The Late, Lamented Molly Marx (21 page)

“I would appreciate that.”

Barry doesn’t dislike Brie. He admires her brains and drive and thinks she’s “drop-dead sexy.” He’s convinced that her current partner preference is temporary, contrived to show the world how progressive she is. But rapport between the two has been tamped down by Barry’s intuitive, accurate awareness that his every fumble and flirtation has been deconstructed by Brie and me for years.

Thanks to a waiting company car, it takes exactly ten minutes for Brie to drive up Madison and cross the park. In my building, only two apartments’ doors open on every floor. Brie and Stephanie enter the building at the same time, silently share an elevator, and, to their mutual surprise, exit together to walk to the Marx residence. Brie turns to Stephanie. Her first impulse is to extend her hand for a shake, but she checks herself. This stranger in tight jeans, spiky boots, and go-getter perfume could be one of my mommy-pals, Brie decides. The woman might take such a gesture as butch.

Brie fears being typecast and tends to overcorrect. Today she is wearing a snug white sheath and spectator oxfords as pointy as tweezers. Their gold metal heels could double as ice picks, and her quietly shimmering snake bracelet winds around one arm. She’d be pleased if you’d guess her occupation as a rock star’s publicist, not corporate litigator.

Brie smiles warmly. Stephanie does not respond. “I’m Brie Lawson, Molly’s friend,” she says nonetheless.

“Stephanie Joseph,” she answers coolly. “Annabel’s therapist.”

Liar, liar, pants on fire!

Barry opens the door. His thinning hair is tangled from running his hands through it and he’s padding around barefoot, although he’s still in his rumpled dress shirt and suit pants. “Stephanie, meet Brie. Brie, Stephanie.” He leads both women to the living room and collapses on the edge of a suede ottoman. “I tried to call that bitch-maniac, but her cell is off.”

“Same thing for me,” Brie says. “We should get to Claire and Dan.”

Claire and Dan. Who might they be?
Stephanie wonders. She longs to be strategic and essential, but how? “What about calling the police?” she suggests in her gravelly, nasal voice.

“The police?” Brie says, looking at this therapist dressed for after-hours clubbing.
And when did Annabel start seeing a therapist? Barry never mentioned her
. “Please, let’s not go there—at least not yet.”

“I’m thinking restraining order,” Stephanie says. “We’re talking kidnapping, at the very least.” But neither Barry nor Brie gives her the courtesy of a response. “Listen, we could all use a drink. Dr. Marx, is that New Zealand sauvignon blanc you served the other night still in the wine fridge?”

Barry turns to Stephanie. “Good idea,” he says. “I finished it, but open another.”

Stephanie walks toward the kitchen.
Not only does this therapist know what’s in Barry’s wine refrigerator, she has a damn good body
, Brie thinks, and I have to agree as I size up her endless legs and high, rounded butt.

“How are you thinking you want to approach this?” Brie asks.

“Hey, lawyer,” he says. “I was hoping you’d have a plan.”

“Dr. Marx?” Stephanie yells out from the kitchen. “Could you give me a hand in here?”

“Excuse me,” Barry says, and disappears. After a minute, Brie looks at her watch. Two more minutes pass before they return, Stephanie minus her burgundy gloss, although artfully applied liner remains around her lips.

“None for me, thanks,” Brie says when Stephanie offers her a glass of wine. “We shouldn’t waste any more time before we call your inlaws,” she says to Barry. “The call’s got to be from you.”

“I’m dialing them now,” he says, and reaches my father, who has just finished unpacking at a small hotel in the East Sixties. My mother has walked to Bloomingdale’s to scout for Kitty’s hostess gift. Scented candle? Chocolate-covered pretzels? Whatever she buys, my mother feels it will be wrong, and on that point she is right.

“Barry,” my dad says heartily, answering on the first ring. “
A ziesen pesach
.”

“Same to you, Dan, but it’s not such a sweet Passover, I’m afraid.”

Dan braces himself for a bad joke. A Catholic priest, a Protestant
minister, and a Hasidic rabbi walk into a bar. “Don’t tell me. Your mother decided to serve sushi instead of gefilte fish?” he asks genially.

“Are you sitting down?” Barry says, wanting to handle this right. Like most people on earth, Barry genuinely likes my father.

My dad doesn’t just sit. He stretches out his bulky body on the bed and looks at the ceiling, his phone pressed to his ear. “Sit down” is never a preamble to anything you want to hear.

“It’s Lucy,” Barry says, and I see my father exhale with relief.

“Oh, yeah. I am so sorry she’s not joining us for the holiday, Barry. It was extremely generous of your mother to invite all three of us, and I hope she’s not offended. But you have to understand, Lucy’s not ready—”

“She tried to snatch Annabel this afternoon, Dan. She did. She showed up at the school and almost got away with it. Scared Annabel to death,” he adds, which I doubt is true, although I certainly haven’t forgiven my sister for her colossal insanity.

These New Yorkers, bunch of drama queens
, my dad decides. “What? There must be some mistake.”
The ceiling has a brown-ringed water stain as big as my head
, he thinks,
yet they charge almost five hundred bucks a night for this airless shithole
. My father hates virtually everything about New York—the industrial-strength coffee, the warp-speed tempo, and the noise to match, but especially the rip-offs. “Barry, kids that age make things up. Molly used to have this imaginary friend, Pogo.” He realizes he is shooting off his mouth, too much and too fast.

“There were witnesses,” Barry says. “I don’t know what was in your daughter’s head,” he says, still kindly, and I feel admiration for my husband’s self-control as he edits himself. “Lucy’s head.” Because once there were two daughters. “I’m wondering, do you?”

Did he ever? That my father adored us was enough, at least for me. I never expected to be understood.

My father is sitting up now, and his face has flushed to a fevered red. “No, Barry, I don’t know what the hell my daughter could possibly have been thinking. But, damn, you have to give her a pass. Don’t get me wrong—if she did this … thing, it’s contemptible and, Christ, goddamn twisted, and we will get to the bottom of it.”
How will I tell Claire? She will dissolve into the floor
. “Obviously, Lucy needs help.”
We’ll see to it that she’s on some shrink’s couch so fast her head will fall off
, he thinks. “We’ll call her in St. Bart’s and demand—”

“Whoa. St. Bart’s?”

“That’s where she’s going.”

“She was hoping to take Annabel to St. Bart’s?” Barry says. Lucy is an even bigger wack job than he thought.

Maybe St. Bart’s was the cover
, my father realizes. Man, does he feel thick. “Barry, I haven’t even spoken to my daughter”—
my only surviving daughter
—“since yesterday. I better try to call her now. Please, son.” He is afraid he will cry. “You’ll have to excuse me.” He hangs up without saying goodbye.

Barry throws his arms up in an exaggerated shrug and looks at the two women facing him.

“Am I correct to assume that Dan and Claire didn’t know a thing?” Brie asks, pushing her snake bracelet up and down her arm. She and I both catch Stephanie watching her. Correction: it.

Barry nods. He feels it’s safe to say they may rule out Divine conspiracy theories.

“I still think the police should be notified,” Stephanie says, not unreasonably. “Maybe she’s going to try this again. Lucy could be-anywhere.”

Lucy, however, is not
anywhere
. Her plane is getting ready to touch down at O’Hare, and she is debating whether she should call a twenty-four-hour lunatic hotline. She is sweating remorse, stinking with regret, lonelier than she’s ever been.
I’ve really done it this time
, Lucy has the good grace to think.
Too damn impulsive, didn’t think through my plan. Lost sight of the ball. Now I’m good as busted
.

Barry is weighing Stephanie’s advice when Brie walks to the piano. At my husband’s request, my solo photographs have been packed away—“I can’t handle looking at them”—but several happy-family pictures remain. Brie’s gaze settles on my face. I feel her missing me, remembering me, loving me, wanting to do the right thing on my behalf.
She’s the only real friend I could ever trust
, Brie thinks.
Molly lives inside me now, and I owe her. This crazy thing with Lucy’s going to suck up energy and divert from finding the pig that’s responsible for Molly’s murder. Yes, murder. Had to be a murder
.

Am I in the room with a murderer?
The thought rattles inside Brie’s mind. She turns to Barry and speaks slowly and softly, one of her canniest courtroom techniques. “Barry, let’s think about Molly. You know
she would never want you rushing to implicate her sister, no matter how unforgivable the offense. She’d want you to talk it through with Lucy—eventually—and then figure things out. Privately. Discreetly.”

Lucy should get what she deserves, and Molly was a wimp
, Barry thinks. I always suspected that he thought that, but it hurts to hear it. Stephanie downgrades me to moron and tacks on spoiled bitch. “Come on,” she says. The wine has given her courage and a glow that isn’t unattractive. “This is crap, people. The right thing is to call the police. Forgive me for saying this, but we shouldn’t let sentimentality cloud good judgment.”

Brie, Barry, and I all read the boldface subtext:
What does it matter what this Molly thinks? She’s dead
.

“Stephanie,” Brie says, her voice an icicle, “you’re overreacting. Speaking as a lawyer now, I wouldn’t rush to judgment. This is strictly an internal family problem.”

You, woman, are not part of the family
smacks Stephanie between her carefully made-up brown eyes, which she’s narrowed to slits.
Neither are you
, her face volleys back. “Speaking as a friend of the family—and a therapist—calling the police seems to be the only responsible, objective, intelligent response.” She lands on each adjective slow and hard. This is not a woman to underestimate.

Under other circumstances, Barry thinks, he might sit back and enjoy—even encourage—an old-fashioned catfight. But not today. He knows whom he should call, the person he should have phoned two hours ago. “Pardon me,” he says, and disappears into the bedroom.

“Kitty, you’re not going to believe this one.” For the next few minutes he fills in his elite one-woman security force on the world news of the week. When he’s finished, and effectively ten years old, he takes a deep breath. “So what’s your call? Get the police on it?”

I see his face whiten as he listens to her directive, blunt and instinctive. He hangs up the phone and returns to the living room.

“So?” Stephanie says.

“Ladies, Kitty Katz has spoken, and as usual, she is right,” he announces. “Police equal publicity, and sensational publicity will fuck my practice. No police.” He laughs, but he is not amused. “I’ll work something out with the Divines. At least for now.”

“You’re going to do squat?” As Stephanie stammers, she spits an
s
that lands on Brie, who flicks it off. Unfazed, Stephanie crosses her arms in front of her in a pose that I am certain she’s practiced in order to make the most of her full, high breasts, which, Brie and I are both guessing, have benefited from enhancement, perhaps under the steady hand of Barry Marx, M. D.

“For now, yes,” he says, and looks at his watch. “And if you will both excuse me, I’m going to pick up my daughter.”

Stephanie’s eyes bore into Barry’s as she waits for him to ask her to join him in collecting Annabel. Maybe he will even ask her to accompany both of them to his mother’s seder, about which he seems to have forgotten. He does neither. “Okay, well, see you later,” she says.

Brie hugs Barry and squeezes his hand. “We’ll talk,” she says, and turns to leave.

A minute later, Brie and Stephanie stand silently side by side waiting for the elevator. When they enter and the door closes, they are still alone. Brie faces Stephanie and asks the question at the top of her mind for the last half hour. “Tell me, was it before or after when you two hooked up?”

Go, Brie, go! Departed minds want to know!

“My relationship with Dr. Marx is strictly professional.” Stephanie’s voice has bounced back to an almost musical timbre. “Although last time I looked, he was single. And now it’s my turn.” She smiles at Brie, but only with her mouth. “Does it hurt that your girlfriend Molly picked Barry over you?”

“I wouldn’t get too attached to Dr. Marx if I were you,” Brie says. “He’s got the attention span of a jock strap.”

“He seems interested enough.”

“You’d never pass his mother’s sniff test.”

“You are so wrong,” Stephanie says, and laughs. “It was Kitty who introduced us.” She remembers how after a yoga class Barry swung by to pick up Kitty for one of their regular lunch dates. “The famous son,” Stephanie had said as she stood on the sidewalk talking to her new pal Kitty, who’d spoken of him often and hadn’t overestimated his appeal.

“If you want to be territorial about Barry, why don’t you just pee on him?” Brie asks.

“Excuse me? I can’t hear you up there on your cross.”

The voices are getting louder, higher, and shriller. When Brie walks out to Central Park West and glides into a waiting town car, I want to cheer her, although I had always mocked her for that particular perk.

Stephanie turns the corner. I pray she steps in dog shit.

I despise that woman
, Brie and Stephanie each think.
What a piece of work
.

’ve got tomorrow all planned,” Brie says as she wields her hairbrush in fluid strokes while blasting a blow-dryer in the opposite hand. Her arms are slim and defined, like a fourteen-year-old boy’s. I always envied them. “I was hoping you’d join us this time.”