“Roz!” I said. “You’re wicked. He’s married, and he’s our age, and he was her boss!”
“Well, he’s not hard to look at,” Roz said. “And we did used to joke about him being our ‘spring fling.’ Do you remember?”
As if I could have forgotten.
“Do you think Aviva could have heard us?” Roz said.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“That wife of his.” Roz was pleasantly soused. “I change my mind, good for him. Aviva’s a catch. They would have had be-yoo-tee-full babies, those two.”
“Well, it’s over now,” I said. “No babies, thank God.”
TEN
I want to begin by saying, the accident was neither Aviva’s nor the congressman’s fault.
An eightysomething woman, driving with a suspended license and in the beginning stages of dementia, wasn’t looking when she took a left turn, and she slammed into the side of the congressman’s Lexus sedan. The old woman was killed, which meant there was an investigation. The investigation found that the old woman was at fault, and also that my daughter, who was in the passenger seat at the time, was having an affair with the congressman. This was the beginning of South Florida’s Aviva Grossman obsession. Avivagate.
But I get ahead of myself.
Before Avivagate, before the story had a name, there was a period of time when we waited for the story. We waited to see if the story would even become a story, or more precisely, if Aviva would be a character in the story. For a brief but shining moment, she was the “unknown female intern” who was traveling in the car with the congressman. We didn’t know if her name would be released, and I believe the congressman tried to keep Aviva out of it. He may be an immoral man, but he is not a cruel one. Unfortunately, interest in the story grew beyond the congressman’s power to protect my daughter. The public would not be sated until it knew who had been in the car with the congressman that night.
Aviva couldn’t bear to tell her father. She waited until the day before the police’s release of her name and the congressman’s press conference addressing that release. I offered to tell Mike for Aviva, but to her credit, she said she wanted to tell him herself.
We took Mike to the sleepy restaurant at what used to be the Bridge Hotel but is now a Hilton. Roz and I like to joke that everything in the world eventually becomes a Hilton. The restaurant was a favorite of our family’s, mainly for the view of the Intercoastal and the boats passing by, but the food was nothing special. Pool food. Club sandwiches. Steak fries.
Aviva ordered a Cobb salad, which she did not touch. And then, to prolong the meal, she ordered a coffee, which she did not drink. We talked about things: my job, Aviva’s classes, Mike’s job. We did not talk about Congressman Levin, though the story—sans Aviva’s name—was already in the air. That kind of gossip didn’t interest Mike, though. So we talked about nothing, and time flew. I knew Mike was planning to go back to the office. I considered prompting Aviva, but I decided against it. It was not my secret to tell.
As Mike was going over the bill, he told a story about a woman whose heart he’d operated on a few years back. “Sixty-one years old. Quadruple bypass,” he said. “No complications, but the recovery was long. Anyway, about a year after the surgery, she was playing with her granddaughter, and out of the clear blue sky, she made a perfect replica of the family’s dachshund out of Play-Doh.”
“Play-Doh!” Aviva said too enthusiastically.
“Yes! Can you imagine? And the granddaughter says, ‘Make another, Dodie.’ So Dodie does one of the granddaughter and the house and Dodie’s childhood home in Yonkers, which she hasn’t seen for years, and by this point, the whole family is gathered around to witness this miracle. And Dodie’s son says, ‘Maybe we should get you to a sculpture studio, Mom.’ Before the heart attack, she’d never been in the least artistic. She had no sense of perspective, could barely draw stick figures. And now she’s making these photorealistic three-dimensional busts out of marble, clay, whatever medium she can get her hands on. She did the whole family, all of her friends, a few celebrities. She’s so good, the story gets picked up by the local news. They’re calling her the Grandma Moses of sculpture. And now Dodie’s taking commissions, and she’s getting paid thousands of dollars to do sculptures for towns, for public spaces, for celebrations.”
“You should get a percentage,” I said. “She owes it all to you.”
“I wouldn’t go that far, but she is making a bust of me right now,” Mike said. “Gratis.”
“You can put it in the lobby of your office,” I said. “The Head of a Great Man.”
“What do you think caused it?” Aviva asked.
“You unblock the heart, and the increased blood flow will improve brain function. And maybe the improved brain function creates new neural pathways, resulting in the discovery of heretofore undiscovered talents. Who knows?” Mike said.
“The heart is mysterious,” I said.
“That’s garbage, Rachel,” Mike said. “The heart is fully explicable. The brain is mysterious, I’ll give you that.”
“The heart is explicable to you,” I said. “The rest of us are in the dark.”
Mike signed the receipt.
“Daddy,” Aviva said.
“Yes?” Mike looked up.
She kissed him on the cheek. “I love you,” she said.
“I love you, too,” Mike said.
“I’m so sorry.” Aviva began to cry.
“Aviva, what is it?” Mike sat back down at the table. “What can it be?”
“I screwed up,” she said.
“Whatever it is, we’ll fix it,” he said.
“This can’t be fixed,” she said.
“Everything can be fixed,” he said.
AVIVA DROVE BACK to Miami, and Mike, who had canceled the rest of his day, and I drove back to our house to argue pointlessly.
“I suppose you knew about this,” he said.
I sighed. “I had suspicions,” I said. “I did suspect.”
“If you suspected,” Mike said, “why in God’s name didn’t you do something?”
“I tried,” I said.
“You didn’t try hard enough!”
“She’s a grown woman, Mike. I can’t lock her in her room.”
“I thought the one thing I could say for you was that you were a good mother,” Mike said.
He had always been lousy in an argument, and this is one of the many reasons I do not miss being married to him.
“How could you let her do something so immoral?” Mike said.
“It’s not as if you set a great example,” I said quietly.
“What? What did you say?”
“I said, there’s no point in us trading insults. We have to figure out what we’re going to do.”
“What can we do?” Mike said. “Other than get her a lawyer and wait for this to pass?”
“We have to support our daughter,” I said.
“Obviously,” Mike said. He put his head in his hands. “How could she do this to us?”
“I don’t think she was thinking of us,” I said.
“Would you have done something like this at that age?”