No One Could Have Guessed the Weather (9 page)

“You remember what you used to say, sweetheart: ‘Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.'”

“That wasn't me, Mom,” said Julia. “That's from
Ferris Bueller's Day Off
.”

“I don't care,” said Julia's mother. “That's why I became a synchronized swimming coach.”

And then she started to sing
“Who knows where the time goes?”
in her reedy, slightly out-of-tune mezzo. Julia joined in. It was a most unexpected mother-daughter moment.

When they had finished they both giggled. Her mother said good-bye and sent her lots of love, told Julia her father sent her lots of love, waited for his footsteps to leave the room, and then added in a whisper, “Kristian's a good man, Julia, and you have two wonderful children. I know there were very important reasons for what happened between you, but now that you're aware of the inevitability of death, I want you to ask yourself if on your own is where you want to be.”

And she hung up.

Julia got out of bed and ran all the way along First Avenue to the loft on Rivington Street, where Kristian, who had been waiting a long time, ran down to meet her and kissed her and she told him the story and what her mother had said and he listened and said everything would be all right. Although he couldn't resist a small smile as he said, “So you're sure the Attack Dog is gone for good?”

“She was called Marjorie,” cried Julia, and he didn't laugh.

•   •   •

J
ULIA HAD CONTACTS DOWN
at the local police station, and they took the dog away and even brought some ashes back for Courtney in due course, although by that stage Courtney was preoccupied with her morning sickness (Benedict had left more than the memory of his personality when he returned to Calabasas), and the beginning of a new romance with her gynecologist, who had always been attracted to her but, knowing her desire to be pregnant, had ruled himself out, as he was infertile due to a teenage attack of mumps. Julia lost touch with Courtney after that.

Julia told the Life Coaches she wanted to sell (she and Kristian decided to buy a little place upstate with land and lots of trees for the children to clamber over on the weekends), and, eventually, Courtney did, too, when she and the gynecologist and the baby moved to Brooklyn.

So Michael and Johannes finally got most of the town house, Julia heard from an actress who's been seeing them about her kleptomania that it's stunning, and everyone lived happily ever after.

Apart from the ugly dog called Marjorie, of course.

E
very morning, when she woke up, Christy Armitage looked out of the window and thought about death. She blamed this on two things. First, last month she had volunteered to go on the school field trip to the Met, where she and the twins had got stuck with a group of Italians in the Temple of Dendur. Her nose was practically jammed up against a piece of hieroglyphic graffiti as the enthusiastic docent described in slow, labored English the slow, labored death of the wife, servants, and animals of the pharaoh, immured with his corpse in the pyramid. Christy had felt physically sick, and the funny feeling had never left her.

Second, there was the undeniable fact of Vaughn's advancing age. Awake, upright, with his hair dyed some unrecognizable shade of browny chestnut with artful streaks of gray, his tanned, squash-playing body marching purposefully into the elevator, it was easy to forget that he would be seventy-one on his next birthday. But as she turned from the window and her thoughts of immolation in the penthouse in NoLIta, she watched him sleeping, his face in saggy repose, snorting snores fluttering his white nose hairs. He looked like an
old
man
. She shuddered. Dear God, or Buddha or whoever, what had possessed her? Or what had possessed him? The twins were only six years old. They had just been to their half-sister's fortieth birthday party, where Lianne had sobbed on her shoulder, bemoaning her childlessness, and begged her,
Christy, what
will I do
?

Christy, ever practical, had discreetly given her the number of the agency where she and Vaughn had got the egg donor, and told her they were affiliated with a reputable sperm bank, Ivy League students, that sort of thing, but insisted that, in the event of pregnancy, she tell her father it was a drink-fueled one-night stand with a fellow tourist in Cabo San Lucas. She didn't want to deal with Vaughn's rage at the idea that his grandchild might be related to his children in ways he could not even imagine the genetic permutations of. It was positively Egyptian, she reflected, and,
whoosh
, there she was, trapped in that temple again.

Somewhere in the distance a phone was ringing. It stopped. There was a pause, and then a fast padding of indoor shoes along the carpeted hallway to their suite.

“It's the agency,”
said Loretta the Housekeeper (for that was exactly how she was called). “The Nanny quit.”
Vaughn sat straight up; he could go from dreaming to despotism in less than sixty seconds.

Loretta the Housekeeper intercepted with only the slightest tremble. “It's all right. They've got someone else. She's called Maria, and she's from Colombia.”

Now Vaughn's eyes narrowed horizontally, but the effect on his physiognomy was vertical, as if his forehead was about to meet his chin. It was scary, but Christy was not surprised. They had once had a cleaner from Colombia who had been a disaster. She'd told Christy that the metallic Versace evening dress had been destroyed by hot solvents at the dry cleaner, but Vaughn had discovered her selling it on eBay and become racially prejudiced. What Christy was surprised about was what happened next.

“Tell them no, thanks. They must find us three choices to interview. In the meantime, my wife will look after our children.”

It was a measure of Loretta the Housekeeper's years of service that she managed to leave the room without dropping the telephone in astonishment.

Vaughn looked at Christy in the window. Her face had not changed expression, but inner Christy, the one trapped in the Temple of Dendur, was screaming. She shook herself off and decided to be positive. At least it had taken her mind off death.

Her mother used to say she had married a father. Christy knew that this was pejorative to her father rather than herself, part of an ongoing battle as to which of her parents would write the story of their own marriage, but, in truth, her relationship with both of them was strained. They had never got over the incredible beauty of the child they had accidentally produced (when Christy was a baby, people stopped her mother in the street; one woman took photos inside the pram), and they treated her like a changeling, with a combination of fear and awe, as if the faeries had stolen their natural lumpy child and given them this magical one instead.

It was a relief to all three of them when cross-eyed brother Jake finally came along. He belched and blew up frogs with a straw and took their attention so they could leave Christy in her room, staring out her window, imagining a quite different life in a galaxy far, far away.

When that life failed to materialize, Mr. Vaughn Armitage II did. But their relationship was not at all what her mother diagnosed. For Christy would have quite liked a father, or what she imagined to be a father, a soothing paternal presence, a rock. But Vaughn was neither of these things. He had boasted of the length of his member, as he quaintly put it, the first time she had met him and, apart from his brief and bitter first marriage, he had romanced, also quaintly put, scores of desirable women. In fact, after Christy and Vaughn returned from Turks and Caicos, the question on everyone's lips was
Why did he marry HER?
She was thirty-five, a bit-part actress and former catalog model, with no real aspirations to society life or charity work or even luxurious idleness. She was doing a degree in art therapy at the New School, her nails were often chipped, and she bought clothes at Banana Republic. And so it was universally acknowledged that she should have refused him and allowed a better groomed and more deserving woman to spend his money. On good days as well as bad days, Christy acknowledged that, too. But there was no accounting for what Vaughn might do once he had made his mind up about something.

The nine years since their marriage had passed in a blur. After six months of infertility, Vaughn took them straight to a gynecologist in Sutton Place. The doctor had been calm, he had reassured them that Christy's age was not a problem, the irony of which was not lost on anyone in the room, and he ordered them to relax. Christy, obedient as ever to a strongly expressed view, rounded her lower back and exhaled, but then the doctor made a fundamental mistake. He relaxed, too, and with Vaughn that was always dangerous. He said that in his experience the number-one cause of infertility among professional New Yorkers was not having enough sex. Vaughn was so outraged at the slur on the virility of his member that, from the following week, Christy was booked for a seemingly endless series of invasive fertility tests that traumatized her so much that eventually she agreed to the IVF with donor eggs to make it all stop. Three pregnancies later, the twins were efficiently removed by cesarean section and Christy never went back to the New School. But she could not quite pinpoint what she had been doing since then. In fact, her life was just like her faulty Toyota Prius. At about age twenty-one she had put her foot on the accelerator, it jammed, and when it stopped, she was a forty-four-year-old woman wondering where it had gone.

The previous week, Vaughn had been sent an e-mail invitation to a dinner where every confirmed guest had a small descriptive sentence after their name in parentheses, a label, presumably to make the event more attractive to prospective attendees. So someone called Misha was not just from Montenegro, but had also founded his own Reconciliation Advisory Agency, and his wife, Elaine, was a mother and Environmental Campaigner. It went on like this for twelve people. Vaughn, Innovative Global Financier, deleted it, but it had struck fear in Christy's heart. How would people describe her other than “the woman to whom Vaughn Armitage was married”? Even the
verb
wasn't active. She was lacking something—it was obvious. She simply did not know how to be a person, let alone a wife or a parent.

But today was apparently going to be the First Day of the Rest of Her Life, so she walked purposefully into the enormous playroom where Sorcha and Sinead were sitting side by side, staring at the wallpaper.

“Don't you want to watch TV, girls
?
” she asked hopefully. They shook their heads in unison and informed her they were looking for pictures to materialize in their heads that they could tell each other about. Assuming this was some telepathic twin thing, Christy told them she would just sit with them, then. They didn't seem to mind very much. That was as good is it ever got between mother and daughters.

She had once tried to suggest to her best friend Julia Kirkland that perhaps her difficulties with the girls were to do with her unresolved feelings about the egg donation. Julia had snorted unsympathetically. “If you grew them, they're yours.” But that was Julia all over. She was a writer. She had opinions. They had met ten years before, when Christy was doing walk-on parts and Julia had just started as a story editor on a new TV show about a private detective with multiple personalities, one of which was a serial killer. The story lines were violent and misogynistic beyond belief, and Julia, who had already decided to have a brilliant career, was responsible for the most violent and misogynistic of them. But to go back to the first point, maybe she shouldn't listen to Julia too much on the mothering issue, for, as Julia said herself, her label was “the woman who walked out on her children,” although, and this was said with a rueful chuckle, she thought it should be “misunderstood.”

Within half an hour Julia was round with the lattes from Café Gitane, and she and Christy were smoking menthols on the balcony as the girls played solitaire with each other. Julia had brought round an old game of Twister and informed Christy that this would be today's activity.

“That's the secret, Christy—make a plan for every day. That's how you'll get through it.”

“My plan for tomorrow,
”
Christy informed her, “is for the agency to ring with a new nanny.”

But they didn't. So Christy pulled her padded fleece on over her Juicy tracksuit and took the girls to the playground. It was very interesting to see how children did resort to imaginative play when there was nothing else to do. Also, that you could get three slices of pizza for three bucks if you walked five minutes toward Chinatown. The next day they went to a children's film, a shameless holiday concoction involving elves, a three-legged reindeer, and snow. They giggled and ate green candy and popcorn and ice cream, although afterward, Christy was perturbed when Sorcha told her that the last time they were at the cinema, the nanny had taken them into the toilets and asked them to take photos of her in her underwear, which she then texted to someone called Rik on the iPhone Christy had bought for her. Christy made two mental notes: first, not to mention this to Vaughn, and second, never to employ another nanny who boasted about familiarity with modern technology.

They ice-skated at Rockefeller Center, where she avoided the attentions of a priapic Santa. They saw the Three Bears at the Marionette Theater in Central Park. They marveled at the Rockettes, high-kicking their way through a London bus onstage at Radio City Music Hall. She took them shopping and, instead of buying them coordinating outfits, allowed them to choose their own clothes. They skipped home in purple and blue leggings, demanding Vaughn's approval, and he deemed them “funky,” which made them dissolve into laughter.

Christy was the very opposite of the helicopter parents she saw whirring from school gate to enrichment class; her detachment gave the girls space. They were both like Vaughn, independent, type-A personalities (his alpha sperm had beaten the eggs into submission) and, although she wondered how she would cope with a couple of puppy-like, emotionally demanding boys, within days she could see that she was exactly the kind of mother her twins needed.

She was getting a bit cocky by the time she saw Julia after her Wednesday-night meditation class. That night's theme had been
Life provides you
with exactly what you need
, and Christy felt enlightened.

“I had no idea there were so many things to do with children in New York. And because I'm so busy during the day, Vaughn's decided we don't have to go out every night or away every weekend. Bliss. And he's taking us to a hotel upstate for the holiday so I don't have to deal with my stepdaughter's list of dietary requirements. Life provides you with exactly what you need.”

Julia was approving. She took out her red leather-bound notebook.

“This is happening a lot,” she said. “I'm making notes for an original screenplay. Because of the recession, more and more women are having to look after their children again. And a certain proportion of them appears to be finding fulfillment.” Julia said this in the calculated manner of a scientist explaining an anthropological phenomenon, but her interest was commercial.

“My new agent says there's a
huge
gap in the market for an aspirational movie for women like us who don't know how to be mothers.”

Christy thought for a second. “Speak for yourself. I don't know about fulfillment, but I do intend to buy their presents myself this year. I have some ideas about what they might like. And I haven't thought about death any morning since the nanny left.”