All Is Vanity

  I was sorry to be dreading this reunion. After all, despite our antithetical outlooks, Brooke and I had become fond of one another in college and, simply by virtue of the fact that we had maintained contact, our bond had strengthened now that the circle of acquaintances who shared our four-year history had naturally thinned over the years. I admired her directness and her abhorrence of the sentimental, and while I wasn’t sure what she liked about me, I appreciated her feeling all the same. I should, I knew, have felt merely warm anticipation at the chance to see her for the first time in at least eight years. I should have been looking forward to cheering her on, hearing about her life in England, her current beau, and her impressive career. Instead, I prayed the car would squeal to a stop, and I and all these people, exuding our smells and stamping our heavily shod feet, would be stuck here in the dark for three hours, a fate preferable to sipping coffee across the table from obvious success.

  At Fifty-ninth Street I wormed my way out of the train and onto the grease-and-gum-dotted concrete platform, shoved through the turnstile, and escalated toward the gray November light. I would not, I decided, even mention my novel, only say that Ted and I were doing well, that we liked New York, that we hoped to visit Brooke in London someday, when we were not so busy. I would talk about the Hopper exhibit at the Whitney. I would ask questions; I would express delight; I would sigh when the plates were cleared and wish we had more time.

  I’d been meanly pleased when Brooke mentioned a hotel I’d never heard of. How highly could her company value her if it wasn’t putting her up at the Plaza? The doorman at the Daniel, a male model in a loose-fitting, black crepe Calvin Klein suit, who nodded condescendingly as I shouldered my way in, made me realize my mistake. This was a place too hip to be staffed by friendly graying fellows from Queens in broken shoes and stiff maroon crested jackets. It was, I realized with chagrin, a place too “in” for me to have heard of.

  I phoned Brooke from the black glass lobby as we’d planned.

  “You’re here!” she squealed, so sincerely happy to hear my voice that I was at once ashamed of my cynical roilings.

  She emerged from the elevator as polished as I’d imagined, although her shoes were flats. Her hair somehow managed to be both stylish and careless; her clothes were so current and so London, as to look almost wrong in New York. When she hugged me, though, she was the person I’d known in school, back when we were girls pretending to be women and then actually becoming such. I was glad I’d come.

  “So how’s London?” I asked, when we’d been seated in the suede-walled dining room.

  “It’s completely spoiled every other city for me. It’s so …” she faltered, searching for the right adjective.

  “English?” I offered.

  “No, not at all. That’s what makes it so great.”

  We traded information about various mutual acquaintances at Penn—who’d had children, who owned his own software company, who’d already been divorced three times, who’d been arrested for drug dealing—which sustained us until the food arrived.

  “So, what do you do here?” she asked, slicing with the side of her fork through the glistening mass of egg on her plate.

  “Well, Thursday nights—” I began, ready to explain that admission to the Whitney Museum was free on that particular evening and then to launch into my detailed critique of the current show.

  “Are you going to that opening at the Gardner Gallery on Thursday? I said I couldn’t make it, but if you’re going, I’ll call and say I’ve changed my mind.”

  The Gardner, I guessed, was a private gallery, probably in Chelsea. One would not have to pay for a ticket to attend, but one would need to be invited.

  “I think we might have other plans,” I answered vaguely. Surreptitiously, I began to push the tiny pots of jam and honey that had come with my English muffin close to the edge of the table, so as to more easily whisk them into my bag if the opportunity arose. Around us, the murmur of the other diners swelled. All of them, I realized, had invitations to openings and premieres. They didn’t poke about in the ashtrays outside the Metropolitan Museum, hoping to turn up a discarded admission button. They didn’t go early to Bryant Park to stake out a free mosquito-infested seat for a movie like Casablanca that everyone on earth had already seen a dozen times. They danced in the meatpacking district, behind unmarked doors, not in the plaza at Lincoln Center, open to anyone who wandered down Columbus Avenue. They wore clothes like the doorman’s suit to galas and benefits and birthday parties and screenings. They bought makeup brushes in SoHo at stores that looked like art galleries. I was not even sure what galas were. I wouldn’t know what to do with a makeup brush if I owned one.

  These people, parrying their heavy utensils in the chic, pinkish light of the dining room, were the lifeblood of the city; these people, who thought nothing of ordering nineteen-dollar bowls of granola, not we who spirited jam pots into our purses, not the worker bees who grabbed cellophane-wrapped bagels from the deli counters to chew in the airless tunnels, as they waited on the pleasure of the trains that would hurry them with numbing daily regularity into the maws of their spirit-sucking jobs, but these. A woman at a table to my right dropped a spoon that hit the carpet with a gentle thud. She raised one discreet finger toward the waiter and with the other hand adjusted her so-chic-as-to-be-ugly eyeglasses.

  “I’m working on a novel,” I announced, in a desperate attempt to wrench myself free from those with whom I’d spewed onto Lexington Avenue an hour before. (Of course, half of them were probably working on novels of their own.)

  “Really?” Brooke sighed and discreetly raised her own finger for the waiter. “Sometimes,” she said, “I feel like I put in all this time and effort and what do I have to show for it? Nothing you can put your hands around. Nothing that’s really me.”

  I nodded, gazing affectionately at my friend. Her regrets made me feel closer to her.

  “You know,” she went on, “I’ve got an idea for a novel or two in mind. Someday, I’m just going to have to take a summer off and write one up.”

  I waved indiscreetly at the waiter, knocking a jar of black currant jam off the table with my elbow. How many people believe they have a novel fully formed in the backs of their brains, I thought, ducking below the table for the jar, and are convinced that if only they could manage to tear themselves away from much more important work, they would just “write it up”? I would say one in two. That’s fifty percent of the population who believe that they could easily do what I was discovering every other day to be impossible and who, because they would never actually try it, would remain infuriatingly oblivious to this truth. I dropped the jam jar into my purse on my way back to the surface of the table. Brooke was already handing her American Express card to the waiter.

  “I wanted to treat you,” I protested.

  Brooke held up one hand dismissively. “Don’t be silly. Jones and Cartwright will get it.”

  I could have ordered the eggs Benedict or even the Japanese breakfast box.

  “Speaking of money,” she said, “you should look into this stock I just bought—Genslen—my financial adviser is very high on it and I don’t think he’s been excited about a stock since Xerox.”

  “What do they do?” I asked. Although I did not have investments and so didn’t understand exactly what people looked for in a stock, my conversations with Warren had led me to believe this was a reasonable question. It was not, apparently.

  “Oh, you know,” Brooke said, and paused to calculate the tip, “it’s a drug stock. Something with genetic engineering, I guess.”

  She kissed me goodbye in the French way, swearing she would call if a moment opened in her schedule. I, we both understood, would always be free.

  It was beginning to rain when I reached the sidewalk, and the concrete exuded a sharp smell, as if it objected to the wetting. Twice on the way to the subway, I was offered five-dollar umbrellas, but I knew a vendor downtown who sold them for three, so I marched on, my h
air first covered in a veil of fine mist and then dripping down my forehead. What did it matter if I was unpresentable, I sulked, plunging at last down the subway’s urine-scented stairs? I had nowhere to present myself. Ted and I, it turned out, were not imbibing New York, experiencing the delights of the most powerful, arguably the most culturally exciting metropolis in the world. We were not, in other words, at the center of the universe. We were instead clinging to the city’s edges by our fingernails like poor tourists. We may as well have been buying shot glasses with a picture of the Empire State Building stamped on them or climbing the Statue of Liberty. Perhaps in some past decade, we might have been bohemians, but it was difficult now that the sort of restaurants in which Dawn Powell’s characters treated each other to bottles of wine charged twelve dollars for a plate of pommes frites. Had we been twenty-three, it would have been fitting, exciting even, that a night out in Gotham meant cutlets and plantains at the Puerto Rican lunch counter on Eighth Avenue or chicken vindaloo on Sixth Street, but how could we consider ourselves New Yorkers—how could we say we were any sort of real people at all—when we were skulking in the fringes at this time in our lives?

  At home, I stood over my notes in my closet/office, eating leftover lo mein from the box and willing my novel, the vehicle that would transform me into a real person, to coalesce. If Brooke called, I told myself, I would be busy. I would be writing.

  I spent the remainder of the week weeding through my school files, admiring the discussion topics I’d teased from The House of Mirth and chuckling at the clever sentences I’d composed for spelling quizzes. Brooke did not call.

  M—

  Do you and Ted ever take people out to dinner? This is what we do with the people Michael has been meeting recently. We don’t always, or even usually, mean to take them out, but they call and say, “Let’s get together.” And then we’re all supposed to think about what we should do. Sometimes people suggest a new play in one of the little theaters on Santa Monica Boulevard. “But then we won’t be able to talk!” someone always says, “and we want to get to know you,” which is so flattering, so we decide to go to a restaurant they’ve been dying to try or absolutely love or just read a review of. I’ve yet to get anyone to agree to the chicken and waffle place Michael and I have always been partial to.

  We get Delaney to babysit and we take the Saab, because the Saab is fun, but also because of the Tercel’s embarrassment factor. Once, when the Saab was in the shop, we almost canceled. We valet park, because when the other husband hands the valet their ticket, it’s also too embarrassing to trek off into the night as if we hitchhiked there. (Although the night we had to take the Tercel, we pretended we hadn’t managed to get our workouts in that day and so had deliberately parked twelve blocks away to force ourselves to exercise—people understand an obsessive need to exercise far more easily than they understand owning a ten-year-old Tercel or refusing to valet park.)

  Once safely inside the restaurant, we order a bottle of mineral water for the table, and start with things like frisée with Asiago and balsamic vinegar, and crab cakes with corn salsa and cilantro, and tuna tartare dressed in hazelnut oil, and then move on to the kumquat-crusted roast duck breast and the sea bass, lightly seared, and throw in some pancetta and some onion confit, and maybe a risotto with broccoli rabe. We get a Willamette Valley Syrah, two bottles—even though we never even half finish the second, and two desserts, perhaps a coconut crème brûlée and a flourless chocolate cake, accompanied by a small pile of forks and spoons, so everyone can taste, and espresso all round. And all the while we’ve been talking about Los Angeles real estate and private schools and museum gossip and traffic patterns. And then Michael always makes that little motion to the waiter or waitress, which means “bring the check here,” and the other husband halfheartedly opens his wallet and gives the top edge of his credit card a peek at the outside world. Occasionally, we’ll split a bill, but Michael usually insists on treating. He’s scared of being seen as poor and/or chintzy. “Our treat next time,” the other couple will say. “Yes, next time,” we say. We all nod, we smile, and Michael’s pen makes a great many figures on the credit card slip.

  The next morning the wife calls and says what a lovely evening they had and how much they hope we can get together again soon, and I say the same, even though, four out of five times, we both know we’re lying, and that all we’ve done is spent an evening enriching a chef or a restaurateur, who still will probably not make enough money to keep the establishment going for more than another eighteen months. And even if we do go out again, it will be so many weeks from now that they will have forgotten that they intended to pay “next time.” Having money, it turns out, is very expensive. Luckily, the funding to increase Michael’s salary should be coming in soon—so we’ll be able to treat even more people to dinner, like you and Ted, I hope. Duncan says he wants Michael to help define the overarching vision of the museum, which obviously needs definition, since I, for one, have no idea what this means.

  Also, the consensus among our dinner companions seems to be that soccer camp is a must for Mario and Hunter. Must look into that.

  Love, Letty

  CHAPTER 10

  Margaret

  WE’D AGREED TO MAKE our Christmas trip to Los Angeles between December 12 and 17, to avoid the airline’s holiday price gouging. Also, this meant that Ted could arrange to spend a couple days talking to people at a Santa Monica think tank, so that we could write the whole trip off our taxes. The several hundred dollars we were thereby saving made Ted’s sighs as he studied the ledger in bed particularly irksome. I pulled my knees up firmly and lifted my own book, The Best and the Brightest, closer to my face.

  Ted sighed again. “What’s this?” he asked, tilting the ledger toward me, so I could see the list of figures. The difference in our entries was striking; Ted always wrote in the ledger with the same black Razor Point, whereas I used whatever implement came most quickly to hand. During the month of November that had often been a green wax marking pencil, left over from a creative spurt in October, during which I’d spent a week and a half chutneying cranberries. Being rather thick, the wax numbers were not exceptionally clear.

  “What’s what?” I asked.

  “This number.” He pointed to a scribble of wax labeled “linoleum tiles.” Letty’s kitchen remodeling had inspired me to buy the cheapest, thinnest, most-prone-to-scratching, “appropriate for a rental” variety of black-and-white sticky-back squares to paste over the worn, dark, and dated faux brick that until then had covered our own kitchen floor. While Ted had admired the effect, and even spent an hour discussing the pros and cons of a diagonal versus a straight pattern, he hadn’t entirely approved, maintaining that since the mottled brick appeared dirty even when clean, it demanded less upkeep than a floor that would show every grain of sugar and every turn of a black rubber heel. Also, the landlady would not pay for the new floor, the kitchen having been renovated as recently as 1975. “How much did I pay for those tiles?” Ted asked.

  I felt a flash of angry heat, as if the vulnerable underside of my arm had pressed for a sizzling moment against the oven rack. “How much did who pay for those tiles?”

  “That isn’t the issue,” he said. “The issue is whether those cheap tiles—which we now do not even own, I might add, unless you intend to pry them off the floor with a butter knife when we move out—cost a hundred and fifty dollars!”

  I leaned over the ledger and with a fingernail flicked the hundred off the page. “Piece of spinach,” I said. “Try fifty.”

  Mollified, he leaned back against the pillows. “Fifty is better.”

  I tried to return to Johnson and his cronies but read the first half of a single page several times, without grasping its meaning. Mightn’t it be Ted’s fault, what with his continual anxiety about how the work was progressing, that the novel was not in better shape at this point? It was certainly his fault that I was now stewing over his attitude toward our finances—specifically, his a
pparent conviction that he was magnanimously keeping me in overdecorated splendor—rather than attending to my research on Vietnam.

  I snapped my book shut. “So it’s beginning, is it?”

  “What’s beginning?”

  “The inevitable resentment, the veiled demands, the erection of attention-wasting roadblocks.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Do you want me to quit, Ted? Because if that’s what you want, you should have the courage and the courtesy to say so.”

  “What do you mean? Quit?”

  “Give up on this novel. Get a job. A paying job, I mean. One that would allow me to spend fifty dollars to ‘remodel’ our kitchen without guilt.” A sliver of me, paper thin, wished he would say yes. I could imagine myself, years hence, sighing pensively and talking about the book that might have been, that was really quite well along, but in the end could not be finished “because we simply didn’t have the money.” I could be the artist stymied by the exigencies of the modern economy. I could be a woman who understood and forgave her selfish husband.

  “I said fifty was OK.”

  “What gives you the right to ‘say’ anything? You may at this particular moment be filling the purse, but that doesn’t mean it belongs to you. What if I were taking care of our children, instead of earning a wage—would you still think you could ‘say’ how I could spend money?” This argument was safe. I knew we both abhorred the idea of a patriarchal marriage. “What if I were going to school?” I said. But the fact remained that I was doing neither of these things. I hadn’t stopped earning money to nurture our family or to increase my ability to make a better living later. I wasn’t even attending art or music appreciation classes and enriching myself. I might as well have quit my job to play the slots.