She is now talking to the dog and the television. What next, the recycling bin? She is nothing if not the classic modern old maid. Well, not exactly a maid, in that she’s been soundly deflowered.
She has only herself to blame for choosing the specific forks in the road that led to her becoming a living, breathing urban cliché, the kind of woman who finds herself portrayed generically and tragically, every five years or so, in a New York magazine soft-sociology cover story. One afternoon, killing time in a Williams-Sonoma (a decent saucepan cost how much?), she stopped at a display of boxed cookie cutters under a pink-lettered sign: PLANNING A SHOWER? One set was designed for wedding-themed cookies (bell, bouquet, bride-affixed-to-groom), the other for infant-affirming sweets (teddy bear, pram, onesie). Well, she mused, how about a set designed for a party celebrating initiation into the class of women Merry thought of as BUMPFs: barren upwardly mobile professional females. You could bake a sugar-glazed briefcase, a chocolate-chip stiletto, or how about a shortbread cookie shaped precisely like the bell curve graphing an ovulation cycle?
She’s still clicking through row after row of dismal, obscure movie options when the phone rings. She looks at the caller ID. A Manhattan cell number. Oh please not Sol, Sol the cost-benefit czar, Sol the storm cloud approaching her career. No; Sol has a Westchester number.
“Hello?”
“Hey, is this Meredith?”
A man. Maybe she’s wished the fictitious suitor into reality.
“Yes.”
“It’s Danilo Daulair. We met at the Mort Lear thing. Central Park. Last Sunday.”
The caretaker’s brother.
“You gave me your card,” he says.
Merry takes a gulp of water. “Nice to hear from you. I guess you made it home in that deluge. I barely did. Lost my shoes.” She tries to laugh.
“Yeah. Well, I was on my bike.” He laughs even more awkwardly. “So I know you want to connect with Tommy—with my sister. And I’m thinking maybe I’m going to pay her a visit this weekend. Out in the country.”
“Oh.” Was she supposed to ask him to put in a good word for her?
“And I thought. Maybe. You’d like to go with me.”
“Are you driving?”
“I thought I’d rent one of those Zipcars.”
“I have a car,” she says. “I can drive. I’m happy to drive.”
“Great,” he says. “I was thinking Sunday? I have Sunday off.”
“Sunday’s great,” she says. “Sure. I’ll call you Sunday morning, that all right? I have to go just now.”
She barely makes it to the bathroom. Everything comes up, and when she finally sinks back onto the cold tile floor, laying a cheek against tufted scarlet bath mat, she feels despair and release in equal measure. “Let’s not do this again,” she says, admonishing the toilet seat above her. Linus comes into the bathroom and regards her anxiously. She sits up and gathers him into her lap.
“Linus,” she says, “we are going to pull ourselves together. Yes, we are.”
Nine
FRIDAY
“Tomasina? Hello?” The voice, irresistibly cheerful, is his and no other. She realizes, too, that she hasn’t asked him to call her Tommy—the gesture seemed impossibly assertive, even when he asked that she call him Nick—and now she finds that she likes the sound of her old-fashioned name in his melodic voice, as if he’s given her a newly dignified persona.
But here he is, early again.
She is on her knees in the path between the peony beds, weeding. Pivoting clumsily, she stands in time to see him round the corner of the house. “I wasn’t expecting you till two.”
“I know, forgive me, tell me to bugger off if you like, but I had an idea, since we made such good time, that you’d let me fix you lunch. I rang, but I got no answer, and we were driving in circles—”
“It’s fine,” she says. Though she doesn’t like the sound of that we.
They trade meticulous smiles. Yet again, Tommy finds it irritatingly hard to stop staring at him. Today he’s wearing a shirt with dainty gray pinstripes, tails loose over white jeans, the same blue sneakers—their jubilant hue balanced by the same tangerine-colored scarf. His sunglasses nest in his artfully untidy hair.
“Let me just introduce you, quickly, to Serge.”
“Serge?”
“My driver. He’ll push off to that place you recommended, the Chanticleer. It looks just the ticket—we drove by—but I don’t want you startled if I need him to show up here.” When he sees her expression, he says, “He won’t hang about. I just need to have him on call.” As if Nick Greene is the host and Tommy the guest, he beckons her toward the front of the house.
Serge, who fills every seam of his black suit, looks more like a bodyguard than a chauffeur, his reflection in the car’s spotless hood magnifying his mass. His handshake is declaratively firm. “Pleasure,” he says, with so thick an accent that it might well be his only word of English.
Serge removes a leather suitcase and four grocery bags from a trunk large enough to hold several bodies. Tommy recognizes, on the paper bags, the name of a gourmet shop three towns closer to the city.
The two men carry everything toward the kitchen door. Tommy holds it open.
“Thank you!” Nick says to Serge once they’ve set the groceries on the counter. “For everything. And”—playfully, he points a finger at Tommy—“I mean what I said about lunch. I’ll just see Serge off in the proper direction, make sure we have our coordinates set, watches synchronized, all that James Bond rigmarole….”
The screen door bangs shut behind him. She goes to the sink and washes her hands, then looks inside the grocery bags. Why would movie-star food look different?
And then, as she listens to the car depart, it’s as if the calendar’s flipped backward to exactly nine days ago, almost to the hour, for here they are, again, alone together in her kitchen: Morty’s kitchen to Nick Greene, who’s already taking in his surroundings with the hungry eye of a genteel burglar—though even in Morty’s day, this room was hers.
“So. So!” He is blushing. “First thing is where you’d like me to stash the goods. I brought my own food, but I’m happy to share. And how’s a frittata? Red pepper and goat cheese? Do you fancy sun-dried tomatoes? Does asparagus vinaigrette appeal?”
She wants to ask him to slow down; his effusiveness is wearing her out. But the energy is nervous, and his ardent if bumbling attempts to ingratiate himself are touching. She is also having a hard time reconciling the man before her with the man she watched in the movie last night—the deeply disturbing movie.
It hadn’t occurred to her he’d bring his own food—or so much of it. “Why don’t you put things in the back fridge?” She points to the pantry.
“Super,” he says.
She represses a laugh. Why are the English so English? she wonders nonsensically. “I’ll just go outside and finish up.”
“Excellent. And not to worry—I’ll find my way around the pots and pans. Upside of living like a nomad.”