Gossip (14 page)

Dinah promised. They brought her tea, a bag of ice for the knee and her knee brace, and Nicky laid the fire and lit it for her.

Grace asked as she drank her tea, “Tell the truth, Dinah. Can you walk?”

“I'd like my cane,” she admitted, and Nicky went to find the one she'd gotten after surgery on her torn meniscus. (When you're young you never even hear such words; then suddenly you reach an age when you can't have a conversation without them. Gil says getting old is like going to medical school one course at a time.)

They told her about the party. Grace did her entirely too apt imitation of Avis primly writing down the names of the givers and the details of the gifts while all about her people were drinking wine and tying ribbons around each other. But Dinah didn't really cheer up. After a while she began to cry again, and both children were dumbstruck. Dinah was never blue. Often cross or loud or out of patience but never this purely sad.

“What is it? What
is
it?” Grace asked.

“Mom, please,” said Nicky. At last she came out with it.

“I'm dreading this wedding. Just
dreading
it. I know Avis has dreamed of this since you were born, Grace, but I've looked forward to Nicky's wedding day too. Of course RJ would want the whole suburban country club thing, and he had it and it was fine, but I thought planning this with Nick was going to be fun. That we'd do it on top of a mountain with a punk klezmer accordion band. Or that we'd do it right here, you'd write your own vows and be married by Reverend Billy, and we'd all wear blue jeans and then have a feast. Instead, it's like planning a wedding with Lizzie Windsor.” (This was how Dinah referred to the British monarch.) “I won't be able to dance at your wedding, I'll be lucky if I can walk down the aisle without crutches. And the only evening dress we could find that I can afford makes me look like a giant eggplant.”

This hurt when I heard it, I can tell you. I went to no small trouble over that dress; it had to be made from scratch, and she never knew that I had only charged her for materials. She had chosen the fabric herself, and the color was very becoming.

Nicky and Grace were upset. Was there no way out of this? How could they go through with Avis's wedding knowing Dinah was so unhappy?

“I know,” said Grace. “We'll elope.”

“You can't,” said Dinah. “It would kill Belinda, and I like
her
. And my parents would be sad as well.” It would also have disappointed Nicky, but she luckily didn't have to say that.

“All right,” said Grace. “We'll get married twice. We'll get married here, in secret, with a punk klezmer band and Reverend Billy, and only our best friends standing up with us. Then we'll go through Avis's wingding, and no one will know it's just a performance. And if you don't get through it or don't want to stay, or even don't want to
come,
you won't miss anything real!”

At this point, you're thinking what I'm thinking. Dinah has to say no. She has to say it isn't fair and it isn't right; it's mean-spirited. To let Avis go to all that trouble, and incredible expense, and not know the whole thing is a charade? It's
too
bad.

But Dinah apparently said yes. Well not apparently, she did. She said yes. I don't know, maybe that's why now we're all dressing for a funeral.

I
'll tell you what it was like, not that I was there, since apparently I couldn't be trusted not to tell Avis. They were married in Dinah's apartment right after Thanksgiving. Sebastian, Grace's little poodle, was the bride's attendant; he wore a red velvet ruff for the occasion. Nicky's friend Toby got himself ordained by some site on the Internet so he could perform the service. Dinah's sisters were there, and RJ and Laura, and about twenty young people, many of whom I had considered my friends. Dinah read a poem; Grace and Nicky recited vows they had written themselves, then they faced each other in front of the fireplace, holding hands, and sang to each other. Grace sang “A Wonderful Guy”; Nicky sang “The Most Beautiful Girl in the World.” They were pronounced husband and wife by the power vested in Toby by the State of New York, and then everyone had champagne and blinis with caviar. I have no idea what anybody wore, except the dog—gym clothes, probably. Avis still doesn't know it happened, and I hope she never finds out.

I
f nothing else, the official wedding was a bonanza for hair salons, dress shops, and the social press. Though it wasn't that long ago, in these days of failed banks and financial disaster at every hand, it seems like an event from the last days of Pompeii, but at the human level it was a complete success in the one way that mattered most, at least to me: Belinda loved every minute of it.

We made a new dress for her in navy satin that was actually in two pieces, to allow for the tubes from her side that were permanently draining into a pair of sacs she called Harold and Maude. Mrs. Oba made a matching bag for them held with a broad satin strap that crossed her now tiny rib cage diagonally like a military sash. It was decorated with large grosgrain roses that concealed almost perfectly its actual function. Belinda walked up the aisle to her seat on the arm of Nicky's friend Toby, resplendent in his swallowtail coat, with her cane swathed in ribbons that matched her dress, her well-coiffed head bobbing with effort on her long neck while she smiled proudly at beaming friends on both sides of the aisle. It was the last time she walked in public. After the ceremony she allowed herself to be moved into a wheelchair, but from it she enjoyed the dinner, the toasts, the couple's “first dance,” and the cutting of the seven-tier wedding cake covered with marzipan doves.

Belinda did not leave her bed again for days afterward. Then she seemed to recover, and we eased into foolish hope. But in March she had a terrifying bout of rigor shakes—do you know the term? It rhymes with
tiger
and it's shattering, caused by the kind of infection you get when your immune system is on the mat and about to be counted out. That put her back in the hospital for weeks, after which, though she lived almost to the end of the year, she was in the hospital more than she was out of it.

One morning in early April, Belinda's housekeeper, who was Peruvian and took care of her with as much slavish devotion as if Belinda were the Great Inca, called me at the shop. Her English was not good, so this was an act of particular courage for her.

“Missus Lovie . . .” Ursula always sounded as if she might burst into tears if she had to attract personal notice to herself in any way.

“Good morning, Ursula. Is Mrs. Binney all right?”

“Yes, missus. No, missus. She is in the slammer, Missus Lovie.” She uttered this without irony, as it was the way Belinda referred to the hospital. “She wants a banana smoothie, missus, and I don't know, and Missus Avis is not at home . . .”

“Thank you so much for telling me, Ursula. I can take that right to her now.”

“Oh, thank you, Missus Lovie!” You'd have thought I had personally averted the death of the sun, or the need for her to cut her own heart out on some high stone altar. I bustled uptown in foul raw weather and waited in the lunch rush line at the shop near the hospital that Belinda favored. When I placed my order, the counterman said that he had no bananas and was annoyed when I wouldn't order something else. I struck back out into the drizzle and wind and walked until I found a bodega, bought a bunch of bananas, went back, and handed them to the counterman. It was worth it: Belinda in her high narrow room was delighted with the story and sang to me, “Yes, we have no bananas . . .” a song that she claimed had greatly amused her father. It was a good day for her, and I stayed quite a while as she told me stories of her childhood in Dover, Ohio, where her parents had owned a hardware store.

It is my observation that the people who enjoy money the most are the ones who weren't born with it. For the congenitally rich, money creates a kind of cage, a structure of manners and expectations they don't dare question, because if they do they might discover they don't know who they are. For our classmates at school it was the water they swam in, isolating them in ways they sometimes never understand. But the money she'd married, then cleverly managed into a sizable pile, changed Belinda from a quietly pretty girl in rural Ohio to the Great Inca of New York City, and she enjoyed every cent of it because she never lost the memory of what it was not to have it. Not that she hadn't enjoyed her simple childhood; she had, very much. That was her true distinction, not the money. The capacity to enjoy and appreciate what she had, whatever it was.

What she had now was time, measured no longer in vats or even gallons but teaspoons. Her response to her death sentence was to resolve to live every moment she had left impeccably. Never to rage or blame, never to feel that her minutes mattered more than other people's, never to presume that her needs and wishes weighed more than theirs did. A hospital like MSK is filled with patients so frightened and angry at their fates that they attack even those trying hardest to help them. No wonder Belinda was a favorite there. I saw her undone only once in all the time I spent with her in the hospital; we were downstairs in Imaging, where she was waiting for some kind of test for which they were dripping fluid into an internal organ—we didn't discuss which one. She sat in her wheelchair in the hallway with her metal tree beside her hung with bags attached to tubes attached to Belinda at various points on her body. I sat beside her, telling her some tale I had heard at the shop. Her face was gradually clouding with distress, and I didn't know what to do. Go on chattering? Scream for help? At last she interrupted me. When I got back to her with a nurse in tow, he blanched to see how much liquid had left whichever bag it was, blowing up something inside Belinda to the point of unbearable pressure on some, I suppose, sphincter. I rolled the intravenous tree behind her as he rushed the wheelchair down the hall, knocking on doors to bathrooms. I thought he might burst into one and pull whoever was in there off the can, but he found an empty one, and the two of them disappeared inside.

When she was returned to me, Belinda's lashes were wet with tears. She looked at me with a face for once empty of cheer and said in a tiny voice, “You can't imagine the indignities.” It was true, I couldn't. Though I was learning to fear them deeply in the small hours of the night. The next moment she pulled herself together like one gathering up a failed house of cards, and said, “Now tell me the gossip.” This became my purpose, the thing I could do for her, bring in news about life outside to surround her. She wasn't prepared to leave what she had loved, although it belonged to others now, a moment before her time.

B
elinda had wanted to give Nick and Grace a trip to Europe as a wedding present. They told her they couldn't go because of their jobs, but the truth, I'm glad to say, was that they wouldn't have anyway. This was no time, Grace said, to be leaving Belinda or Dinah, who was finally having her knee rebuilt. For a wedding trip, they took a long weekend and went to California.

“California!” said Belinda happily. “Oh, I
love
San Francisco! We used to go out and stay at The Clift. The light on the bay at twilight, all green and violet, is too beautiful to bear!” She would never see that light again, or see anything more than half an hour from the hospital. Grace and Nicky stayed at the Huntington, on the top of Nob Hill, at a cost that even Avis found hard to believe, and spent their time, as near as we could make out, at the zoo.

“Nicky
loves
zoos,” Grace reported, apparently finding this deeply charming. “He loves animals. When I wake up in the night and he's not in bed, he's always in the den, watching the Nature Channel.” He had wanted to take Sebastian on the honeymoon, but wisdom prevailed, and Sebastian was residing instead in Dinah's kitchen.

After San Francisco, they drove down the coast to Monterey, where they spent half a day watching the sea horses at the aquarium. They spent a night at a paradise for sybarites set into the sere hills above Big Sur. They had a romantic dinner and a naked soak under the stars in the coed Japanese baths. “Ooh la la!” said Belinda. The next day they hiked in Los Padres National Forest, and afterward had side-by-side massages in their room.

They spent a night in Santa Barbara, and two nights in L.A.

“I never cared for Los Angeles,” said Belinda. “What did they find to do?”

“They spent one day at the Getty Museum and one at Disneyland.”

“Well, they are a pair,” Belinda said. And then, thoughtfully, “But what kind of a newlywed twenty-eight-year-old is up in the middle of the night watching the Nature Channel?”

N
icky, as it turns out, loved L.A. He loved the climate, he loved the cars, he loved the beach at Malibu. We learned this when, about a month after the wedding trip, he was offered a part in a television pilot by one of his college pals, now a Hollywood hyphenate, writer-producer. I was keeping Dinah company as she pedaled resentfully on her recumbent bike machine, under orders from the P.T., whom she called her Physical Terrorist, when Nicky arrived with the news. (Grace had given Dinah an iPod already loaded with “Mom music” for her recuperation, but she hated exercise so much that mere music was not enough of a distraction or incentive. I came over a couple of times a week to crack the whip.)

“It's a comedy/drama about a marriage license bureau,” said Nicky.

“Set in L.A.?”

“Keep pedaling, Mom. No, set in New York.”

Dinah grudgingly resumed her labors. “That's good at least,” she said. “So you'll film here?”

“Only the exteriors. If it goes, we'd be here a couple of days a month.”

Dinah stopped again.

“Keep pedaling, Mom.”

“Stuff it,” she said, hauling herself to her feet and making for her big chair by the fireplace. “Get me a Diet Coke, will you?”