What Nora Knew (10 page)

Veeva’s name first popped up in the trades in the early nineties after her big feud with superagent Swifty Lazar over a power play for Al Pacino. Veeva won the feud, but not exactly fair and square. A week later Swifty died of kidney failure, and Veeva became ten times more powerful than ever. People would say, “That Veeva Penney—she’ll negotiate to death!”

She’s as top an agent as top agents get. How could I not introduce myself? I was a writer. Writers need agents. I had
my secret collection of essays. Or short stories. I was still figuring that out. We could meet. She could sell my stories. I could get my column. My sisters could host a book party for me. All I had to do was waltz over to the pigs in a blanket and shake Veeva’s hand.

I also had to pee. That’s the other thing I had to do. I’m never my best with a full bladder. I was intimidated by Veeva, and stalling. I’ll do loads of things without much thought—many now qualify as major regrets—but presenting myself to Veeva Penney would require some extra aplomb and maybe another vodka tonic. I couldn’t even go up and say, “Hi, I’m a friend of Sarah’s,” and I certainly wasn’t going to say, “Hi, I’m dating Sarah’s chiropractor.”

I set my empty glass on a passing tray and headed to a powder room off a hallway between the kitchen and the front entryway. Bathroom radar is one of my talents. Only my radar wasn’t doing me any favors. Cameron Duncan was standing a few feet from the closed door.

“Molly!”

“Cameron.”

“Hello.”

“Are you the bathroom attendant?” I asked, my attempt at sounding clever. But I probably sounded more like a wedding guest lost in a hotel.

“I’m waiting for a friend,” he said. “Good to see you, Molly.” He sounded sincere, which I found sincerely perplexing.

“Great party,” I said. “You might want to tweet about it. I hear great parties are made, not born.”

Did he even know I was referring to his post-Hamptons tweet? For a moment there, just an instant, Cameron looked embarrassed. But in a calculated, charming way, like he was trying to look embarrassed. “I didn’t realize you follow me,” he said.

“I don’t. I just tripped over you.”

“Well, I apologize for the tweet. Though what makes you think I was referring to you?”

“Because you just apologized to me.”

He smiled that amused, crooked smile of his. Not quite a smirk. Not quite a grin. He had an ease about him that made me uneasy. A tiny scab on his cheek said he must have cut himself shaving. His curls could use a trim. But he looked good in a fitted gray suit with no tie. Somewhere between polished and rumpled.

“How do you know Sarah?” he asked.

“How do you?”

“We share the same agent.”

“Veeva Penney?”

“You know Veeva?”

“I think I heard a flush. Did you hear a flush?” I said.

“I wasn’t listening for flushes.”

“Oh. Most people in bathroom lines do.” What was wrong with me? Why was I discussing plumbing? We each gazed around looking at nothing, checking out the walls. They were a creamy shade of gold with wainscoting, white trim on the woodwork, and a couple of framed Audubon prints. Rich-people walls. “So why mysteries?” I finally asked. I was
making conversation. “Why not politics or historical fiction or haiku?”

He shrugged. “I don’t like knowing how things will turn out.”

“I do.”

“See, that’s what I like about you. I never know what you’re going to say. I’d have taken you for a loves-surprises woman.”

“Really?” I liked that self-image. Maybe someday I’d adopt it.

“What’s interesting about knowing an ending?” he asked.

“Well, in
Sleepless in Seattle,
your
supposed
number one favorite movie, we know Meg will end up with Tom. But it’s not about who she’s going to end up with. We still want to keep watching. We’re mesmerized by the journey.”

Cameron seemed to be considering my comment, making a mental note. “Maybe the mystery isn’t who we’re supposed to be with in life,” he said, “but what’s keeping us from recognizing them.”

I waited for him to say touché. Instead we hit another lull. I noticed a scuff mark right above the baseboard. I counted three electrical outlets. I nodded at the door. “You sure your friend’s alive in there? Maybe she needs a doctor.”

Down the hallway, a woman emerged from another door and walked toward us. She saw Cameron and smiled. She had exquisite brows—clean, sculpted, and delicately arched. I can’t tell you anything else about her, that’s how transfixed I was by those eyebrows. She paused and kissed Cameron on
the cheek, saying, “Poor Mike Bing can’t go out on the balcony? The view is divine.” She breezed off toward the party area waving good-bye with her fingers.

“Has your detective been banned from balcony privileges?” I asked.

“He has a phobia,” Cameron said.

“Like in
Monk
?”

“Yes.”

“So you stole the idea of a detective with a phobia?”

“I didn’t steal it. It’s an homage.”

“
Sleepless in Seattle
was an homage to
An Affair to Remember.
Giving your detective a phobia because a TV-show detective has phobias—isn’t that stealing?”

“Then I stole it from myself.” If a man can blush, Cameron Duncan was blushing. “I have a problem with heights.”

“How’d that happen?” I said. “Did your mother drop you as a baby?”

“You want to crack jokes about my phobia?”

“Oh. Sorry. I don’t meet a lot of phobias.”

“I
have
a phobia. That doesn’t make me a phobia.”

“Well, what happens if you walk into the living room and look out the window?”

“You don’t want to know.”

“Actually, I do. I’m curious.”

“That’s right. You like to know the ending up front.”

I frowned at Cameron. He frowned at me.

A man holding a martini glass came around the corner. “Waiting line?” he asked.

“His friend’s in there,” I said. “Reading
War and Peace.
”

The man left. Cameron told me about his fear of open rooftops and window seats on airplanes and stepping onto balconies. “I’m determined to overcome it,” he said. “By Labor Day. That’s my deadline.”

“How many therapists are involved?”

“No therapists. Just me. I’ll go cold turkey. Like a smoker.”

“And do what? Ride an elevator to a penthouse? If you’ve got until Labor Day, leave now and walk up. You’ll have more time to adjust.”

“Don’t bother trying to bait me,” he said. “I’m unflappable.”

“Really? No one can flap you? Not a soul? Only balconies?”

“Feel free to try.”

“Your house is on fire.”

“Don’t own a house. I live in a ground-floor apartment in Brooklyn.”

“A hundred relatives are coming for dinner and the caterer just canceled with the flu.”

“Order in Chinese.”

“There’s no press here to cover your appearance.”

“Aren’t you the press?”

“No
interested
press.”

“Pity.”

“I’m fourteen years old and I’m having your baby.”

The bathroom door opened. A woman exited. Not the redhead from the Apple-store elevator. A different woman.
Another beautiful woman. With a perfectly made-up face and perfectly coiffed hair. She must have had a beauty-parlor appointment in there.

“Baby?” she said.

I wasn’t sure if she was addressing Cameron or referring to my illegitimate spawn, but I was too mortified to care. “My turn,” I said, and ducked into the powder room. What was it with this Cameron Duncan? His mere presence unnerved me. He was too smooth, too charming. Totally irritating. I could hear applause coming through the bathroom door, somebody calling out, “Congratulations, Sarah!” It was a lovely powder room. Creamy gold with more Audubon prints. I washed my hands and had a conversation with myself in the mirror. I said to myself:
Why not ask Cameron to introduce you to his agent? What are you afraid of?
My self answered,
You can’t trust that tweeter. You don’t need his help. Just walk up to Veeva and say hello.
I chucked myself on the chin and patted myself on the back—metaphorically, of course—and returned to the living room.

Veeva Penney was standing near Sarah’s book table encouraging a man to purchase a second copy.
Buy one more! You can afford it!
Who wouldn’t want an agent like that? I was five feet away from her, ready to extend my hand and introduce myself, Molly Hallberg,
EyeSpy
reporter who happens to have written almost two dozen sparkling essays, when Russell slipped up behind me, wrapped his arm around my shoulder, and said, “Come meet Sarah’s mother. She’s also a patient.”

I met Sarah’s mother. A delightful woman. With a bad back. A back that was much improved thanks to my boyfriend. By the time I could extricate myself from discussing Sarah’s mother’s knee replacement and Sarah’s sister’s apartment and Sarah’s fabulous book and too bad the grandchildren weren’t invited, I saw Veeva leaving with Cameron and his powder-room friend.

“Have you ever met a man more bighearted and adorable?” Veeva was saying in her big Veeva voice. She patted Cameron on the ass and the three of them were gone.

Father’s Day in my family is a two-day holiday. Mother’s Day lasts about three weeks and is regarded on the level of a national holiday, which technically it is, but nobody celebrates the celebration of herself like my mother. Fortunately, she’s also gracious enough to throw a fuss on my father’s behalf, making sure way in advance that her three daughters clear their calendars and get their butts to Long Island on his national holiday.

Before heading out of the city for the weekend, I submitted my big story to Deirdre. I wrote
Nora Ephron romance article
in the subject line. Deleted
Nora Ephron
and left
romance article
. Then changed that to just
article.
I hit the send button and left the office with Emily calling after me, loud and clear, “Leaving early, Molly?”

For me, the pilgrimage back to the town of my youth is a train ride requiring a transfer at the Jamaica Station. For my
thirty-seven-year-old sister, Jocelyn the Wharton Grad, it’s a five-minute drive in her Prius. And for Lisa, the youngest of the three of us, and the most beloved daughter, the Daughter Who’s Produced Grandchildren, it’s a major megillah requiring a taxi, a plane, and car service because Lisa now lives in Atlanta. Her husband, Tate Underwood III, and the reason Lisa moved 868 miles away to what my father calls “that Southern speed trap,” is usually too busy to attend Hallberg family functions. Tate III manufactures pool-cleaning supplies. Tate III travels to Asia. Not Long Island. Of course the twins, Travis and Tate IV, do accompany their mother back home, and that’s what really matters. They’re six years old and two of my favorite human beings on earth. They speak with Southern drawls; I’m “Aunt Maaahhlly.”

When we gather for our mini-family reunions, each of the Hallberg girls sleeps in her former bedroom, except Jocelyn’s room is now a TV room, Lisa’s room is my father’s at-home office, and my room is my mother’s upstairs arts-and-crafts room, versus her basement arts-and-crafts room, and the bedroom most likely to kill off a daughter from the deadly fumes of poisonous glue. The boys sleep on air mattresses in Lisa’s room. That way they stand a chance of surviving until adulthood.

The Year Bitsy Gave Up Cooking—that’s not a time reference, that’s the name my father uses to refer to the year my mother gave up cooking—was notable for another big reason. Within days of her “Enough’s enough!” announcement she gave away her chafing dishes, tossed out her cookbooks, said good-bye to her Cuisinart, and started cutting pictures out of
her stacks of magazines, relabeling her Tupperware containers and filling them with alphabetized categories—flowers, puppies, butterflies, umbrellas—for her hobby: decoupage. And not just a decorative touch on a tchotchke or two, but decoupage with a vengeance. The bread bin, lampshades, tabletops, picture frames, jewelry boxes, toilet-seat covers, the back of my father’s fish tank—any hard surface is at risk. The house went from smelling like brisket and potatoes to library paste and shellac. My father blames this unfortunate turn of events—from cook to kooky—on my mother’s getting lost in the wrong aisle at Michaels, suburban America’s paean to hobby crafts. If she hadn’t turned left instead of right after the pipe-cleaners section, she might be crocheting all of us afghans instead of plastering pictures of fruit on my father’s toolbox.

I like to imagine that first night in 1970 when my parents met at Cafe Wha? in the Village, two strangers across a crowded room, one with a business degree, the other the only child of Ziggy and Shirley Grossman, owners of Grossman Upholsterers. Three months later they were married and my father was given the title of president, probably the only upholstery business in the universe to even have a president, but Ziggy and Shirley didn’t want their daughter to marry anything less.

My grandparents promptly bought a condominium in Boca Raton, spending winter, then winter and fall, then spring, winter, and fall—every season other than the beastly hot summer—in Florida, until Grandpa Ziggy suffered a massive heart attack while floating on a blowup raft in the
condominium building pool, which aside from the tragedy of it all was supposedly quite a sight. A heartbroken Grandma Shirley tried living the widow lifestyle in Florida, but since she didn’t play canasta and could enjoy only so many shopping expeditions to the Boca Town Center and had no patience for all the other women fighting over the few available widowers, she sold the condo for a nifty profit, packed up her Hummel figurines, and moved back to Roslyn, where she’s spent the past twenty-five years telling my father he doesn’t know shit about running an upholstery business. Which even she knows isn’t true. Really she’s just jealous and regrets that she didn’t join the women’s movement and run the whole shebang herself when there was still time.

Not only has my dad put three daughters through college and kept his wife living in proper Long Island style, but he’s expanded the business beyond Great-Grandfather Grossman’s wildest pushcart dreams. In a whirlwind of salesmanship, President Hallberg wined and dined all the big-name interior decorators within a thirty-mile radius to send their sofas and dining chairs and ottomans to him, then worked his way through the New York Design Center on Lexington Avenue, using his interior-decorator clients as references and building the business to include major furniture manufacturers. I once asked my mother how she felt sure enough about my father to marry him after only three months. “Are you kidding?” she said. “The man can sell anything.”