Emma's Table (16 page)

“I know there's something here, Dick.”

Benjamin was adamant about it. He'd convinced himself that the pretty young mother was acting out her anger on the
little girl—probably furious with her, he thought, for stealing the attention away from herself. That's why she plies the girl with sweets, he decided: to make Gracie as unappealing as she could.

Spooner rolled his eyes. “So what do you want from me?” he asked.

“I want to make a psychiatric referral,” Benjamin told him. “I need your sign-off.”

“It sounds like a waste of time,” Spooner said, huffing out a little breath.

Benjamin didn't say another word, but he didn't look away either. He held his ground.

The phone rang, and Spooner scrambled to pick it up.

Shit, Benjamin thought. He couldn't let his boss slip away. “Dick?” he said, with an insistence that surprised him.

“Hang on a second,” Spooner said into the receiver. He looked back at Benjamin as if he were so much asbestos hiding in the walls of his tiny dining room.

“Okay, Blackman,” he said. “Just don't let this get in the way of any real emergencies.”

Like your drapes? Benjamin thought.

 

AT THE VERY MOMENT OF WAKING, CASSY PLUCKED
the miserable scene at her mother's apartment from all the others at her dreamy disposal—like bobbing for just the wrong apple in a wooden barrel filled up with them.

It was too late for turning back.

She pictured last night's dinner in painful detail. She could see it breaking up fast—once the name-calling began anyway. She watched Benjamin running for the door like a
white-tailed deer, in just five or six leaping strides—as if it were hunting season still.

Calling her mother a felon had pretty well spoiled the evening.

Why am I so mean? Cassy wondered, turning over in bed.

“We all have our nights,” her father had told her as he walked her from the dining room into the foyer. He'd forgiven her already. Cassy appreciated his kindness, but she only had eyes for her mother.

She stared at Emma, and Emma stared right back.

She saw anger and hurt—in nearly equal measure—in the tight purse of her mother's lips, and the softness of her cloudy eyes.

Cassy wanted to apologize right away.

Of course she did; it was the least she could do, but something inside her held her back. Cassy waited instead, wanting to see how her mother would respond.

Emma kept looking and looking, as if she'd never laid eyes on her before.

It's a little late for that, Cassy thought.

She felt even more abandoned then, seething as her mother stared, as if she were a piece of gold jewelry. Was it precious to her, Cassy wondered, or merely paste? Her mother's gaze gave no hint.

Emma reached out and took her daughter's hand.

And still neither of them spoke. They let the moment pass.

Cassy pulled her hand away.

She might have relished the attention once—when she was twelve maybe, or thirteen: her mother's eyes on her, at least, if not a soothing hand at the nape of her neck, or a kind
word on her way out to school. She wouldn't have minded the public squabbling even—not back then, not if it jolted her mother into something like attentiveness. Provocation had been one of the only weapons in the girl's arsenal, after all. She'd dragged irrelevant boyfriends home, nearly begging to be caught in the act, trailing the evidence of misbehavior behind her like so many neon breadcrumbs in the forest. There were ziplock packets of powdery drugs and condoms wrapped in golden foil; there were glittering piles of shop-lifted jewelry, sprinkled like fairy dust all around her room.

But her mother never said a word.

“We'll talk later,” her mother said—as late as last night, when Cassy walked to the door.

Probably not, she thought, waiting for the elevator that would take her downstairs—but that's okay too.

Cassy had almost stopped hoping for her mother to pay attention by then. She'd learned to make do with what was on hand instead: her anger, for starters. There was always plenty of that. She hoarded her mother's failure to inquire, the relentlessness of her self-regard, as if they were faceted rubies in a black velvet case. Her anger was more than enough by then.

Cassy was accustomed to inattention.

 

It's not the end of the world, she supposed, rousing herself in bed that morning. She could apologize later, at the office maybe. Or maybe not, she thought, smiling a little as she stretched out long.

She
is
a convicted felon, after all.

Cassy sat up and rested her head against the plush mohair headboard. She noticed a little fur hat down by her feet.

I don't have a fur hat, she thought, watching—dumb-struck—as the thing sprang to life, turning into a tiny brown dog before her very eyes. But I don't—she started—yet there it was: like a curly brown lamb shrunk down to size, no bigger than a furry shoe.

Its eyes glinted back at her.

The two of them sat frozen in place, sizing each other up. Then the little thing was on her in a flash, frisking onto her tired chest and licking her face with gusto.

Cassy screamed out.

Now
she remembered—the featherweight of its little body, and the silky fur against her skin. She huddled at the edge of her bed, and the puppy scampered to a neutral corner, squeaking out a tiny bark. It was her impulse purchase from the night before.

 

Cassy had walked past the pet store on her way home from her mother's—just in from the corner where the cab dropped her off. Le Petit Puppy, it was called, next door to the deli where she bought her milk. There were always a handful of dogs in the window—little white ones usually, tumbling in the bay that was strewn with ashy wood chips and three tons of confetti.

She could smell the filth right through the glass.

Cassy wasn't a dog person.

There was just one puppy in the window last night—a little brown one with curly hair. Cute enough, she supposed, but she only stopped because the little thing was all alone, looking every bit as defeated as she felt. They might have been the only two puppies in the whole wide world that hadn't been claimed after a weekend of brisk trade.

Cassy saw the confetti, but she knew the party was over.

It was nearly ten o'clock on Sunday night.

She walked into the shop and asked a sour-looking man behind the counter where the dogs slept at night. She had a hunch that everything would be fine if she could just lay her eyes on a comfy little dog bed, or a fluffy pillow at the back—a mother dog somewhere in the vicinity.

“What's it to you?” he asked, scowling at her rudely.

He's not very nice, she thought—with his scowling face and nasty disposition. She wasn't quite sure how to respond to him either: what
was
it to her, in fact? The two of them stared each other down like quick-fingered gunslingers at the OK Corral, neither of them moving a muscle, but ready to draw in the blink of an eye.

The man behind the counter looked as if he'd said everything he was going to say.

“I'll take it,” Cassy told him.

She'd never considered such a thing in all her life. I don't
want
a dog, she thought—not two seconds after she'd offered to buy his.

“Suit yourself,” the man replied. He didn't sound impressed.

The man retrieved the puppy from the window. Cassy didn't know its age or sex; she didn't even know its breed. The man put together a little “care package” for her—they came free with purchase at Le Petit Puppy. She didn't know the first thing about dogs, but she wasn't going to ask the man behind the counter a single question more: look where the first one had gotten her.

“That'll be eight hundred dollars,” he said.

 

Cassy watched the puppy peering over the edge of the bed, its furry little face hungry for the floor. It stretched its skinny back legs long, a bony ballast to its head's strong desire.

She recognized the warring impulse.

She cowered in a neutral corner, the bedcovers pulled up around her ears as if she needed protection from the little thing. She was impressed when it jumped off the bed finally, landing front legs first without a sound on the wooden floor. She watched it scamper out of the room.

Thank God, she thought, in pure relief, as if all her troubles had vanished with it, a poisonous wasp flown out the bedroom window.

It took her that long to realize that the puppy was on the loose.

She scrambled out of bed, chasing after the thing, peeking into the bathroom first, but the dog wasn't there. She nearly stopped to pee, but didn't, fearful that the little thing might have something similar in mind. Cassy ran through the foyer and into the living room, but the puppy was nowhere in sight. Just the kitchen to go, and she was heading straight for it when she heard the sound of water pouring beneath the dining room table.

“Oh, no,” she moaned.

She saw the puppy then, squatting a stream of urine across her leopard-skin rug. “Not the leopard!” she cried.

The dog looked up at her, its head cocked slightly. It finished its business and walked right off. It didn't look sorry at all.

Cassy contemplated the yellow puddle, like a shallow bowl of consommé. It didn't seem to sink into the rug. I guess that's good, she thought, running to the kitchen for a roll of
paper towels. She supposed it made a kind of sense. It was
skin
, after all—a leopard's skin; a dog's pee shouldn't sink into it any more than a burst of rain on the African plains. Cassy fell to her hands and knees and began sponging up the urine with a magnificent wad of paper towels. She didn't want a hint of the stuff seeping into her own skin. It was more than enough that the poor old leopard had been doused with it. She noticed that it didn't leave a trace—no circle of darkness or moistness at all. She ran her palm over the soft leopard, combing her fingers through its stiff black mane.

That's lucky, she thought.

But it was a strange kind of luck; she knew that too—the need for which might have been so easily avoided if she'd just left the damned dog in the store window where she'd found it.

Cassy got rid of the pee-soaked towels and came back to the living room with what remained of the roll tucked beneath her arm, just in case. She saw that the little dog had burrowed its way beneath the living room sofa, a chic Florence Knoll number in navy blue, just six inches or so off the floor.

It was awfully cute, she had to admit, smiling at the dog in spite of herself—a tiny camper beneath a blue pup tent. The puppy lay its head down on its two front paws and yawned wide.

Maybe this wouldn't be so bad?

Then it began to gnaw on a sofa leg.

“No!” she screamed, throwing the roll of paper towels straight at its little brown head. She missed, and the dog squeaked out another bark, darting from its perch beneath the sofa and knocking into the small side table, upsetting the
little blue teardrop that Cassy had only just placed there with care, the one she'd stolen from her hostess on Sunday afternoon.

The teardrop fell to the floor and shattered into pieces.

Serves me right, she thought, giving chase.

The little thing had a funny run: more up-and-down than she would have thought, and practically no forward momentum at all—more like a curly brown rabbit than any kind of dog.

It made it easy to catch, at least.

She scooped it up and placed it in the crook of her arm. It felt soft and warm there. She couldn't help but bring her cheek down to its silken curls.

“Oh, God,” she moaned, trying to resist it—visualizing the puddle of pee on the dining room rug, and the smashed-up teardrop, and the gnawed sofa leg. She tried to picture all the havoc it would wreak, but her visions were useless to her then. The dog felt like heaven in her arms, soothing even after her mad dash through the apartment.

And it wasn't so much brown, she noticed, as cinnamon-colored—just the nicest shade of auburn. Russet, she thought, and once she'd named it, she knew she was done for.

Cassy carried the dog into the bathroom, for lack of any better plan. She placed it down at the bottom of the tub and sat herself on the toilet seat. She needed to collect her thoughts.

The dog's ruddy fur looked even prettier against the shiny porcelain.

She felt exhausted.

The dog scratched all around the porcelain, trying to scamper up its shiny sides, but it never made it very far. The tub
was too slippery and deep for that; the puppy kept tumbling down to the bottom again.

“Just relax,” she said, in a quiet voice.

They were her first kind words in a very long time.

Cassy tried to relax too, picking up the dog again and settling it snugly into her arms. She felt her body unwinding at the puppy's perfect fit, her heartbeat slowing with its warm, soothing touch.

She supposed there were worse things than a little urine on her leopard-skin rug.

Beef Lung and Anise Biscuits

EMMA SWANNED PAST THE DOORMAN ON HER WAY
inside, a benevolent smile on her lips and a slightly distracted air—like the queen of a small European country. Her silver fur hung from her shoulders as she sailed quietly onward. She read the freestanding sign on its thin black pole: “All Visitors Must Be Announced.”

She walked straight past it.

Emma had no business in this place.

“Good morning, ma'am.” The doorman smiled, as if he'd seen her there ten thousand times. He probably has, she thought, nodding back at him, so regal, a fresh coat of lipstick lying heavy on her mouth. He'd have seen her on all those magazine covers when he sorted the mail, or on his television set every time he turned around. Just one of the advantages of being me, she thought, her tongue almost in cheek: she was free to walk into strange buildings with impunity.

Emma didn't kid herself though; there'd have been hell to
pay if that doorman hadn't let her pass. She had half a mind to call Bobby, in fact—to warn him about the lax security of the place—but she wanted the element of surprise on her side still.

She'd been more than a little surprised herself when the car pulled up in front of the building, 44 West Seventy-eighth Street—her husband's secret hideaway. It was one of those huge residential towers, a developer building that had been slapped up in about fifteen minutes and christened with a fancy name to compensate for the overwhelming cheapness of its construction—“The Vanderbilt,” she'd bet, or, better still, “Ardsley Hall.”

“Is this it?” she'd asked the driver. It looked so ordinary.

He confirmed the address.

“Wait here,” Emma said. “I'll just be a minute.”

The driver hopped out of the car and opened her door. She thanked him sweetly. She always seemed to manage sweetness best when she was a little afraid.

She glided past the doorman.

Every surface in the lobby was slick and shiny. There was a sea of cheap terrazzo on the floor, and ugly panels of milky glass attached to every wall. She walked on tiptoe; she didn't want to make a racket.

What were they thinking? she wondered, tapping past a small arrangement of Mies-inspired furniture. Vinyl would be a step up for these cushions, she thought.

Emma was conscious of her every step, of lifting her feet so carefully up and placing them down again even more so; she didn't want to slip.

Wouldn't that be the icing on the cake—breaking her neck in her husband's love nest?

Ex-
husband, she reminded herself.

She sailed past the mailroom and into a waiting elevator, which carried her straight to the twelfth floor. She found Bobby's apartment at the end of the hall—number 12G. She fished the keys from a deep chinchilla pocket and pushed straight past the stubborn lock.

I should remind him about pockets, she thought, rolling her eyes at Bobby's carelessness.

She prepared herself before she opened the door, as if composing a face for the television cameras. “Here we go,” she said, lifting her head high as she walked directly in.

Emma felt her heart drop down to her knees as she took in the scenery, all hollowed out inside; there was nothing to keep that broken, beating thing in place. She'd expected something from a Crate and Barrel catalog, generic and a little low-down, suitable for a college student, maybe, or a little better than that—a suite in a business hotel perhaps. But her husband's apartment defied her expectations. Every item looked chosen with care—fabrics rich and tweedy, the tables cut from a forest of burnished wood. She recognized some of the pieces from so long ago that she had only the vaguest memories of them; others she didn't remember at all.

And I've got a mind like a steel trap, she thought—when it comes to furniture.

She opened the velvet drapes in the living room and looked down onto a pretty playground across the street. She spent more time gazing out that window, at the splintery see-saws and metallic swings, than she ever had looking out her own windows, onto her spectacular view of Central Park.

Emma needed to sit down.

She made her way to a club chair in the corner. It was up
holstered in old kilim rug. Too much, she thought at first—all that color and pattern colliding—but she knew it was only wishful thinking. The fabric had softened beautifully with age, and it was perfect for the chair, she hated to admit.

She picked up a section of the newspaper from a stack on the floor beside her. February 9, she read: just the day before.

Bobby had told her he was going to the office.

I need an Advil, she thought—maybe two.

Emma rustled for a bottle of pills in her handbag. She choked a couple down, dry—even though the kitchen and its sink were just ten paces away. She tasted the sugary coating on her tongue, and fingered a loose button on the chair's armrest.

She wondered where the kilim chair had come from.

Back when he was happy, she supposed.

Emma stood up again and wandered all around the place—strolling through the kitchen and peeking into the tidy bath. She walked into the small bedroom just beyond it.

This is worse than I thought, she decided.

There was an old oak suite from somewhere in their pasts—a tartan spread and matching drapes. She was sure she recognized it.

“From his mother's house!” she gasped.

This was no hot-sheets hideaway. Emma got the picture then: this was where Bobby really lived.

She wanted to be furious; she expected at least that much of herself, but for the life of her, Emma couldn't rip a single picture down or slash even one upholstered cushion. A sharp knife would be no use to her here.

I can't compete with this, she thought.

She sat down on the corduroy sofa in the living room.
It was camel colored, with crisp little arms and thin walnut legs. “And would you look at that picture?” she murmured, shaking her head at a breathtaking landscape on the opposite wall. She remembered Bobby's admiring it—at a Sotheby's auction, she thought, a million years before.

“Absolutely not,” she'd said at the time. She'd never have a nineteenth-century landscape. Emma liked her art fashionable and contemporary.

Now, all these years later, she admired it, and its hand-wrought frame too.

Solid mahogany, she suspected.

Emma was forced to unlearn, in a stroke, what she'd spent half her life believing to be the case. He
does
care, she thought—having convinced herself, long before, that all her home improvements sailed right over his head. Bobby cared plenty—just not about the home he shared with her.

Emma wasn't sure what to do next.

All those vain promises he'd made when he came back to her weren't worth a damn, she saw. She wouldn't let herself wallow in hurt feelings though. Emma might feel frail at heart, but she'd be cast iron for the world to see.

She stood up again, and settled on the familiar: she rearranged the furniture. She dragged the kilim chair from out of its corner—pulling it forward, toward the center of the room. Then she inched the sofa away from the wall—letting it breathe a little. She moved the velvet ottoman to the other side of the room.

Much better, she thought, admiring her handiwork.

She'd opened up the room.

It was time for Emma to leave.

She stepped into the hallway and nearly bumped into a
girl who was rushing in the opposite direction. Looks like a prostitute, she sneered, fixing on her short, short coat and her tall black boots that shone a little cheaply. So much for the neighborhood, she sniffed—but she knew the girl was just young.

“Emma Sutton,” the girl called out, as if it were the beginning of a playground rhyme.

Emma nodded heavily and kept on walking.

 

A few minutes later, she pushed through the revolving doors again, walking out to the street. She found her car waiting at the curb, right where she'd left it. She saw her weekday assistant—Allison—waiting in the backseat, her driver scrambling from the car once he'd seen her on the sidewalk.

“Too late, Danny,” she said, in a punishing mood.

Emma opened the door for herself. She stepped into the car and took her seat, waited for the driver to close the door behind her.

“Everything all right?” her assistant asked. She sounded a little nervous.

“Perfectly,” Emma said, settling into her seat again, as if she weren't terribly hurt. She shrugged the fur from around her shoulders and sank back into the upholstery leather. “Why wouldn't it be?” she asked, looking back at the girl through gimlet eyes.

Allison looked down fast.

Emma was sure she must be wondering what the hell her boss had been doing in some mediocre apartment building on the Upper West Side—for twenty minutes, no less—but she wouldn't confide a thing in the girl. She'd already learned her lesson on that front. She'd already sat by, stunned, as
nearly every last one of the boys and girls who'd ever worked for her sang their hearts out to the
New York Post
, back in the thick of her legal woes. People would say just about anything, she'd learned, for the prospect of seeing their names on Page Six.

She wasn't going to give the girl the ammunition.

“Any calls?” she asked.

Allison ran down a list of three or four, but Emma didn't care about any of them really. “And a Mr. Tanaguchi called at noon.”

“Who's that?” she said.

“He's from the UN?” Allison told her. She made it sound like a question; the girl made everything sound like a question. It annoyed Emma terribly. “Something about a Nakashima table?” she added.

Of course, Emma thought—the little man from the auction house, her losing bidder. “What did he want?” she asked.

“He said you knew where he could find a Nakashima table.”

“I do,” she replied, a little defensively.

She was on the verge of telling the girl to throw the message away.

Why bother? she wondered. But something in her balked at the impulse: Don't, she told herself, in no uncertain terms.

Don't what? Emma wondered.

She sat quietly in the back of her limousine, an index finger pressed softly against her lips and a wave of guilt flooding over her. She drew a perfectly straight line between her terrible behavior at the auction house and the betrayal she'd discovered upstairs, as if her thievery of the Nakashima table had prompted Bobby's abandonment of their life together.
It felt as causal to her then as if the tiny Japanese man—or George Nakashima himself—had placed those secret keys into the palm of her husband's hand.

Emma needed to undo it at once.

She'd make it up to Mr. What's-his-name.

“Call him back,” Emma said. Then she changed her mind. “No,” she continued. “Call Christina at Modern Edge first, and tell her that I'm coming by at five. Tell her I want a Nakashima table.”

The girl was scribbling as fast as she could.

“If she's got anything for us to look at,” Emma told the girl, “call Mr.—”

“Tanaguchi,” Allison said.

“Yes,” she said, all determination. “Call Mr. Tanaguchi and have him meet us there.”

“At five?” she asked.

“Well, of course, at five,” Emma said.

The car phone rang before the girl had finished transcribing her instructions. Emma had no doubt she'd botch the job. Allison answered the car phone, and turned to Emma.

“It's Benjamin,” she said, her hand covering the mouthpiece.

“I'll take it,” she replied, plucking the receiver from the girl's quivering grasp.

“Hello,” she said, the way some ladies do—a tad softer and a half note higher than her normal speaking voice.

She was impressed with him for calling.

“I want to apologize for last night,” he told her, without any warm-up or pleasantries at all. He sounded sincere.

“Whatever for?” she asked. She'd just expected him to thank her.

“Well,” he said, “I think I rubbed Cassy the wrong way. I think that's why she snapped at us.”

Emma didn't remember her snapping at him.

“That wasn't your fault,” she said.

“Well, I think it was,” he replied, contradicting her.

It was sweet, she thought—his trying to take Cassy off the hook.

“So I'm sorry,” he said, repeating himself.

“She was just blowing off steam,” Emma told him. That's all it was—a little sparring between girls. But she knew Benjamin wouldn't understand that. He never seemed to have any steam to blow off at all.

“By the way,” she said, “I've got your cell phone.”

“Did I leave it?” he asked.

“Well, I didn't steal it,” she told him. Emma hated stupid questions. “We'll get it to you later,” she said, handing the phone back to Allison, who looked at it as if she weren't quite sure what to do with it.

“Well, hang it up,” she said—which the girl proceeded to do.

Emma sat back again, cradled in a sea of dark upholstery leather. She looked out the window to see how far they'd gotten—not very.

She was pleased that Benjamin had made the effort—not that he could do much to improve her black mood. She could have dealt with a mistress in three easy steps, but a secret life—a whole world apart—was something else altogether.

Emma felt beside herself.

Plus, her trip to the Upper West Side had made her late. She was supposed to be in the studio already, shooting her self-styled version of the perfect home office.

Emma was tired. And the day had lost its promise.

Getting into Bobby's apartment was the only item on her agenda that she cared about. And look how
that
went, she thought, a grim little smile baked onto her lips.

 

“
ARE THE SANTIAGOS HERE
?”
A VOICE CALLED—A
woman's voice. She sounded strict to Gracie.