Lydia's Party: A Novel (11 page)

Norris

Now Norris’s clothes, and the inside of her car, reeked of smoke and fish. At least the smell would cover any trace of last-minute sex, she thought. She’d been trying to get out the door when Jay pulled her down.

“Now you’ve made me late,” she’d said, after, pulling layers of black clothes back on.

He’d been sitting in the middle of her bed with one of her Hudson Bay blankets wrapped around his bony, boyish shoulders, smoking a joint. He smiled then, as if he’d been complimented, glad to have had an effect.

•   •   •

“What happens when I’m left sitting in a cold puddle halfway to Chicago?” She’d said this to the top of his head, standing over him with her boot in his lap. He was dawdling—if she wouldn’t take him along he’d do what he could to make her even later. He’d offered to tie her boots, then pulled out the laces. Now he was relacing them.

She’d nudged him under the chin, poking his soft neck with her hard toe. “Huh? What then?”

He’d dodged the boot, snaking his supple neck to move his head out of the way. “Then you’ll think of me,” he’d said, keeping his eyes on the elaborate knot he’d begun to tie.

•   •   •

Only a boy can be so cocky and so sentimental at the same time, she thought. It was scandalous, she supposed, what she was doing, robbing the cradle this way. Though no one would think twice if it were reversed, if she were a man. And Jay was of age, old enough to make his own choices.

It was his
big boy choice.
That’s what they’d called it with Sam, when he was little, when she and Andy were trying to trick him into doing something he didn’t want to do. He’d learned early on it was flattery, not a real choice. He’d stand there trying not to cry, torn between what he really wanted and his
big boy choice
, the lousy grown-up alternative they were pushing on him, usually for reasons that had nothing to do with him. Jay’s big boy choice wasn’t so bad, Norris thought, not by comparison.

She kept it quiet, though, for Sammy’s sake mostly, not that he’d ever find out. Jay and Sam might as well have lived on different planets. Sam, safely tucked away in his fraternity house in Ann Arbor, was as insulated from Jay’s world as if he were still in kindergarten. People like Jay existed for Sam only on television, or in the movies, as colorful outlaws, and Norris planned to keep it that way. Though they were so close in age that Norris sometimes felt in danger of conflating them, of confusing Sam’s baby sweetness with this tougher almost-boy, especially now that Norris could see how young he really was. She’d thought he was older at first, but now that he’d dropped his act she could see he was almost as young as her son.

He’d started hinting lately about taking her to some kind of family function, his cousin’s wedding. As his date.

“Oh, sweetie,” she’d said, trying to be nice for a change. “I don’t do weddings. I barely made it to my own.” She’d made a joke of it though it was true. She hated weddings.

He said he wanted her to meet his family.

Norris couldn’t help laughing. Then he’d looked hurt, so she said, “No, you don’t.”

“Yes, I do.”

“Darling, I could be your mother.”

“No, you couldn’t.” He’d said it automatically, a child’s defense. But it was true. He was from some town out in the sticks where they got knocked up in high school. She was probably older than his mother. Norris supposed it was time to end it.

•   •   •

She was driving up LSD now, as the natives called it. Lake Shore Drive. Old joke: How did you get here? I took LSD. Her car stunk of fish. She didn’t mind—that old fish shack was one of the few things she missed about the city. People said,
Don’t you miss the culture?
Please, she thought. If she wanted culture, which she didn’t, she’d go to New York. The only reason she was here, in January, was to check out the space for her show. At the last minute she’d decided to leave a day early, stop in at Lydia’s party. And not for the party, which was tedious, to put it mildly. For Lydia.

Norris could see the lake on her right, a big black nothing except for where the moonlight glinted a weird silvery color off the ice. The sky was that awful orange streetlight color the city had adopted in the seventies. It looked like poison gas now, caught in the mist.

Norris missed Michigan already. It was too cold to be in the city. It wasn’t any warmer there, but cold in the woods was different, less sinister. There she had her big stone fireplace. She liked to power walk the path around the pond, listening to the crunch of her boots breaking rhythmically through the frozen snow and leaves and cracking sticks, hearing her own breath, panting inside her scarf. When she got back to the house she, or they, when she let Jay come along, went inside and at first the house seemed oppressively hot, cloyingly domestic after the wildness and danger of the fresh, clean cold. The house always seemed to smell of old soup and toast and coffee then, no matter what she’d eaten that day, and she’d feel a jolt of revulsion. But then she’d get used to it and they’d take off their coats. Jay, when she let him, would pile oak logs in the fireplace that were so hard and cold they banged almost like metal when he dropped them on the hearth. Then she’d light a fire and they’d take off their boots and sit. Jay wanted to talk then but Norris discouraged it.

Somehow the cold there, while Norris knew it was dangerous, felt less ugly. Cold there seemed like part of some larger order. It seemed necessary, meaningful. The woods needed to rest, things needed to die. Here it just seemed cruel.

Norris drove past a man with no gloves holding a sign that said, “HELP mE I’m Homeless and Hungry GOD BleSS yoU.” For the briefest moment she considered slowing down, handing the guy a package of smoked fish, along with her gloves. She had a small fortune in food sitting next to her on the passenger seat, each type of fish packaged separately and wrapped in white paper. All she had to do was roll down the window and hand one out. She could give him two and still arrive with too much—she knew at the end of the night most of it would be thrown out, or fed to pets that were already overfed.

But what was the point, Norris decided, speeding up. He was probably just some alcoholic who’d puke it all up. It was best not to encourage them.

Goddamn everything, Norris thought. She hated the city. Except for setting up this show, she had no reason to come back, not even to see her dealer, Natalie. They handled everything by e-mail. Norris skipped the openings, usually, shipped the art. She paid Jay to drive in the small work, the drawings she didn’t trust to shippers. That’s how she’d met him. He’d answered an ad she placed for an art courier. Later he claimed he thought it was a euphemism for gigolo. Not that he’d used that word, euphemism.
Secret babe code
, he’d called it.

What a child, Norris thought. And what a cad he’d grow up to be when she was done with him.

•   •   •

Except for Lydia and Natalie, everything was in Michigan now. Norris’s parents were gone, and the less she saw of her brothers and their wives and their hordes of children, the better. The only thing that had kept her in the city was Sam, and now he was in Michigan, too. Even Andy’s parents were there, still in the old house outside Traverse City. Sweet little white-haired Betty and Hank, who’d retired from the post office sixteen years ago. It had never occurred to them to move away, go someplace warm, or even to stop working. Hank ran a lawn mower repair business in his garage now. In the winter he worked on snow blowers. Norris supposed Sam had inherited his sweetness from them.

Betty had cried when Norris told her about the divorce—Norris had made sure she got to them first. Betty had said she and Hank would always think of her as their daughter. Andy never did tell them what happened. He didn’t want to turn them against her, he’d said. He thought she was coming back, Norris realized, later. He didn’t tell them later, either—too embarrassed, she supposed. Now they were closer to her than they were to him.

Her doing, that, partly at least.
You subverted
their
affections
, Andy had yelled at her, almost crying, back during the worst of it, when they still bothered to fight. She’d alienated them from him, he said. It seemed like an ugly thing to say at first but she saw he was right. She hadn’t even realized she was doing it and then, after she thought about it, she thought, yes, exactly, and kept doing it, on purpose. Though they were easily enough bought off, she thought, with adorable grandchild visits. When he was younger Sam had spent a month with them every summer and Norris had made sure she was the one who ferried him back and forth, as if he were her personal gift to them.

•   •   •

Norris was making good time now. She knew she should slow down, on this ice, though she doubted she’d crash—her reflexes were excellent. If a cop stopped her she’d be tempted to tell him that. Laws were for people who lacked sense, or self-control, she’d want to say. She knew what she was doing.

Most people couldn’t help failing, Norris thought, passing some idiot with his flashers on, doing forty in a broken-down car. They were so sorry, they always said, after they’d made some colossal mess. They had tried to do better, but they just couldn’t. It seemed like whining to Norris, but maybe it was true. Maybe most people couldn’t help being weak and stupid. Who knew why? All she knew was she was the opposite.

Certain people, people like her, Norris thought, should be licensed to drive faster. They were better at it, and they really did need to get where they were going sooner than everyone else. It would be like diplomatic immunity, she thought, except this would be immunity for people who were smarter. Superior. It was just a fact. Some people, like her, were, and in a few years, she was pretty sure, they’d figure out a way to read it in someone’s DNA and be able to issue a special driver’s license that granted privileges. She didn’t plan to roll over people, Norris thought. They just lay down in front of her. What was she supposed to do—stop? Slow down? She didn’t think so.

Sometimes Norris thought she’d wasted herself on art. Maybe she should have done more, gone to law school and become a prosecutor or a judge, run for office, not because she wanted to but because she’d be so good at it. She had the temperament—ruthless, she was told. Most people weren’t. Even people whose job it was to be ruthless usually didn’t have the stomach for it, though it was what the world needed more of. Balls. Someone had to be strong. The job fell to whomever was able, and willing.

It had been so easy to win over Betty and Hank, Norris thought. Presents, flowers, compliments. Remembering their birthdays, for God’s sake. Holiday visits with Sam. Norris thought now they must not have resisted much, must have sensed what a little weakling their son had turned into and preferred to be on the winning team. Most people did, given the chance. Not that Norris had given them a choice. Once she made up her mind she was hard to resist.

A force of nature
, Andy used to call her, meaning it as a good thing in those days. Norris remembered how he’d say it in bed, worshipfully
. I like strong women
, he’d say. Arm wrestling had excited him; he’d liked it when she won. He had no idea what he was getting into, Norris thought, and even she hadn’t realized how mismatched they were, until it was too late. Norris only wished Sam had gotten more of her in him, more of whatever it was that made her capable of heartless force when necessary.

•   •   •

She was going over seventy now—even Norris thought it was too fast, in this snow. She needed to slow down, calm down. She switched her thoughts to the house, always a palliative. It was hers now, the exquisite glass-and-steel box slung low in the trees along the lake, with its bleached oak floors and stainless-steel kitchen and 360-degree views. An all-glass enclosed walkway led to the studio, where she’d installed twenty-foot ceilings and skylights and an interior balcony with a clerestory. There, the seasons surrounded her. There was nothing else to see.

Don’t you miss culture?
Some fool had asked her that at an opening when she first moved. What a joke. She spent all day, every day standing at an easel. When she got tired she read a book, listened to music. She had a lifetime supply of culture in her head. What she craved was nature. And what a poor substitute for nature culture was anyway. People who asked if she missed culture meant did she miss people. Parties, openings. God, no. Never. She preferred her trees, and silence. What a gift it had been to herself, to move there. And it wasn’t even that silent. There was the sound of water, birds, small wildlife rustling in the underbrush—the gray squirrels skittering up and down the tree trunks, screeching at each other over mulberries, in summer the bees. At night she heard owls. What was she doing in this city, she thought, dodging a pothole in the narrow one-way street as she drove through the filthy slush.

Won’t you miss us?
Someone had said it at one of these parties, after she and Andy split up and she announced she was moving north. Who was it that said that? Someone she didn’t expect sentiment from. She’d laughed, then felt sorry, realizing how cold she sounded. But they were so provincial, clinging to their little routines. Didn’t it ever occur to them to leave?