A Bigamist's Daughter (7 page)

Elizabeth nods. “So,” she says. “To repeat the question: Why do we feel guilty about knowing why we shouldn’t?”

Ann looks at the ceiling. “Because,” she says, ticking off the logic on her fingers, “if you feel guilty, you feel responsible; if you feel responsible, you feel there is something you can do about it. You’ve got some control. But no guilt means no responsibility, no control, no power. So we make ourselves feel guilty even when we have nothing to feel guilty about. You should have taken that course at NYU with me. We were always talking about women and guilt.” She frowns again. “So what did you do to Tupperware that makes you feel guilty?”

“I invited him to my apartment tonight,” she says and then quickly adds, “But that’s not what I’m talking about.”

Ann slaps her hands together. “Oh, good,” she says. “Are you going to sleep with him or just let him look at you?”

She’s a little startled. “Look at me?”

Ann laughs, taking a thin manuscript from the OUT box.
“God, when you two walked out of here, he was watching you as if you were pure gold.”

“That’s because I’d just told him what a masterpiece he’d written.”

She looks at the manuscript in her hand, reads the title page.

“Heart Murmurs.
Poetry, hey?” She shakes her head. “No, it was more than that. Pure adoration.”

Elizabeth shuffles some papers, trying not to look too pleased. “Oh, great, that’s all I need.”

Ann shrugs, looking up from the poems. “So go to bed with him. Do what I did to Brian. Fuck the adoration right off his face.” She turns and walks to the door. Blue and white. Hips and breasts. She turns suddenly. “Oh, dear,” she says. “Speaking of adoration, that’s what I came in for. Mr. Palmer is here to see you.”

She moans. “Does he have an appointment?”

“You made it with him. That day he called to tell you his brother had just dropped dead on Beaver Street.”

She remembers the day. Elizabeth had been one of the first people he called. His brother had been his last surviving relative.

“You felt sorry for him,” Ann says.

“I know. Well, call me in fifteen minutes.”

“Will do, boss.” She swings out of the office, all hips.

Elizabeth tries to remember the logic: guilt, responsibility, power. This from Ann who turns every rotten thing Brian ever did into her own sly maneuver.

Mr. Palmer’s bio card has little information. Jonathan Whitney Peale Palmer. Author of
Apocalyptic Calculations Based in the Third Dimension.
Lives in the Hotel Belvedere. Signed a $6,500 contract but is still making slight changes in his manuscript. Graduated from Harvard sixty years ago.

Another wealthy young man whose family paid to let him
be a writer, or, actually, an apocalyptic mathematician, so that now, sixty years later, the sole survivor, he can publish a book that will give the family name immortality. If a name on a hundred books sitting in a dusty storeroom can be considered immortality.

But she’d felt sorry for him. It happens. In her two years here, she’s learned to control her pity, but still, at times, it escapes, grows from her heart like those thin, flesh-colored bubbles that occasionally, unexpectedly, blossom between Bonnie’s chapped lips: transparent, pulsing, achingly thin. Not that her authors deserve or even want it. Not that it does any of them any good.

She had pitied Conrad Sikes and he, the next time he saw her, ducked his head and raised his tanned fingers to his brow, like a reluctant star. As if, that night, he had been the star.

She returns Mr. Palmer’s card to her file and goes out to the reception room to collect him. He is sitting on one of the Danish modern chairs, partly sunk into it, his battered brief case and black homburg on his lap, a faded blue ascot wrapped around his thin throat. He looks badly in need of a dusting.

“Mish Connelly!” he sputters when he sees her.

“Hello, Mr. Palmer,” she shouts, holding out her hand, helping him out of the chair. “Nice to see you again.”

He reeks of Old Spice and she can feel drops of spittle falling on her outstretched arm as he speaks. “Ash beautiful ash ever,” he says, beaming, his yellow upper plate slipping from his gums with each word. His thin hair glistens with tonic.

“Thank you,” she says. “You’re looking well yourself. Come inside.”

He goes through the door ahead of her and as he does, she notices Bonnie. Her hand is over her mouth, her eyes and blood-red forehead wrinkled with laughter.

Mr. Palmer walks slowly down the corridor, his free hand
brushing the wall. Taking his elbow, she guides him into her office, into one of the brown chairs.

“Now, Mr. Palmer,” she asks, smiling, closing the door. “What can I do for you?”

He lifts both hands and taps them on his brief case. “Thish is my manuscript,” he says. “I want to show you the changes I made.”

He fiddles with the latch and then hands the brief case to her, smiling apologetically. She opens it for him and passes it back across the desk. It’s an old leather bag with the initials JWPP printed on it in worn gold letters.

He takes out the moth-eaten manuscript and she moves to the chair beside him so he won’t have to lean across her desk.

“That’sh a lovely dress,” he says softly before he begins.

“Thank you,” she says.

He hands her the manuscript, then searches in his brief case again. She imagines Ned’s reaction when
Apocalyptic Calculations
hits production.

Mr. Palmer extracts a small, wrinkled sketch from his bag. It is on dirty tissue paper and seems to be a grid of some kind.

“Thish,” he says, pointing to the paper with a trembling finger, “goesh here.” He taps the front page of the manuscript and she marks the spot with a red pen.

“Fine,” she says.

“That’sh very important, you know.”

She nods, looking grave, and he turns a few pages of the manuscript. “Theesh numbers here are all wrong,” he says, pointing to a row of them.

She crosses them out with the red pen and he says, “Very good.”

“What should they be?” she asks him.

He taps his fingers against his brow, rolling his eyes, wafting Old Spice through the room. “Eshleben,” he says finally.

She repeats it and he nods and she writes 11 on the page.

“No,” he cries, smiling. “Eshleben.” Spittle hits the page like tiny raindrops.

“Seven?” she asks. He nods and she writes 7.

“No, no,” he says again, laughing. He is being very patient with her. “Eshleben.”

She points at the 11 she’s just crossed out. “Eleven?” she asks again.

Very gently, he takes the pen from her hand and writes, in large, shaky letters: 29. He hands the pen back to her and points to the number. “Eshleben,” he says, smiling.

She nods and he pats her gently on the shoulder. “Oh,” she says loudly. “Eshleben.”

This goes on. Five is 9, twenty-two is 50. He shouts numbers at her and she writes them down. Only twice is she right. Every other time, Mr. Palmer gently takes the pen and patiently writes the number for her. It’s like learning to count all over again.

“See?” he asks, and she says, “Yes, twelb,” nodding and pointing to a 93.

When the last number is changed (selenty-sel is 33), he sits back, sighs. “Now it’sh finished,” he says. “It’sh a very good book.”

“Yes,” she tells him. And he smiles at her with all his perfectly yellow false teeth.

“Yesh,” he says. “I know.”

Chapter 4

When she leaves work at five, she walks down to Penn Station. It’s starting to get dark earlier now, and the crowds around Thirty-fourth Street are moving quickly, crossing the street in clumps, like conventions of blind people. A woman in a red coat stands in front of her as a group of them wait for the light on Eighth Avenue. The woman has a black attaché case tucked under her arm. “I’m sick of this,” she tells another woman beside her. “Sick, sick, sick.” The other woman laughs.

Downstairs in Penn Station it is dirty and bright. People are running stiffly, as if it had begun to rain and they have a specific shelter in mind. The whole place smells of doughnuts.

The bar is unbelievably dark, a yellow, muddy kind of darkness, and it takes her a while to see Joanne. She is in their usual booth, right next to the hot hors d’oeuvre. She flutters her fingers at Elizabeth, and Bert, the tall black man who carves the ham and dishes up the meatballs, says, “Here she is, here she is,” as she approaches.

Joanne slides out of the booth and they hug. Although Elizabeth is nearly four inches taller, Joanne seems to lean into her a little, as if she were the one who had to bend for the embrace. They haven’t seen each other since her wedding a
month ago, although before that they met here for drinks nearly every Friday night. Joanne has a party to go to when she gets home tonight and Elizabeth has Tupper Daniels coming over, but they made this date two weeks ago and neither of them wanted to break it. They’d promised each other that Joanne’s marriage wouldn’t change their very old friendship, and this meeting is their token attempt to keep that promise.

“How
are
you?” Elizabeth says, sliding into the booth, slipping off her jacket. “You look great.”

Joanne laughs, puts her thin fingers to her face. Her thick, shining wedding band. “Do I still have my tan?”

“You do,” she says, looking closely. “How was Aruba?”

“Hot.” She rolls her eyes. She has a narrow face and big, bulging brown eyes. Nervous hands. When they were in grammar school at St. Elizabeth’s, people used to say that Elizabeth was the Irish version of Joanne and Joanne the Italian version of her. But since then Elizabeth has grown taller and wider and her nose has gotten sharp. Joanne has simply grown breasts, large ones; everything else about her has seemingly stayed just about the same.

The waitress comes to take Elizabeth’s order and Joanne asks for another vodka and tonic, although the one before her is nearly filled. Elizabeth notices that the black bowl between them contains only popcorn kernels and is nearly empty.

“How long have you been here?” she asks.

Joanne shrugs. “Not long. So what’s new with you? Did Toby ever call you?” She picks up one of the kernels and bites it between her front teeth.

“No,” she says. “I didn’t really expect him to.” Toby was her partner at the wedding. They’d kept up a polite banter throughout the whole thing and eventually got ridiculously drunk together, but she was sure he’d only asked for her number because all the other unmarried ushers were asking all the
other unmarried bridesmaids for theirs. “I think he just took my number because he was kind of caught up in the spirit of things.”

“What do you mean?” Joanne asks, looking at her carefully, almost cautiously.

“Oh, you know, the wedding and the drinking and the dancing. And you and Tommy looked so cute together, I think everyone wanted to get married, or at least be in love.” She laughs. “And when your father got up and sang ‘Stay as Sweet as You Are,’ to your mother—”

“He was drunk,” Joanne says.

She laughs again. “God, who wasn’t?” It had been a wonderful, extravagant wedding. Eight bridesmaids, six limousines, three hundred guests, a nuptial mass, and seven rolling bars. Joanne’s father, a short, burly man, almost suave in his brown tuxedo and ruffled yellow shirt, had cried openly during the ceremony and then danced with every woman at the reception, frequently grabbing the microphone away from the band leader to shout insults at his friends. Insults that always ended with, “Ahh, I love ya!”

There had been a cocktail hour with a twelve-foot table of hors d’oeuvre and a fountain of champagne. A six-course Italian dinner, a Viennese dessert table. Tommy’s family sang German and Irish songs, Joanne’s sang Italian, all of them did the hora and sang
Hava Nagila.

“You should see the hem of my dress,” she tells Joanne now. “Ripped to shreds.”

Joanne looks concerned. They’d spent a year finding those blue Qiana dresses and another six months deciding what to wear in their hair and what flowers to carry. “Is it ruined?”

“No,” Elizabeth says. “I can fix it. Don’t you remember? I showed you at the wedding.”

She shakes her head. “They say the bride never remembers
anything.” “Are you on drugs?” Elizabeth had asked her at one point during the reception, she was smiling so, her eyes were so bright. Joanne had just smiled back at her, lights snapping around them.

“How did the pictures come out?”

Joanne pushes her glass to the end of the table and pulls the new one to her. The small red napkin beneath it is soggy and she lifts the glass a few times, blotting it. “I don’t know,” she says, watching the glass. “I haven’t looked at them.”

“What?” Elizabeth laughs a little. “After all the posing we did? How could you not look at them?” She suspects Joanne is joking.

She takes a sip of her drink. “I don’t like thinking about the wedding,” she says solemnly. “I don’t even like to talk about it.”

Elizabeth puts her hand on Joanne’s wrist. A reflex. Like when they used to play lightning tag when they were young: If I’m touching home and you touch me, you’re safe, I’m safe. If I’m touching you and you’re out, I’m out too. They always tried to be near each other when they played.