Outtakes from a Marriage (5 page)

“My mother never had a pedicure in her life,” I told her, thinking of my mother’s tanned feet. The bottoms of her heels were hard and made a clicking sound when they met the backs of her sandals, but the skin under her graceful arches was tender and soft.

“Gross!” Ruby had said.

My mother died long before Ruby was born. She was killed in a car accident when I was eight. We have plenty of pictures of her, but to Ruby she’s just a woman frozen in random events of another time. The hopelessly young bride dancing with my father in his naval officer’s uniform on their wedding day. The pretty mother smiling down at my brother in his christening gown. The blond flower child in a maternity dress and a floppy hat, sunburned and freckled, waving from the front seat of a yellow Beetle convertible, a cigarette scissored between the very tips of her middle and index fingers. She always held her cigarettes that way, at the very tips of her long, slim fingers.

Later, Neil and I would fight over who had to ride in the back of that VW, because the floorboards had rotted out there and you had to ride with your feet tucked up beneath you. I told Ruby once about how my mother and Neil and I sang “rounds” while she drove. I liked to start. I was the youngest and would begin with “Row, row, row your boat…,” and Neil would chime in with “Row, row, row your boat” just when I began the next stanza, and finally my mother would join in and we’d all sing as loud as we could, each on our own musical path, winding in and out of one another until we’d fade out, one at a time, with my mother trilling “Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream,” like an abandoned songbird, all alone at the end.

When I arrived at Jonathan’s salon, his assistant, Lexi, parked me at his station.

“He’ll be right with you,” she said.

And there I was. The mirror, in all its steely honesty, laid it out for me as plain as day: I wasn’t getting any younger, and it wasn’t just the lighting. I had recently become aware that my jawline was softening almost imperceptibly, probably something nobody else would notice, but I knew it was a precursor to the heavy jowls that were evident in the photographs of my ancestors—my grandmother, my aunts, and especially my father. When I tilted my head up to sharpen the angle of my jaw, I saw two blond hairs firmly planted beneath my chin. The actual hair on my head was limp and lifeless that morning, and a thin strip of my natural hair color—a color I can only describe as something between dirty blond and filthy gray—bordered my part on each side. I ran my fingers through my hair, trying to disorganize the roots a little. I pursed my lips and opened my eyes wide. I sighed, looked around for Jonathan, and then gazed back at myself.

The mirror arose from a thin metal shelf, upon which lay pointy steel scissors and hair clips and a jar filled with a blue antiseptic solution and combs. On the other side of the mirror, a woman sat facing me, but I could only see her legs and feet, expensive black sling-backs, and crossed tanned ankles.

“…and it was in move-in condition,” the woman was saying to her stylist. “We did a quick paint job—all white. Everything white. I’m into that whole Scandinavian-chic thing. The floors are bleached almost white.”

“White, eh?” replied the stylist, a cute Scottish guy named Frank. I recognized his voice. He had worked with Jonathan for years.

“I know. Everybody tells me I’m insane with three kids and all that white. But everybody takes their shoes off when they come into my apartment now. Everybody. My mother-in-law told me I was rude and I told her, rude or not, I spent fourteen thousand dollars on those floors.”

There was a pause, then: “She has bunions. I guess she doesn’t want anyone to see them.”

Another pause. “So now I’m all done! We’re all moved in!”

“Sounds nice,” said Frank. “I was thinking of doing the same thing to my floors. But we’re just renting. Did you have to remodel the kitchen?”

“No! I loved what the people before us had done.” A pause. “Of course, we had to have the whole place de-vibed.”

“You did? I think my friend did that….”

“Yeah, well, the people we bought the place from, they were going through the messiest divorce. It’s one of the reasons it took so long for us to close. And they were in a nasty custody dispute—allegations of adultery and child molestation. It was just so…toxic! So we got this priest to come in and sprinkle holy water all over the place.”

“I thought you were Jewish.”

“Yeah, I am.”

“Is your husband Catholic?”

“No. Jewish. My friend suggested we do it and we thought, Why not. Actually, I don’t even think the priest was Catholic. Maybe…Episcopalian?”

“Cool!”

I thought about the vibes in our apartment. We had bad ones now. A strong and dark undercurrent pulled treacherously at our household, at all its members. My heart began racing and I felt it coming on, the waves of adrenaline, the fear surges—anxiety attacks that I had been experiencing on and off ever since becoming a mother—and as I reached into my purse for my phone, I thought of Catalina reaching for her rosary beads.

“Why didn’t you tell me you’re such good friends with Cillian Murphy?” Jonathan shrilled, planting himself between the mirror and me.

“I’m not friends with Cillian Murphy,” I said. I dropped the phone back into the murky depths of my bag.

“How come I saw a picture of you sitting next to him at a restaurant? I think it was in
Vanity Fair
?”

“Oh. That wasn’t a restaurant. It was a fund-raiser. Big Brothers or something. Joe and I were just seated at his table. It was months ago—last spring.”

“I just saw the issue the other day! C’mon, what was he like?”

“He seemed nice.”

“I
love
him. He’s got my abs. The abs I want.”

“On yourself or somebody else? Listen, I think I should try blonder….”

“Myself
and
somebody else. Why can’t
I
meet Cillian Murphy? All you have to do is introduce him to me. He’s gay, right?”

“How should I know?”

Jonathan turned now to admire the profile of his abs in the mirror.

“You sat next to him at dinner, didn’t you? Did he flirt with you?”

“Well, no, but he’s probably ten years younger than me, so I don’t think that’s a very good indication.”

“Did he flirt with Joe?”

“He didn’t flirt with anyone. He was very nice.”

Jonathan had to go mix the hair color and when he returned he had a small plastic bowl that he held just above my head. He frowned into the bowl, stirring its contents in a sweeping, scraping motion with a small brush, glancing up now and then to view the busy activity in the salon. A tall young woman walked quickly past, her head sprouting foil, and Jonathan nudged my knee with his.

“That’s so sad,” Jonathan whispered, glancing up at the woman. Then he resumed his stirring.

“What?”

“That’s my poor client who just finished sitting for her color. She’s had it really bad.”

I didn’t want to hear about somebody else’s problems, especially now, but before I could interject, he continued, his voice low, his highlight brush dipping in and out of the pungent gold cream. “She was engaged. To a rich investment banker. Really rich. Goldman Sachs guy. She bought the dress, sent out the invites, booked the Rainbow Room. Deposit and everything…”

“And he left her standing at the altar,” I guessed.

Jonathan paused for dramatic effect, the highlight brush erect. “He killed himself.”

“Oh my God…how?”

“Jumped!”

“From a bridge?”

“From her fourteenth-story apartment!”

“No!” I tried to get a glimpse of the woman’s face, but she was at a sink with her head tilted away from me.

“Right. After. They. Finished. Making. Love.” Jonathan tapped the air with his brush after each word and then shook his head sadly. “I mean, how do you go on?”

“Right after?”

“Right after.”

“Like the minute the…deed was finished? Or after she fell asleep? Or what?”

“Julia, I don’t know! I didn’t ask! But I think she was asleep.”

“Wow,” I said. And then I was silent. Jonathan began painting on my highlights, and covering them with foil, humming away.

Jonathan was one of my first friends in New York. He knew Joe and me long before Joe became famous. In fact, Julian, Jonathan’s boyfriend and business partner, loves to brag that he remembers the days when Joe Ferraro’s checks used to bounce regularly. In return, I remind him that I knew him and Jonathan when their salon was a dingy hole-in-the-wall on Columbus Avenue. Now they have a large salon on Madison, a huge salon in SoHo, and a product line sold in those hair-supply stores in malls all over the country.

I was aching to tell Jonathan about Joe’s phone message. Jonathan has a unique vantage point from which to observe the female condition, and he has consoled me and countless others many times over the years. Difficulties conceiving, unrequited crushes, unfaithful lovers, pregnancies, births—these are the things Jonathan’s clients fret or rejoice about while sitting, facing their own mirrored images, and they find him to be a sympathetic, if somewhat overly opinionated, counselor. As a result, Jonathan has become an expert on love, loss, and the female reproductive system, and I have, more than once, consulted him before calling a doctor. “It’s normal for your periods to be getting heavier now,” Jonathan told me once when I complained. “You’re approaching peri-menopause.” Another time, after I’d felt what I thought was a lump in my breast, Jonathan asked, anxiously, “Is it soft or hard? Painful or not?” When I told him sort of soft and painful, he visibly relaxed. “It’s just a cyst or something. Breast cancer lumps don’t hurt.” Of course, I went in for the mammogram anyway, but he was right, it was nothing. Now I wished I could tap into his mother lode of knowledge about cheating husbands and spying wives, but I realized that while I didn’t mind if Jonathan blabbed about my rather bland gynecological travails, it wouldn’t do to have him whispering about Joe and Julia Ferraro. And asking Jonathan to keep it to himself would have been like asking him not to breathe.

“I’m going to the Golden Globes,” I said suddenly. Here was something I didn’t mind having repeated. “Joe was nominated!”

“Oh my God. I forgot! Julian told me yesterday morning. That’s fantastic! So, who are you wearing?”

“I don’t know.”

“Honey, it’s soon, isn’t it?”

“It’s the twenty-second.”

“You have to call my friend Monica. She works for Vera Wang. And my client Sharon Bronson works for Calvin Klein. She’s the one who outfits celebrities for events. I’ll get Julian to get you their numbers. What about your hair?”

“I don’t know. I guess the network will send somebody over to do hair and makeup. I’ll just get a blow-dry.” I’ve worn my hair in the same style since Ruby was a baby. Shaggy layers. Not long, not short. Easy.

“You have to let me give you hair extensions. It’ll be gorgeous on you. We’ll book it today and I can do them next week.”

“Extensions? I don’t think so….”

“No, Julia, listen to me. Everybody your age and older in Hollywood has extensions. Everybody you see with long hair. Mariska and Julia and Sharon Stone and—”

“Sharon Stone,” I said. “Please!”

“Julia, this haircut is cute, but it says one thing. It says…Mom.”

Sold.

[
five
]

I
had told Catalina that I would pick up Sammy after school that afternoon, so I had the cab drop me off on the corner of Eighty-fourth and Broadway. Then I walked a block west to the double-wide town house that heralds the letters MMS from a rainbow-colored flag waving piously above the front door.

The Multicultural Montessori School had been called the Riverside Montessori School until sometime in the mid-eighties, when Elaine Mayhew took it over. Elaine is a white, upper-middle-class woman who grew up in Short Hills, New Jersey, received her master’s in education at Columbia, and has been married and divorced twice. Elaine hates her type, and if her clone had a child she wanted to get into Multi, that child would almost certainly be rejected. The ideal child at Multi would be a Rwandan adoptee raised by a pair of biracial, trilingual lesbians. Every holiday at Multi is marked by an angry passage penned by Elaine in her monthly Parents’ Memo, outlining why the particular holiday is hurtful and exclusionary and thus, while of course families are free to practice the rites surrounding the holiday in the privacy of their own homes, there would be no school celebration. The October memo reminded us that our children would not be allowed to wear costumes on Halloween because the holiday’s origins may be found in rituals of pagan Christianity. Celebrating Thanksgiving? Why not celebrate all forms of genocide? Instead, suggested Elaine in her November Parents’ Memo, consider inviting a Native American neighbor over for a meal in the spirit of atonement. (I imagined a mad scramble by all three hundred Multi families to locate the one Native American family on the Upper West Side. What a coup it would be to have one’s child say he hosted an atonement dinner!) The winter holidays would obviously not be acknowledged at Multi, and Elaine would appreciate it if parents would keep in mind, while considering holiday decorations, that “not all of your child’s playdates understand your traditions. Trees, stockings, and candles can be confusing, alienating, and hurtful to children who don’t share these idolatries with their own families.” I knew better than to expect a Valentine from Sammy—everybody knows it was
Saint
Valentine—but I still held out hope for a Mother’s Day card that first year. What could it hurt to have the kids scrawl out a card for their mom? Maybe a little handprint pressed into a slab of clay? It could hurt plenty, explained Elaine in her April memo, if, for example you are being raised by two dads.

It was clear, after that first year at Multi, that in Elaine’s mind, the ideal world would be inhabited by people who all looked different and were multiculturally diverse on the outside, but inside were in intellectual and spiritual lockstep with one another. Every speech Elaine gave was peppered with language about “celebrating difference,” but celebrating different religions or holidays was not tolerated. I tried tossing this out once or twice at cocktail parties where there were other Multi parents, but it was usually met with an appalled silence, or worse, robotic statements like, “We’re glad our children are growing up in a time of greater sensitivity about differences.”

As I approached the school, I noticed the usual group of predominantly white, upper-middle-class “difference-aware” parents standing and talking among themselves. This group was slightly outnumbered by the brown-skinned, working-class group of caregivers who were “difference aware” enough to keep themselves slightly set apart from the parents. The kids hadn’t been let out yet, so I slowed my pace considerably. A year and a half of picking up Sammy at school had created an actual anxiety condition that only presented itself when I was surrounded by other Multi parents, and sometime that past fall I had gotten into the habit of having Catalina drop off and pick up Sammy each day, so I was working to change that.

I was almost at the school’s front steps when I saw the three mothers I dreaded most—Bunny Northrop, Vicki Walker, and Judy Green—standing slightly apart from the group of other parents. They stood to the side and surveyed the rest of the adults with a sense of casual superiority, like three lionesses surveying a flock of useless birds. Occasionally Bunny or Vicki or Judy would swing her freshly coiffed head toward the others and whisper something with a sly smile and the other two would return the smile and nod. I hastily fumbled about in my purse for my phone, a prop I often used at pickup time, but before I could press it to my ear, Bunny cried out, “Julia!”

I smiled and waved. The three waved back and motioned me toward them.

“Three days in a row!” said Judy. “This is getting to be a habit!”

“Is Catalina okay?” asked Bunny earnestly.

“Yes,” I said, forcibly turning up the corners of my mouth. “Why?”

“Oh…no reason! It’s just nice to see you, that’s all.”

These three took great pride in the fact that despite their full-time nannies—Bunny had a cook and housekeeper as well—they made it a point to drop off
and
pick up their children from school each day. Most of the working moms just did drop-off.

“Gregory is so relieved to see me when he gets out of school,” Vicki told me once. “I feel sorry for the little ones who have a nanny pick them up every day.”

“I suppose you’d feel even more sorry if the parents left their jobs to pick up their kids, got fired, and could no longer send them here or feed them,” I ventured, to which Vicki replied, “Oh no, I didn’t mean the working parents. I just meant the parents who stay home and send the nanny. Kids know the difference.” The funny thing is, I used to be a lot like Bunny, Vicki, and Judy. When Ruby was little, I harshly judged parents whom I felt were negligent, based on the lack of quality time I thought they spent with their children. I didn’t have a nanny, so I picked Ruby up every day. Now that we had Catalina working full time, she loved to pick up Sammy, so it seemed easiest to let her do it. Now that I thought about it, I’d love to be Catalina at pickup time. Bunny, Vicki, and Judy didn’t talk to nannies.

“Did you get my message?” asked Judy.

“Umm…I don’t think so.” I actually had not checked my own voice mail since the night before when I started checking Joe’s. “Were you calling about a playdate?”

“I wish,” said Judy, rolling her eyes. Vicki and Bunny smiled at her sympathetically.

“Actually, I have the unfortunate honor of chairing the auction again this year. Elaine knows we live in the same building, so she’s asked me to ask Joe if he’d be willing to be the auctioneer this time. But since I don’t really know Joe, I was wondering if you would ask him….”

“Or persuade him!” said Bunny.

“Or beg him,” laughed Judy. “Really, I do hate to have to ask you.”

“No problem, I’ll ask him,” I said, knowing that it would save everybody’s time if I just said no now. Joe would never stand up in front of a bunch of parents in a school auditorium auctioning off trips to Paris and Nantucket. He had told me so last year when they asked. “I’m shooting that night,” he had said to them, but he said to me, “I’d rather be sodomized with a burning poker.”

“Thank you, Julia, you know I can’t stand doing this. It just comes with the job….”

“Chairing the auction, that’s such a lot of work,” I said, because Bunny, Vicki, and Judy liked to be told how hard they worked. They considered themselves the best kind of working mothers: the stay-at-home kind. They were kick-ass, hardworking, career stay-at-home moms who rarely stayed at home. Their mornings were devoted to dropping off their children at their various schools, a task that was rarely delegated to the nanny, not only because they considered school drop-off time “quality” time with their children, but also because it was prime time for viewing and judging the other mothers and their children. Bunny, Vicki, and Judy were concerned about all children, not just their own, so they kept tabs on who looked hung over (“Poor Libby Myer. I wonder who puts the kids to bed while she’s out drinking with clients all night?”) and who was having trouble coping (“Two under three and working full time as a litigation lawyer—no wonder Claire looks so…old. I hope she’s not sick. For the kids’ sake”). The remainder of the school day was devoted to meetings of various school, playground, co-op, and condo committees, and their afternoons were spent monitoring their own and all the working mothers’ children and nannies at the playgrounds. At night, they poured themselves a generous glass of wine while the nanny got the children ready for bed and another after the nanny went home. Bunny, Vicki, and Judy had husbands who worked in finance. They rarely saw them.

I had always viewed these women as ridiculous but harmless sanctimommies, but now I felt a sense of guarded rage toward them. “You don’t
do
anything,” I wanted to say to them. “Chairing the auction isn’t a real job! How can you justify having a full-time nanny when you don’t
do
anything?” But I didn’t do anything, either, and, honestly, this was the first time I actually admitted that to myself. I mean
fully
admitted it. Until that afternoon at Multi, I had somehow managed to use my fragmented half-lives to justify my lack of a whole life. I had told myself for years that I couldn’t work as a writer, my trained vocation, because I had children who needed my time. And I couldn’t devote all of my time to my children, because, well, I was so smart! I had a degree in journalism! I had a screenplay I was going to start, a children’s book I was going to finish. I had convinced myself that I was engaged in this hectic lifestyle, this crazy balancing act of motherhood and career, but I didn’t really
do
anything.

Once, when Ruby was in kindergarten, her teacher, Ms. Hill, had grabbed me when I came to pick her up after school.

“Ruby said the cutest thing today,” she gushed. “We went around the room and all the kids said what they wanted to be when they grew up, and Ruby said, ‘I want to be a nothing, just like Mommy!’”

I managed to smile at Ms. Hill that day and say, “That’s adorable. I work at night…when she’s asleep. So she’d really have no idea what I do….”

But Ms. Hill had moved on to greet another parent and I remember that I chided myself for caring so much what she thought.

Now, caring very much what the Mommy Gestapo thought, I said, “How do you find the time, Judy?”

“Oh, I do it every year, either officially or unofficially. I know I’m crazy, but I could run the thing with my eyes closed now, so I figure why not do it one more year. Next year will be the first time in nine years that I won’t have a child at Multi, so I’m actually kind of feeling a little sad, knowing that this’ll be the last time I set up the silent auction, the last time I have to delegate all the little details….”

“I’m furiously taking notes!” said Vicki.

“Vicki and Bunny are going to chair the auction committee next year,” explained Judy.

“Great,” I said, eyeing my watch.
Where were the kids? Where the fuck were the kids?

“Anyway, Elaine would be so thrilled to have Joe up there at the podium! I know he was shooting last year, but hopefully this year he’ll be able to do it!”

“I’m not sure, but I think he’ll be in the middle of shooting this year, too.”

“Um, no, they’re actually on hiatus the week of the auction,” said Bunny.

I was floored.
I
didn’t even know when the show’s spring hiatus was. “How do you know?” I stammered.

“My sister-in-law has a niece who works as a production assistant on the show, so we got a copy of the show’s shooting schedule and set the date of the auction accordingly,” Bunny said proudly.

Once, last year, when Ruby was playing in a soccer game, Joe made the mistake of signing an autograph for a mother who was also watching the game. Instantly, a crowd of nannies, parents, and siblings formed around him, and he said, “Sorry, guys, I’m here to watch my daughter’s game.”

“Okay, just this one,” “I’m a huge fan,” “Just one for my mom, c’mon,” were the replies. Joe signed a few more and then said, “That’s it. No more. My daughter’s on the field.”

I had moved away from Joe when the crowd formed so I could watch Ruby. As the group dispersed, two rejected mothers, obviously unaware of my relationship to Joe, stood beside me, complaining bitterly.

“He’s just standing there!” one of them said, and the other replied, “I hate it when people get famous and don’t remember to pay their dues to the people who got them there: the fans!”

“I like Tom Hanks. I hear he always signs autographs and poses for fans, and he’s much more famous than Joe Ferraro. I didn’t even know who he was until you told me.”

“It makes them feel more famous if they refuse to sign autographs—as if Joe Ferraro’s autograph is worth something.” The women ranted on like this until Joe came to stand next to me, draping his arm across my shoulder. The mothers, visibly embarrassed, but giggling, scurried away.

I realized that this was a similar situation. I knew Joe didn’t want to be the auctioneer, but since the committee had deliberately scheduled the auction for his free week, in their minds he would just be hanging around doing nothing instead of honorably paying his dues—to his fans and to his dear son’s school. I wanted to ask them how they would like it if I found out their husbands’ business schedules and arranged some stuff for them to do the next time they had a few days off. Instead, I said, “Great, well, I’ll ask him.”

Judy’s cell phone rang. “Oh, sorry, guys, I have to get this. I think it’s the lighting guy for the auction,” she said as she stepped away from the group to answer.

“That reminds me, I have to check my voice mail, I’m expecting a call,” I said, cursing myself for not coming up with this sooner.

Many times I had stood waiting for Sammy with my phone pressed to my ear, occasionally tapping a button so that the other parents would assume I was checking messages. Of course, I was just using the phone as a prop to keep from having to discuss test scores and ongoing school placements and reading readiness with parents who had allowed their child’s life to eclipse their own. Now, as I held the phone tight against my freshly blond hair, it occurred to me that I did have messages to listen to. Joe’s messages. I tapped out his number and his code and waited, smiling occasionally at Sammy’s classmates’ parents as they crossed the street.