Pleasure Palace, page 17
“Well, my boyfriend Liam is gonna be an actor in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and is gonna be on tour and won’t be in school,” Charlotte says breathlessly. “I’m, like, so so so upset.”
“And I’m so out of it, I didn’t even know you had a boyfriend,” Cliff says. “Who’s this Liam, anyway? Is he handsome? How long have you two been a couple?”
“I don’t know, I just know I’m gonna miss him, Grandpa.”
Madison has picked up the phone as well; Cliff can hear her breathing noisily into another landline, until finally she says, “Liam’s not even Charlotte’s boyfriend—she just pretends he is!” Madison sounds deeply affronted.
“You don’t have any boyfriend, Maddy, so just shuh up and don’t be jealous, okay?” Charlotte says.
“You can’t tell me to shuh up!”
Settled into a cozy armchair in Cliff’s bedroom, Sallie is keeping watch over the ashes of her beloved feline companion, Russell, currently stored in a glazed ceramic urn on the window sill. It’s the piece Cliff was working on in his ceramics class at the Y several days before Penni died. He forgot all about it in the aftermath of her death, and when his instructor at the Y reminded him weeks later, all Cliff could think was that he’d started the urn as a long-married man and returned as a widower to add a final coat of glaze. He’d taken the plastic bag of Russell’s ashes from the unadorned cardboard box sent by the pet crematorium, and gently deposited it into the copper-red urn, looking around him, an instant later, for Penni, wanting her approval.
It has been more than two years now, but from time to time he still catches himself expecting to see her in the apartment or next to him in line in Whole Foods; still catches himself listening for her distinct sigh of contentment, or the sound of her amused voice saying, That’s a joke, right, baby?
“I can SO tell you to shuh up,” he hears one of the twins repeating several times in a progressively louder voice, until Rachel takes over, ordering the girls to get ready for a quick shower before bedtime.
“Bye, Grandpa!” they shriek in unison.
He listens to Rachel gripe good-naturedly about the twins’ endless squabbling over this and that, and then, suddenly chickenhearted, he says, “So here’s the thing, honey,” and reports only that the plus-one he’s bringing to her fortieth birthday party is someone named Jessa; he’s going to keep the word “girlfriend” to himself for a while longer, he’s just this moment decided.
“Okay, cool,” Rachel says, but doesn’t ask a single question about that plus-one of his.
He is disappointed—and also a little insulted—by her lack of curiosity, but won’t offer any further information on his own.
She tells him all about the party, which will be held at a venue that was formerly a 9,000-square-foot garage: there will be vendors offering steamed Japanese dumplings, pizza, barbecue ribs, pulled pork sandwiches, and of course, plenty of alcohol.
“Sounds awesome,” Cliff says. “Can I wear jeans? Or is this a formal affair?”
“You can wear anything you please. And you’ll probably wanna bring some ear plugs, because we hired a kickass deejay,” Rachel warns. “And, sorry, but Bob Dylan’s not on the playlist.”
“Damn, no Dylan? But that’s my favorite party music! How could you disappoint me like that?” he kids her.
He remembers Rachel at her mother’s funeral, standing graveside on the first day of winter and reciting wisdom that had been downloaded from the Poetry Foundation’s website onto her iPhone. After great pain, a formal feeling comes. The poem, unsurprisingly, induced tears at Penni’s grave, but he still wishes he could have seen Rachel reading from an actual book clutched in her hands. Just the sight of her reading Emily Dickinson’s words typed on a sheet of copy paper and fluttering in the noisy wind over the newly dug grave would have been of comfort to him. He knows the world will always be in flux, sometimes painfully so, and he has come to accept this, but the very notion of Emily Dickinson being read from a smartphone continues to spark a small flame of outrage in him.
“Love you,” he tells his daughter just before hanging up, and though he thinks he hears Rachel echoing his words, he’s not entirely sure.
Ankles crossed, her heels resting against the dashboard, Jessa fools with her smartphone, which is connected to the sound system in Cliff’s compact Audi sedan. They’re en route to Massachusetts the day before the party, and even though her shoes are off and her socks look perfectly clean, he’d like to ask Jessa to please take her feet down from the dashboard of his almost brand-new car. Her socks are patterned with images of neon-colored ampersands, exclamation points, and hash tag signs (which he recently learned from his beloved OED are technically called octothorpes); looking at all of these has brought a smile to his face.
“So would this be considered a high-performance car?” she asks him. “Like a BMW?”
He gets a kick out of hearing the words “high-performance” coming from Jessa; cars have been one of his passions since adolescence, though not something Penni ever wanted to hear much about during their long marriage.
“Yup, like a BMW M2,” he says happily, ignoring the sight of Jessa’s feet on the dashboard and forgetting about the marks her socks might leave on its pale gray leather. Ever since he retired, he spends hours online studying the comparison tests and the glossy photos of his favorite sports cars. And unlike Penni, Jessa doesn’t seem to mind a whit. She will sit beside him on the couch in the den, her feet up on the swivel chair she’s wheeled over from his desk, reading novels by Henry James and Edith Wharton, their covers ornamented with images of unsmiling women showing off noticeably large broad-brimmed hats.
Using her fingertip, Jessa scrolls through her iPhone until she arrives at “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” and hums along with the baroque-sounding organ music.
“You know, Procol Harum was the very first concert I ever went to,” Cliff says. “It was at the Anderson Theatre on Second Avenue in the East Village, and I was seventeen. And the very next month I saw the Doors at the Fillmore,” he boasts. He instantly remembers the girlfriend who accompanied him—a dark-haired girl with a high-pitched voice who, years later, he was surprised to learn, had become a neonatologist. “Deb Sommers,” he says, but is drowned out by the sound of Gary Brooker’s melancholy voice. He is thinking of Deb next to him in his British racing green MGB, the two of them parked in front of her house on so many Friday and Saturday nights that last year of high school, Cliff hoping for a chance to slide his hand under her sweater, under the thin turtleneck beneath it, and then—if he was parked beneath the luckiest of stars—under her bra, her flesh warm even on wintry nights. Although he’d never loved Deb Sommers, he did love the feel of her cupped flesh in his palm and remembers, with embarrassment, how he always had to warn himself not to squeeze too hard. If he did, she would slip her tongue from his mouth and complain, Gently, Cliff, gently!
“I’m sort of nervous about those gifts I bought for the twins,” Jessa is saying. “What if they already have all the coloring books and colored pencils and markers they need in this world? What if they roll their eyes contemptuously and flounce away in a huff?”
“They’re eight years old,” Cliff says. “I guarantee you they don’t know the meaning of the word ‘contempt,’” he reassures her, but, in fact, he knows no such thing. “At the very least,” he says, “they’re going to love that pencil sharpener in the shape of a nose. What eight-year-old wouldn’t love to sharpen her pencils in those beautiful plastic nostrils?”
“I should have bought two of those fabulous noses,” Jessa says. “I could kick myself.”
“Trust me,” Cliff says, “it’s all fine.”
Maybe it is, and maybe it isn’t.
Rachel has a master’s degree in landscape architecture, but works full-time selling software for commercial mortgages. She’s elfin, with hair that’s still reddish and wispy, still trailing past her shoulders, just as it did when she was in high school; Cliff can’t quite believe forty looks so very young to him.
“Hey Gramps,” she says, and welcomes him in the foyer with an enthusiastic smooch on each cheek. When he asks where her husband is, she says Jack is still in Cambridge, in his office at MIT, but will be home in time for all of them to have dinner together.
Fine. His son-in-law is a mensch, he thinks—smart, hard-working, and given to calling Rachel sweetheart rather than by her name.
Just as Cliff is about to introduce Jessa, there’s the sound of canine nails scrabbling furiously on the living room’s polished granite floor. It’s Spike, Rachel’s Yorkie, and he’s got something lodged horizontally across his mouth—a small white plastic tube smeared with red markings—which he drops proudly at her feet.
“Jesus Christ!” Rachel yells, and she and Jessa exchange a look that seems to shift from horror to amusement and then, finally, disgust, all of it meaningless to Cliff.
“What?” he says. “What am I missing here, guys?”
Spike is wagging his tail, apparently expecting a reward of some kind, but what he gets is the word “naughty” repeated again and again, along with, “How many times do I have to tell you to stay out of the garbage, you rotten kid?”
Jessa explains to Cliff, in a whisper, that the plastic tube is a tampon applicator. A used one, as it happens.
“Well, he’s a cute little pooch nonetheless,” Cliff says. Oh, and by the way, I’m Jessa, he hears her officially introducing herself to Rachel an instant before the twins come strolling down the stairs, barefoot, in satiny, ankle-length costumes, one granddaughter in pale blue, the other vermilion. After eight years, he thinks sheepishly, he still can’t tell them apart, and broods over how likely it is that he ever will. The twins have thick, wavy brown hair that falls into their dark eyes, and chartreuse polish on their tiny nails; they’re small for their age, but for a couple of pipsqueaks, they possess surprisingly lusty voices.
“Guess who I am, Grandpa!” one of them says.
“Charlotte?”
“No, Silly, I’m Princess Elena of Avalor!”
“And you are …?” Cliff asks the other twin.
“Can’t you tell I’m Rapunzel?”
“Frankly, I’m not that into fairy tales,” he says apologetically. “But I could really use some kisses from you two.”
He gets a couple of juicy ones from each of them and feels no need to wipe them away with his fingertips; he savors the dampness on his cheeks left by those he loves best in this world.
“Hey, girls? Come say hi to Grandpa’s friend, Jessa,” Rachel says before disappearing into the kitchen, the errant tampon applicator now wrapped in a tissue and headed to another, presumably more secure, garbage pail.
Hand on her hip, the twin dressed as Rapunzel stares at Jessa for a long moment, then advises, “Basically, I really think you should blow-dry your hair.”
“Basically,” the other twin says, “my new Barbie really needs a manicure and a blow-dry.”
“In that case, I’m not the slightest bit insulted by your suggestion,” Jessa says. “And I might even start blow-drying my hair one of these days.”
He loves her for this, Cliff almost says aloud; it’s the first time he’s aware of actually connecting the words love and Jessa while in her presence.
Rachel returns with a glass bowl of taco chips and a porcelain mug filled with salsa. “I need some napkins, girls,” she says, but neither of the twins bothers to look at her. They’re on their stomachs on the living-room floor, busy with the art set Jessa has given them, along with coloring books full of trolls and Hatchimals.
“What are those?” Cliff says, down on his knees, pointing to outlines of smiling, teddy bear-like creatures with big heads and diminutive bodies.
“Oh, that’s an Owlicorn, and this one’s a Bearakeet,” one of the twins says. Cliff thinks it’s Charlotte, because he’s pretty sure she’s the twin with the huskier voice, but hey, he’s probably wrong. If his family lived in New York and he had the privilege of seeing the twins every week, would that make him less of a shamefully incompetent grandfather? An undergrad degree from Yale and a law degree from Harvard, and he can’t differentiate between a pair of identical twins who share his DNA. And whom he surely adores. He watches as they take turns sharpening, so industriously, some colored pencils in the nostrils of the plastic nose Jessa gave them, and he wonders what they will do with their lives as adults—perhaps, like their mother, they will study for a master’s in landscape architecture but end up in the business world or, like their father, pursue a doctorate in American Studies. And he wonders, too, whether he, the retired dude who’s presently in early old age but who doesn’t feel old at all, will be around to see these grandchildren of his flower into adulthood. He thinks of Penni running vigorously on the treadmill in their den for a half hour every morning in her pajamas, and following that with exactly one hundred and two sit-ups, and always eating wisely, never putting even one cigarette to her lips, but look—just look—how her life ended. In their bedroom, on a comforter embellished with a red-robed geisha feeding a pair of koi, only a few feet from the treadmill where Penni had started her day that very last morning—struck down by what she warned Cliff, in an anguished, bewildered voice, was the single worst headache she’d ever experienced.
By the time a trio of EMTs from the Fire Department arrived, she was already gone. Thank you, Cliff managed to say in his quietest voice, after one of his neighbors down the hall, a young anesthesiologist, pronounced Penni dead; even in the worst of circumstances, even as he sat shell-shocked and perfectly motionless at Penni’s side, Cliff was nothing if not polite.
Later, waiting for the courteous, black-suited employees from the funeral home to show up, murmuring things he can no longer remember, Cliff held one of Penni’s damp, ice-cold hands in both of his own, but failed to warm her.
“Dad!” he hears one of the twins shrieking, and here’s his son-in-law, over six feet and muscular, his beard thick and threaded with sparks of silver, though you can see that his is the face of a man still young, Cliff thinks.
“Hey, how’s it going?” Jack says, and he and Cliff hug briefly but warmly, as they always have. Feeling Jack’s fingers pressing lightly against his back, Cliff remembers the big white bandage enveloping his son-in-law’s ring finger after he accidentally gouged it with an X-Acto knife in Cliff’s garage in the suburbs the day before Rachel’s wedding; Jack had been cutting wood for an oak bookcase he was going to build for the new apartment he and Rachel would be sharing in Cambridge. It was Cliff who had driven him to the ER to get stitched up that morning a decade ago, Cliff who had made him soup that came in an envelope in a cardboard box, throwing in a chopped-up carrot and onion he’d cooked in a saucepan first, serving it to Jack on a wicker tray as he relaxed on the living room couch, his injured hand resting on a small velvet pillow.
He’d been a good father-in-law from the very beginning, of that there is no doubt.
This time it’s one of the twins who introduces Jessa, while the other displays the nose-shaped pencil sharpener with a long purple pencil protruding now from one plastic nostril.
“Cool!” Jack says admiringly.
There are Rachel’s home-made fish tacos decorated with cilantro and shredded manchego for dinner; afterward, following an impassioned discussion of the president’s latest follies both domestic and international, the conversation shifts to the Glam Squad and Madison and Charlotte’s devoted coach, Angela, who came to the house bearing pints of ice cream for the twins after their respective tonsillectomies several months ago. Cliff and Jessa watch a video, on Rachel’s tablet, of the twins performing in a competition, the exact nature of which he doesn’t quite catch; staring at images of his granddaughters on the screen in their shiny pink leotards, black short-shorts, and glittery white eye shadow, he gets lost in some rap music he can’t identify playing in the background and the row of tiny, similar-looking girls waiting their turn to perform handsprings and one-handed cartwheels. He and Jessa applaud loudly as Rachel gestures with a fingertip toward one of the twins cartwheeling her way across the floor of a school gym. It’s a talent that’s alien to him; in childhood he was one of those kids who could barely complete a somersault when ordered to do so by, as he remembers it, some grimly zealous gym teacher sporting a military-style crewcut. Unlike his granddaughters, rolling his body head over heels, end to end, was never one of Cliff’s favorite activities. But watching on the tablet’s screen as they perform smartly for the Glam Squad, he is especially proud of the twins. And proud, too, of the busy, comfortable life he knows Rachel and Jack have made for themselves and their daughters, here in their black-and-white colonial in this placid, leafy suburb where they’ve fit so easily, so confidently, these past few years.
He takes nothing for granted—neither the peaceful contentment of his daughter’s life, nor any happiness of his own.
The twins have gone to sleep upstairs, each into her own separate bedroom and queen-sized bed—beds, Cliff marvels, as large as the one he and Jessa share in his apartment—while the grown-ups are watching, on a 65-inch curved-screen TV hung against a brick wall in the den, as Stephen Colbert handily ridicules a politician’s misspelled Tweets.
“One can only guess at the depth of frustration felt by his seventh-grade English teacher,” Jessa says, “and I’m not talking about Colbert’s.” Her left hand is entwined with Cliff’s right, and when she yawns now, she lifts both his and hers to cover her mouth, leaving a silent kiss near his wrist.
“Ready for bed?” he says quietly; he doesn’t want to disturb anyone’s enjoyment of Colbert’s entertaining litany of grievances, large and small, against various politicians. “So I think we’re going to hit the sack,” Cliff reports, more forcefully this time. His hand still in Jessa’s, he pulls her up from the love seat and tells Rachel that the bedroom on the first floor, beyond the kitchen, where he’s already wheeled their suitcases, is where they’ll be sleeping. If that’s okay with management. “Not that we have anything against trekking up and down the stairs to the guest bedroom on the second floor. We’re just lazy,” he teases. “Or as some might say, not as young as we used to be.”
