“Here, come help Grandma with the soup.” Rose lifted one of the twins into the air and handed the kid a piece of chopped carrot. “You just put it in there. Perfect!” For indeed, the tiny fist had immediately hurled the bit of vegetable into the giant pot of water on the stovetop. With an unconscious ease, Rose handed the second twin her own bit of carrot, so that both children would have a turn. The simplicity of the moment was weird and graceful, plugged innately into a kind of knowledge Alison couldn’t penetrate. How did these women know so instinctively what those kids wanted? Even chopping vegetables was a mysterious enterprise these days. It was a given that you would just buy them already chopped, at Dean & Deluca.
The phone rang. Everyone’s focus had so completely moved on to the task at hand—dropping vegetable bits into that giant pot of water—Alison was the only one available to pick the thing up. “Hello,” she announced.
“Alison, hi.” Time flipped. The past and the present kept smashing into each other in completely untenable ways. How did people do this? Why was she so bad at it?
She called upon the actress. Chipper, bold, secure. “Hey, Kyle, hi!” Megan glanced up, but somehow managed not to raise an eyebrow. They were all moving on.
fifteen
KYLE’S WIFE SEEMED to float. She was gliding around the glorious open kitchen, a kid on one hip, pushing a perfect wisp of a blonde curl off her forehead, turning with a faint look of confusion and then smiling, welcoming, couldn’t be happier to see Kyle’s ex in her fantastic home. Wow, Alison thought. She’s like a painting.
She was like a painting, a painting of a wife inside a painting of a house. As she hurried across the room to greet Alison, the illusion of perfection gave way to a kind of harried happiness, which seemed even more perfect. She was so pretty it was like a state of being; she clearly had carried it with her from childhood. Alison knew these girls. There was something about being told you were pretty from the second you were born; it did something to your brain.
“Alison! I am so glad you could come.”
“Thanks! Thank you, Van.” Alison was abashed in the face of the other women’s lovely enthusiasm. Van seemed like such a nice person; of course Kyle would marry a nice person. “Here, I brought you this.” The standard offering, a generic Malbec, the guy in the store had promised it was good. Van laughed at it, finally a slight note of brittleness.
“Oh, I wish I could! I’m breastfeeding, I can’t have a drop of anything. And my milk is so erratic. I know you saw Kyle buying formula, which I so didn’t want to do, but my placenta tore, there was blood everywhere and I was anemic for three days, the milk just didn’t come and didn’t come and you’d think being married to a pediatrician they’d warn you what that might mean—”
“I did warn you,” Kyle noted, reentering the room with another guest. Thank God, this was an actual party, there were going to be strangers to meet who would keep the whole thing complicated and social. “Alison, this is Martin Emory. Martin is a friend of ours from St. Luke’s. Martin, this is Alison Moore, she’s visiting from New York.”
“Of course I know who you are,” Martin assured her. He was plainspoken, with an open face, good looking perhaps if he would compose his features into some kind of expression, but that hadn’t occurred to him, or maybe he didn’t actually know how to do it. His absolutely ordinary face seemed to simply want to be pleasant. These people really didn’t exist in New York; they just didn’t.
“Nice to meet you, Martin,” Alison responded.
“When Kyle said you were in town, I thought, terrific! I really want to meet her,” Martin explained.
“Oh, thank you,” said Alison. This was different from her fans, who gushed a little more effusively and always took a selfie. Martin was considering her now with a quiet and expectant enthusiasm. He seemed to want her to say something more, but what? Or maybe this fuzzy silence was enough for him. He smiled and nodded, and for a moment Alison thought that he might start bleating, like a sheep.
“So you’re from Cincinnati!”
“I, yes,” Alison agreed.
“But you live in New York now?”
“Yes.”
“I thought all you actresses lived in Los Angeles.”
“Oh—well, a lot do,” Alison acknowledged. What was with this guy? He didn’t come at her with the alpha male energy of a New Yorker, but there was an undertone that implied that he knew absolutely everything, even though he was from Ohio. On her way over Alison had told herself that a party at an old boyfriend’s house in Cincinnati would be a cakewalk compared to the shark-infested dinners and screenings and openings and club nights that were her usual fare. But she was already feeling the troubling misconnects of people who lived and believed different things. What had Kyle just said, he knew this guy from church? In New York no one admitted that they went to church, unless they went to temple.
Martin was still smiling, but there was that edge of something else underneath that fuzzy Midwestern bonhomie. Superiority? “I was in Los Angeles once, the weather’s nice but the traffic was so horrible. I don’t know how anyone lives there.”
“I can’t stand LA,” she agreed, although the few times she had gone on press junkets out there, they had put her up in posh hotels and treated her like a movie star. It didn’t precisely suck.
“New York is worse,” Martin continued. “All those homeless people? Who wants to see that?”