All Is Vanity (20 page)

Also, the consensus among our dinner companions seems to be that soccer camp is a must for Mario and Hunter. Must look into that
.

Love, Letty

WE’D AGREED TO MAKE
our Christmas trip to Los Angeles between December 12 and 17, to avoid the airline’s holiday price gouging. Also, this meant that Ted could arrange to spend a couple days talking to people at a Santa Monica think tank, so that we could write the whole trip off our taxes. The several hundred dollars we were thereby saving made Ted’s sighs as he studied the ledger in bed particularly irksome. I pulled my knees up firmly and lifted my own book,
The Best and the Brightest
, closer to my face.

Ted sighed again. “What’s this?” he asked, tilting the ledger toward me, so I could see the list of figures. The difference in our entries was striking; Ted always wrote in the ledger with the same black Razor Point, whereas I used whatever implement came most
quickly to hand. During the month of November that had often been a green wax marking pencil, left over from a creative spurt in October, during which I’d spent a week and a half chutneying cranberries. Being rather thick, the wax numbers were not exceptionally clear.

“What’s what?” I asked.

“This number.” He pointed to a scribble of wax labeled “linoleum tiles.” Letty’s kitchen remodeling had inspired me to buy the cheapest, thinnest, most-prone-to-scratching, “appropriate for a rental” variety of black-and-white sticky-back squares to paste over the worn, dark, and dated faux brick that until then had covered our own kitchen floor. While Ted had admired the effect, and even spent an hour discussing the pros and cons of a diagonal versus a straight pattern, he hadn’t entirely approved, maintaining that since the mottled brick appeared dirty even when clean, it demanded less upkeep than a floor that would show every grain of sugar and every turn of a black rubber heel. Also, the landlady would not pay for the new floor, the kitchen having been renovated as recently as 1975. “How much did I pay for those tiles?” Ted asked.

I felt a flash of angry heat, as if the vulnerable underside of my arm had pressed for a sizzling moment against the oven rack. “How much did
who
pay for those tiles?”

“That isn’t the issue,” he said. “The issue is whether those cheap tiles—which we now do not even own, I might add, unless you intend to pry them off the floor with a butter knife when we move out—cost a hundred and fifty dollars!”

I leaned over the ledger and with a fingernail flicked the hundred off the page. “Piece of spinach,” I said. “Try fifty.”

Mollified, he leaned back against the pillows. “Fifty is better.”

I tried to return to Johnson and his cronies but read the first
half of a single page several times, without grasping its meaning. Mightn’t it be Ted’s fault, what with his continual anxiety about how the work was progressing, that the novel was not in better shape at this point? It was certainly his fault that I was now stewing over his attitude toward our finances—specifically, his apparent conviction that he was magnanimously keeping me in overdecorated splendor—rather than attending to my research on Vietnam.

I snapped my book shut. “So it’s beginning, is it?”

“What’s beginning?”

“The inevitable resentment, the veiled demands, the erection of attention-wasting roadblocks.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Do you want me to quit, Ted? Because if that’s what you want, you should have the courage and the courtesy to say so.”

“What do you mean? Quit?”

“Give up on this novel. Get a job. A paying job, I mean. One that would allow me to spend fifty dollars to ‘remodel’ our kitchen without guilt.” A sliver of me, paper thin, wished he would say yes. I could imagine myself, years hence, sighing pensively and talking about the book that might have been, that was really quite well along, but in the end could not be finished “because we simply didn’t have the money.” I could be the artist stymied by the exigencies of the modern economy. I could be a woman who understood and forgave her selfish husband.

“I said fifty was OK.”

“What gives you the right to ‘say’ anything? You may at this particular moment be filling the purse, but that doesn’t mean it belongs to you. What if I were taking care of our children, instead of earning a wage—would you still think you could ‘say’ how I could spend money?” This argument was safe. I knew we both abhorred
the idea of a patriarchal marriage. “What if I were going to school?” I said. But the fact remained that I was doing neither of these things. I hadn’t stopped earning money to nurture our family or to increase my ability to make a better living later. I wasn’t even attending art or music appreciation classes and enriching myself. I might as well have quit my job to play the slots.

“I just thought a hundred and fifty dollars was excessive for eighteen square feet of instantly scratchable plastic. I thought maybe we should complain to the manufacturer or the Better Business Bureau. That’s all. I wasn’t blaming you.”

“Oh,” I said. I opened my book. Luckily, I’d kept a finger in the page I’d been reading.

Ted returned to sighing over the ledger. “A baby would be cheaper than these birth control pills, unless it had to go to college,” he muttered, toting up a line of figures he’d inked neatly onto one of the sheets of scrap paper he filched in bulk whenever he visited the NYU library. “Aha, now here’s something! What would you say to doing without Parmesan? Isn’t it really just superfluous topping? And shampoo! Look here, if we replaced shampoo with plain bar soap and cut out the conditioner altogether—
I
don’t use conditioner as it is—” He glanced meaningfully at me, “look how much that would save in a year.” He circled the figure he’d written on the scrap paper and pushed it toward me. “Also, you know, don’t you, that it’s ultimately more expensive to turn your computer on and off all day than just to leave it running, right? We’ve discussed that.”

“Yes, we’ve discussed it.” I did, in fact, turn my computer off frequently. It was vexing to see those fish swimming serenely across the screen, reminding me that I’d not touched the keyboard in at least four minutes.

Our early departure demanded early holiday preparation, but, as
I told my laptop and notebook when they reproached me with their stiff, closed covers, when everyone else was still Christmasing it up on December 25, I’d be virtuously back at work, refreshed by a period of celebration that had not been unnecessarily and enervatingly dragged across an entire month. And so, with a clear conscience, I paddled along in the exhilarating current of pre-Christmas New York, breathing in the Midtown air, permeated by what I imagined to be a Victorian charcoaly smell of chestnuts roasting and pretzels toasting on pushcarts, striding purposefully along with the rest of the crowds, and nearly weeping at the sight of the giant Rockefeller Center tree, that had, precisely because it had struggled upward so long and so well in some small, upstate backyard, been sacrificed merely to please shoppers. I was not a shopper. Months ago, I’d justified my chutney experiment by telling Ted the jars would make good—and inexpensive—gifts. My results were somewhat thin; some ingredient, as Ted said, had not “chutted properly.” But we agreed this was no matter, since no one actually consumed such gifts. Even Ted thought, however, that the jars alone looked too stark for presentation, despite the holly leaves I’d sketched on the label with my green wax pen.

I was not a shopper but I was a scavenger, and a few afternoons spent perusing the Hanukkah refuse bundled in recycling bags along the sidewalks produced paper of various colors and textures and five yards of ribbon, string, and twine. In Washington Square I collected a boxful of twigs. Then I spent two pleasant days listening to carols on the radio, tearing the wrapping paper into strips, sewing the strips around the jars with large, loose artistic stitches, and attaching a crown of twigs to the rims with Scotch tape. I hid the tape under a bow and hung cranberries strung on thread in the “branches.”

“Like a little tree,” I said proudly, presenting one to Simon the night before we were to leave.

“Looks hard to pack,” Ted said, and the three of us spent the rest of the evening unhooking the cranberry ornaments and untaping the twigs, which we placed in a separate box ready for reassembly in Los Angeles.

“Wow, Margaret! This is great,” Letty said, shifting Ivy on her hip to reach for my “tree.” Some of the twigs had broken in transit and their edges looked raw in the hard, clear Los Angeles light. “What is it?” This was our traditional remark upon receiving gifts from one another, ever since I’d given her a poem composed in runes for her ninth birthday. “I don’t have anything for you yet, though.”

“The only thing I need,” I said, holding up both hands as if to prevent her from bombarding me with presents, “is a few chapters of this stupid novel.”

“It’s not going well?”

Ivy was pulling at one of the cranberry ornaments. “Here, sweetie,” I said, prying her little hooked fingers away, “let me take that.” Letty expertly replaced the prohibited cranberries with a plastic crescent that began to heave forth “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” at a dragging pace. Ivy was not fooled. She dropped the moon and leaned away from her mother, reaching with both hands for the better toy, the object she observed Letty and I wanted for ourselves, a jar wrapped in refuse with dirty sticks taped to its lid.

“Trade you the chutney for the child,” I said, and, setting the jar on the seat of Letty’s Tercel, I reached for Ivy, who came to me
willingly and was instantly distracted by something around the area of my mouth, possibly my teeth.

We were waiting for a real estate agent outside of a Cape in Brentwood. Letty’d explained that Brentwood was closer to Michael’s office, but we both understood that no one moved to Brentwood for the sake of proximity. Although Beverlywood had a prettier name, Brentwood was brighter. The lawns had that brilliant, jeweled, somewhat stiff lushness characteristic of well-tended Los Angeles landscapes, where each vibrantly colored plant reserves a distinct spot all to itself, often with a ring of brown earth around it, unlike in the East, where various shades of green leaves, runners, mosses, and blades tend to rat together. It smelled clean, too, with eucalyptus leaves tanging the blue air. A newlywed could announce with pride that she’d just bought a house in Beverlywood, but later she would have to spin a list of extenuating circumstances—her children’s close friends, a $200,000 addition, nearby aged parents—to justify staying there. Personally, I would feel vaguely ashamed to admit I lived in Brentwood, but then, thanks to Ted, I have socialist tendencies. Most people declare that address with a silver note of triumph in their voices.

“Now remember,” Letty said, half to me and half to herself, when a white Grand Cherokee zipped into the driveway, “this is way overpriced. We’re not planning to buy. We’re just taking a look at what’s out there.”

The door swung open and a tiny woman slid carefully off her perch to the ground.

“Letitia!” she exclaimed, hurrying toward us in a pair of suede shoes of the type that make valuing comfort over attractiveness fashionable. “So glad you decided to keep going with this project.
Peri Scott,” she said, turning to me. She grinned for a moment at all three of us to solidify the atmosphere of good cheer and then drew from her purse a pink, reptile-skinned pouch, from which she drew one of her cards and handed it to me. “Peri” was short for “Periwinkle.” “Now don’t,” she cautioned, raising one finger, “hesitate to tell me if this is not at all the kind of thing you’re looking for. At this point, I’m just trying to learn what you’re all about.”

“Good,” Letty said.

“Yes,” I said. “We want to see what we’re all about, too.”

Letty gave me a tiny frown, but Peri said, “Exactly!” She brought her hands together and then opened them out, like a blossoming flower, as she spoke. “I like to think of home buying as a process of self-discovery. What could be more personal than your home, the place where you’ll raise your family?” She shook Ivy’s hand playfully, and then reached into her bag for a tissue to wipe her fingertips. She could not be blamed for this. I, too, had noticed that Ivy was going through a stage in which her hands were continually sticky though she’d had no access to sugary substances. “Shall we go inside?”