No One Could Have Guessed the Weather (22 page)

She stared up at the ceiling, which was plaster, and beamed, very cozy, very un-Julia, in fact, and rested her hand on her swelling belly, waiting for the fluttering and gurgling that told her all was well, new life was coming. Perhaps unsurprisingly, she thought about the first Christmas and Mary, nine months pregnant on a donkey, jigging over hills into Bethlehem.
What a nightmare!
she thought.

She was awoken about an hour later by the sound of a guitar playing, a soft, plangent series of chords, and then a young boy, his voice high and pure like the angels that appeared to the shepherds that night, began to sing.

In the bleak midwinter

Frosty wind made moan.

She stood up carefully—the nausea of early pregnancy had left her, but sudden movements made her dizzy—and crept out into the hallway.

Earth stood hard as iron,

Water like a stone.

Outside, halfway up the stairs, Julia was waiting for her.

“It's our favorite carol,” she said.

Christy nodded.

“You've got to hand it to Christianity, really,” Julia continued. “The nativity, it's such a powerful, beautiful story of hope.” She paused. “Of course, the whole God-is-a-child thing is a bit weird.”

Then she looked at Christy.

“But the birth of every baby is a miracle.”

Christy smiled and walked down toward her, and they went into the kitchen and sat in front of the glowing embers of the fire in there, and they delivered their speeches softly to each other.

Christy was brief and pithy. She described how she had been overcome once again by feelings of entrapment, but this time it was about the years and the girls slipping away from her, the circumstances of her marriage to Vaughn (or rather the state of affairs between them), and the nurse she would inevitably become, dictating her choices. She had decided that there had to be one thing in her life just for her, so she had given Vaughn an ultimatum. The thing she wanted more than anything else was a baby and, knowing that when a woman wants a baby only a baby will do, Vaughn, determined not to lose her, had reluctantly agreed to the defrosting of two of their previous embryos, taking comfort in the extraordinary unlikelihood of the odds and their compromise, which had been they would try only once. Yet Christy had become pregnant and, although she had miscarried one of the twins early on, she had clung to the other with all her might. It was a boy. Unto them a son would be born.

This, finally, had banished Christy's cabin fever.

Now it was Julia's turn, and by contrast she was long-winded and meandering. She started by describing her life as a Venn diagram, with circles and oblongs representing children, work, marriage, and friends, and how increasingly it seemed impossible to make everything coexist in a harmonious pattern and she feared she was slipping back into the kind of behaviors that had sent her out of her mind and into the Wellness Center before. It was just harder to stay up all night glugging Red Bull laced with vodka in Malibu, where eighty-year-olds jogged past you on the beach at six o'clock in the morning and drinking two delicious lychee martinis was viewed with the same horror as shooting up heroin, apart from by the people who were shooting up heroin, of course. But she had already lost Christy by this point, so she started again with herself, Kristian, and the kids stuck in the car park that the Holland Tunnel often became on weekends and holidays.

The children, tied into the backseat, were moaning loudly about the fact that neither she nor Kristian would allow them to play with what were always contemptuously referred to as “electronic devices,” and Lee almost decapitated himself by craning his neck out of a window to try to watch
Up
on a screen in the land cruiser in the lane next to them. That day, the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, after they had finally given in and handed over their mobile phones switched to game apps, they emerged from the tunnel into horizontal rain lashing against the windscreen like a carwash, Kristian had good-humoredly turned to Julia and, laughing, said, “How d'you feel about Southern California?” and she had said, “You're right. It's time.” Kristian had then stalled the car in shock, causing a trumpet of car horns from behind them, which underlined the solemnity of Julia's statement.

Romy was already showing distressing signs of creativity and the accompanying emotional fragility, so while Julia continued to encourage her ten-year-old toward a sensible occupation (when Christy asked her what such an occupation might be, Julia replied “cardiac surgeon”), she feared it was too late. Romy was already on the first chapter of a novel called
The Fear in Me
, was the lead singer in her band, and it was increasingly apparent to Julia that a new stage of family life was upon her—a stage where her daughter needed her not to expend vast amounts of energy obsessing about who was the lead in the school play but just to sit on the end of her bed every night and talk about how it felt to be, well . . . like her.

Julia had held out hopes that Lee, who was extremely good-looking, sensibly intelligent without being flashy, and brilliant at sports would not require the same level of maternal time investment. This made him her favorite, though she would never admit it to anyone, even Christy, mainly because he was far less exhausting, although she knew that it was also because she, who had been the tall, skinny, brainy girl humiliated by the cheerleaders and whose best friend was her hamster, was delighted to have given birth to one golden child. But even he had started writing acrostic poems about the different seasons, and Kristian reported that in the one called

W

I

N

T

E

R

he had written
Wishing for fields and mountains
at the beginning.

One thing was for sure. Julia knew when to hold them and when to fold them. She would never lose her passion for New York, but she could love it from a distance. Within a fortnight she had found a house just off Broad Beach to rent, a good school with huge windows and a soccer pitch nearby, and a tenant for the loft on Rivington Street. Lucy and Richard were making noises about buying the cottage upstate because Lucy had come into some money after her mother died. Julia was not even annoyed when Kristian declared this was all synchronicity; she was finding his New Agey-ness endearing these days, and anyway, he was right. The kids would be surfing, and he would be running breath workshops in Montecito within days of their arrival, and, while she would never be a person described as “laid-back,” she might no longer be one who hovered on the edge of a nervous breakdown at least once a month. No, everything had clicked into place with a devastating momentum.

“And it's not like I'll never see you again,” she finished. “I'll have to stay at your place when I come back for work.”

Christy reached over and took her hand.

•   •   •

O
UTSIDE, THE SNOW
had settled, and, from the bustle in the hallway, they realized that Lucy and Richard were bundling the children into their outdoor clothes and snow shoes.

“Where are Christy and Julia?” called Richard, as he headed out.

“In the den, probably,” replied Lucy. “Leave them, they need a little chat.”

“Even I, insensitive male that I am, could tell there was a bit of aggro.”

“Oh, they'll be fine,” whispered Lucy, and they could hear the grin in her voice. “It was just a storm in a PMT cup.”

They could hear Richard laughing behind the closed front door.

Julia looked at Christy apologetically.

“I like her,” said Christy, and they hugged and wished each other happy holidays, though inside they didn't know whether to laugh or cry.

I
t was dark outside, although the bars on the tiny windows in the dingy classroom wouldn't have let much light in, anyway. Lucy sat at the desk, arranging her pens and blank pad in a neat pattern in front of her. She looked up and smiled nervously once at the other people in the room: four other women aged between eighteen and eighty, and two gray-haired men who looked more scared than she was. She picked up her pen and wrote the date, January 21, underlined it using the spine of the
People
magazine that she had in her handbag, and quickly stuffed it back in. It wasn't quite the image of herself she wanted to portray in a creative writing class where the serious-looking woman next to her was reading
Freedom
and nodding earnestly every couple of paragraphs.

Julia had given Lucy the course as a present before she left for L.A. They were sitting in Café Mogador having a farewell breakfast when Julia handed her an envelope which contained details of the place and time of the course (every Wednesday night for the next eight weeks, seven until ten o'clock) and a receipt indicating she had booked Lucy in and paid for it.

“Don't worry, it wasn't expensive,” she said reassuringly. “It's taught by Ryan James—you know, Robyn Skinner's ex. Don't know if he's any good, but it doesn't matter. I just really feel you should do it. You need to
do
something, Lucy.”

Lucy nodded. In Julia she had found a friend with whom such directness could be given and taken without rancor, in the spirit of the generosity Julia always showed. The question of whether writing could indeed be a suitable occupation for Lucy had been vexing them for many months now, and she and Julia had discussed different possibilities at length. For although her life was full and busy and exhausting these days (with young children and housework and volunteering at the school and being happily married), Lucy still found herself considering
Is that all there is?
and wanted something more, something that was not just about financial independence, though that was certainly a desire that had been reawakened in her, but would give her the confidence to sashay through middle age like Tina Turner, with her skirts hiked above her fantastic legs. Julia encouraged her in this determination.

“What are we all meant to do, Lucy?” she would say. “Lie down and die?
I don't think
so.
”

Lucy didn't think so, either, which is why she thanked Julia from the bottom of her heart and promised faithfully she would attend.

At that moment, Julia's attention had been diverted by a text coming through called
News About You!
Julia explained that some underpaid minion in her agent Clarice's office had the job of scanning all media for references to clients.

“It's very interesting,” she said. “Sometimes I learn things about myself I never even knew.”

Today however, the minion had made the colossal error of telling Julia that a Julia Kirkland had died yesterday of complications of emphysema at the age of 103. This threatened to ruin Julia's morning, as she couldn't help but wonder if it was some strange portent, but after another cup of coffee she brightened—103 was a damn good age, after all—and suggested to Lucy that she make it the first line of a story.
That morning, Julia learned she had died
, or something like that.

“I wouldn't want to write about you,” replied Lucy.

“It wouldn't be about me, necessarily. Or if it were, you could just change my name.”

Lucy suddenly remembered Richard telling her what Kristian with a
K
had said about Julia before she had ever met her.

“Is that why all artists need the ‘splinter of ice'?”

“Oh, please,” Julia snorted dismissively. “Kristian's always banging on about that, but I think it's just silly. All artists use things that have happened to them, whether they paint, or act, or write. It helps to make sense of everything. Anyway, my dear, in case you hadn't noticed, you have the splinter of ice, too. With you it's the ability to distance yourself from people and observe them.”

“That doesn't sound like a great thing when you say it out loud. You know, for a person to be like that.
Distant.
”

“Why? I think it could give you a voice. A way of writing about life the way you see it. You have a distinctive view of the world. That's why you should use it. Mark my words, Lucy. You have something to say.”

Lucy smiled. “I'm going to miss you.”

“Ditto,” said Julia. “You'll have to come visit me in Lotus Land. Make sure Kristian doesn't force me into buying a juicer and doing family yoga.”

“That'll never happen.”

“You're right.” She glanced at her watch. “Gotta go. The new tenant wants me to change the blinds to match the sofas. He's German,” she added, as if this were an explanation.

Lucy was dragged back to the moment by the appalling noise of chalk and nail scratching on a blackboard and saw Ryan, central-casting creative writing teacher in glasses and a brown corduroy jacket, his body language indicating his enjoyment of this intoxicating combination of pedagogy and tight jeans, scrawling words with a flamboyant flick of his right wrist.
Stop it!
she thought, as she caught herself doing this,
holding herself back and
observing
as, despite Julia's words ringing in her ears, she had resolved to stop the
distant
thing. Surreptitiously she slid her plastic magic magnifier out of her wallet and peered through it at the blackboard, on which was now written
ONE THOUSAND WORDS A DAY.
She glanced around to see her fellow participants dutifully copying this into their notebooks. Lemminglike, she followed suit.

Ryan spun round, ran his chalky hand through his boyish crop of hair, and grinned. “That's all you need to know,” he said.

Lucy reevaluated. When Ryan was with Robyn she had never thought him the remotest bit attractive.

“One thousand words a day,” he continued. “That's the thing about writing. You sit down and you do it. I hope this course will give you some tools, but if you can't commit to the thousand-words-a-day rule”—he paused, catching the eye of the most obviously attractive female in the room, a twenty-five-year-old social studies student called Dianne—“stand up, take your stuff, and leave!”

Lucy wondered if anyone had ever actually gone at this moment and what would happen if she did, but Ryan was now circling the room, soliciting introductions and expressions of intent. There was the lovely Dianne, who wanted to express herself. Roger and Stu, who wanted to do that, too (Stu on the instruction of his therapist). Marian, a stick-thin eighteen-year-old, who planned a career in songwriting, and her mother, serious-looking Jennifer, who wanted to do “something for herself.” Betty, an unfriendly, wizened septuagenarian who really did have the face she deserved, tut-tutted at this (although Lucy knew exactly what Jennifer meant) before ranting on about why all contemporary fiction sucked for about five minutes,
“It's psychotherapy masquerading as plot,”
and finally
announcing that she had been working on her memoir for the last ten years.

Finally, Ryan turned to Lucy and actually saw her. By the way he double-took, she knew he was trying to remember how he knew her, failing, and then worrying about the increasing number of senior moments he had experienced recently, so she put him out of his misery by declaring that their kids used to go to the same school. She told the room that she had studied literature, worked in publishing (when Ryan flinched, she assured him she had been a lowly editorial assistant in nonfiction), taken time out to be with her children and support her husband's career (when Betty flinched she wanted to say that Richard's career was brilliant no longer and they were all the better for it, but it felt too convoluted and disloyal), but somehow a few years' break had turned into ten as if by magic. Then she told them that she had turned forty this year and, although everyone said to her it shouldn't be a crossroads, it sure as hell felt like one, so she had decided to get off her ass and try something she had always felt she could do. For, after all, what was the point of reading a book and thinking
“I could do that”
when the only valid response would be, “
Maybe, but you didn't, did you?”

Jennifer smiled and clapped her hands together, reflecting the waft of approval emanating from round the room; even Betty could not think of a sneering riposte, and Ryan nodded in a sincere manner. Lucy stared down at her empty pad with the date neatly written across it, considering how pathetic it was that she could experience an intoxicating sense of achievement simply by speaking in front of strangers.

To begin, Ryan asked them to think of a headline in a newspaper or on the Internet that they felt could inspire a story. Who were the characters? What were the events? How would they tell it? Lucy immediately thought of an article she had seen in the
New York Post
and laughed out loud, startling herself as much as everyone else. Ryan looked at her curiously, so she had to explain. The article was about a pensioner who had poisoned forty-seven police officers with dodgy tuna melts over a two-year period.

“Great,” said Ryan, hoisting himself onto Dianne's desk, his manly thighs spreading slightly so she had to pull her pencil case away. “Let's run with that. Betty, who is this woman?”

Betty was not amused. “Why would you ask me? And why do you assume it's a woman?”

“Fair point,” said Ryan, thinking
What big ears you have, Granny
, and asked Roger for his thoughts. Roger tactfully suggested it was a man called Stu, because he couldn't think of another name on the spot, who harbored a secret resentment toward the police because—

“His wife left him for a station sergeant,” piped up Marian. And Jennifer added, “With a big nose,” and they both laughed ruefully in tones redolent of private meaning.

“Yes,” said Stu in the deep, husky tones of a presenter of late-night jazz, which startled everyone, as he had not spoken up to this point, “and my, I mean Stu's, restaurant was closed down after I fled to Paris to train as a pastry chef because of malicious claims by my ex and her husband.”

“This should be set somewhere else,” said Dianne. “How about Corleone. It's in Sicily.”

“Do they have tuna melts in Italy?” remarked Betty sourly.

“If it were an American restaurant they would,” said Ryan, both chivalrous and grammatically correct.

And Lucy, though silent, was happy. And while she hoped fervently that Ryan would not end the class with any profound statements along the lines of the longest journey beginning with the first step, or some such version relating to a large book and a single letter, as she looked around her she knew it was true.

Anyway, he didn't. Ryan was much less annoying as a teacher at night school than as an unhappily married parent you had to make small talk about the school nits epidemic with at the Halloween barbecue.

•   •   •

L
UCY TRIED TO GET
into a groove. After the boys went to school she would spend half an hour cleaning and tidying the apartment, take the puppy to relieve itself in Tompkins Square Park, walk along First Avenue to Abraço to buy the best cup of coffee in the neighborhood, and then return ready to sit down in front of the laptop. Ceremonially, she placed the coffee on her right, a pad for notes on her left, the puppy by her feet, and then she removed a Post-it from under the desk, the days when they were used to give orders to the staff long gone, and stuck it on the wall in front of her.

One thousand words a day
was written on it
.

That was the easy part.

She enjoyed the challenge of the writing exercises Ryan set them. She described a memorable incident from her schooldays (this was pure fiction, as she did not want to share the truly memorable ones), she dramatized a historical event from her own perspective (the morning of August 31, 1997, when she had awoken to Camilla shrieking down the hall of their flat in Bayswater that Diana, Princess of Wales, had died), and she wrote a surprising monologue for a fictional character (she imagined that Melanie Wilkes in
Gone with the Wind
hated Scarlett O'Hara, which was how Lucy herself felt). But once her homework was done, the lure of displacement overwhelmed her. She would stand up, gather the latest of the never-ending piles of washing, and walk to the launderette thinking about the evening's dinner. Often she took a short detour to see if
Hello!
had come into the International Newsagents on Fifth Street. One day she rang Julia in desperation, looking for inspiration, but Julia was lost in Beverly Hills, late for a breakfast meeting with someone so famous she couldn't say who it was, and had just spilled a double macchiato down her James Perse lounging T-shirt while doing a U-turn, so a garbled “Write something you'd like to read yourself” was the best she could do. It did not help. Lucy struggled to type a single word a day.