The Road Taken (39 page)

Peggy and Ed had bought Markie a fur coat for her recent birthday, and Peter told her to take it off quickly and hide it because Jamie would have a fit. But it was too late; Jamie saw her hanging it in the hall closet.

“One should never wear what one cannot eat,” Jamie said, looking very upset.

“Didn’t you ever have a darling little roast mink on a toothpick?” Markie asked her. “They’re delicious.”

“That’s not funny!” Jamie cried.

“Only if you were expecting a cocktail frank.”

Jamie burst into tears and ran out of the house.

“My goodness, what’s going on?” Rose asked, disturbed. “Peter dear, you should go after her.”

He did. The others poured more champagne and pretended nothing had happened. “Poor Jamie wants a baby,” Rose whispered to Joan. “She’s afraid it will be too late, and Peter doesn’t want one. She’s threatened to leave him.”

“And do what? Find a father?” As soon as Joan said it she realized how ironic that was. She had found a father for Markie, and run away from him and joined him again, and Markie had found a father and lost a baby, and for all she knew that father was on his way out.

“I hope she changes his mind,” Rose said. “She and Peter do love each other.”

“Yes,” Joan said.

“I told him they could continue to live here even if they have two babies,” her mother said wistfully. “There’s plenty of room. We brought up you girls in this house.”

“I know,” Joan said. She wondered if her mother was getting forgetful.

“Just so you remember,” Rose said with a smile.

“I do.”

Peter finally came back with Jamie, who looked tearful and sullen, and Ed carved the turkey. Rose, diplomatic as always, had set out place cards. Joan and Peggy sat at opposite ends of the table and, although they gave each other pleasant looks and smiles when their eyes met, they hadn’t exchanged a word after hello and how are you. Joan knew from experience it was possible for them to spend an entire evening this way, and she reassured herself that many other families had such tricky relationships too.

Nor did Peggy and Jamie act warmly to one another. Peggy was annoyed at her daughter-in-law’s reaction to Markie’s fur coat, although she had known before she bought it that Jamie would object. Peggy and Ed thought that Jamie was a left-over hippie, an eccentric, but had to admit that was what they would have expected their strange son to have married. It had always been Peggy’s way, when she didn’t like something, to withdraw, closing the wings of her household (what was left of it) around her, and so she did today, leaning over Markie and Angel with such devouring attention that Joan thought next she would cut their food.

Markie and Angel were seated between their parents. Ginger was with Uncle Hugh and Teddy, the eternal triumvirate. How old Uncle Hugh and Teddy are looking, Joan thought, and rightly so—although for years Uncle Hugh had dyed his hair. Ginger was going gray, with wiry silver strands, and she was wearing the same dress she had worn last year. She just didn’t care, or perhaps didn’t recall, but she seemed happy to be here; in fact, she was glowing at everyone.

We are all growing older, thought Joan, grandmother manqué.In all the years since she had returned to her family, Joan had attended Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners gratefully and never thought about the future, but this time, for the first time, she did. I wonder who will be gone next, she thought.

It did not occur to her to wonder until later who would be new.

Chapter Forty-Nine

It was the end of the eighties. In Europe the Berlin Wall came down, while cheering onlookers grabbed pieces of it; in China tanks rolled through Tianamen Square, killing thousands of protesting students; and in New York City a young woman jogger was bludgeoned, raped, and left for dead by a group of Harlem boys in Central Park, making “wilding” the new urban fear as racial tensions rose. People who had believed they could have it all were beginning to think they couldn’t; it was too expensive, too difficult, too exhausting, too time-consuming. Prozac was the new drug for depression and obsessive-compulsive behavior.

Sprightly Great Uncle Hugh was still going to ACT UP meetings to get rights for gays and lesbians, and Jamie, pregnant at last and huge, was at PETA meetings getting rights for animals. She was not as happy about her incipient firstborn as everyone had expected her to be because she had too many worries about this world her child would be born into. Peter didn’t worry at all; he was one of the people on Prozac.

After her “procedure,” it had been simpler than Markie had thought to go on with her life. David was still there, talking about moving in, changing his mind, putting more of his clothes in her closet. For all his complaints about his roommates he was still in that hovel—Animal House, she called it—refusing to grow up. Sometimes she thought she wanted to break up with him and look for someone better, more appropriate, and then she considered how easy it was to be with him just the way he was. She had enough free time for her career and her friends, and she had a Boyfriend so she didn’t have to date. She had a man to bring to things, and she had her solitude when she needed it. Their appetite for one another continued undiminished, as did the tenderness afterward. Yet she also knew he could leave at any moment.

“How do you make them commit?” her unmarried women friends constantly asked, exasperated, as did Angel, although Angel didn’t expect an answer—which was good because Markie had no answer to give.

Markie was thirty. She had felt a wrench at that birthday, knowing she needed to make something happen. Then she wondered why. After all, she was a well-paid attorney with an interesting career, a perfectly acceptable little apartment, living in New York, the city of her choice, and she was neither alone nor lonely. It could have been worse. To celebrate her birthday she and David went to Jamaica for a long weekend and stayed in a villa with another couple they were friendly with from the city, and four servants, who cooked for them while they went to the beach. It was a grown-up holiday, luxurious and quiet, and she felt as if she had the best of all possible worlds.

Why, then, did she sometimes feel that life was passing her by?

David was fond of saying that people lived several different lives in one lifetime these days because they lived so long. He said it was natural, and that they were lucky to have the chance. He was twenty-six now, but he was still, in many ways, a child. “There’s school, and then the first career,” he said. “There’s the first marriage, and the children, and then there’s the second marriage, and maybe the second set of children, and then the second career, and then . . .”

“Don’t say any more,” Markie would say, stopping him. If she had to think that the love she felt now would disintegrate with familiarity, that this beloved face she woke up next to would time-morph into the face of someone else, a total stranger at the moment, living his life, not knowing he would someday end up with her, not understanding that the woman he loved right now would bore him or go away or die, she would not be able to bear it. That was why one could not see the future. Who would want to?

Her mother had been in love with only one man her entire life. Aunt Joan had been in love with many. Her parents’ friends, at least the ones they still saw, had stayed together for the long haul; many of Aunt Joan’s had not. Markie wanted to be married only once, and because of this mental commitment, which seemed oppressive and frightening, she often didn’t know how she felt about David. What could she think, when he believed in the freedom of serial monogamy and still did not know how he felt about her? Sometimes Markie thought Aunt Ginger was smarter than any of them, because she didn’t need anybody.

That fall Jamie had the long-awaited baby, a girl she and Peter named Hannah. How retro, Markie thought. Hannah Glover: she already sounded like an old woman. The baby, Markie’s first niece, was cheerful and pink and fair-haired and looked like her father. Jamie and Peter had redone the upstairs rooms in the town house where his aunts had spent their childhood, and this new family moved up there so the parents could be near the baby. The downstairs room was a den again, and an office. Peter, who was writing another novel, from which no one expected him to earn a living, had just taken a side job as a ghostwriter; and all day his computer screen glowed in the dimness, whether he was there or not, a symbol of his industrious intent.

Birth and death, Markie thought, when that fall, Teddy, who had recently been in failing health, died of a heart attack after attending a protest march with Hugh. Hugh felt proud of Teddy for going with him and guilty because he had let him. It had been too cold and windy, Hugh kept saying, it had been too much. Teddy had been eighty-two. He was two years younger than Hugh, it turned out, although no one had eve mentioned it, and probably no one but Hugh had known. Hugh had lied about his age when he was younger, always shaving off as many years a he could get away with, and only when being old had its own advantage did he tell the truth.

Teddy was cremated, as was his wish, and his ashes were scattered in a lake next to one of the nearby country inns where he and Hugh had spent many happy summer weekends. Hugh told the family he was going to do the same when his time came. Markie was surprised that he seemed calmer about the subject than she would have expected. The discussion seemed to her to be morbid and unsettling. There was a memorial service for Teddy in the city afterward, actually a potluck supper with little speeches in the mews house that had belonged to Hugh and Teddy, and now, through inheritance, was Hugh’s alone.

When everyone but the immediate family had left, Hugh looked frightened. Grandma took his hand. “Come stay with us for a few days,” she said quietly. “You can have your old room.”

“But it’s Peter’s office,” Great Uncle Hugh demurred.

“He can put his computer anywhere,” Rose said. “Can’t you, Peter? It’s just temporary.”

“Of course,” Peter said, but it was clear he wasn’t pleased. Still, it was Rose’s house, and this was his grieving great uncle. Peter faked a welcoming smile.

So now it had been two months and Hugh was still there, in the room that had been his so many years ago. He went back and forth to his mews house every day, to be sure it was still the same, as if it were his office. He went through Teddy’s things, he sorted whatever one sorts when a longtime partner has gone, and he probably mourned. He checked up on the antique store and the new young man who was working for him. Then he came back to his sister’s house faithfully in time for dinner, unless he had made plans with his younger friends. But even when he went out, he came back to the Carson house to sleep, just as he had in his youth. Everyone knew it. No one said anything, but they wondered how long this would go on.

It’s too difficult to be solitary during the holidays, the family agreed. So Hugh remained for the holidays with his sister and grandnephew and the grandnephew’s wife and their baby, and then before any of them realized it, it was six months. It was not as if he didn’t still have a life of his own outside that house. It was not as if he were senile or frail and had to be watched. It was not as if he had rented his empty mews house to strangers and made a decision. It was just that he was still there.

It’s sad to be alone, Markie thought. People aren’t really meant to be alone. It made her think about moving her relationship with David forward one notch, at least to declaring they lived together and getting him to prove it. And then perhaps the next notch. . . . After all, good sex didn’t last forever. And she was thirty-one. Good looks didn’t last forever either. She knew she and David would make a beautiful baby, and she had no idea how long young eggs would last.

“We need to talk,” Markie said to David that Sunday. They had finished a run in Central Park, the brunch they prepared together with good things they had bought the day before, the reading of the
New York Times,
and later they would go to an early movie.

“Yes,” he said. “I want to.”

They sat side by side on the living room couch. “I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately,” she said. “I think we should live together.”

“I thought it was my place to say that,” he said.

She was insulted. She hated it when he took on the stereotypical dominant role of the male. “Since it’s my apartment,” Markie said, “I am the one who should extend the invitation.” As soon as the words left her lips she knew she shouldn’t have said them. No man likes a castrator, she thought, or at least no man I would want.

David looked nervous but he didn’t look hurt. “I wanted us to talk too,” he said. “The reason I wanted to talk is, I think we should see other people.”

“Other people?” She had always tried to be prepared for the fact that he might leave her someday, but now she discovered she was totally unprepared after all, and she felt as if he had punched her in the gut. He hadn’t even acted suspiciously and given her any signs.

“Yes,” he said.

“Why?” Well, that was a silly thing to ask, she thought. He wasn’t interested in her anymore, that was why. Suddenly she felt chilled and she wanted him to stay and fall in love with her all over again. If he had been in love.If he had ever been in love at all.

“I need to be sure how I feel,” David said.

“Oh.”

“This is hard,” he said. “We see each other at work so we have to be friends. . . .”

“Well, how difficult will that be? I thought we
were
friends.”

“We are. We are, absolutely. We’re just . . . we’re together too much.”

“I thought too little. Apparently I was wrong.”

“I’ve been with you longer than any woman I’ve ever known.”

“And this is bad?”

He shook his head. “No. Scary.”

“Love is scary. Being a grown-up is scary.”

“I know that,” he said. “And I’m not ready.”

“When will you be?”

“I don’t know.”

Markie wondered if she should cry and beg, even though that was not her style. Other women, she knew, would have made a scene, but she wondered if it ever worked. Still, despite her best efforts, a tear trickled down her face. She wiped it away as fast as she could, but she knew he saw.

“I don’t want to make you miserable,” he said. “I care about you.”

“But not enough.”

“Markie, can’t we stay friends?”

Could they? They couldn’t be enemies, certainly, not when they saw each other every day at the office. She looked at him, at the shape of his dark and fleecy and childlike head, wondering about all the thoughts that were in it. It was only three o’clock, there was a whole evening ahead of them, and what should she do? Throw him out? Go with him to the movies? Take him to bed and hope to heal their relationship with the thing they did best? It would take him five minutes to pack his few things, and then what would she do afterward? All the Sunday nights she had been relieved to see him go disappeared. The special moments of being alone, of preparing herself for the work week, getting her identity back, seemed pointless and self-centered.

“Are you going out with other people already?” she asked.

“No,” he said, but it sounded like yes.

“Oh,” Markie said.

They had gone to a movie, finally, at his insistence, but she hadn’t been able to see more than flashes of it and she couldn’t remember it afterward. He didn’t hold her hand. A movie where they didn’t have to talk seemed preferable to a fight, and he, too, seemed reluctant to spend the rest of a Sunday alone and lonely. How cold are we? she thought. How sick are we? How expedient are we? After the movie they went to a cheap and fast Chinese restaurant, where he ate as if nothing was the matter and she could not. He left that night with his things. He kissed her good-bye and held her for a minute. She thought when he went home he would probably start calling women.

Men leave the bathroom so dirty, Markie thought, trying to hate him. She scrubbed it, removing every trace of him. She changed the sheets so she wouldn’t have to smell him, because she knew it would set off a combination of yearning and rage. She put the happy, smiling vacation photographs of the two of them and their friends into the desk drawer so she wouldn’t have to see them, then she pulled them out, then she put them back again and slammed the drawer shut. Then she called her sister, Angel, knowing she would be home by now, and when Angel answered the phone Markie at last allowed herself to cry.