Modern Lovers (12 page)

T
he house on East Nineteenth Street was going to sell fast—there were three bids after the open house, and now it was a matter of who was willing to pay. Elizabeth loved the rush of multiple bids—they were all under ask, but once buyers knew there was competition, they'd come up, and pretty soon, they'd be sailing over the $2 million mark. The sellers were going to be thrilled. Their condo in Boca had probably cost under a million. This was the kind of money that paid for grandchildren's college educations. It wasn't all greed. She leafed through the offers on her desk at work. Deirdre looked over Elizabeth's shoulder.

“Not bad,” she said. Deirdre had chopped off her hair, so that people would confuse her with Halle Berry, she said. Deirdre was a gorgeous size fourteen, and Elizabeth thought she actually did look like a movie star. She always wore tight sweaters the colors of emeralds and rubies. The O'Connells were dazzled by Deirdre, and Elizabeth didn't blame them. Mary Ann and her kids were pasty, with freckles all over, even on their arms and legs. Every one of them always looked like they had a very mild case of the chicken pox.

“It's great!” Elizabeth said, holding up one of the offer sheets. “I really like this couple. Young, friendly. Totally book-club potential.”

“Do your clients know that you're just scouting for your personal
friends?” Deirdre raised an eyebrow and then laughed. “It only works if your friends have big checkbooks! I'd sell a house to an asshole if the check wouldn't bounce. I like 'em rich and heartless.”

“You do not,” Elizabeth said. Before Deirdre could respond, Elizabeth's phone rang.

“Holding for Naomi Vandenhoovel,” someone said.

“Oh, shit,” Elizabeth said. “Not again.”

“Lizzzz-eeeeeeee,” Naomi said. “I'm in New York! Come and have coffee with me! Come to the office! I want to show you what we've got put together so far. I think you'll go craaaaaaaazy for it.”

“Hi, Naomi,” Elizabeth said. “How are you?” She rolled her eyes at Deirdre.
It's nothing,
she mouthed.

“I'm freezing my ass off because the air-conditioning in the office is on autopilot, but other than that I'm perfect,” Naomi said. “I'll e-mail you the address. Come today, my afternoon is totally clear. You need to see our Lydia. Ciao-ciao!” She hung up.

Elizabeth set the phone back in its dock and looked at the pile of paper on her desk. She'd already done her work for the day—she'd responded to all the agents and all the clients. Everyone had their marching orders. There was more to do in the office, of course—there always was. But no one would mind if she took a few hours to go into the city.

•   •   •

N
aomi was set up in a conference room in the Fifties, on Fifth Avenue. Elizabeth had had to give her name to three different people sitting at desks, each of whom whispered into a phone and looked her name up on a computer. The last gatekeeper, an effete young man wearing a bow tie, told her to wait and that Naomi's assistant would be right out. A girl with a small, neat Afro and bright red lipstick came swanning out a few minutes later.

“Elizabeth?” she said, sounding bored. “Follow me.”

They walked past stainless-steel half walls and glass-enclosed offices. Elizabeth peeked into each of them, just in case there were any visiting movie stars. The studio released prestige movies, award winners. Naomi was no slouch. Finally they reached a door. Elizabeth saw Naomi inside, talking to another young woman, whose back was turned. Elizabeth stopped—even from behind she could see it—this woman, whoever she was, was their Lydia. And if Elizabeth didn't know better, she would think that it was her Lydia, too. The hair was just right—thick and dark and wild, as if it had never been brushed. It wasn't just fashion—Lydia didn't own a brush, or a comb, or a blow-dryer. She'd practically set those things on fire when she moved to Oberlin for school. Scarsdale was in her rearview mirror, and she was never going back.

“Hiiiiiiiiiii,” Naomi said, opening her arms wide. “It's the genius!” She was taller than Elizabeth expected, with thick-framed glasses and perfectly straight California-blond hair down to the middle of her back.

“Who, me?” Elizabeth asked. She let Naomi embrace her, inhaling a cloud of sweet perfume.

“Yes, you!” Naomi pulled back, holding Elizabeth's arms out. “Darcey, this is Elizabeth Marx, who wrote ‘Mistress of Myself.' She fucking wrote it. Can you believe that? Like, it didn't exist, and then Elizabeth wrote down the words, and it was a fucking song.”

Darcey stood up and turned around. It wasn't just her hair that looked like Lydia's—it was her eyes, her cheeks, her chin. Elizabeth understood immediately why Naomi had wanted her to come.

“Oh, my God,” Elizabeth said.

Darcey did whatever actresses do in place of blushing. She smiled, and turned her face from side to side. “I know,” she said. “I was literally born to do this. If I had a dollar for every person who ever told me I looked like Lydia . . .”

“You wouldn't even have half your salary for this movie! Ha!”
Naomi pulled Elizabeth closer, and then pushed her toward a white leather office chair.

Darcey sat back down in a chair opposite Elizabeth. Elizabeth tried to look away but couldn't, which Darcey seemed to enjoy, smiling widely every time she caught Elizabeth staring.

“I also found this,” Naomi said. “You've seen it, of course, but we did a little work. Check it out.” She grabbed a remote control and aimed it at the ceiling. Curtains slowly lowered, making the whole room dark. A screen illuminated on the far wall, and with another button push, a familiar song started to play.

Kitty's Mustache had made three music videos. They were all shot by an Oberlin kid named Lefty, whose real name was Lawrence Thompson III. He had a good camera and was in love with Zoe. She'd slept with him once or twice, Elizabeth suspected, just to keep him in the band's employ, or maybe she just let him see her naked. The first two videos, for “Frankie's Lament,” a song Elizabeth had written about their landlord, and “Magic Lasso,” a song about Wonder Woman, were both okay, shot in and around campus, mostly in their grimy apartments and in empty classrooms and in the arboretum, but for the “Mistress of Myself” video, they'd spent the day on a cold beach on the banks of Lake Erie.

There they were—in full goth mode, all of them dressed entirely in black, standing side by side on the beach. Small snowbanks were in the foreground. It was Lefty's masterpiece, his Swedish art film. “How did you get a copy of this?” Elizabeth asked. Lydia's hair whipped around her face. They'd brought out some of their instruments, but Lefty decided they should leave them in the car. It was like “Wicked Game,” except instead of Chris Isaak and Helena Christensen, it was all Elizabeth's screaming mouth. At one point, Zoe lay down in the sand and rolled around. Lydia scowled. Andrew spent half the video with his back to the camera, which he claimed was his silent protest of his own role in the patriarchy.

Elizabeth leaned forward. It was a close-up of Lydia's face—only it wasn't Lydia. It was Darcey. “Wait,” she said. “How did you . . . ?”

“I know, it's seamless,” Naomi said. “Our guys are fucking great. Once they retouched a birthmark on Angelina Jolie's boob for a three-hour movie. They added a birthmark! She refused to do makeup, said it was something to do with child labor, or maybe with her children, needing more time or something. Makeup can seriously take hours every day, so it was worth it to let her sleep in with all her kids and then just spend an extra million on Photoshop or whatever. It's amazing, right?”

“How did you get this? The original, I mean?” Elizabeth had a copy on VHS, but she'd heard through friends that Lefty had burned all his films after he decided to go into the family investment-banking business, so as to set himself free from his artistic dreams. As far as she knew, hers was the only copy.

“Not for nothing, Lydia's archives are in surprisingly good shape for someone who died of a heroin overdose,” Naomi said. “She kept everything. If you didn't know better, you'd think that she was a librarian. Seriously. Color-coded, in chronological order, the whole nine.”

“That is so strange,” Elizabeth said. “The Lydia I knew was a mess. She didn't even know how to balance her checkbook.”

Naomi's assistant laughed. “Checkbooks. That's like a flip phone, right? But for money?”

“I'm serious,” Elizabeth said.

Naomi nodded. “I think this is something you're really going to sink your teeth into, Darce—on the outside, she was this wild child, you know, this fuckup, but on the inside, she was always plotting for her historical legacy.”

“I totally get that,” Darcey said.

Elizabeth folded her hands in her lap. Her Lydia wasn't a wild child or a fuckup. Her Lydia was self-centered, and unreliable, and
kind of a jerk. Her Lydia had never been interested in having female friends, at least until pretty famous actresses started coming to her shows, and then she seemed to be one of the gals. But Elizabeth knew that those pictures—or her Buddhism, or whatever she called it—didn't really mean that she had changed. Elizabeth had tried with Lydia; they all had, especially Andrew. At first, it had made Elizabeth jealous, all the nights that Lydia would just happen to be curled up with Andrew on his couch, her socked feet tucked under his legs. This was after Elizabeth and Andrew had made it clear to the band and everyone that they were a real couple, and still, there Lydia would be, batting her eyelashes and asking Andrew for help putting air in her bicycle tires, as if she were ever going to ride that stupid fucking bicycle.

“I want to see this movie,” Elizabeth said. It would only be part of the story, of course, but maybe there was more to Lydia than she knew. If Lydia had been hoarding Kitty's Mustache ephemera, than maybe she was also taking notes. “Did she have diaries?”

“For every day of her life, starting at fifteen.” Naomi smiled. “She did all the work for us, you know?” Naomi uncapped a pen and handed it to Elizabeth. “Need another copy of the form? Ashley?” The assistant was at her side in less than a second.

Elizabeth didn't think about Zoe, who she knew would be happy enough either way. For the first time in a long time, she really thought about Lydia, her long-lost, faraway friend. Twenty-seven was such a dumb time to die. But more than Lydia, she thought about Andrew, and herself. The imaginary girl that Naomi had talked about, that was her—both then and now. She wanted to see herself pick up the guitar and write that song. She wanted to watch Andrew fall in love with her on the spot, once he knew what she was capable of. She wanted it for both of them, and signed her name. “Give me one for Andrew, too,” she said. When Elizabeth left Naomi's office, she went into the bathroom, dried off the countertop with a paper towel, and forged
Andrew's messy signature, just as she'd done a thousand times on school permission forms and credit-card receipts. In their family, she was in charge of the paperwork, and so that's all she was doing, taking care of their joint business. It wasn't a big deal—just two seconds of ink on a sheet of paper. In another two seconds, she'd be in the elevator, and then she'd be in the subway, and then she'd be back in the office, and she'd fax it in, just like she faxed a thousand other forms all day long. Nothing to see here, nothing at all.

A
t home, Zoe's piles of stuff migrated from surface to surface, stacks of unread magazines and bobby pins, but at Hyacinth, all the counters belonged to Jane. Everything was labeled with masking tape, everything was face out. All the salts were next to one another, fine to coarse to flakes.

What people didn't understand about chefs was that it was only partially about cooking. It was about having a vision, a voice, a set of personal beliefs that were so strong that you needed to build something around them. There was literally no reason to open a restaurant if you felt like someone else was doing it better than you could. After twenty-five years of working in kitchens and ten years in her own place, Jane was still sure that no one else was doing Hyacinth better than she was. The restaurant was a glorious machine, and she was its engine—the mastermind. And all she wanted was to be the mastermind of the rest of her life, too.

Jane had a headache, and the headache's name was Ruby. Zoe had it worse in terms of direct combat, that was true, but they could also cuddle up and go play dress-up in Zoe's closet and talk about obscure bands that no one else had ever heard of, and it was all fine. Jane was the baddie. She was always the one who had to tell Ruby she couldn't
have another ice cream, or that she couldn't force all of her preschool friends to call her the Queen and do her bidding. Jane was the boss, and the boss never got to cuddle.

Her own teenage years had been remarkably easy. Massapequa was a fine place to grow up. She played on all the teams, and went out for pizza with her friends, and had crushes on movie stars, just like everyone else. Everyone was a virgin, so it didn't matter that she was a lesbian virgin. What was the difference? They all had bad haircuts and listened to Z100. The summer before she left for the NYU dorms, Jane had spent every day in the local pool, avoiding little kids because they were obviously peeing at all times. She had freckles everywhere, even between her toes.

All summer, her parents treated her like she was made of glass, and she didn't understand why until it was over and they were packing the car full of pillows and boxes and books. Unlike Ruby, Jane had siblings—two brothers and a sister, all younger than she was. Like Ruby, Jane had had no idea what it meant for her parents to have their oldest child get ready to leave home. Leave home! It sounded so final. At the time, Jane had thought her mother was experiencing some very prolonged kind of stroke, where she was always blinking back tears and staring at Jane like she was the new episode of
Dallas
. But she understood it now. Children wanted to go. Children knew that they were old enough—it was prehistoric, baked-in knowledge. Only the parents still thought they were kids. Everyone else—tobacco, the voting booth, porn shops—said otherwise.

Jane moved through the kitchen slowly. She rotated jars so that they were facing the right way. The bell rang over the door, and Jane looked up to see her sous-chef, Clara, striding in. Clara was good—as solid as they came. Someday she'd want her own place, too. There were always more children to leave. Jane could feel herself drifting
into the danger zone, and cleared some space on the counter. She grabbed the bread flour and the salt and the yeast, and when Clara walked in, Jane nodded hello. Baking bread for no reason had always been Jane's favorite form of stress relief, and Clara knew well enough to go about her own work instead of asking questions.