Gossip (19 page)

Nicky and Lindy met me at the ferry. I saw them both waving as I made my way onto the wharf along with the pedestrian throng and the babble of greetings, instructions, questions, and warnings to children not to fall or get lost that went with disembarkation. As we jostled along, cars were streaming one by one from the belly of the ship through its gaping mouth onto the sunlit wharf like a herd of four-wheeled Jonahs.

“Here she is, Lindy-hop! Here's Auntie Lovie!” Nicky hopped each time he said her name, and she tried to hop too, tucked firmly against his hip, with her little legs clutching him around the waist. Nicky put her down and took my luggage. Confidingly, Lindy took my hand.

He led us proudly to a vintage Saab convertible that apparently came with the house. I held Lindy while he drove.

“Is this safe, Nicky? Shouldn't she be in a car seat?”

“You are her car seat,” he said. I thought he drove rather fast as well, but he always did like to startle the bourgeoisie. Lindy stood on my lap and held on to my hair, playing at butting my cheek with her nose.

The house was practically on the beach. Avis had hired a young graduate of the Culinary Institute to cook, a slim homely girl in a long white apron and green plastic chef's clogs who came in by the day. She served us a delicious lunch on the porch. Grace was nowhere to be seen; she was sailing with childhood friends. After lunch, Lindy went down for her nap. I offered to stay with her so that Nicky could get out and enjoy the day, but he said he wanted to work. He was writing a screenplay.

Avis said she herself was dying to read it. Nicky told me, with a wicked smile, that he had talked to Alvin Grable's agent about it, and she wanted to represent him. Off he went upstairs with his laptop. Avis and I took a long walk on the beach.

Five o'clock came, and still Grace wasn't home. Lindy was a sunny child but had been asking for Mummy for over an hour and was finally querulous. Avis looked weary, and I could have done with a nap myself. I'd forgotten how much sheer boredom there is in looking after young children.

We were sitting with Lindy in the airy living room, the rattan rug strewn with puzzle pieces and toy barnyard creatures. Nicky was still upstairs. I had read what seemed like stacks of picture books aloud, we'd had a tea party on the grass with dandelion cookies, and we'd found all the broken shells worth finding on the beach beyond the narrow lawn. Avis was singing “Kookaburra sits on the old gum tree,” to Lindy. When they got to “Laugh, kookaburra,” Avis would put her hands in the air and pretend to laugh, her nose and her long narrow teeth making her look fleetingly like an elegant horse. Lindy imitated her, lost her balance, and sat down hard on a plastic cow.

She started to howl. Avis scooped her up and went on singing, but Lindy would not be soothed. She went from wailing with surprise and pain to screaming. Avis kissed her and jiggled her helplessly. Nicky came down the stairs two at a time in bare feet, stepped painfully on a Lego block and swore as he crossed the floor, seized Lindy from Avis, and left the room. The screaming grew wilder and more bereft as it traveled up the stairs and into the bedroom over our heads.

“He won't spank her, will he?” He had looked to me as angry as Lindy.

“Oh, I don't think so,” said Avis uncertainly.

The screaming upstairs was unabated when Nicky rejoined us in the living room. He sat, stormily pretending to ignore the sound. I thought she couldn't possibly keep it up for more than a minute or two, but the noise raged on for five, then ten, then twenty. Then she'd been at it for almost half an hour.

It was excruciating. I busied myself on the floor, collecting wooden and plastic pieces of things, and wondered if it was too early to ask for a drink. Avis sat with her hands clasped over her bony knees.

She said, “I'll just run up and be sure she doesn't have a pin in her or—”

“She doesn't,” Nicky snapped. “She has to learn to comfort herself. Please leave her.” Of course, she couldn't have a pin in her, there are no such things as diaper pins anymore, but I agreed with Avis. Surely there might be something really wrong?

But he was the father. Avis stayed where she was and I did too, and the shrieking continued.

Grace came into the house, running. “What's happened? You can hear her out on the road!”

“Nothing happened! She was crying for you and now she's having a tantrum.” Nicky looked as if he was holding on to the chair arms to keep himself still. Husband and wife stared at each other, locked in an argument we could see but not hear.

The sound from upstairs, now coming in hoarse waves, battered the walls and beat at our ears like bird wings. Their eyes held each other's.

“She's almost asleep,” Nicky declared, though I doubted it. Grace's skin was sun-gold. She was still wearing a salt-stained visor over her hair.

Grace left the room, heading for the stairs.

Like a cat, Nicky was out of his chair and after her. Her footsteps quickened; so did his. From the stairway landing, where their footsteps stopped, we heard a thump, as if a body had slammed against a wall, and a single cry of anger and surprise.

Avis and I stared at each other.

For a long moment nothing could be heard except the baby's wail. Then one set of footsteps hurried up from the landing and into Lindy's room. There was a last shuddering sob from the baby, and then silence.

Silence. It took several seconds to remember that this state, which seemed at first shot through with comforting colors, like water after great thirst, was our normal state.

Nicky came back into the room. His face was red and wore a closed, congested expression. Briefly he looked at me, as if he thought I should take his side. His dark hair stood up a little on one side, as if when the baby started to cry he had been napping, not writing.

I said, “I think I'd like a gin and tonic. Can I get anyone anything?”

No one answered me, so I went into the kitchen to make myself a drink. When I came back, Nicky had a magazine in his lap, and Avis was gone.

Some time passed. Out on the sound, the ferry was crossing the broad blue water that formed our view, lumbering back toward the mainland, its belly full of SUVs and its back thronged with tired and sunburned people. A large gull strutted along our beach with its chest puffed out like a comic-book plutocrat, pausing now and then to peck at the sand. Then it took off, out toward the ferry.

Grace came in holding Lindy, who burrowed against her, face still red and wet, clinging to her like a marsupial baby whose mother's body is still its home. Grace had been crying too, but was no longer.

Nicky looked up and stared at her. Ignoring him, she came to sit in a chair close to me.

“She'd have been asleep in another minute,” said Nicky.

“I couldn't stand it,” she said.

“Apparently.” He got up and walked out of the room, off the porch and down to the beach.

Avis came in from the kitchen with a glass in her hand. She had combed her hair and put on lipstick. “Can I get you anything, darling?” she said to Grace. Grace shook her head.

Nicky didn't come back until after sunset, when we were half finished with dinner.

The next morning, Avis hired a babysitter for the duration. The sitter was a big patient girl with huge bosoms, poor thing, only fourteen but the oldest in her family, and wonderful with the baby. She came at nine in the morning and went home after Lindy had had her supper. I thought maybe now Nicky would spend some time with Grace and her friends. Thought he should, in fact, but he said they all worked for investment banks and kept asking him things like “So, what are you up to now, guy?” Also, he was almost through his second act and couldn't waste the momentum.

Grace played tennis and went sailing, and Avis and I rode bikes to distant beaches, often with the sitter and Lindy along. In the evenings, groups of attractive young people came to eat lobster and corn on the cob, drink stunning amounts of jug wine, and talk and laugh. Most nights they played charades, at which Nicky excelled. A halcyon time, I would have said, apart from the start.

Dinah, however, was not so pleased. I proposed to stop on the Vineyard and pay her a visit on my way home, but she said tartly that she was too busy and her house was full. I didn't see her until September in New York, and she was in a sour mood.

“Now that Grace's back at work, Nicky is just frantic. He's trying to work too, you know.”

I said that I did know, and that he'd had a good stretch of work time when he was on Nantucket.

“Not as much as he would have if Grace ever helped.”

“Wait. That's not fair. Grace did the early mornings and breakfast so Nicky could sleep in, and the rest of the time there was a sitter.”

“I know about the sitter. Trust Avis to think you can have your children raised by the help.”

“Dinah. You had a nanny for RJ!”

“I was
working.
And I never liked it. Now Nicky's either got to give up his work to take care of the baby, or have a nanny in the house all day, and he can't get anything done with people in the house. You don't know what it's like, being a writer.”

“Why doesn't he join Writers Room? Or the Society Library?”

“It's
hardly
in the neighborhood,” she said, as if it were the stupidest suggestion she'd ever heard. Last time I checked there were subways that made it possible for New Yorkers to work in neighborhoods they don't live in, but I didn't want a quarrel. We shifted the conversation to the clothes she should wear on camera for her tryout for a show on the Food Channel. I know some things about colors under the lights, and I had a makeup person my clients work with whom I thought she should meet. She remembered to ask about Gil and about business. Which was still booming in 2007, those were the days. I still missed my little dog, Hannah, who had died in July, and Dinah was reasonably sympathetic.

As I was leaving, she said, “You know, Nicky and Grace spent four days with me in August, and Grace still hasn't written me a thank-you note.”

It's a good thing I didn't laugh. A thank-you note? Dinah expected a thank-you note from Grace? Did Nicky write her thank-you notes? Grace was practically her daughter. Had Dinah ever written
me
a thank-you note for all the discounts, all the . . . oh, never mind. Dinah said, “And she never thanked me for cleaning her grotty apartment before she came home with the baby! Remember that?”

I did, and I explained about Ursula.

Dinah put her hands on her hips. “Well, that's just ducky. She and Mumsy seem to be hitting it off these days. Have they started wearing mother-daughter outfits yet?”

So
that
was it.

I said that I must be going.

Chapter 16

W
hen your love is a great deal older than you, you have to face the fact that one of you is going to be left behind, and it will probably be you. You might think that since I had been without Gil so much during the years we shared, I would be better equipped for this eventuality than some, but that would be to underestimate the power of the lifelong conversation that had been going on between us since the weekend we met in Vermont. Gil seemed to me so grown up in those days, though he was so much younger than I am now. Gil, tall and lanky and so graceful, mentally and physically, always. Gil, who seemed to remember every book he'd ever read; Gil, who could talk to anybody; Gil, so endearingly quick to find himself ridiculous; Gil, who thought the world delightful; Gil, who could always make me laugh, whose advice could always be trusted; Gil, who was always on my side.

Anyway. It's a lot to do without, when it's been the air you breathed for forty years. The silence that falls at the end of that conversation is deep and dark, and I'd been frightened for years that when it opened up before me I would fall in and never climb out.

Silence does affect people differently. Solitary confinement is a punishment for the most grievous kinds of transgressions. Yet for monks and hermits and others who choose it, it can bring transcendent joy, a sense of connection with all that is holy, an erasure of self that means erasure of personal disappointment and pain. It stands to reason that the emotional silence that comes at the end of a lifelong love must also be survived or not, a punishment or a prayer, depending on the character of the individual.

Are we ever done with tests of character in this life?

T
he only marker others noticed that Gil was slowing down was that he'd switched from singles in tennis to doubles. He laughed just as much, finished double acrostics just as fast, and he could reliably clean my clock at backgammon. He was not planning on change or decay; he was halfway through
Remembrance of Things Past
in French. Then shortly before Christmas, he slipped on the ice, fell, and hit his head on a stone step. He was only briefly concussed and recovered consciousness quickly; the ER didn't even keep him overnight. But before he fell, he was a lively citizen of the world somewhere near the end of middle age. In one day he became an old man.

Althea came home from France. Gil and I had looked forward to celebrating Christmas at our house in Connecticut, but that hope was gone. He was sleeping a lot and taking things very slowly. Once Althea saw him, she canceled her other plans and stayed. We didn't meet for a month while he was convalescing; the best we could do was talk on the phone when Althea was out of the apartment. Althea was a better nurse than anyone would have expected, and he was grateful for the care she took of him. She wasn't young herself.

By February he claimed to be back in form, but his balance was uncertain, and he was understandably afraid of falling. He came to me two afternoons a week when he was supposed to be playing bridge at the Knick. Where once we would have headed into the park for a ramble or gone out to a film, we stayed in by the fire, sometimes reading or playing backgammon, sometimes just holding hands and watching the flames. I told myself that he still had years, but like a version of the pregnant woman's suitcase packed with everything she'll need at the hospital once she goes into labor, I also began taking care that I always had cash, a purse at the ready with reading glasses, my MetroCard, a list of his medications, and anything else one might need if something happened while he was with me. Or if I were suddenly summoned to a vigil in the middle of the night. But
would
anyone summon me? And if yes, who?

On the days when we couldn't see each other our habit was to “have tea” together. I would leave the shop and go up to my flat, brew a cup of decaf Earl Grey, and wait. Gil would call from his bedroom on a second telephone line he'd had installed for me. Was there ever a marital conversation about that line? I have no way of knowing. On a gray afternoon in early March I made my tea and sat down to wait, but no call came.

By five I was frantic. I called the line, a thing I'd done only once before, but this time it rang and rang.

I called downstairs and told Stephanie to close the shop when she was ready to go home, that I couldn't leave the apartment. Then I sat.

Do you know about the London
Times'
first Golden Globe sailing race? Of the two sailors competing to sail the fastest course single-handed around the earth, one fell so in love with silence that when he rounded Cape Horn, instead of shaping a course for England to finish the race and collect his prize, he kept sailing east, around the Cape of Good Hope and into the Indian Ocean again until he finally came to rest in Tahiti. The other, the only other candidate still in the running, same race, same silence, went mad and went overboard. His logbooks, found on his drifting boat, told the tale.

The phone rang at ten. I had it to my ear before the first ring had finished.

“Is this Loviah French?”

“Yes, speaking.”

“This is Meredith Flood. We met—”

“You came to the shop.”

“Yes.”

Then our hearts failed us both, briefly.

“Something's happened,” I said.

“Yes.”

“Tell me.”

“A stroke.”

The thing he feared most, the thing I feared for him.

“A bad one?”

“Yes.”

“May I come?”

“I think you'd better.”

She told me where he was, and in minutes I was on the street, in a cab.

He was in the intensive care unit at a hospital where he'd served on the board for years. They'd given him a view of the East River, but it didn't make any difference and neither would anything else, as I understood when I stood at the gap in the curtains and saw him lying on his back, completely still. A nurse was unhooking the tubes that ran into his nose and the back of his hand.

I was still wearing the suit I'd dressed in for work that morning. I could have changed, but it hadn't occurred to me; I had been stuck in a state of waiting since I sat down with my tea so many hours ago.

Meredith stood with her back to the room, looking down at the river. She was crying. Althea was seated beside the bed, her hand holding Gil's cold one, her forehead leaning against white sheets. She appeared to be praying.

Meredith turned, and Althea looked up and found me standing there. Her face was lined and old. There were bags under her eyes, and her lipstick had bled into the tiny wrinkles around her mouth.

Our eyes met, and she held my gaze for a long moment. She didn't speak; she didn't have to. He had died in her arms.

The way the story ends tells you what the story means.

F
or a great while, I can't really say how long, I couldn't bear real conversation. Chat with strangers was fine, even desirable. Mrs. Oba knew without being told to keep silence with me, except on the simplest level: A tuck here? Let the cuffs down? Face the hem for another half-inch of length? I found conversations with customers—about the galas they were dressing for, the details of the stepdaughter's wedding—more than possible; necessary. A sort of soothing, dulling the consciousness, like knitting or strong drink.

My close friends grew anxious that I was spending too much time alone and tried with increasing pressure to get me to attend things they thought would divert me. A taping of Dinah's cooking show. A gathering for someone's tedious memoir. A house party in Millbrook, opening day at Belmont Park. In fact I went for the last one. A friend took us down to the paddock to see her horses saddled. There is something reassuring about being close to very large quadrupeds. It shakes your sense of scale. The horses were practically radiating life force, very beautiful and young. It was a nice day with the grass a bright strong color and the leaves all looking lime green. I won eighteen dollars on the fourth race. Gil would have loved it.

I wasn't in fact spending that much time alone. Instead, I was with new people, people who'd never met Gil. I went out to Southampton with a woman I swam laps with at the Colony Club. I went to films with single friends I'd known slightly for decades, and to the opera with one of Avis's young walkers. Little by little the days passed. Toward the end of the summer I paid some attention, not much, to talk of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and their problems. Richard Wainwright would call and say he thought I should sell this or move that. He sounded upset, but that barely registered. I told him to make any changes for me he thought right. Then Lehman Brothers crashed and burned, and even I woke up to the news that we were witnessing an end to prosperity as we had known it.

So I had something new to worry about.

I suppose I had better admit here that I was dealing with something almost more disorienting than Gil's death. Which, after all, we had both always known was coming. It was this: as you will have gathered, there was a place in Connecticut that had been ours, his and mine. It had come to him from his parents; Althea had never been interested. There was a small house of great charm, the place where we lived together as a couple. There were gardens, especially a rose garden planted and tended by me for many years. Huge deciduous trees like peaceful giants surrounded us with colors in the fall. He had always told me it would come to me, along with enough money to keep it up.

I can't explain it . . . it's not that I can't get along without a country house. It's the surprise. Well, the shock. My gardens. How many times had he seen me come in glowing after an afternoon of staking delphiniums, deadheading peonies, digging in the rose beds, knowing I thought they would always be mine?

I'll never know what changed. Or if this was always his plan. Nor will I ever be the same.

I found out at the funeral through an innocent conversation with the Floods' estate lawyer, whom I had met earlier that morning. The service was at the church of St. Vincent Ferrer, Althea's church, in the east sixties, right down Lexington Avenue from Hunter College. It's a neighborhood I know well, not far from my first flat where I lived when I worked for Philomena. The day was bright and dry, if still very raw, but I had dressed for a walk after the service. The reception was to be held at Gil and Althea's apartment, and of course I couldn't go there; instead I stood in the narthex waiting for Althea and the children to enter the small herd of limousines that idled outside and be whisked off, watching the friends and extended family pouring past me as if I were a rock in a streambed and they were the water. As they descended the church steps in the pale sunlight, they were already beginning to chatter to each other about the beauty of the service and whether to walk or look for a taxi, when the lawyer joined me.

He was just doing his version of mourning Gil, by musing aloud about what a wise and thoughtful job Gil had done of planning for his loved ones, unlike some of his clients who seemed truly to believe they were taking it with them. How carefully Gil had weighed this against that so that all three children could share equally in unequal things. He felt free to talk to me of such matters, as he knew I'd been close enough to Gil to be a legatee. He mentioned that Gil had left me a token sum of money and his grandfather's gold pocket watch, which he'd been given on his own twenty-first birthday. Gil carried it when he wore black tie, which he rarely did with me. He had left my house to his daughters.

The lawyer had no idea that he had just reached down my throat and stopped my heart.

S
o. I had a lot to process.

But in the fall of 2008, so did everybody else. Richard had read the tea leaves cleverly, and both Dinah and I were well insulated from the rolling disaster going on down on Wall Street. And, as we all learned to say eight times a day, on Main Street.

But my clients were not immune by any means. One of my ladies had lived for decades in a palatial Park Avenue duplex. Her husband had invested everything with the Ponzi schemer Bernie Madoff. Overnight, they moved to a garage apartment in the suburbs, and at seventy-four she is selling cookware at a Bloomingdale's in a mall somewhere. Her husband has congestive heart failure and sits all day in a wheelchair looking out the window. Or so I'm told.

I sell a luxury product, and even those who could still afford to travel and dine out stopped spending conspicuously that winter. If you didn't actually need a new opera coat or fresh cruise wear, it seemed more appropriate to do without or to appear in “vintage.” Plenty of my clients had pieces that had become vintage while hanging in their own closets; that's how it works if you buy good things that suit you and take proper care of them. They'd stop in wearing some suit I'd sold them in 1991 and thank me. By February 2009, I'd had to let Stephanie go and was running the shop myself. Mrs. Oba volunteered to take a pay cut and come in only three days a week. I was grateful, though I miss her on the days she's not there. Her daughter is now practicing medicine in Boston and her son lives near her in Brooklyn and has small children, so she has plenty to keep her busy.

I did not.

The hours were long in the shop, with virtually no custom. Life was gray. So I was particularly happy to see Avis outside pressing the bell for me to unlock the door on a blowy day in March. She came in, bringing the fresh smell of wind with her, her cheeks bright, her expensive loafers sodden.

“You look marvelous,” I told her truthfully as she took off her wet things.

“I've been taking yoga with Grace. Bikram. I must say I feel sensational.”

“That's the one in the hot room?”

“Yes, it's wonderful. I can stand on one leg for hours, and as Grace says, I am strong like ox.”

“I'm quite jealous,” I said, though I have never had trouble keeping my figure and I hate classes, as well as heat.

“I need a new evening skirt or two and maybe a jacket, if you have something with pockets.”