The View From Penthouse B

38





Amplifications


MARGOT HAS NOW READ everything I’ve written and believes I have underplayed the good while overstating the bad. She thinks I sound too modest and too mousy. “You need to say something like ‘I know I gave the impression that I was unpopular and not terribly attractive, but I was never considered either of those things. In fact, I’ve grown into my looks, and it’s a widely held belief’”—a pause while she conjured—“‘that I’m the fairest sister of them all.’”

“Who said that?”

“I know for a fact that Edwin did. All the time.”

“Doesn’t count.”

“Dad used to say something along those lines. Remember? ‘A rose between two thorns’?”

“Maybe when you two were fighting.”

“I don’t care. Write that down,” she instructed. So I did.

She’d given me carte blanche to describe these past two years: widowhood for me, singledom for both of us, and the poorhouse for Margot and Anthony. I know now that she was humoring me, letting me tell all, even the exposing of financial and marital secrets better left in the cemetery of dead headlines—because she didn’t think a memoir by Gwen-Laura Schmidt would ever get published.

After I printed out the whole manuscript, I watched as she read it, both of us seated, days on end, at the dining-room table that so often represented the full geography of our social lives. She divided the pages into two piles: those she could live with (the chapters covering her own private life and romantic renaissance) and those that needed beefing up.

“For example,” she said, pausing to fold one offending page into a paper airplane before launching it across the table into my chest.

I opened it and read my own words. “I love this scene,” I protested.

“A kiss in a restaurant? That’s it?” Had I not realized, she demanded, that a kiss was only a snapshot at the end of my second date with Eli, and how were readers supposed to know that everything didn’t collapse before the third? “Remember that song from A Chorus Line—‘Dance 10, Looks 3’?” she asked. “Because if I was rating your pages, I’d have to say ‘Roommates 10, Gwen 3.’ And even that might be generous.”

I said yes, she was making that quite clear.

“It might be enough of an ending in an old black-and-white movie, where the kiss is the last thing the audience sees as the music swells and the credits roll. And, yes, in a simpler world, a kiss could mean ‘happily ever after.’ But you’re not Doris Day.”

When I said, “I was trying for subtlety,” she looked up. “Oh, really? Because I notice you didn’t hold back when it came to Charles and me. I come across as something of a vixen.” She grinned. “Which I thank you for.”

I asked, “How far do I have to push it?”

“You’re the writer in the family! Put in some reassurances. Put in some flesh and blood.”

So here is more, dedicated to Margot, who gave me backbone but is still, apparently, the boss. My dates with Eli increased in frequency from weekly to semiweekly to what my mother would have called “an understanding.” Still, everyone (Margot, Anthony, Charles, Betsy, and even Chaz) noticed that progress in certain areas was slow. Totally understandable, I reminded everyone. Eli and I often, maybe too often, referred to our dead spouses, and perhaps with that topic came a sad or dreamy look that discouraged a wandering hand. Margot and Anthony were their usual, unsubtle selves, asking after each date, “Still? Nothing?”

Thus, I did what any red-blooded woman would feel an urge to do on a beautiful moonlit summer night, back from another warm and chastely romantic date that didn’t progress past first base: I sent him an e-mail. Wrote, erased, composed, deleted, revised. How to ask? To be euphemistic or direct? With a glass of Chardonnay at my fingertips, I finally wrote:





Dear Eli,

Thank you for another lovely evening. I just wanted to say that if you, some day, wanted to move the relationship in a horizontal direction, I would welcome that.

xo, Gwen





He wrote back so fast that I thought I was getting an out-of-office reply.





Dear Gwen,

I’ll be right over. (Kidding, but only due to the hour.) How’s tomorrow night?

Love, Eli





The next morning, merely walking down the hall toward the linen closet, I must have conveyed something with my expression or skin tone because Margot grabbed my wrist as she passed me.

“You look different,” she said. “Flushed. What’s up? You can tell me.”

“Eli’s cooking me dinner tonight. At his place . . .”

And with only that, she negotiated me backward into my room for a conference. Actually, it was a wordless conference; she went straight for my underwear drawer. And as soon as she completed her inventory and refreshed her lipstick, we went shopping.





So we got to the other side of this project, at his apartment, between cocktails and dinner and Egyptian cotton sheets. Who knew what I was capable of? Not this Gwen-Laura Schmidt.

Over lobsters steamed and delivered by an obliging fishmonger in his neighborhood, Eli said, “I seem to have worked up quite an appetite. And if that sounds like code for something else, it is.”

I looked down at my plate, then up at him. “Lobster is just as good cold, don’t you think?”

“Better, actually.”

“C’mon,” I said.

Later, side by side at the microwave, remelting the butter, Eli said, “I just remembered. My mother invited us for dinner this weekend. How would you feel about that?”

I said I’d like that very much. Was he sure the invitation included me?

He left the kitchen and returned with his phone. There on the screen was Myra’s e-mail, enlarged and unambiguous: When are you bringing Gwen home to meet me? Love, Mom.

“Radar,” I said.

Two days later, on a scalding Sunday, I found myself on the Number 7 train to Queens, dressed in a sundress and sandals bought for the new season Margot had dubbed the Summer of Second Chances, holding a potted orchid on my lap. Its card said only MOST GRATEFULLY, GWEN.

Greeting us at the door with arms opened wide, Myra Offenberg looked like the vigorously retired school principal that she was, with excellent posture, a French twist, and eyeglasses on a hot-pink cord. She was taller than I, nimble, smiling, tanned. “Come in, come in. It’s cool! I have cold white wine and iced tea. Sweetie? Get my wedding goblets. I didn’t want to get up on a step stool. Let’s have a toast to something.”

I told her the apartment was lovely, adding—a line I’d had at the ready—“Eli told me you moved here from Washington Heights when he was starting first grade because the neighborhood elementary school was better.”

My comment seemed to delight her. Soon enough I would realize that all questions, all topics, all answers did, too.

“We did! For the schools. Nineteen sixty-something. I’ll show you his room.” I followed her down a short hallway to an unlikely candidate. Its walls were a deep rose and its pale-pink lampshades looked like tutus. “Do you believe what I did? Like a cliché! I turned it into a study two minutes after he left for college. He was the worst slob—clothes everywhere. Didn’t know what a hamper was for! He’d empty his pockets onto the nearest surface—pennies, quarters, Canadian coins, receipts, gum wrappers, golf tees. A pigsty! I rolled up my sleeves—I was just going to clean it up, vacuum, and then I got carried away. Voilà. The desk and adding machine were my father’s. He was a CPA. The sofa converts, of course.” And after only the slightest pause: “Are your parents alive?”

I said, “No, unfortunately. They died within a year of each other.”

“Before your husband or after?” she asked. “No. Why did I ask that? Morbid curiosity. You seem fine. I mean, able to go full-swing into this.” And with that, she tilted her head in the direction of her absent son.

He joined us, managing three monogrammed goblets. “Believe me,” he said. “The walls weren’t pink when I lived here.” Then, in teen-lover-boy fashion, he slipped an arm around my waist and asked, “Wanna listen to some music? Ma, you leave. She’s helping me with my English homework. I’ll keep the door open.”

Myra said, “Very funny. C’mon. I have Gouda and Triscuits.”





I listened hard for hints of buyer’s remorse from our matchmaker, especially for any words suggesting she’d been too hasty in promoting a match with a non-Jew. After we finished an unidentified cold green soup, she told me no, sit, Eli would clear. And while you’re in there, hon, would you take the pot roast out of the oven and slice it up nice on the big oval tray that was on the counter?

“Happy to,” he said. “But be nice. No third degree.”

“Use the oven mitts,” she said. And as soon as he’d left the dining room, she whispered, “It’s written all over his face, isn’t it?”

I didn’t want to be presumptuous, so I said, “Something good, I hope.”

“Good? Better than good. He’s happy,” and with that, her voice broke. She flapped one hand in front of her face, signaling Don’t mind me.

I said, “I’m happy, too, Mrs. Offenberg.”

“Myra!”

“Myra.”

“You continue to be happy. He’s a wonderful boy. A wonderful man. Much neater now. I’m lucky that I lived to see this,” she said, waving her index finger back and forth between me and the kitchen.

I said, “I don’t want to take anything for granted . . .”

She leaned closer. “I’m a widow, too.”

I said, yes, I knew that—

“I had just turned seventy, maybe seventy-one, when Joe died. And even though it wasn’t the biggest love story ever told, I had no desire to keep company with another man.”

“But you did?”

“My high school reunion, another cliché! My fiftieth. Does that add up right? Maybe it was an odd-year reunion. Nathan Sondheim—no relation, unfortunately. We’d gone to a dance together junior or senior year, not even a prom, a semiformal. Not a word or a photo in fifty-plus years. He walked in alone. I walked in alone. Nathan recognized me immediately. And when I got home that night I dug out my high school yearbook and I saw what he’d written. Believe it or not, it said, ‘Myra Lowenthal, will you marry me?’ Of course, I took it as a joke because he was always something of a wisenheimer.”

“How soon was this after Mr. Offenberg died?”

“Actually, it was before, but a few months later he was gone. Nathan sent a card. We had our first dinner together six, maybe seven months later. When people ask, I say it was a year.”

“Has he since confessed that he meant it—the marriage proposal in the yearbook?”

“No! He has no recollection of it, so I haven’t brought it up.” She smiled. “He took me to his grandson’s bar mitzvah this past April and introduced me to everyone as ‘the woman to whom I’m not married.’ That’s how we like it.”

She whispered that Eli wasn’t up to speed on Nathan. Her doing. Sons can be squeamish about a mother’s love life. She patted my hand as if to say Watch this. “Hon? How are you doing in there? Was the knife sharp enough?”

“No, but I’m almost done,” he called back. “Two minutes. Do you have any parsley? Everything’s the same color.”

“Of course I do.” She winked at me and said, “Chop it fine. And arrange the carrots and potatoes around the meat, okay?”

He called back, “Sure, I’ll stall.”

Myra’s reply was “Don’t be silly.” And then to me, “Would you marry again?”

I said, “I never thought I would . . .”

“But?” Myra was breaking her roll into increasingly smaller pieces, to no obvious end.

“What are you hoping I’ll say?” I asked her.

She took her time before answering. “Maybe something like ‘But then Eli came along.’”

I took a roll and passed her the butter dish.

“Then Eli came along,” I said.





Nobody was home when I got back to West Tenth Street, the first time in recent memory that penthouse B had been deserted on a weeknight. I checked the messages on my silenced phone. The first was Margot’s. “We’re out” was followed by a muffled side conversation with Charles. “Quiet. Sorry! We’re debating sushi versus Thai, and a late movie if we can agree on which one. How was the mom? Call me.” And a text from Anthony, nothing more than Out w Wm. Won’t be home. Thank U! How was dinner? How was Myra?

I texted back the same to each: Myra is great. So am I. Have fun. xoxo.

A bleep told me I had a text message from Eli. It was short but perfect.

I still have it.