The Wonders of the Invisible World (26 page)

As Jane Eaglen shrills out
“Hojotoho!”
Holly watches Seth mangling his grapefruit. What a bad, bad wife she is. But the granola’s a hit: she’s the only taker on the Shredded Wheat. On her first full day of being thirty-two, she doesn’t want to start putting on weight.

After breakfast, Seth goes upstairs to do some work, and Holly drives Tenley and her friend to the station in the Explorer.
It creeps her out to have anybody else in the Saturn after she’s used it to go commit adultery. Her official excuse is that the car’s a mess; she keeps it that way by chucking napkins, McDonald’s bags and Diet Coke cans on the passenger-side floor. She’s even tried to think of a plausible-sounding reason to trade in a two-month-old car. In which her husband just had a twelve-CD changer installed.

“I
still
feel like I’m buzzed,” Tenley says. “You guys always get that wasted? I was so wrecked last night, I went to the bathroom and I couldn’t, like, remember how to pee?”

“Wow, really?” says the boyfriend.

“It’s sort of Seth’s hobby,” Holly says. “Like rock climbing.”

“But what about you?”

“I just basically keep him company.”

Tenley looks at her. “Yeah, I noticed.” She sighs. “Oh, well. Anyhow, you’ve got a fabulous place.” She pulls down the visor and lifts her chin to look in the mirror. “You know, the kitchen
alone.
God, I look like shit.” She flips the visor back up. “Carl? You didn’t hear that.” Carl’s in the backseat, drumming his fingers on Tenley’s headrest.

“Thanks,” says Holly. “It’s not really my doing, but—you know, yeah. It’s pretty great.”

“So is he after you to have kids now? Carl, could you cut that out?”

“We talk about it.”

“It just made me think, you know, choosing a house that big. And of course now that you’re—anyway. So you never told me what he got you for your birthday.”

“Oh. A CD thing for my car.” He’d also gotten her the 1935 recording of Act I of
Die Walküre
with Lotte Lehmann, who he’d read was the all-time greatest Sieglinde.

“What kind?” Carl says.

Tenley looks over her right shoulder. “This is girl talk.” She turns back to Holly. “Carl does have one
big thing
in his favor.”
Holly glances in her rearview mirror; Carl’s just looking out the window. Tenley sighs. “God, I can’t believe how
rich
you guys are—sorry, I know how that sounds, but I’m really sort of in awe.” Tenley shares a two-bedroom in Park Slope.

“I guess I would be, too.” Holly puts her left blinker on. The station’s just up ahead, and that’ll be that. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to say. ‘I’m still the same person’?”

“Oh, you
are,
totally. I mean, nobody would ever …” Tenley looks over at Holly, shrugs.

“Right,” Holly says. “Say no more.”

“I can say no more,” Tenley says, in an Indian accent. When they were little, they must have seen
Help!
twenty times.

At two-thirty Seth and Holly start down for La Guardia in the Explorer, through a freezing rain. Can his father’s plane even land? She wishes it would turn tail and take him back, which she suspects is the cover-wish for her real wish.

The plane’s late because of the weather, but they’ve brought along a few sections of the
Times,
and she buys a cheap ballpoint to do the crossword puzzle. She’s trying to figure out “Forsterian dictum (two words)” when the flight’s finally announced and passengers start straggling in the gate. Seth and his father hug, then Van hugs Holly, mashing her breasts, his leather shoulder bag slapping against her pelvic bone. “Mmm,” he says into her ear. “So
glad.
”

“We are, too,” she says, and he releases her.

“Bumpy ride?” Seth says.

“Only along toward the last,” Van says. “I was able to read until we started hitting turbulence around Washington. Then I figured discretion was the better part of valor and had ’em bring me a drink. Since I was too pusillanimous to haul out my own supply. Listen, I have a gift for you two.” He pats the shoulder bag.

“A bottle of hooch,” says Seth. “How did I guess.”

“Oh, no,
that
I’m keeping. Like to have my little nightcap in my room. No, this is a one-of-a-kind—well, it is and it isn’t. I’ll have to give it to you when we get to your dacha. Couple things came loose, so I need to stop and get some rubber cement.”

“Hmm. Mighty mysterious,” Seth says. “Holly must have rubber cement in her workroom.”

“Hell, of course she would. Losing my marbles here. Ah, which reminds me. Guy goes to his doctor, doctor says, ‘I got some bad news. You have terminal cancer.’ Guy says, ‘Oh,
no.’
Doctor says, ‘I got more bad news. You’ve also got Alzheimer’s.’ Guy says, ‘Whew, thank God. I thought you were going to tell me I had cancer or something.’ ”

“Good one,” says Seth.

“Except you’ve heard it.”

“Still good.”

Van stretches forth a hand and regards his palm as if holding what’s-his-name’s skull. “Age cannot wither nor custom stale. Speaking of which …” He gives Holly another quick hug. “You wouldn’t happen to have an older sister? A much older sister?”

“I have a
younger
sister—well, you met her. At the wedding.”

“I remember her well. Nearly as lovely as your lovely self.
Too
lovely, I’m afraid.”

“But she does have low standards,” Seth says.

“If she’s got standards of any kind, that lets
her
out,” says Van. “I remember when I used to have standards. It was back when Benjamin Harrison was president.”

When they get back to the house, she starts a pot of coffee, which seems better than offering Van more to drink. Seth shows him around, carries his bags upstairs and comes back down to the kitchen alone.

“Mmm.” He sniffs the air. “Good idea.”

Holly says, “Why were you ragging on my sister?”

“Say what?”

“She has low standards?”

“
I
thought I was ragging on what’s-his-name.”

“That’s not how it came across. You essentially told your father she was a slut.”

Seth does that little take of his where he raises both palms and rolls his eyes upward.

“Why would you
do
that?” she says.

“Holly. I was talking about her sorry-ass boyfriend. Shit, I
like
your sister.”

“Well, be more careful what you say, okay?”

“Okay. I’m sorry, babe.” He smiles and holds his arms open. What can she do but go to him and put the side of her head against his chest? Though she didn’t appreciate hearing that he likes her sister, either.

Van comes back down with his gift: a photo album filled with old pictures, captions typed on slips of white paper that he’s rubber-cemented to the black pages. They sit on the couch, Holly between them holding it on her lap as Van points and narrates. The story of his marriage, basically, with what seem to Holly grudging glimpses of Seth: selected baby pictures and milestones in costume—Little League uniform, mortarboard, Abe Lincoln in a school play. In groom suit, gray jacket, striped pants, holding hands with Holly in her wedding gown. The last page has shots from the fortieth-anniversary party. Among displays of exploding tropical flowers, Seth’s father, as tanned and smiley as an actor, works the room. Raises a champagne glass. Feeds a forkful of cake to Seth’s mother, stonefaced in her wheelchair.

“This is great,” Seth says. “I’m glad to have this.” Holly’s impressed: it’s a good imitation of the normative reaction. Over to you, Holly.

“Thank you,” she says. “This is going to be so wonderful to have.” She rubs her index finger back and forth on the slip of paper that says
OUR
40
TH, SIESTA KEY
, 1/8/95,
and the smears ball up into springy grains of rubber. She’s managed to imply that (a) his gift is not yet wonderful, and (b) it will be wonderful only when he, too, is dead. But Van puts an arm around her back, clamps her far shoulder and gives it a squeeze, apparently to express some feeling too powerful for words. He excuses himself and goes into the downstairs bathroom, and Holly turns back to that first page. A young man and woman in bathing suits, arms around each other’s waists, water and mountains behind them:
LILY AND VG, SARANAC, SUMMER
1957.
In 1957, Seth’s mother had looked like Winona Ryder, except that her thighs had that tubby look nobody minded back then. Van had looked like a younger, even handsomer Seth.

Holly bought lamb chops for dinner, but now that it’s stopped sleeting, Van insists on taking them out for what he calls “our first night.” Lately, he says, he’s had a jones for Mexican food. A jones, yet. So Seth calls The El Coyote—which is what it’s actually called,
The El
—while Holly goes upstairs to put on earrings and lipstick.

She’s looking through her jewelry box when Seth comes in and closes the door behind him. He opens his top drawer, gets out his pipe and goes kitchy-koo.

“I don’t think I should,” she says.

“Oh, come on. I need my coconspirator. I can’t do this straight.”

“I thought you were
enjoying
it.”

“Good,” he says. “That means he probably thinks so, too.”

After turning him down in bed last night, Holly can’t totally punk out on this. But she only takes two hits to his four or five. That little bit she should be able to handle, or there really
is
something wrong with her.

•   •   •

The El Coyote is all welcome and abundance. Somebody’s put wooden bowls of salsa and blue corn chips on their table before they even sit down; the menu calls this “Bottomless Chips and Salsa—Complimentary!” The tabletops are wooden factory spools polyurethaned to a gloss like honey.

Holly can’t imagine how Seth got them here: he must be twice as wrecked as she is, if that’s quantifiable. At one point they had to squeeze through a construction zone where the plastic mesh fencing whipped by just inches from her window and giant bulldozers, cranes and earthmovers loomed in pink light. And then all that confusion at the door when they had to stop and be looked up in a book—what seemed to Holly the kind of episode that could lead to getting arrested. She tries to recall how the Bible line goes:
Thou hast preparedest for me an table set before me in the presence of mine enemies.
But it would be good to stay away from thinking about enemies.

She hears the crunch of a corn chip all the way across the table. “Good salsa,” Van says. “Salsa without cilantro is like a day without sunshine.”

“Matthew Arnold?” Seth says.

“He will
never
cease to twit me about this,” Van says to Holly. “One line—a very apposite line—in your wedding toast. From ‘Dover Beach.’ Apparently this was the ne plus ultra of fuddy-duddyism. See, years ago—this character was still in grade school—I used to teach nineteenth-century. Until I realized that my true gift was for glad-handing.”

“You used to say it was for kissing ass.”

“Ah, but there’s a lady present.”

“It’s okay, she knows about these exotic practices.” Seth crunches a corn chip. “Are you having a margarita?”

Silence. Holly looks up. He’s looking at
her.

“Oh.” She tries to determine whether he’d implied that she should or she shouldn’t, but the sound of his voice is back too far and getting farther. Would a margarita help bring her down or make it worse? She’s pretty sure tequila comes from the same cactus as mescaline.

“Be working on your answer,” Seth says.

“
My
arm is twistable,” says Van.

“Maybe if I had a half?” Holly says. God, her mouth is dry.

“A small one?” What Seth means is
I’ll help you through this, but you’re being a drag.

The waitress moves toward them, her healthy face appearing to glow from inside like a Halloween pumpkin, but there’s a candle on the table to provide a reassuring explanation. All these little things will click back into place if Holly can just hang on. The waitress says her name is Andrea, and she recites the specials while looking them in the eyes. She has rings on every finger of both hands, even spoon rings on the thumbs; she’s pretty and young and fetishy, and Holly feels the threat, which is insane given what
she’s
been up to. In fact, Holly tried out fetishy things on Mitchell: an ankle bracelet, then a tiny silver stud piercing the web of skin between her big and second toes. Seth liked it, too.

When the waitress goes away, Seth’s father turns to Holly. “So, are you nagging this character sufficiently about his health? He asks, having brought them to a restaurant specializing in fatty food.”

This question has so much ironic spin that she gives up and says, “I don’t know.”

“Well, by my calculations, he’s about to turn forty, and depending on whose genes he got the most of … You see what I’m saying. These last few years have put the fear of God into me. I go in every six months, religiously, get ’em to check my cholesterol, EKG, the works. Prostate exam—very important.”

“Fingered for death,” Seth says. “I have to say, one of my least favorite things.”

Holly understands he has to say this in front of his father. In fact, isn’t that why he said
I have to say
? Clever Seth! But she knows what she knows.

“Yes, well,” says Van. “If you want to talk about least favorite things …”

“Yeah, you’re right,” says Seth. “I should be doing it.”

“I’ve also got my living will witnessed and notarized. But if I’m in any shape to prevent
that
situation, believe you me …”

“Well.” Seth looks over his shoulder, as if to see what’s keeping their waitress. “Let’s see how you feel if it ever gets to a point like that. I mean, how did Mom feel?”

Van shakes his head. “I wondered all the time.
All
the time. I used to look for any sign that—you know. Well, we don’t need to pursue this. Holly, you look like you’ve been shot.”

“I do?” She has no idea what else to say, though he clearly wants her to build on this and then they can all three be talking. She feels a leg against her knee and moves her knee away.