She Matters (28 page)

I knew I'd put her on the spot, presented a scene that demanded response. I wanted to apologize. “Come on,” she said, taking the glass from my hand, setting it somewhere. She turned off the warm lights of the kitchen and we went upstairs together. On her landing, the floor below mine, she wished me well for sleep. Into the following year, I called on many friends, closer and fonder, better known, who understood my family. I called on their varied ways of giving me a home in the world, but in that new orphaned hour, sheltered in her house, Connie gave me a last, firm look before going to bed and made me feel instructed and very strong.

M
arlene suggested the bar in the Four Seasons. I would have said yes to any plan. In the two days since my father had died, I'd wandered, trailed, traipsed my city, had put my children on a plane home to their father, who'd returned from camping. I'd stood alone at crosswalks, sat down in unexpected parks, unable to change this; gathered with friends who loved me; I'd drunk a lot of white wine for the chill in my mouth and the softness of mind and muscle that followed the alcohol. I couldn't handle the hiss of the subways and the muddle of close, heated bodies, so I'd been riding the bus, staring from the window, consuming details that meant little of streets I once knew deeply. They told me nothing of myself. My city was changed. I didn't know where to go.

Marlene wrote, “Oh Susy,” a cry. She'd known me as Susy. In her note, she encouraged me to call, and I did, having to concentrate on the sequence of numbers as I copied it from laptop screen onto a notebook page. Paper, the contents of my bag, standing up—every action, every object required exhausting focus. I made the call in a gray stretch of hot shadow against a building on the Upper West Side. It was one of the short streets between Broadway and Central Park, where the neighborhood wedges itself into an awkward triangle, conceding briefly the true topography of the
island. I'd never thought before of the island as terrain. If I faced west I could watch the double avenue, sense the Hudson's expanse, and, turning east, I saw the spark of green from the park's trees. When Marlene answered I said, “It's Susy,” and I was, and we fell straightaway into comfortable, miserable speech. I strained to hear above the churn of air vents around me, exhaust pipes, the high-pitched, rhythmic pierce of work trucks in reverse. When Marlene spoke my name, I felt thirteen and liked it, my age when my father started seeing her. She said, “Can we meet, I really want to see you.” I said, “Just tell me where, when.” I had nothing I was meant to do.

• • •

When I was in eighth grade my father's MS started to worsen, and he stopped driving. He could still cook, deliberate gestures, his hands shaping the ground lamb, his fingers able to pluck at the little hill of chopped parsley, the coarse grains in the salt dip, but he could not rely on reflex, fast changes, and he had to give up the car. One weekend, Marlene drove my father and herself up to my school in Connecticut, her black terrier on his lap the whole way. My mother, as it happened, had introduced him to Marlene. Her best friend, Bev, brought Marlene to a party my mother gave, and they conspired to throw this young reporter at him. They watched from across the room. When he asked the reporter out and took her out several more times after that, my mother was furious, excluded. The intentions of the adults were mysterious, and I could not get a grip on who wanted what. My mother seemed excited one minute, dismissive the next, loved to tell people what good friends she and my father were, such a progressive divorce, but she wasn't pleased when he stopped flirting with her.

I got into the back of the car, behind my father, glad to avoid
his gaze, which could stun me. Marlene slowly drove the road that wound through the campus, and she asked what's that, what happens there, so I could point out what mattered to me, using the arcane terms of segregated life. She and I hadn't done much together. Once, she'd taken me to a movie, R-rated but not shocking; and she'd given me
The White Album,
pressed in white vinyl, when I still didn't get the Beatles. The undeniable cool of this present informed my view of her.

In the backseat I was dreaming, gone. The night before—how many hours, I counted backward—a boy had kissed me. It was my first French kiss—the phrase itself delicious—and I replayed it: tiptoe on the steps of my dorm, aware of curfew minutes away, and the broadness of his upper body, the dry taste of boy, the colliding textures on his face of smooth lips, scratchy cheek. His hands were too heavy on my shoulders. I reviewed the tiny moment of last air, right before his leaning in became his mouth on mine, which had sent an addictive charge into my body. In the car, the charge again coursed, a devastating, honeyed sensation. I was lost to an erotic spell as Marlene and my father debated dinner, her sweet voice teasing him.

I was bursting to announce, to just let this out, but my father would mock me, ruin it. He took too great an interest in my crushes, managing to be both prurient and belittling, and I had to keep this from him. It must have shown, though, my body alight—does it show, can't you see my lips are different? Am I discovered? I scanned the campus for the boy, who was nowhere to be found.

They stayed in a motor court, as my father insisted on calling it, and Marlene unlocked the door and threw it open, guiding me inside. I walked the dog from the parking spot, amused by her trot and tug. I sat on one of the beds. My father despised attention
as he worked his slow legs, so we'd left him to get out of the car alone, and I talked to Marlene, dropped a hand over the side of the bed to find the dog's ears and nose. It was casual, without moment. Starving for good women, I loved her.

“You know what?”

“What, Susy?”

“I had my first French kiss last night.” The boy himself was less and less relevant.

“What happened?” Marlene said, a spark to her. She wanted to hear me tell. Before my father made it inside the room, I confided the strangeness and excitement.

“But don't tell him,” I said.

“I would never tell him.”

That weekend, I had an easy time with my father, Marlene coaxing his good moods. I was still afraid of him, no one could wipe that out, but it was a novel fear, loose rather than vigilant, relaxed by the new instinct that being his adult daughter would be better than being his child. We'd been estranged, as I, age twelve, had renounced his swift lacerations and undermining indifference. I took two years off from him, protecting myself. I credit Marlene with a crucial thaw between us. They weren't together very long and when they ended, over what I never knew, I was bitter. “Why didn't you marry her, I didn't want her to go,” I said. He said she wanted someone healthy instead of ill, but he always spoke of their romance with deep affection. She had introduced him to something in himself. To me she was a necessary, wonderful mercy.

• • •

I'd never been inside the Four Seasons, had just a notion of its status, the midtown anchor of opulence. New York, that day, those
days, was breaking apart into two pieces, the familiar and the disconcertingly unknown. The very familiar Lenox Hill Hospital, home in childhood to my mother's back surgeries and overdose revivals, and then last week reknown with the dowdy repetitions, the day after day leading to my father's death. In contrast, the aggressive sheen of corporate retail confused me, a false overlay that obscured my historical markers.

For the first time in days, with the hotel ahead, I felt composed. I could rise to the occasion, after being submerged. My eyes were lined with a steady hand, my lip touched with pale color. Just enough to be pulled together. Today, which bore no relation to the day before, I knew the contents of my bag and where my wallet was. I knew which pocket held my cell phone. These seemed like fundamental miracles, after the earthquaking of my heart. I moved amidst the cars, the bicycles and food carts, the wandering and the hurry, people with their lively bodies. I had to be careful with myself.

I was swept off Fifty-seventh Street into the theatrical magnificence of the lobby, where I was meant to be overwhelmed by architectural decision, trains of fabric, and acres of high ceiling, and I was. A dose of Asiatic lilies drugged the air. The unoccupied couches and empty carpets in stately greens and browns. A rise led to the elevated restaurant that looked out over the lobby, and a solicitous man in well-cut black showed me to a table by the window. His cuff snapped as he indicated my seat. The window was its own dramatic residence, primped with sheer muslin and velvet, layers of enclosure. Beyond the glass, the sunlit street had become a prop, an adornment. Filtered through white tulle, sun fell on the tablecloth, a warmed spot, and I sat on a tightly upholstered armchair, scattering my loose self, as my sunglasses, phone, wallet, pen, notebook, all found a separate
place on the table. I could live in this coached oblivion. I asked for Sancerre, the wine that had become my friend this week simply for its pretty name, which I didn't need to think about when I ordered.

In thirty years, I'd seen Marlene once. The year before my book came out, but when I'd finished it and felt an unflappable confidence, Christopher and I went for drinks at my father's, where Marlene and her husband were expected. I was terribly nervous to see her. The girl-me loved her forever, as she was. After she and my father split up, she'd married and moved to the country. She had sons, grown men now. My father still—well, not today or yesterday, not anymore—talked to her frequently, sent e-mails and token books, thought of her and told her so, still flirting. But she wasn't in the regular circle. My stepmother did not like to admit the women who had mattered.

On their way to a party, Marlene and her husband could only stop for a drink, half an hour, an hour, they were saying in the hall as they took off their coats and greeted my stepmother. I waited for Marlene to see me, as shy as a new student, and we put out our arms, pressed shoulders, ladylike and gracious but not more. We gathered our chairs in the bedroom, my father our focus, the way he liked it. We made light conversation, a convivial mood, holiday reports. How grown I felt as I handed Marlene her wineglass, then a glass to her husband. Of course, I
was
grown, past forty, but I wanted her to see all that had happened, all I'd become, to review the years she'd missed. I talked with her husband, partly afraid that my eyes on her would betray old worship and make me foolish, but now and then I looked, willing the appearance of my familiar reckonings, and she was still there, girlish and a little flustered, too, and it charmed me.

• • •

Marlene walked toward the table, and I stood. We looked into each other, took the measure, sat down. “Have you eaten?” she said. I'd read the menu. A sandwich cost $27. I objected on principle. “Oh, Susy, please have the sandwich, please.” Okay. I let her take me to lunch. I needed an immediate mother. My stepmother the day before had exiled me from the apartment for good, no explanation beyond, “This is too awkward.” I can't remember where I slept, helped by some receiving friend. My stepmother, whom I'd loved for thirty years and had believed loved me, had thrown callous ill feeling at me through this whole thing, and disorientation ruled my latest interactions. But it was too much, not for now. I'd think about it later.

There was catching up, my children's lives and Marlene's, our work, but mostly, we talked of my father, a confidential and vivid closeness. I imagined how we looked, not friends, but a mother, her daughter. Marlene forged ahead with the beloved and the obnoxious, memories of my father rising and blending together, just as mine were, ungraspable details I wanted to catch before they evaporated. As if they'd evaporate.

“Do you know what he called my husband? After I got married?” she said. “A golden retriever.”

“Oh, God.”

“My husband didn't like that,” she was laughing. We had more wine. We tattled on my father with intense affection, profound knowledge.

“You know he adored you.”

“Well, yes,” I said. “But we had a hard time the last couple of years.” This was hurting terribly. My stepmother had chosen
the day after he died to tell me I'd wounded him. That he'd been disappointed, waiting for me. Nothing could help me digest her choice, her need to dispatch her rage.

“He never stopped talking about you.”

“He didn't?”

“Susy. He was so proud of you.”

She said it simply. In the week my father died, it was the only time anyone said this. Marlene, again and at the right moment, wound his humanity with mine, made us father and daughter, daughter and father.

W
hen I agreed to move to the big blank of Montana with Christopher, I asked him to come with me as I said my good-byes. I wanted to introduce him, have people see he was
it
. We drove around the East Coast, my inventory of friends in Boston, Providence, New Haven, family members in New York. In Sag Harbor, April and Marina pulled us into the kitchen, sat us at the broad table and asked to hear everything. “Tell us!” We loved to tell that story, only a few months old.

As I talked, April listened with acute attention. “So
beautiful
!” she exclaimed at the slight asides, the passing detail: I had to wait for Christopher to unlock the car door . . . He'd just come back from a run, when . . . She revered each step in the dawning of love, the joining. She gazed at Marina, whose ranging, coppery curls and red lipstick made her the focal point of any room. We all stared, the delicacy and sleepy, erotic energy, those wrists. Love shaped April, decided her. April and Marina exalted sex as sacred and did it saying
cunt
and
pussy,
spilling mock secrets, letting raunch erupt. “Stop it! Oh, don't!” Christopher blushed, already uncomfortable at playing the fourth to our three. It's
good,
I wanted to tell him, when women say the real everything, allow each other, wield dirty talk as part of living; but I was startled, too. Marina lowered her eyelids, and April touched those curls. I leaned forward and loved them.