No One Could Have Guessed the Weather (10 page)

“Interesting,”
Julia said, and scribbled something down. Christy peered over her shoulder and glimpsed the words
Temple of Dendur
with two exclamation marks scrawled after it and
had too much time on her hands
, which ended with a question mark.

•   •   •

V
AUGHN HAD NEWS FOR
Christy when he came into the spare room the following morning. She slept there after meditation, as it often awakened subconscious thoughts in her that made her thrash around or talk in her sleep all night. The previous night after the co-op board meeting he had had to sack the doorman, whom he liked. Raoul had been renting second-floor apartments by the hour to an upmarket escort agency while their owners were out. Vaughn secretly thought it showed great entrepreneurial flair and felt it was the fault of the board members, who were snobby but cheap, for not paying him properly. Raoul's great asset was that he could do pretty much anything—electrics, plumbing, painting—which actually suited the parsimonious owners, and Vaughn often slid him fifty dollars on the side to keep the lobby presentable. However, even he had to draw the line publicly at prostitution, and so Raoul was gone and the management company had sent them a temporary.

“He's Irish apparently,” Vaughn said meaningfully. “Let's hope he's legal.”

The mention of Ireland always caused a little froideur between them, but today it lasted only a couple of seconds before the next headline.

“Oh, and there's a new nanny who can start January first.” Christy looked up. Suddenly she saw a vision of herself, sitting on their cream leather sofa, trapped inside a pyramid, the stones being hauled shut, sand rushing through the cracks. She was screaming, pounding her fists on the walls, as the girls sang and played Twister outside.

“I want to look after them myself from now on,” she said.

The words had come out by themselves. She appeared to be channeling a very in-control woman. She was startled but excited, she liked the sound of herself, and, as it was only the second time in their entire marriage she had expressed a specific desire to do something, Vaughn was momentarily discombobulated.

“When will you go to the gym?” he asked.
He had clearly not noticed that the girls had started school the previous September.

•   •   •

T
HE GIRLS HAD
a crush on the new doorman. Christy knew this because on Valentine's Day they had made him a card at school and asked her to hide it behind the front desk. She insisted on looking at it first. It had a very peculiar-shaped shamrock inside a star-dusted heart. She pointed out that it was not customary to sign a Valentine's card, but their response was, “How will he know it's from us then?” and she didn't have sufficient mastery of dialectic to combat their logic. She tried to make them give the card to their father, but it really was a lost cause. She had to make a pinkie promise it would be placed in an obvious, but not too obvious, place where he would discover it and feel the warmth of their devotion. Of course, as she staggered in from the school run, an enormous backpack swinging off each shoulder, although he was not present, the lobby was filled with a flirtation of females, as it tended to be these days, and it was not possible to deliver the secret missive.

Christy herself had not seen John Paul O'Sullivan (the girls met him every Saturday morning when Vaughn took them for breakfast and quality time), although she had once glimpsed a muscular bejeaned leg sticking out from the store cupboard and heard
Oh Holy Mother of God
in manly Celtic tones emanating from the laundry area. She figured that she would have to wait until teatime, when the two fantastically
french
French teenage girls living on the fourth floor had to eat some steak, and Miss Sorenson, the octogenarian former ballet dancer from the ground-floor garden apartment, usually had him rescuing Mikhail, her corpulent tabby, who often got stuck on the window ledge outside the French family's kitchen, looking for gristle.

And so it was that at five o'clock the reception area was empty. Vaughn would consider that a sacking offense, but Christy was delighted. She hurried straight over to the desk, pulled open the top drawer, and put the card in, but she was distracted momentarily by a gaudy leprechaun key ring. She picked it up and held it to the light. That was the moment he returned.

“Are you rifling through my drawers, Mrs. Armitage?” he said, and stopped, embarrassed when she didn't laugh.

She decided to get the whole exchange over with quickly—Valentine's card, little girls, pinkie promise—and even managed to hand him the pink envelope without looking into his face, a habit she had practiced because she had never been able to get comfortable with the idea of staff.

She was almost at the elevator when she heard his soft chuckle.
Sorcha and Sinead, Sorcha and Sinead
.
She paused. The words did sound different in his musical brogue, and so she looked at him. His eyes were blue, his hair was dark, he was handsome, but it was his voice that was beautiful.

“It's nice to hear you say their names,”
she said.

“Are you or your husband Irish? Why are they called that?”

Of course she should have remembered to say that her father was second-generation Irish, his grandfather had come over on the boat and her maiden name, another quaint expression, was Mahon, but she didn't. She made the mistake of telling the truth.

“Our egg donor was an Irish student, and we decided
it would be good for the twins to honor their culture.”

(In fact, “we” hadn't decided at all. Christy had insisted in the middle of another burst of morning, noon, and night sickness and had prevailed, the first instance of this, which was the reason for Vaughn's froideur around all things Irish.)

The conversation ended there and then. That had shut up his blarney. But as she rode back up to the penthouse, Christy thought, not for the first time, how far she had come from her upbringing in rural Southern California and how out of touch she now was with anything that could remotely be described as normal. It was nearly as excruciating as when she had tried to commiserate with one of the Mothers at the School, whose husband had just been made redundant, by saying that she had decided to stop using a driver for errands. But, as Julia always said to her, at least you know this, at least you attempt an “examined life.”

She thought this could be the only reason Julia was her friend.

•   •   •

V
AUGHN HAD TAKEN
a two-week break from work in early March (he had been planning a discreet ribbon lift on his neck, but now that Christy was baking cookies and having play dates and had even joined the reading group at the independent bookstore on Prince Street, she had reverted to her former self with no interest in grooming, and he didn't feel the need to keep up), so he decided to spend the time rereading
The Diary of Samuel Pepys
, letting his daughters crawl all over him, and patrolling the apartment block to see what sort of a job the new doorman was doing.

He was impressed. Although Mr. O'Sullivan appeared pretty useless at anything beyond keeping the lobby tiles clean, he was brilliant at exuding a professional air, always had an umbrella ready for the female residents, and seemed to have a vast network of Irish plumbers, builders, and electricians who materialized in a minute and were reasonably priced.

Julia, who had actually had a proper conversation with him, had learned he was an actor, or rather had spent ten years in L.A. trying to be an actor. Her theory was that he was “playing” being a doorman. Christy found this very interesting. It had sometimes occurred to her that she was “playing” being a mother.

“Action is character, Christy,” said Julia.

Julia was absolutely thrilled by Christy's transformation. And it wasn't just because of her friend's increased happiness. Julia's original screenplay was taking shape.

“It starts with the scene in the Temple of Dendur. Very New York. Very Nora Ephron. You're my heroine. You've been obsessing about death, or rather the death of your personality to your alpha-male husband—that's the interpretation, right?—but you've broken out of the pyramid.”

Christy told her it was more literal than that. It was a condition of her prenup that in the event of Vaughn's death, she could live in their properties only if she remained single.

“Is that legal?” said Julia, scribbling in her notebook again, as she knew well that you could not make this stuff up. Christy shrugged.

“I just signed it. I knew everything would be fine. And it is.”

“That's good,” Julia replied. “I'm only writing happy endings these days.”

Christy was indeed chuffed by her story so far. She was even beginning to consider the vague but tantalizing possibility that she might get a proper job one day, although Vaughn would probably draw the line at that. But despite Julia's protests, these developments didn't seem very dramatic or “Hollywood” enough. She asked Julia whether a movie could really end with a woman talking about Edith Wharton at a reading group.

“Of course not,” replied Julia. “This is only the first ten pages. It'll be a romantic comedy; you'll meet a guy somewhere in act one and fall in
lurve
.”

Christy was horrified. “I couldn't do that to Vaughn. You can't have the heroine of a romantic comedy abandon her husband and children.”

There was a terrible pause as she realized what she had just said, but Julia didn't take it personally.

“You're right. What a monster you are! Vaughn will have to croak first—”

Some time later, Christy was still tittering in a disturbed way about this conversation when the handle of the fridge came off in her hand. She turned around a little helplessly, looking for Loretta the Housekeeper, but she had gone to collect dry cleaning (the only staff member allowed to do it these days) and Vaughn was having his constitutional nap, so Christy, after ineffectually hitting the handle with a hammer a couple of times, knew that she would have to summon the doorman. She felt a bit weird about it—it was the Irish egg conversation—but she had no choice. Vaughn did not tolerate anything broken around him, particularly kitchen appliances.

In fact, it all went very smoothly. After three minutes' chat about the size of the fridge, John Paul was able to fix the handle, although he decided to call his second cousin Patrick, who was really the man for the big fridges, to check it over later. And then she made him a cup of tea and decided to prove to him that she was not the person he imagined her to be. She asked him about being an actor, and he told her he had spent several years in L.A. with moderate to poor success. He had stood behind Colin Farrell a few times, had a few one-liners in episodes of daytime drama, done a washing powder commercial once. He grinned slightly manically and riffed on about the power of a white wash, but she did not laugh, and he was glad. She mentioned that she herself had been a pair of legs in a pantyhose commercial, and he didn't laugh, either. In that moment, they understood each other perfectly. They had both walked along the boulevard of broken dreams and ended up in the same apartment block, although one of them was at the top, and the other at the bottom.

Vaughn came in looking for coffee, bleary-eyed and uncharacteristically crumpled after sleep. He eyeballed the doorman, and then, without a word, formed a question mark on his face to her.

“The fridge handle came off,” she said. “John Paul fixed it, though his second cousin Patrick, who's the man for the big fridges, is coming back tomorrow to check it.”

John Paul seemed to shrink in the laser beam of Vaughn's silence. So this was Vaughn's choice of weapon today, she thought; he would be the dominant lion of the pride by whatever means necessary. John Paul, by contrast, was a beta male, a sort of handsome adjunct, who might be stroked occasionally by a sickly lioness, but he would never father the Lion King. Christy sighed to herself and wondered what it would be like to be married to a beta male. She imagined she wouldn't really mind, though it had proved very difficult for Julia. In the middle of a vision of herself walking down the aisle with the doorman, Vaughn said something. Both John Paul and Christy were surprised.

“I said, Will you be here to supervise this Patrick, your second cousin?”

John Paul shook his head. He told them he had a day off; it was Saint Patrick's Day, and as he'd never been in New York on March 17 before, he was going to the parade.

“Christy,” said Vaughn, about to surprise her again (it was happening a lot these days), “you and the girls should go to the parade, too. You can take them, can't you, Mr. O'Sullivan? The girls have Irish DNA in them.”

John Paul shuddered involuntarily. Christy knew he did not want any more information about their reproductive adventures, but Vaughn kept to the party line.

“Christy's grandfather was from County Limerick. He came over on the boat, died three years later.”

Vaughn could not understand why the doorman had laughed.
Strange people
, he thought, and hoped the guy was not a drinker.

•   •   •

T
HE GIRLS WORE
green, white, and orange hats, tried to copy a troop of flame-haired children reeling, and sang along at the top of their voices to “Beautiful Day.” After a couple of hours they were all frozen, so they went to a pub he knew in Greenwich Village where the owner turned a blind eye to children and they sat in the back by a fire, as Gaelic football played on a small television above the bar, and John Paul told Sorcha and Sinead stories about Ireland, about the faeries and the hill of Tara.

“That's why the recession came to Ireland, you know. Because they tried to put a motorway through Tara.”

He made the story of the Celtic tiger sound like an Irish myth.