Zinnie looked left and right. “Promise you won’t tell anyone? Especially not Mom?”
“Certainly I promise,” Claire crossed her heart. She liked the idea of a secret with Zinnie. Particularly since Zinnie had come across her twice talking to herself since she’d come home.
Zinnie lowered her voice. “Right when Carmela was working on her finals, she got pregnant. And she got an abortion. Without telling Arnold.”
“What?”
“Sure. You know nothin’s-gonna-standin-my-way Carmela. The only reason I found out was because she started hemorrhaging afterward and she called me up to take her back to the clinic. He wound up finding out about it anyway. She hit him with it during one of their famous shouting matches. You know, top of the ninth and the bases are empty? She just laced it into him ’cause she had nothing else left to hit him with, I guess. Anyhow, that was the beginning of the end. Now she’s all wrapped up in this therapy shit. Even the people she hangs out with are these intellectual, overanalytical uptown types.”
“Too much Freud, not enough roast beef?”
“Yup. Exactly. Now she writes about ‘winter-or summer-palette people’ and ‘hemline psychosyndromes’ and she calls herself a columnist. She makes me sick. I mean, she has such a good mind and it’s all off in the wrong direction. The divorce just sent her off the deep end, Claire, I swear it did.”
“You and Freddy went through it. And you had Michaelaen. You seem all right.”
“Do I? I was pretty shaken up at the time. But with Freddy and me it was different. We were friends growing up. I still love him, you know it? I always will, the sap. I mean, behind all the fresh-out-of-the-closet fruitcake, Freddy’s a stand-up guy … and he pays all of Michaelaen’s bills, without being asked to. He’s got a steady boyfriend already, can you imagine? They’re opening a restaurant on Queens Boulevard.” She laughed ironically. “May they live happily ever after.”
Zinnie stretched as though she didn’t give a hoot. “God, I’m tired,” she moaned. “I just get used to one shift and they put me on another. Say, Claire? Whatever did happen with that duke guy?”
“Wolfgang? The last time I saw him he was leading some Brahmanic heiress around by the nose.”
“You still hurting?”
Claire’s eyes went out the window and all the way up Park Lane South. “It’s difficult to describe. I feel lighter. After I left Wolfgang in Delhi, I spent six months on my own in the Himalayas. In a place called Dharam Sala. McLeod Gange, Dharam Sala. It’s a sort of refugee camp for Tibetans. Anyway, after one sort of difficult but illuminating month, I couldn’t figure out why I’d stayed with him as long as I had. In Dharam Sala, I started looking at things in a different way, you know?”
“Yeah, I know what you mean. Those Himalayas’ll clean your eyes right out.”
“Aw, c’mon Zinnie. Not you, too.”
“All right, go on. The Himalayas cut your cataracts. And then?”
“And then I decided that as long as I was changing half of my life, I might as well change the rest of it. No more working for travel brochures or fashion magazines. I didn’t have too much money left over so I sold my pearls—”
“Those luscious pearls from the German doctor? How could you?!”
“They didn’t exactly go with my life-style anymore,” Claire laughed. “They hadn’t for a long time.” (No sense mentioning all the other things she’d had to sell.) “Anyway, to make a long story short, without Wolfgang’s expensive tastes to support, I figured I could do what I wanted for a while. You know, the ‘virtue of selfishness’ and all that.”
“That doesn’t sound like you. You usually bolshevize everything.”
“Not anymore I don’t. Not after Wolfgang.”
“Tell me something. Did he do coke?”
“Sure he did coke. That’s why his allowance from home was never enough.”
“Did you?”
“Oh, God no. I got high on my mantras.”
“Huh?”
“Meditation.”
“Oh. Well, just don’t go doin’ none a that stuff around here,” Zinnie warned. “Bad enough Mom’s got Michaelaen going to church with her.”
Claire stood up and paced to and fro. “I don’t pray anymore,” she scowled. “I’m so full of self-congratulation when I do that I disgust myself. It’s like, I’ve done this, so now I deserve a reward … or … or progress, at least. My motives are all egotistical and self-serving, which is not the point at all, or it shouldn’t be.” She threw her arms up in a hopeless, almost comical gesture. “I’m much better when I’m not so good.”
They looked at each other.
“And,” she added, “I did used to smoke hashish occasionally. Does that make you feel better?”
“Not really. So then what happened with Wolfgang?”
“I guess I started seeing him for what he was.”
“Yeah, a pimp.”
“I wouldn’t call him a pimp.”