Plan C (12 page)

I bet you haven’t had this kind of pasta at your house, I think, because it’s not something that comes from a can. “I want the kind my mommy makes,” he whines.

Jean-Christophe looks to his brother, signaling him to pick up his fork and knife. They bang their utensils on the table in unison.

“Oh well…” I say, quietly, fantasizing about garnishing their pasta with Ambien. The twins add humming to the already annoying pounding, and suddenly I feel like I’ve just stepped into “Beowulf” at the Mead Hall scene.

Me, I don’t use the guilt trip on these kids. And I don’t tell them I’ve taken five jobs to help put this meal on the table. Instead, I just do what any sensible American woman would do. I sit down, exhale, and take a sip of my wine, which turns into several steady gulps. And then a refill.

I can’t help but think back to… the museum, earlier when I was headed to the mail room, bypassing the lunch room where various school groups of kids on field trips were opening their lunchboxes – unless they were the kids from Spence and Dalton, who came equipped with their mother’s debit cards. On one table I noticed a group of little boys eating whatever their mothers had thrown together. One had some five day old sandwich meat slapped carelessly between slices of bargain brand white bread – and he
was the luckiest. His companion had a half eaten Twinkie and a bag of store-brand chips. Filler food with no nutrition.

I asked a colleague who ran Special Events, “What would it take to buy these kids some fresh fruit, grilled sandwiches, and those fancy cupcakes from the cafeteria?” She smiled at me, squeezed my hand and said, “Tell the lunchroom staff you’re Mr. Boone’s assistant. That ought to do it.”

“Really?” I asked, surprised that such power existed.

And I did.

As I put down my wine glass, I turn to Ben, smiling. “Did you know that you learn something new every day?” I say. “take Salamanders…”

“The lizard?” asks Madeline.

“Yes, they’re amphibians actually, and they get very….” I raise an eyebrow.

“Horny,” says Madeline.

“How do you know this?” I ask.

“Studied them in Earth Science,” she says.

‘And salamanders have big…”

“Orgies,” says Madeline, mouthing the word so the twins miss it. “And you thought I wasn’t paying attention in sixth grade.”

“But that’s only on
date
night, honey,” says Ben to me. “The rest of the time they have boring married sex.”

“My mommy says that
sex is
a bad word,” says Jean-Christophe.

“It’s not a bad word. Honestly,” I say, stabbing at a meatball. It’s just a word that isn’t in your mommy’s vocabulary.

“So, you’re going to China, Ben?” says Madeline, changing the subject. “When? Mom was telling me. That’s so cool!”

And then the Marines land at my dinner table. Jean-Baptiste brings up war figurines from beneath his seat and unleashes very verbal blow-em-up sound effects – apparently Spiderman is battling a brown plastic creature with three heads. But when the creature loses the fight, Jean-Baptiste launches Spiderman into midair, knocking over Ben’s wine glass. Its contents flood the French linen tablecloth with forever-staining burgundy. Not that Ben can see it. He’s colorblind.

“Boys, that’s enough,” he says with such little authority that it’s pointless. Now Jean-Christophe’s reaches toward the table center to retrieve Spiderman. Madeline tries not to laugh, busying herself with the mozzarella and tomato salad.

Jean-Christophe leaps from his seat and scampers across the table. “What is it you want?” his father asks. “Just ask politely…” But it’s too late, Jean-Christophe has knocked over the wine bottle, and now the bread basket is completely saturated. Quickly, Jean-Christophe grabs the last piece of dry bread, tears off a piece of the warm dough, and chomps it with his mouth open. Pieces fall from his lips to the tablecloth.

Madeline is completely amused. I’ve seen this fascinated expression on her face a thousand times when we’ve attended an afternoon matinee. That mischievous sneer she gets whenever the lead character turns out to be some sort of psycho - like Regan” in “
The Exorcist,
” or Rebecca DeMornay, the evil nanny in
“The Hand That Rocks the Cradle.”
Or Judi Dench’s twisted lesbian antics in “
Notes on a Scandal.”

“Let’s chew with our mouths closed,” says Ben to the boys. But his lazy approach to teaching them manners is about as useless an exhausted woman pushing for twelve hours in labor only to find out they’ll perform a Caesarian anyway.

When Jean-Christophe jumps from his seat and says ‘you’re it!’ to his brother, I finally put a hand out and intervene. “Jean-Christophe, can you please return to your seat.”

“I don’t have to. You’re not my mother,” he says.

I go back to taking cloth napkins to sopping up the wine. Madeline offers hers as contribution, then my gritted teeth finally part. But I stop myself from commenting that it seems the boys do everything but
eat
at the table.

“Okay, boys,” says Ben, “You win. Do you want us to make you something else?”

“Something else?” I say, stunned. “Something else?”

“Well, maybe if they liked what’s for dinner they might eat…”

“What am I running? A restaurant? Are you crazy, Ben?”

Jean-Christophe calls out, “My mommy’s
friend
says if you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all.”

“You’re mommy’s
friend
is right,” I say, knowing the word “friend” signifies another one of her
Match.com
men. “So I’m expecting silence from you.”

“Okay,” says Ben, “Let’s all relax and eat our dinners.”

But Jean-Christophe looks straight at me and goes into Satan mode, squinting his eyes and saying, “If you make me eat it…”

“I know,” I respond lazily, “you’re gonna call the police and have me arrested.” I roll my eyes and reach to refill my wine glass but of course the bottle is empty.

Now Damien-like, Jean-Christophe morphs into some deep-sea creature coming up for air, inhaling and exhaling his chest, before picking up his fork, setting up a piece of broccoli - not salted, not buttered, but just al dente the way he likes it - on the end of the fork. With one precision move he catapults it clear across the room. The broccoli flies through the air in what feels like slow motion to me. That’s because I know where it’s headed: toward Kitty’s twelve thousand dollar Karl Klingbiel oil painting, the one Kitty asked us to house for her temporarily while she’s renovating her gallery. And then
splat!

“Jean-Christophe!” says Ben, only a bit more sternly than usual. “That wasn’t very nice. You know better…”

Now I’ve reached my boiling point. My patience has worn thin, and far worse, my wine glass is empty! Why is that all those fairy tales depict us as stepmothers as evil old hags who lock their step-children in the attic? That’s the only problem with New York. A scarcity of attics. It seems in real life a stepmother’s only recourse is keeping their mouths shut – and therefore harboring resentment in her stomach. You watch. In twenty years they’ll do a study about all the stepmothers who have ulcers or stomach cancer from being forced to suppress their feelings. Maybe I should start compiling the statistics for the article now…

“Daddy says if I’m good he’s going to buy me a new cell phone,” announces Jean-Christophe.

“Really? That’s great,” I say. “Maybe you can use it to call your mother and tell her it’s time to come pick you up.”

It took Bebe two years after her separation from Henry to venture out of the house. Ordinarily she sat staring blankly at QVC or pacing floors like a widow whose ship Captain husband was lost at sea. I had convinced Bebe to volunteer at the women’s shelter, but the more time she spent around little girls the more depressed she got over how hard the system seemed to work against her adopting a baby.

As a child, Bernie McCann had been an altar boy - a real die-hard Irish-Catholic. But when he grew up he cast his religion aside and proudly admitted that he liked to play “covet thy neighbor’s wife.” For a while, he dated only married women. Sometimes he’d even cruise the real estate section of the Sunday paper in order to find rich recent divorcees or widows.

But it was in the lower level of Barney’s department store that he first spied Bebe, who was sniffing the Jo Malone candles. She wore a wedding band on her left ring finger, and she looked oddly aroused by the orange blossom scent dancing in her nostrils. Bernie was aroused by something else: Bebe smelled of devastation.

Bernie came from a beer-bottling empire, yet neither his childhood travels nor his father’s wealth had afforded him a proper education. Bernie might have been raised with his finger clutching a tea cup at Brown’s in London, but if you had told him that the
Boston tea party had changed history more than two hundred years ago, he would have given you a completely blank look. He was as thick as an unabridged dictionary. That said, Bernie McCann knew who Sam Adams was. “He invented the first beer,” said Bernie, puffing his Cuban stogie and flashing his industrial whitened teeth, which contrasted oddly with his fake tan-gone-orange skin. Bebe beamed with pure admiration, for what she assumed was Bernie’s brilliance while Kitty and I looked for the nearest trash can to vomit.

Bernie was like a poor man’s Rat Packer - more of a ring-a-ding-dong - the perfect combination of ignorance and arrogance. Bebe’s version of an elegant man translates to my version of gumba. An elegant man doesn’t say “You’re
fucking
beautiful,” unless he’s Bebe’s man. It always amazed me how Bebe would attract these types. Put the two of us in a local Cape Cod bar and men of a certain kind flock to her; the same ones usually threatened by me. It’s as though they instinctively know I can see straight through them to the other side of stupid.

Kitty once tried to have a conversation with Bernie about one of her favorite artists, Francis Bacon. “I know all about Francis
Bacon,
” said Bernie. “My dad brokered a deal between him and Oscar Meyer, back in the 70s.”

Bebe saw only the good hair, good teeth and good penis but all we saw was how blind she was. She was a delicate vegetarian and Bernie was a loud, five-napkin burger kind of guy. And a drunk. Take the time we all went to Nantucket for a weekend. We were waiting in line for the 1:30 p.m. ferry – Bebe, Clive, Kitty, Ben and I - when Bernie excused himself to go to the men’s room. Ten minutes went by, then twenty and finally the harbor master couldn’t hold our seats any longer. After forfeiting our spots on the
boat, we went in search of Bernie, whom we found at the Ropewalk drinking his third beer. We knew this because he liked to line up his empties. He didn’t even apologize. He just insisted on buying us a round. “There’s always another ferry!” he said handing out Cuban cigars. But there wasn’t another Bernie, that’s for sure.

Bernie wore Tommy Bahama everything. You know the look – loud, floral, clothes with parrots and tropical palms that scream insecurity, as do the gold chains swinging around his neck. On Cape Cod, there are two words that never go together: Boatshoes and socks. Bernie knew this, so he never wore socks in his boatshoes. He wore a gold ankle bracelet instead. He was so “Man overboard!”

And Bernie bought everything on the Men’s Marketplace page in the back of
Esquire
magazine from the “Pheromone 10x” attraction potion to the “4 minute exerciser” not to mention the “Liquid Trust” an Oxytocin product that “fuels intimacy,” “reduces your stress in social situations,” and “compels others to trust you.” Okay, so apparently, it wasn’t working.

But Bebe wasn’t – thank the Lord - married to Bernie. Actually, I had to give him credit – he was the first person who made Bebe smile after her beloved Henry’s departure. At least he gave her something to do besides rack up InCircle Points from Neiman Marcus.

Oh, and he did one other right. He had a vasectomy. To her friends, that was a blessing – it meant there wouldn’t be any baby Bernies running around – but Bebe wasn’t so sure, especially when her doctor told her that at age forty, “There would be only a 7% chance of conceiving a baby.”

One day two months or so ago, we were strolling home from a visit to the adoption agency where we had filled out more papers and dropped off a letter of recommendation I had written for her. I kept worrying – if the agency ever did find her a baby, would it be better for Bebe to rid herself of Bernie
before
she brought it home, or after? My advice – my gut feeling was not to wait. Bernie had become a codependent, needy-son-of-a-bitch who phoned her cell ten times an hour, and usually from some mahogany bar…and then if Bebe didn’t pick up, he’d hit redial over and over and leave fifty voice messages.

I feared that Bernie’s neediness was going to interfere with her life’s biggest moment. I could only imagine some orphanage House Mother dressed in dismal Pilgrim clothing, standing in the single beam of a light streaming into a dark room as in a Vermeer painting – and presenting the St. John’s-tailored Bebe with her prize: “Blonde-haired-blue-eyed-baby, meet your Mommy.” And just as the baby tumbled into her mother’s arms, Bebe’s phone would beep, and there would be Bernie’s utterly trivial message marked “urgent.”

These dark thoughts prompted me to blurt: “Are you sure you want your blonde-haired-blue-eyed baby to think of Bernie as daddy? It might confuse the little girl.” What I really wanted to say was: “Are you sure that you want Bernie? Maybe he’s your rebound from Henry? Maybe you need therapy? Maybe you need to really have your head examined? Maybe you need to do some more shopping to forget about him?”

But before I could utter any of that, and faster than you can say, “There’s a sale at Bottega Veneta,” Bebe exclaimed: “I don’t want Bernie anymore. Nobody will ever replace my beloved, Henry. I just have to figure out when to lose Bernie and how. And I
don’t want to hurt the dear man. He does mean well.” And then she patted my hand as she always does.

Always the Miss Melanie. Even with the assholes! That was my Bebe. Every time I caught her having a blonde moment, she’d follow it with something smart, grounded and sensible. Not because she was smart in the head, but because she was smart in the heart.