The broker took her to a dozen apartments in Prospect Heights, Ditmas Park, and Bensonhurst. “The crème de la crème of my very best deals for people who aren’t worried about their school catchment. When you don’t have kids, your choices are much wider—and, frankly, of better value. More bang for your buck.”
Every single option cost more than her current rent (the one about to be launched to the moon), and not one came with a perk like her key to Gramercy Park—never mind the responsible twelve-year-old girl next door who was practically willing to pay Merry just to spend time with Linus. Okay, she’d been spoiled. Except that right now she feels anything but spoiled. She feels embattled.
After parting ways with the broker (Yes, wasn’t Renee’s little Cressida the most adorable baby ever?), Merry pulls out her phone and orders an Uber. She needs to remind herself what it’s all for, why it’s worth staying in this magnificently heartless, ego-crushingly fabulous city.
“Yes, really,” she says when the driver, an overly friendly twenty-something, doubts her destination.
“Whoa,” he says when they arrive at the building site. “You dumpster diving or something?”
“Do I look like I’m dumpster diving?” she says, barely omitting the young man with which her mother would append that question.
He actually leans over backward and looks at her attire. “Yeah, well, no way.”
“Could you wait? I’ll just be ten minutes.”
“No prob.”
Because she cannot enter the building site itself (where, reassuringly, workmen are marching around giving orders and operating a lot of manly machinery), Merry asked the driver to drop her at the adjacent site, the one that’s destined to become a parking lot. She walks carefully through the broad stretch of industrial flotsam to the edge of the canal. Chain-link fencing prevents casual swimmers or desperate depressives from jumping in—not that the water looks enticing—but a year from now, this plot of wasteland, obscured by pavement, should stand in the shapely shadow of the zero-carbon-footprint palazzo from which she will reign, Lear or no Lear. And Jonas Hecht’s design is virtually all glass on the canal side, its top floor just high enough to offer views of New York Harbor.
What if she were to invite Tomasina Daulair to visit the site? Take her for a cozy-groovy girls’ lunch in Dumbo (but no: almost overnight, it’s turned into Broville Central) or Cobble Hill (much better), then grab an Uber (hopefully not this dweeby upstart) and share a thermos of iced tea while Merry shows her the architect’s renderings on her smartphone and explains her own vision. Maybe she can dragoon Hecht into coming along, giving them a hard-hat tour.
Worth a try. She picks up a small stone and tosses it over the fence into the water. She makes a wish: that a few years from now, wherever she’s living, she’ll feel a lot less ungrateful toward the world.
“Manhattan,” she says when she gets back into the car. “Gramercy Park.”
“You do the extremes, don’t you?” says her driver.
“That is one way to see my life,” she says, then makes a show of pulling out her phone and texting, though it’s nothing but pretend. The weather is sublime today; maybe she’ll take Linus and have dinner at that Park Avenue bistro with the sidewalk tables. Coq au vin, potatoes dauphinoise. Then she will walk Linus over to the West Side, admire the lights of New Jersey casting their confetti on the Hudson, circle back home. Which reminds her that it’s high time to visit her mother, who rarely complains about Merry’s chronic negligence. Perhaps she should drive out and take Mom to the garden center next weekend. The woman loves to plant shrubs. You’d think she has stock in azaleas.
Merry laughs at the thought of her life as one of extremes. Tame, tame, tame—but there are comforts in that. There’s stability in that. Call her a bourgeois fool.
—
Just as she’s begun to feel moderately calm about the weekend, certain that the actor is what he appears to be (as her father might say, a fine young man, artistic to boot!), now this: a letter sent to her care of Morty’s agent. Angelica included it in yet another batch of correspondence from people not yet aware of Morty’s demise. The letter is dated ten days ago, though it feels as if it’s caught up with Tommy from decades gone by, as if it’s been chasing her down, a messenger from her past, inept but resolute.
Dear Tommy,
I don’t know when I last wrote a real personal letter to anyone, but even if you were on Facebook (good for you, resisting that social dominatrix), it wouldn’t feel right getting back in touch that way.
As you can guess, I saw your name in one of the many articles I’ve read about Mort Lear’s death. My daughters loved all his books, and so did I. They’re among the ones I turn to when I’m feeling nostalgic about my life as a dad. (Keira, Dominique, and Jo are all out of the nest, to my perpetual astonishment.)
I sometimes wonder if you ever forgave me for more or less vanishing, but I’m not so vain as to think you dwelt on what was probably an inevitable parting. Still, I owed you more than an over-the-shoulder wave. To explain, not excuse, I let law school swallow me whole, and when I scrambled out of the whale’s gullet, I found myself engaged to a classmate and tackling the treadmill of pursuing partnership in a big firm that handled stuff like mergers and acquisitions. Mortgaged my soul to the devil, I know. My wife, Louise, worked in family law, giving me the lame justification that somehow she could balance our collective karma. (Not that I believe in such things.)
Three children and one college tuition later, I got my comeuppance during the Big Bang. Our firm shriveled from a plum to a prune. I was one of the cruise-line passengers thrown to the sharks. I went back to square minus-one and now I’m teaching high school English. (After leaving the law, I felt like a dog off leash for the first time in years. I even wrote poetry for a while. And I still take too many bad metaphors out for a spin. Professor Matz would be horrified.)
I am happier and poorer, as you’d expect. And I’m still in Chicago, to which I boomeranged right after Stanford. Louise was from Milwaukee, and our families made us a deal we couldn’t refuse: down payment on a tiny house in Oak Park.
Here, Tommy sets the letter down and wonders why in the world he is telling her all this, thrusting his life with its bumpy but more-or-less stars-aligned trajectory in her face. Yet back she goes for more.
I’m now in a condo in the city, Louise in the larger house to which we “upsized” in my professional prime. You were right about me: I didn’t have much faith in happy endings. I won’t blame it on poor Henry James, and I suppose the “divine justice” in my fate is that the restrictive curriculum of my public school system compels me to teach The Turn of the Screw, year after year. Louise and I split up five years ago, after Jo, our youngest, left for Barnard. Pretty amicable—though I hate that word—for a pair of attorneys. Maybe we gave up too soon—but she’s remarried.
You must think me selfish just to send you my life story like this…