The Cousins (19 page)

She read Marc’s articles in bed because that was the only time she had to herself. “What are you reading?” Roger asked.

“Marc Delon was in the office today with his dog. He left me these. He wrote them.”

Lie number one, she thought. Is this how these things happen? And I didn’t even do anything with him.

“Any good?” Roger asked.

“Actually, yes.” They were essays mostly about feelings, social mores and what it was like to be a young man like him in the world today. One was about problems with a girlfriend he was living with, an affair that seemed doomed. She looked at the publication date and figured this was the one he had recently broken up with. Why had he given her this particular piece? He obviously wanted her to know him better, unless it was a favorite of his. She recognized the sadness of knowing that something that had been briefly radiant was over, that nothing was right anymore and all that was left was closure. She had felt that way herself in her series of ill-fated romances between husbands and before meeting Roger. It was interesting to read it from the man’s point of view.

She remembered the cleaning woman who had worked for her years ago, who had formerly worked for her family. They had been looking for a way to get rid of her, and offering her to Olivia as a favor was a good excuse. The cleaning woman was a friend of the woman who worked for Uncle David and Aunt Hedy. “Your family is saying bad things about you,” she reported, having heard the household gossip from her friend. “She keeps telling him that you’re a slut. He tries to defend you but . . .” The
she
was Hedy, the
he
Uncle David. Olivia had been deeply hurt.

“Tell her it’s very painful being a slut,” she had said cheerfully, and the cleaning woman had laughed. She knew how hard single life was, even if Hedy had forgotten.

Olivia waited two days to call Marc. “I read your articles,” she said. “You’re very talented. I loved them.”

“Thank you.”

“Some of the things you said reminded me of myself.”

“Really?”

“Especially the one about how hard it is to go on being with someone when you both know you’ve made a mistake. I mean—not Roger, of course. I’m talking about the past.”

“Your two marriages.”

“And a few other errors.”

“But I don’t like being alone either,” Marc said. “Did you?”

“No. But I was good at it.”

“I’m not even very good at it, unless I’m with someone. Then I love my private time. I like to go off by myself and write, or just think.”

“The comforting framework,” Olivia said, remembering Mandelay.

“Yes, exactly.”

“You must need these tear sheets back.”

“I do. We could have a drink together next week and you could give them to me then.”

She was glad he hadn’t said she could just mail them, but she hadn’t expected him to. “All right.”

“Monday?”

“That would be fine.” Monday evening Roger would be at the gym. It seemed ironic that now she was using his former cheating hours to do something secret of her own. She refused to let herself feel guilty; it was only a drink in a public place.

“The Carlyle again, at six?” he said.

“All right.” Just don’t say
It’s our place
, she thought, or I’ll cancel.

“It’s our place,” Marc said ironically, and then he laughed.

She smiled. She had underestimated his charm. She didn’t intend to cancel.

22

U
NCLE
D
AVID’S BIRTHDAY PARTY
was on Saturday night. Nick and Lynne’s new apartment, which they had spent so long renovating, was a duplex, with a large, curving staircase, a wraparound terrace overlooking all of Central Park, a Lichtenstein, a Jim Dine and a Botero in the living room and three Warhols in the dining room, which had been set up with round tables and spindly gilt chairs for the party. All the other furniture was modern but very comfortable, and the painted walls were so shiny you could ice-skate on them. Everyone was very dressed up. The adults were walking around inspecting the new apartment, complimenting everything. The children were gathered in Amber’s room, which was actually a suite, waiting impatiently for turns to play her pinball machine. Next to Amber’s suite was another one, furnished but without any toys in it yet, waiting for the second child Nick and Lynne hoped to have someday.

While Nick and Lynne showed off their apartment, Melissa and Bill were showing off the Uncle David commemorative scrapbook, which was huge and reposed on the living room coffee table. A tuxedoed waiter brought around glasses of champagne and sparkling water, a maid passed hors d’oeuvres. Someone had been hired to play the piano, and cocktail music tinkled quietly behind the familiar voices as the Miller family gathered again. The cousins greeted each other with hugs and kisses. Uncle David was beaming.

Almost everyone was there: Uncle Seymour and Aunt Iris, Aunt Myra, Jenny and Paul, Taylor and Tim, Kenny and Pam, even Anna the Perfect and her husband, and a young man who looked oddly familiar until Olivia recognized him as Charlie the Perfect’s son Tony, there with his preppy-looking wife. There were also over a dozen older people, who were longtime friends of Uncle David’s.

“You have to come visit us,” Pam said warmly to Olivia and Roger. “We’re moving into our new house next month. It has lots of rooms for guests.”

And no unheated water bed, Olivia thought, remembering. Kenny has someone to take care of him now. “We’d love to,” she said, although she knew that was the last thing Roger would ever want to do on a vacation.

She wandered away and looked into Amber’s bedroom suite, admiring her little cousins. They all seemed so much older, bigger than when she had seen them last. They changed so fast. She felt a kind of sadness wash over her. I’m missing their lives, she thought. They were much too busy to notice her, and she went back to the living room to join the grown-ups.

“Those kids are something,” she said to Jenny, who was standing at the window gazing out at the view.

“I know,” Jenny said. “Did you see how tall Sam has gotten? All the girls at school are crazy about him.”

“Does he have a girlfriend?”

“Two or three.” She preened. “Do we look like parents of a teenager?” She obviously expected Olivia to say no.

“No.”

“And Max is the next teenager coming up.”

The maid came by with her tray. “Sushi,” she said.

They took some. “Do you still eat this stuff?” Olivia asked Jenny in a whisper.

“Why?”

“You know, pollution.”

“Not usually, but this is such a fancy party, I’m sure it’s fresh.”

“I guess.” They ate it. “Nice apartment, isn’t it,” Olivia said.

“Amazing. Expensive, though.”

“I can just imagine. Funny to see Charlie’s son here all of a sudden. I didn’t even recognize him.”

“He wants to get to know the family better, I think,” Jenny said.

“Ah. But of course Charlie isn’t here. He never comes to anything.”

Jenny’s eyes opened wide with shock. “You didn’t know?”

“Know what?” Olivia said.

“Charlie’s dead.”

Dead?
“How could Charlie be dead?” she said, feeling as if they were talking about some other family. “How could I not know? When? What happened?”

“His plane went into a mountain in July,” Jenny said. “He was at the controls, as usual. It wasn’t his fault, it was structural failure. You and Roger were in Paris. I thought somebody would have told you.”

“Nobody told me.”

“Well,” Jenny said, “it was a pretty big shock.”

Olivia was so numbed by the news that she didn’t even know how she felt. Charlie the Perfect had always been the golden boy. Although she had hardly known him, she had known about him. He had been the family genius in business, on the board of many charities: well-dressed, handsome, charming. Charlie dead in a stupid, pointless accident. And he had been so healthy! For this he needed to be a vegetarian, she thought; to work out instead of eating lunch, to run the Marathon and finish at the same time as his son?

The name Charlie the Perfect, which she had given him years ago, was partly ironic, because like his sister, Anna the Perfect, to the older generation he could do no wrong. But she had always felt that he had been too competitive. She remembered an incident years ago, when he had visited Mandelay. He was already an adult. Olivia had told the family proudly that she had finally swum fifty laps in an Olympic pool. It was a particular triumph for her because she was so unathletic. They were impressed.

“Single or double laps?” Charlie had asked briskly, his eyes narrowing.

“Single.”

“That doesn’t count,” he said. “You did twenty-five laps. I do seventy-five double laps in an Olympic pool at my gym. Where did you do yours?”

“Here.”

“Mandelay doesn’t have an Olympic pool,” he said. “An Olympic pool is the size of a football field. You’d know it if you saw one.”

He had left her feeling embarrassed and silly.

“Uncle Seymour is teaching Tony about the store,” Jenny said. “He was a lawyer, but now he has to give it up. He always knew someday he would run Julia’s, but he didn’t think it would be so soon.”

“Even Aunt Myra didn’t tell me,” Olivia said. Now she was beginning to feel left out and insulted. “I would have said something to them.”

“It’s very strange,” Jenny said quietly. “Uncle Seymour and Aunt Iris never mentioned Charlie again.”

She imagined their silence. “It must be so painful for them,” she said. “They can’t even talk about it yet.”

“Of course. At their age, to lose a child. They expected to go first.”

“Everyone must think I’m terrible not to have gone to the funeral,” Olivia said. “But no one told me.”

“It was a huge funeral,” Jenny said. “He was a pillar of the community. It was in the New York
Times
.”

“We didn’t get the New York
Times
when we were in Paris.”

“Well, don’t worry about it. Nobody’s mad at you.”

“They’re always mad at me,” Olivia said.

“No, no,” Jenny said calmly, soothingly, like a good mother. Olivia thought how lucky Jenny’s children were. Lila would have told her the family was angry and upset.

She glanced over at Uncle Seymour and Aunt Iris. Suddenly they seemed very frail. They were smiling at Tony, their grandson. His little boy had come out of the room where the children were playing and was clinging to his mother’s side, asking for hors d’oeuvres. Aunt Iris leaned down to pat him and handed him a cheese puff. Their great-grandson: the chain of life. This was how they could go on.

The pianist stopped playing. Nick came forward to make a toast. “To my wonderful father,” he said, raising his glass. Olivia wondered if Charlie’s recent tragedy would make Nick think again about continuing to risk his life helicopter skiing. She hoped so.

Nick began to reminisce. He told of fun-loving Uncle David’s youthful adventures that had been handed down as family anecdotes, and then of the good times they had all had together as Nick and his sister Melissa were growing up. Olivia had heard these stories before. She let her mind wander. She looked at Roger across the room, so familiar and solid and kind—and yet burdened by secrets—and then she thought about Marc Delon’s soft lips against her face.

Melissa came forward then, slim as a waif in her narrow black dress with the little rhinestone straps, and raised her glass. “To my darling father,” she said. “Happy birthday, and thank you all for coming here to help celebrate his special day.”

There was applause. Uncle David stood up. “I want to thank my children for this wonderful party,” he said, “and for just being them. I couldn’t ask for better children, or nicer grandchildren. And I thank my beloved wife Hedy for the many years of happiness she gave me, gave all three of us. She was the best of wives, and the best of mothers. I have had a happy life.”

He always thought Hedy was a paragon, Olivia thought. This marvelous Hedy he was thanking was not the sharp-tongued, critical Hedy she had known. Somehow it seemed strange to hear him talk about Hedy, as if she shouldn’t be there anymore, should just disappear, because nobody else had liked her. I wish I were that important to someone’s life, she thought. I used to think I was to Roger. But Uncle David never looked at another woman in all the years they were together.

They went into the dining room for dinner. Olivia and Roger sat next to Taylor and Tim, at a table with Jenny and Paul and Kenny and Pam. “It’s nice to have a family,” Taylor said. She looked wistful.

“You have all of us,” Olivia said.

“I mean parents and children.”

“I don’t have parents or children.”

“I have my
mother
,” Taylor said, and made a face, as if that didn’t count. But it did count, that was the trouble.

They ate cold lobster and drank a crisp white wine. “Isn’t this a lovely party?” Pam said. “I’ll give you one, Kenny, when you’re old.” She smiled flirtatiously. The idea of Kenny’s being seventy-five seemed light-years away.

“ ‘Will you still need me, will you still feed me, when I’m sixty-four?’” Kenny sang. “Do you remember how ancient that seemed? You’d have to be fed.”

“I’m off Prozac now,” Taylor said. “I can start trying to get pregnant before I’m too old.”

“The child will feed you,” Kenny said, smiling.

“The child may have to,” Taylor said. “I’m still paying Grady’s mortgage. No one wants to buy his house. I need to get his deck fixed.”

“I wanted to fix it myself,” Tim said, signing. “It would have been kind of fun. But she won’t let me.”

“You have better things to do,” Taylor said. “You’re an artist. Grady is my responsibility.”

Is she being possessive or guilty? Olivia wondered. Perhaps both. Taylor had to be aware that Grady had never felt secure enough to come to her directly to talk about his life, and she had been the closest person to him in the world. Neither of them had ever mentioned the videotape he had sent her; they obviously felt it had been an overture best forgotten. Perhaps now Taylor was sorry about that.

They ate tender, rare filet mignon with baby vegetables, and drank a velvety red wine. “How was Paris?” Paul asked cheerfully.

“Wonderful,” Roger said. “It was a perfect vacation.”

Except that you weren’t really attracted to me, Olivia thought, and I met someone I can’t seem to get out of my mind. “It was fun,” she said.

“There is something to be said for not having five children,” Jenny remarked dryly, but they all knew she didn’t mean it.

They ate field salad with brie with the rest of the velvety red wine, and then there was sorbet, long-stemmed strawberries, champagne and a huge chocolate birthday cake which Uncle David cut to applause from the guests. “Your uncle is going to drop dead from this meal before he even gets to go on his cruise,” Roger said.

His saying that annoyed her; she felt it was ill-advised and morbid. Dear old Uncle David. Why couldn’t Roger behave himself; what was wrong with him? She didn’t want to think about one other person dying. But of course, Roger didn’t know about Charlie yet.