Mazes and Monsters Page 8

  She put on her bikini and went outside, where they were waiting. They sat in the hot tub and drank iced tea with fresh mint in it. They sat in the Jacuzzi and drank cold white wine. Her father asked her about college and Kate told him what he wanted to hear: that he had absolutely nothing to worry about. She did not mention the game, although she knew he would have found it fascinating. He always wanted to do whatever he thought young people were doing. But for her it was not just a game, it was an emotional thing about all the most private fears and fantasies of her life, and she couldn’t share it, even with her parents. Besides, he wouldn’t understand and he would think it was crazy. Chlorine read L’Officiel, quietly letting father and daughter have their little talk.

  After a while they had lunch under a tree: chicken salad with walnuts in it, the way Kate’s mother used to make it. It was Kate’s favorite salad, but she could only swallow a few bites. She thought she would throw up. He’s even got the same recipes, she thought.

  “I thought you ate chicken,” her father said.

  “I do. Just that I’m full … all that tea and stuff.”

  “We don’t eat meat anymore either,” her father said.

  Kate helped Chlorine take the dishes back to the kitchen. Her father, as’ in the olden days, didn’t move a muscle to help. He’s found himself another love slave, Kate thought in wonder. How does he do it?

  “Still thinking of getting a job, Norine?” Kate asked by way of conversation.

  “No, I don’t think so. Maybe later.”

  “Don’t you get bored just cleaning and cooking?”

  Chlorine shrugged. “I go to the gym every day. I have to take care of my wardrobe. I get my manicure and pedicure and bikini wax. It takes me a whole day just to wash my hair. I do my gardening—those plants all over the house, I grow them myself. I’m busy all the time.”

  After lunch Chlorine went to her room to take a nap, leaving Kate and her father alone together.

  “Want to take a run?” he asked eagerly.

  “I’m kind of tired.”

  “Okay. We’ll just sit here and talk.” He opened another bottle of cold white wine. “You’re not too full for a little more wine, are you?”

  She shook her head. Might as well get smashed. She wished she had a joint. He probably had one, but she didn’t want to ask him.

  They sipped their wine in silence. “Kate,” he said finally, “I want to tell you why men get divorced.”

  She didn’t say anything. She wasn’t sure she wanted to know, after wondering all this time, because she was afraid of what he might say. Whatever he said would be about him and her mother, and there were places in their lives where she did not want to walk.

  “A man and a girl are dating,” he went on, “and she’s very seductive, very unattainable. She’s sexy. He falls in love with that girl. Then they get married, they have children, and suddenly she’s living the marriage script her parents taught her. She thinks a home has to be a safe, boring place where the children can grow up. She wants it to be boring. She’s not sexy anymore. She can’t help it; it’s the way she was brought up. The home has to be a haven for the children. The man wants more. He leaves.”

  “Chlorine is boring!” Kate burst out.

  “Norine? What makes you think she’s boring?”

  “She’s a dumb cow,” Kate said. “You think she’s sexy because she has big tits and she’s young.”

  “No,” he said. “I think she’s sexy because she thinks I’m sexy.”

  Kate felt embarrassed. She didn’t want to know about her father’s sex life. She wondered if part of what he said was right. At least he thought it was right, and he knew his side of it.

  “I just hope you two don’t have any kids,” she said. “I’d hate to see them spoil your lives.”

  “Kate … it wasn’t you and Belinda. Don’t you understand? It was the way women of a certain generation were brought up.”

  “It’s your generation too. You were just afraid to get middle-aged.”

  “I thought you were sophisticated enough to understand,” he said.

  “I’m trying.”

  “It’s going to be different this time, with Norine and me.” He smiled. “She’s pregnant. You see, I don’t have anything against a family.”

  “You two are going to have a baby?”

  “In June. A little Gemini.”

  Her hand was shaking as she filled her glass with wine. She drank it down. “Well,” she said, trying to sound pleasant because he looked so proud and pleased. “I guess I’ll have a little sister or brother.”

  She knew now he was gone for good.

  CHAPTER 2

  Long before she was Kate’s mother, Meg Porter had grown up as a perfect child of the Fifties. She fervently believed every movie she’d ever seen, and when life did not turn out like the movies she never questioned the movies; she thought something was wrong with life. She was a cheerleader in college, leaping around with pom-poms, and she was also an honors student. She was a mischief-maker who never did anything really bad, so she didn’t get in trouble. People thought she was cute. When she was at college her friends used to say: “I have to get married before all the good ones are taken.” Surrounded by the “good ones,” popular and secure, Meg waited for her own special Mr. Right. She knew when he came along she’d know it immediately, just like in the movies.

  Mr. Right was Alan Finch. She found his name romantic and English. He was a veteran, a former lieutenant. They were always lieutenants in the movies. He even looked like an actor; the nice one who got the girl at the end. He was four years older than she was and seemed experienced and sophisticated. She met him on a blind date in Senior year, and after that first date neither of them went out with anyone else.

  They were married right after she graduated, and moved to San Francisco because Alan had always wanted to live there. It didn’t frighten her to leave her family and friends. It made her feel grown-up. Alan would be her family and friends now—her very best friend, and they would live happily ever after.

  They got a little apartment in Berkeley, which they painted themselves, and after they had Kate and Belinda they moved across the bay and bought their house. Meg learned how to be a gourmet cook and how to take care of plants; she tended the children and the cats and dog; they bought furniture, books, records, quilts, rugs, antique toys, a car. Every time she and Alan acquired something together she felt it was another brick in the good wall that was going to keep them safe and secure forever. The thing that made their little world complete was the children. Kate and Belinda were bright and beautiful and fun. Meg worked hard to make their home a haven for Alan to return to every evening after a dangerous day out in the market, gambling with other people’s money, making his conquests. She was happy to live through him. His glories were hers too. She pictured the two of them growing old together.

  When he told her they had already grown old together she was shocked. What did he want her to be that she wasn’t? She begged him to tell her what he wanted, and he answered that he had been cheating. She was willing to forgive him. They had been married fifteen years and had a whole life they’d built together; cheating wasn’t enough to tear that down. He said he was bored, sad, disappointed. He acted as if it were her fault. She didn’t understand. She had never been bored. How could he be sad and disappointed when he had everything they’d dreamed about when they were engaged and planning their future?

  He tossed her and the children away as if they were biodegradable.

  After a while Meg got over her anger and bitterness. She decided Alan was crazy. She had her two wonderful daughters, and they were her best friends. She loved them fiercely. They made her laugh. They were so vulnerable under their coolness that she wanted to stand like a Valkyrie and protect them, but she knew she couldn’t. The best thing she could do for them and for herself was to have a new life of her own.

  She went out on blind dates. They were the former “good ones,” now on their
second or third go-round, but they didn’t look so good anymore. She wondered why they didn’t treat her the way men had in college.

  When Kate went to spend the weekend before Christmas at her father’s, Meg Finch had her last date. She had met him briefly at a party the month before, where her hostess recommended him as “the best bachelor in California.”

  The first thing he said to her was that he was dismayed she had cut her hair. He said he had preferred it curly; it was sexy, like pubic hair. She thought of jumping out of his car, but he was driving fast, down a residential street that was far away from any transportation, and it was raining. He took her to a bar called Fantasy: wall-to-wall mirrors, blue, red, and green lights reflecting off them, a young man in a full-length mink coat leaning languidly against a white piano. Her date asked her about her life. At least that was familiar.

  Meg told him about law school, how frightened she had been at first because she thought everyone else would be so young, and how happy she was to find quite a few women her age in her class. She told him how she admired those other women for starting all over again, for fulfilling old dreams or daring to reach for a new one.

  He said he bet none of them had ever had an orgasm.

  She felt like crying, running away, or screaming at him. But she did none of those things: she blushed. She was back in the time tunnel to the girl she had been when she was dating at college—passive, agreeable. Then the colored lights in the bar swirled around and a floor show started. It was an S&M show. Whips and chains. Meg walked out and took a taxi home.

  After the weekend Meg told Kate about her date. They both laughed over the telling of the story, now safely in the past, but underneath Meg was angry. She announced that had been her last date, and she meant it. From now on she would only go out with friends. If a man wanted to see her it would have to be on her own turf, at dinner in her own home with her daughters. She wanted normalcy, not sparring and humiliation.

  Meg was planning to cook a big Christmas dinner—that was comforting. She had invited friends and told the girls to ask their friends too. Not everybody had a family that made a big fuss over holidays. Kate had brought Christmas presents for herself and Belinda from their father, and the girls insisted on opening them right away. The presents looked as though Norine had picked them. Kate had received sexy lingerie: a satin teddy and a nightgown and peignoir. Belinda had been given a plaid flannel bathrobe. They were both disappointed. But since each of them loved the other’s gift, they traded happily. Their father never gave them the right thing; it was as if he didn’t know them at all.

  And then Kate broke the news. Alan was about to become a father again. Meg knew Kate and Belinda were only pretending they didn’t care; as for herself, she was numb. The man who had walked out on her six years before was a stranger now. They would always be tied together by their children, but he no longer had the power to break her heart. Men remarried and started new families; he wasn’t the first. She wasn’t even really surprised. She only wished that instead of just telling Kate he had picked up the phone to tell her too, like a friend.

  But that was another of her romantic fantasies that one by one were being replaced by reality. Long ago she had dreamed that she and Alan would be best friends. Now she knew they would never be friends at all.

  She decided she wouldn’t let it matter. She was still a romantic. The world was askew, but she would always have dreams. She would have her own life now, on her own terms, and she would make it work.

  CHAPTER 3

  Jay Jay looked at the outside of the Park Avenue apartment building where he and his mother lived, collecting himself now for the stress family confrontations always seemed to bring. Other people liked going home; he went home because there was nowhere else to go.

  “Good-bye!” Robbie yelled behind him, putting his little car into gear. “Merry Christmas!”

  “Good-bye,” Jay Jay called back. “See you soon.”

  The car drove away and he was alone; Merlin in his cage in one hand, his suitcase in the other, his cowboy hat on his head to remind him that he was the great Jay Jay, the one of mysterious glamour. The doorman, in his dark green winter uniform, came out to the sidewalk.

  “Mr. Brockway.”

  “Good afternoon, Paul.”

  He had graduated from being Jay Jay to being Mr. Brock-way when he went to college. It was Paul’s way of being nice; it was ridiculous, but he rather liked it. All those lonely years at high school where the other kids were so much older they looked on him as a rather amusing mascot, but never a friend; the humiliation of graduating at fourteen when everyone else was eighteen, and tall, and having a sex life and social life that didn’t include him—all of that was somehow shut off into the past when he became a College Man. Mr. Brockway. There wasn’t one soul from high school he even spoke to now, not that he’d spoken to them very much then either.

  “Help you with your bag, Mr. Brockway?”

  “Thank you.”

  The doorman took his bag to the elevator and Jay Jay gave him a dollar.

  The marble floors of the lobby were as polished as ever, the mirrors gleamed, not a bulb was out in the crystal chandelier. The enormous Christmas tree loomed in the corner, decorated with colored balls and lit. There were Hanukkah candles on the mantel. No tenant was to be ignored in this season of goodwill and holiday tips.

  Jay Jay let himself into the apartment with his key. His mother, Julia Brockway, was a rather famous decorator, with some very well-known, rich clients, and her large, highceilinged apartment was a showplace for her new ideas as well as a home. He noticed that she’d moved the furniture around in the living room again, and this year’s tree was decorated with nothing but hundreds of tiny, perfectly tied, red-and-white checked bows. She always kept things around that smelled: sachets, pomander balls, incense, perfumed candles, sticks of vanilla. She even put special perfume on the light bulbs so they scented the room when they were lit. This Christmas the theme seemed to be cloves and cinnamon.

  “I’m here, Mom,” he called.

  She came floating out of someplace in the back vastness of the apartment, looking chic and slim and beautiful. He looked like her; the same pointed face and mass of golden curls, the small-boned quickness, but it was more suitable on her. She was wearing a white silk bathrobe and had all her makeup on, so he knew she was getting ready to go out.

  “Darling,” she said, in her light voice that was like water. She could be Queen of the Sprites. She put her hands on his shoulders and kissed the air near his cheek so as not to mess up her makeup. Then she looked him over. “I think you grew a little. Did you? I hope so.”

  “I’m not growing anymore,” Jay Jay said. “Where are you going?”

  “To a cocktail party at the French Embassy. Then dinner at a new place in SoHo that got a good review in Vogue. Everything nonfattening. Even the champagne, apparently—it has less sugar content.” She clapped her hands. “Let me show you your Christmas present!”

  “Now?”

  “Of course now. You’d see it anyway.”

  She led the way to his room. His heart sank. He knew already what it would be, and he felt the anger roaring through him, choking him. She always killed his identity, she made him disappear into her own fantasies—please don’t, Mom, say you didn’t do it again …

  “Voilà!” She flung open the door. She had redecorated his room completely; he couldn’t even recognize it.

  “Oh, shit,” Jay Jay said.

  When he had left for Grant in September he had left a cozy, warm, masculine room with antique furniture and tan-and-white-striped fabric on the walls. He’d just gotten used to it. When she had changed the last room he’d gotten to like he had thought the new one was too staid and stuffy, but after a while he had grown to like it too. And now all the warmth had been stripped away to the stark white bareness of High Tech. It looked like a goddamn hospital. Everything was built-in and hidden, the bed was a four-poster made of steel things that loo
ked like girders, a mover’s pad was the hideous cover, and the brightness of those shiny unadorned walls was blinding.

  “Where’s my stuff?” he screamed.

  “It’s in the cabinets,” she said. “Don’t you scream at me. I worked my tail off to get this ready for you in time for the holidays.”

  “I liked it the other way. Where’s my furniture?”

  “Don’t you like your new room?” she asked. She looked hurt.

  “Don’t I like it? I just told you I hate it. Why do you always act like you’re deaf when I talk to you?”

  “Maybe because you scream when you talk to me,” she snapped. “Do you know how many clients would give their eyeteeth to have a room like this, done by Julia Brockway?”

  “Your clients remove their eyeteeth by hand every night and put them in a glass of water,” Jay Jay said.

  “You’re a fresh little kid.”

  “My room is my turf,” Jay Jay said. “It’s my nest. My cave. I don’t want you changing it around when I go away. And Merlin hates it too.” Merlin was blinking his eyes. “Tell her, Merlin.”

  “Birds can’t talk,” Merlin said.

  “Coward,” Jay Jay said to him. “Mom, when you change my environment without my permission you obliterate me. You’re going to make me schizophrenic.”

  “I doubt that,” she said. She pouted now, and crossed her arms over her breasts like the statue of a saint. “You know I’d never do anything to hurt you, Jay Jay. I just thought it would be interesting.”

  For you or for me? he thought, but he didn’t say it. His poor mother; she would never understand him. Right now his beloved antique furniture was probably sitting in some client’s bedroom. His mother treated all the furniture in their apartment with the same cavalier attitude as she did Jay Jay’s, except for a few pieces that were irreplaceable and to which she was devoted. Even those, he suspected, she loved for their investment value. He wondered if there was anything—or anyone—in the world that had his mother’s purely emotional affection.