The Late, Lamented Molly Marx (28 page)

“Don’t ask me to elaborate,” he said. “Tell me what you want from me, and I’ll come through.”

I thought I might be reading genuine anguish on Barry’s face. “What I want you to do is talk to me,” I pleaded. “To share a little of the real you”—whoever he is. Why didn’t all men realize that, at least for every woman I knew, being listened to and revealing a secret truth or two is always the ultimate aphrodisiac? Luke got this. Why didn’t my husband? Or did he share his dreams and hopes and fears and zany insights only with other women?

“We talk all the time,” he said.

“But we don’t,” I answered wearily. “I don’t know that we’ve ever had a real conversation that didn’t relate to your work or Annabel or if the steak should be medium or medium rare.”

“Oh, come on. Now you’re being ridiculous. Throw me a bone here.”

“It might take time,” I said. It was definitely not anguish, I decided, that I was reading on Barry’s face, at least not anymore. Could he be scared that I was going to blow his cover?

I’d suddenly become so tired I couldn’t say or listen to another word. From a few blocks away, the bell of the church chimed once. I stood and grabbed my pillow. “I’m sleeping in the other room,” I announced. Barry didn’t stop me.

I woke to the smell of freshly brewed hazelnut coffee. Barry was standing next to the couch with two steaming mugs in hand. “Good morning,” he said. He kissed me softly on the cheek. His hair was still wet from the shower, and in his face I could see the college senior I’d met almost seventeen years earlier.

“We need to get ourselves to a therapist.” The words tumbled out of me, unexpected. “I heard of someone who’s supposed to be good.” I’d been carrying Felicia Stafford’s name and number in my wallet for more than a year.

“If that’s what you want, I’m in,” Barry said. “Now get that adorable butt into the kitchen, or you’re going to miss my pancakes.”

’ve decided,” Brie says. “I definitely want a baby.”

Isadora’s face, reflected in the glass of their kitchen cabinets, remains composed. As she reaches for the plates she keeps her back turned to Brie. “What makes you so sure you’ll be a good mama?”

“Absolutely nothing,” Brie admits.

I wish Brie knew, as I do, that she would be the finest of mothers. Before I died, Barry and I were still debating whom to pick to be Annabel’s legal guardian, and Brie was my first choice. I’d have lobbied harder on her behalf if my decision wouldn’t have insulted my parents and Lucy. I can’t think of better guardians than my parents, but they live far away. And Lucy? Her advanced degree in early childhood development not with standing, after a year with my sister, Annabel might require after-school psychotherapy instead of ballet.

Barry wanted Kitty to be Annabel’s guardian—“because Annabel’s life could continue as it is.” True, except that Kitty would send her to fat camp before she digested her first Oreo, and possibly destroy all proof that I was her mother. So the guardian issue remains unresolved. Like so much.

“What kind of mother do you think you’d be?” Brie asks.

Isadora takes two square black plates from the shelf and places them on the honed stone counter where Brie is sitting. From a metal basket she selects a large tangerine and starts to peel it with a sharp mother-of-pearl-handled knife. The rind, which perfumes the air with its fresh scent, snakes into a ribbon as she does the job with artistic precision. “Frightening,” she says. “I’m exacting, self-involved, and impatient. Isn’t that what you love about me?”

“Seriously, Isadora. You’re not hearing me. I want a baby.”

Isadora delicately dissects the denuded fruit and begins to slice segments into bite-sized pieces. An amused smile remains on her ageless, symmetrical face. “Do you plan to jet off to Malawi and claw one out of some impoverished woman’s womb?”

“I want to get pregnant. That is, unless you’d rather carry our child.”

“Have you totally lost your mind?” I do love Isadora’s teeth—small, even, white as china. She laughed for so long I got an excellent view of them.

“You’re not too old—you’re only thirty-nine.”

“That’s the least of it. I’d rather have liposuction without anesthesia. The species will have to propagate without my help.”

“Then I’ll be the pregnant one—with your egg, if you want, implanted in my uterus. Done all the time.” Brie never stints on research.

“
Mi amada
,” Isadora says, and leans over to cup Brie’s firm, pointed chin, the type that gets called “stubborn.” “I love our life. Sleeping late, running away to Paris and Barcelona and Buenos Aires, me spoiling you, you spoiling me. Why give any of it up for a
bebé?
And what if that little egg and sperm grew a penis? Could you honestly see me as the mother of some midget jock? Go back to bed and wake up sane.”

Brie stands and washes her plate and coffee cup. Even without my powers I know her well enough to realize she’s going to table this topic—for now. “Maybe I’m just premenstrual,” she says lightly. “You’re right—I must be nuts to ever suggest bringing anything as messy as a third party into our life.” The remarkable thing is that Brie is able to speak without a scintilla of sarcasm while the words
sybarite
and
indolent brat
flip through her brain. She knows how to bide her time, something I never learned to do.

So I’m surprised when only two nights later she raises the topic again. The two of them are eating at Koi, where the ceilings are as high as the prices. They’re seated in a booth, taut thighs touching, ignoring the crowd. I find this hard to do, since obviously everyone here must pass a rigorous grooming and attractiveness test before they check their coats. At their banquette, Isadora selects a tiny rice block blanketed with very spicy, very fresh tuna—mercury levels be damned—and reaches to put the tiny orange delicacy into Brie’s mouth.

Brie pushes it away. “Stop for a minute, please.”

“Not hungry?”

“We need to continue our conversation.”

“Need?”

“Okay,
want
—about the baby.”

“What baby?”

“The one you don’t want.”

“That baby.”

“We could adopt, but I’d rather be pregnant,” Brie says. “I have to at least try to be a mother.”
Molly wants me to have a baby
, I hear her think. It’s crazy, the thoughts that we in the Duration hear attributed to us, but I am flattered and intrigued.

Isadora moves on to eggplant, whose glistening purple-black skin matches her inscrutable eyes. After the eggplant disappears, she lazily alternates between sesame-encrusted lobster tail, sautéed asparagus, and shiitake mushrooms, licking her full lips as she samples each one.

“Aren’t you going to talk to me?” Brie asks. Apparently not. Isadora is Barry in drag.

“What is there to talk about?” Isadora finally says, defiant. “You know my position. I’m not going to debate or defend myself. I never deceived you. This is who I am. It’s me or this mythical baby. Pick, my darling.”

“Won’t you even consider it?” Brie says, her voice silky smooth.

Isadora rests her chopsticks and meets Brie’s gaze. “I had a baby,” she says. “In my marriage to Pedro. Had the child lived, she would now be twenty. The
bebé
tore me apart in every way. I know this bloody experience, and now I have earned the right to be a hedonist. I want my decadent life where every day I wake up and think,
What would make me happy? What would make Sabrina happy?
I would like this life with you,
love, but if not, not.” Isadora clips every sentence as if she is pruning a rosebush.

I have always been immune to feeling anything toward Isadora except envy, but as I try to make room for empathy, my bullshit detector blares. What a crock. Not the part about Pedro—Isadora was married once, for fourteen months. But there was never a child, not even in Isadora’s imagination or in the head of Pedro, which was filled with coke. I want to rattle Brie by the shoulders. I want to send her a harsh wake-up-toots-and-smell-the-bullshit psychogram, a ranting celestial e-mail.

“Honey,” Brie says, all sympathy, “why didn’t you ever say anything?”

Isadora casts down her eyes, as if she is exercising enormous self-control to maintain dignity.

“Why did you keep this a secret from me?” Brie asks again, taking Isadora’s hand.

Isadora removes her hand.

They finish their meal without talking, without sipping a drop of warm, soothing sake. Brie pays the bill, which is steep. I follow them home. Isadora goes directly to bed, while Brie stays up until three, her mind racing. Why can’t I be a dancing moonbeam who points her toward the truth? At the very least I long to haunt Brie’s dreams, but Bob reminds me, time and again, that such behavior violates the Duration’s bylaws, unwritten but transmitted on faith, and will terminate my powers. I can take no credit, then, for the conversation between Brie and Isadora the following week.

“I’ve made up my mind,” Brie says at midnight on the fourth of a series of rainy days and nights. “I need to be in a relationship where having a baby is at least a possibility.” She offers these words with tremendous tenderness, after many days of sleepwalking.

Isadora accepts the news without theatrics, but this time I feel compassion for a woman who has bargained and lost. I have searched her heart and believe she loves Brie. Now Isadora will have to search again for her matching sybarite.

When Brie returns from work the next day, Isadora is gone, along with her considerable library of books about twentieth-century art, early jazz, and contemporary architecture, her exquisite bags and
hand-cobbled shoes, her Fendi furs and four-carat diamond studs, her elegant fruit knives and black bone china. Brie has twice as much storage space and an even larger vacancy in her heart, but she doesn’t look back. “Molly,” she says out loud now, because there is no one to hear her and tell her she is
loca
, “I can feel you guiding me.”

She is wrong. The decision was entirely her own.

A few weeks later, Brie rescues Jones, a year-old chocolate Lab, and her apartment is overrun with squeaky toys, organic dog food, and sloppy kisses.

et’s go over this once more,” Hicks says. “Your relationship to Molly Marx was—”

“Professional.”

“And?”

“Okay, personal—for a while, off and on—but any …”—Luke fishes for a word—“intimacy between us was over well before she died.”

Intimidation, intestines, indigestion, intifada, intimacy. Could Luke possibly make what went on between us sound colder and uglier?

“Mr. Delaney, the last call Mrs. Marx got was from you, and as I like to remind folks, half the truth is a big fat lie.”
This guy’s giving me nothing
, I hear Hicks think.
The husband, he’s one more doctor who mistakes himself for God. But Delaney—something doesn’t add up
. “What did you two talk about that day?”

“I don’t recall.”

This isn’t a lawyer-coached response. It’s true. Just as I can’t tell you if I put 1 percent or 2 percent milk into my coffee the day I died, Luke has no recollection of cross-the-
t
-dot-the-
i
specifics of what went on that day. “My guess is we discussed work.”

Until today I’ve never mustered the courage to witness conversations
between Hicks and Luke. I’ve been too raw, too confused, and entirely too chickenshit. As they face each other, Hicks towers over Luke, whom I’d always thought of as tall but who now looks not just shorter but older. He could use a posture lesson from my mother:
Shoulders back, chin up, darling
. The blue-gray shadows under his eyes may as well be tattoos, and he appears gaunt and more in need of a haircut than usual. His apartment is worse. Bathroom towels are funky and askew and his hockey equipment hides under a layer of dust in which I could easily scrawl my name if the Duration allowed such folly. Except for some Major Grey’s mango chutney whose sell-by date most likely is older than the Colonial occupation, the refrigerator is empty. Luke’s freezer, however, is stocked—with Stolichnaya, Absolut, and three vodkas labeled in Cyrillic, as well as Cherry Garcia and Dulce de Leche, unopened.