“He would be.”
“When she meets him, won’t it be clear that you were playing a joke on her?”
Nick didn’t answer. Instead, he grumbled about the dearth of the Echo’s reporting on Everton Country Day’s football team’s six-and-two season. Finally, he looked up and asked, “You never met Brooke, did you?”
“True.”
“Here’s what’ll happen, vengeful joke or not. She’ll answer Stuart’s charming bullshit introductory e-mail. They’ll write back and forth, and before finding out he doesn’t have a pot to piss in and doesn’t bathe, she’ll decide to give it a shot.”
I said, “Okay, fine. Let them live happily ever after for all I care.” I sat down again, looked up from my shopping list to ask, “Any requests outside the usual?”
We didn’t grocery shop together, since two people pushing a cart on a Saturday morning looked like a couple. He put out his hand, palm up. For a bold half second I thought of squeezing it, but instead I just passed him paper and pen.
24
Oh No, Oh No, Oh No
Must THERE BE A time in a modern parent’s life when he decides that his adult children are mature enough to help unburden his tortured soul over lunch?
This is what Henry Frankel told Joel and me as the three of us tried to eat stylish luncheon fare at the café in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts: that he couldn’t go on living a lie. Against all odds and defying logic, he’d met someone and they were—so sorry!—deeply in love.
Nearly in one voice, my brother and I demanded who, when, and why now.
“Her name is Tracy,” he pronounced most reverently.
“Tracy! How old can someone named Tracy be?” I asked.
“Is that really important? And is that really what needs to be discussed?”
“How old?” I repeated.
“Almost forty,” he said.
“Wait,” said Joel. “You’re telling us you’re having an affair with a woman who’s Faith’s age?”
“Not Faith’s age.” He turned, and asked, “You can’t be close to forty, can you?”
“No. But for purposes of this conversation, yes!”
“What about Mom?” Joel asked.
“Your mother’s figured it out,” he said quietly.
“When?”
“Over the course of the last few weeks. In terms of telling you two, our timing was deliberate. We didn’t want to add to any of Faith’s woes, but now all seems relatively peaceful.”
“Until, like, sixty seconds ago!” said Joel. He gave his plate a shove, the plate holding the triple-decker sandwich with the bacon smoked over alder wood that he’d been so delighted to find on the menu.
“I didn’t want to tell you over the phone.” Dad sighed heavily. “And now I’m thinking this”—public space, eager ears—“wasn’t such a good idea, either.”
“Who is she?” I asked.
He started with “She’s a housewife,” followed by a correction that technically she was not a housewife because she was divorced, but that would have applied when she was married, with two daughters and a big house to care for. However, she was a law school graduate and member of the Massachusetts bar.
“So she’s a divorcée?” I asked, putting as much old-school disdain into that word as I could summon.
“It was a very unhappy marriage,” he said.
“Like we give a shit!” said Joel.
“And you met how?” I asked.
“And when?” asked Joel.
“We met in August when she commissioned me to personalize Blue Angel for her daughter’s bat mitzvah—”
“Wait!” I said. “Is she the one who started this whole thing?”
“What whole thing?”
“Painting Chagalls, personalizing them, whatever you call it. Just when we thought you were all starry-eyed and professionally fulfilled. Turns out it wasn’t art at all! It’s infatuation.”
“He’s fulfilled all right,” Joel said. “That’s coming across loud and clear.”
“This isn’t infatuation,” our dad said. “Infatuation burns itself out.”
“The new Chagall,” I ranted. “Getting Mom all invested so she sits home in case it’s a future patron calling, as if she’s your secretary. How’d you let that happen? How’d you let any of it happen?”
Dad assumed a look of misunderstood, lovesick confusion. Were his two adult children incapable of relating to love overwhelming, which in its own sweet, storybook way was guilt free due to its near-biblical inevitability—at least that’s how I was translating his expression.
After a prolonged period of sitting without any of us touching our food, he tried again. “I couldn’t keep it to myself anymore. Your mother wanted to run to the phone, but I said, ‘No, let me tell them face-to-face.’ I didn’t want you to be shocked when I moved in with Tracy.”
“Did you say ‘move in with Tracy’?” I managed to repeat.
“With her barely teenaged daughters? Because good luck with that,” said Joel.
“Where?” I asked. “Florida? Isn’t that where this whole subspecialty got started?”
“Not Florida. No, that was different; that was a de Kooning I did in Aventura. Tracy lives in Newton. And, yes, with her daughters, two of them, fourteen and almost twelve.”
“Won’t that be handy,” I said. “Live-in models for all the princesses and angels and that other moony crap you’re peddling!”
Uh-oh. That was not exactly on topic. Within seconds, it was clear that the hush that followed was an unsteady one, that he was verging on tears, no doubt distressed first by our hostility and prudishness, and now by my artistic effrontery.
“Look,” said Joel. “We’re not babies. We know people have affairs and get divorced even after decades. But I don’t want to see Mom curled up in a ball, crying her eyes out.”
“She could be suicidal,” I hissed, drawing glances from our fellow café patrons.
“I assure you, she is not curled up in a ball,” Dad said.
“You know because you’re talking to her?” I asked.
“Daily,” he said. “More than that. And by the way, no one is talking about a divorce.”
More shocked noneating followed. Joel said, “Do they serve liquor here? Anyone else want a drink?”