The Late, Lamented Molly Marx (20 page)

Much to the surprise of the woman who used to be me, back in the city Barry, Annabel, and I had settled into snug domesticity. Barry had become reasonably housebroken, and when the weather cooperated, we’d spend hours each weekend at the playground, steaming cups of coffee in hand, eager to meet others who tottered on this strange new precipice called parenthood. After his morning runs, Barry would often be the one to change Annabel’s soggy nighttime diaper and give her breakfast. Sometimes I would catch him dancing around the room, Annabel in his arms, and my heart would be jelly.

Every night, after I put the baby to sleep, I’d fix my version of a low-fat homemade dinner, and while we ate, Barry and I would rattle on about Annabel, obviously the most precocious and charming baby on earth. Each Saturday, we paid Delfina an outrageous sum so she would sleep over, and we’d splurge on an evening out, even if all we did was eat pad thai at a local joint.

It wasn’t a glamorous Manhattan life. It wasn’t even a glamorous Sioux Falls life. But it was comfortable, which was the last word I’d have used to describe how it felt to be sitting in an over-air-conditioned, overdesigned hotel room, weary from travel, knowing that for the next
four hours I’d be trapped in a flouncy four-star restaurant, trying to verbally joust with Luke and two recent graduates of Wesleyan and Yale.

I picked up the phone. “Hey Luke,” I said, trying to sound like one of the guys. “Please don’t think I’m a thankless wretch, but room service is looking pretty sweet right now.”

“I totally understand,” he said, too quickly. “It was clear you were wiped.”

Did I look that bad?

“Get some rest,” he said, “and I’ll see you tomorrow. Seven-thirty?”

I thanked him, hung up, and expected to feel relieved, but my vanity kicked in. Perhaps the real reason I hadn’t wanted to have dinner with Luke was because I was afraid he’d put the moves on me, and I wouldn’t know how to react. Since it was clear that wasn’t going to happen, I felt like the hound at the pound that no one wants. I circled the room twice, flicked the television on and off, called Barry and discussed whether we should install a garbage disposal, devoured my artisanal vegetable salad in seven bites, and fell asleep while watching Johnny Depp on pay-per-view. I was in the wine capital of North America and hadn’t even ordered a glass.

For the next three days, I labored like a migrant worker. Rise at six, quit thirteen hours later. Unpack. Pack up. Push away the ottoman. Move it back. Arrange a tray for imaginary guests. Pick a different tray and do it over, once with gherkins, once without. Lay down the hand-tufted wool rug. Decide it’s better suited to an English boardinghouse. Roll it back. Run upstairs, forty-seven times. Make the bed. Sweep the floor. Remove stains from the marble counters. Resist the impulse to allow this loftlike aerie to metastasize into a Parisian flat crammed with flea market frippery.

“Beautiful, beautiful,” the good-natured Eric would say after every setup. He was working as hard as I was, and not averse to pushing a sectional couch around the room until I decided where it should park.

“You go, girl,” Jasper, the Yalie said to me, again and again. That expression should be banned, especially when repeated with an English accent via Nashville. I longed to stuff a linen pillow sham down his throat.

But the best praise came from Luke. “I think this one’s going to be great,” he’d say before he took a shot. Every time he finished, he’d turn to me with “Told ya so, Molly. Perfect. Just perfect.”

As Jasper snapped Polaroids of each setup, he put them in a book, and by two o’clock on the third day, we could all see that our efforts had yielded a major success. There was nothing left to do. If the editor who’d sent us on this mission had any sense, the minute he saw Luke’s film he’d put him under contract in perpetuity.

“How shall we celebrate?” Luke said after we’d packed up and gotten into Eric and Jasper’s SUV to drive back to Healdsburg. The question was meant for all of us, but he was looking at me, sitting next to him in the backseat. Luke was wearing a black T-shirt and khaki cargo shorts, and his legs were stretched out, tanned and strong.

“My vote is to pull into that winery right there and drink Sonoma’s finest until we’re shit-faced,” Eric said. “See the sign?”

“You go, girl,” Jasper said to Eric. We all knew Eric was gay, but I loathed Jasper all the more for banging on it.

“The driver calls the shots,” Luke ruled as he rolled his eyes at the back of Jasper’s head. Since Eric was behind the wheel, he chose to turn off Dry Creek Road into the Ferrari-Carano Vineyards.

Some of the wineries we’d passed were little more than tumbledown shacks, but we could see we’d hit pay dirt. At the end of a drive, a vast pink stucco estate house with arched leaded-glass windows stood before us, fronted by classical gardens circling a fountain. The lawn was rolling and lush, the privets manicured. Thinking back to it, the place reminds me of the Duration, especially when Puccini wafts through the air.

“Holy cow,” Eric said as he led us into the tasting room off the main lobby. It was all but devoid of other customers, but thousands of wine bottles glinted, there for the buying.

From behind a gleaming wood bar a white-aproned man greeted us. I have no idea if he knew a Barolo from a Chianti, but I liked the look of his shoulder-length salt-and-pepper hair, tied back in a ponytail. “Would you care for a pour of our Syrah?” he wondered.

We would. And the zinfandel, the Tresor, the Eldorados—the Noir as well as the Gold—the fumé blanc, and, what the hell, the cabernet sauvignon. All four of us sipped and critiqued with flowing pretension.
We started with “fruity” and “earthy” and shamelessly worked ourselves up to “herbaceous with hints of anise, berry, and tobacco.”

After nearly three hours, Eric and Jasper decided to drive back to town; they were heading to San Francisco. That I, a full-fledged mother, allowed these two to get into a moving vehicle now fills me with shame, but that’s how drunk I was. “Don’t worry,” Luke said to them. “We’ll find our way home.” The proprietor was only too happy to give us a card for a taxi company: the longer our stay, the bigger his sale.

Eventually, Luke and I had sampled nearly every wine from the vineyard. I decided to ship home a case of the zinfandel. Luke picked the Syrah. I wandered around in a fog, lubricated as much by the past week’s work as by that day’s excellent vintages. Nor did the excellent company hurt. Whatever fear I’d had about living up to Luke’s expectations had been washed down the hatch, and we were laughing and showing off for each other.

“You go, girl,” Luke said in Prince Charles’ voice. In the moment, I thought he was hilarious.

Shaky on my feet, I was ready to call our cab when Luke motioned me out to the big white-tiled center hall and pointed to some steps. “Let’s explore,” he said, mischief in his eyes and voice.

“Are you sure it’s okay to go down there?”

“The door’s unlocked. I took a peek when I took a leak.” Another line of his I’m now embarrassed to say that I felt deserved a hearty laugh.

We tiptoed down a short flight of creaky wooden stairs into a low-ceilinged windowless room the size of a basketball court. From wall to wall, heavy old oak barrels sat like monks, each presumably filled with wine. The cellar air felt refreshingly cool. Like Alice in her maze, I walked in one direction and Luke in the other, in and out of narrow aisles.

“Molly, come here,” Luke stage-whispered from across the room.

“What is it?” I asked. Maybe he’d found a barrel with an open tap and we could polish off our afternoon with one last, secret swig.

“Come over here,” he said. “You’re going to love this.”

I did.

He grabbed both of my hands and pushed me against the side of the tall wooden barrel. Then he kissed me, hard. His lips tasted better than
any of Ferrari-Carano’s premier selections, although I swear I detected a drop of the zin, with just a hint of boysenberry and licorice. He slid his cool tongue deep into my mouth and cupped my face in his hands while he tenderly and sensuously explored. “I’ve been dying to do that for days,” he whispered.

I said nothing, but I let my hands roam to his back and my mouth stayed with his. “No” and “yes” both came to mind as he unzipped my jeans and slid his fingers inside me. I didn’t stop him and answered his lust with my own, each sweet movement calibrated for maximum pleasure, his and mine, together, as my own hands found his flesh, hard and inviting.

By the time we heard footsteps, we were both on the floor, which in my bliss felt as comfortable as an inner-spring mattress. “I don’t think I want to spend the night here,” I said.

My hand in his, we walked up the steps and outside, into the twilight. The winery was closing and we were its last visitors to leave. I gave Luke the card for the taxi, which he called with his arm draped around my shoulder. He leaned heavily and deliciously against my side.

We walked, melted into one, toward the entrance, and stopped to kiss by a towering bronze statue. The figure was a wild boar said to roam the Sonoma Valley, where he stole away the grapes. A plaque announced him as Bordeaux: those who made a wish while they touched the giant snout were said to see their dream come true.

I looked up. The big boy’s nose was rubbed to a coppery gleam. I stretched to reach it.

Let me love the right man
, I said to myself.
Let me not ruin my life. Let me figure out what will make me happy
.

I knew I’d made three wishes, not one, and hoped that Bordeaux wouldn’t fault me on a technicality.

arry!” Stephanie says.

It better be important
, Barry thinks. He’s behind schedule, because surgery ran long today which he’s explained to me can happen when the patient is enormously fat.

As Stephanie begins to speak, his nurse steps into his office. “Sorry to interrupt, but Delfina’s on line two,” she tells him. “She says it’s urgent.”

“Later, Stephanie.” Barry clicks off. He hopes Delfina isn’t calling to make a sudden trip back home to take care of a sick relative. Or ask for a raise. Or resign. He worries about this every day. Delfina is the Swiss Army knife of his life, solving virtually every practical problem.

“Dr. Marx?” Delfina says to Barry. “Mrs. Marx’s sister—”

“Lucy?”
What now?

“Mrs. Marx’s sister. She snatched Annabel,” Delfina blurts out, her usual Zen-like restraint splintered. The way Narcissa, a Mary Higgins Clark devotee, relayed the incident a minute ago, Lucy had been ready to whisk Annabel away to, Narcissa speculates, a bunker under a chicken coop in some undisclosed location.

“Oh my God,” Barry says, gulping air. “That bitch. Where’s Annabel? Is she okay?”

“Annabel’s fine—she’s with Narcissa and Ella. I’m on my way over there. Mrs. Marx’s sister”—Delfina no longer thinks it seems Christian to call her Lucy—“took off.” After Barry reaches Annabel—“Hi, Daddy. Aunt Moosey came to my school! Yes, it was very exciting. No, she didn’t say why. Daddy, Narcissa’s going to make us milkshakes now. Bye”—he cancels four consultations: a sweet-sixteen chin job, a redo on one of those unfortunate noses from Kitty’s generation that look as if they were pointed in a pencil sharpener, a postdivorce nose-jowls combo, and a fiftieth-birthday lift on a woman who loathed the neck rings she’d accumulated each year as if she were a redwood. He bolts from his office, hops in a taxi—Barry has the best cab karma of anyone I know—and rushes home, ignoring Stephanie’s repeated calls.

When Barry is nervous, he paces. It is twenty minutes later now, and like a panther at a substandard zoo, he’s traversed the long hall, the living room, the dining room, the kitchen, and back, again and again and again. Twice he has started to phone his mother and Detective Hicks—in that order—and thought better of it. Finally, he makes a call. “Stephanie. You aren’t going to believe this.”

“Jesus, finally! I’ve been trying to reach you everywhere.”
God damn it
, she thinks,
who are you to duck my calls?
“Where are you?”

“Home.”

“Then I’m on my way over,” she says, seizing this unexpected gift. “I should be there in twenty minutes.”

Barry continues his loop-de-loop, then suddenly goes into our bedroom and opens an embossed leather book. No BlackBerry for me. It had been my annual ritual to spend the better part of one Sunday in early January entering the stats of my nearest and dearest into a tasteful address book while I deliberated on who should make the cut. This year, I edited away three college friends and two former coworkers, and when four of these people showed at my funeral, I was shamed, deeply.

Barry reaches Brie at work. “Lucy’s gone off the deep end,” he says. I admire his restraint. “She made a grab for Annabel.”

“Back up. That’s impossible,” Brie says. “Lucy Divine can be off, but she’s not ready for an asylum.”

“I assure you, she’s both.”

Brie’s pause is a true seven-second delay, while she processes that Barry expects her to take action. Of what sort, she doesn’t know, but she recognizes that only face time will do. “Shall I come over?”