March 13, 2012
Whenever life took him outside the Beltway, Sandy felt as if he were escaping Earth’s orbit, breaking free of a particularly harsh gravity. As built up as the suburbs got, as bad as the rush-hour traffic was, a drive west on a bright March day lifted his spirits. Maybe he should go for more drives in the country. Did people still do that? Probably not. Most people spent too much time in their cars to consider driving fun, or recreational.
Sykesville, Andrea Norr had said when she called out of the blue this morning. Go see this guy in Sykesville. Despite five decades in Baltimore, Sandy needed a moment to remember where Sykesville was. Those towns between Baltimore and Frederick kind of blended together for him—Sykesville, Westminster, Clarksville. Sykesville was the closest of the three, it turned out, not even twenty minutes from the Beltway, and Sandy took the exit with something akin to regret. He’d like to keep going, driving on this straight, uneventful highway, past Frederick, into the mountains. And he could. No one would notice, no one would care.
But there’s no point in running away when no one wants you back, so he might as well go interview Chef Boyardee.
“Bayard,” Andrea Norr had said. “Chet Bayard. I was reading Chowhound, and it turns out he has a new place after all these years.”
“Reading what?” She had called Sandy at 8:00 A.M., which probably seemed late on a horse farm, but Sandy enjoyed taking his time in the morning, inching into the day. He had worked midnights much of his life and was still barely on speaking terms with the hours between six and ten.
“It’s a website for people who are interested in food.”
“I know that.” He did. He thought about the woman he had met. Short, stocky, but it had seemed like her natural build, not a body nourished on particularly good or bad food. She had made that god-awful tea, too, and gone back for seconds. Someone who ate for fuel, someone who didn’t pay attention to restaurants.
“He was on the Eastern Shore ten years ago,” he said, the file alive in his mind. “When the body was found. Cops took a statement then.”
“Well, he’s in Sykesville now, got a new place.”
Hadn’t Tubman suggested that Andrea Norr had reasons to divert attention away from her? “So you just happened to be reading this website and you just happened to see this guy’s name and you just happened to remember he was the last person to talk to your sister that day and, bam, there he was?”
“No, I did a Google search on him and he came up. I’m surprised you haven’t done that.”
“He was on my list. There are a lot of people in that file. And I thought he was all the way down to Cambridge or something.” And I have better sources than Google, for Christ’s sake. Everyone with a computer thinks they’re so slick.
“That place in Cambridge closed a few years ago, but he’s trying his luck again.”
“Poor sap.”
“What?”
“Never mind.” He would humor her, go out there. He didn’t like relatives telling him what to do. Usually, he had already done it. But he wanted to keep Andrea Norr as his ally in this. She knew something. He just wasn’t sure what it was, or if she even realized she had something of significance to share. He’d prefer that she be a liar, actually. You could break a liar down.
Poor sap. Sandy couldn’t help evaluating Sykesville as a location for what was supposed to be an upscale French restaurant. The heart of the old town was charming, but it wasn’t a destination. The way Sandy understood it—and he had learned much of what he knew about the restaurant business in hindsight—you really needed an inn to make a go of a place like this, either one that was connected to the restaurant or a place within walking distance. The Inn at Little Washington, or even Volt out in Frederick. That had been Julie Saxony’s business plan when she disappeared—add a big-time restaurant to a B and B, then people would have a reason to come to the B and B. But she had been in Havre de Grace, which had the river, things to do. Sykesville struck Sandy as too close in for a weekend getaway, too far for a big night out.
But the place looked nice enough, and the posted menu was promising. Very traditional French, so old-fashioned as to feel new again. Coq au vin, daily fish specials, lentils, cassoulet.
He tried the heavy wooden door, found it unlocked.
“We’re closed,” a young woman said without looking up. “No lunch during the week.”
“I’m not here for a meal. I’m here to talk to”—he squinted at a piece of paper in his hand, although he knew the name—“Chester Bayard.”
“Chester—oh, Chet.” She called back to the kitchen. “Chet, some guy for you.”
The man who came out of the kitchen wore a chef’s coat with his full name embroidered on the breast pocket: Chester Bayard. Cocksman, Sandy thought. Sandy could always tell. It was in the tilt of the head, the predatory nature of the man’s eyes. He was probably sleeping with this girl, who was much too young for him. He probably screwed every attractive woman with whom he worked. He had probably screwed Julie Saxony, or tried. He was one of those guys. It was what he did, automatic as breathing.
“I’m an investigator with the Baltimore City Police Department.” When he came in cold like this, he never said homicide, not first thing.
“A detective?”
“Once, but I retired. I’m a consultant now. I do cold cases.”
“Murders.”
Everyone was so goddamn savvy these days. Or thought they were. Yet this guy, this chef, would probably be appalled if Sandy presumed to know his trade based on watching a couple of shows on the Food Network.
“Yes, Julie Saxony in this case. I’m going to assume you remember her.”
Bayard nodded. “I’m glad you’re taking an interest. She was a nice lady, gave me my start as a chef. You want to sit?”
He indicated a table, then picked up a bottle from a pine buffet—Ricard. He poured the yellowish liquid into a small glass, added water from a ceramic pitcher. He was way too into the ritual, which meant he was either a show-off or a boozer. He offered Sandy a glass, but he passed. He drank with friends. Well, he used to. He hadn’t really kept up with any of the other detectives after he retired. Bayard then waggled his fingers at the girl, her signal to leave. She flounced out, clearly miffed, although Sandy couldn’t tell if it was the fact of being dismissed or the way it had been done.
“Why now?” Bayard asked. “It’s been—”
“Twenty-six years since she disappeared, eleven since a homicide was established.” Sandy was aware that he was finishing the sentence, but not answering the question.
“Has something happened?”
“Not really. Sometimes cold cases are nudged back into being by new information, but sometimes we just look at the file and decide there are things that were never properly explored.”
“Is there new information?”
“I wouldn’t tell you if there was.”
“The detectives, the first time around. Small-town cops, didn’t know what they were doing. They did a shit job, no?”
“No. They did okay. It’s hard without a body. Not impossible, but hard. Havre de Grace police don’t work a lot of murders, but their file was complete. Woman drove away, was never seen again. They talked to a lot of people, followed every lead they had. They talked to you.”
“Well, I was the one who reported her missing. They kept asking me about the boyfriend.”
“You mean Felix Brewer?”
“Yeah. That guy. Stupid waste of time.”
Sandy couldn’t help himself. “Everyone thinks everything’s a waste of time when it’s not the thing that leads to an answer.” He paused, taken by his own turn of phrase, considered its larger implications. It could be a philosophy, almost. Then he realized it was a variation on that hippy-dippy shit about life’s journeys. Still, it was a good rule in police work. Ruling stuff out was a kind of an answer. “It would have been irresponsible not to consider it, given the world in which he moved.”
“She never spoke of him.”
“Really?”
“Not to me. Never mentioned him or her past. She was hurt when the business became successful and he was always part of the things that were written.”
“Never” was a big word, in Sandy’s experience. If love and hate were intertwined, so were never and forever.
The girl came back with a wooden board of cheese and fruit, a long loaf of French bread already sliced.
“Dig in,” the chef said. “It’s almost noon, no?” It was the second time he had allowed himself that Gallic inflection, but Sandy thought this guy was about as French as French’s mustard.
“No, thanks.” He noticed that the girl lingered, pretending to be busy in the immaculate dining room. Ears big as pitchers. Nabby’s expression, a mangling of what other people said about little pitchers and big ears.
“What kind of relationship did you have with Julie?”
“Very good. She was a great boss. And she gave me my start, got me out of the catering business.”
“Was the relationship strictly business?” Bayard’s girl was so fair that Sandy could see the tips of her ears flame red. Honey, this guy is in his fifties. Do you think he’s never been laid before?
“We were friends.”
“More than that?”
Bayard glanced at the young woman. Her back was still to them, but her posture was so rigid that it seemed as if she were literally holding her breath, waiting for the answer.
“I would have liked that. But she was past having lovers. A young woman, still in her thirties, and she claimed she was ‘done with all that.’ ” He made air quotes with his fingers. “She needed me as a friend and I was that. I was—”
He stopped.
“Go on.”
“No place to go. I was her friend.”
“A friend with—hope?”
He laughed. “Where there’s life, there’s hope. Although—not to be cruel—she wasn’t aging well. She dieted herself until her figure was very severe—anything to get rid of her curves, to hide her old self. She didn’t want people to see the dancer in her.”
“Dancer’s a nice way to say it.”
“Ah. Now see, that was the problem, no? People are so judgmental about strippers. She wasn’t a whore. I’m not saying that girls on the Block didn’t do tricks back then, but she didn’t. She was Felix Brewer’s girl within days of starting there.”
The details were awfully specific, Sandy thought, given she had never spoken of her old life to Bayard.
“She danced in a G-string and pasties. Girls today, they go to the beach in less clothing.” The chef’s eyes rested on his girl, now trying to create busywork over at the bus station, unfolding and folding napkins. He was bored with her, Sandy decided. He was a man who got bored quickly.
“Did she carry a torch for Felix?”
Something caught light in Bayard’s eyes, and he aimed his forefinger at Sandy’s nose. “Do you know you are the first person to ask me the question in that way?”
“I find that hard to believe.”
“No insult intended to your brothers in blue, but no one ever asked me what was in Julie’s heart. It was always—‘Was she in touch with him? Were there mysterious calls?’ They checked her phone bills, her bank accounts. I think they even pulled the records on the pay phone a few blocks away. They were very interested to know if there had been contact, if she had any knowledge of him. As far as I know, there wasn’t, she didn’t. But she was still in love with him.”
“How could you know that if she never talked about it?”
“I know women.”
A smug thing to say, something only an a*shole would say. Didn’t make it untrue.
“That bug you? Her carrying a torch for this long-gone guy, while there you were, right under her nose?”
The name is always in the file. Always.
Bayard laughed. “I suppose you have to ask that. But I also have to assume that you have reviewed all the information and know that I spent July 3, 1986, prepping for what we expected to be a very big weekend. We were doing—not exactly a soft open, more of a test for friends. The restaurant was months from its official opening, we hadn’t even finished the renovation of the dining room. I was pretty much in full view of my staff from the moment she drove away. I asked her to go to a kitchen-supply place for me.”
Sandy did know that.
“You reported her missing that very day, right? She tells you she’s going to Baltimore to go shop at Saks Fifth Avenue and you make the first call at ten thirty that night. What made you so sure that something had gone wrong? There are all sorts of reasons for people to stay out late. Traffic jams, a breakdown, running into an old friend, having dinner.”
“The car had just been serviced two days before. And stores close, you know, around nine, and she had already been gone so long.”
“Some women can easily shop that long.”
“Not Julie. She was very decisive. And she had a woman who pulled things for her, to make it easier.”
“Pulled things?”
“Oh, you know—what do they call it? A personal shopper.”
“Did you mention that to the police at the time?”
“I think so. I don’t know. They did take it seriously. Her failure to come home that night, the following day. And the kitchen-supply store was pretty definitive that she had never made it there. But there was the boyfriend, the car—where did they find it?”
“At the Giant Foods on Reisterstown Road, more than a month later.”
“Right. So I assumed they were thinking—well, that fits. She met someone, left the car, didn’t plan on coming back. The thing is, she made no provision for the business. Once she was gone, it went to shit. I didn’t have power of attorney. Neither did her sister. It was a mess, straightening all that out. She had consulted her lawyer a week earlier, but she hadn’t done anything. This was not a woman planning to leave.”
“How did you meet her in the first place?”
“Catering business.”
“Yours or someone else’s?”
“Someone else’s. Julie was looking for a great chef, but she needed someone she could afford. She was very cagey, putting the word out for someone who was good, but not in a position to open his own restaurant. I was practically an indentured servant. I did all the work, the owner reaped the benefits. But I had no name, no backers willing to take a chance on me.”
“But how did she find you?”
The chef played with his Ricard, adding water, swirling it, making quite a production. More show-off than drunk, Sandy decided. “That’s another question no one thought to ask. It’s quite harmless, really, but I didn’t want to talk about it at the time. Out of respect to her, because it just loops around again to the same old topic, and I really did think that was a distraction.”
“You haven’t answered my question.”
“I’m aware of that.” He tapped a cigarette out of a pack, glanced at it. “I guess I can break the smoking laws in my own damn restaurant when it’s closed. It might be closed forever soon enough. I can’t seem to catch a break in this business. My food is good, too. But that’s never enough.”
“I know,” Sandy said. The chef shrugged as if he thought Sandy was making polite conversation. How could some cop know anything about how hard it was to run a restaurant? “Anyway, how did you meet her?”
“My boss was the caterer of choice for big events among the rich Jews on the Northwest Side. Weddings, anniversary parties, bar mitzvahs. A woman named Lorraine Gelman hired me to do a big party, then referred me to her friend, Bambi Brewer, and I did her daughter’s bat mitzvah. Julie called me a few days before the event, told me she was looking for a chef for a new restaurant, something very ambitious, but she wanted to sample the food, get a sense of what I could do. So she dropped by, hung out in the kitchen during the party.”
“Julie Saxony was in the kitchen during this party for Felix’s daughter?”
Bayard smiled, as if at a memory. “Yeah. I didn’t have all the pieces then. Didn’t understand why she was skittish, why she all but ran into the pantry when one of the family members came into the kitchen. I had tried to talk her out of visiting this particular party, asked that she wait for an occasion where I would be doing something more impressive than crepes and frites. I realized later that it wasn’t entirely accidental, her choosing that event to sample my food. Sometimes, I think she hired me just to save face, you know? Plus, I am a great f*cking chef. But that’s not enough to make it in this business.”
“So I’ve heard.”
“Julie disappearing—I never caught a break after that. That restaurant was my big shot. I left Maryland, came back. Tried a superlocal thing on the Eastern Shore, but that was ahead of its time and too far from the Washington money. Now I’m trying to make traditional work. Want my advice? Look at what I’m doing now and do it in five years, and you’ll be a rich man.”
“What’s the old saying? How do you make a million dollars in the restaurant business?”
Bayard smiled, finished his Ricard, then finished the joke. “Start with two million.”
April 12, 1986
Rachel washed her hands, taking far more time than necessary, but she was enjoying listening to Michelle’s young friends as they ran in and out of the bathroom, puffed up with their intrigues. Joey says he likes you more than a friend, but not quite as a girlfriend. Michael kissed Sarah even though he’s going with Jessica. Baz—Baz?—says you’ll be cute after your nose job. Rachel loved kids, of every age, but you couldn’t pay her to be thirteen again, not even a thirteen-year-old beauty such as her sister, who had been pulling a pout all evening over this party, for which their mother had spent thousands, maybe tens of thousands.
“When did bat mitzvahs start having themes?” Linda had asked Rachel rather crankily when they entered the Peabody Hotel’s party room, transformed into the Rue Brewer in the Thirteenth Arrondissement. The thirteen was for Michelle’s age, of course. The Brewers had no intimate knowledge of Paris.
“They all do now,” said Rachel, who had been her mother’s confidante throughout the planning, in part because the mere mention of the party triggered Linda’s temper. “One boy in her class did baseball—the family created an entire deck of baseball cards, with all the kids and their ‘stats’—and another girl did Madonna, if you can believe it. I don’t know what her parents were thinking, and I can’t imagine what she wore. Then that one girl, Chelsea, whom Michelle dislikes, also decided to do a Paris theme and hers was first, in March. When Michelle got the invitation, she tried to wheedle Mom into changing the whole thing—I think she wanted to do some variation on Hollywood—but Mother was firm with her.”
“For once,” Linda had said, apparently determined to be in a bad mood all evening. She was seven months pregnant, and the hormones were taking their toll.
Ah, but Michelle deserved her party, Rachel thought, drying her hands and continuing to eavesdrop. (The girl who liked Joey had sent her emissaries back into the party to further parse his feelings. She remained behind with two others. She was pretty and appeared confident, but Rachel, as the older sister to a truly confident girl, recognized fake bravado when she saw it.) And the ballroom was really very charming, with the catering stations set up as pushcarts and sidewalk cafés. Artists sat at easels, drawing caricatures of the guests, and a strolling band of musicians played the kind of music heard on the sound track for Charade. Excessive, yes, but the crepes and pommes frites and madeleines were outstanding, not always a given at such a large-scale party. Lorraine Gelman had been right to crow about her caterer.
But—ninety-five dollars a head, and that didn’t include the open bar—Rachel didn’t want to do the math. The per-plate fee also didn’t include the cake in the shape of the Eiffel Tower. Figure another five hundred dollars or so. It would probably be tasteless, too; in Rachel’s experience, the more elaborate the cake, the less enjoyable it was. She had requested German chocolate cake for her bat mitzvah, which gave her grandmother Ida palpitations. Nana Ida could not stand anything German, although she made an exception for the Singers, the German Jewish family into which Rachel had married two years ago. And an exception for the BMW that Marc’s parents had given them as a wedding gift, in which Ida loved to ride. “It’s the least we could do,” Marc’s father said, “given that you kids took us off the hook for a wedding.”
Yes, Rachel had wanted to say. It really is the least you could do. You’re very good at figuring out the least expected of you and doing just that, nothing more. Besides, my mother would have paid for the wedding, insisted on it, which is why we had to elope. But for all your alleged class, you have no antennae for the feelings of others.
While Rachel had eloped, terrified by the unmatchable elegance of the engagement party thrown by Marc’s family, Linda had the smallest wedding possible, only family and the Gelmans. A brunch at the Gelmans’ house, coconut cake with whipped icing. Now that had been a good cake. My life in cakes, Rachel thought wryly. An interesting structure for a book of poetry. Except she wasn’t a poet. She had tried to be, but it just wasn’t in her. Instead, she had settled on a degree in semiotics, a very fashionable thing to study at Brown and an excuse to lose herself in the words that she could not corral on the page, no matter how she tried. There had been two Baltimore boys in the program, one named Ira, whom she never got to know, and Marc, whom she spent three years avoiding because they had been at Park together and she was all too familiar with his rep as a snob and a player.
Then she fell in love with him. Crazy-insane-head-over-heels in love with him. Marc was the best thing that had ever happened to her. And now the worst.
Respect your first instincts about people, her father had told her the day of her bat mitzvah. People make fun of love at first sight, but it’s just good instincts.
You fell in love with Mama at first sight.
I did. And she with me, although she always pretends she didn’t.
Had Rachel fallen in love at first or second sight? Had she loved Marc back in high school, but pretended indifference because he was out of her reach? She could no longer sort it out. She loved him, he loved her—and he had hurt her more than anyone she had ever known.
Sometimes, Rachel wondered if her parents’ big romantic story would be less of a burden if Felix had actually stayed. Certainly, that charade of perfect love at first sight couldn’t have been sustained as his daughters had grown, become more adept at picking up subtle signs that things were far from perfect. And yet—the myth survived, even after the terrible confidences that Bambi had shared with the two older girls not long after their father left. It was Michelle who was growing up with the full fairy tale, with no knowledge of the other woman. Women, although Bambi seemed to be bothered only by the last one, Julie Saxony, whom she described in strangely poetic terms. Flaxen hair. Cornflower-blue eyes. Those pretty words were worse, somehow, than the gag-worthy information that their father’s girlfriend was a stripper.
The girl who pined for Joey suddenly squealed and ran out of the ladies’ room, her handmaidens in tow, and Rachel was left alone. She sighed and tried to do something with her hair, finally admitting to herself that her dawdling had as much to do with avoiding Marc as it did with playing Margaret Mead in the ladies’ room. She poked at her usually limp brown locks, which had been amplified by Bambi’s hairdresser into seriously big hair, with bangs and tendrils that looked sexily spontaneous until one tried to touch a strand. It all but repelled her comb. She then stuck an experimental finger into her outsize skirt, but the dent repaired itself immediately. Bambi had insisted that all three daughters buy their dresses at Barneys New York, and the result was that the Brewer women were so fashion-forward that they looked hilariously out of place at a Baltimore bat mitzvah. Rachel wished she could have had the cash her mother spent on the dress, but then—she would never take money from her mother. Like Linda, she was terribly worried about the cost of this event. She just wasn’t in a dull fury about it. Besides, Bambi swore that it was okay, that she had found a way to get the money without putting too much of a strain on the household. Which probably meant she had gone to Bert.
Rachel needed money, too. What a joke, being married to a rich man and being so poor. It would be one thing if Marc’s family were cheap across the board. But Marc’s parents were exceedingly generous with themselves and their children. They were stingy only with those who had the bad judgment to marry into the family. Sometimes, Rachel would find herself staring mutely, pleadingly, at her brother-in-law, wishing he were the kind of person who would go outside and smoke a cigarette with her so they could share their mutual pain. But that tall drink of water, that stupid shaygetz, was so na?ve he didn’t even know they called him the stupid shaygetz behind his back. Which was odd, because the Singers pretended they didn’t know Yiddish most of the time. They were too grand, too many generations removed. Oh, how Rachel wished her father had been there the night of the engagement dinner, if only for his commentary on the finger bowls. At least Bambi had been able to humble them a little, through her sheer beauty and poise. But the money in that house—that evening, Rachel had watched her mother’s hand go to her necklace, her favorite diamond earrings. A stranger couldn’t tell, but Rachel knew that Bambi was unnerved by her new in-laws.
She wouldn’t have been if Felix were still around.
Ten years. Ten years. Rachel missed her father every day. Not consciously, but his absence was a part of her, like a vine that wraps around a structure, sustains it even as it weakens it. She assumed Linda and her mother felt the same way, but they seldom spoke of him. They allowed themselves a handful of nice stories—“Remember the time at Gino’s?” “Remember the bumper cars?” “Remember the time at the Prime Rib?”—and that was all.
Rachel had avoided Marc at Brown because he knew her story. Rachel had fallen so hard for him because she didn’t have to tell him her story. Upon arriving at college, she was determined not to lie about her father, yet also intent on avoiding the emotional promiscuity that dorm life seemed to bring out in people. Sex was one thing, but why were girls so slutty with their life stories? But Marc knew. Knew her and didn’t pity her.
“So here you are,” Linda said, coming through the swinging door. “Marc looks unhappy.”
“It’s a pose he affects,” Rachel said. “He’s more handsome when he’s brooding.”
“What’s going on with you two?”
“We had a fight.” Not quite true, but they were going to have one, tomorrow.
“Oh, you two are always fighting.”
“Not always. But it’s normal to fight sometimes,” Rachel said, hoping this was true. “You just think everyone should be like you and Henry in the Peaceable Kingdom.”
“We fight,” Linda said with a self-satisfaction that belied her words. She sat down carefully on one of the tufted stools. Although hugely pregnant, Linda moved with her usual grace.
“You yell at Henry as though he were a bad dog and he hangs his head and asks for your forgiveness. Or laughs at you. Either way, it’s not real fighting.”
“We happen to agree on most things. What do you and Marc have to fight about, anyway? Everything is going great for you.”
Did it really look like that? Even to her sister? Rachel tried to stand outside her own life and see what others saw. The nice town house, a gift from Marc’s parents, although in a rather sterile development. She would have liked to live in one of the old neighborhoods near downtown, but when someone else is paying, choice is curtailed. Marc worked for his family’s real estate company, on the commercial side. Big deals, big money, he liked to say. Marc would rather sell one warehouse than five homes, whereas Rachel thought the only lure in real estate was the opportunity to make people happy. Rachel was a copywriter at a Baltimore ad agency, but the job was a favor called in by her father-in-law, and she wrote about things so boring that she literally fell asleep at her desk, which did not impress her boss or coworkers.
“Marc’s parents couldn’t even be bothered to attend the service this morning. Didn’t you notice? His father claimed he had an important golf game. There has never, in the history of time, been a truly important golf game.”
“The only thing I noticed was how everyone turned around when the door slammed at the exact moment Michelle got up to give her haftorah. But I’m looking at the bright side—now everyone will think she was rattled, and that’s why she did such a shitty job.”
“Linda!” But she was right about Michelle’s abominable Hebrew.
“Is it too much to ask that she make even a halfhearted attempt to do a good job after all the expense and time Mother put in? She had her own tutor, Rachel, spent countless hours with him. And it wasn’t just the Hebrew. Her speech was ridiculous.”
“I didn’t think it was that bad.”
“Rachel—she incorporated the lyrics of a Wham! song into the story of the Exodus. It was borderline sacrilegious. Make the bread before you go-go?”
“ ‘Lose the yeast or it will be too slow-slow.’ I thought it was funny.”
“Rachel, our semiotician. How’s that working out for you as a career?” But Linda, while frequently furious, was not cruel. She put her hand on her sister’s arm by way of apology. “I’m sorry, Rachel. I feel like I’ve been pregnant for three years. And I’m just so pissed that Mother spent all this money she doesn’t have.”
“She told me it would be okay. She swore. She said she had a little windfall.”
“From what? Aunt Harriet is still alive and kicking, with no signs of letting go. She’s out there right now, stuffing rolls in her purse.”
“She wouldn’t say. But she said there’s even enough left over to give her a little cushion.”
But not enough cushion, Rachel thought, to bail Rachel out. If she left Marc, she would have nothing. She had no savings and quite a bit of college debt. The job, provided as a favor to his father, would disappear. The car, too, would be taken back; the title was in his parents’ name. And there was the prenup. Technically a postnup, presented to the happy couple when they had returned from their Las Vegas elopement. How Rachel and Marc had laughed at his silly parents. Why not sign a document that had no meaning, they agreed. They would be together forever.
Rachel believed Marc had been sincere in that moment. He loved her and they were kindred spirits. He even wrote poetry and—knife to her heart—his was good. Second knife to her heart, he abandoned it. “I don’t want to get an MFA and teach and be poor,” he told her. “I grew up with money. I like it.” How could Rachel argue? She had known life with and without it, and there was no contest: money was better.
But if she had Marc’s gift for writing and if her father were still around—she didn’t doubt that he would encourage her, support her. Your family should be your Medicis. Maybe if she found a real job, on her own—
“Do you believe it?” Linda asked.
“What?” she said, pretending she had been listening all the while, not lost inside herself.
“You know. The story. The door.”
“Oh, no. You know how people go in and out throughout the service.”
“But the doors usually just creak, not make that hollow booming sound. Everyone turned around—except Mother.”
Rachel smiled. The two sisters had an almost twinlike closeness. Nice for them, hard on Michelle.
“You’re saying Mom is like the defendant in that old story about the trial where the attorney announces the real killer is about to walk through the door. He doesn’t turn around because he knows he’s the real killer. So Mom knows that nothing can bring Daddy back, not even Michelle’s bat mitzvah.”
“If he were to come back, it would be for that, though.”
“Really? Not college graduations, not our marriages? Only Michelle’s bat mitzvah would bring him back?”
“You didn’t go to yours. Graduation, I mean. And I had no interest in mine because I was already planning my marriage to Henry. Did it ever occur to you,” Linda said, dropping her crankiness for earnestness, “that we both chose the kind of weddings where an absent father was less noticeable? You in Vegas, me at a brunch in the house.”
“We were only trying to save Mother money.”
“And save ourselves from disappointment. Think about it, Rachel.” Linda rose to her feet, swaying a little, like a balloon on a string, but still very graceful. “There’s always been this stupid fiction that he comes back, like some benevolent spirit, standing at the rear of the synagogue, like Elijah on Passover. He’s never come back. And he’s never coming back.”
Linda looked very pale.
“Are you okay?”
“I think I’m going to throw up. Other women have morning sickness during the first trimester. I have evening sickness in the final one.”
Linda walked with admirable dignity to the nearest stall. Rachel waited for her, noting that her sister managed to vomit rather quietly. Ah, the powers of the trained PR person, so skilled in papering things over that she knows how to mask the sound of retching. Or maybe she simply hadn’t started yet.
A girl entered, rubbing her eyes.
“Sydney.” Rachel had known Sydney Gelman, now eleven, all her life. She had been adopted when Bert and Lorraine despaired of having their own children. Less than two years later, Lorraine gave birth to twin boys.
“Oh—hello, Rachel.”
“Are you crying?”
“No. I just had an allergic reaction to the shellfish in the crepes, so Mother asked the waiter to take it away and bring me a fruit plate.”
Sydney was plump, always had been. It was a sweet, healthy plumpness, the kind that came with lustrous hair and shining eyes. Rachel thought Sydney would be much less pretty if forced to lose weight. But Aunt Lorraine lived off broiled grapefruit and Tab and didn’t see why Sydney couldn’t as well.
“Did you get to have the crepes suzette at least?”
“I don’t think I saw those.”
“Why don’t you come with me and we’ll see if there are some left in the kitchen?”
She started to take Sydney by the hand, something she would have done naturally a few years ago, before she left for college. But Sydney was only five then. To treat her that way now would be disastrous. Rachel sneaked her into the kitchen and procured a plate of sweets for her, despite the murderous glances from the man in charge of the catering crew. What was the big deal? Perhaps he didn’t want anyone eating there, but she and Sydney knew that if they took the plate back into the dining room, Lorraine would find a way to whisk that one away as well. It was a party. No one should have to diet at a party.
“Are you having a good time?”
“It’s okay,” Sydney said. “I don’t know many of these kids because I’m two classes behind them. One girl asked why I was even here and I said Michelle and I were like cousins. And she said I was lying.”
“She’s probably jealous,” Rachel said. “We are like cousins.”
“Michelle doesn’t speak to me.”
“What?”
“Don’t say anything.” Sydney’s voice, while pitched low, was panicky. “I don’t care. Really.”
Sydney was wise in her own way. It would be counterproductive to remonstrate with Michelle, but, oh, Rachel wished her sister weren’t cruel. Rachel and Linda had been kind to everyone, at their father’s insistence. The practice had served them well after he left because there were no grudges, no girls waiting for them to fall.
The party was wrapping up when Rachel returned Sydney to the ballroom. The fact that Sydney was at Rachel’s side softened Bambi’s murderous look, but not Marc’s hurt one. Rachel followed him to the BMW, resolved not to fight. This would be Michelle’s bat mitzvah day, not the day she confronted Marc.
In the car, she realized she had left her wrap behind. He didn’t want to go back and they drove another five minutes, which, as she pointed out to him, only added ten minutes to the trip. Said it nicely, still determined not to fight. The shawl was cashmere, a gift from her mother. There was no way she was going to trust it to the hotel’s lost-and-found overnight.
When she entered the ballroom, it was almost empty of people, although the fake cafés and shops were still standing. A woman was walking the ersatz French boulevard, taking it all in.
“Oh, I—I’m . . . I’m here to meet the caterer,” she said when she noticed Rachel. “About another job.”
The woman was dressed like the catering crew, in black slacks and a white shirt. She had blond hair and blue eyes, Rachel noted. One might even say flaxen and cornflower blue. She was thin, much too thin. She bolted for the kitchen and Rachel was tempted to follow her, but she let it go, let her go. The encounter was so odd that she had an instantaneous desire to speak to Linda about it, followed by an immediate resolve to never speak of this to anyone. She couldn’t be, she just couldn’t be. Even if she was, it was just one of those Baltimore coincidences. She very well could be hiring the same caterer. Maybe she was getting married. Hooray for her. Rachel found her wrap draped over a chair and headed out into the night.
Back in the car, she sat in silence as Marc wondered aloud again why she had abandoned him all night. He was nudging, trying to pick a fight, then backing away as if nervous about what a quarrel might bring.
“I mean, it’s okay, I can handle talking to Lorraine Gelman, although she bores me silly. She and my mom go all the way back to Park. But why would you do that to me, Rachel? You looked so pretty tonight. I just wanted to be with you. Why did you disappear?”
I don’t know. Because I was having more fun in the bathroom. Because I missed my father so much tonight. Because you have a girlfriend. Some stupid piece on the side who actually sends you notes at our house.
“There were just so many people to talk to,” she said.
Was it really only yesterday that she had opened the hand-lettered note to Marc? She wasn’t a snoop by nature. She had picked it up only because it was from Saks and she assumed it was some stupid flyer for a sale and Marc could be needlessly extravagant. She expected to find a notice of a fur sale, given the time of year, or maybe jewelry tied to Mother’s Day.
Instead she found the most explicit love letter she had ever read. A sex letter would be a better description. Your cock here, your cock there, my mouth on your cock. It seemed as if the letter went on for pages, that it was longer than Ulysses, longer than all twelve volumes in A Dance to the Music of Time, a work that Rachel and Marc both loved, but it was really only a page and a half, and it wouldn’t have been that long if the handwriting had been more controlled. Part of Rachel’s mind detached, imagining Marc’s horror at such pedestrian language, the sloppy handwriting.
Another part of her mind, even more cool and cruel, chimed in: Well, look at you. You are truly your mother’s daughter now, a woman whose husband loves her so much that he sleeps with other women. Love at first sight, love at second sight—what about love at last sight? Is that too much for a Brewer woman to ask? Or does one have to settle as Linda has, for a man who’s sweet but weak and pliable?
How had Rachel ended up living her mother’s life? How could she get out of it with her dignity intact? It was one thing to marry the better poet, but he was supposed to be a better man, too.
“Where are we, Rachel?”
She thought the question existential, but Marc, a suburban boy, had gotten twisted in the city’s one-way streets and ended up making a series of squares.
“You’re going north on Calvert. You should circle back to the JFX here.”
“But I can pick it up in a few blocks, right?” He always asked for her help, always got defensive when she provided it. He couldn’t possibly know—or could he?—that his chosen route took them past Horizon House, one of the high-rises thrown up in the 1960s during yet another abortive Baltimore renaissance. It was not quite the spiffy place it had seemed to Rachel ten years ago when her mother had pointed it out to her two oldest daughters, saying in a strangely matter-of-fact voice: “Your father’s girlfriend lives here, but I bet she’ll be moving now that she has all his money.”