Carnegie Hill, page 38
“Values? Of course I share your values.”
“Rick, you attacked Caleb just so you could feel powerful again. Do you really understand how bad that is? Or were you just agreeing with me because I was angry?”
“Sure I do. He works for us. He’s black. I scared him.”
“Rick…” She glanced at him, and his incredulous anger frightened her into silence.
“Like you’re some messiah for black people? You planned one fundraiser to ease white people’s consciences. You convinced the co-op board to let in one black family. You’re not exactly Sojourner Truth. You’ve never had to work a day of your life. And you go on, complaining about gentrification and racism and all the black people who can’t get into our building, but I don’t see you taking responsibility for any of it, when you, a rich white socialite, are literally the problem. So fine, you think I’m an asshole. You think I’m a liar. But please don’t talk to me about values and then go have tea with your white friends in our white building with money that I gave you. The hypocrisy makes me sick.” He walked away from her in the snow, still heading out of the park.
She’d known all of this, in a small way, all along, but hearing him say it with such disgust in his voice made her furious. “The only thing that matters to you in this whole world is money. You think you can do whatever you want if you throw a wad of cash at someone.”
He laughed theatrically. “For someone who wants nothing to do with money, you sure spend a lot of it. I don’t know what they taught you in finishing school, but most volunteer party planners don’t get to live in four-million-dollar apartments.” He was shouting, his breath visible.
She was lucky enough not to have to make what she spent, but that didn’t mean she had to get a job at a bank to prove a point. “Well, how about this? Most people who are getting married in a week don’t think that’s the perfect time to have sex with a stranger.”
They reached the mostly shoveled sidewalk of Fifth Avenue, where they could walk more quickly, though the thin layer of gray slush made it slippery. It occurred to Pepper that they were in a race to the apartment, past a minivan making a hopeless attempt at parallel parking in deeper slush.
“So that’s it?” Rick said. “You can’t forgive anything I’ve done?”
“I did forgive you for that,” she said, “but that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. And for the record, you never apologized.” The blanket apology in the sky didn’t count, not really.
“Well, sorry, okay? Sorry, sorry, sorry for everything I’ve ever done and ever will do. Sorry. Are you happy now?”
She wasn’t going to respond to that. She could find someone with a more genteel personality, someone she could live with. Or she could live on her own. If she really couldn’t wait for a baby, she could find a sperm donor. “We can see Dr. Dixon again if you want. But only to help us end it.” The light changed, and she crossed the street toward Madison Avenue.
“I worked so hard for you,” he said bitterly, as he followed her. “You made me better. You can’t just throw it all away.”
“I’m better because of you, too,” she called behind her. “And now I know that I have to move on.”
“But we’re married,” Rick said. “You married me. You can’t just walk away because you figured out that we’re different. You promised me a life together.”
She hastened toward the apartment building. She knew he was following her and didn’t dare look back. She crossed Madison Avenue and stopped fifty feet from the entrance. She didn’t want to be together in the apartment again, and if they fought in front of the doormen, the whole building would find out. She turned around. He was a few steps away, a vision of elegance in his long black coat and waterproof leather boots. He never wore a hat because it would ruin his hair.
“I’m going to stay with my dad for a while,” she said. “Please go back to work so I can pack.”
He took a step forward with a mischievous smile.
“It’s over,” she repeated. “It’s over.”
He took her by the waist and pulled her toward him. He was wearing a new cologne, smelling of leather, powder, and grapefruit, and his face and neck warmed her cold nose and cheeks as he kissed her, tongue slashing across her mouth, lips firm. She hated herself for kissing him back, breathing in his breath, absorbing the sensuous blows of his tongue. His hand slid beneath her coat and sweater and gripped her back. The weakest part of her wanted to take back everything she said, to stay in the marriage and let things be wrong between them. Finally, he stopped, rested his forehead against hers, and continued to watch her eyes. Her face tingled with the memory of his stubble.
“How about I come upstairs with you?” he offered.
He could only mean one thing by that, and she craved it, too. But she knew that if she let him make love to her, she might never leave him. And she had to leave him. Or did she? It wasn’t too late to change her mind. She needed more time to think. She peeled his hands off of her and stepped back. “I’ll see you at Dr. Dixon’s.”
He put his hands in his pockets and studied her. “Don’t go to your father’s. I’ll stay in a hotel.”
“We’ll figure this out,” she said, taking a tentative step backward, then another, then a third, and when she saw that he wouldn’t follow, she turned and hurried toward the building, smiled compulsively at the doorman, and, with one last glance at Rick, went inside.
* * *
Francis and Carol were seated at a corner table in a windowless back room without a tablecloth, set with dish towels instead of napkins. Someone had stuck dandelions in a bud vase and called it a centerpiece. The ambience was so casual, the ninety-five dollars whispered in cursive at the bottom of the prix-fixe menu read like a joke. At least it was quieter than he’d expected.
Nate, their towering waiter in a black T-shirt, rested his hand on Carol’s shoulder and asked if he could get them a drink. Francis missed the days when waiters stood up straight and didn’t try to be charming. Formality was a lost tradition. Soon he would be gone—maybe any minute now—and who among his survivors would care about the old ways?
Carol ordered a glass of Merlot, and Francis asked for a cup of tea.
“We have Earl Grey, ginger peach, gunpowder green, jasmine green, and lavender mint,” Nate recited, bending back the same finger five times.
“You don’t have plain black tea?”
Nate pursed his lips. “I’m afraid not.”
For what could be his last meal on earth, they didn’t even have plain tea. “Then bring me hot water and a slice of lemon. And I want the water to be really hot. Just off the boil.”
When the waiter had left, Francis wondered aloud, “What kind of restaurant doesn’t have plain tea?”
Carol slathered her roll with butter and bit off two thirds of it. Even fifty-three years of suggestion couldn’t give her a little polish. At least she looked nice. She didn’t even need the usual convincing. She’d dressed up, brushed her hair, and put on perfume, all without a fight. He couldn’t figure out why that annoyed him. “I like that they don’t have plain tea. It’s nice to change up your routine sometimes.”
“How would you feel if all they had was ginger-peach-flavored wine?”
“Sounds heavenly. I’ll take two.” She sneered.
“Of course you would.”
“I have an idea. Just for tonight, just while we’re having dinner, can you not say anything negative? Is that possible for you?”
“One more thing, and I’ll be as positive as a schoolboy. I think waiters should wear a name tag telling you their sexual preference, so husbands know how to feel when they grope their wives.”
“Only Francis Levy would think a tap on the shoulder constituted groping.”
“Is that a formal complaint?”
“Forget it,” Carol said. “Let’s please not bicker tonight.”
“Fine. From now on, everything’s going to be sunshine and lollipops.” He picked up his fork. “This makes me so happy!” He embraced the wine bottle filled with tap water—which Nate had called “our house water.” “What a clever idea!” He looked around. “Isn’t this place just swell?”
She tightened her jaw. “Actually, I like it very much. You only take pleasure in hating everything. That’s not the man I married, and I’m telling you, I’d like my old husband back.”
Nate appeared with a tray full of glassware and crockery for the two drinks: a miniature carafe of wine, an empty wineglass, a teacup with spoon and saucer, a teapot on its own saucer, a square appetizer plate with a fan of lemon slices in one corner, and a little vase sprouting tubular sugar and sweetener packets. The preciousness of the setup suggested to Francis that the water would not be hot enough, so he stuck a finger in the teapot. “I asked for it to be just off the boil,” Francis said. “This is more like a puddle on a hot day.”
“Actually,” Carol said, “don’t worry about it. It’s plenty hot.”
“You’re sure?” Nate asked, cocking his head with a practiced squint, doubtless learned at surfer academy.
“Positive.”
This was not the time to cross her, even if he’d die with a cup of lukewarm water in his hand.
“Okay, well, let me know if you change your mind,” Nate said. “It’s no trouble to heat it up a bit. Have we made any decisions?”
“I have,” Carol said. “Are you ready, Francis?”
“Why don’t you give him your order,” Francis suggested, still scrutinizing the menu, “and by that time I’ll have figured out mine.”
Carol smiled at Nate. “I’ll start with the rabbit terrine, and then for my entrée, I’d like the appetizer portion of the gnocchi with pancetta.”
“My two favorite menu items,” Nate said.
“Thanks for giving us your top picks, Nate,” Francis said.
Carol kicked him under the table.
While the waiter hid his impatience under a broad smile, Francis tried to choose a dish that he could eat. It seemed the newer the restaurant, the fewer the meal options. And this one had pork all over it, much of it in code: lardons, pancetta, speck. Was this a new way to exclude Jews, subtler but no less disgraceful than the anti-Semitic policies of private clubs in the past? Carol thought kosher laws were quaint, but Francis maintained a modicum of respect for the traditions of his ancestors. He was the last one in his extended family who cared about preserving the past. Within a few generations, the religion as he knew it would probably cease to exist.
The relatively kosher elements of the menu weren’t much more viable. The trout was “crispy”—which meant fried—and came with “creamy radicchio slaw” and “pine-smoked morels,” all of which spelled disaster for Francis’s gut. The “orecchiette with brown sheep’s butter and porcini foam” would be far too rich for his vulnerable heart, and the steak came with a spicy au poivre sauce and truffle-dusted french fries: salt, salt, salt. Had his laxity about salt caused the aneurysm in the first place?
He wished he’d fought Carol on such a precious restaurant and its “farm-to-table” baloney. Even if she decided she was sick of being married to a person of sensitivity, even if she didn’t care that his father had died from eating in a restaurant, the least she could do was accept his limitations before she had to scrape his remains off the floor. George’s forsaken cell was still etched into Francis’s vision, his stink in Francis’s nostrils. If Francis were ready to hop out the window, would Carol tell him, “Life’s too short to be unhappy”? The scream inside him yearned to escape.
“I’ll have the salad with no lardons and no dressing, and the pasta without any sauce,” he said.
“Really sorry,” Nate said, “but Chef doesn’t allow substitutions.”
“They’re not substitutions, they’re deletions. For ninety-five dollars a person, I can’t get something I can eat?”
“I can ask.…” Nate said. “I’ll tell him you have a medical issue.”
“Forget it,” Francis said, rubbing his temple. “Give me the salad and the steak, extra-well-done, with a big stack of napkins so I can wipe off the sauce. And I know ninety-five dollars is not enough to grant me say as to how my food is prepared in this concentration camp, but please tell ‘Chef’ not to salt the meat. I cannot have any salt at all.”
“I’ll see what I can do,” Nate said. Without writing down a word of their order, he gathered the menus and hurried off.
“Now, who is this old husband you were talking about?” Francis asked. “He sounds sort of interesting.”
“Quiet! I’m pretending you’re not here,” Carol muttered.
He dug out a tea bag from his inside breast pocket, bobbed it in the teapot, gave it a quick squeeze, and set it aside. “What about my old wife? The one who comforts me when I’m down instead of undermining me with positive thinking?”
“It’d be easier to comfort you if you weren’t down every minute of every day. Have you had a single pleasant thought in the past six months? Ever since I had that cancer scare, you’ve been impossible. Maybe I’d understand your upset if I was dying. But it was nothing. I’m healthy.” She reached for his hands and squeezed them. He could barely feel her touch. “I’m not going to die on you, Francis. I’m not going to leave you.”
It was time to tell her. Whatever her response, it would be better than this hideous estrangement. “The truth is, I’ve gotten some very bad news,” he began.
“Listen, I started on Zoloft a few weeks ago.” She spoke over him, pulling her hands away and sipping her wine. “I didn’t want to tell you because you hate people who take antidepressants, just like you hate everyone else. But I was tired of being depressed, and, believe it or not, I really like being happy.”
He was stunned into silence. He’d known something strange was going on with Carol. He supposed that unhappiness had become so unsightly and unbearable in modern life that everyone was expected to extinguish it with chemicals, but was this really the woman he married? Someone who chose drugs over feelings? Who chose happiness over her husband? “I don’t hate people who take antidepressants,” he said with effort.
“Really? What about George? And your sister-in-law? And Marilyn Devine? And that girl you like on the co-op board? What’s her name? Penny?”
“I don’t hate any of them. I just think they want a shortcut through their pain. They think it’s inconvenient to be sad. I’m sorry if my unhappiness has inconvenienced you.”
“There’s nothing heroic or interesting about being depressed.”
“On the contrary, I think sadness is very interesting.”
“Believe me, it gets old,” Carol said. She took a long sip of wine.
* * *
Something told Birdie to leave the front door unlocked. The apartment seemed too quiet.
She was bone-tired and shivering from two hours of searching for George, scrabbling over snowbanks and navigating slushy gray ponds at every street corner. She’d started at the Turkish café on Eighty-fourth and Third that they’d adored since moving to New York. Next she ran past Emack & Bolio’s for the second time that day, in the off chance his seeing the sundaes put him in the mood for one. Then she peered in the two sleepy, mediocre bistros they relied on when she didn’t feel like cooking, as well as the Irish pub George liked for prime rib on Saturday nights. She should have given up at that point, but the longer she looked, the more frightened she became. So she had plunged into Central Park, sinking into the deep snow, scanning the Great Lawn for his big red fleece in the oblique afternoon light. Everyone was looking upward: “SORRY” was written in the sky. Could it have been a farewell message from George?
Just in case, she knocked on his bedroom door.
“Come in,” George said. “I have a present for you.”
Had he been home the whole time? She had looked in his room but hadn’t pressed into the pile of covers and pillows. She cautiously opened the door. “George, I don’t want any funny business.”
“There you are!” came his voice, more confident and rapid than it had been in months.
He was standing in the corner of the room on a blue plastic tarp that hung from the wall behind him. The light from a bedside lamp spattered on the tarp and cut distorted shadows across the wall. His hands were wedged in the pockets of his sweatpants, and a blank, uncontained rictus stretched across his face.
Birdie couldn’t breathe.
“Don’t be afraid,” he said. “I would never hurt you. I’ve given this a lot of thought. I know this is what you want.”
When he took his hands out of his pockets, she saw that he was holding a pistol. Cold burned in her stomach.
“Please put that down,” she managed to say. “Let’s go out for dinner and we’ll talk it over like adults.”
“I tried, Birdie. God, I’ve tried. And I am so sorry, but I can’t try anymore. I can’t be any better for you.”
“Listen, I’ve decided to stay with you. I’m wearing my rings again, see?” She held up her left hand.
“Shh. Don’t say that. I don’t want to hold you back anymore. Please let me do this for you. I left a note on the bedside table if you need something to show the cops. All you have to do is let me die.”
She put her hand down. It seemed crucial not to lie to him, not now. “I don’t want you to die,” she said, and it was the truth.
He pushed the barrel against his temple, then reconsidered and pointed it at his chest. “Happy Valentine’s Day. We had a good long run.”
She couldn’t stand it anymore, any of it. “George, I’m freezing and exhausted and I really don’t have the patience for this. Now put that gun down and stop all this rubbish.”
For a second she thought she had gotten through to him. Then his glare slackened into disgust. “Don’t tell me what to do,” he muttered. He squinched his eyes and fired.
* * *
A big, flat package was leaning against the front door when Pepper got back to the apartment. She set it atop some other boxes in the living room, hung up her coat, changed into a kimono and slippers, fixed herself a mug of tea, and lay next to the bookshelf where she could listen to Birdie and George through the hole. She needed to stop doing this, she knew. But she had to calm down from her fight with Rick, and forgive herself for her weakness in letting him kiss her, and listening through the hole worked better than an Ativan. Unfortunately, it was about as addictive.
