The Private Lives of Pippa Lee (3 page)

She was sitting at the table drinking a cup when Herb walked in, opened the front door, and dragged the local paper off the mat.

‘So,' she said. ‘I can't believe you had a party and didn't invite me.'

‘What are you talking about?' he said, putting on his reading glasses.

‘You left all the plates out.'

‘What plates?'

‘Herb, there were six plates with chocolate cake on the table this morning. Or there were six plates. Two of them didn't have any cake on them. One of the slices had peanut butter on it.'

Herb sat and looked at her. ‘Have you gone stark raving mad?' he said, laughing.

‘At first I thought someone came into the house, but the doors are all locked.' There was a pause as this sank in.

‘Does anyone else have a key?'

‘Well, I guess the maintenance people. And Miss Fanning.'

‘The cleaning lady? She lives in New Milford. Why would she drive all the way over here for chocolate cake? We better check if anything is missing.' Nothing was missing. Pippa called Miss Fanning and pretended she was confirming her for Monday. Then she casually asked her what she'd been up to the night before. There was a pause. ‘Bowling?' the woman answered tentatively. Herb called the administrative offices to register a complaint. They asked if he wanted to call the police. Herb declined. ‘I suppose you could call it a victimless crime,' he said, his nostrils expanding slightly. The man on the other end of the phone chuckled politely.

Pippa called a locksmith, had the locks changed. This time, they gave no one a key. A week went by. Pippa kept thinking about the cake. It had to be Herb. He had forgotten. He was losing his mind. Pippa watched him with special care now. Every time he misplaced his glasses or forgot someone's name, she felt her suspicion grow. Then, the next Sunday morning, she walked into the kitchen and found carrot sticks planted in a bowl of vanilla frosting. A frying pan with the remains of fried ham cemented to the bottom. More dirty plates. This time she woke Herb and showed him. They looked at each other.

‘Maybe you should see a doctor,' she said.

Herb was furious. ‘Okay, if I have Alzheimer's so be it, I'll kill myself. But first I need to see the evidence.' He drove straight to the electronics store in the mini-mall and bought a small surveillance camera with a wall mount, then paid the man from the store to install it in the corner, where the wall met the ceiling. The guy was up on a ladder, sweat pouring down his face. Pippa turned on the air conditioner. ‘This must seem a little strange to you,' she said.

‘You'd be surprised what people do for entertainment in this place,' said the man.

‘Really?'

‘Yeah, but I've never seen it in the kitchen before.'

‘Oh. No. It's not – it's –' Pippa let it go. She'd rather have him think they were filming themselves humping on the kitchen table than chronicling her husband's descent into inanity.

An hour later, Pippa was straightening out the living room when she looked out the plate-glass window. Across the pond, in the Nadeaus' driveway, a U-Haul was hitched up to a bright yellow truck with an orange shell clamped over the bed. The shell had windows with ratty blue and red gingham curtains pulled shut inside. Pippa could see Dot gesturing to a dark-haired man who was carrying a cardboard box. Pippa picked her bird-watching binoculars off the coffee table and trained them on the young man. He had a T-shirt with ‘What?' printed on the back of it. So the half-baked son was moving in after all! It was funny about Dot, she thought. It felt so natural, talking to her. It made Pippa feel like a different person. Dot knew her out of context. A few months ago, in her old life, she would no sooner have had a friendship with Dot Nadeau than flown around the room. Their friends were editors, novelists, critics, poets. Yet Pippa had never felt fully at ease in their hypercivilized company. Only with her twins, when they were young – only then had she felt fully secure in who she was. Grace and Ben had looked up at her with such certainty in their little faces, and called her Mama. They knew, so she knew. Now her babies were gone. They called sometimes, came home to visit. Occasionally they all went out to lunch together. But they didn't look at Pippa the way they once had. Ben was still so sweet to her. He had always needed little, expected everything, received what he expected. He was born thoughtful, but secure. Pippa's feeling for him was simple, ample, easy. But Grace – that was a real fuckup. Pippa felt stupid and bumbling in her daughter's company, and somehow guilty, as though she had let Grace down by amounting to so little. And there was something more.

As a very young child, Grace had been needy, clutching at her
mother like a baby monkey. Her love for Pippa was possessive and competitive. Though she adored her twin, she tried to edge Ben out of her mother's embraces, desperate to bask in her love alone. The day after her fourth birthday she sat down at Pippa's feet, opened a book, and read the whole thing out loud. Pippa was astounded; the child had been completely intractable when it came to reading, refusing to sound out letters at all. Little Grace looked up at her mother then and, with furrowed brow, asked, ‘
Now
do you love me more than Ben?' Pippa swept the girl up into her lap and hugged her, feeling a sting of guilt like a poisoned needle in her sternum. Because she knew what Grace was getting at. There were flashes of jealous intensity in her daughter's love that Pippa found domineering, devouring, even repellent in moments that came and, mercifully, dissolved again into the otherwise sunny landscape of their daily lives. Once, watching a ship disappear over the lip of the ocean, Grace said to Pippa, ‘I own you as far as the eye can see.'

Though she did not recognize it, in some secret part of Pippa's mind, her daughter's wish to possess her utterly echoed another love, a deadly, sweet, and voracious passion that had all but suffocated Pippa in her youth.

Yet, never mind, in spite of it all, now that Grace was grown she was a triumph! So sophisticated, so courageous. Pippa found herself watching her sneakily, out of the corner of her eye. And occasionally, in her daughter's recklessness, her lust for adventure, her desire for experience, she recognized herself, a self that had vanished long ago. How had it happened? How could she have changed so much? She remembered the morning she looked in the mirror and saw three white, bent hairs sticking out of her head. They had looked obscene to her, like stray pubic hairs escaping from the crotch of a bathing suit. Now, beneath the reddish blond tint, her hair was white. Pippa was a placid, middle-aged woman. And Herb was eighty years old. The thought of it made her laugh. Life was getting so unreal.
More and more, the past was flooding into her, diluting the present like water poured into wine.

Herb walked in then. Pippa turned. ‘Do you need anything?' she asked.

Herb sat down and patted the pillow beside him. ‘How's my pal?' he asked.

‘I'm okay,' she said.

‘Are you sad that you're living in Wrinkle Village?'

‘I have to fill up my days more. But I'm not sad. I think it's sort of romantic, starting again like this, with so little stuff.' Herb smiled sadly and lay back on the cushions. His skin, bronzed from all that time on the patio, was creased like a rock face, his eyes points of light.

‘Always looking on the bright side,' he said to her.

‘Why can't it be?' There was a pause.

‘Maybe we should move back to the city,' he said.

She laughed. ‘We just sold our apartment!'

‘So we buy another one.'

‘Really?'

‘No, of course not. It's just hard thinking this is the end of the line.'

Pippa put her hand on his knee and looked around the room. She wondered what she could make for him. Maybe a glass of carrot juice. She had begun to feel a kind of desperation when they were alone sometimes, as if everything that they could possibly say to each other had already been said, and now language was useless.

‘That was good cheese yesterday,' Herb said.

‘It was vacherin – I was so excited to find it.'

‘I love that cheese.'

A week later Pippa woke up with one arm asleep, pinned beneath her side. She felt as though her body had been crushed into the mattress through the night, her face mashed into the pillow. There was a rotten taste in her mouth. She sat up stiffly, shaking the blood back into her numb limb, which flopped helplessly from side to side like a separate being.

In the kitchen, a thick, yellow continent of what looked like scrambled egg was congealing in the center of the Formica table. A box of chocolates lay open and ransacked in the middle of the mess. A fork was balanced on the edge of a chair.

Remembering the surveillance camera, Pippa snapped her head back and looked up. The thing stared down at her with its cold glass eye, the red Record light blinking ominously. She couldn't bear for Herb to witness himself like this. Every day she would wake up extra early; if there was evidence, she planned to clean it up, erase the tape. He would never know. Pippa wiped up the mess as fast as she could, scraped off a smear of dried egg yolk with her fingernail, her vision blurred with tears.

She went into the den and shut the door, then shoved the tape into the mouth of the VCR. Her heart was pumping wildly in her chest. Seen from above, in black and white, like so many holdup videos Pippa had watched on television, her kitchen seemed sinister, like a crime scene. Pippa fast-forwarded the tape. Nothing. Nothing. Then a figure in white sped by, right through the frame. Pippa rewound the tape and hit Play. The room was empty again. A muffled, banging sound emerged from the TV. Then, a woman shuffled into the kitchen. It was Pippa/not Pippa. The stranger walked with an eerie, graceless gait, her posture slumped, her
gaze downcast. This creature disappeared from the screen, came back into the edge of it, and started stirring eggs in a frying pan. She then dumped the eggs on the table, sat down in a hunched position, and scraped forkfuls of them off the Formica, shoveling them into her mouth with mechanical motions. Pippa watched herself with incredulity and revulsion. There was something inhuman about the scene.

She smashed the bedroom door open with her fist. Herb sat up, stunned with sleep. ‘What –' She was next to him, burrowing her head in his chest, her cheeks wet with tears. ‘It's me,' she said. ‘Herb, it's me –'

‘Slow down, pal. What are we talking about here?'

‘The chocolate cake. And the eggs, and – I saw it on the video, oh, it's horrible.' He held her like that for a while, stroking her head.

‘I must be walking in my sleep,' she said.

‘I don't remember any eggs.'

‘This morning there were eggs. All over the table. She – I – dumped them on the table and – Oh, my God, this makes me feel insane.'

‘Didn't you do it when you were a kid?'

‘That was just a couple of times I walked around.' At fourteen, she would pace the upstairs hall of the rectory, her pillow under her arm, till her insomniac mother led her back to bed.

‘You sleepwalking is a hell of a lot better than me being senile,' Herb said, rolling onto his side and drawing Pippa in, raising his knees so she was resting in a little chair of him. She felt his warmth along her back, tucked her feet between his warm, furry calves.

‘I guess so.'

‘Sleepwalkers are a dime a dozen, honey. You can't even get off a murder rap with that defense anymore. So don't get any ideas.' She was already feeling reassured. Herb had a way of casting light on muddled thoughts, dissipating the shadows. This rational viewpoint was inherited from his father, a darkly funny
man who despised religion, all exaggeration, and musicals. He was the embodiment of deadpan. Herb's mother had died of cancer when he was two; for years his father was a loving, if gruff, protector. He owned a profitable appliance store in Queens until he lost his business in the spending vacuum of the depression. With economic ruin came a darkening of Mr Lee's humor. Ribbing of his intelligent son turned to bullying and, finally, a bitter, brutal dismissiveness of Herb as an effete intellectual, a fag even. For much as he pitied the dupes that looked to God as a balm to their wounded spirits, Mr Lee reserved his special disdain for those who thought they were better than other people just because they read books. Herb was hurt by this rejection at first, but mercifully it absolved him of feeling guilty for bettering his old man. He left for college on a scholarship at nineteen, alone in the world, determined never to be bullied by another human being for the rest of his life, his taste in literature already formed by the very man he had come to hate so much. He mistrusted extravagant metaphor, favored the driest prose. As Herb saw it, he was always having to dehumidify Pippa's mind.

She felt a touch against her tailbone, and then it was gone – then back again, insistent, like a creature pressing its nose against her back. She turned, closed her eyes, and kissed him.

She was lying beside Herb, her eyes still a bit puffy from crying, when there was a knock on the door. She knelt on the bed and peered out the window, pushing the curtain aside. It was Dot. ‘Doesn't that woman have a phone?' Herb asked. Pippa pulled on her robe and walked into the kitchen.

‘Hi!' purred Dot, standing on the threshold. She looked different this morning. Beneath the crazy network of sun worshipper's lines etched into her deflated skin, Pippa could discern the sweep of a strong jaw. Her brown eyes were sparkling. Dot must have been a knockout.

‘You look lovely,' said Pippa.

‘Are you kidding? I'm on my way to the beauty parlor. Have you been crying?' asked Dot.

‘It's just allergies,' said Pippa. ‘Would you like to come in?'

Dot's eyes rose to the surveillance camera, then back to Pippa. ‘I came to invite you over to meet Chris,' she said. ‘Herb is welcome too, of course, only I don't want to disturb him.'

‘Chris?'

‘My son. He's moved in with us. It's perfectly legal.'

‘Of course it is.'

‘I mean, in the charter it says you can have relatives under fifty stay for up to six months. I'm just inviting a few neighbors, you know. I don't want anyone to think we're sneaking around.'

‘I would love to meet him. When should I come over?'

‘Around four would be good. We can all have a drink and be home in time to make dinner. I hope you don't think it's rude that I'm not inviting everyone over to eat.'

‘Not at all.'

‘It's just, I hate cooking in large quantities. It never comes out.'

As Pippa closed the door, she tried not to wonder about Dot. She sensed a tragic shadow there, a wound. Pippa suffered from an excess of empathy. Sometimes, she found the mystery of other people almost unbearable to contemplate: rooms within rooms inside each of them, an endless labyrinth of contradictory qualities, memories, desires, mirroring one another like an Escher drawing, baffling as a conundrum. Kinder to perceive people as they wished to be seen. After all, that's what Pippa wanted for herself: to be accepted as she seemed.