Rise and Shine (19 page)

It reminded me of the first semester of Meghan’s first year at Smith, when she had not come home until Christmas. I sent her long, discursive letters about the difficulties of algebra and the cat I’d acquired at the pound and the painting I was doing of the park across the street at sunset. I got a handful of postcards back, so perfunctory as to sound like fortune cookies: “Pet that kitty for me!” “Don’t sweat the math!” “Freshman year is the hardest!” They sounded so unlike Meghan that I wondered if she had gotten them out of some big-sister primer. Only later did I discover that Meghan, miserable and feeling out of her league, had gone to ground and spent most of the semester in her room.

“There, and yet not there,” one of her high school friends had said.

It was fine for my aunt to talk again and again about Meghan’s determination to hide from adversity, to struggle alone, to go under the porch. But her disappearance was taking on a larger, more ominous tone, as though she was in a witness protection program for the walking wounded. Perhaps somewhere she was regaining her strength, but all I could think of was how shattered she seemed at a distance, how lost and weak.

The stories trailed off, the references to the FCC investigation became fewer after they’d levied a fine of $100,000 against the network, which was roughly commensurate to Meghan’s travel and entertainment expenses in any given year. As for Meghan’s whereabouts, the network couldn’t let on that they didn’t know and the other networks couldn’t show they cared about a rival star. The straight papers don’t cover that sort of thing unless they can do it as a business story—“Network in Ratings Slump as Morning Newscast Changes Personnel”—and the tabloids were preoccupied with a serial killer in Ohio, a sitcom star who had come out of the closet (unless you happened to be gay, in which case the announcement was about five years behind the times), and most troubling of all, a missing wife on the East Side. Long blond hair, two kids, what the tabs kept calling a $2 million co-op apartment, as though that would be anything larger than two bedrooms and a maid’s room in this market.

The supermarket tabloids remained on Meghan watch, but after she left Grosvenor’s Cove, they were reduced to reporting spurious sightings. Meghan on the yacht of a software mogul who was a rival of Ben Greenstreet’s. Meghan in a Buddhist retreat center in Nepal. Meghan angling behind the scenes for the job as evening anchor, the job she had really always wanted, which was true. The always wanting, not the current angling.

One morning I got a phone call from Hadley Booth, the loathsome socialite. That’s how Meghan always refers to her, as though it is her full name. She has had to be very careful over the years not to say this in front of Peter Booth, Leo’s friend, Hadley’s son.

“Bridget? Hadley,” she said, as though we were the closest of friends. “I needed to check in. Leo seems so distraught. So. Distraught. Not at all the same boy. And we do think of him as our second son.”

I shuddered, at the thought of anyone else thinking she was Leo’s surrogate mother, and at the idea that that person might ever be Hadley Booth, who had once thrown a fit because she was shut out of a Chanel show after arriving late. But even from the collagened, lying lips of Hadley Booth, the notion that Leo might be suffering disturbed me more.

“I didn’t know Leo and Peter saw each other when they were at college,” I said.

“So close,” she purred. “E-mail, phone, all those other techie things I don’t begin to understand. Peter is a rock for Leo. I’ve told him that I’ve had so many friends come out the other side of all this. I’ve seen it over and over, and there is a light at the end of the tunnel.”

“You’ve had lots of friends who misspoke over an open mike on national television?”

“That’s the symptom, isn’t it, Bridget, not the illness.”

I refused to bite.

“I said to someone just the other day, I know Meghan Fitzmaurice, and Meghan Fitzmaurice will emerge from this crisis stronger than ever before.”

“Tanner,” I added.

“Excuse me?” Hadley Booth said, barely hiding her annoyance. She had taken time out of a very busy day of laser resurfacing, Pilates sessions, and shopping on Madison Avenue to get the scoop from the impoverished, obscure sister so she could spread it around town at dinner that night. And she was getting only sarcasm. It occurred to me that I sounded a bit like Meghan.

“She’ll be tanner,” I said. “She’s at the beach. Hadley, I’ve got to run, I’ve got a crack addict and a cop waiting for me. It’s always nice talking to you.”

I was definitely channeling Meghan.

When I called Leo to report on the call, he just sighed into the phone. “Don’t listen to Mrs. Booth, Bridey,” he said wearily. “She’s a complete bitch. And Peter never tells her anything. Besides, here’s what I decided: It’s kind of better this way. Dad doesn’t really want to talk until he can do it with Mom, and Mom can’t talk until she gets back. And if I don’t have to talk about it, I have some time to get used to the idea, you know?”

“It’s very sweet of you to make that sort of allowance for your mother,” I said.

“I learned that one at the feet of the master,” he said. I wasn’t sure whether he meant me or Evan. That was a bad sign.

The network was letting the morning newsperson, a nice young woman who was always tripping over stray consonants as though they were heaves in the sidewalk of a sentence, sit in for Meghan, and even having her say “Rise and shine!” in a way that somehow suggested she spent a lot of time practicing in front of a mirror. I found this dispiriting. Leo might have felt as a boy that Meghan had cheapened a greeting that was theirs alone by turning it into common parlance, but to hear come out of the mouth of Susan Lomenta the words with which my sister had awakened me, first when our mother was taking her much-vaunted beauty sleep down the hall, then when our aunt was working the early shift at the hospital, was infinitely more jarring than Meghan’s on-air imprecation against Ben Greenstreet had been.

“I don’t believe you, Bridget,” Evan said when I insisted I had no idea how to reach Meghan, which was almost true, as so many things are. I had not had a fax since that first declaration. But although I had given her assistant the fax number and insisted that she use it sparingly, I would be damned if I would have a stream of divorce documents scrolling their way out of thin air into the steamy, sweet-scented days in which I liked to imagine her, the blue sea spread before her like thin, shimmering cloth until it disappeared into the horizon somewhere short of Cuba.

Leo told me he planned to have dinner with his father every two weeks. Leo said the first two dinners were pleasant but, I divined, somewhat empty of content since he had declared a moratorium on any discussions of his mother, his mother’s whereabouts, his mother’s shortcomings, and his parents’ marriage. I could imagine their time together, Leo sitting quietly at a Thai or Greek or Italian restaurant not far from Grand Central so he could take the train back, Evan returning to Amherst, where he was always preternaturally lively, as though to illustrate through simple bonhomie that he was somebody, he had been somebody. “He’s gotten this bald spot on the back of his head,” Leo said thoughtfully, reminding me that he was just as apt to make judgments and find the jugular as his mother, although with no ill will. When I asked what he and his father discussed, Leo said, “The Yankees.”

“Go Yanks,” Irving muttered when I recounted the conversation in the back of a cab.

“They suck!” the cabbie had said in heavily accented English.

“Mets fan?” Irving asked.

“Certainly. The Mets are the team of the workingman.”

“You see?” Irving muttered. “This is why we should take my car everywhere.” More loudly he said, “I’m a cop.” The driver began to drive so slowly that Irving literally tore his own hair. “We’re in a hurry!” The driver gunned the engine, and we jerked forward, nearly colliding with a man and his dog in the crosswalk. By the time we got downtown, I was carsick. Of course we were going to a clam house, which is one of Irving’s three favorite kinds of restaurants. The man once sat across from me at a dinner and stared morosely at a bowl of cucumber gazpacho for nearly a half hour without speaking. He loves ketchup, nitrites, and crullers.

He loves me, too. He held my hair as the aroma of clam sauce and slightly ripe garbage overwhelmed me and I vomited in a gutter at the corner of Grand and Mercer streets. Then he gave up zuppa di pesce to walk me down to a little place that served pancakes and pie and other sweet, heavy foods that settle your stomach.

“You eat today?” I shook my head. “See, that’s not good. You’re under way too much stress, and you’re not taking care of yourself. Take the day tomorrow. I’ll take the day tomorrow.”

“I can’t take the day off,” I said to Alison that night on the phone.

“Yeah, you can. You just think you’re indispensable.”

“Do not!” There’s nothing like a little insight to bring out the youngest child in a youngest child.

So we took the day off and went to Coney Island. We even took the subway, which is a mode of transportation I love, particularly with Irving. What is it about him? Sometimes I look at him and imagine that he looks like a middle-level capo in the Gambino crime family, the prosperous head of a family company that sells cheap sportswear to Kmart, the principal of Sheepshead Bay High School, even a reporter at a tabloid. Maybe it’s the eyes, which are deep brown but look black and are always a little narrowed. But if a guy is on the A train with Irving and he’s carrying a knife, a gun, a box cutter, a can of spray paint, or is simply a little behind on visits to his parole officer, he knows Irving is a cop. There is a force field around him, and I am in it with him.

The old men watching the water rise and fall from their benches on the boardwalk gave him respectful nods. At the aquarium they let us in free to watch the beluga whales smile from the other side of the thick glass, showing off their pale bellies as they glided against the side of the tank. At Nathan’s the counter guy handed over three chili dogs, two fries, and two root beers, and waved his hand when Irving gave him a twenty.

“You nuts?” the counterman said. “Paying?”

“You cops,” I said as we ate.

“It’s got nothing to do with the cops,” Irving murmured, his cheek full of chili and bun. “When I was younger I used to take my nana here every Sunday. If we see an old lady, you watch. She’ll act like I’m Jesus H. Christ on the cross.”

“How come we don’t see old ladies? All we see are old guys. And old ladies outnumber old guys by about ten to one. At the projects there are no old guys at all.”

Irving did his close-one-eye-lift-the-lip-what-kind-of-moron-are-you? look. It’s very effective. I saw him give it to the governor once at a press conference, and the governor deferred on the next three questions to the commissioner. “There are no guys in the projects over the age of twenty-five. Dead or incarcerated or got the hell out.”

“It’s not that bad.”

“It’s that bad. Here it’s a different thing. Those guys on the benches are the last living husbands. Every day their wives throw them the hell out so they can wax the kitchen floor, then have lunch with their girlfriends. They got into a routine when they were younger: the husband goes to work, the wife cleans, watches the soaps, talks to the other girls. The husband retires, it’s a nightmare. So they tell them—go out, exercise, get some fresh air, pick up some milk. You come out here in February, these poor sons of bitches are freezing in Russian hats and scarves and gloves, the whole nine yards. When my nana was here, there was one guy, been married fifty-seven years, he goes and leaves his wife for one of the widows in the building, lives three floors down. His son shows up, yelling, carrying on, says to his father in the lobby, What the hell are you doing, Pop? The guys says, She lets me stay inside during the day.”

“You’re making this all up.”

“Swear to God.”

Irving finished the last bit of my dog and crumpled up the trash. It was one of those deceptive spring days when the sun shines down so confidently that you begin to think of putting your winter coat away, one of those days that gets the weatherman an additional minute or two on the evening news, with film of kids playing ball in the park, a couple walking amid the daffodils. Irving and I walked beneath the roller-coaster supports. The roller coaster at Coney Island looks like it’s built of two-by-fours and spit. Irving swears by it. A homeless guy wearing a
NEW YORK CITY MARATHON
T-shirt with a mongrel dog lying alongside him held a sign:
GULF WAR VET, AGENT ORANGE, NO BENEFITS, MY DOG IS HUNGRY, AIDS.

“Sign sucks,” Irving said, dropping the twenty the Nathan’s people had passed up into the guy’s cup.

“I guess marriage is a mystery,” I said, looking at two old men huddled together on one splintering bench as though for warmth in the thin May sunshine.

“A misery, more like it. Yo, Mr. Kanterman. Mr. Beck.”

“Irving,” one of the men called. “How’s your nana?”

“She’s dead,” the other snarled at him, hitting him in the side with the back of his hand. “Four years ago. You sat shivah.”

“It’s okay, Mr. Kanterman. I forget everything, too.”

“How’s the wife?”

Again the hand, like a martial arts expert. “He’s divorced! Idiot!” The man I assumed was Mr. Beck peered at me. His eyes were a blue so light that he would have looked blind had he not fixed them so accusingly on me. “Unless there’s a new one.”

“I’m just the girlfriend,” I said. Mr. Beck looked disgusted at the notion that I actually talked, but Mr. Kanterman nodded and smiled and said, “That’s good.”

As we started down the boardwalk, Mr. Beck called, “Irving? Irving! You got your gun? You be careful. They’re everywhere now.”

“Your nana just died four years ago?” I said as Irving lit a cigar and puffed energetically into the wind off the ocean. On the horizon were two big tankers, bookends to the two big apartment towers where the old people lived. Maybe someday the buildings would be unmoored and sail away south, to Miami maybe. Maybe that was what all the residents were waiting for.