The Three Weissmanns of Westport

8

The Weissmanns sat, all three together, in the little living room. It was the cocktail hour, a sacred ritual held over from the days of Joseph.

"Look at the size of this baby," Betty said proudly, holding up an enormous vessel, a glass bottle of vodka the size of a Kentucky jug. "Costco is a destitute widow's dream."

"You spent over a thousand dollars there," Annie said. They all glanced at a newly installed hearth in which a ventless gas fire danced merrily.

"I miss the fireplace ladies," Miranda said.

"We are the fireplace ladies now," said Betty with a brave smile she had noticed in the mirror that morning and decided to keep.

Annie got up to set the table.

"Don't forget. Set an extra place," Miranda said. "Two places."

"The boys!" Betty said, as if Kit and Henry were brothers, were Annie's children. "I bought ice cream."

It was hard to think of Kit as anything but a boy. He seemed to be a very good father, warm and loving, gentle and firm when Henry behaved badly, appreciative the rest of the time. He had the patience of a saint — or a babysitter, Betty thought. There was something easygoing and relaxed about the young man that was extremely charming, but was a grown man with a young son supposed to be so at peace? Betty remembered when she first married Joseph. Annie had been almost as young as Henry. Joseph had not spent all his time playing with the girls. He had been at work, and when he was home, he had agonized about work. Joseph wanted to build a future for his family. That's what he told her at night when they lay in bed, arms around each other, dreaming of all the good things that would someday come their way. Well, Betty thought, here we are in the future, and what good did all of Joseph's planning and concern do them? Perhaps Kit's way was better. The child was his chum, his companion, his "little buddy." He always had time for him, except for those occasions when he had to go into the city for an audition. He was an actor, so he never had any work. He did always seem to have plenty of money, however, taking Miranda out to extravagant restaurants and appearing at the cottage with expensive bottles of wine. Perhaps Kit's way was better, Betty repeated to herself. Yet it was hard to accept him as an adult person. He was so intensely boyish, as if not the theater but being boyish were his profession. He seemed to have sprung from Henry's loins rather than the other way around.

Kit had taken Miranda sailing that morning. She had never sailed much before, but in the last month, Kit had taken her out almost every morning. She preferred sports that actually allowed you to move, like tennis or skiing or, in a pinch, golf. But sitting next to Kit on his Aunt Charlotte's sailboat, his unconscious youth illuminated in the rich autumn light, his skin burnt by the sun and the wind, his pale gray eyes squinting into the benign autumn sun, the sail full and bleached white against the richness of the sky, snapping in the wind, the clouds racing the sailboat across the blue expanse, sitting beside Kit, the sky so deep a blue and so alive on her skin, sitting there, so still, not moving a muscle, yet shooting through the waves, the spray cold and fine, Miranda had rediscovered the joy of speed.

This was not the same as movement, a sensation she knew so well, a sensation she needed and cultivated constantly, clapping her hands, waving her arms, striding purposefully across a room, standing, sitting, crossing and uncrossing her legs. Movement was a language Miranda could speak. But this was something entirely different. This was a rush of excitement, this was the universe's movement, not her own, this was beyond her control. For the first time in years, Miranda was passive, flying through time, hurtling toward her fate, whatever that fate might be.

Henry had been there, too, of course, on all the sails, swaddled in a fat yellow life preserver. That morning he had spent most of the time on Miranda's lap asleep. When he woke, he pointed at an airplane, at a seagull, at a plastic bleach bottle bobbing in the water, naming them as God named the birds and beasts of the Bible: plane, bird, bottle. Children are not very discriminating, she thought, seeing his gleeful eyes, and wondered where she fit into his interests. When he asked her to sing a song, she could think of nothing but "Puff the Magic Dragon." But when she got to the part about Little Jackie Paper going away, Henry began to sob.

"It is sort of tragic," Miranda said apologetically to Kit, who took the gasping child and tried to comfort him. "But who ever pays attention to the words? Except for them maybe being about pot."

"Really? I never knew that."

Kit replaced Henry on her lap, and the little boy wiped his face in her sweater. She patted his silky head as if he were a cat, feeling the sweet pressure of his face against her. My little pussycat, she thought, feeling oddly shy, unable to say it out loud.

Kit was still so young that his own childhood was very much alive for him. When he spoke about his family and his youth, his face lit up. Then he gave a relaxed sigh, like someone after a good meal.

Why, he was young enough to be her assistant.

The perfect assistant, an assistant who took over one's life. He poured coffee for her from a thermos. He peeled an orange and passed her bright, perfect sections. He handed her ropes and told her to pull them taut or release them slowly. This, this was what she had been searching for in an assistant all these years — a skipper.

Then, reaching across the little boy, who was thoughtfully sucking on a plastic dinosaur, Kit had put his smooth hand beneath her chin. He had moved his thumb softly across her cheek. And she had seen that in spite of his age and his competence, he was neither her assistant nor her skipper. That there was no hierarchy involved in their relationship, none at all.

"I'm so lucky," he said. He looked down at Henry's shining hair, then turned his pale eyes back to Miranda. "Always have been." He smiled, a tight, ironic half smile and closed his eyes. "And so grateful," he added. "So fucking grateful."

There was something touching about his declaration, as though he knew all his happiness, even his memories of happiness, could be snatched away.

"Lucky to be lucky," she said, for she suddenly felt lucky, too. Her business was falling apart. Her reputation was ruined. The sky was blue. The wind filled the white sail. A child hummed a tuneless song beside her. She was skimming the water. She was still, motionless, swift.

No, no, bad idea, Miranda, she had forced herself to think then, but of course he had kissed her. He'd opened his eyes, looked into hers and somehow the distance between them, an expanse of sea air and sunlight and decades, had disappeared.

Miranda recalled that first kiss with a private smile. She watched Annie in the kitchen, catching a glimpse of an elbow, an arm, a general bustling beyond the doorway. Annie worried too much. It was very stressful, worry was. Took its toll on your health. Not to mention your skin. She had bought Annie some La Mer cream, which really did work miracles, but all Annie did was work herself up over the cost. Annie needed perspective. Life was not just about material things. She thought of little Henry. That's what life was about, the little Henrys. Annie had her boys, it was true, but they were grown. She needed someone to take their place, if not in her heart, then at least in her life.

"I wonder how Frederick is," she called out to Annie. "You should call him, Annie. Get him to drive down."

Annie yanked the silverware drawer open. One of the unwelcome side effects of her sister's new fascination with Kit Maybank and his little sidekick was a newfound and frequently vocalized interest in Frederick Barrow. She reached in the drawer. "Shit!" she said, pricking her finger on a steak knife someone had put in with the forks.

"Don't be so controlling, dear," her mother said, having no idea what Annie was complaining about but sure it had to do with her totalitarian views of the kitchen. As if Betty had not had a kitchen for over fifty years.

"I cut myself," Annie said, going into the bathroom for a Band-Aid.

"Don't bleed on the napkins. Although that OxiClean is supposed to be wonderful. And use Neosporin. Cuts heal three times faster."

Betty had begun watching daytime TV and found it extraordinarily informative and reassuring. There were so many problems in the world she had never thought of, and so many products to solve them.

In the bathroom, her cut throbbing a little in its bandage, Annie stared at herself in the mirror and wondered, not for the first time, what she really looked like. As other people saw her. It didn't seem to mean anything, the way she saw herself, for it changed with her mood. I'm not bad-looking, she decided, as she so often did. Whatever that meant.

Was that what Frederick had seen? A middle-aged woman, not bad-looking, who took very good care of herself, as she would have taken care of a rare first edition? She plucked her eyebrows and had her lip waxed regularly. She used night cream at night and day cream in the morning and sunscreen even in winter. Her makeup was natural-looking, but she never left the bathroom in the morning without it. She swam almost every morning. Her hair was the same natural-looking brown of every other middle-class middle-aged woman who went once a month to have it colored. She was not exceptional, but she was not exceptionable. She was, she realized with a mixture of pride and self-pity, conscientious.

It had been a month since she'd seen Frederick, or even heard from him. Ever since he'd gone up to Massachusetts after his reading. That night, while waiting for his car at the parking garage, he had sent her a text message thanking her again for arranging the event, saying he would miss her and urging her to visit him in Cape Cod. Then — nothing. She was deeply disappointed, but not really surprised. Frederick Barrow was an important person. She was not. There was a reason he was important, there was a reason she was not, there was an order to the universe that kept the important people in their important sphere and the unimportant people living with their mother and sister in a borrowed shack. Still, sometimes an important man like Frederick was in New York City and sought out an unimportant but quite intelligent and pleasant woman like Annie. It had happened before, it might happen again; in fact, she was sure it would happen again in some desultory fashion. It was not enough, but it would have to be enough — to have a friend like Frederick, a friend she saw when it suited him, when he had time, when he was in town.

Annie was used to being alone. There were people who felt they didn't exist if they were alone, who needed to be talking and listening to others all the time. But Annie felt acutely alive when she was by herself, when she was silent, when she was surrounded by silence. She sometimes looked at the books on the shelves in the library and felt a kinship with them, so full, so still, so potent.

Her sister, of course, had always been just the opposite. She had reveled in talk, whether on the phone or in person, her own or that of the couple at the next table at a restaurant — the more people around her, the happier she was. Though she had never entertained like Cousin Lou, she had always taken her clients and their editors out, filling up almost every meal of almost every day — breakfast, lunch, or dinner, the choice calculated using her own internal and complicated formula, a successful author getting dinner, as well as one who had hit hard times. But she did these things, ate these meals, not in a great flourish of hospitality like Lou, but out of fascination. Miranda loved problems. She loved turning problems into stories and stories into gold.

"I am an alchemist," she would say. "And a nightmare."

Annie knew she herself was neither an alchemist nor a nightmare. Perhaps that was why Frederick had disappeared. Yet she was sure he had liked her. Really liked her. And she was sure she had liked him. She would let her thoughts go no further in that direction. She had liked him. In a way she had not liked anyone in a long, long time. In a way that left her hollow without him. In a way she would push out of her mind.

Back in the living room, she watched her sister thoughtfully perusing a People magazine, which, along with all tabloids, she referred to as her "files." These quiet days in a suburban Indian summer must be hard for Miranda, Annie thought. Annie was used to being left alone by the world. Miranda was not. But now the publishers had stopped calling. The editors had stopped calling. Even the press had stopped calling. There were, of course, the remnants of the Awful Authors. It seemed as though they unfortunately would never stop calling. They were like foghorns, mournfully hooting from their lonely rocky promontories. No wonder Miranda was so taken with Kit and his little boy. They were young and fresh and untainted by the false disasters Miranda had wasted her life pursuing.

When Kit arrived, he brought a bottle of Maker's Mark and, on the basis of his many years as an unemployed thespian bartender, made them Manhattans. Miranda sucked on the Maraschino cherry. He had actually brought a bottle of them. The resplendent red, the sweet unreal flavor, reminded her momentarily of Josie, of special nights out and tall glasses of Shirley Temple cocktails.

Henry sat on the floor with a plastic cow and a robot. The cow and the robot danced. Or wrestled. Miranda could not tell which.

Now Kit was talking. But, mirabile dictu, instead of telling her his stories, Kit was asking about her own. He wanted to know what she thought about before she went to sleep when she was a child. Did she have wallpaper in her room? What teachers had she loved and why? What was the first pair of shoes she remembered? She sometimes felt that he was rummaging through her life as if it were an attic full of musty antique treasures, but his curiosity was warm and detailed and domestic and endless, and Miranda, so accustomed to listening and waiting and pouncing on the sordid details of others' lives, found herself almost delirious at the intoxicating novelty of hearing her own voice telling her own small stories.

Annie listened to her sister talking about their childhood. Now and then she would add something, or Betty would jump in with a clearer memory. Annie had to admit she liked having Kit and Henry around. On the floor, Henry muttered seriously to his toys and allowed her to stroke his silky hair. Kit had dropped his jacket on a chair and kicked off his shoes and, though just barely suggesting the sweeping piles of shoes and socks and sweaters and electronic gadgets that her own boys would strew around her apartment when they were home, these small gestures afforded her a momentary tender motherly exasperation.

She heard a phone ring from deep inside her reverie and thought for an instant that it was her phone, her call, her sons. But of course it was not even her ring, it was Miranda's.

"Yes," Miranda was saying in her patient Awful Author voice, at the same time grimacing to the others in the room. "Oh, that's outrageous! You poor, poor thing. However, that's why you have me. That's exactly what I'm here for."

"Christ," Annie said when Miranda hung up. "Those people. What's he doing, writing a memoir about writing a false memoir?"

Miranda shrugged. "One of the few clients I have left. You guys have children, I have has-beens. We all do our bit."

"But look how great you are with Henry," Kit said. "The Awful Authors must have trained you well."

Miranda beamed.

She's beaming, Annie thought, surprised. She was also surprised that Kit knew the family name for Miranda's clients. It seemed so intimate, somehow. And Kit and Miranda had known each other such a short time — a month? Although they had been together almost constantly during that time. She watched Miranda turn her smile to Kit, not her seductive manipulative smile, but this open, unstudied, happy, beaming smile. Kit, clearly dazzled, blinked at Miranda as if she were a bright light and he a stunned bunny.

This can only end in tears, Annie thought.

This can only end in tears : the words parents used when their children became too exuberant. She reminded herself that Kit and Miranda were not her children. Even her children were no longer her children. They were all grown up. Soon enough they would have their own children. This small boy on the floor who had brought back so many memories was closer to a grandson than a son. She felt suddenly very old and curled up next to her mother on the couch, murmuring, "Mommy," as she laid her head on Betty's shoulder.

We are old, she thought. Miranda is old. Miranda must not become a desperate old cougar.

Then again, who was she to say what Miranda should be? Who was she to say what was desperate? That way lies tears, but who was she to say that tears were wrong? You couldn't protect anyone, not even Miranda. Particularly if they did not want to be protected. Particularly from a handsome, attentive young lover. If lover is what he was. A handsome, attentive young lover might, at any rate, take Miranda's mind off the Awful Authors. The Awful Authors were not the victims they had been cracked up to be. They were charlatan victims. It must be galling to a connoisseur of imperfection like Miranda. They were fakes, reproductions, costume, paste. If she could not have authentic victims, then at least she deserved an authentically ordinary, healthy person like Kit Maybank, a man with a real life — if you could call auditioning a real life — to take her mind off all those counterfeit people chronicling their counterfeit lives.

Nevertheless, this could only end in tears.

Frederick was a real man with a real life, she supposed. He worked, and he doted on his children and grandchildren. He woke up in the morning and breathed air blown in from the sea. That was really all she knew of him. Except that he had come up to her apartment one night. He had followed her into the narrow hallway. He had pushed her roughly against the wall, a hand on each of her arms. He had kissed her and pressed against her and surprised her with his urgency, to which her response had at first been the unworthy thought that he had perhaps taken Viagra. Was it just kicking in or about to wear off? Was that what this was all about? "Erections lasting more than four hours..." The TV commercial flashed through her mind — then her thoughts got gorgeously foggy and she pulled him even closer and they staggered like teenagers to the bedroom.

Annie smiled at the memory. Frederick had spent the night, his clothes scattered across the floor. He had carefully turned off his cell phone, though, probably hiding from those children of his.