"I'm sorry."
"I wouldn't send them to that grubby secondhand shop if I were on my knees. And the thought of seeing a perfect stranger walking toward me on the street in an outfit I'd loved! I would feel utterly wretched. No. I know you were trying to help, but no."
She turned and waved off my outstretched hand, waiting instead for Ashok to help her to the lift.
--
Despite our occasional misfires, Margot and I were quite content that spring.
In April, as promised, Lily came to New York, accompanied by Mrs. Traynor. They stayed at the Ritz Carlton, a few blocks away, and invited Margot and me for lunch. Having them there together made me feel as if a threaded darning needle was quietly drawing the different parts of my life together.
Mrs. Traynor, with her diplomat's good manners, was delightful to Margot, and they found common ground over the history of the building and of New York in general. At lunch, I saw another Margot: quick-witted, knowledgeable, enlivened by new company. Mrs. Traynor, it emerged, had come here for her honeymoon in 1978 and they discussed restaurants, galleries, and exhibitions of the time. Mrs. Traynor talked of her time as a magistrate, and Margot discussed the office politics of the 1970s, and they laughed heartily in a way that suggested we younger people couldn't possibly understand. We ate salad and a small portion of fish wrapped in prosciutto. I noticed that Margot had a tiny forkful of everything, sliding the rest to one side, and despaired quietly of ever getting her to fill any of her clothes again.
Lily, meanwhile, leaned into me and quizzed me about where she could go that didn't involve either old people or any kind of cultural improvement.
"Granny has packed these four days absolutely full of educational crap. I've got to go to the Museum of Modern Art and some botanical gardens and all sorts, which is fine, blah-blah, if you like all that, but I really want to go clubbing and get wrecked and go shopping. I mean, this is New York!"
"I've already spoken with Mrs. Traynor. And I'm taking you out tomorrow while she catches up with a cousin of hers."
"Seriously? Thank God. I'm going backpacking in Vietnam in the long vac. Did I tell you? I want to get some decent cutoff shorts. Something I can wear for weeks and it won't matter if they don't get washed. And maybe an old biker jacket. Something good and battered."
"Who are you going with? A friend?" I raised an eyebrow.
"You sound like Granny."
"Well?"
"A boyfriend." And then, as I opened my mouth: "But I don't want to say anything about him."
"Why? I'm delighted you have a boyfriend. It's lovely news." I lowered my voice. "You know the last person who got cagey like that was my sister. And she was basically hiding the fact that she was about to come out."
"I am not coming out. I do not want to go rooting about in someone's lady garden. Bleurgh."
I tried not to laugh. "Lily, you don't have to keep everything close to your chest. We all just want you to be happy. It's okay if people know your business."
"Granny does know my business, as you so quaintly call it."
"Then why can't you tell me? I thought you and I could tell each other anything!"
Lily bore the resigned expression of someone cornered. She sighed theatrically and put down her knife and fork. She looked at me as if braced for a fight. "Because it's Jake."
"Jake?"
"Sam's Jake."
The restaurant ground to a gentle halt around me. I forced my face into a smile. "Okay! . . . Wow!"
She scowled. "I knew you'd react like that. Look, it just happened. And it's not like we talk about you all the time or anything. I just ran into him a couple of times--you know we met at that Letting Go thing for that cringy grief counseling group you used to go to and we got on okay and we liked each other? Well, we sort of get each other's situations so we're going backpacking together in the summer. No biggie."
My brain was spinning. "Has Mrs. Traynor met him?"
"Yes. He comes to ours and I go to his." She looked almost defensive.
"So you see a lot of--"
"His dad. I mean I do see Ambulance Sam but I mostly see Jake's dad. Who is okay, but still quite depressed and eats about a ton of cake a week, which is stressing Jake out a lot. That's partly why we want to get away from everything. Just for six weeks or so."
She kept talking but a low hum had started somewhere in the back of my head and I couldn't quite register what she was saying. I didn't want to hear about Sam, even vicariously. I didn't want to hear about people I loved playing Happy Families without me while I was thousands of miles away. I didn't want to know about Sam's happiness or Katie with her sexy mouth or how they were no doubt living in his house together in a newly built den of passion and tangled matching uniforms.
"So how's your new boyfriend?" she said.
"Josh? Josh! He's great. Totally great." I put my knife and fork neatly to the side of my plate. "Just . . . dreamy."
"So what's going on? I need to see pictures of you with him. You're massively annoying that you never put any updates on Facebook. Don't you have any pictures of him on your phone?"
"Nope," I said, and she wrinkled her nose as if that were a completely inadequate response.
I wasn't telling the truth. I had one of the two of us at a pop-up rooftop restaurant, taken a week earlier. But I didn't want her to know that Josh was the spitting image of her father. Either it would unbalance her or, worse, having her acknowledge it out loud would unbalance me.
"So when are we heading out of this funeral parlor? We can leave the olds here to finish their lunch, surely." Lily nudged me. The two women were still chatting. "Did I tell you I've been winding Grandpa up massively about Granny's imaginary heartthrob boyfriend? I told him they were going on holiday to the Maldives and that Granny had been to Rigby and Peller to stock up on new underwear. I swear he's about to break down and declare he still loves her. It's making me die laughing."
--
Much as I loved Lily, I was grateful that Mrs. Traynor's packed schedule of cultural improvements over the next few days meant that, aside from our shopping trip, we had limited time together. Her presence in the city--with her intimate knowledge of Sam's life--had created a vibration in the air that I didn't know how to dispel. I was grateful that Josh was flat out with work and didn't notice if I was down or distracted. But Margot noticed and one night, when her beloved Wheel of Fortune had finished and I rose to take Dean Martin for his last walk of the night, she asked me straight out what the matter was.
I told her. I couldn't think of a reason not to.
"You still love the other one," she said.
"You sound like my sister," I said. "I don't. I just--I just loved him so much when I did. And the end of it was so awful and I thought that being over here and living a different life would insulate me from it. I don't do social media anymore. I don't want to keep tabs on anyone. And yet somehow information about your ex will always end up finding its way to you. And it's like I can't concentrate while Lily's here because she's now part of his life."
"Perhaps you should just get in touch with him, dear. It sounds as if you still have things to say."
"I have nothing to say to him," I said. My voice grew impassioned. "I tried so hard, Margot. I wrote to him and sent him e-mails and called. Do you know he didn't write me one letter? In three months? I asked if he would write because I thought it would be a really lovely way for us to stay connected and we could learn things about each other and look forward to speaking and have something to remind us of our time apart and he just . . . he just wouldn't."
She sat and watched me, her hands folded across the remote control.
I straightened my shoulders. "But it's fine. Because I've moved on. And Josh is just terrific. I mean, he's handsome, and he's kind, and he has this great job, and he's ambitious--oh, he is so ambitious. He's really going places, you know. He has things he wants--houses and career and giving things back. He wants to give back! And he hasn't even really
got anything to give back yet!"
I sat down. Dean Martin stood in front of me, confused. "And he's totally clear that he wants to be with me. No ifs and no buts. He literally called me his girlfriend from our first date. And I've heard all about the serial daters in this town. Do you know how lucky that makes me feel?"
She gave a small nod.
I stood again. "So I don't really give a monkey's about Sam. I mean, we hardly even knew each other when I came over here. I suspect if it hadn't been for each of us requiring emergency medical help we might not have been together at all. In fact, I'm sure of it. And I plainly wasn't right for him or he would have waited, right? Because that's what people do. So all in all, it's great. And I'm actually really happy with how everything has turned out. It's all good. All good."
There was a short silence.
"So I see," said Margot, quietly.
"I'm really happy."
"I can see that, dear." She watched me for a moment, then placed her hands on the arms of her chair. "Now. Perhaps you could take that poor dog out. His eyes have started to bulge."
25
It took me two evenings to locate Margot's grandson. Josh was busy with work and Margot went to bed most nights by nine so one evening I sat on the floor by the front door--the one place where I could pick up the Gopniks' WiFi--and I started googling her son, testing the name Frank De Witt, and when nothing of that name came up, Frank Aldridge Junior. There was nobody who could have been him, unless he'd moved to a different part of the country, but even then the dates and nationalities of all the men who came up under that name were wrong.
On the second night, on a whim, I looked up Margot's married name in some old papers that were in the chest of drawers in my room. I found a card for a funeral service for Terrence Weber, so I tried Frank Weber and discovered, with some wistfulness, that she had named her son after her beloved husband, who had died years before he was even born. And that sometime further down the line she had changed her name back to her maiden name--De Witt--and reinvented herself completely.
Frank Weber Junior was a dentist who lived somewhere called Tuckahoe in Westchester County. I found a couple of references to him on LinkedIn and on Facebook through his wife, Laynie. The big news was that they had a son, Vincent, who was a little younger than me. Vincent worked in Yonkers with a not-for-profit educational center for underprivileged children and it was he who decided it for me. Frank Weber Junior might be too angry with his mother to rebuild a relationship, but what harm would there be in trying Vincent? I found his profile, took a breath, sent him a message, and waited.
--
Josh took a break from his never-ending round of corporate jockeying and had lunch with me at the noodle bar, announcing there was a company "family day" the following Saturday at the Loeb Boathouse and that he'd like me to come as his plus-one.
"I was planning on going to the library protest."
"You don't want to keep doing that, Louisa. You're not going to change anything standing around with a bunch of people shouting at passing cars."
"And I'm not really family," I said, bristling slightly.
"Close enough. C'mon! It'll be a great day. Have you ever been to the boathouse? It's gorgeous. My firm really knows how to lay on a party. You're still doing your 'say yes' thing, right? So you have to say yes." He did puppy eyes at me. "Say yes, Louisa, please. Go on."
He had me and he knew it. I smiled resignedly. "Okay. Yes."
"Great! Last year apparently they had all these inflatable sumo suits and people wrestled on the grass and there were family races and organized games. You're going to love it."
"Sounds amazing," I said. The words "organized games" held the same appeal to me as the words "compulsory smear test." But it was Josh and he looked so pleased at the thought of my accompanying him that I didn't have the heart to say no.
"I promise you won't have to wrestle my coworkers. You might have to wrestle me afterward, though," he said, then kissed me, and left.
--
I checked my inbox all week, but there was nothing, other than an e-mail from Lily asking if I knew the best place to get an underage tattoo, a friendly hello from someone who was apparently at school with me but whom I didn't remember at all, and one from my mother sending me a GIF of an overweight cat apparently talking to a two-year-old and a link to a game called Farm Fun Fandango.
"Are you sure you'll be okay by yourself, Margot?" I said, as I gathered my keys and purse into my handbag. I was wearing a white jumpsuit with gold lame epaulets and trim that she'd given me from her early eighties period and she clasped her hands together. "Oh, that looks magnificent on you. You must have almost exactly the measurements that I had at the same age. I used to have a bust, you know! Terribly unfashionable in the sixties and seventies but there you go."
I didn't like to tell her that it was taking everything I had not to burst her seams but she was right--I had lost a few pounds since I'd moved in with her, mostly because of my efforts to cook her things that were nutritionally useful. I felt lovely in the jumpsuit and gave her a twirl. "Have you taken your pills?"
"Of course I have. Don't fuss, dear. Does that mean you won't be back later?"
"I'm not sure. I'll take Dean Martin for a quick walk before I go, though. Just in case." I paused, as I reached for the dog's lead. "Margot? Why did you call him Dean Martin? I never asked."
The tone of her response told me it was an idiotic question. "Because Dean Martin was the most terrifically handsome man, and he's the most terrifically handsome dog, of course."
The little dog sat obediently, his bulging, mismatched eyes rolling above his flapping tongue.
"Silly of me to ask," I said, and let myself out of the front door.
"Well, look at you!" Ashok whistled as Dean Martin and I ran down the last flight of stairs to the ground floor. "Disco diva!"
"You like it?" I said, throwing a shape in front of him. "It was Margot's."
"Seriously? That woman is full of surprises."
"Watch out for her, will you? She's pretty wobbly today."
"Kept back a piece of mail just so I have an excuse to knock on her door at six o'clock."
"You're a star."
We jogged outside to the park and Dean Martin did what dogs do and I did what you do with a little bag and a certain amount of shuddering and various passersby stared in the way you do if you see a girl in a lame-trimmed jumpsuit running around with an excitable dog and a small bag of poo. It was as we sprinted back in, Dean Martin yapping delightedly at my heels, that we bumped into Josh in the lobby. "Oh, hey!" I said, kissing him. "I'll be two minutes, okay? Just have to wash my hands and grab my handbag."
"Grab your handbag?"
"Yes!" I gazed at him. "Oh. Purse. You call it a purse?"
"I just meant--you're not getting changed?"
I looked down at my jumpsuit. "I am changed."
"Sweetheart, if you wear that to our office day out they're going to wonder if you're the entertainment."
It took me a moment to realize he wasn't joking. "You don't like it?"
"Oh. No. You look great. It's just it's kind of a bit--drag queeny? We're an office full of suits. Like, the other wives and girlfriends will be in shift dresses or white pants. It's just . . . smart casual?"
"Oh." I tried not to feel disappointed. "Sorry. I don't really get US dress codes. Okay. Okay. Wait there. I'll be right back."
I took the stairs two at a time and burst into Margot's apartment, throwing Dean Martin's lead toward Margot, who had gotten up out of her chair for something and now followed me down the hallway, one thin arm braced against the wall.
"Why are you in such a tearing hurry? You sound like a herd of elephants charging around the apartment."
"I have to change."
"Change? Why?"
"I'm not suitable, apparently." I rattled my way through my wardrobe. Shift dresses? The only clean shift dress I had was the psychedelic one Sam had given me and it felt
somehow disloyal to wear that.
"I thought you looked very nice," said Margot pointedly.
Josh appeared at the open front door, having made his way up behind me. "Oh, she does. She looks great. I just--I just want her to be talked about for the right reasons." He laughed. Margot didn't laugh back.
I rifled through my wardrobe, throwing things onto my bed, until I found my navy Gucci-style blazer and a striped silk shirt dress. I threw that over my head and slid my feet into my green Mary Janes.
"How's that?" I said, as I ran into the hallway, trying to straighten my hair.
"Great!" he said, unable to hide his relief. "Okay. Let's go."
"I'll leave the door unlocked, dear," I heard Margot mutter as I ran after Josh, who was headed out. "Just in case you want to come back."
--
The Loeb Boathouse was a beautiful venue, sheltered by its position from the noise and chaos outside Central Park, its vast windows offering a panoramic view of the lake glinting in the afternoon sun. It was packed with smartly dressed men in identikit chinos, women with professionally blow-dried hair, and was, as Josh had predicted, a sea of pastels and white trousers.
I took a glass of champagne from a tray being proffered by a waiter and watched quietly while Josh worked the room, glad-handing various men, who all seemed to look the same, with their short, neat haircuts, square jaws, and even white teeth. I had a brief memory of events I had been to with Agnes: I had fallen into my other New York world again, a world away from the vintage clothes stores and mothballed jumpers and cheap coffee I had been immersed in more recently. I took a long sip of my champagne, deciding to embrace it.
Josh appeared beside me. "Quite something, isn't it?"
"It's very beautiful."
"Better than sitting in some old woman's apartment all afternoon, huh?"
"Well, I don't think I--"
"My boss is coming. Okay. I'm going to introduce you. Stay with me. Mitchell!"