No One Could Have Guessed the Weather (20 page)

“He has a town house on Charles Street,” Ryan added for no apparent reason, and suggested that they all take Madison to the party. This was not what Robyn wanted at all. And she really wished Ryan had not told her about the town house.

“Oh,” she said. “It's just that Michael wants you to take him to the movies and I thought we'd split up for the afternoon.”

She and Madison were late to the party. Robyn had not known what to wear, and then they had to scan the several events going on, the hellish shrieking reverberating high up into the domed ceiling. The place was full of different children, but characterized by the same adult behavior, as parents, or mainly mothers, futilely offered celery sticks and raisins to children who were stuffing handfuls of chips down their throats, and hid empty cola bottles in their bags before other parents arrived to collect their by now hysterical offspring. Finally, Robyn saw Schuyler's leather jacket in the distance hovering by a balance beam, as Quinn crouched in tearstained refusal before it. Madison ran off to join two girls dressed like or by the Olsen twins, and Robyn made her way over to Schuyler, just as his ex, the climate change denier with the gray pixie cut, appeared.

“Quinn, it's a gymnastics party,” she said, trying to disguise her exasperation. “It's what you said you wanted.”

“I wanted to tumble!”
the boy shouted.
“It's not my fault there's no tumbling! This is a bullshit party.”

“Don't speak to me like that.” She turned to Schuyler, her own eyes reddening. “You shouldn't let him speak to me like that.”

“
Quinn.
Your mother's right—”

Even Robyn, predisposed to view Schuyler through town house–tinted glasses, thought this was pathetic. She had endured many similar scenes in her own home, scenes that never ended well. Fortunately, at that moment Big Dave, who was in charge of activities, appeared and, realizing that his sizable tip was diminishing as Quinn's behavior disintegrated, stepped into the breach.

“Quinn would like to tumble,” sniffed the ex.

Robyn could tell that whatever Quinn wanted, Quinn got, so she was not surprised when Big Dave immediately crouched down and started doing forward rolls across the blue exercise mats. Quinn followed until he twisted his right arm beneath him and started crying loudly for his mother, who dutifully sprang toward him despite the fact that Schuyler tried to stop her by hanging on to her sleeve. Schuyler shook his head, and Robyn looked away to avoid the pain-filled, silent exchange between them that she thought told the whole story of their years of reproductive torture.

When Robyn looked back, Schuyler was watching the other children, Madison in the excitable center, queuing up to swing on the monkey bars. They then both turned and caught sight of Quinn half punching his mother in the chest as she hugged him. Robyn saw in Schuyler's face his dislike of his own child.
Something would have to be done about that
, she thought. She asked him if he wanted a coffee. He looked at her, nodded, and held out his hand. And as if it were the most natural thing in the world, she took it and led him toward the machine.

He told her that the reason he and his wife had not been able to have more children was not her highly strung, stale-egg infertility but his own less-than-zero sperm count. The doctors had tried to make him feel better by mixing sperm from two donors with the couple of sperm they had surgically retrieved from his bladder before the in vitro, but when he looked at Quinn he knew there was no part of his DNA anywhere near him, the conclusive proof of this being that Quinn loved anchovies. Schuyler had gone to great lengths to source anchovy-flavored chips, and he knew no other children would eat the pizza because it was covered in them.

“Anchovies make me barf,” said Schuyler, and they both smiled.

“I'm sorry I came on so strong to you,” he continued. “I've been taking my therapist's advice to have some fun. It'd been a long time and, boy, it's amazing how much fun you can have with the ladies if you're . . . up-front.”

Robyn tried to convey a mixture of understanding and suitably ladylike shock, although she knew as well as he did it's amazing how much fun you can have with the gentlemen if you're up-front.

“I liked all the flowers,” she said primly. “My office looks like a funeral parlor.”

“That doesn't sound very good,” he said.

“I didn't mean it how it came out,” she replied, not meeting his eyes, though in fact it was exactly what she meant. It was just that something, not someone, had died.

“Well, anyway, I'm sorry. For all of it.”

This was a reference to the increasingly suggestive texts he had sent, often late at night, and his one attempt to leave a phone-sex message on her mobile. It had made her laugh so loudly that Ryan had become convinced they were so happy these days they should renew their vows.

“But now I want to get serious.” He meant it. Robyn adopted an intense listening pose.

“I want another child, Robyn. I don't care how. I deserve a second chance.”

He crushed his plastic cup in his hand and threw it so it landed in a bin twenty feet away. He had excellent ball skills and, unlike Quinn, Robyn suspected he was extremely gymnastic. Then he smiled, looked at his watch, and announced he had to go find the only cake shaped like a fish in the fridge. It had silver icing shaped into gills and everything, and some pastry chef in the Meatpacking District had slaved over it after his/her shift the previous night.

Robyn knew she was losing him. She recognized from the look on his face that he wasn't looking for an affair anymore; he wanted a second marriage and a new baby. If that was what
she
wanted, she reckoned she had about eight weeks to snare him before some gorgeous twenty-eight-year-old, tired of dating and making excuses for the lack of commitment from her male contemporaries (“I feel sorry for him, actually”), would listen to her mother and see Schuyler Robinson not as a tired middle-aged man but a good catch.

Robyn had some serious thinking to do, so she wandered outside and stared over the river. Ryan would be fine, she knew that. He had the ultimate relationship survival skill, self-absorption. It was Madison and Michael who had to be considered. She was not an evil person, after all, but wasn't the fashion of subservience to your children out of vogue?

Weren't things going back to the fifties and Betty Draper–style parenting (a cigarette and a slap) these days?

A bird, a big ugly gull, squawked overhead. She looked up, idly wondering if this might be a sign. The bird released an enormous shit that landed on the side of a yacht called
The Anemone
. The sign was that in New York City, everyone dumps on everyone else eventually.

That night, she had a long bath in Jo Malone nutmeg-and-ginger oil and allowed Ryan to glimpse her moving seductively along the tiny corridor to their tiny bedroom. He followed her, meaningfully throwing his notes onto the floor and removing his T-shirt flirtatiously, a long-standing sign between them that he was available and ready to go. She laughed but escaped from his embraces to run back into the bathroom. “Just a minute,” she giggled, and closed and locked the door.

Then she lay down on the yellowing bath mat, gathered herself, opened her legs, and, taking a deep breath, stuck two fingers inside herself, feeling for the wire threads of her Mirena coil. She found the first easily, then wiggled for the other.
Eureka!
She closed her eyes and pulled, hard, until the coil came out in her hand, clear, sticky
fecund
mucus stretching round it like chewed chewing gum. She wrapped the plastic in toilet tissue and threw it into the bin.

May

Christy noticed Robyn immediately on Sixth Avenue, although Julia had said that the effects of Robyn's new life on Charles Street had transformed her to the point of unrecognizability. It was not just the obvious physical changes, her clothes, her skin, her haircut, it was that she smiled.

“Maybe it's love?” Julia had suggested, then begun laughing so hard the muscle she had pulled during Soul Cycle went into spasm.

“You shouldn't be so cynical,” said Christy. “Just because Schuyler's rich doesn't mean she didn't fall for him.”

Julia recognized that this was a sore spot for Christy and regained her composure. Christy decided there was solidarity between her and Robyn, and determined to be very nice to her if she ever saw her again. She had resolved to ask her to join her book group, until she remembered Schuyler's ex was in it, so instead she asked her if she wanted to go for lunch in Bar Pitti. Robyn was delighted, telling Christy she had all the time in the world these days as she had stopped working
“outside the
home,”
they both said quickly, as soon as she had moved in with Schuyler. She had also become a born-again virgin, so there was no embarrassment for her in inquiring solicitously after Vaughn's health.

It was only when they sat down at their table, and Robyn removed her fun-fur gilet, that Christy noticed she was definitely carrying more weight up front. She said nothing. Robyn had always been a little heavy, but Christy wondered if Julia was right and the weight gain was a sign of repenting at leisure. (Christy, with her anorexic worldview, could never accept that a woman could be fat and happy.) But Robyn caught her glance and announced proudly that she had not been hitting the dessert trolley but that she was pregnant.

“How?”
said Christy, too sharply. When they had read
The Handmaid's Tale
, Schuyler's ex had told everyone about his lack of sperm motility.

Robyn, sagely accepting that in the circles in which she now mixed there was no such thing as too much information, answered calmly that the baby was in fact Ryan's, the result of a moment of passion inspired by the realization that their life together had ended (Christy blinked a little at this) but that Schuyler had been overjoyed at a second chance at fatherhood.

She shrugged happily and ordered a primi pasta and the kidneys in a cream sauce.

“Everything's great. Ryan's living with his colleague from the gallery on West Eleventh, so the kids see us both all the time. Nothing's really changed for them. Except they've got two happy parents.”

Christy was disoriented by the matter-of-factness of it all. She ordered two primi salads, one beet, one artichoke, and wanted to ask how life could be so straightforward, but felt she could not without revealing her own private torments, so instead she said, “So you met Schuyler and you knew he was the one and you just went for it?”

“I'd been unhappy for a long time. And there was just one moment when I was standing by the water, and I saw a beautiful white bird and it skimmed up into the clouds, flying free, and I knew what I felt and I thought,
Robyn, you need to fly free, too
.”

Christy had no idea Robyn was such a poet.

“I bumped into Lucy Lovett the other day and told her, and she said it was another wonderful/terrible New York story.
So Lucy.
”

Robyn paused as she was overtaken by heartburn. “Then she said something else. She said I had taken on the city and I'd won. I didn't have a clue what she meant.” Robyn's heartburn eased, but her confusion did not. “What do you think?”

Christy rolled her eyes dismissively.

“Robyn, I don't know what Lucy's going on about half the time,” she said. “Julia says it's like Mornington Crescent, whatever that means, and it's a cultural thing, but she seems to understand her.”

But Christy did understand. Lucy had meant that Robyn had exactly the right combination of bravery and ruthlessness required for success in New York, and when the opportunity for a new life had presented itself, she had taken it. Christy knew this because when her opportunity had come, she had not.

“Julia
adores
her,” said Robyn meaningfully.

Christy smiled weakly and stabbed an artichoke.

“I think I really love Schuyler,” Robyn continued, “but I'm not going to lie. I really love my new life, too. It's a better fit for me. I've been on a long, tough journey, and this is the right ending. I don't feel guilty about
anything
. I'm riding into the sunset. Ooh. The baby's moving.”

She said this blithely, her unabashed reincarnation as a Real Housewife complete, and then stood up to go to the bathroom, explaining that the baby had kicked her in the bladder. Christy felt like someone had kicked her in the heart.

When Robyn returned, Christy was examining the dessert menu. To Robyn's surprise, Christy said she would share the chocolate mousse, and they started talking about private schools.

J
ulia's trick was to cook the turkey upside down. This guaranteed moist juicy breast meat and not the white sawdust-tasting astronaut-chew food people were used to. She had learned this from a cookery demonstration she went to the year she had lived in London, during which she had embraced the full Victorian ideal of Christmas, the holly wreaths, traditional English carols, even brussels sprouts, with the zeal of a convert. Ever since, she strove annually to have at least fifteen family members sitting round her dining table pretending they liked one another, for, as she always said, “Christmas won't be Christmas without any alcohol-fueled arguments.”

Last year her teenage nephew had obliged by setting fire to his hair gel with the end of a joint and, although Kristian had saved the day and possibly the youth's chances of future successful sexual congress by hurling a jug of pomegranate bellini over him, when Julia's unmarried brother Andy, in whose bag the illegal substance had been found, explained that he was taking it for medical reasons only (he lived in Vermont), he and Julia had had a violent dispute, ending in a headlock straight out of WrestleMania, about how Andy had ruined everyone's life with his burgeoning addictive behaviors the year before Julia had left for Barnard.

So Julia had promised Kristian that they would experience the magic of the next holiday season alone, just the four of them, in the cottage upstate, and her parents clearly felt the same way, as they booked themselves onto a three-week cruise in the Caribbean in order to avoid the four days toward the end of December when all hell broke loose. But as November drew to a close, Julia started feeling like a failure, and, under the pretext that it was good for the children to experience the communal table, she invited Lucy and Christy and their families, and for different reasons they both said yes.

Kristian was sanguine about it. He wanted Julia to be happy, because over Thanksgiving, which Julia considered merely a warm-up in the turkey stakes, they had made a Big Life Decision, one he was sure was the right thing for their family. But he worried Julia had not fully reconciled herself to it. He knew this because she had not told Christy, and this was hanging over her like the scent of the eucalyptus candles she began lighting as soon as she woke up on Christmas Eve.

Outside, the elements had bent to her will. It was picture-perfect. A fresh dusting of snow had glazed the garden, the bare trees stuck into the white like twiglets in icing, and Romy's snow
woman
, accessorized with yellow straw hair, a conical bra made out of plastic cups, and false matchstick eyelashes, stood proud in the middle of it, like a snow Madonna on the Blond Ambition Tour.

It gladdened Julia's heart to see Romy and Lee running outside in their fleeces, hurling themselves onto the ground and making snow angels. Kristian was happily hauling logs on the sled. All she needed was Judy Garland singing,
“Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas. . . .”
on the sound track, and that was easily remedied by pressing the remote play on her iPod, as a selection of holiday classics was already ready to go. She peeled squash and sang along, thinking of Judy and her heartbreaking voice that could bring tears to your eyes with the tiny sob at the end of a line.
“From now on our troubles will be out of sight.”
Julia fervently hoped so. She had color-coordinated her two Christmas trees in the hope that she would find the perfect moment with Christy, the two of them alone in front of the glowing fire, or outside, ruddy-cheeked in the snowscape, where she would make her announcement and they would hug and be happy. That was how she planned it, anyway, and no one knew better than Julia the power of setting up a scene correctly.

In fact, it had been easy to avoid telling Christy anything over the last few months because she had been increasingly preoccupied and distracted. If Julia hadn't known her so well, known that Christy kept no secrets whatsoever from her, she would have sworn she was up to something furtive herself. Christy did not answer her mobile phone, even though she had put a special
boinging
ring on it to tell her it was Julia calling, and didn't ever seem to have the time to chat. This had happened before in their relationship, and Julia assumed it was for the same reason. For while Christy was resolute about not letting her girls become spoiled and extravagant and talk about their full money boxes or bringing child-size cuddly toys home from far-off places by buying an extra seat in first class on the plane, Vaughn was a very rich person, and Julia had long known that the lives of the very rich are not the same as those of the medium or fairly rich. Occasionally, Christy had to get involved in very-rich-person activities such as renovating ski lodges or flying to Barbados to play in charity golf tournaments, which made her distracted and distant, as she never liked to admit to them.

So Julia had begun ringing Lucy when something chatworthy happened; and that was how she had ended up telling her the news first, and realizing that Lucy had somehow usurped Christy in her affections. Julia also realized that this feeling would never be entirely mutual, as Lucy's best friend was Richard and, despite Lucy's occasional intimations about the “ups and downs” they had endured in the past, now they were the happiest couple Julia knew, herself and Kristian included.

Romy was shouting something outside, and Julia looked out of the window and witnessed Lucy and Richard's arrival, the rumbling of the tiny rental car muffled by the duvet of snow. It was like watching a silent film as their boys tumbled out of the backseat, scrapping, and Richard leapt out after them, lifting the smallest up and spinning him round, taking in the 360 degrees of expansive views around them. Lucy appeared now, a guitar case in her right hand, and when she handed it to Richard he threw his other arm around her, gesticulating and talking and thinking and talking again.

Kristian came over, embraced them, and led them to the former Oat Store where they were going to camp out together. Julia had been embarrassed offering them this accommodation (Christy had preempted it by saying she would check her family into a suite at the Luxury Olde Inn down the road, as Vaughn always made clear that he liked nature as long as it wasn't natural), but Richard had enthusiastically announced that he had been awarded thirty Cub Scout badges (including air activities) in the three years his father had been posted in Hong Kong, and it would be good for Lucy to learn how to tie a reef knot and melt snow in an empty baked-beans can. Julia had then felt embarrassed to tell him the building actually had a bathroom, electric heating, and wiring for cable TV, so she had whispered it to Lucy, who visibly relaxed and surprised Richard by her enthusiasm for the survivalist experience.

Lucy bounded up the path, marveling at the size of the enormous footprints she made in her wader boots.

“It's like yeti tracks,” she said, kissing Julia firmly on the cheek in the doorway.

“What's a yeti?” asked Max, pausing only briefly to drop graying chunks of wet snow on the tiles before hurling himself toward Lee, who had two-player Guitar Hero ready to go in the den.

“A great hairy beast,” Julia called after him. “Nothing at all like your mother.”

“You haven't seen my legs,” said Lucy. “I don't shave them after the clocks change for winter.”

“Really? Does Richard go for that?”

“Yes, he's got some posh-boy thing for the peasantry. It makes him feel very droit du seigneur pillaging a filthy local maiden. ROBBIE! What the
hell
do you think you're doing?”

On the path behind her, Robbie had pulled down his track pants and was sending a yellow arc of urine rippling into a flower bed.

“I am mortified,” declared Lucy for good form's sake, though it wasn't actually true, but Julia just smiled and went out to peer at the evidence as one day at her very worst, exhausted, white-as-a-sheet former self on the Crime Show, the Asshole had told her that her eyes looked like piss holes in the snow, and she had often wondered what that really looked like. (Boreholes with a greenish-yellow tinge at the top.
Interesting.
)

She returned to the kitchen to see that Lucy had pulled open the oven door to peer at the enormous brisket roasting inside, the smells enveloping the room with the promise of satisfaction and happiness and all good things.

“I'm glad I didn't offer to bring any food. I mean, you are so domestic goddess.”

“I know,” Julia said, and grinned. “And you wait till tomorrow. I'm only getting started. It'll be the full monty . . . isn't that what you lot say?
All the trimmings round the bird.
”

Lucy flinched involuntarily. Not only had Julia's approximation of an English accent (a cross between Joan Collins and Rupert Everett) sounded exactly like a sadistic art teacher she had loathed, but the very use of the word “bird” for turkey brought back all her unfortunate memories of Christmases in her childhood which mainly involved overcooked or undercooked “birds” and, one year, a sherry-soaked argument between her parents so ferocious that it ended with her mother throwing a sherry-soaked trifle, in its glass dish, at a group of carolers from the local Church of England and breaking the vicar's baby toe.

Julia didn't laugh when Lucy explained this. Whenever she got such throwaway glimpses of Lucy's childhood, she marveled at how her friend had ever survived to become halfway sane.

“Oh, well.” Lucy wanted to move on to the happier present. “Now. Have you told Christy yet?”

Julia shook her head and started to make gravy. Lucy's eyes widened as she pondered the implications of this. Julia had promised a stress-free holiday among friends, and, while she could not imagine a trifle-throwing competition breaking out between them, she had witnessed enough of the intense nature of their friendship to be concerned about how Christy might take Julia's news. She glanced up at the clock.

“When are she and Vaughn due?”

“The middle of April,” boomed a male voice behind them. “How did you know?”

Lucy and Julia turned to see Vaughn, charismatic and handsome with the new, carefully trimmed white beard he had grown, in an Italian duffel coat, carrying four bottles of whiskey with a huge designer poinsettia balanced precariously on top.

“Know what?”
said Julia, rather more aggressively, thought Lucy, than one would normally expect when welcoming guests for a holiday lunch.

“Know that Christy's pregnant,” replied Vaughn, refusing to falter, in the voice that had launched a thousand hostile takeovers.

At this moment Christy appeared, ravishing in a white ankle-length coat, the two girls beside her in matching red capes, all their hoods and eyelids flecked with fresh snow. As she stood next to Vaughn, it was as if Merlin had married a benevolent Snow Queen and they had given birth to two little Red Riding Hoods. Christy was carrying three Bloomingdale's big bags full of presents wrapped by the service. Mindful of her condition, Lucy hastily took these.

“It's really starting to come down out there,” Christy said. “Thank goodness it's so warm in here.” But as she said this her voice trailed off as she felt the temperature around her dropping once again.

“What's up?” And she looked at Vaughn.

“The ladies were talking about due-
ness
, and . . . I misheard . . . so I let our . . .
news
slip.”

“So many congratulations to both of you,” said Lucy warmly, kissing Vaughn on both cheeks and embracing Christy while leaving space around her stomach with appropriate sensitivity. It was as if such news were a completely normal occurrence, and Christy blinked in surprise. There was such a depressing lack of drama about Lucy sometimes.

At least over by the oven it was not only the gravy that was simmering.

“Why didn't you tell me?” said Julia, and then,
“How could you?”

And so Christy, caught off guard, disoriented, who had had a speech ready for when she and Julia were alone later that day, possibly by the glowing fire, possibly ruddy cheeked in the snowscape, felt robbed of her moment delivering the news of her Big Life Decision. Now disappointed, she decided to deliberately misunderstand what Julia had said.

“How dare you? What do you mean
How could I?
I'm not that old. And neither is Vaughn.”

“I have to disagree with you about that, my dear,” said Vaughn, who was working out how quickly they could make a dignified exit, “but as I told her, Julia, at least I won't have to deal with the appalling teenage years, because I intend to be dead.”

He reached for Julia's hand and gripped it. They had always got on well. She looked at the liver spots on his paper-thin skin and the veins knotted beneath it.

“I'm sorry, Vaughn. You know I didn't mean—”

“I know, sweetheart. But even this won't keep me alive forever, and other people will think and say it, and we would be well advised to prepare ourselves.”