“I have a question,” I said, knowing I was stoned and that she wasn’t but finding it hard to keep in mind the second half of that proposition. “You do this with all your assistants?”
She considered: “No, not this exactly. People are different. I always do something. I can’t have somebody in my face twenty-four-seven who is going to act shy around me. No time. And I don’t have the luxury of getting to know you in some slow, delicate way or being politely English about it, saying please and thank you whenever I want you to do something—if you work for me, you just have to jump to it. I’ve been doing this a while, and I’ve figured out that a few intense hours at the beginning save a lot of time and misunderstandings and bullshit later on. You’re getting off easy, believe me. I had a bath with Melanie.”
I attempted a goofy extended joke, hoping to hear her laugh again, but instead she squinted at me.
“Another thing you should understand is that it’s not that I don’t get your British irony, I just don’t like it. I find it adolescent. Ninety-nine percent of the time when I meet British people my feeling is: grow up!” Her mind turned back to Melanie in that bath: “Wanted to know if her nipples were too long. Paranoid.”
“Were they?”
“Were who what?”
“Her nipples. Long.”
“They’re fucking like fingers.”
I spat some of my Coke on to the grass.
“You’re funny.”
“I come from a long line of funny people. God knows why the British think they’re the only people allowed to be funny in this world.”
“I’m not that British.”
“Oh, babe, you’re as British as they come.”
She reached into her pocket for her phone and began going through her texts. Long before it became a general condition Aimee lived in her phone. She was a pioneer in this as in so many things.
“Granger, Granger, Granger, Granger. Doesn’t know what to do with himself if he doesn’t have anything to do with himself. He’s like me. We’ve got the same mania. He reminds me of how tiring I can be. To others.” Her thumb wavered over her brand-new BlackBerry. “With you I’m hoping for: cool, calm, collected. Could do with some of that around here. Jesus Christ, he’s sent me like fifteen texts already. He just needs to hold the bikes. Says he’s near the—what in hell is the ‘men’s pond’?”
I told her, in detail. She made a skeptical face.
“If I know Granger there’s no way he’s swimming in fresh water, he won’t even swim in Miami. Big believer in chlorine. No, he can just hold the bikes.” She poked a finger in my belly. “Are we done here? Got another one of those if you need it. This is a one-time deal—take advantage. One time per assistant. Rest of the time you work when I work. Which is always.”
“I am so relaxed right now.”
“Good! But is there anything else to do around here besides this?”
Which is how we came to be wandering around inside Kenwood House, followed, for a while, by an eagle-eyed six-year-old girl whose distracted mother refused to listen to her excellent hunch. I trailed red-eyed behind my new employer, noticing for the first time her very particular way of looking at paintings, how for example she ignored all men, not as painters, but as subjects, walking past a Rembrandt self-portrait without pausing, ignoring all the earls and dukes, and dismissing, with a single line—“Get a haircut!”—a merchant seaman with my father’s laughing eyes. Landscapes, too, were nothing to her. She loved dogs, animals, fruit, fabrics, and flowers especially. Over the years I learned to expect that the bunch of anemones we had just seen in the Prado or the peonies from the National Gallery would reappear, a week or so later, in vases all over whichever house or hotel we happened to be in at the time. Many small, painted dogs, too, leaped from canvases into her life. Kenwood was the source of Colette, an incontinent Joshua Reynolds spaniel bought in Paris a few months later, whom I then had to walk twice a day for a year. But more than any of these she loved the pictures of the women: their faces, their fripperies, their hairstyles, their corsetry, their little, pointy shoes.
“Oh my God, it’s Judy!”
Aimee was across the red damask room, in front of a life-size portrait, laughing. I came up behind and peered at the Van Dyck in question. No doubt about it: there was Judy Ryan, in all her horrible glory, but four hundred years ago, wearing an unflattering black-and-white tent of lace and satin, and with her right hand—half maternal, half menacing—resting on the shoulder of a young, unnamed page. Her bloodhound eyes, terrible fringe, the long, chinless face—it was all there. We laughed so much it seemed to me that something changed between us, some formality or fear fell away, so that when, a few minutes later, Aimee claimed to be charmed by something called The Infant Academy I felt free enough at least to disagree.
“It’s a bit sentimental, isn’t it? And weird . . .”
“I like it! I like the weirdness. Naked babies painting naked pictures of each other. I’m a sucker for babies right now.” She looked wistfully at a boy child with a coy smirk on his cherubic face. “He reminds me of my baby. You really don’t like it?”
I didn’t know at the time that Aimee was pregnant with Kara, her second child. She probably didn’t know it herself. To me it was obvious the whole picture was ridiculous, and the pink-cheeked infants especially repulsive, but when I looked at her face I saw she was serious. And what are babies, I can remember thinking, if they can do this to women? Do they have the power to reprogram their mothers? To make their mothers into the kinds of women their younger selves would not even recognize? The idea frightened me. I restricted myself to praising her son Jay’s beauty in comparison to these cherubim, not very convincingly or coherently, thanks to the weed, and Aimee turned to me, frowning.
“You don’t want kids, that it? Or you think you don’t want them.”
“Oh, I know I don’t want them.”
She patted me on the top of my head, as if there were not twelve years between us but forty.
“You’re, what? Twenty-three? Things change. I was exactly the same.”
“No, I’ve always known. Since I was little. I’m not the mothering type. Never wanted them, never will. I saw what it did to my mother.”
“What did it do to her?”
To be asked so directly forced me to actually consider the answer.
“She was a young mum, then a single mum. There were things she wanted to be but she couldn’t, not then—she was trapped. She had to fight for any time for herself.”
Aimee put her hand on her hips and assumed a pedantic look.
“Well, I’m a single mom. And I can assure you my baby doesn’t stop me doing a damn thing. He’s like my fucking inspiration right now if you really want to know. It’s a balance, for sure, but you’ve just got to want it enough.”
I thought of the Jamaican nanny, Estelle, who let me into Aimee’s house each morning and then disappeared to the nursery. That there might be any practical divergence between my mother’s situation and her own did not seem to occur to Aimee, and this was one of my earliest lessons in her way of viewing the differences between people, which were never structural or economic but always essentially differences of personality. I looked at the color in her cheeks and where my hands were—out in front of me, like a politician making a point—and realized that our discussion had become rapidly and strangely heated, without either of us really wanting it to, as if the very word “baby” was a kind of accelerant. I put my hands back by my sides and smiled.