No One Could Have Guessed the Weather (12 page)

Suddenly she felt very grown up. And that was good, because as she jetéed into the room she heard her father ask John Paul to switch off the TV.

From their body language (the shoulder clasp, the rugged bonhomie) she knew that Ron and John Paul had become mates. She suspected Ron would treat John Paul like a son he never had, instantly bonding over the Irish connection. (Her brother, Jake, had not amounted to much. They had poured all their parental aspiration into the wrong avatar.) It made perfect sense, of course. Once Ron tired of watching sports all day, he would have gone looking to do odd jobs round the building and come across John Paul in the lobby. John Paul, desperate to know what was going on with Christy, would have cultivated this assiduously, and so here she was, standing with her daughters, her parents, and the man she had sucked face illicitly with on the Ghost Train at Coney Island. When her parents saw her they emphasized how helpful John Paul had been to them, that nothing was too much trouble for him, and, without looking at Christy, Felicia remarked that “the girls say you all go on little outings together.”

Now Loretta the Housekeeper announced there was some dinner ready. Fish pie. John Paul looked up greedily; he was
starving
, he said.

Felicia beamed approvingly. She liked a man who ate and had never trusted Vaughn's calorie-controlled attitude to life.

“What about the lobby?”
said Christy. “You can't leave the lobby unattended
.
”
Everyone looked at her in horror; she half expected booing and hissing as if she were a pantomime villain. She tried again, modulating her voice, adding a gentler inflection. “It's just I heard Mrs. Sorenson going on. You could get in trouble. Lose your job.”

Her parents closed ranks with John Paul.

“What would you know about a job, Christy?”
said her father.

“Nothing,” she replied, and patted his arm kindly, for at that moment she shared his disappointment in her.

So John Paul got what he wanted. They had their evening and he did not have to sell his soul. He had his dinner in his magnificent apartment with his beautiful “wife,” his stepchildren, and his in-laws. He handled it with grace, the perfect host, grateful but not patronizing to Loretta the Housekeeper. Christy was struck by the fact that he was a very good actor. Julia was right. It was a dreadful profession, all about luck and nothing about talent. But she played her part well, too.

When they had carried the girls to bed, and her parents disappeared discreetly to their room, they walked onto the balcony. There was a mist over the city, and the tops of the buildings poked through it, as if the skyline were floating. They allowed themselves one chaste kiss. If there had been a sound track it would not have been Céline Dion singing her heart out, but rather discreet, poignant strings. She told him that nothing else was going to happen between them, there was no future, she was going to do the right thing, for, after all, she had chosen her life for better or worse. What would they do, anyway, the two of them? They were too similar, two drifters, but they were too old to go off to see the world. He wiped the tear away from her left eye with his thumb. He held her hand, very still and sad. Then he decided to make things easy.

“I suppose it's a relief,”
he said. “I'd never be able to say no to you, but what would I tell my girlfriend?”

She would never know whether it was a joke or not. Three days later, John Paul quit. She heard from the French teenagers that he had gone back to L.A., but from him she never heard anything again. For the next few years she would go to any movie with Colin Farrell in it to see if he was in the background.

Vaughn was discharged from the hospital with orders to retire, and they started dividing their time between the city and Bridgehampton.

Although she asked the girls to delete the clips of them all in Coney Island, they didn't know how to, so sometimes, if she pressed the wrong combination of buttons, her phone would spontaneously burst to life and replay five seconds of her and John Paul fighting over some cotton candy.

It always gave her a strange feeling. Sometimes she remembered this was happiness.

•   •   •

J
ULIA CAME
back from the month in Connecticut a new woman and, as so often happened with Julia, a catastrophic event in her personal life had vastly improved her professional one. In group therapy she had met a producer she had been pursuing on a networking site for ages and, to cut a long story short, she had pitched him her rom-com idea starring the Christy character. He had negotiated a deal with her agent secretly (phones were, strictly speaking, not permitted, but they made exceptions for Academy Award nominees) and, as Julia told Christy over lunch, “I just have to write it. So, tell me more I can use.”

“Well, actually,” said Christy, “I had an idea for the story. I thought I
could fall in love with the doorman.”

Julia looked at her admiringly. “That's genius! What would happen?”

So Christy told her the story, embellishing it in key areas. She was particularly keen on her ending, involving the lovers standing by the ocean, staring out at a moon river, as one of them remarked that it was as if they could walk across it except they would surely drown. It was bittersweet, poetic; she would cry if she saw it in a movie. The only bit she left out was the kissing in the Ghost Train, which was just too personal.

Julia wrote quickly in shorthand until Christy stopped.

“It's brilliant,”
she said, not taking her eyes off the page. “Two things I'd have to change. I don't believe you wouldn't have sex. There'll have to be skirts up in act two. And the ending. The ending is dreadful. It simply couldn't end like that.”

Oh, yes,
thought Christy,
it could.

I
t was Lianne's idea to do the horse course in New Jersey, and she decided that Christy would do it with her. She engineered this by ringing her father, Vaughn, on his private line and suggesting he give a place to Christy for her birthday. It would be nice for her to spend some time with her stepmother, she said, for, unlike Cinderella, it was her own mother who was wicked, and that Christy must be exhausted from the demands of looking after him and the girls. Vaughn had some vague memory of Christy wanting a pony when she was a child, and, as he was tired of buying her expensive jewelry that she never wore (it infuriated him that she had let her ear piercings grow over when there were three sets of diamond studs in the safe), he told Lianne to book the course, whatever it cost, and he would add the money to her monthly allowance.

Christy found out a week later when Loretta the Housekeeper announced that she was looking after the girls for the weekend of May 25 and 26 while Christy was away. Christy was confused and immediately went to the kitchen to check the year planner on the wall. Armed with the knowledge that the days were empty, she found Vaughn in his study, where he put on his calculatedly distracted face and told her that it was a surprise for her and it was all Lianne's idea.

Uh-oh
, thought Christy.

Lianne had Vaughn in a headlock of guilt and recrimination; “she imbibed it with her mother's milk,” he would joke, although Lianne had been exclusively bottle-fed by Nanny Marta while her mother chain-smoked and got her thighs back into her Pucci slacks.

It was an old, old story. The savage emotional deprivations of his own youth had made Vaughn incapable of two things: denying his daughter anything material and being even a halfway decent father to her. These, added to the fact that the first Mrs. Vaughn Armitage II was mentally unstable, ensured that Lianne had the kind of spoiled but unhappy childhood that inevitably creates a spoiled and unhappy adult. So while Vaughn might say after the fraught family gatherings that happened every five years, “
My money may not have bought her happiness, but she has a better quality of misery,”
it seemed too late now to buy her either a personality or a man, as even the most abject gold digger had been put off eventually by Myron Schulberg's prenuptial demands and . . . well . . . Lianne herself.

“She wants to spend some time with you,” he responded limply. “You're a role model for her.”

“I'm only four years older,” she said, but she knew she shouldn't have, because Vaughn never wished to be reminded of the age difference between them, particularly since the heart attack had slowed his pace from hare to tortoise, and sometimes Christy heard him saying to people that
she
was more tired these days, or her ankles were hurting her, or “Christy doesn't like traveling as much as she used to,” to explain why his racing-around days were over.

Vaughn fiddled with his wedding ring, a sure sign the conversation was over. Resistance was useless. Christy knew she was going on the horse course, but, to her surprise, she noticed a glimmer of uncertainty in his expression.

“What is it?” she asked.

“The minimum number for a group is five, so Lianne wants to bring a couple of friends with her. I said you'd be fine with that.”

Uh-oh again
,
thought Christy.

The last time Lianne had brought her friends to the apartment, one had found a magnum of vintage champagne that Vaughn was saving for his seventy-fifth birthday and drunk it out of the bottle. Another had pissed upward onto the intaglio etchings of lilacs in the guest bathroom.

Christy remembered that she was no longer living her life in the passive form.

“I'll find three others,” she said.

•   •   •

“E
QUINE-
A
SSISTED
L
EARNING. I'VE
heard about it,” said Julia as they power-walked the High Line. “It's incredible for children with special needs. And adults with back problems. There's pretty much nothing a horse can't help you with. As Catherine the Great used to say.
Baboom CRASH.
”

“Oh, please. The point is I can't do it on my own with Lianne, and even if I could, I would need you there to stop me from strangling her. When I rang to ask her if I needed to bring jodhpurs, she said ‘No, all you need is an emotional dilemma the horse can help you solve.' Hers is ‘Should I break up with this new guy I've just met because he's got genital warts from visiting prostitutes in the Far East?' She needs help. I mean, what's Black Beauty going to say about that?”

Julia wanted to interject the obvious here, but—

“You have to come, and you owe me. Remember when I had to play Woman with Bruises at two hours' notice for you on the show and the Asshole hit me with the plastic coffee cup?”

“I don't remember that.”

“Maybe we'll all find it healing. Lianne's convinced it will be therapeutic, you know, for her abandonment issues. And you
always
have emotional dilemmas.”

Julia ignored this.

“You told me Lianne was trying to have a baby.”

“Don't talk to me about that. Vaughn paid for her to have her eggs harvested, and I set her up at the clinic. But when I asked her when she was going to be implanted, she looked at me with this petulant expression on her face and said, ‘Do you really think I need to be pregnant right now?' And I said yes,
if you want a child
.”

Christy was acting out the exchange, imitating the high-pitched monotone of Lianne's voice. Julia knew that this was a bad sign in anyone and realized that she must be compassionate.

“Stop, stop there. I'm coming. This is going to be good. I'm always open to a new experience. I wanted to do EAL in Connecticut, but they suggested Jungian sand play instead. And I like to see you and Lianne snarling at each other. It reassures me that you're not perfect. She drives you crazy.”

Christy stopped and regarded her friend haughtily. “She doesn't drive me crazy, apart from when she calls me
‘Mom'!”

Julia checked the new diary app her kids had loaded on her phone. This took some time, for she had only just got her head around texting. Christy's agitation was fermented by impatience and then bubbled into annoyance when she discovered that Julia had arranged to spend the Saturday, May 25, with her new friend Lucy Lovett. She tried to conceal it, but Julia knew her well enough to know what she was thinking, which was
I thought I was your best friend
, so Julia volunteered to invite Lucy to come, too. They were all Mothers at the School, after all, and, more important, Julia was integrity filled and didn't stiff people when she had a better offer. Usually Christy admired this trait. Not today.

“Lucy Lovett is sarcastic.”

“She's
English
. Haven't you ever watched
The Office
on BBC America?”

“I heard her say to Robyn Skinner that if parents can't spell, how can they expect their children to?”

“Who's Robyn Skinner?”

“Robyn Skinner's that woman who's always late for pickup, so someone always has to wait with her kids, and then she's always cross. Like it's any of our faults she's so disorganized. Honestly, it happened last week and she looked at me really strangely. Like she hated me.”

“Lots of women hate you. Don't you ever look in a mirror?”

“No.” (This was true. Christy avoided looking at herself, as she had acute body dysmorphia, a legacy of her modeling days, and often referred to her “wobbly bits,” oblivious to the stab of loathing this induced in every other woman around her. )

“I'm telling you she hates us all.”

“Ridiculous. Anyway, back to Mrs. Lovett and her crusade against the incorrect use of the apostrophe, which, by the way, I agree with.”

“People see her graffitiing on the PTA notices.”

“Give her a chance. Maybe in the end
you'll love Lucy
?”

Julia winked, but Christy was in no mood to be humored.

“You, me, lunatic Lianne, and sarcastic—oh, sorry,
English
—Lucy Lovett. Okay, that's four. Apparently the minimum on the course is five, but I can't take the stress, so I'll just pay for the extra place. Vaughn mustn't know, though. Don't mention it to him.”

“Why?”

“You know Vaughn can't bear waste. It's because of his childhood. He eats yogurts after their sell-by date.”

Julia shifted a little, unwilling to join Christy in a domestic lie.

“It's only a few hundred bucks,” Christy pleaded.

Now Julia looked at her strangely.

“Hey, Marie Antoinette. Don't say that in front of anyone else except me.”

“Oh, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I'm being awful. It's Lianne and this stupid weekend. At least it can't get any worse!”

Christy's nostrils flared, and she flicked her mane.

•   •   •

L
UCY,
J
ULIA, AND
C
HRISTY
sat side by side on wonky plastic chairs at the back of the school hall as the raffle was being drawn. Julia was hunched up in the middle, as, although usually she insisted on the end of a row so she could stick her legs out the side, she understood that Christy, who had Irish roots, was having some strange postcolonial reaction to Lucy and was scared of her.

Dolores Madden, head of the PTA, a woman who could have run a small country as a dictator but instead had four children and managed the local CVS, was holding aloft a large scented candle wrapped in orange plastic.

“Number seventy-nine. Seventy-nine.”

“That's you!” said Christy, nudging Julia, and before Julia could pretend to have lost her ticket the two women behind them started clapping. Julia hurried up to Dolores, made a futile attempt to give the candle back, but Dolores just hissed, “Nobody wants this. Just take it.” Julia returned to her seat, blew the dust off the wrapping, and wondered who she might regift it to.

“The next prize is . . . unusual,” said Dolores, making no effort to raise her expression above pained. “A place on a weekend course in E . . . A . . . L . . .” She picked up an envelope and read, her tone tightening with every word. “That's Equine-Assisted Learning, which incorporates horses experientially for emotional growth in participants. Kindly donated by Mr. and Mrs. Vaughn Armitage II.”

She looked accusingly at Christy. Last year Vaughn had paid for five new computers, obviating the need for spring semester fund-raising.

“What?”
said Christy, turning to Julia, bemused.

Lucy explained.

“I got Vaughn on the phone last week when I was ringing round for donations. He said he'd just had an e-mail from the horse people. There was a place you hadn't filled. . . .”

She stopped. Lucy sensed she was tightrope-walking above a treacherous marital crevasse, and anyway, she was confused herself.

“I thought it was a riding weekend.”

“Did you?” said Julia innocently.

“Number three hundred and two. Three hundred and two.”

“That's me!” came a voice from the front of the hall. Lucy, Christy, and Julia all leaned forward to look.

“It's Robyn Skinner,” said Christy.

“Who?” said Julia.

Christy looked at her meaningfully.

“Is that good or bad?” wondered Lucy, until she saw the expression on Robyn's face as Christy detailed the prize.

“So the three of you are going . . .” Robyn was looking up at them, her hands fiddling with the waistband of her baggy skirt. Her hair, scraped back into an unforgiving ponytail, was ash blond. Her face, open and freckled, was unlined, apart from a triangular furrow between her eyebrows. The three sides of the triangle were anxiety, hostility, and bemusement.

“And my stepdaughter, Lianne. It was her idea,” said Christy.

“How old is she?”

“Forty.”

Lucy filled the ensuing silence. “Have you ridden before, Robyn?”

“No,” said Robyn bitterly, “I didn't grow up in that sort of home.”

Ouch
, thought Lucy. She wanted to say “Neither did I,” but she didn't.

“Neither did I,” said Julia.

“It doesn't matter whether you can ride or not,” said Christy firmly. “The course is psychological. Lianne says you spend time with the horses and you learn life lessons. Then, when you find yourself in a crisis situation, you think,
What would a horse do?
”

“How does that help a crisis situation?” said Robyn. “It's a horse.”

None of the others could think of a response to that.

“Is it in a hotel, Christy?” What Robyn meant was might there be room service and an opportunity for two nights of uninterrupted sleep?

“No. It's an equestrian center. We sleep in yurts.”