Gossip (20 page)

“For here, or are you heading south?”

“Both. I'm taking Lindy and her parents to Sea Island for Easter.”

“Lucky them,” I said.

“You couldn't shake loose for lunch, could you?” Avis asked. “Could your girl cover for you for an hour or so?”

“I'll tell you what. Let me show you a couple of things and then I'll just close up. If customers show up without appointments,
tant pis
.”

“That's the spirit,” said Avis.

A
t the bistro around the corner we ordered cheese soufflés and split a bottle of Sancerre. A little vacation in a glass, it seems, to have wine at lunch. I enjoyed myself, but I could see now that something was troubling Avis. She got around to it over coffee.

“Have you seen much of Nicky lately?”

I said not as much as I used to.

“How does he seem to you when you see him?”

I considered. To be truthful, he seemed drawn and touchy.

“I expect they're both exhausted. How's Grace?”

Avis paused, unhappy. Finally she said, “Could I tell you something in confidence? Really total confidence?”

I said of course.

T
he long courtship. The months Nicky spent on the West Coast. His seeming contentment there, so far from his wife, though the separations made Grace so unhappy. As soon as she started to talk I had the sense of suddenly hearing a disturbing noise that's been sounding in the distance for quite a while.

Avis had seated herself with her back to the room, and I was on the banquette across from her. She was wearing a black skirt and a gray Donna Karan jacket over a soft white open-collared shirt, and she had a long sheer linen scarf in charcoal that she wound around her throat, then removed again minutes later. Ladies of our age spend half their time reacting to their demented inner thermostats.

The restaurant had been crowded when we sat down, but by now the only occupied table near us was behind Avis, a foursome in the middle of the room who were absorbed in one another and having a jolly time. One of them was a lady known to us. I kept an eye on them as Avis leaned toward me, speaking softly.

“ . . . says that . . . Well, that Nicky's
drive
isn't very strong. Even when they first fell in love, he was . . . tentative, I guess is the way she put it. Very happy to kiss and cuddle and leave it at that.”

Oh.
That
kind of drive. This was really nothing I wanted to know about my beloved godson, and Avis was pretty rigid with discomfort as well.

I murmured something and kept a close watch on the table behind us. They were ordering dessert.

Someone came and poured us more coffee. Avis stopped talking. Like most people brought up with servants, she didn't interrupt conversation while being served except to say thank you, unless the topic was sex or money.

“So . . .” She took her scarf off again. “Since the baby, there's been . . . it's all stopped.”

We looked at each other.

“Nothing? No . . . Nothing at all?”

“They haven't been . . . intimate”—Avis squirmed at the word, knowing she sounded like a down-market women's magazine—“since her fifth month.”

Oh dear. I tried briefly to imagine having had this conversation with my own mother, or grandmother, or anybody, and failed. Poor Grace! But at the same time, I saw how truly close Grace and Avis must have grown, at last, that Grace had confided this. And how much it meant to Avis.

Dismayed and angry as I was about Gil, he had never been less than ardent as a lover and a gentleman in bed. I've led a sheltered life in that way, and I barely knew what to say.

“Have they talked about it?”

“She's tried. Nicky says . . .” I put my hand over hers, and she stopped speaking. Our acquaintance at the next table had risen, no doubt on her way to the ladies', and spotted us. As she penetrated our air space, we turned together and lit up our faces, all smiles.

“I thought that was the back of your head!” the woman trumpeted to Avis.

“Delia, what a treat! How are you?”

“Everything's fine. Actually that's a complete lie, but we won't go into it.”

“You remember Lovie?”

Delia greeted me. Then said to Avis, “How is that precious grandbaby?”

“Perfect.”

“Well, give her a hug for me,” said Delia. “It is lovely to see you both.” She blew us kisses and set off. At the table she had left, her three companions were leaning close together; then suddenly there was a loud burst of laughter.

“She's a beast,” Avis said. “Tell me when it's safe to go on.” When she could, she said, “Nicky says he doesn't see the problem. He said he had so much of that sort of thing when he was younger he just doesn't feel the need.”

“But that's like saying you had so much food when you were young you've given up eating.”

Avis nodded. I wondered how much of that there had been in her own marriage in the later years. Delia reappeared, and we fell silent again.

“What can Grace do?” I asked finally.

“There are really only two choices, aren't there? Give it time and hope it gets better, or leave him.”

I was shocked. Avis, who had put up with so much with Harrison. And all our hopes for Nicky and Grace! All our shared pleasures in the match. The baby.

Custody fights. And my god, Dinah!

E
aster. Gil had been a believer, but I have always been more of an atmospheric Christian. I love the flowers and the incense and the music, especially singing the hymns that seem conferred through DNA, but which I really acquired at boarding school. In those years we all went to church every Sunday morning and also sang hymns after supper while the math teacher hammered away at the upright piano in the Main Hall parlor. A clever piece of indoctrination, the hymns. Those melodies are emotional triggers that flood your system with the information that
This is part of you
and
You are part of all that it has been for centuries,
and
Whenever you return, you will be welcomed and taken in
. To find you know verse after verse, the alto lines, the descant, without having made any effort to learn or remember them, is a powerful experience.

Gil and I were normally in Connecticut for Easter; Althea preferred to observe Christian festival days in a Catholic country, specifically France. Easter is my least favorite part of Christianity—too triumphal for me—so Gil went by himself to the boxy stone Episcopal church in the next town over, and I worked in the garden for my Easter observance if the ground was soft enough, and if not, sat inside on the sun porch looking at garden catalogues, planning my annual beds.

This year, drawn by I'm not sure what, I went to the Palm Sunday service at the church that Gil attended in the city. It was odd to be greeting the season of resurrection with no crocus or snowbells or jonquils of my own to welcome back from the dark of the earth. I had filled my apartment windowsills with paperwhites in pots, and the violets twinkling amid dark green ground cover in Central Park and the daffodils and tulips along the median on Park Avenue would have to be my garden now. Walking north that Sunday morning with a weak spring sun warming my back, I remembered a beige linen spring coat I'd had in boarding school, with elbow-length bell sleeves, worn with a navy pillbox hat and long matching kid gloves. Very Jackie Kennedy. I could see myself walking with Meg to the Congregational church in the village, the feel of the garter belt tugging at my hips, the pinch of my stacked-heel pumps from Willy's Style Center in Ellsworth that never fit right. I could see the two of us, with all our lives stretching before us, and just about everything we then imagined those lives were going to be destined to be wrong.

Simultaneously I felt very much myself as I am now, a woman of a certain age who could barely resist stopping to pull the city's weeds out of the city's flower beds.

Could it be that I'd never been to Palm Sunday service in an Episcopal church? If I had as a child, I don't remember. I remember Sunday school dresses and Mary Janes with white socks, and being given two palm leaves to take home. You made a slit in one and pulled the second one through it to form a cross, and you tucked that into your mirror frame in your bedroom, where it stayed until it was time to burn it to make the ashes for the next year's Ash Wednesday.

This year, in this church, when it came time for the reading of the gospel, one of the deacons spoke the words of Pontius Pilate. The rest of us played the part of the crowd. “Meanwhile the chief priests and elders had persuaded the crowd to ask for the release of Barabbas and to have Jesus put to death,” boomed Father Leonard in his purple Lenten robes with his rich baritone.

The deacon cried, “Which of the two would you like me to release to you?” and we all shouted “Barabbas!”
Shouted
. With what felt like enthusiasm.

“Then what am I to do with Jesus called Messiah?”

“Crucify him!” we shouted.

“Why, what harm has he done?” the deacon asked us.

But we all just shouted louder, “Crucify him!”

It was horrifying. I walked home in the sunshine feeling like a sac of poison. Feeling as if I didn't know who I was.

O
ne afternoon in late April I was walking across the park after lunch on the West Side with an old classmate. It was a brilliant day, perfect weather for walking. The park smelled of warm earth and was full of foreign tourists carrying maps and guides to the city, a good effect, I suppose of a weak dollar, though I wasn't writing the Fed any thank-you notes; it was costing me more and more to buy from my European designers, let alone to go on scouting trips and pay for a decent hotel room with euros, and as I've mentioned, my clients were buying less and less. Eventually, I supposed I'd pass some tipping point, when the clients stopped coming to me at all because I had nothing in the shop to show them.

I could hear the babble and trill of small children playing as I neared the Fifth Avenue exit. For some reason I decided to look in at the playground, and as I approached, I caught sight of a very familiar profile. It was Nicky, still tanned from Easter in Georgia with Avis, sitting on a bench with the Irish and Haitian nannies. For the brief time I watched, when he believed himself unobserved, I thought he looked like the saddest man I'd ever seen.

His face lit up when he saw me. “Lindy-hop!” he called to his daughter. “Look who's here!” We embraced and Lindy looked up briefly from where she was busy filling her shoes with sand. She was wearing a pair of velvet corduroy overalls embroidered with bunnies that had the look of something Avis had chosen.

“What are you two doing way up here?” I asked, taking a seat.

“We have a playdate with Julian. Ginette's son.” Ginette was a charming young woman with reddish quattrocento hair, a friend of Grace's from school, whom I'd met at Lindy's birthday party. She taught music. I could only suppose that a music teacher was able to leave school earlier than a homeroom teacher, and thus could take her own child to his afternoon playdate when Grace could not.

We watched Lindy hoist herself to her feet and careen toward us with a shapely pebble she'd discovered in the sand.

“What is that, Lindy?” Nick asked her.

“Gold!” she cried. Then she bombed off again to her excavation site.

“Did you enjoy Sea Island?”

“Lindy loved it, especially the beach. We have a world-class collection of sand dollars.”

“And how is Grace?”

“Fine.”

“I'm glad. And you? How's the screenplay?”

“All good. I'm shopping it to agents, and I'm working on a TV pilot.”

My memory was that the screenplay was going to Alvin Grable's agent. So that hadn't worked out? Or had my memory failed me?

“Hello, sailor,” said Ginette, who stood before us, extricating Julian from his stroller. She clearly had no memory of meeting me. As I left, they settled down together on the bench, and both children were leaning against Ginette's knees as she dispensed Baggies of goldfish crackers.

I
t was getting to feel like a pattern. When Casey Leisure stopped in at the shop one morning a week or so later, she had no memory of having met me either.

We were on the cusp of May, and the weather was warm, unseasonably. The flowering pear trees planted along the streets were dropping drifts of white petals at every breeze, and Casey had some in her sleek streaked hair, like freakish snow that never melts.

“Good afternoon,” she said briskly, in a tone I recognized as reserved for servants and shopgirls. “Is Mrs. French in? I'm Casey Leisure, she sold my friend a pair of trousers I'd like to try, I'm very hard to fit. Long legs, you see, and a long rise as well, now
that's
a gorgeous piece,” she said. She was pointing at a large polished ebony necklace in my accessories case.

“I'm Loviah French,” I said.

“Oh!” She looked at me, surprised, then extended her hand.

I shook her hand and said, “I think we met at Marta Rowland's table at a benefit lunch; it's so nice to see you again.” I wouldn't have mentioned it, but if she suddenly realized she had seen me before, it would seem as if
I
had forgotten
her,
which is not good for business.

“You're a friend of Marta's?”

“Tell me about the pants you're looking for.”

“Literacy Partners?”

“Women Refugees.”

“Oh yes,” she said. “I remember.”

She didn't. She had also managed to inform me of a different party at which I had not been included. “You're a size forty?” I asked.

“Oh, I never know European sizes. Eight above the waist, ten below.”

Fortunately it was one of Mrs. Oba's days in the shop. She brought us trousers from two of my designers who do pants for well-toned ladies of a certain age, one German, one Danish. The cut of the German designer was perfect for Casey, and she took three pairs. This was easily the best sale I'd made all month. We settled down to adjusting the fit.