Gossip (15 page)

Nicky came back with one for each of us.

“I'm playing the upper-class twit whose girlfriend leaves him at the altar, and he winds up working there. Alvin wrote the part for me.”

“Wait, Nick. I'm thrilled for you,” said Dinah. “But could I just point out that you have a wife and she lives in New York?”

“Gosh,” he said, slapping his forehead. “Is that who that girl is who's always at my apartment when I get home? You must be right!”

“Not to mention your tragic old mother, whiling away her sunset years eating cat food by herself.”

“Grace loves Alvin's work, and she knew I was an actor when she married me.”

“She did not. She thought you were going to be a lawyer. So did I. How are you going to pay your student loans if you quit?”

“She knew I was an actor first, and this job pays three times as much as I'd make as a starting lawyer.”

“Really?” said Dinah. “Three times?”

I said, “Alvin's work?”

He named a couple of movies I had heard of but not followed closely, being fairly much opposed to entertainments with the word
jackass
in the title.

“What happens if the show doesn't go?” I asked.

“I'll finish school and be a lawyer.” Knowing how way leads on to way, I doubted that, but maybe he'd be a hit as an actor. Stranger things have happened.

“What's the pilot about?” Dinah asked.

“There's me and my girlfriend, Petula, a flower child who shows up with her new fiancé, some hedge fund monster, and she tells me she'll always love me like a brother and asks me to give her away.”

“Give her away! How about throw her out a window?”

“I hope you don't do it,” I said.

“I give her away. Weeping. Then for the rest of the show, just at the happiest moments, I wander through again, with tears streaming.”

“I guess that's funny.”

“There's the pink-haired punker who's marrying a guy who needs a green card. They can't understand a word of each other's language. Then there's a guy who wants a license to marry his cat, because she was his girlfriend in a former life.”

“That's funny,” said Dinah.

“Then a guy who works in the bureau becomes hysterical and begins ranting about his lonely hovel and his Fiestaware, and trying to make his mother's recipe for pot roast for one, and they take him away, and there I am, still weeping in the corner, so I get his job.”

Dinah and I look at each other. “For this we sent you to college?”

“I knew you'd be pleased,” said Nicky.

The pilot took four weeks to shoot. Grace, who'd begun student teaching, was exhausted, but she and Sebastian flew out for two of the weekends. Her friends all thought it was way cool.

Chapter 14

D
inah's cooking classes started this way, that same spring of 2004. Dinah met a man at the rehab place where she went after she had her knee rebuilt. His name was Mike Allison. They passed each other several times in the hall before Dinah called to him, “I'm a knee, what are you?” He has one of those faces that looks sad or sullen in repose, but changes entirely when he smiles, which he did as he said, “I'm a hip.”

“Lucky you,” said Dinah as they stumped past each other on their walkers. Mike was a widower, a finance guy who had recently moved back to the city from the suburbs. He seemed lonely. “Two major crises: he lost his wife, then he lost his context,” Dinah told me.

“Then his hip.”

“Yes, but let the record show, knees are much worse than hips.”

“I'll take your word for it.”

The first time I saw Mike, he was walking ahead of me toward Dinah's building with a bottle of wine and two bunches of tulips. I thought he well might be Dinah's new friend and had a moment of disappointment at the silver hair, the round bald spot at the back of the head, the slight stoutness on what had the look of a once-athletic body. I hadn't expected him to be old. When we were properly introduced and I saw him in the light, I realized he was younger than we are. This happens more and more, and it is quite disorienting. You'll understand in about twenty years.

Dinah had invited me and Grace and two of Grace's friends to a dinner that night to meet her new buddy, the hip. It was early May but still chilly weather. She had planned short ribs with horseradish sauce, a soup to start and panna cotta with caramel to finish, then she realized she couldn't possibly stand long enough to cook it. I urged her to let me bring soup and buy dessert, but she said, “Grown men have been known to faint at my panna cotta.” Grace volunteered to be her sous chef so Dinah could sit and give orders.

By the time Mike and I arrived for that first dinner, the kitchen was an unholy mess but the apartment was filled with delicious smells. I set the table and showed Grace how to clean and arrange the tulips while Dinah and the hip man sat by the fire with their drinks and set about getting to know each other.

Everything about that evening clicked from the start. Grace's young friends were freshly scrubbed and attractive and wildly appreciative of everything. Grace was in that heightened state that comes sometimes with the pleasure of mastering something you never thought you'd understand, and Mike—it had been years since I'd seen Dinah with a man who got her sense of humor so immediately and completely. I found myself wishing Gil could be there instead of wherever he was—in Aruba, I think it was—but I suppose that had its charms as well.

I was bringing in the salad—a simple green salad of butter lettuce with spiced walnuts and pomegranate seeds, if that's your idea of simple—when I heard Grace say, “All right, come clean—what do you mean by your ‘misspent youth'?”

Mike's face was pleasantly flushed, and he'd loosened his tie. “You promise not to laugh?”

We all promised.

He said, “I was an opera singer.”

“Shut
up
!” said Grace's waiflike friend.

“Prove it,” said Dinah.

Mike straightened his posture and launched into “Una furtiva lagrima.” By the time he was done, I was in love if Dinah wasn't. He told the rest of the story, how he started, why he stopped, while I was unmolding the panna cotta, so I missed much of it. But by the time the evening was over, the group was planning a rematch. Dinah had promised that she would teach all of them how to make chicken with forty garlic cloves the next week, and everyone was lobbying about what kind of dessert soufflés to make with it.

Thus began Dinah's third career. Travel was no longer the pleasure it had been for her; climbing stairs or hills was a problem, and airline seats had come to feel unreasonably confining. Lately she'd been accepting only assignments close enough to home to drive to or reach by train or subway, and how many times can you find new ways of describing another chrome-and-leather bachelor loft in the meatpacking district for yet another Goldman Sachs billionaire? Actually, if I'd been a writer, I'd probably have been able to carry it on for quite a while, since I really care about how things look. But Dinah has always wanted to know what they mean beneath the surface, and in her view, these private palaces didn't mean anything underneath, except that the owners were much richer than she would ever be.

At first the classes were held every Saturday, and Grace's friends began coming. Grace and Dinah were more and more in each other's pockets, working smoothly together, sharing private jokes, almost as it had been with her and Simon Snyder. Dinah added weekday classes, and
New York
magazine wrote her up, followed soon after by a feature on her savory cocktail cookies in Oprah's magazine. Her knee was healed and forgotten as she acquired new devotees, explored new cuisines, and sat for more interviews. During the second summer she moved out to Water Mill with Mike while her kitchen was remade for teaching large classes. She did a before-and-after article on the renovation, and with the fee was able to buy a huge Sub-Zero refrigerator and a restaurant-size freezer.

People pointed out that pouring money like that into an apartment you don't own was a poor investment, but she said it was cheap insurance, protecting her from murder by landlord. And Mike was like the Man Who Came to Dinner and never went home. He helped with the prep work for the classes and paid for a helper to clean up after the meal was eaten and the students had gone. He and Dinah sang Sondheim together in the kitchen. The students ate the food they all prepared, course by course, perched on stools around the work island, made friends and started romances. Dinah hadn't been so happy since before Richard met Charlotte.

And was Mike in love? I certainly thought so. If Dinah's size was going to be a problem, that would have been apparent from the first, and it clearly wasn't. There are more men than you think who prefer their ladies heavy, maybe because they feel it protects them from competition. If there are also erotic aspects to the phenomenon, and I suspect there are, I draw the veil. But I know at least one size eighteen wife of a real estate tycoon whose husband left her for a woman even larger, and it's an interesting part of my business, finding really good clothes to fit them both.

N
icky's pilot didn't sweep the ratings, but it did well enough for the network to order six shows. When those did well enough, the bosses ordered six more, a full season. Avis was sweetly proud of him. She told all her friends about the show and stopped going out on Tuesday evenings so she could watch it. Grace rolled her eyes and said, “You
could
TiVo it, Mother,” but Avis said, “That wouldn't be any fun,” meaning she didn't know how. “Besides, doesn't it help the ratings if I watch it when it's broadcast?”

“No,” said Grace.

At a dinner Grace and I attended, Avis told her guests about Nicky's show. “You should watch, you really should, they are perfectly charming. They're directed by that young man Albert Grable, who makes those movies.”

“Writer-producer, Mother,” said Grace. “And it's Alvin.”

Avis paused. “What did I say?”

“You said director.”

“Oh,” said Avis, and looked a little sad.

Grace had only joined us that evening because she was restless and lonely. Nicky hadn't been home for three weeks.

O
ne afternoon in late fall of that year, on a last day of Indian summer, I closed the shop early and walked, wearing only a light wool jacket, all the way to Belinda's apartment, relishing the sun on my face, and the last gold leaves still clinging to naked branches. Althea Flood had gone to Venice with friends, and Gil and I were to have a whole week together, the first good stretch in what seemed like eons. I couldn't wait to get up to Connecticut, to be sure my gardens were properly covered in pine boughs and ready for winter.

Ursula opened the door to me and exclaimed, “Missus Lovie!”

“How are you, dear, on this beautiful day?” I handed her my jacket.

“Fine, missus! . . . Missus Avis is here, missus!”

“How nice. Upstairs?”

“In the study, missus.”

I went in to find mother and daughter just beginning a Great Inca tea, with cookies and hot cinnamon toast and the whole silver tea service on a table before Avis. The teapot had an incongruous tea cozy over it, printed with blueberries. I kissed both my friends and took a seat on the sofa with Avis, who poured.

“We were just talking about Iraq,” said Belinda. She was sitting in a chair carefully fitted with just the right pillows, in reach of the radio. The metal tree from which her bags hung was behind her, and Harold and Maude in their day bag were tucked into the chair beside her. I didn't like the color of the fluid in the tubes snaking out from under Belinda's bed jacket, but she herself looked lovely, with her hair done and her makeup in place. I noticed she barely ate anything, except to nibble from time to time on a piece of naked ginger from the bowl on the tea tray. Avis had it sent up from the club because it settled her stomach.

“You look lovely,” I said to Belinda as I accepted my cup.

“Don't I? Ursula is just a whiz. She insisted on going with me the last time I had my hair done, and she studied everything, the shampoo, the blowout, and now she can do it all. She blows me out every morning.”

“You're not letting her cut it, are you?” Avis asked, sounding alarmed.

“No, Lance comes up if I can't go to him. But I have no doubt she could do it if she had to. I don't know how I got so lucky.” She beamed. Avis and I managed not to look at each other. I wished I could have Belinda's temperament transplanted into me like a cornea or a kidney when she no longer needed it . . . but no. Spiritual attainments come to you only one way.

Then just as everything seemed perfect in our world, except that one of us was dying a painful and relentless death, Grace blew in.

She was excited, and her cheek still smelled of the fresh fall air as she kissed us in turn.

“What brings you here, darling?” asked Belinda. “Have some tea, it's still hot.”

“First I need the loo.” She took her handbag and dashed off. Ursula rushed in and took away our teapot to refill it with smoky lapsang souchong, Miss Grace's special favorite.

When Grace came back, very excited, she was carrying something not unlike a Popsicle stick. She showed it to me and demanded, “Lovie, isn't that pink? Right there, that line?”

Although I would have loved to be the final arbiter, I had to say, “But really, I'm not the one to ask . . .”

Belinda said “What
have
you got there?”

Grace rushed back to the bathroom to throw the stick away and wash her hands, and when she came back, she sat down and drummed her feet on the floor in an ecstatic tattoo. “Granny, I'm pregnant!”

Avis clapped her hands and cried, “Oh Grace!”

Belinda said in amazement, “You
are
? Have you been to the doctor?”

“No, but this morning I suddenly realized how late I was, and I'm never late,
never,
so I got a home test on the way to school, but then I couldn't do it at school, in the bathroom with the little girls going in and out . . . I've been going crazy all day, waiting to get out, and it was faster to come here than to go home, so . . . I'm pregnant!”

Belinda radiated joy and held out her arms. Grace flew into them. Then Grace kissed her mother again, and me, and then she did another jig of joy on the carpet.

T
he end came for Belinda less than a week later. It seemed shockingly sudden, because it began as had so many other crises that she had survived. Just the day before, I had ridden downtown with her on a mission to Grace's apartment, to see the plans for turning the den into a nursery. That was a lovely afternoon. She wheeled around the apartment in her chair, admiring everything. She got tired a little before I realized she was done, but she dozed in the car on the way back, and we got her upstairs and into bed for a good nap before supper. Avis saw her in the evening and said she was crowing about her outing.

The next morning, though, something went wrong with Harold and Maude, and she was back in MSK to have them replumbed. Ursula was with her, clutching the bag with Belinda's hospital shawl, her books, and the cell phone Avis had insisted she carry so her friends could find her without having to know where she was. Avis was there all morning as well, since a hospital is no place to leave a loved one alone. When she was still in lockdown by the afternoon, Avis called me to take over; she wanted to explain in person to Gordon Hall why she couldn't fly to Ireland that night to look at a picture that might or might not be a Ribera.

They let me take her home at about five that evening. I'd sent Ursula ahead to get ready. Belinda seemed fine, if weary. Once she was in bed, and finally shaking off the last of the sedative, she wasn't quite ready for me to go.

“They want me to think about hospice care,” she said. “But it's too soon.”

I said enthusiastically that of course it was. I was still working on whether she could manage a trip to see the skaters at Rockefeller Center, if we wrapped her up carefully and the driver lifted her into and out of the car. Belinda looked at me quizzically and said, “You
do
know this story only ends one way, don't you?”

She was back in the slammer the next day; the drains were leaking again. They let her go home once more; Friday she was back yet again. This time they kept her overnight, and on Saturday morning, Avis called me in tears of anger. A young doctor had looked at Belinda's chart and said to her brutally, “Why are you here? There is nothing more we can do for you.”