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.
9
Betty marveled at the new houses that seemed to lurch out of the ground at ever-decreasing intervals, each one bigger and in a more complicated interpretation of a greater mixture of historical styles than the last. Each new house had a garage with three doors, behind which were three cars, which explained, she supposed, the constant traffic in the town. She drove her own car slowly and disapprovingly to the supermarket and wandered stupefied through the wide aisles. When she marveled at the size of the supermarket, at the abundance of produce and the gigantic cereal boxes of every brand imaginable, Annie told her she was like a Russian refugee in 1983, and she might just as well have been a refugee, that was how foreign she felt. In New York, she had fought her way through the cramped aisles of Zabar's and Fairway or stopped on the corner at the little produce market to pick up some flowers. The bags were delivered, and the doorman kept them for her if she was not home, bringing them upstairs when she arrived, carrying them into the kitchen. Here, she pushed an oversized shopping cart to her car, struggled to get the bags into the trunk, struggled at home to get them out of the trunk and into the house. She enjoyed her shopping trips when she set out. The supermarket spread before her as a place of boundless opportunity, something new and vast and exciting, the way the prairie must have looked to the first settlers of the West. But by the time she got home, Betty was tired and defeated and longed for her old life.