The Widow Waltz (6 page)

The snapshot of myself that I am offering is not, I realize, flattering or dignified, and I am relieved to be rescued by my pasta. Steam rises from the bowl. I close my eyes and breathe in the savory aroma of the three herb kings: sage, oregano, and tarragon. When I look again at Stephan, I believe I see sympathy, that or the fear that I will beg him for money.

“Shall I go with you to see Fleigelman?” he asks.

Smart, competent brothers like Stephan produce two kinds of sisters: those who look up to their sibling, craving fatherly guidance and protection; and my kind, who run the other way, knowing that if they allow themselves to be in their brother’s debt, the interest will compound for eternity, bankrupting them of independence, of pride, of any wisdom gained from making their own decisions and mistakes.

“That’s not necessary. I can handle it,” I say, though I doubt I can. This morning it was as hard for me to get out of bed as it would be to swan dive into an icy ocean. “But down the line, I may need your help in a different way.”

Holding his steak knife and fork as if he had been raised by British aristocracy, not first-generation American suburbanites, Stephan cuts one small piece of filet, then another. Silence hangs between us. I stare at the gravy forming a fjord between his pureed peas and delicate mound of mashed potatoes.

“I may ask you to sell my jewelry.” The fireplace blazes, but I feel chilled. To take this step would mean that my circumstances are real.

“Not the pieces from Mother, I hope,” he says immediately.

Except for the small ruby pin and a sly, amethyst-eyed lizard, the unworn lady-who-lunches collection would be the first to unload—elaborate brooches shaped like nosegays and starbursts, a diamond evening watch that stopped telling time at ten past midnight in another century, studded bangles suitable for a belly dancer, and a pink sapphire necklace shaped like a horseshoe. “Not Mother’s wedding jewelry,” I say, although I have never put on the dagger-shaped marquise solitaire or the thick matching band. “I always thought one of the girls might want them.”

“I see.” I imagine Stephan compiling a list and wonder if he would charge me commission. “Maybe
you
should come and work with me, not Nicola.”

I manage to laugh. “Within a day one of us would wind up in a maximum security prison.”

“I take your point,” he says. “But have you thought about working again?”

“Only day and night.”

“Would you return to teaching?”

My résumé is one paragraph long and twenty-four years stale, rendering me underqualified yet shopworn. Until we adopted Nicola, I taught English at a small girls’ high school. I loved my work, but felt that if another woman had sacrificed her child so I could have one, I needed to give up my job. As the years passed and the girls were in school all day, I considered returning to teaching, but by that time Ben’s law firm had prospered and I’d gotten the kind of rich-lady lazy that passes for busy, earnestly volunteering, often chairing committees. I wasn’t just a museum docent but one of the Central Park Conservancy’s star flowerbed weeders, and I have the T-shirt to prove it. But I never again worked for a salary, even when I was chloroformed by boredom.

“I’ve sent out letters—nobody’s jumping,” I say. Stephan seems to expect more, so I go on, my hackles up and ego bruised. “I keep cycling through all the obvious choices for women my age who haven’t had a job since the Clinton administration. Does the city require another residential real estate broker or personal shopper? I don’t cook well enough to cater. I’d rather eat nuclear waste than be a wedding planner, choking on other people’s stress, and opening a store or going back to school to get another degree costs a fortune. I’ve put out feelers to tutor in English and”—heaven help me—“help kids write their college application essays.” I feel out of breath and pathetic from my speech.

“So I guess you’ll have to be a high-priced escort.”

“If only I hadn’t aged out of that one. Maybe a madam. I’m not creative enough for phone sex.”

Stephan sits back in his chair and looks as if he were seeing me for the first time in a decade, maybe more. “You may truly be in a pickle, yes?”

Unwanted pity is embedded in that statement. “Don’t cry for me, Argentina,” I say. “Not yet. I have a little money, and in this town you shouldn’t underestimate the pressure of getting in to college. Plus, if you’ll turn my baubles into cash when I ask, I’d buy me time.”

“I assume that includes your own treasure chest?”

Over the years, Ben gave me gifts that I’d always imagined he had chosen with exquisite care. Each carried history, and when I put them on, I wore more than bracelets, rings, pins, necklaces, earrings, and watches. I wore the day when Nicola arrived, the morning when after thirty-eight hours of labor I gave birth to Luey, the time when Ben won his first big case. I wore every anniversary and exotic vacation, each year together, which I viewed as twelve more months of good fortune. Well-deserved good fortune, if I’m being honest, because who considers an accidental advantage undeserved? Find me a rich person and I’ll show you someone who in her heart feels she’s been exempted from pain and poverty because God has noticed and rewarded her unique goodness, vaccinating her against bad luck. Gratitude is often a forgotten postscript.

Not only has the statute of limitations on my utopia expired, I feel itchy with guilt for having taken it for granted all these years. With a shadow cast on Ben, I also feel robbed of my past. I wish my glowing memories had come with warranties. This is why I say, “I’m not going to be sentimental. If I have to get rid of things, I will.”

“I’ve never seen you wear much, anyway.” It is true that for the daughter and sister of jewelers, I am a heretic, a walking white cotton shirt.

“Most of it doesn’t work with yoga pants.”

“Your watch?”

I love that watch, circled by diamonds, but I say, “I can give that up. My phone tells time just fine.” I shovel the last squiggle of fusilli into my mouth.

“And that epic Art Deco ring with the emerald and diamonds I got a glimpse of? I thought I’d see it on your hand tonight.”

The server approaches our table with a tray of desserts. Lemon tart is the centerpiece of the selection. I am tempted.

“What ring?”

“Your birthday present, I thought.”

“My birthday present was a trip to Japan we were supposed to take in January. After I pleaded sympathy, the travel agent gave me a full refund.” Almost.

“Georgia, are you daft?”

“Did you just say ‘daft’? Are you?”

He leans back and cocks his head. “I would suggest that you look very hard for a diamond and emerald ring, probably from the 1920s, a real showstopper. I’ve seen few like it. Ben brought it to me for appraisal—he was hoping I’d sell it for him—and led me to believe he was accepting it as collateral or payment from a client.”

During our marriage Ben often repeated this practice, one I protested on the grounds that it was as sleazy as it was risky. Why couldn’t he be paid in money like every other decent lawyer? What would be next, sacks of grain?

“Ben was told the ring would go for close to a million. In my opinion, your husband was taken. It’s a fine old piece but would fetch maybe half of that. This did not make my dear brother-in-law happy and he left with the ring, accusing me of low-balling him, ranting about how he’d take his business elsewhere. ‘Be my guest,’ I told him.” In the tone of a university provost my brother continues. “This was the last conversation I had with your husband.”

With that, I lose my appetite for dessert.

“N
icola, my sweet,” Stephan said over early morning croissants on Madison Avenue. “You appear to be nonplussed. I’d like your answer.”

Nicola couldn’t decide if being employed by S. Waltz would be the beginning of the resplendent opportunity on which her mother was trying to sell her or plain and simple martyrdom. She pictured herself modeling pave diamond cuffs, fingering precious gems (or semiprecious, she wasn’t picky), and helping design shoulder-grazing opal and platinum filigree earrings like the ones she’d coveted in Paris. Then she remembered how imperious Uncle Stephan could be. Around him, she felt lumpy, boneheaded, and twelve.

“Thanks for the vote of confidence”—if the offer was that, or her uncle’s version of pity— “but I don’t have much office experience. I wouldn’t want to disappoint you,” Nicola said, though this was the one aspect of the job she felt she could fulfill.

“What I need, mostly, is common sense,” Stephan said, not that he’d ever given Nicola the impression that he considered either her, Luey, or her mother, for that matter, to be endowed with that quality. “Beyond that, the primary qualification is trust.”

“Oh, I am absolutely trustworthy,” Nicola replied with dead earnestness, though a few minutes earlier she’d exaggerated her office experience. She had none. The moment the statement sailed from her lips she knew, from the smile Uncle Stephan was failing to suppress, that the specious answer was wrong. Luey would have responded with something half clever. She took herself for Dorothy Parker, aiming for intellectual flirtation. Repartee was not Nicola’s strong suit, with her uncle least of all, and when he said something like, “A man’s face is his autobiography; a woman’s is her work of fiction,” Nicola suspected that he was testing or insulting her. To compound her irritation, in his case that particular quote wasn’t even true. She’d bet good money—if she had any—that Uncle Stephan had had surgery on his neck and eyes, which looked a lot tighter than before she left for Europe. And those silver sideburns? C’mon. He could thank the hair colorist who left in a bit of gray to add authenticity to his dye job.

What, however, were her job options? Despite her culinary skills, she’d had only one brief job in a restaurant, in another country, at the bottom of the line—not experience she could leverage or for which she even obtained a reference letter when she walked away—and she could not see herself trying to sell cupcakes or organic baby food at the Brooklyn Flea or sweating in food trucks. She’d like to return to Paris, but at the moment she didn’t have enough saved even for a plane ticket. The best part of the job at S. Waltz would be that it would come with a salary—nothing major, but a step up from tying on an apron to become a barista, and she’d already been turned down for two bar-tending spots. As one employer plainly said when he reviewed her résumé, “Liking martinis and looking hot at a party don’t count as qualifications.”

“If you apply yourself, I could teach you a great deal about our family business,” Stephan said, stirring his double espresso, which she noticed he drank unsweetened. “There’s a lot more to it than baubles and trinkets.”

The word Nicola liked best in that sentence was
family
. For all his shortcomings, Uncle Stephan had never once suggested that Nicola was anything but a Waltz. That territory was exclusively inhabited by his mother. She looked up over her café au lait. The restaurant Uncle Stephan had chosen was small and winsome without being coy. He spoke to the waitress in French, and to Nicola’s ear his accent sounded authentic. This would have made Luey laugh, though Nicola took it as a sign. She needed a sign.

“When would you like me to start?”

W
ally has found nothing—I check with him every other day—and I am running out of places in the apartment to look. In my waking hours, I’m blurry around the edges yet keeping it together, trying not to act as if I am subsisting on a diet of cottage cheese and opprobrium. I stumble through my routines, reminding myself to floss, to take Vitamin D, to stock up on dog food, and to care for my plants—the bromeliads, the flowering maple, the hopelessly retro Boston ferns that wick away the humidity of my bathrooms, and the mistletoe fig and prayer plants that line my kitchen window. Other people can get their cardio workout hauling mulch and fertilizer as they grow organic vegetables. Except for my sometime servitude in Central Park, I am an indolent gardener. In the country we employ a landscape service, and in the city I exploit the advantage of my apartment’s enormous west- and north-facing windows.

Since I have neither strength nor inclination to lift a blow-dryer, my hair shambles around my face in an animated halo—frizzy in spots, strangely lank in others, a mirror of my soul. When my standing salon appointment came do, I canceled it, and with Nicola assisting, I have tried hair coloring at home. My shade now hovers between margarine and mustard.

It’s after dark when Ben rolls in like fog, crowding me, teasing me. His night shift begins after I turn off whatever Turner Classic has dished out, the warm milk that puts me into a coma. Tonight, Clark Gable was in zany pursuit of Myrna Loy.

“Ben!” I groan in my sleep, as he thrusts, hard and demanding. My mate knows the history lessons of my anatomy and places his hands confidently on my hips as he pushes deeper. “Ben! I love you, Ben. Love you, love you, Oh . . .” I arch to meet him, luxuriating in the warmth that runs its intimate course between my thighs.

I call out his name again and jolt awake to find that there is no Ben. At the foot of the bed, Sadie rolls over, snorts, and kicks a back leg reflexively as she wrestles with her own dream. I freeze into stillness for minutes, or maybe an hour, ultimately forcing myself to open my eyes. On television Myrna has become Claudette Colbert, and Clark, a long-faced, soft-jawed boy-next-door type. The pair is raising chickens in some godforsaken bump on a log. An actor is muttering about eggs. I see that I am wearing a T-shirt from a charity walk, not one of my Jordan almond–hued wisps of lingerie nestled in a drawer I haven’t opened in weeks.

I remember: Ben is gone, yet I feel him in the room as I do every night, embracing me with arms kept strong by endless push-ups—my husband, the invincible gladiator who expected to live past one hundred. Some nights I cry or curse or simply lie like a corpse myself, eyes open to the sooty darkness, and other nights are like this one—Ben and I make love, after which I pummel away his image with my fists.

I kick off the duvet, which feels as heavy as a lead apron, and look at the clock. It is already tomorrow, three in the morning, that war zone infested by workaholics, parents of fretful infants, and, my own demographic, the freshly bereaved. I want to shout at Ben, but this might convince Cola and Luey to cart me off to some public snake pit of a mental institution, since the private, leafy variety is a luxury we can no longer afford. I keep my voice low, my whisper more plaintive than sneering, because I have not fully committed to anger or husband hatred.

Perhaps animosity is what Ben deserves, but my heart argues for a postponement of sentencing, even an ultimate reprieve. Since my dinner two nights ago with Stephan, I’ve doubled my search efforts. “Give me a clue,” I say to the man who cannot reply. “Darling, you owe me an explanation. What is this insanity about a ring? And why did you empty our accounts?”

I am answered by the wind whistling beyond the window, which is open, blowing a chilling mist into the room. I move one foot and then another, feeling a cramp in my lower back as I force myself out of bed. Floors below, a couple is letting it rip, and words carry into the still night. “Why the fuck did you do that?” a woman screeches. “Again! Every goddamn time!”

Get away now, when you’re young,
I am tempted to shout back. Stick around and in twenty years you’ll be wondering if ghosts are real. I try to convince myself that this is fatigue talking, pull on Ben’s plaid robe and a pair of his warmest socks coiled on the floor where I let them fall last night, and wander into the hallway. A light shines. God forbid anyone in this family should flick off a switch.

Nicola’s door is closed, as is her sister’s, but when I reach the kitchen, there is Luey, scrunched into the corner of the banquette, her back toward me, idly yanking a spike of hair with one hand, the other cradling her phone. She is speaking in a heated, breathy voice, saying, “I’m not kidding.”

If I turn to leave, I may make a noise and she will surely accuse me of eavesdropping. I stop dead until she speaks again. “That’s a help.” This is followed by a lengthy silence, after which Luey slams down the phone so hard that she spills a mug of cocoa sitting on the table. She doesn’t mop it up.

Except for when she visits the dentist, of whom she is terrified, Luey is not a crier. As a child, she would bite her lip to staunch the tears that any other small girl might shed as she would swallow a verbal clobber from a kid who was an even bigger bully than she. But in the lamplight, my daughter holds her knees to her chest and rocks, after which the sobbing comes in gasps. This is Luey very angry or very scared.

I would not hesitate to run to Nicola’s side, but Luey keeps me at a remove. A minute passes. “Honey?” I whisper hoarsely.

She looks up, though her arms stay in place. “You’re sneaking up on me now?” I expect a glower, but her face is open for business.

“Can I help?” I ask.

Crisis intervention is not my specialty. I’ve never gotten beyond offering balm for elementary boy trouble, if that’s what’s on the table. As far as I know, however, neither of my daughters currently has a boy, least of all a man, in her life. Luey releases romantic information on a need-to-know basis, pointing out that I have no need to know, and when Nicola’s last beau that I knew of started a PhD program in Iowa City, she paid the young brainiac exactly one visit. “Imagine, a college town where you can’t find crème fraîche,” she griped. “Not even a decent baguette.” A week later, she’d enrolled in Berlitz and bought tickets to Paris. Nicola has a way with foreign languages and American Express.

After a sustained glare, Luey gathers her cell phone, grabs a container of yesterday’s pad thai from the refrigerator, and stomps out of the room. The statement, “You can help by not asking questions,” trails in her wake.

I picture my daughter pulling noodles out of the box like so many worms and hope she keeps a fork, even an unwashed one, in her bedroom. I fill the teapot, turn on the flame, and search the cupboard for the plastic honey bear and Sleepytime tea. While I wait for the water to boil, my head does a one eighty, hoping for any distraction. I will force myself not to think about Luey.

The kitchen is a shiny, tidy room, though Opal is now coming in only once a week. “This schedule is temporary,” I stressed when we had our conversation. Opal graciously accepted my lie, saying she’d make up the days by working for the young mother of twins who lives downstairs. I felt grateful that an unknown neighbor has absorbed a portion of my contrition.

I used to love to read cookbooks at night, planning imaginary parties. But now cooking is almost the last thing I want to do. The last thing is to face my finances. On the desk in the kitchen, unopened mail is stacked in toxic clumps. Somber envelopes, thick and thin, hit the mailbox every day, some for accounts that I’ve never realized we had.
Over here! Overdue! The Silver-Waltz National Debt, climbing by the nanosecond!

For years after Ben and I married, we kept up a financial ritual so precise we might have been Swiss watch parts. The second Sunday afternoon of each month we would write out checks, address envelopes, affix whatever jaunty commemorative stamps I’d selected, and drop the bills in the mailbox as we walked to a theater to reward ourselves with a movie, after which we would eat Chinese. I balanced our joint checkbook down to the penny, and if pop quizzed, I could recite the bottom line of our account as accurately as my daughters’ birthdays.

Then Ben bought a toy, a personal computer, and became an early adaptor to a genius program that allowed him to manage all our banking, down to printing every check, which he stopped showing me when the novelty diminished. The movies continued, but around the time Szechwan turned to Thai, my attention to fiscal minutia faded away. Every month, my husband direct-deposited a sum into an account he established for me. “The money’s yours—I don’t need to know how you spend it,” he said, with the understanding that I would use this fund for Opal, household expenses, clothes, and other spoils of being in a high-tax bracket. In a glorious spike of upward mobility, I downshifted to the role of a child, though I threw around words like
liberation
to describe this era when my sense of financial responsibility ended.

I eye the stack of envelopes as if they might spill out anthrax.
Dare you
, says a chunky one with the return address of Bank of America. There’s no way I’m going to fall back asleep. I’m up to the threat.

I use a letter opener to carefully remove the statement. No surprise: the last infusion into my account was seven weeks ago. Since then, there are withdrawals every few days—I have been hitting the ATM like a mother whose children enjoy a bottle of eight-dollar Shiraz with a square meal. I brew my tea and settle in, ripping open envelopes, dividing the big bills from the small. Utility company; telephones; car rentals; mortgages; insurance; mini-storage; dry cleaning; dues to four gyms—everyone in the family had a favorite; doctors; and credit cards—Nicola’s, Luey’s, and my own. I sort the bills right, left, right, left, picking up speed like a cardsharp dealing in a high-stakes game. I toss each subscription renewal in the trash, along with course catalogs from NYU and the New School, but when I see a solicitation for a worthy cause—when did every other friend start supporting a school in Africa, and could the globe please stop cracking with earthquakes?—I flinch. For all their flaws, my parents were charitable, and I’ve prided myself on carrying that torch. It hurts to think of myself as a skinflint.

Once more, I study the bank statement. In a few months I’ll be underwater.

I had a life. Now I have a situation. Perhaps I, too, should open a chicken farm and start selling eggs. Isn’t this one of Martha Stewart’s ninety-nine sidelines?

Suddenly I am too beat to wash my mug or wipe up cocoa, and I tell myself I will think about this tomorrow, though it is tomorrow. I heave myself out of the chair, pull Ben’s robe tightly, and begin to stumble back to my bedroom for a shower. As I pass Luey’s door, the light is creeping through. I think about knocking but keep going, a mother incapable of either wisdom or common sense. Then I hear a voice.

“Ma?”

I turn. Luey is standing in the doorway, looking barely fifteen. “Sweetie, you’re still up,” I say, feeling a love rush so strong that my knees wobble.

“Want to come in?”

I cross into Lueyland, which smells of bubblegum and patchouli and hasn’t changed in ten years. My daughter climbs under her covers and looks at me with solemn eyes. I am being sized up. I sit at the foot of the bed, longing to reach forward and brush the hair out of my Luey’s face, but I am fearful of overstepping, of rejection.

“What’s going on?” I try to sound less tentative than I feel. Luey cocoons herself deeper into her lavender polka-dot linens and says nothing. “Did you have a fight with a friend?”

This evokes a laugh. “Oh, yeah.”

I name every friend I can recall—Emily, Sheena, Amanda, Miso, Madison, Katy and Katie, and Caitlin.

“Cold, colder, much colder,” she says.

I wonder if I’m being teased, and my fatigue sucks me into irritability. This is why I say, “Does this have to be a game?”

“I wish.”

I’m not going to take another risk, so I offer nothing and wait.

“It’s a guy thing,” she says.

“You’re going to have to help me out here,” I say, “because I wasn’t aware you had a boyfriend.”

“I don’t.” She laughs. “I had a fuck buddy.”

“Charming.” I regret my sarcasm.

“It doesn’t matter one way or another. He’s out of the picture.”

“You broke up?”

“We were never really together.”

I want to say,
Then why does it matter?
But clearly this boy or man counts for something. “Is there anything you
can
tell me?” Luey doesn’t respond. My nose finds the pad thai, upended into the wastebasket.

“Yes,” she says. “I’m pregnant.”