No One Could Have Guessed the Weather (16 page)

“I can't get you a room of your own yet,” he said. “But I did get you this.”

She rested her head on his shoulder for a moment, and then she walked over and sat down. The desk was reclaimed and had been painted in French country style: a white base, with leaves growing up the legs and meeting in a delicate pattern of foliage and flowers on the top.

“I saw it in the window of the shop round the corner and I thought of you.”

Lucy and Richard occasionally experienced love so transcendental that they could communicate their feelings without words. This was useful at this moment, as she could not speak. She looked over at him, and he knew that there would be no gift at a specific moment in her life that she would ever value more.

•   •   •

E
VERY
M
ONDAY MORNING
from then on, she sat at her desk and read and wrote. The scripts encompassed everything from the high-concept “Tudor zombies take Manhattan and joust in Central Park” to the low-budget “Unhappy couple argue for ninety minutes.” Because she had taken to the art of pithy précis like a duck to water, Carmen, who usually listened to script reports over the phone, insisted that they meet, and they enjoyed their weekly chats in cafés downtown about the romantic comedy with minimal comedy or romance, or the Scandi genre script with much snow and sexual violence. And soon she started to understand what made dialogue work, what a “pinch scene” was, or indeed an “inciting incident.”

Although Julia said that the only things she had learned off Carmen were that “the time to slow down is when you're most in a hurry” (something Julia wished she had done more often in her life) and that “white, as in white jeans, is a wardrobe basic,” she discovered that Carmen was a sort of Yoda of cinema and, as they shared an obsession with the films of the seventies, she was delighted to sit at Carmen's feet and talk about
Star Wars
or
The Godfather
or
Annie Hall
or
Badlands
.

Inevitably, as they were women and they liked each other, they also talked about life.

In Tea and Sympathy, over beans on toast and a stiff Earl Grey, she explained that she had never felt English until she came to New York. When Carmen asked her what she meant, she explained that the broad American definition of “Englishness,” as something to do with British bands, or aristocrats, or Windsor Castle, was not something that would ever be applied to her with her nondescript suburban upbringing when she was actually in England.

In Tartine, over milky coffee and a toasted baguette, Carmen explained that Little Carmen had never felt any sense of who or what she was until the 1970s. When Lucy asked her what this meant, Carmen explained that it was not until then that a girl might realize there was a choice about how to be a woman.

“I was a sixteen-year-old in a print dress and pointy shoes, thinking of a future with
The I Hate to Cook Book
(which, by the way, is hilarious), when I read Betty Friedan,” Carmen said, “and Betty changed my life. I came to New York and I dared to be different, although, as I'm sure I would have found out eventually, it was the only way I could be.”

She remembered his question “Was it worth it?” but said nothing. The next time she met Carmen, however (they were in the spectacular loft on Greene Street, as one of the Siamese had hypoglycemia), Carmen appeared to have been considering it.

“You know, Lucy, I used to say to Julia that I lived my life so women like her, and you, didn't have to. You can engage with the magnificence of your own potential in the way a man can, see what the options are, and decide for yourselves whether the sacrifices are worth it.”

A silence fell. Lucy walked over to the floor-to-ceiling windows and looked down onto the cobblestone street, then across at the cast-iron façades and felt the ghosts of SoHo: the bohemians, the sweatshop workers, the artists. How many of them had come to this city wild with hope? How many had found the magnificence of their potential?

“When did you buy the apartment?” she asked.

“In 1986. Off an actual artist who painted wall-size canvases in drip style and had no heating. Took me ten years to do the renovation. Every time a film got a distribution deal in Korea I thought,
There's another window
.”

The sickly Siamese cleared his throat and crawled listlessly onto Carmen's lap, and they were all conscious of his sour breath.

“I only ever had passionate affairs with married alcoholics so, with hindsight and therapy, I know that I did not want the picket-fence-and-rose-garden fantasy. But I have friends who deeply regret some choices they made for political reasons.”

She turned to look at Carmen, whose bony-red fingernails were caressing the cat's head.

“Oh, no. Not me,” said Carmen. “I don't think I ever wanted children, really.”

On the far wall hung a huge wooden carving of four female warriors, arms inextricably linked, breasts proudly jutting toward the enemy, brandishing spears and raising their muscular legs in a war dance.

“Sometimes when I think of all the time I've wasted, I feel so sad I don't know what to do with myself,” Lucy said suddenly.

Carmen did not agree or disagree, but simply said, “Maybe you're a late developer?”

She looked unconvinced.

“Lucy. I long for the certainty I had when I was twenty, it makes life so much easier if there's only one road to travel, but now I'm older, I think there are as many shades of women as . . .”

Carmen paused, and so she piped up, “. . . drugstore hair color to cover gray. Everything from ash-blond warrior to raven-black homemaker.”

And the melancholy mood in the loft lifted, although the smell of sick cat did not.

“I'm obsessed with hair color at the moment,” she confessed. “I don't know what to do with mine, what with the regrowth and the frizzing.”

“Every woman has a bad-hair decade,” said Carmen firmly. “The important thing is, once you find your style, to wear it well.”

“Because I'm
worth
it,” she said, with a knowing wink to an imaginary camera, and they both laughed. But then Carmen got serious.

“You are, Lucy. Believe me, you are.”

•   •   •

A
S
C
ARMEN HAD PREDICTED,
one day Bruce, the baby boss, did call and fire her, but it was a confusing experience because he had done a management course on effective dismissal and spent ten minutes out of twelve on “positive focusing.” Carmen made three subsequent phone calls: the first was to a lawyer to ensure that the settlement included health insurance for life; the second to a man Carmen had met while shooting a movie in Argentina five years ago, who immediately issued an invitation to stay at his estancia
and learn how to play polo; the third to Lucy, to say that from now on the company would be shredding unsolicited scripts, and so she was unemployed, too.

She was sanguine, and Carmen, who was sanguine, too, appreciated this and quoted lines from Tennyson's
Le Morte d'Arthur
about how “the old order changeth, yielding place to new.” Then Carmen invited her to come to the opera that Friday night and say farewell or, rather,
“adios.”

“It's a date,” she said, and they agreed to meet by the fountain.

She deliberately came out of the subway onto Columbus Avenue so she could savor every step she took toward the Met. As she approached, the early-evening sunlight hit the sparkling sprays of water and a series of rainbows danced across the magnificent façade, and she laughed at the absurd beauty of it all.

Carmen emerged from behind the fountain, ever youthful in leather jeans, a poncho, and a green felt gaucho hat.

“I left the spurs at home,” Carmen said. “I thought they were a bit too
Magnificent
Seven
.”

They air-kissed with real affection and then headed inside, where she spent her last day's wages on champagne, and they marveled at the Chagalls and the chandeliers. Then they took Carmen's usual seats in the very front row of the stalls, where they could practically feel the air move as the conductor lifted his arms, the curtain rose, and suddenly they were in a darkened church in Rome as the painter Cavaradossi finishes his portrait of Mary Magdalene and awaits the arrival of his lover, the diva Floria Tosca.

When she was ten, before she had any idea what opera was, she had listened to the twenty most beloved arias as her father drove her to school. He had bought a limited-edition box set of two cassettes, a special offer from the
TV Guide
, and one day, stuck in traffic, through the tinny car speakers, Maria Callas had sung “Vissi d'Arte” from
Tosca
, and her father had started to cry.

“What does it mean?” she had asked, but her father said he didn't have a clue, there was just something about the voice of Callas that had affected him.

In the first interval, Carmen took out an embroidered handkerchief in preparation for this, and when the magnificent soprano began to sing “Vissi d'arte,
vissi d'amore,”
Carmen, too, started to cry.

I have lived for art.

The English surtitles were projected overhead.

I have lived for love.

She smiled at Carmen, and squeezed her hand.

“Thank you. For everything,” she said.

Carmen nodded, wiping her cheeks, as one bulging tear sat on her right eyelash like dew on a strand of grass.

“Green shoots are growing, Lucy,” she said enigmatically, and Lucy felt a shiver of anticipation.

W
hen Lucy was living in London she had longed to go to the Hamptons, so when Julia and Christy mentioned they would both be there over the Fourth of July weekend, Christy in the barn in Bridgehampton and Julia in a rental in Amagansett, she thought,
“At last!”
Sitting in her library in Ladbroke Grove, Lucy had spent many happy hours researching houses and reading about the Jitney. She knew in topographical detail which bit of East Hampton was actually in East Hampton and not buried in woodland where you could find deer lactating in your driveway or be bitten by Lyme disease–ridden ticks.

None of this information was of any use in her present accommodation, however, a budget motel with pink-and-green bedspreads that smelled of cooking oil and a shower that Janet Leigh would have refused to enter, and where they were lulled to sleep at night not by waves rolling along the shore but by trucks rolling along the Montauk Highway.

It didn't matter that Lucy remembered trips to five-star hotels in paradisaical locations round the globe where she and Richard had bickered and complained, and twice he had remembered urgent business in the office and left a week early, chatting to the boys at the infinity pool via Skype as Lucy resentfully sipped the first of her afternoon cocktails. No, she had a nasty little secret. In her hotel bathroom she expected Aveda toiletries at the very least, was pleasantly surprised by Bliss, and once, in Florence, had been delighted by Santa Maria Novella. In the motel on the highway, she had gingerly picked up a yellowing bar of used soap from behind the toilet to examine the thumbprint in its center.

“OCEAN! Don't be such a girl!”

Lucy looked up from her soggy towel and reverie to see two children, a boy and a girl, arguing on the beach because the boy called Ocean didn't want to go into the water. After glancing over to check that Max and Robbie were still happily splashing with Richard in the shallows nearby, she nudged Julia, who in turn nudged Christy, who reluctantly put her iPad down and listened.

“Leave me alone, Harmony!” the boy shouted, and stuck his nose in the sand and his butt in the air and beat his fists and feet in the distinctive rhythm of tantrum as the girl called Harmony started kicking sand over his Saint Tropez–style shorts.

“Poor Ocean,” whispered Christy.

“Poor Harmony,” said Julia. “Who'd be a girl in that house?”

“
Houses
, I suspect,” said Lucy, as a man and woman marched barefoot toward them past a tower of Boogie Boards. They were clearly the parents of Harmony and Ocean (like the Hapsburgs, father and children had very distinctive chins), and they were arguing.

“He said he wanted to do surf camp,” the mother pleaded, her fashion-forward caftan that had seemed like such a good idea in Bergdorf's wilting around her.

“No. You just wanted to stop me from using the beach pass,” retorted the father, taking exaggerated steps through the sand.

“Talk about dis-harmony and ocean,” Christy said to Julia, once the unhappy couple was out of earshot. “That's one for the writer's notebook.”

“I couldn't use it,” replied Julia.

“What? Not even the beach pass?” said Lucy. “That was funny. Getting a beach pass here is a nightmare.”

“Nope.” Julia shook her head.

Lucy and Christy looked at her.

“If you saw it in film you wouldn't believe it. You'd dismiss it as unconvincing social satire about the kind of people who summer in the Hamptons and call their kids Harmony and Ocean. It might be true, but it doesn't feel
real
.”

And with that, Julia jumped to her feet, brushed the sand off her legs, and expertly zipped up her wet suit, her right arm angled awkwardly behind her. She pulled a small tube out of Romy's backpack and smeared the zinc cream across her nose, cheeks, and the backs of her hands. It was bright blue and, as she ran to join the surf class on the beach, with her absurdly elegant limbs, her long graceful feet, and her turquoise face, she looked like one of the Na'vi in
Avatar
.

Lucy closed her eyes and took a moment to consider their conversation, but Christy settled herself down again, waved at Sinead and Sorcha, who were happily digging a moat around a palace of sandcastles, and eagerly pulled her iPad back out of her beach bag. She had reached the second part of
The
Age of Innocence
, and, as for some reason she had never seen the film, she was engrossed in the twists of the plot. Passionate but too proper Newland Archer had actually married quietly scheming May Welland, but now he was in Newport, staring at the distant figure of his true love, the Countess Olenska, who stood at the end of the pier, watching sailboats go by. Newland, engulfed in the tragic contemplation of his loss, was wondering if she could sense his presence.
“Shouldn't I know if she came up behind me?”
he mused.

Christy stopped reading and looked up across the waves of Ditch Plains. She thought about Newland's self-righteous irritation and wanted to shout at him.

“You got married to someone you didn't love! Of course Olenska doesn't want to see you.”
She shook her hair back and stared moodily over the sea, her perfect profile framed beneath her straw panama. She considered a world where the biggest emotions were expressed in the smallest gestures, where a declaration of love was turning to look at someone, where the bitterest betrayal might come on a scented visiting card, where the wave of a white-gloved hand meant good-bye forever. She wondered why, although she wanted to identify with the mesmerizing Countess who trailed her tragedy and the whiff of old Europe behind her, she felt a sneaking admiration for May.

“Christy,” said Lucy suddenly, “what Julia just said. That's how I feel when I remember I'm forty years old. It might be true, but it doesn't feel real.”

“Oh,” said Christy, but she still didn't quite get it.

•   •   •

A
NOTHER MORNING
,
in the city, Robyn lies in bed and listens to the rumble of the subway train from beneath the foundations of the building. Someone has once told her that it makes them think of a dragon roaring from the subterranean depths, and Robyn always remembers this when summer comes, and she sees the dragon's steamy breath rising through the sidewalks and increasing the stifling heat to unbearable. It's seven in the morning, and already pointless to open a window, so she switches on the fan and throws back her sheet and lets the stale air beat over her as best it can.

Robyn leaves the apartment early, her bag weighed down with deodorant, foot powder, and a pair of smart shoes as she wears her Crocs to walk in. The summer is not just a challenge for childcare, but a horror for feet, and, whenever she bothers to look down, Robyn thinks,
if I had a dollar for every throbbing bunion
, or, for that matter, every bloodstained Band-Aid hanging off a heel. She moves briskly, but not briskly enough, it seems, for an enormous muscle-bound jogger, sweating through his Duke University sweatshirt, who lumbers toward her with the footfall of a T. rex, and who claps his hairy hands together like a gunshot an inch in front of her nose and bellows, “WAKE UP, LADY!” to get her out of his way. Shocked, she stops for a moment and notices that a small jar of petroleum jelly has fallen out of the pocket of his shorts. She picks it up and gleefully hurls it into the trash.
I hope you chafe like hell, bully boy
, she mutters.

In the park by Chrystie Street, she sees a few tiny children running and laughing in the water sprinklers and smiles. Ryan has taken Madison and Michael to their grandparents' house in Anaheim for three weeks. There has been much hemming and hawing about the invitation; Michael has begged her to come with them, even for a week, but in the end common sense has prevailed. What to do with the kids for the long summer months is an annual nightmare, inevitably resolved with a patchwork of friends, work leave, any family that can be cajoled into it, and the inevitable couple of weeks at grim, inexpensive sports camps where the children cry as she leaves them because they don't know anyone and are still crying when she returns to pick them up. This year, however, with most of July covered by the trip to California, if Robyn takes two weeks off to sit with them in front of the TV, kick a ball round Battery Park, and chase them through the water sprinklers, they are nearly at the start of the fall term again. Of course the most commonsense
arrangement would be for Ryan merely to drop the kids off with his parents and pick them up, but, even as he was protesting that caring for them would be “too much” for his mother, she knew he was looking forward to lying by his parents' pool, eating three cooked meals a day, and writing his blog about the challenges of the artistic life. It is too much, but Robyn has long known that she and her husband have different definitions of the same words.
Wake up, lady.

As she approaches Grace Church, she glances at her watch. If she gets on the subway at Union Square, she can take ten minutes, and so she does, entering the church slowly by the back door and slipping into a wooden pew. The stone coldness envelops her as she examines a laminated reference guide to the church, one she has read many times before, and picks out the characters in the Pre-Raphaelite stained-glass windows. At the bottom of the guide is an italicized quote from 1869:
“For many years Grace has been the center of fashionable New York.”

Robyn kneels down and prays for many things, one of which is a change in the weather.

•   •   •

V
AUGHN HAD BUILT
the barn in Bridgehampton as his first marriage was collapsing. Although “barn” might imply an Amish-style structure where the most fun you could have would be watching a chicken lay an egg, Vaughn's barn covered five thousand square feet, and had a home cinema as well as wooden beams in the ceiling. It was his pride and joy. He had delayed its completion to try and keep it out of the divorce settlement, but in the end, a sort of time-share agreement had been reached between him and the first Mrs. Armitage II over its usage.

When he married Christy, Vaughn had been concerned whether she would feel comfortable about this, but Christy, who did not have a territorial bone in her body, loved the house as much as he did and often remarked on what exquisite taste her predecessor had. Christy was struck by the fact that the flowers in every room complemented the color scheme and, in the case of the living room, where a huge oil painting of white Madonna lilies hung over the fireplace, an enormous bouquet of matching flowers was always on the table, together with a pair of ornamental scissors to clip out the stamens and the clusters of red-brown pollen atop them. The first Mrs. Armitage II, who had a penchant for crisp white French linen, knew how to avoid a stain emergency.

Christy had the scissors in her hand when Vaughn came in and volunteered to take the girls out for a few hours. By the conspiratorial look on their faces, Christy knew that part of this excursion would involve ice cream, but she was delighted. She was planning to surprise Vaughn one day that week by making his favorite dinner, steak and kidney pie, and this was her opportunity. She put the scissors down, kissed them all good-bye, and hurried to the kitchen, where Loretta the Housekeeper had stocked the fridge according to that week's list.

She had just lifted a handful of flour-covered meat into the sizzling casserole dish on the stove when she heard a car turning into the drive. She hid the dish in the oven and, wiping her floury and bloodstained hands on her cream apron, walked into the hall. Now she heard the insistent revving of an engine, which rose to a mechanical squeal. Christy's father had considered it his primary parental duty to teach her and her brother basic automobile skills. She knew this was a car in pain.

Vaughn had remarked only the previous week that the unfenced ditch next to the garage was an accident waiting to happen, and, when Christy came outside, she saw that a small rental car was stuck in it, its front right wheel jutting upward and spinning as the driver continued desperately to turn the engine on.

“
Stop!
You'll flood it!” she shouted, and at that moment Teddy, the gardener, appeared from the lavender beds and ambled over.

He walked to the driver's door, opened it, and a woman got out. She was wearing a dark suit and black stockings and enormous sunglasses, and when she pulled them off she blinked in the sunlight and looked around nervously, like a goth meerkat. Against the shimmering blues and greens and soft grays of the landscape she looked ridiculous, and she knew it. She took off her jacket and threw it on the backseat. Underneath was a plum-colored silk blouse that even to Christy's fashion-illiterate eyes looked expensive. (Lucy could have told her it was vintage; Tom Ford for Gucci from around 2001.)

“We'll soon have you out of there,” Teddy was saying as Christy approached.