The Late, Lamented Molly Marx (23 page)

“She was one of those sad, unstable people who looked normal enough on the outside but was really the type no one could make happy.”
Suicide
, Kitty thinks,
is going to get this detective with his wheedling ways sniffing elsewhere, away from Barry and away from me
.

This is why Bob has warned me not to trail Hicks in his investigations, because it will make me want to commit murder. I would like to crush and mash Kitty’s most valuable piece of Murano and stir the shards into her tea, then force her to drink it slowly, to max out the poison and pain—even if Hicks ain’t buying what she has to sell.

“No one could make her happy, not even your son?” he asks.

Kitty tilts her head down so Hicks can’t see it. I can. She looks nervous, deeply agitated. “Some women just can’t be content—the well of misery is that deep.”

“Others have implied this.” Hicks feels a sharp bang in his gut as he articulates this lie designed to draw out Kitty.

“Really?” Kitty asks. She’d like to believe this were true, but she smells a setup, even if this is the first time she’s ever been questioned by a police officer.

“Yes, really, and what I’d like to know is, what could have made Molly Marx angry enough, and so deeply disappointed, that she would abandon her daughter and husband by taking her own life?”

As if she might discover the answer inside, Kitty picks up a green lacquered box that Pinky keeps filled with fresh cigarettes. “I’d like to know that, too, Detective Hicks.”

He’s being stonewalled, and Hicks feels his work here today is as finished as Kitty’s last smoke. “Well, if anything comes to you …” He stands, stretches his legs, and shakes Kitty’s hand formally. She steps back a step, almost as if she’s frightened.
Did I overdo it?
she wonders.

Hicks leaves behind his card as Pinky materializes and hands him his raincoat. He does a double-take.
What the fuck. Does this other woman live in Ma’s building? Nah, she just looks like that busybody next door
.

Maybe Molly did kill herself
, he thinks as he stands in the richly carpeted
hall, ringing for the elevator. Self-defense against big mean Kitty with her claws out.

Hicks has a craving for gravy and biscuits, for home. “Ma,” he says on his cell phone as soon as he walks to Seventy-sixth Street, glad to get her on the first ring. “How do you feel about cooking on Sunday?” He shakes his head. “Sure, Ma, invite Ev.”

ou were brilliant,” Luke said when the Sonoma pictures came back. “Get out your calendar, Molly Marx, because thanks to your good work, we have a job in Bridgehampton, and after that Nantucket, and then one right in town.”

“
Our
good work,” I said. I thanked him, put down the phone, and penciled in the dates, my hand trembling.

I’d been back from California for five endless days and four sleepless nights. Luke was taking up all the space in my head. I’d relived our vineyard romp so many times that I could have acted out both the male and female leads for the most discriminating of directors. This was our first post-Sonoma conversation. If there was a next move, I didn’t know it, at least as long as I was stone-cold sober, which I fully intended to stay.

Luke downshifted to a low murmur. “Do you have any regrets?”

Did he? Because if so, I could no more imagine standing next to him at a shoot than I could see myself having Annabel’s first-birthday party that weekend at Hooters. If Luke felt regretful, I’d simply cancel the jobs I’d written into my calendar. No looking back.

“Molly, are you there?”

“Regrets?” I said. What the hell. I’d tell the truth, and while I was at it impersonate an eighteenth-century courtesan. “None.” I couldn’t quite get a word like
darling
out of my mouth. “What about you?”

There was no hesitation, although I suspect Luke was waiting for me to elaborate. “I’ve never been less regretful in my whole life,” he said. “Best day of my decade.”

I said nothing.

“So how does lunch sound?”

“Great,” I answered, trying to respond like a woman with no more at stake than a Cobb salad. “Thanks.”

“At my place,” he added, whipping out the E-ZPass to every illicit relationship. “What day can you make it?”

I didn’t want to make decisions. I wished Luke could read my mind and know that. What I wanted to hear was
How about lunch tomorrow?
To that I would reply that I couldn’t accept because Annabel had a playdate. One more day of longing from afar. Which was a lot simpler, and would absolve me of the guilt I was feeling along with the mightier wallops of sexual longing, full-tilt excitement, and plain old curiosity. But unfortunately, Luke was being entirely too flexible. This led to thinking that there was an us, which required me to stick around to see what would happen between the members of this attractive couple. I was not able to shout out, Oops,
I am terribly sorry, but it slipped my mind that I’ve taken a vow of fidelity in front of hundreds of people, a rabbi representing both thousands of years of Judaism and the sovereign state of Illinois, and the man who might be a cheater but just the same is my husband. No, sir. I can’t have lunch. I shouldn’t even have a Pepsi
.

So we made a date for the following week.

As I was on the way to Luke’s apartment, my stomach lurched, and potholes weren’t entirely to blame. The taxi driver stopped at his address, a four-story limestone building on a gritty street. There was a sprinkling of trash littering the sidewalk and no doorman. A woman walked out the front door and I breezed in. The lobby had a speckled terrazzo floor and black marble walls. I could see it in a decorating spread titled “Faded Glory.” I stepped into the elevator, which rose in slow motion, a
long, brass arrow pointing to each passing floor. I felt as if the arrow might leap off the wall and land in my heart.

A few months ago, Luke had decamped from the West Village for the East Village. To the remotely hip—a demographic to which I do not belong, now or ever—this hadn’t been a pioneer neighborhood for more than a decade.
Rent
-style squatters had moved on. I’d heard about cunning boutiques sandwiched between locksmiths and filthy bodegas and knew the area was loaded with bistros serving fusion cuisine far beyond French/Vietnamese—Japanese/Guatemalan, Israeli/Palestinian? On ac count of this culinary creativity, four-star restaurants in sadly stuffy midtown and above were now empty night after night, especially on weekends. Yet despite all this, on my mental map of Manhattan, the East Village may as well have been the Balkans.

I stood outside 4B. Should I turn around? I’d gotten this far. I knocked.

“I didn’t hear you buzz,” Luke said a half minute later after he’d looked through the peephole. “Have you been waiting long?”

Yes
, I thought,
I have been waiting thirty-five years to behave this way
. I suppose women do this all the time in Paris, in London, and right here in Manhattan. I, however, am a woman more comfortable deciding between wild- and farm-raised salmon than whether or not to sleep—again—with a man who is not my husband. I wished I’d stepped out of a forties movie where the wasp-waisted vamp wears a belted trench coat over a slinky satin dress with shoulder pads. At least then I could deliver some sparkling dialogue. Instead I said, “No, not long.”

“C’mon in,” he said, hanging my coat on a peg in an oak-paneled hallway that led to a big, square room. Burnished wainscoting ended above my head, beyond which the walls were an inky blue. The room had a twelve-foot-high ceiling; hanging from it, four dimly lit antique brass chandeliers cast a clinquant glow on this sunless day. There were two groupings of squashy brown couches, and a sensual dark red recamier next to a table piled with books. In the air I detected a faint scent. Green tea? Fresh pears? My nose traveled to a small pile of scented black rocks next to a photograph of a family that must be Luke’s. In the far corner of the room a round table was set for two with rough beige linen placemats and sleek white dishes.

He really did mean lunch.

“Did you notice that over the outside door it says New York Free Circulating Library?” Luke said eagerly. Ah, he was nervous, too.

“I missed that,” I said. “Should we have a do-over?”

“Shall we?” he said, and reached his arms around my shoulders as he melted against me. I closed my eyes and explored his mouth. There I was again, adrift, surrounded by a moat that kept reality at bay. I was circulating, all right. I felt as if I could feel my own blood rushing through my veins and every hair standing on end.

He took my hand. “Let me show you around.” His arm encircling my waist, Luke led me to another hall, on which he’d hung dozens of his black-and-white photographs, not just pictures from work but bridges, many bridges. On one side of the corridor, a French door led to a study lined with bookshelves and covered with wallpaper on which peacocks strutted. “The birds are from the previous owner,” he said. “I was planning to rip them out, but I’m beginning to think of them as pets.”

“If you rip them out, I will kill you,” I said, pointing. “The big fellow here just winked at me.”

On the other side was the kitchen. Over an enameled sink-pristine and white—a stuffed deer’s head stood watch, its graceful antlers the only curve in the room. The two bathrooms’ walls were paneled, and in the larger one, a claw-foot tub faced a window overlooking a roof garden with iron furniture and a leafless tree growing in a large terra-cotta tub. Our tour proceeded slowly, Luke an eager guide. “I was able to salvage it from the original” or “Looks authentic, yes? Big fake” or “You’ve got to see this.”

There was one last door at the end of the hall. As Luke placed his hand on the brass knob, I took a deep breath. To enter might be the most regrettable move of my life.

“I don’t know what to do with this room,” he said as he crossed the threshold. “Any ideas?”

I stepped inside. The walls were stark white. I turned my back on the black iron bed, plainly made with simple linens, and took in a baroquely carved mantel, also white, its hearth laid with birch logs. Hanging above was a blow-up of a nude couple entwined in sheets. I recognized the shot from Luke’s portfolio and remembered the highly
publicized story about the models, busted for snorting coke and hooking up on the job. In the center of the ceiling hung a trio of old ships’ lanterns, tranquilly sparkling like magnums of vintage Champagne.

“Aside from the hockey stick in the corner, I’d say don’t change one thing.”

“Sorry, the stick stays—but one thing’s missing,” he said, emerging from the shadows.

I was wearing a cashmere V-neck, a pencil skirt, tights, and tall boots, but nonetheless I felt chilled. “I don’t think I can do this, Luke,” I said. My voice was a whisper.

“I want you,” he said hoarsely. “And unless I’m crazy, you feel the same way.”

“That’s irrelevant.” Painful, but irrelevant. “I’m sorry.” I wasn’t sure why I felt the need to apologize.

“Molly, I would never pressure you,” he said, and hugged me close for at least a minute. I wanted both to continue and to stop. Luke steered me back to the hall, his hand on the small of my back. We walked into the kitchen and stared at each other without exchanging a word. The music—was it Diana Krall?—had stopped, or maybe I just couldn’t hear it over the beat of my heart. He reached for two bowls on an open shelf and from a tall black stockpot ladled steaming carrot soup, redolent with ginger. Crusty bread and olive oil were already on the table, and a salad of soba noodles, sweetened with mango and spiced with chilies and mint, waited in the glass-fronted refrigerator. Our lunch had turned careful, controlled. As we ate and drank and finished with espresso, we spoke only of work.

I’d made the right decision to keep my skirt on and my guard up, I told myself. I felt church-lady solid, the ne plus ultra of virtue.

Shortly before three o’clock, when the last dish was dried, we kissed goodbye—chastely, sweetly. My pheromones behaving themselves, I walked out the door with a promise to e-mail him ideas for the next job.

The taxi hadn’t traveled two blocks when I knew. I pulled my phone out of my bag. “Luke,” I said, “I forgot something.”

“Really?” he said.

“Yes,” I answered. “Dessert.”

I needed to feel the roughness of his cheek against mine and move
my mouth down the length of his body until I found an even sweeter spot. I wanted to trace his profile with my fingertips and let them linger below. I needed and wanted more of what I’d tasted on that Caribbean island and while pressed against a floor beneath a cool vat of California chardonnay. Need and want were scrambled and I could no longer decipher, or even cared to decipher, my internal code.

I instructed the driver to return to the spot where he’d picked me up. When we got there, he asked if I wanted him to wait. “No,” I said. “I may be a while.” I twisted around the stone in my engagement ring so it wasn’t glaring at me with reproach and dropped a twenty-dollar bill into his hand. The driver seemed happy, as did I.

This time when I walked into Luke’s apartment, I headed straight into the bedroom, which is where I stayed until the afternoon ended, along with what remained of my innocence. In its place, I’d found something else.