The Wonder Spot (36 page)

My mother just nodded, as though she got compliments from her mother all the time instead of never.

I said, “You do look great, Mom.”

Now she perked up: “Really?”

I said, “You really do.” And she did; her face looked less gaunt, her skin pink instead of gray.

“Are you wearing a new lipstick?” my grandmother said.

“No, Mother,” she said—coldly, I thought.

“It's pretty,” my grandmother said, as oblivious to her daughter's new disposition as her daughter was to hers.

When Laura returned with my scotch, my grandmother said, “I wanted you to put it in a crystal glass,” but that was the only sign of the old Steeny.

. . . . .

Afterward, on the elevator, I said, “You didn't tell me.”

“What?” my mother said.

“About Grandmom.”

She said, “She seems frail, doesn't she?”

“Her whole personality is different.”

“She has all those nice leather pocketbooks,” my mother said. “Why she's holding on to that vinyl purse I don't know.”

“She's nice,” I said. “She got nice.”

My mother nodded, but either she didn't agree or it didn't matter to her, which seemed as strange and dramatic as my grandmother's transformation.

I said, “You don't see the change?”

“Of course I do,” she said. “She feels vulnerable. She's older.”

I said, “Does it get on your nerves or something?”

“Of course not,” she said. “I think Laura's lovely, don't you?”

. . . . .

Neil and I went away for the weekend; a patient lent him her country house in Connecticut. We rented a car. On the drive, I asked him what he'd wanted to be when he grew up, and without hesitation he said, “Astronaut.” He told me that he'd been obsessed with NASA; he'd been transfixed watching the men walk on the moon, and had written letters to all the astronauts.

“Did they write back?”

“Some did.” He said he'd have to ask his mom where the letters might be, but then he said, “I'm sure she threw them out.”

“Are you serious?”

“She'll let me spend hours looking for them before she admits to it,” he said. “Then she'll defend herself by making me feel like an idiot for wanting the letters in the first place.”

“Nice,” I said. “What about your dad?”

“Let's see,” Neil said. “I think the best one is that when the school dentist told me I needed braces, my dad told me to push on my front teeth instead.”

“Your dad was a . . . ?”

“Dentist,” he said. “No. He was an accountant.”

. . . . .

We stopped at an antiques store that had zillions of postcards. Some were just old photographs, posed portraits, that had been made into
postcards, and Neil said, “I bet they didn't think they'd wind up in an antiques store someday.”

I said, “You never think it'll happen to you.”

The owner said, “Anything you're looking for?”

“I like old pictures of animals,” I said.

Neil looked at me like he'd never met anyone as fun and zany.

A box was brought down. Old zoos, a pigeon farm, a promenade of ostriches—I bought them all.

In the car, I told Neil that my favorite fashion photograph featured a model named Dovima posing between two elephants. I said that I'd been searching for her long black dress my entire life, though it hadn't done much for Dovima; according to her obituary, she'd gone on to be what
The Times
called “a hostess” in a bowling alley.

When we pulled into the driveway, Neil handed me a giant bag of Life Savers and said, “In case you get claustrophobic with me.”

I felt just the opposite and said so. What came to mind was the expression
The wide open,
which an ex-boyfriend had used to describe the Western landscape he missed and longed for.

The house was old and charming with painted floors and a fireplace. We undressed on the way upstairs and got right into the four-poster bed.

When I opened my eyes, I could see outside the window to the apple trees in bloom.

In the last few years, the closest I'd come to cooking dinner for anyone was opening a fresh pack of cigarettes and emptying an ashtray. But I wanted to cook for Neil. Maybe it was because he'd said he'd grown up on frozen dinners and he and his wife had always ordered out. I didn't know, but I got in the car and went to the market for groceries and to the liquor store for wine.

When I got back, Neil was on the phone, and he must've just dialed because he was saying, “May I speak to Ella, please?”

He said, “Okay, then,” not exactly into the receiver, and hung up. He tried to make a joke of it, imitating his ex-wife saying, “She's not here,” and slamming down the phone.

“She hung up on you?”

He imitated it again.

“I thought you and Beth were on good terms,” I said.

“We are, relatively.”

I said, “Relative to what?”

“She used to hang up when she heard my voice.” He tried to laugh. He told me that they got along better than a lot of divorced couples.

He turned his back to me and pretended to look through a drawer for something. He went into the other room, and then upstairs. I thought of him saying that he'd disappeared for sixteen of the sixteen years he'd been married.

I unpacked the groceries and washed the vegetables. I uncorked the wine and poured myself a big glass.

He came back in the kitchen only when the phone rang and I answered it. I knew his service by then; it was Helen, and she said, “I'm trying to reach Dr. Resnick.”

As a joke, I said, “This is Dr. Resnick,” and I was glad when Neil laughed.

“Hi,” he said into the phone, and, “Okay, put her through,” and then: “This is Dr. Resnick.”

He was always getting calls from patients because he covered for so many doctors, and one in particular, the forever-traveling Dr. Glatz, whose patients were celebrities of one sort or another and especially demanding.

I didn't mind. I liked listening to Neil talk to patients; I liked how sure he was, and how knowledgeable, and I liked that he was helping someone who needed help.

After he hung up with his last patient, he said, “Sorry,” and I said, “No.”

He said, “I can't believe you're making dinner for me.”

“Me, neither.” I lit candles and decorated the table with my new postcards. The chicken was edible and the salad outstanding.

Afterward, we looked through a shelf of videos, and he was thrilled to find
2001: A Space Odyssey
. “We have to watch this,” he said.

I said, “It's about space, right? And the future?”

“Uh-huh.”

“I have some bad news,” I said. “I hate space and the future.”

He said, “Please don't say that.”

. . . . .

In bed, Neil asked me if I'd ever been close to getting married.

I told him a little about Chris: He'd grown up in Manhattan, gone to Brown, and worked as an advocate for homeless people. I said that we'd been engaged for three weeks when I decided not to go through with it.

“Why?”

“I saw that getting married wasn't going to change anything,” I said. “It would just be more of the same.”

“Which was . . . ?”

I said,
“Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”

He said, “So, you don't regret it?”

“He died,” I said. “In a car wreck.”

“Jesus,” he said. “When?”

“About a year later.”

“That's so sad,” Neil said, holding on to me.

He fell asleep, and for a long time I lay there. Then I got dressed and went downstairs. I poured myself a glass of wine and took it outside to the little porch.

There was a nice moon, not full but fat, and it lit up the apple trees and the petals underneath.

I smoked a cigarette.

What I didn't tell Neil was that I always thought I'd wind up with Chris, even after we'd broken up, even after he'd died.

Adam had gone with me to the funeral. It was crowded, as a young person's funeral almost always is. We sat in the back, where it was hard to see and hard to hear.

I was looking at all the women. I could only see them from behind, but I studied each one, their hair and backs. Their necks and shoulders. Their arms. I found myself thinking,
You? Did he sleep
with you?
Here I was at his funeral, overwhelmed not by grief but jealousy.

Reading my mind, Adam told me that whoever these women were they hadn't meant anything to Chris. “They were just keeping your seat warm,” he said.

As a procession, we walked to Central Park, past the carousel to the field where Chris had played softball on Sundays. There was a metal can of his ashes, and Adam and I each took some and scattered them on the mound. As a joke, I said, as I had a thousand times, “Tell me the truth: You don't think Chris and I will ever get back together, do you?”

Adam laughed, and so did I; he hugged me, and then I think he knew I was about to cry because he said, “Oh, shoot, I think I got Chris on you,” and dusted off my coat.

Adam and I were walking to the Boathouse when a woman stopped us. “You don't know me,” she said. “I'm Myla. I was the one after you.”

Once she'd gone, Adam said, “See?”

It didn't make any difference.

The part of my brain that made no sense at all didn't believe Chris was dead. He'd switched hospital ID bracelets or charts with another patient. He'd tied sheets together and lowered himself out the window. I looked for him, like he was a fugitive in hiding. A hank of blond hair, a jean jacket, and I'd think,
Chris.

I'd always thought of him as the one who got away, but right then it stopped being true. I knew that if Chris walked across the moony grass and up to this porch and proposed again I would say no again.

I wondered if he was here—that is, everywhere. I imagined that he was. I imagined him saying,
Who's the guy inside?

As though he had, I made my voice as kind as I could: “He's the one after you.”

. . . . .

After my father's death, my mother had called me every day, then every other day, and then every few days. One Sunday I realized with a pang of guilt that we hadn't spoken in more than a week.

She answered in a voice so husky I said, “Do you have a cold?”

“No,” she said. “I feel wonderful.”

I told her about Neil, but she was distracted. Finally I stopped talking.

It took her a minute to notice. Then she said, “I'm so glad you have somebody, too.”

. . . . .

Once when we were talking on the phone, she said, “That's my Call Waiting.” She got flustered, and asked me to hold on, and then she was gone.

I knew it was Lev Polikoff; what I didn't know was whether she'd forgotten about me or decided to let me wait.

She called me back an hour later. “I'm sorry,” she said, and I could tell that she was.

. . . . .

I began calling my new-and-improved grandmother as I never had the old one. At first, we'd only talk for a few minutes; I'd call her while I was waiting to go into a meeting or finishing my lunch. She'd ask me about work, and in the beginning I'd say, “It's okay,” because I wanted her to think it was.

Once when I called her, she said, “What are you working on until ten at night?”

I said, “I'm trying to write a stupid brochure.”

“What's the problem?”

It was hard, I told her, because the brochure wasn't supposed to sound like a person had written it; it had to be authoritative, like the voice of God or Science.

She asked me to read it to her, and I did, even though it was long. I kept stopping, but she said, “Go on,” and, “It's not like I've got a dance to go to.”

Afterward, trying to compliment me, she said, “I'd never know that was written by a human being.”

. . . . .

Adam called to tell me that Steinhardt, the publishing house where we'd met, had been sold, and the editorial department would probably be disbanded. “It's the end of an era.”

I said that I thought the era had ended a while ago. I was about to say,
Do we even know anybody who works there anymore?
when I thought of Francine Lawlor, and I said her name aloud.

He complimented me on my memory, but I told him no; Francine had been sending me Christmas cards for the last fourteen years.