You should of held on to that picture, Ma, I bet it’s worth a lot now.” But I don’t have any regrets. I wasn’t going to have that dead-moth woman coming in over my mantel a day longer than I could help.
Maybe. My sister said, if you want to look at it from a religious point of view, Celia’s won: she’s got him back now. Not that I believe any of that stuff. Anyways, if there is an afterlife, there’s so many females fighting over Dan that a sad little bug like her wouldn’t have a chance.
Don’t get me wrong, I never had anything against Celia Zimmern. She was a nice enough woman, from what I hear; I only met her once. And everybody knows she was smart. She was a real highbrow, reading heavy books all the time. I think she made Dan feel kind of a clod, not that she probably meant to. But she was awfully kind of dim and washed out and ineffective. She sure wasn’t the right woman for him.
Pretty, yeah, I’ll give you pretty, but in marriage pretty isn’t everything. I’ll tell you what my mother said. She said, “What for did Dan want to marry a shiksa in the first place? You know what you get with a shiksa? Wonderbread. No taste, no nourishment.” And then Celia was sick so often, those last couple years, she wasn’t much use to anyone.
Oh, yeah, of course he was fond of her. When she was sick he got her the best doctors, he did all anybody could do. But every time he had to go to the hospital to see her it just about broke him up. He always said to me, “Marcia, when I go, I want to go fast.” After his heart attack, the doctor told him, take it easy, Mr. Zimmern, no exertion, no alcohol, no tobacco, no steak eggs butter, I don’t know what all, a nap every day, you could live for years. He tried it for a week, maybe two, then he said the hell with it. He said he might as well be dead already as live like that.
Yeah. He was gone in six months. But I figure it was what he wanted. He couldn’t have stood to waste away slow like Celia did.
No, I didn’t dislike her. I was sorry for her, really. It was her daughter I couldn’t stand.
Well, for instance. Most normal kids would be happy if their father found someone he could make a good life with, instead of moping around alone the rest of his days in that big sad empty White Plains house. Dan’s son, Lennie, he was always decent to me, not that we had much in common, but he used to come to dinner sometimes, and bring a bottle of wine, and we’d have a good laugh. ... But Laurie — or “Lorin” like you keep saying — and that’s another thing, that fancy name she picked out for herself. Affected, I always thought. Dan never could get used to it, he went on calling her Laurie, so I did the same. But I know she resented it. When she phoned it’d always be “This is Lorin here,” and I’d say, “Just a moment, Laurie, I’ll get your father.” Here, let’s have a little more gin. Come on, what’s the harm? We’re both grown women.
How did she treat me? Well, she hated me from the word go, really, that’s what I always felt. For one thing, she thought I was too young —
I was about forty, and Dan was going on sixty-five, but so what? He had more energy and nerve than most men half his age. If he came into a room, it was like a two-hundred-watt bulb went on, right up to the end. When he was in the hospital, dying, even then, he was so ... excuse me.
I didn’t mean to get weepy. It’s just that — I mean, I loved my first husband, he was a nice boy, but he didn’t know from nothing compared to Dan. Dan was the best thing that ever happened to me. You know, a widow with two kids, she doesn’t get many offers, not that kind anyhow. Sure, a lot of men were willing to take me out, give me a good time. But marriage, forget it. When Dan asked me I didn’t stop to think, how soon will I be a widow again? You’ve got to bet on your instincts, isn’t that right?
Anyhow, that’s what I always say. But Laurie couldn’t see it. She thought I was marrying him for his money, probably, not that he had all that much. And besides that, she thought I wasn’t educated enough. And then it was her opinion that we didn’t wait long enough after her mother was gone, and she blamed me for that.
Well, it was nearly seven months, most people would have said that was enough, specially since Celia had been in and out of the hospital for so long. But not Laurie. ... Besides, if you want to know the truth, she thought he was too chummy with me before Celia died.
Okay, suppose it was true? Dan was a healthy, good-looking man, and Celia hadn’t been a real wife to him for a long time, if you know what I mean. But his daughter couldn’t accept the facts of life. She was jealous, like a spoiled little girl. Only she wasn’t a kid anymore; she was nearly thirty. She was awful to me.
She treated me like a wicked stepmother, that’s what I always thought, as if I was persecuting her or something.
It wasn’t anything definite she did. But for instance, if you want to know, most of the time she wouldn’t even speak to me, not really. Okay, she was shy, but so what? After you know somebody a few years, you should get over shyness. But it was always the same: every time we saw her, almost every remark she addressed to her father. It was like I wasn’t in the room, only now and then she’d give me this sneaky Cinderella look.
No, Dan couldn’t see it. He was such a sweet guy, he always believed the best of anyone close to him, you know, and she was his baby daughter.
Oh, she knew what she was doing. Yeah, she knew, all right. I’m sorry to have to say this to you, seeing as how you’ve got to write a whole book about her, but Laurie Zimmern wasn’t a nice person.
10
A COLD DULL DAY in early December; an opening at the Museum. Polly was there, huddled on a sticky black leather bench in a back hallway near the telephone booth. She appeared to be waiting to make a call, but in fact she was hiding out.
She should never have come here, she thought; she should have gone straight home after her appointment at the endodontist’s. But she hadn’t wanted to admit that besides hurting her and frightening her and insulting her and giving her a first-class headache, Dr. Bebb had ruined her whole afternoon. It was bad enough that he had insisted on calling her “Paula” and told her that she probably ground her teeth at night, but he had also had the nerve to compare his work to hers.