Spoiled Page 2

  A week after getting the bad news, I walk by the building, daughterless this time, and find myself slowing, then stopping in front of it. A man emerges, then two schoolgirls in uniform. I put my sunglasses on to hide the fact that I am staring in an ugly, covetous way. How tortured and unpleasant I must look compared to the woman my age who comes out next, well dressed, smartly coiffed, followed by two children, a girl and a boy, who are tailed by two Tibetan nannies. For an incredible moment, I mistake the woman for an older, more sophisticated Christie Thorn. Out of habit I am pretending not to see even this twin of hers (the way you ignore a man in a bar who resembles your ex-boyfriend), when the doorman’s greeting rings out—yes, as if in a dream—“Mrs. Bruewald.” “Hi, Lester.” He asks how long she will be, and the woman says, “Oh, an hour or two. We’re just going to go to the park and do some shopping before Daddy gets home.”

  In a vile moment only Darwin could love, I paste a smile on my face, and I call out, “Christie?”

  WE WENT TO that Italian restaurant on Madison that people are always forgetting the name of. Kids and nannies were dispatched to the park. It was an off hour, three or four o’clock, and I remember I almost hated to dirty one of the white linen tablecloths that were set for dinner. We started with cappuccinos, then moved on to glasses of the house white—that fruity Soave you can always count on. When we got hungry later, the waiter, who clearly knew Christie, brought a plate of pecorino and some bread, and to wash it down I had another glass of the white and Christie switched to red. I was longing for a cigarette, and eventually I asked her, “Do you still smoke?” “My God, I’m dying for one,” she said, and took a pack out of her purse. It was just after the smoking ban had gone into effect and there was giggling when the waiter slipped us an ashtray. Feeling happily illicit, we each smoked two.

  I should have mentioned before that it was one of those surreally springlike days at the tail end of winter, the kind of afternoon when you flirt with the mailman, the coffee-cart man, and the busboy, when you long for a new pair of open-toed sandals and a good excuse to sit in a café all afternoon, ignoring your responsibilities, rousing that old pleasure-seeking self of yours, and getting drunk. Well, we certainly had the excuse. There was catching up to be done—husbands, children, careers, in a nutshell.

  From the beginning, I was drinking rather fast. All the information sharing, I realized, was making me uneasy. I, who used to rattle off insouciantly all the good things that were happening, was the guarded one now. I had something to protect, it seemed. I held back, forming half-truths for every potential question Christie might pose—asking myself, “Will I tell her about that or not? Will I act as if everything’s fine or will I level with her?”—while she was expansive with me, as she now could be. The family crest was not a joke; it was not a sham. In some little town in the former East Germany, the Bruewalds were evidently a big deal. “All the money was tied up in this castle in Saxony—this huge, horrible house—and, the minute Onkel Guenther died, Thomas and I looked at each other and we were like, ‘We’re selling!’ It was like, before he died we couldn’t mention it, and the minute we got the news we never looked back. It was a done deal.” They had inherited the lot: sold the Schloss, auctioned the furniture, started up trusts for Hildie and Axel. (Although Hildie still resembled her father, her appearance would be seen, later in life, as distinguishing. I could see that now. People would seek ownership of those peculiar looks—how could I have missed that before?) In addition to the ten rooms on Fifth Avenue, the Bruewalds now owned a ski lodge in the Arlberg, a country house in New Jersey, and a mansion in Solln, which Christie cheerfully described as “the Greenwich of Munich.”

  The sheer mass of the good luck was making me dizzy, but when she mentioned Greenwich I sat up and did her the one courtesy I could. I fed her the line. “That must be nice,” I said. “It must feel just like home.” She drained her glass of wine, though she had already drained it once, and then she put it down and unexpectedly met my eye. “You know,” she said, “when we got the money I went out and got myself a two-hundred-and-fifty-dollar-an-hour shrink. I used to think I was a horrible person.” She wasn’t a horrible person, the shrink had told her; in fact, there was nothing wrong with her at all.

  We split a third glass of wine and then split a fourth, which made the waiter laugh. I told her why I had been loitering outside her building. I wasn’t hoping to get something out of telling her, I just wanted to ante up with something real of my own. It seemed secretive and creepy not to mention it. Christie laughed, the way you laugh at something you find absurd. “Oh, for Christ’s sake!” she said. I stared stonily at the table, the way I do when I’m both drunk and mortally offended—that’s how defensive I felt—and she had to talk me down. “No, no—listen. Thomas is on the board, and they so owe us. This is no problem, no problem at all. Don’t believe what they say about the liquid assets. It’s just a way of keeping people out.”

  I was still suspicious.

  “You know what I’ll do?” she said. “I’ll tell them about your Mayflower ancestor.”

  “I told you about my Mayflower ancestor?” I said.

  “Yup.” She smiled. “The first time we met.”

  There was nothing I could do but turn bright red and finish my wine.

  Christie went to the bathroom, and I sat at the table, flipping a matchbook over and over in my hand. I felt giddy and keyed up, as if I were waiting for a date to return, as if we might be planning to go back to her deluxe pad and make out on her and Thomas’s king-size bed. People had always said that Christie had a great body, and that’s the kind of body it was—firm, relentlessly fit—offered up as a commodity for others to comment on. In the early nineties, she had been an aerobics queen, logging two, three hours a day at the gym; now, of course, she was into yoga and Pilates, but, “to tell you the truth,” she’d confessed to me earlier in the afternoon, “I kind of miss the screaming and the jumping up and down.”

  We had moved to the city at the same time—ten years ago now—and sitting there, playing with the matchbook and waiting for her to come back, I tried to get a handle on what those ten years had amounted to. We had been single. Now we were married women with children. But, despite the italics in my head, I couldn’t seem to take it any further than that. My thoughts drifted to the apartment, trying in some way, I suppose, to notch the progress we had each made. If my husband and I got the place, we’d be cash-poor for a few years. With both of us working, we could bring in x amount per year, put y aside, and contribute z to our 401(k)s. But, even considering promotions and raises, there was a limit to x. X was fixed, and there was only t—time—to increase it. But time ate up your life. You could say “In ten years” or “In twenty years,” but the problem was that then whatever it was would be in ten years, or in twenty years. A decade, two decades of your life would have gone by before you attained it. The fixity of x was the most bittersweet thing I had thought of in ages. Of course, it was comparing myself to Christie that had brought on all these thoughts. When she came out of the ladies’ room, looking as happy and drunk as I had felt a minute before, her innocence struck me like a storm. And I realized that what separated us, and perhaps had always separated us, was the understanding that I had only just reached and that she—she would never have to: In life you can only get so far.

  I WALKED HOME with the good news for my husband and daughter. It seemed that Christie and I were going to be friends again—friends after all. My husband would be dubious, to say the least. “The same Christie Thorn you told me you would never have coffee with again?” Nor would he like the idea of her getting us past the board; it would take a week to make him understand what had changed in the course of an afternoon and why it wasn’t the case that we were simply using her. Then again, I deserved a dose of his skepticism. I had carried on about her—had laughed in my best moments, but from time to time had been disdainful, and even indignant. I asked myself, now, how I truly felt about all those pretensions of her
s. I went through them one by one—that wedding, the Christmas card; then little things, little remarks from her single days, her obsession with going to the “in” restaurant every year, for instance. I came to the conclusion that none of it was worth getting worked up about. None of it was profound. As the shrink had evidently made clear, none of it had anything to do with Christie herself. On the contrary, I told myself, it was your problem.

  Bait and Switch

  “OH, GOD, ELS, it’s that nightmare German guy I was telling you about.” Louise shuddered, pleasurably, in the doorway of the beach house, and rejoined Elspeth on the terrace. “I told him we’d have lunch with him tomorrow in Riva Bella.”

  “Why?” Elspeth said, her voice flat to mask her alarm. Despite the fact that the two sisters had been squabbling nonstop since she’d landed at Fiumicino two days ago, Louise’s finding the need to make plans beyond themselves worried Elspeth. It was so nice, in Europe, to ride Louise’s long coattails; intolerable to have to cope on one’s own, getting by, like any tourist, with foolish smiles and an ingratiating overuse of the formal “you” form.

  “He keeps calling me. … It’s so funny.” Louise tucked a lock of black hair behind her ear with a coy little shake of her head, as if protesting a too-lavish compliment. “I can’t imagine what he wants.”

  “What—is he on vacation here, too?” said Elspeth shortly. Lately, she felt she was on a one-woman mission to combat all outward manifestations of Louise’s moral shortcomings: this habit her sister had, for instance, of speaking aloud yet seeming to consult herself.

  Louise looked blankly at Elspeth for a moment, as if puzzled to find her sister sitting across from her. “No, haven’t I told you?” She faux-cringed and murmured significantly, “He’s actually moved here.”

  “Has he,” Elspeth said neutrally—pointedly obtuse. She knew, of course, what Louise was hinting at—knew that she was meant to say “Gosh, do you think this guy is in love with you or something?” Oh, she could see right away where all of this was going. But she pressed her lips grimly together, refusing to be complicit. Louise called out nervously to Annie.

  “What are you doing, Anz? You having fun?” The little girl was squatting, a few yards from the table, beside a puddle the outdoor shower had made in the dirt, a trove of plastic Pollies and Polly accessories arranged around the bit of water as if the dolls were sunning themselves at the beach. It was nearly ten o’clock but the light lingered still, and Annie, like an Italian child, stayed up late.

  “It’s my fault, I guess. I’ve let it get out of hand,” Louise went on, topping up their glasses with the last of the trebbiano. They’d been nursing the wine since supper ended, both unwilling to desert the terrace. The lapping of the Maremman sea, just visible through the row of umbrella pines, and the lasting evening light, which never lost its novelty for Elspeth, seemed to entrap them there each night, while Louise unburdened herself to Elspeth. “We were all sort of friends in London. His wife worked with—” Here Louise raised her eyebrows to avoid mentioning “Robert” in front of Annie, and Elspeth rolled her eyes, for it was a habit she disapproved of. “It’s not like he’s dead, Louise! You ought to mention him all the time—in a very natural way,” she’d instructed Louise, on the way home from the airport. “What do you think you’re saying to Annie by pretending her father doesn’t exist?” Last night’s temper tantrum, too, had provided an opportunity for reproach, or rather not the tantrum—now impossible to impute to the child’s absorbed, industrious mien—but the spanking it had resulted in.

  “My Polly’s all wet,” Annie announced.

  “Is she, sweetie? Let me see.” Louise swiveled in her chair, more quickly solicitous, because of the topic of their conversation, than she would have been normally.

  (“I would never hit a child,” Elspeth had sententiously pronounced when Annie had been put tearfully to bed, to which Louise had replied blackly, “Call me when you have a kid.”)

  “Bring her here, Annie.”

  Annie stood up, frowning, and walked carefully to the table, the doll’s fibrous hair springing from her fist. “She fell in the water and her hair got wet.”

  Picking up the child, Louise drew her into her lap, her mass of black hair descending around her daughter. There was no denying that Louise was striking. Unlike Elspeth, who was more hit or miss, Louise had the kind of looks that could withstand photographs, which announced beauty and then carelessly bucked the scrutiny that followed. In the iconic maternal pose her sister’s face looked a little unnatural, Elspeth thought, as if it withstood the softening maternal glow as well. A petty thought, for now it was Elspeth’s turn to sip her wine and look away—left out. “Shall we dry it with this special spa towel?” Louise said, pretending, with a cloth napkin. “Will that help? I think she’ll be all right, don’t you?”

  After Louise’s failed marriage to Annie’s father, an Englishman named Robert Dennis (or more likely, Elspeth suspected, though she shrank from any precise dating, the affair had overlapped with the end of Robert), there had been the brief, Parisian interlude with Jean-Marc. That had ended when she met the quasi-divorced Giacomo in a chairlift in the Dolomites, and moved herself and Annie in a rental van to Tuscany. Elspeth was still single—free as usual, she thought with vexation, to vigil through eight hours in coach to Europe for the annual homage paying à Louise.

  IN NEAR DARKNESS Elspeth wiped down the table while Louise did dishes in the tiny strip of kitchen at the back of the house. Elspeth sponged the oilcloth irritably, a vision of tomorrow’s luncheon, with herself in the role of chaperone to Louise’s flirtation, coming rapidly into focus.

  “He’s always had this … thing for me, I guess you could say,” Louise had said as they cleared the table, now speaking in the lock jawed murmur she used when she didn’t want Annie to follow the conversation. Two or three trips inside were required, to return the plates and serving bowls to the kitchen, the oil and wine, the salt and pepper, the tablecloth and napkins. Louise believed in nothing if not the keeping up of domestic standards. “They split, too … As a matter of fact, it was just around the time we did.”

  “What does Giacomo think of—what’s he called again?” Elspeth felt a perverse, self-preserving loyalty to Louise’s current boyfriend, who had after all rented them this beach house. (“If,” as Elspeth had said in the one e-mail to a pseudo-boyfriend in New York she had managed from the Internet café in town, “it’s not too misleading to refer to a semidetached, postwar, cement condominium as a ‘beach house.’”) Giacomo had laughed at her gushing encouragement to try to drive out from Florence and join them for a few days. “No, no, Spee,” he had said, his short Tuscan accent, the severity of his manner, making the family nickname both funny and touching. “I cannot ‘find’ time. I must work.” In the driver’s seat, Louise was silent behind her large sunglasses. Nevertheless, she managed to convey a supreme derision at this claim.

  “Werner Stechel?”

  “It sounds familiar—I think I have met him.” Louise sounded tentative when she finally came up with the man’s name, as if she was a little embarrassed that this was all she had to offer, after so much buildup. Elspeth responded as she did simply in order to keep herself in the conversation—remain part of tomorrow’s plan; she couldn’t, at the moment, distinguish the man in her mind from the dozens of Louise’s Euro-acquaintances who had been produced for her in the last decade, from the first summer Louise took the au pair job in Brittany, abandoning Elspeth to a hateful summer alone with their mother and her shame. Nearly all of them, acquaintances over the years, had seized upon Louise’s little sister as the ideal person to whom to show off their English. (Elspeth had fantasized about delivering a lecture to the lot of them. “The Present Progressive,” she was going to call it. “Not a Tense You Want to Use a Lot Of”) Werner Stechel, though, she thought suddenly, rinsing the sponge under the outdoor tap at the side of the house and meditatively wringing it out. He did sound familiar.

  “You
like this stuff?” Elspeth said as she came inside. Her niece was standing before the large, squat TV. Onscreen, two men caught up to a third, pinned him against a wall, and began to knife him.

  Annie neither concurred nor demurred but, tucking a foot underneath her, settled into the fat, tapestry-covered sofa—thumb in her mouth, her index finger hooked around a strand of perfectly straight black hair. The joke when she was born—Robert’s own self-deprecating one—had been that while Annie’s father had not contributed any genetic material to his daughter, “at least she’ll understand cricket.” Funny, it had been at first, Elspeth recalled.

  “Do you think she ought to be watching this?” she muttered, as the knifed victim’s knees buckled and he sank slowly down the wall, streaking it with lines of blood. But she didn’t repeat the question loudly enough for Louise to hear over the running water. Her niece had seen it all—sex, murders, the beheaded horse in The Godfather. Instead, still holding the sponge, she sat down reluctantly beside Annie in the hope that her presence might mitigate the violence.

  Elspeth got it—she wasn’t dumb. The television free-for-all was Louise’s answer to their childhood—their own PBS-only, no-sugar-cereal Vermont childhood that had, nevertheless, managed to go so dangerously off course. The TV, and the spankings, and the packaged chocolate cookies for breakfast, even the Bain de Soleil tans: It was all an elaborate way of saying “I will not be like her.” Noel. Fat and pathetic—so Louise had called her, anyway, to her face, Elspeth following suit soon enough. And red-faced and unkempt, they might have added—half-dressed most days. After the divorce, their mother’s incapacities were simply staggering. Yet Noel, who might have started by trying to help herself (blue-collar, she had put her husband through grad school), instead bled all over everyone else. Her ten-dollar checks to CARE and UNICEF and the cleft-palate people: Louise would steal them from the mail and rip them up. “We’re not letting her send them till we get color TV goddammit.” When the Jehovah’s Witnesses came to the door, in the strange acrylic clothes of the poor, it was Louise who turned them away—“I’ll deal with this, Mom!” Or the child getting smacked in the supermarket: Tears would come into Noel’s eyes as she asked her older daughter in a choked voice to take the grocery cart and her wallet and go and pay—“I just need to get control of myself. I’ll just be a minute. I’m sorry. I’m sorry, girls. Take Elspeth, too—oh, God, you really shouldn’t see me like this.”