Maine (15 page)

Alice rushed toward him, scrunching up her face, pointing the knife. A moment later, he darted under a hedge and into the woods.

“That’s it,” she yelled after him. “This means war!”

Her heart pounded, but she felt a bit silly now, standing alone in the yard with a steak knife, shouting at no one. She straightened up, smoothed her blouse, and went back inside to finish making lunch.

Maggie

Maggie had been standing in front of Gabe’s building like a pathetic crazy person for twenty minutes. A cab came by with its light on and she hailed it, beginning to cry softly, admitting defeat. She told the driver her address and almost said, “I’m pregnant,” as a way of explaining her tears, but that seemed a bit much.

She wanted to believe that she was overreacting. She didn’t want the problem to be Gabe. Or, if it was Gabe, she wanted him to do something so big she couldn’t let it go by—not just lying about being out with friends or buying drugs, but lying about another woman. Not just grabbing her uncomfortably by the shoulders, but actually slapping her across the face.

She had been waiting and waiting, and now perhaps that thing had come. He didn’t want her to move in, and didn’t seem to care whether that meant they were over. She was pregnant with his child and she was alone. What a dick. What a chronically avoidant, immature asshole. And what kind of freak was she that a tiny part of her was already regretting how she’d acted, wishing she had said, “Okay, fine, we won’t live together,” so that they could go to Maine tomorrow and fall in love again. They’d been trying to make this work for two years, even though it was sometimes hard.

As her mother had put it when Maggie called her crying after one of their fights: “I know you want to be married and settled, but give it up. You can’t make chicken soup from chicken shit.”

Kathleen was forever saying things like that, things that probably made some sense in theory, but were not in the least bit helpful when it came to actually living your life. She kept handwritten AA mantras on Post-it notes stuck to her fridge and printed on coffee mugs and tea towels all around her kitchen:
One Day at a Time. Live and Let Live. To Thine Own Self Be True
.

In her less charitable moments, Maggie thought that her mother had really just replaced one addiction with another: the pride and the self-righteousness of sobriety instead of the rush and release of alcoholism. But then she would remember moments from childhood: her mother passing out on the front lawn after a cousin’s wedding; her parents, drunk on margaritas at the cottage in Maine, laughing and singing and then usually fighting until after midnight, letting Maggie stay up (or, more likely, forgetting about her), which thrilled her, and scared her too.

After Kathleen joined AA, she started doing a lot of yoga. She also began concocting herbal remedies—calendula and witch hazel for Chris’s acne, ground-up nettle leaves and plum oil for Maggie’s allergies. Never have two adolescents coveted Noxzema and Benadryl so much.

Kathleen gave Maggie a dream catcher as a sixteenth birthday gift, and it was all Maggie could do not to tell her how stupid and clichéd this was. The same year, her cousin Patty got a car for her birthday, and she didn’t even have her permit yet. Maggie was jealous, and then immediately guilty—her mother might have gotten her a Camry, too, if she could afford it. Maggie made herself feel so lousy about the situation that she decided not to get her license that year. Sixteen years later, she still didn’t know how to drive.

Now Kathleen was off in California. Maggie knew her mother had her reasons for leaving, but part of her felt like Kathleen had chosen Arlo—a man she hardly knew at the time—over her own children. It was the same feeling she had as a child when Kathleen would go on dates and leave them with Ann Marie. On those nights, Maggie would sit at the table with her cousins in Ann Marie’s bright, open kitchen, wishing she belonged there.

•   •   •

When she got home from Gabe’s apartment, she climbed the stairs to her fifth-floor walk-up, sobbing. From the fourth-floor landing, she heard a door above creak open and prayed it was not Mr. Fatelli, the lecherous old guy next door, who always smelled like soup and wanted her to come inside and have a look at his pet lovebirds, Sid and Nancy.

But then she heard Rhiannon’s voice: “Maggie?” came the soft Scottish accent.

“Yes, it’s me,” she said, walking up the last flight, wishing she could get inside and be alone, despite the fact that she genuinely liked Rhiannon.

Her neighbor on the other side was a gorgeous girl from Glasgow. She was not yet thirty, but had already divorced the older American businessman who had brought her here. Now she worked as a hostess at a trendy restaurant in SoHo by night and attended graduate school at NYU three days a week. Rhiannon seemed like a free spirit, maybe because she was a foreigner, and therefore felt adventurous (or maybe it was the reverse—she was bold enough to come here because she was just the adventurous type). She was always going on a boat ride up the Hudson or biking through the Bronx or trying every pizza place in Staten Island in the course of a week. She lived in New York the way everyone imagined living there, but no one actually did.

A few months earlier, at Rhiannon’s urging, Maggie and Gabe had gone to the restaurant where she worked for dinner. Rhiannon had worn a tiny tight dress in Lewinsky blue; her muscular arms and legs were everywhere as she led them to their table.

Afterward, she chatted with them for a bit, joking with Gabe about her name: “This is what happens when Fleetwood Mac fans mate,” she said. “I’m thinking of starting a support group with my friend Gypsy.”

“Seriously?” he responded, clearly captivated.

“No, not seriously,” she said.

“Ah, you got me,” he said, giving her a wink, which annoyed Maggie ever so slightly. She imagined for an instant how he behaved when she wasn’t around.

Out in the street afterward, Gabe said, “She’s pretty hot stuff.”

“You’re not really her type, sweetie,” Maggie said. “She goes for rich, old geezers.”

“I meant her attitude,” he said. “She’s spunky. She must get bored with a gig like that. Why does she do it?”

Rhiannon had told Maggie that she had gotten the restaurant job only because she needed dental work. Until then she had done fine without health coverage. Maggie herself wouldn’t dare to live without insurance for a single day. That would no doubt be the day that a piano fell from a tenth-story window and landed on her head.

“Are you okay?” Rhiannon asked now, seeing Maggie’s tears.

“Gabe and I had a fight,” Maggie said.

Rhiannon nodded. “Why don’t we pop downstairs for a drink?”

“I just want to go to bed,” Maggie said. “I hope that doesn’t sound rude.”

Rhiannon laughed. “Yeah, goddamn your rudeness. You really need to get that in check. Seriously, though, I’m worried about you. Do you want to talk?”

Maggie shook her head. “Maybe later?”

Rhiannon was her first New York neighbor who had become something like a friend. The two of them weren’t all that close, but they had had several long chats out in the hallway, and on the day Rhiannon’s divorce was finalized, they’d gone for dinner at a new place on Orange Street, and toasted to freedom, though Maggie wondered whether Rhiannon actually saw it that way.

“I’ll be here if you need me,” Rhiannon said now.

“I appreciate it,” Maggie said.

Inside the apartment, she left her packed suitcase by the door and crawled into bed. A pair of Gabe’s corduroys hung over the arm of a chair. His Yankees hat was on the coffee table.

Maggie cried until she fell asleep. She dreamed of her grandfather at the beach in Maine, dancing on the shore alone, in his old palm-tree-print bathing suit, little curls of white hair on his chest. He was laughing, carefree.

When she woke up, she thought first of him. In a lot of ways, he had been more of a dad to her than her own father ever had. It was her grandpa who used to make her giggle with his ridiculous jokes when some kid at school hurt her feelings; her grandpa who came over and shoveled their driveway after a snowstorm. At the cottage in Maine, he’d sing lullabies to the grandkids at bedtime, always in an exaggerated, melodramatic voice.

He had been the one to drive Maggie to college, with all of her belongings in the back of his Buick, all the way to Ohio. That road trip was one of her happiest memories: she got to talk to him in a way that she never had before, without her brother and cousins there vying for his attention.

After ten hours in the car, they stopped for dinner at some ramshackle place on the side of the road. Her grandfather drank a pint of Guinness, and told her that when he had first met Alice he’d been so startled by her beauty that he nearly ran off; every word out of his mouth was utter nonsense. He told her that the day her mother was born was the most amazing one of his life, and that he had left his wife and new baby sleeping in the hospital room and gone straight to morning Mass at St. Ignatius, where he put a hundred-dollar bill in the collection plate.

“Your grandma and I are so proud of you,” he said. “We know you’re going to be a very bright star, Maggie.”

“Thank you.”

“You’re the first one in our family to go to a non-Catholic school, you know,” he said, and she rolled her eyes because he had been mentioning this all summer. “You’ve broken our hearts, but that’s fine.”

“Grandpa!”

“Be sure not to give up on your faith, okay?” he said. “You’re going to the sort of place where they’re not too keen on religion. But remember where you came from.”

The food arrived, and he said with a straight face, “Maggie, my dear, do you know why you shouldn’t lend money to a leprechaun?”

She sighed. “Because they’re always a little short.”

He nodded approvingly. “Well, will you look at her! All right, how about this: Paddy told Murphy that his wife was driving him to drink. Murphy told Paddy he’s a lucky bastard because his own wife makes him walk.”

Maggie groaned but she couldn’t stop him from launching into a series of Irish jokes, delivered in a terribly unconvincing brogue, which lasted all the way through dessert.

Maggie was twenty-two when he passed away, and even now, ten years later, the thought of it was jarring. She recalled a line from a poem she had memorized in college:
No thing that ever flew, not the lark, not you, can die as others do
.

But he was gone, and maybe Gabe was gone as well. It was almost ten, and the sky outside had turned pure black. Maggie looked at her phone. No missed calls.

In twelve hours, they were supposed to be leaving for Maine. Should she still go? She wished she were the kind of person who could bury her head under the covers and order pizza from Fascati’s every afternoon and ignore reality, without thinking obsessively about him, or showing up at his door like a lunatic.

Maybe they’d make up in a day, or a week’s time, and carry on with their plan. But Gabe was rarely flexible like that, never kind after a battle. And anyway, once you allowed yourself to picture such a scenario, it couldn’t happen. That was just the way life went.

She sat up in bed now, and looked around at her place, the whole apartment—minus the tiny bathroom—visible from where she was. Could she really raise a child in a tiny one-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn, alone? She had thought that she was ready to be a mother. But maybe the whole idea was absurd. If it was really over, she wondered how long she could stay here, before the ghosts of them would be too strong to bear. This apartment had brought them together, and every bit of it reminded her of him.

Theirs was one of those meeting stories everybody loved. Friends often asked them to repeat it to strangers at parties, or told them it sounded like the plot of a movie. He had lived in her apartment before she did, and months after she moved in, his mail still flooded the box by the door. At that point, she hadn’t published a single story. She kept a small stack of form rejection letters from literary magazines of varying quality, a few with handwritten words of encouragement at the bottom, which thrilled her when she read them, though hours later she’d feel mortified by her excitement over being turned down nicely. Meanwhile, dozens of envelopes from Simon & Schuster arrived at her new place, addressed to Gabe, and she wondered what they might contain—fat advance checks, or royalty statements, or invitations to have his book published in foreign countries around the globe. She never opened any of the letters, which she later reminded him when he accused her of having snooping in her DNA. It wasn’t biological, she insisted. It was situational. A sensible woman could catch a man in only so many lies before she started to hunt for clues of betrayal. Snoop and ye shall find, he’d say dismissively.
Well, actually, yes
, she’d think.
In your case, yes
.

Anyway, she found the letters inspiring: Here was a New York writer who had not only secured a publisher, but was so above it all that he could just walk away without even leaving a forwarding address. In her imagination, he was reclusive, brooding, and brilliant. She felt lucky to have taken over his space. The thought of him helped her write, helped her keep going, and she’d joke about it to friends, how the literary power of her neighborhood’s former tenants—Truman Capote, Walt Whitman, Carson McCullers, and Gabe Warner, whose book she could never locate at the library—acted as her muse.

When she sold her collection of short stories, she wanted to dedicate it to her mother, but didn’t want her father to feel bad. She couldn’t very well make it out to both of them. Considering they had not been comfortably in the same room since her fifth grade ballet recital, it seemed cruel to make them live together on the page for all eternity. At the last minute, she decided to dedicate it to him, a perfect stranger:
To Gabe Warner, whoever you are. Thanks for making a writer’s life seem possible
. Her mother was pissed, but what could you do?

Gabe had heard about it through a friend who had an advance copy, and so he showed up at her book party looking like the stunning, cocky bastard he was, wearing a suede jacket with elbow patches and jeans, coming right up to her and saying in his clipped prep school voice, “Maggie Doyle, I presume.”

It wasn’t until later that night, when they were lying in her bedroom, which had once been his bedroom, that she realized what his book had been: a manual for do-it-yourself naked photos called
Tasteful Nudes for the At-Home Pro
, with tips on how to hide your belly fat and light a room, how to incorporate props, how to destroy the evidence if your relationship went south or you ever wanted to run for public office. Gabe had been approached to do it by a young editor friend, and he said yes, for a laugh. The book was never published, because naturally he hadn’t ever gotten around to handing in his final draft. The unopened letters from Simon & Schuster, from which she had drawn so much inspiration, were demands to get the book in, or else he’d be sued for his advance money.