Gossip (16 page)

Soon one of the doctors who had cared for Belinda with such humanity appeared. She apologized. She grieved with Avis. She said they were willing to keep trying the temporary fixes that had bought Belinda days, then hours. But they couldn't rescind the message. It was always going to end only one way.

Belinda said, “I want to go home, but I don't want to die in my own bed. I don't want to make that kind of mess for Ursula.”

We ordered a hospital bed and called hospice. Avis sent word to an e-mail list of friends that Belinda would love to see cards or flowers but please, not to visit, as the family wanted her last energy, her last consciousness for themselves. I stayed away until Avis called to say the message didn't apply to me. Nicky took the red-eye home. Grace's stepsisters left their families and came. Two or three of us were always with Belinda from that time forward. Ursula continued to do her hair, which annoyed the nurses and pleased Belinda. She had said to all of us, “Don't let me die without lipstick.” That became the final act of fealty Ursula could show to the Great Inca. The nurses wiped Belinda's face and took the lipstick off. Ursula, ever vigilant, darted in and reapplied it. I still can't speak of it without wanting to cry.

Very early on the fourth morning, Belinda opened her eyes, looked straight at Avis, said “Thank you,” and died. And not a day goes by that I don't want to call her, to tell her something only she would understand, to ask her something only she would know.

A
t the funeral, I sat in front with Dinah. When almost all the pews were full, the family appeared from wherever they'd been huddled. Avis and Grace walked up the aisle together, their arms around each other, between two banks in the sea of mourners. Nicky came behind them, escorting a desolate Ursula, and then came Hilary and Catherine with their husbands and children. Gil was across the aisle, about halfway back, alone. Althea was still in Venice.

Our grief was deep and pure, and I thought at the time, unutterably painful. Now I know the difference between a grieving heart and a heart both grieving and outraged. If you want to talk about pain.

D
inah was just the slightest bit satirical about Grace asking me, the childless spinster, to help her interpret her pregnancy test. She said she understood perfectly why she was not the first to know that Grace was pregnant, as she'd assumed she would be. Belinda's apartment was right across the park from Grace's school. And Belinda, after all, had been dying at the time.

Still.

A
nd life went on. As it will.

The winter and spring of 2005 passed quietly for Gil and me. We spent long weekends in Connecticut, where my lilacs, when they finally came, were spectacular, followed by irises as lovely as any I've seen. But I know now that things were not so happy for Grace. Now that she had her degree and a full-time teaching job, she had her evenings and weekends back and no one to share them with, and she missed Belinda. She'd gone out to California a number of times during the summer and fall, but if Nicky was working, it was a bore to be on the set—the cast was a team, and she wasn't part of it, no matter how often Nicky told us how much his friends loved her. If she didn't go to the set, she had nothing to do. Nicky's apartment was tiny, and he was a surprisingly careful housekeeper. There was no particular use in her shopping for dish towels or rearranging the kitchen drawers. She rambled alone around Santa Monica, or went window-shopping on Rodeo Drive, or cooked him elaborate meals he didn't want when he got home, since the craft services food suited him fine. When she was there, she missed her friends and her New York world. And one weekend in January she'd flown out to surprise him and found that he wasn't working at all; he could have come home but just didn't feel like it. It was slushy and cold in New York, and Malibu was eighty degrees and sunny. (Avis told me this only very recently. I guess Grace felt she couldn't complain to either me or Dinah. She had told her mother.)

The winter weather had finally given way to spring the afternoon I sat down with a cup of chai and a newspaper, turned to the gossip page, and stopped. The headline for the lead story was “Divorce at the Marriage Bureau?” It was accompanied by a picture of Alvin Grable and Nicky on the set of the show, laughing. The copy read, “Sources tell us that Nick Wainwright, a star of Alvin Grable's struggling sitcom,
The Marriage Bureau,
punched his boss at an after-hours club called The Situation Room, on Melrose, after an altercation. Apparently Wainwright took issue with a remark Grable made to a cocktail waitress and was defending the damsel, but police aren't buying it. Wainwright and Grable, friends since college days, refused to comment.”

Dinah was blasé about it. “No such thing as bad publicity,” she said. She and Mike were getting ready to leave for London for a week of theater. Grace was more upset.

“It seems so unlike him,” she said when I called her.

“What does Nicky say?”

“He says that Alvin was drunk and being a jerk and the papers blew it all out of proportion.”

There were follow-up stories the next day. “Insiders” were saying that tensions had been building on the set for some time. One source claimed the two had had words over an episode for which Nicky felt he deserved a writing credit. Reps for Grable and Wainwright said the story was ridiculous, and police confirmed that Oscar-nominated Grable was not pressing charges. That night Grable went on Letterman with his head swathed in bandages and swore he was unhurt, there had been no assault, he had bumped into a door in the dark during a midnight visit to an elderly aunt.

The Marriage Bureau
's ratings were up two weeks in a row, and the network ordered six new episodes. The celebrating had barely subsided when Nicky was written out of the show.

T
he children's apartment, which I suspected Avis paid for, was in a new building on the edge of the East Village. It had two bedrooms and two full baths, but the apartments were designed like dorm suites, with the bedrooms on opposite sides of the common space, the better to share with someone you didn't really want to be that close to.

By Easter the second bedroom had been fully converted from a den to a nursery. Since Grace had elected not to be told the sex of the baby, Avis had bought a crib with flannel bumpers decorated with gender-neutral bunnies; Grace had filled the dresser with bibs and onesies, flannel sheets and blankets, tiny socks and hats. A padded changing table was equipped with wipes and Q-tips, disposable diapers, and a smell-proof pail. “Although,” said Avis, surprising us both, “as long as you nurse, the caca smells very sweet.” Grace looked surprised that her mother had any opinion on baby shit, let alone actually liked it.

Grace was sitting in this room alone at about ten o'clock one June night, reading a parenting magazine and rocking in the nursing chair Avis had sent her, when she heard the apartment door open.

Her heart lurched. No one had buzzed from downstairs to be let in. Lately some of their neighbors had buzzed in strangers, two of whom had been found smoking pot on the roof, and there had been fussing about deliverymen who dropped off their kung pao chicken, then illegally roamed through the halls shoving menus under doors. One, when confronted, had menaced a teenage boy on the fourth floor. There had been a tenants' meeting.

She sat still, listening. She hadn't heard the door close. She called, “Hello?”

Oh shit, oh shit . . . wrong thing to do. Footsteps started toward her. She pictured a psycho delivery guy pacing the halls, trying doors. She'd left the front door unlocked. Had she? She must have. Where was her phone? On the counter in the kitchen. She was a mother. Almost a mother. She was clumsy and enormous; no one would attack a woman this pregnant. If she were killed, the baby could live outside her. Would the attacker cut the baby out, like the Manson Family killers? She looked around for something to protect herself with. Shit!

She wrapped her arms around her huge belly as the footsteps approached the door. She'd defend this baby with nails and teeth if she had to. She wished she could kickbox. She wished she were wearing high heels instead of fuzzy slippers. They call those heels stilettos for a reason. She sat in the yellow light of the baby's circus lamp, with painted clowns dancing around the rim, and stared at the open door, waiting for her fate.

Nicky appeared in the doorway. He was wearing a beer hat, a transparent inflated plastic mug of beer with foam on top. Grace screamed, and the baby seemed to somersault.

“Nicky! You monster! Why didn't you call?”

She was in his arms, halfway between laughing and crying.

“Hey,” he said, “it kicked me!”

The baby, under her rapidly pounding heart, was doing gymnastics. Was it frightened too? Was this bad for it? Nicky laid his head against her stomach. She removed his beer hat and buried both hands in his thick dark hair. The useless Sebastian, sound asleep up to now, was at last prancing around Nicky's feet, barking excitement.

“I could have died of fright! Why didn't you call?”

“I thought it would be fun to catch you in flagrante with your lover.”

She swatted him, then followed him to the front door, asking questions. The door was propped open with a suitcase, and two more were in the hall.

“I got done faster than I expected. Found a tenant for the apartment, sold the guy my furniture, packed, went to the airport, and got a seat on standby. They even upgraded me to middle class because I'm a famous actor!”

Later she found his ticket on the dresser and noticed he had actually bought a full-price ticket in business class. Well, she thought, he'd had a nasty couple of weeks, and he deserved a little comfort. And he could afford it.

G
race went into labor two weeks later. Avis was already at the hospital when Dinah arrived with a bag full of magazines, lollipops for the mother, and food. A nurse alerted Nicky that the grandmothers were in waiting, and he came out to take the lollipops.

Dinah said, “In my day, they only let you have ice chips after the enema,” rather hoping, if I know Dinah, that talk of enemas would discomfit Avis.

“How well I remember,” said Avis.

“You do?” Dinah assumed that Avis would have had herself rendered insensible, or somehow delegated the labor to staff.

“Yes, and Grace took twenty-three hours to present herself. I was absolutely starving.”

“My first one was six hours, but Nicky was practically born in the taxi.”

“Well done,” said Avis.

“Peasant hips,” said Dinah. She offered Avis a spicy chicken wing, and Avis accepted. The waiting room was a mess of crumpled wax paper, napkins, and crumbs by the time the baby arrived.

W
hy do babies all seem to be born at three in the morning? I was deep asleep when they called me. Neither grandmother had quit the field. Nicky grinned ecstatically, they said, when he came to announce the most beautiful baby ever born, and that she had Dinah's hair.

“How is Grace?” Avis asked.

“Insanely great. One of the nurses said she had never seen anyone smile like that.”

“Can we see her?” both asked. Dinah meant the baby. Avis meant Grace.

Soon Grace, cleaned up and still smiling, was rolled out of the delivery room on the way to a room of her own. Her pale hair was dark with sweat, and there were deep bluish crescents under her eyes. Avis touched her daughter's cheek, and said, “I'm proud of you, darling.” It had never been easy for Avis to say things like that, and she'd chosen a good moment.

The baby was taken to the nursery so the new mother could get some sleep. Avis and Dinah admired their grandchild through the nursery window, and Nicky went home to send an e-mail to everyone in the world to say that the baby was twenty-seven inches long and they were calling her Rainbow Raisin.

A
vis has hired a baby nurse for them,” Dinah informed me, as if she had just learned that the baby was to be raised by Nurse Ratched. She was calling to tell me the baby would be called Belinda, not Brooke for her own mother, as Dinah had hoped.

“Grace loved Belinda. So did Nicky, and they're still in mourning for her.”

“Nicky loves Brooke too, and Brooke's still alive to appreciate it.”

I happened to know that they had never seriously considered it; Nicky said if they named the baby Brooke everyone would think they were hoping for a bequest from Mrs. Astor. “Is the nurse going to live in?” I asked, thinking a change of subject would be wise.

“That was the plan, but Nicky hit the roof.”

I had thought that new parents normally wept with gratitude at having experienced help in the first weeks of a baby's life.

“If they wanted another human being in a cramped apartment 24/7 they'd want
me,
” Dinah informed me. “Nicky wants to raise his baby with his wife. He's home, he's a night owl, he couldn't have a stranger in the house.”

She had called me from the kids' apartment, where she had just finished cleaning the bathrooms, getting everything ready for the homecoming. I agreed that I would meet her there, after I closed the shop, and bring flowers.

Dinah was on the floor in the kitchen editing the lower shelves of the refrigerator when I arrived.

“Remember that first flat you had where I used to come and stay?” Dinah greeted me.

“Do
I!”

“Up seven flights of stairs?”

“Four. My legs were like iron in those days.”

“Oh God, what do you suppose this was?”

The container she had just found behind three nearly empty jars of pickles had hillocks of gray-green mold, like a blanket of lichen, covering the contents. “They can't have cleaned out this reefer since the Coolidge administration. Who
raised
these people?”

The buzzer rang. I checked the video cam and soon we had a UPS man at the door with an enormous box from Bloomingdale's addressed to Mr. and Mrs. Wainwright.